Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

dug through her pockets and started throwing chits at us with increasing violence. She flicked them like playing cards, and I raised a hand to keep one from hitting me in the face. I looked down at the pile forming at my feet and began to mentally add up the numbers.

“Take it all,” she said. “Take it and leave me the fuck alone. Or hurry up and shoot me.”

I had a pile like this of my own, locked away in a vault in Sydney: a chit for every job. The electro-luminescent digits glared up between my feet like ghosts—like sunlight on ice fields.

“I said get out of here!” she shouted, and when I looked up, I found myself staring down the length of a wave pistol, quaking in her grip. Her eyes were wild as she climbed down off the APC’s hood to better shove the weapon in my face. I didn’t react.

“Wait,” Naoto said.

“I’ll give you five seconds to fuck off.”

“Olivia,” Danae started. “Please.”

Naoto put his hands up and said “Wait, just—”

“Five!” Jannison shouted. “Four! Three!”

“Cricket, stop!” Danae yelped.

The old woman’s arm pivoted smoothly to train the weapon on Danae’s head instead of mine. Naoto quickly stepped in, trying to make himself Danae’s human shield, but she shoved him away and stepped in closer until she was nearly pressing her forehead against the gun’s emitter.

“What did you just call me?” Jannison asked.

“Do something!” Naoto shouted at me.

It took all my will to do it, but I finally started to raise my rifle.

DANAE

I had learned, a long time ago, to lock down all my feelings when it came to the relationships I’d had in my other bodies. Twelve thousand years of experience came with tens of thousands of loved ones, friends and family, but most of them would never recognize me without the face they were used to. I’d taught myself to accept that. It was dangerous to do what I was doing now: channeling one of my lives and letting myself feel it all the way. As dangerous as pushing on the broken heart of a woman with a gun in her hand and nothing left to lose.

“Three,” Jannison barked, regaining her composure.

“You have to shoot,” Naoto told Alexei.

“Do not shoot!” I screamed.

Jannison barely seemed to notice. “Two!”

I closed my eyes and focused on the memory of the body she would have greeted as kin. I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled, I called back how that skin had felt, how my heart used to beat, how my voice had sounded when I was only him—

“One!”

“When you were a child in Lake City,” I breathed, “your grandpapa called you Cricket.”

I didn’t open my eyes, but the gun in my face stopped rattling.

“What?” Jannison muttered.

“He gave you rides on the handlebars of his bicycle. He said you had an unusual laugh. High and quiet, like a cricket chirping.”

Her voice was rapt with disbelief. “How could you know that?”

“You had a fire in you from the moment you were born,” I continued, and with every word I let in more of that life. I met my granddaughter’s gaze and said, “You were the most serious child I—he—had ever seen. You wanted more than your family could give you. You were going to grow up to have a family of your own, and they’d have everything they ever wanted, no matter what it took out of you. Other kids played, you worked. You tried to start your first business when you were six years old.”

“I don’t—” Her voice creaked. “I don’t understand what’s—”

Naoto jumped in the corner of my vision when I reached up and put my hands on Jannison’s pistol, but she lowered it without resistance.

“One day, you ran away,” I said. “You ran from that slum. You came here to work the mountain?”

“Forty years,” said my granddaughter. “Forty years it took me to work my way up.”

“Until you reached the top, and you were as rich as any wastelander can be. And you did it, didn’t you. You had a family of your own.”

“Yes.”

It was all I could do to control my breath and blink the dusty saltwater out of my eyes. “They died?”

“One by one, they—” Her lungs heaved. “The radiation on this godforsaken mountain. I thought I could protect them, and instead I killed them all.”

We collapsed into each other. When she hugged me, I could feel the pistol still clenched in her hand against my back, still primed to fire. She balled my coat in her fists and wept bitterly into my shoulder, and I couldn’t hold back my own tears.

She still had no idea who I was. I was just a stranger who knew things.

Naoto and Alexei stood back and glanced nervously at each other.

“There’s no one left,” Jannison said. “Everyone is dead. The world’s ending, and I have no one left.”

“You do,” I said. “You do, Cricket.”

“Who are you?” She started to push away. “Who are you?”

I owed her the answer, and words wouldn’t be good enough. Even if she could make sense of what I would tell her, she had no reason to believe it. There was nothing else to do: I reached for her, carefully. I touched the side of her head, and she let me.

“Danae?” Naoto blurted out. “Wait, what are you—?”

I leaned my forehead against Jannison’s and willed—and a small, safe corner of my mind opened to admit her. Here was the house where she’d grown up, suffused with every trace of sensory memory I could well up: the creak of its ancient floorboards, the smell of its old paper library, the color of light through its windows. There were the people we’d called family: the sounds of their voices; the warmth of their hugs; the endless, microscopic details and eccentricities that traced out the essences of who they had been. Some of it had faded with the years, despite all my efforts, but I shared every scrap of