Purgatory City by Rebecca Royce & Skye MacKinnon

Author:Rebecca Royce & Skye MacKinnon [MacKinnon, Skye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peryton Press
Published: 2020-02-24T06:00:00+00:00

11

The aliens had won. They'd taken my humanity. They'd turned me into their weapon.

"Eileen," Kenny said gently from behind me. "You didn't have a choice."

He put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged him off. "Didn't I?"

I stumbled to my feet and started walking, away from those accusing dead eyes, from the bloody corpses, from the men who were shouting for me to stay.

"I need some time," I told them without looking back.

They'd been here for longer. They'd killed goodness knew how many people. X and Y had murdered other humans in front of my eyes back at the lake. Now, I really was one of them.

Not that they'd had any more choice in this than I’d had. We were forced to become murderers. Killing was the only way to survive. And it was nobody's fault, other than the aliens'.

"Tim!" I shouted, clenching my fists as a wave of rage overcame me. It gave me strength, enough to stand up straight as I waited for him to respond.

"You fought well. I watched the battle. Your vitals are a little off, are you hurt?"

If he'd been here, I'd have spat at him.

"Hurt? My heart has been torn into pieces, but I doubt you'd care about that. You made me kill people. You turned me into a monster."

He sighed. "I told you to run. Remember? It was you who decided to stay and fight."

"Because my friends were in danger! I couldn't just leave them!"

He sighed. “And that is your choice. All of this has been your choice. They even asked you if you were sure you wanted to do this when you went through the gate. Blame me if it makes you feel better, but what you did—and you did well—you did yourself by your own choice. You want those four to be your people in there? Fine. They’re yours. I’ll help you as best I can, but if you don’t want to listen to me, if you won’t run when I tell you to, then you’ll fight. That’s how this works.”

I had to catch my breath. He wasn’t fucking wrong, and that made this even worse. I had chosen all of this. Maybe I hadn’t had all the information I needed, but no one had held a gun to my head and told me to go through the gate. Tim had told me to run. I hadn’t. And now I’d killed a whole bunch of people with the technology inside of me. I was a murderer, and if I wanted to stay alive, and potentially keep these guys that I really liked that way, too, I was going to have to somehow survive being this person.

I wiped tears from my cheeks.

“Eileen,” Blake said, and I turned to him. He stood with Kenny.

I sniffed. I’d asked for a moment, but the truth was that I didn’t mind the company. Not now that Tim wasn’t going to let me hide from this being absolutely my own fault. I wiped my eyes again. “Sorry, guys, crying.

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