The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu

Author:Em X. Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
Published: 2023-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

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22 The old town, like all of Helsingør, was destroyed during the catastrophic storms of summer 2123.

23 Traditional Peking-style opera, from context.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HAYDEN

I don’t want this.

I don’t want this, I never wanted this, I don’t—

I can’t—

It takes him nearly ten minutes to realize his uncle has locked him in that first room, the room he found his father’s body in. It feels like days ago, not hours. Or, it feels like another reality ago, some time before everything shattered.

It is cold in here.

Nobody bothered to clean up the mess.

Involuntarily, he shivers.

The cuffs dig into his wrists. His paranoid mind is convinced they are tighter now than when he was bound to Felicia. He tries to tug his hands apart, but the magnetic field refuses to give, and the sharp pain only makes it more obvious there is nowhere to go.

Scanning the room only lets his eyes snag on the red smear by the doorway. Looking away isn’t enough. A screaming headache builds in the back of his mind, a livewire of thoughts. The pain is sharp like a needle, threaded into the base of his skull. Panicked, he brings a hand up, thinking of the worst, the neuromapper malfunctioning, short-circuiting, reduced to nothing but a lump of metal, leaving Hayden alone in his mind with only his own thoughts. The device feels the same from the outside, a nub of smooth metal. Hayden wants to claw it out, drag his spinal column out with it, break himself open and tease out every screaming nerve.

Every time he blinks, he sees a dead man behind his eyelids.

“Hayden,” Horatio says, his voice whisper thin.

What? snaps Hayden.

“Please calm down.”

I’m calm. Even if he can’t open his own throat enough to give air to his words. He feels it. The tranquil surface of an ocean, smooth as glass. He can even crack a smile when he tries. I’m okay.

“No, you’re not.”

I’m fine.

“Is there a reason you can’t say that out loud, then?” Underneath the edge of Horatio’s typical dry sarcasm, there’s something else, a disquieting break in the usual even tones he uses that hooks into Hayden’s gut for some reason, burrows into him deep enough to destabilize. His fingers are shaking.

“You can’t save me.” It’s only when it hurts that he realizes he’s spoken aloud.

He blinks. Everything is too bright.

He tunes Horatio’s protests out, can’t bear to listen to that catch in his voice anymore. Turns a small, tight circle in the lab. The linoleum squeaks under his feet. It doesn’t feel solid. He’s floating, not quite settled in his own limbs, everything moving a fraction of a second too slow.

Logic dictates that he should not feel this wretched. At least, he shouldn’t feel this marrow-deep regret, threatening to crack his bones in two every time he moves, spilling out lipids and dying blood cells into his vessels.

He made his peace with becoming a murderer. Why does it matter which man he killed?

He wrenches again on the cuffs, hard enough to re-open the scratch wounds lining one wrist, to draw an edge of more blood on the other.

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