Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

memory I carried of the people she’d left behind, their love for her, their forgiveness. I let her feel that love. We felt it together.

Then I let go.

She hugged me one more time, tightly. Then, without another word, she dropped her gun in the sand and started walking.

We watched her go in silence for a long time, until she disappeared into the waves of dust in the last light.

“What just happened?” Naoto asked.

I wiped my face off and said, “She gave us permission.” I cleared my mind, forced myself back into the present, and tried not to let them hear the shake in my voice when I said, “Please tell me one of you knows how to drive that thing.”

I slumped in the passenger seat as the machine rumbled down off that hill. I stared ahead through the antique glass windshield and the reflected glow of the heads-up display, into the faint trace of the eastward trade road running on into the sinking dusk. We had twenty-four hours left to reach Redhill. More than enough time.

A fresh wave of relief and awe washed over me every time I thought it to myself: we were all alive. We were going to make it.

“Directions?” Alexei asked. He switched his dosimeter off and set it on the dashboard with a sigh of relief.

“It’s well before Phoenix, and not far off the trade road,” I answered. “Keep going for roughly 400 kilometers, then turn due south, just before the old Flagstaff beacon—assuming the cells are full enough to take us that far.”

“No cells,” he said. “That noise you hear is a fossil fuel combustion engine. No modern readouts. I should be able to estimate how long our fuel reserves will last once we’re farther down the road, but right now I’m more concerned about something breaking. This is a very old vehicle.” He grabbed a knob by his right knee and pushed it into a new position, making an ominous grinding noise.

“Is that a manual transmission?” I asked.

“Yes. I suspect Jannison improvised it herself. Do you know how to operate one of these?”

By now he could only have figured out that he didn’t know exactly what I was, what I knew or what I was capable of. That much was clear in the tone of his voice—but I could only laugh cruelly at myself: for all the lives I’d led, and all the skills and knowledge that came with them, my answer was still, “Not even a little.”

I thought of jokingly asking Naoto if he knew how to drive stick, but when I glanced over my shoulder, he was still slumped against the window, sun-blistered hands in his lap, looking utterly sullen. I called his name. When he didn’t respond, I unhooked my seatbelt and climbed into the back compartment to have a closer look at him.

“How are you feeling? Any headache, nausea, fever?”

“Does it matter,” he mumbled.

I put my hand on his forehead, but he pushed it away.

“Come on,” I said. “We all caught some gamma rays back there. Probably not enough to get sick, but we should still watch out for symptoms.”

He snorted. “I’ve had the same splitting headache and nausea since we left Bloom. How would I even know the difference?”

He needed some space to himself, I thought. “Okay, then just relax. Get some sleep. It’s not so far now.”

I started to climb back into the front seat, but his voice rose just above the drone of the engine to ask, “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you unify with Jannison?”

The question didn’t hit me as hard as the way he asked it. I sank back down into the seat next to him, searching his face. “Exactly what the hell is wrong with you?”

He tipped his head to indicate Alexei in the driver’s seat. “Oh, sorry. I shouldn’t use the U-word. And here you had him believing you’re a perfectly ordinary person with no cybernetic abilities or eons of memory or anything like that.”

Alexei’s dim reflection in the windshield raised one eyebrow but managed not to look at us.

We knew not to get into this fight. Naoto’s body and mine were both racked with a toxic mixture of stress and adrenaline and drugs and sleep deprivation and radiation and who knew what else. I tried to hold back. I failed.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I meant fuck you for asking. What Olivia and I shared is not your business.”

“What you shared,” he echoed. “Do you have any idea how badly I’ve wanted to share those kinds of things with you?”

Anger burned like acid in my chest. “So, what you and I shared in the truck from Crossroads, that was nothing. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No! It was far from nothing, but—” He rubbed his eyes and groaned loudly. “It was just physical, damnit. I’ve wanted to unify with you for three years. You say we can’t, and who the fuck am I to argue. But every time you unify with somebody else right in front of my face, it gets a little harder to believe that ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ routine. Just tell me the truth. I’m not good enough. That’s it, right?”

That was what curdled my blood. To hear him sound so much like Luther.

“I forget how young you are,” I said. “Then you act like a spoiled child, and I remember.”

“I envy Jannison,” he pressed. “I even envied Serena, for fuck’s sake. Because at least your mind and hers touched.”

“You don’t even know what you’re jealous of!” I shouted, so loud that he startled. “Unity changes a person. Forever. I tried to give Jannison a memory she needed, and I can only pray it changed her for the better and not for the worse. I took memory from Serena that I thought I needed, and you saw what that did to me.”

He looked at his burned hands in his lap and said nothing.

“Unity is change,” I said. “And I already know how