Unbreakable by Grant Mira

Author:Grant, Mira [Grant, Mira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64524-104-1
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2023-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4:

Yuina

1.

I sat down on my couch five minutes before the broadcast was slated to begin, nearly vibrating with the need to see what was going to happen next. I’d been aware that they were going to reach out to Piper, and ask-order her to do Craig’s show, even though she had refused them every single time they’d try to make her do it before this. They’d warned me. Had they warned me because they knew I’d try to signal her? Had they finally, after all these years, finally figured out what she could actually do, rather than going off their firsthand accounts and their assumptions?

That couldn’t be so. If they knew how dangerous she was, they’d never be letting her go on live television. Fuck, they’d never be letting her out of her apartment . She’d be sedated until she couldn’t remember her own name and left to quietly drool in a corner somewhere until she had the good grace to go ahead and die and put herself out of their collective misery.

So no. They hadn’t warned me because they were trying to test me, or because they thought I’d somehow be able to reach her when no one else could. They’d done it so I wouldn’t be surprised.

So much of the last thirteen years had been a long dance of never letting me be surprised. They told me when legislation was being proposed, when it was being voted on, when it passed or failed. They told me when there were going to be changes in my staffing, in my schedule, in my small, jealously-guarded routine. And they told me when Piper called. Again and again, they told me when Piper called, even as they let her think that I was the one who wasn’t taking her calls, that I was the one who had decided we were finished with each other. Like we could ever be finished with each other.

I didn’t have any delusions about their candor meaning I was somehow trusted or cleared to receive classified information. They told me things because if they didn’t, they might upset me, and if they upset me, they might find out my invitation wasn’t as dead as they all wanted it to be. None of their tests had ever revealed it to still be active, but that didn’t mean anything. I could feel it if I reached for it, in the space none of them could see.

In the space where I was still unbreakable.

I folded my hands between my knees, fingers laced together, and watched the screen as the seconds counted down, until it clicked on without me doing anything, and there was the soundstage, even duller and more boring when seen through a screen. It was like distance somehow made something so utterly mundane that it seemed unrealistic into something bland enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe. Craig sat behind his desk wearing the same tie he’d been wearing every time I saw him.

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