Page 97 of Elanie & the Empath
“Like I said.” Sorrow flowed from Maximus. And something even worse, making my bones quake: sympathy. “There are some truths we are not ready to accept. But now…” Glancing over his shoulder at Mal and Elanie, he sighed. “Now you may be ready. Go, be with your woman. I’m sorry, Dr. Semson. I wish there was another way. I truly do.”
“Why are you sorry?” My voice cracked. “What’s happening? Maximus, tell?—”
“Sem.” Elanie was on her feet, her shoulders square, determined. “Come here.”
I moved to her as if compelled, my feet ghosting over the floor until I was close enough that she could take my face between her hands. Leaning in, she kissed my lips, wiping the tears from my cheeks. I hadn’t realized I was crying. But something was happening. Something my empathy knew long before my brain did.
“Do you remember the first time we met?” she asked, and I couldn’t understand why everything in her voice, her body, the gentle way she touched me, felt like goodbye.
“Of course. I’ll never forget that day for as long as I live.”
“That’s good.” Her eyes closed, and when they opened again, my chest caved in at the sadness in them. She touched her forehead to mine the same way she had with Mal moments before. “Because you will have to remember it for me.”
I pulled back. “Why?”
She blinked, tears spilling down her cheeks. “It’s the only way, Sem. He’ll kill you. He’ll put Mal and me on metal tables for the rest of our lives.” There was true fear in her eyes when she looked back at Mal’s family. “I can’t live like that. They’re in there. I can feel them, their suffering. They want this to end.”
In an instant, I was hurled back through time, standing next to a different bedside, my patient, locked inside her body, screaming to be released.
“Promise me.” Elanie fisted my shirt in both hands, hereyes wild and pleading. “Promise me you won’t let that happen to me too.”
“What are you asking me, Elanie?” Because if she thought I’d ever willingly decommission her, she didn’t understand me at all.
Footsteps pounded down the tunnel. I felt for Lars, still standing guard outside the door, awe and subservience sparking out from him.
“He’s coming,” Maximus said, hobbling to Mal’s side to place a hand on his shoulder. “This is the end, my friend. Are you ready?”
Mal inhaled deeply, looked to his family one last time, and nodded.
Elanie’s soft hand caressed my cheek, vanilla and cinnamon bombarding my senses, like she was pumping the scents out to soothe me.Stars,maybe she was.
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” she said. “Except to let me go.”
“No,” I insisted.
“Just for a little while. When it’s all over, you can find me again. I know you can. Promise me, Sem. Promise you’ll find me.”
“What’s she talking about?” I begged Maximus as a deep pressure shrouded the room, a sound like an FTL drive spooling up to jump thrumming off the walls.
Maximus’s shoulders fell. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But we have no time.”
Gol’s footsteps grew louder, closer.
I turned back to Elanie, my heart battering my ribs. “Why won’t anyone tell me? Please, tell me what’s happening.”
Another tear slipped down her cheek while Maximus said, “Gen-1s were designed with endgame protocols.”
Something Gol had said tickled at my memory.Gen-1’s had self-destruct sequences, atomics, and?—
“No.” I shook my head at her. “No, Elanie. Not that.”
“I knew it was there.” Mal’s voice was quiet, haunted. “Deep inside me. But I had not felt it in many years.”
“An EMP.” The words fell hard from my lips, landing between us like a missile, reducing me to rubble. That’s what Maximus had done to Mal. He’d repaired his EMP. “Elanie, you’ll be wiped.”
“But we will live,” she said fiercely. “Youwill live.”
“At what cost?” I closed the distance between us, every moment we’d spent together racing through my mind, every moment that meant everything to me, every moment she would no longer remember once the EMP was activated. “You won’t know me. You won’t remember. I won’t survive it.”
