Page 70 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
“To stop it,” I repeated numbly.
“I followed you to and from work. I even joined Amira’s yoga class to get closer to you. I needed to understand what you were planning to do. But then—” He shook his head. “I got to know Amira, and the way she talked about you…you couldn’t be trying to free an Abomination deliberately. You just couldn’t. The more I watched you, the more certain of that I became. You seemed lonely, and sad, not evil. A hundred times, I thought about casually bumping into you on the subway, striking up a conversation, saying something that would make you smile. I was supposed to remain objective, to keep my feelings in check, but that got more and more difficult to do. And then Amira asked me if I wanted to go on a date with you, and”—he shrugged helplessly—“I said yes before I knew what I was doing.”
I couldn’t breathe, as if I’d been squeezed flat under the weight of all these revelations. “You—” I coughed, then tried again. “You came here to kill me. Because you knew what I would do.”
“I came here to stop you. Yes.” He looked at me with an earnest expression. “Please understand. We thought you were deliberately trying to destroy the world, or eradicate some huge part of the population, or something equally terrible. The people you work for—those are the kinds of things they do. Do you know how many times we’ve stopped Management from carrying out one of Their insane schemes?” He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. The point is, I became convinced that you weren’t like that.”
“You thinkthat’sthe point? No, Eric! The point is that you’ve beenlyingto me!”
“You’ve lied to me as well,” he pointed out. “You lied about your job.”
“Because telling you the truth would have gotten you killed!” I stared at him, anger warring with disbelief. “You thinkwe’remonsters? Your people attacked me! They sent you here tomurderme!”
“The Conclave does whatever it has to.”
“That’s funny. We say the same thing in Dark Enterprises.”
His jaw clenched before he visibly mastered himself. “There’s no comparison. Your company does horrific things every single day.”
“We make the hard choices everyone else is afraid to contemplate!” I shouted, suddenly furious. It was bad enough that Eric had lied to me, but now he was casting aspersions on the company’s mission. It was more than I could take. “Don’t pretend your Conclave is unwilling to sacrifice a few people to achieve its goals. That’s why they sent you here, right? To sacrifice me to some higher purpose?”
He opened his mouth angrily before giving his head a hard shake. “I’m not going to debate this with you, Colin. I wanted you to know the truth, and the truth is, we thought you were going to end the world. And now—”
A dark suspicion crept into my mind. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “All those questions, you wanting to know my darkest secrets…you were digging for information, weren’t you?”
“No! I mean, yes. At first.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, focusing his gaze on me with a grim intensity. “I wanted to understand your intentions. I thought I could…I don’t know, talk you out of doing something terrible. I didn’t realize you’d already freed the Abomination by the time we had our first date. No one knew that until people began to disappear, and then my instructions from the Conclave changed. My job after that was to try tocontain the situation, not to stop you. I thought it was safe to get closer to you. Iwantedto get closer to you.”
“So you could gather intelligence. This was a mission for you. And I was the poor, desperate dupe who actually believed that you were interested in me.” I laughed bitterly. “I’m such an idiot.”
“Iaminterested in you!” Eric insisted, moving closer. “I was ordered to leave you alone, but I couldn’t. You’re cute and funny and a good person.”
“A good person,” I repeated, layering my words with scorn. “What does that even mean? I was agood personfor most of my life and it got me exactly nowhere. The rest of the world walked all over me while I smiled politely and took it. Is that what you want? Someone who sayspleaseandthank youwhile life grinds him down to nothing?” My whole body vibrated now with the force of my rage. “Dark Enterprises showed me that I can have everything I want. I just have to be willing to take it. I’m done with being polite and waiting my turn.”
Eric watched me with an unreadable expression. “Even if the whole world has to die?”
“Don’t you dare judge me!”
“I’m not!” His hands clenched and then relaxed at his sides. “I’m not,” he said again, less shouty this time. “I don’t know why you freed an Abomination, or how. And I don’t care! I should, but I don’t. All I want is to keep you safe. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been staying close to you ever since things started to get bad in the city, trying to keep those other two agents at a distance. But after I dropped you off this morning, I got an urgent message from the Conclave. They’d detected another incursion here in Midtown, stronger than anything they’d felt before. It was coming from that building, so I tried to get inside. The protective wards had been weakened,but they were still strong enough to keep out anyone who isn’t an employee. Then people started breaking windows. It was just the doors that were warded, so I was able to jump inside, and then I saw you lying there on the floor, and—” He came to a halt and drew a long, shuddering breath. “I thought I was too late.”
It’s kind of sweet, some part of my brain reflected.The stalking, I mean.I could see the worry in his eyes, hear the mingled relief and fear that roughened his voice. He’d saved my life. If not for him, I would be lost in the World Behind the Mirrors right now, like Beverly and Mr.Venables and who knew how many others.
Weighed against that, though, were the lies. He’d lied repeatedly, and not to protect me. He’d known who I really was all along. I felt exposed, as if someone had been watching me do something private. Our relationship had been unbalanced from the start.
“I don’t know you,” I said at last. A flicker of hurt passed across his features and my chest ached a little at causing him pain, but I pressed on. “I’ll be honest—the fact that you’re some sort of magical knight makes you even hotter, something I didn’t think was possible. But that doesn’t make up for the fact that I was ready to hand my heart to a total stranger.”
“I’m not a stranger,” he insisted. “You do know me.” He reached for me again, and this time I allowed him to touch my hand before I pulled away. His eyes searched mine. “You do.”
“I wish that were true,” I said, before I turned and walked away.
Twenty-Five
I’d never liked Beverly. Shehad an opinion about everything and loved to critique other people’s work. You got to know someone after two years in neighboring cubicles, though. I’d learned that she had a secret vice for torrid romance novels, an elderly father suffering from dementia, and three rescue beagles who would never see her again. Maybe, once the humans were gone, those beagles would join up with all the other dogs and rule the city at last.
I was thinking about Beverly’s unexplained propensity for applying lipstick roughly fifteen times a day as I left the relative tranquility of Central Park at its northwesternmost corner and headed toward Morningside Park a block away. The MTA had finally ground to a halt, so I was walking back to Hamilton Heights, staying off the streets as much as possible to avoid the convoys of soldiers enforcing their citywide curfew. At least while walking through Central Park, I could pretend that everything was okay. The trees softened the sound of distant gunfire.
Thinking about Beverly’s lipstick meant that I didn’t have tothink about Eric’s betrayal, so I spent the next couple of blocks asking myself why she’d chosen such unflattering colors. I mean…burgundy? With her skin tone? Despite my best efforts, though, my mind kept drifting to Eric as I left Morningside Park and walked north. “Nope,” I said aloud as I crossed a deserted MLK Jr. Boulevard. “We’re not going there, brain. He ripped out our heart and stomped it into a million pieces. He can go straight to Hell.”
But you love him, my brain pointed out, traitorously.
