Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

looked hard at Naoto. “We can’t repeat that, any version of that, you and I.”

He frowned. “You’re saying I remind you of him.”

I shook my head. “No. You remind me of me, not seeing his obvious flaws,” I said. “Tell me why you made that awful deal.”

He let out a ragged sigh. “I told you. It was the only way to get you a ride to Phoenix. I had no earthly way of knowing the chief was going to kick me out of Crossroads under penalty of—” He grimaced. “Brain eating, for fuck’s sake.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But you still went in knowing you’d be giving up a small fortune. I’m not asking why you wanted to help me. I’m asking why you were willing to screw yourself over so completely to do it.”

Naoto was silent for a while, hands draped over his knees, staring at nothing. My lives had given me a wealth of experience in reading people. Usually it was of limited benefit—the same nonverbal cues could mean something totally different from one person or context to the next—but in certain rare moments, it bordered on a kind of telepathy. Naoto’s defenses were all stripped down, and I could read him like a book. I saw him weighing different lies, then different ways to sugarcoat the truth. I saw him give up.

“I thought I could stand the thought of stopping and settling in Crossroads, but when we got there, I couldn’t,” he said. “The truth is . . . I need to go to Redhill with you.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to unify with you.”

He studied my reaction with naked and shivering anxiety. “You’re shocked, right? Just like when I told you I wanted to leave Bloom. Just like when I first confessed I was in love.”

“No.” A dozen different emotions clashed in my chest, but shock wasn’t one of them. I sighed sadly and said, “I’ve always known, on some level. I still wish you’d told me sooner.” I hesitated to add, “Why didn’t you?”

He took a long time to work up the nerve to answer. “Like you said: you worry about me. I can’t help the way I feel, but that’s the last thing I want—to pressure you into anything, let alone unity. You have enough to worry about.” He shrugged. “Loving you means I need you to feel safe with me. I need that a lot more than I need to burden you with all my innermost desires.”

“I do feel safe with you,” I whispered. “And I can’t tell you how rare that is for me. I think . . . I wouldn’t have lasted this long, if we hadn’t met.”

Our hands met and held in the gap between us. For a few minutes we just sat there, wordlessly sharing that touch.

He forced some levity into his voice to add, “Besides which, you’ll have to forgive me for having no idea how the hell to broach that subject. I don’t know the etiquette for proposing gestalt consciousness with someone. And do you have any idea how intimidating you are?”

I took my hands back. I winced and shook my head. “I’m nothing. You need to understand that. I’m a shell of what I used to be.”

“A shell,” he echoed. “A shell who’s fluent in fifty languages, with three hundred years of combined training in a dozen different martial arts, who can play every instrument and understands science the entire rest of the world hasn’t even—”

I cut him off. “I get it, but none of that matters. It doesn’t make me any less irreparably broken.”

He wanted to tell me I wasn’t, but he kept it to himself. The truck bounced over some rough ground.

“When we get to Redhill,” I said, “I’ll vouch for you. You can unify with the rest of me, if you want to. You have so much to offer. More than you know.”

A smile flickered across his lips, but his brows furrowed. “I don’t understand. You’re saying I can unify with the rest of you . . . but not you?”

I swallowed down the hard lump in my throat and shook my head. “No. Never with me.”

He turned away, trying to hide the hurt, and failing. “Let me just say this once, so I won’t spend the rest of my life worrying I was too timid to say it clearly. I want to unify with you. Not some other version of you. You. But if you don’t want that with me, I . . . I have to respect that.”

“It’s not about what I want,” I cried. “You have no idea how much I’ve wanted to, but we can’t. I can’t. I can never unify again. Not with anyone.”

“Why not?”

I was crumbling. The wheels hit another rough patch in the road and threw us together between the jostling crates, and before I could stop myself, I balled the edges of his coat in my fists and sobbed, suffocating on the answer, but needing to say it.

“Because I’m a murderer,” I said into his chest. “I killed a man five years ago, in a place called Asher Valley. I knew him. I gutted him with his own knife. I watched the life go out of his eyes.”

Naoto’s arms tightened around me. His hand held the back of my head.

“No one who takes a life may ever unify,” I said. “That’s the one rule. If you unify with me, you’d be a murderer too. It would infect you.”

I had never told anyone. In the sixty years of chronological time for which I’d been whole, I had never needed to confess anything to anyone; I’d never needed to verbally process trauma. In all my lives I couldn’t remember ever feeling more naked than I did then, clinging to him in the heat of that rumbling metal box.

He was silent for a long time. I was grateful for that. I was glad the roar of the truck’s motors was loud enough to keep our mercenary on the roof from hearing me