Page 83 of Anarchy Missing

This I can deal with. So I close my eyes too, my hand slipping underneath her t-shirt.

“Case?” Lincoln’s voice is accompanied by a knock on the media room door. “You in there?”

Fuck. “Yeah,” I call out.

Lincoln walks in, Molly trailing behind him. Thomas appears, but stays propped up against the doorway.

“Sheila came and woke us,” Linc says. “She says there’s nothing wrong with you. But I think everyone in this room will agree if I call bullshit.”

Lincoln isn’t looking at me, I realize. He’s looking at Lulu. And he’s asking her—pleading with her with his eyes—to back him up.

I reluctantly pull away from Lulu and sit up. She does the same and then Molly walks over and takes a seat on the couch next to her.

Molly looks at me for a long second, like she’s trying to figure me out. “I told Lincoln what I think happened to you.”

“Oh, yeah?” I ask. “Why don’t you fill me in on that?”

“Molly thinks the barbs in that lariat were tipped with something.” Lincoln speaks for her. “That she poisoned you that night. And then we shot you up with the jellyfish enzymes, which counteracted it in some way. But it’s not working any longer.”

“You guys don’t know any of that for sure,” I say. “Sheila says—”

“Fuck those tests,” Thomas says. “Sheila also says not to trust the data. And no. We don’t have any fucking proof. But we all know something is wrong with you. And if you have any idea what it is, then you need to start talking.”

I say nothing. It’s… not a theory you share with people. Even these people.

“That’s not the first time you’ve been up on that roof,” Linc says. “Steve told us when we were there. He said he was glad Lulu came over so he could out you.”

Stupid spy.

“So what do you do up there?” Thomas asks. “And how often does it happen?”

I scrub both hands up and down my face for a few seconds, buying time.

“Talk, asshole,” Thomas says. “We’ve got a lot riding on the next couple of months and even though yesterday I was telling myself things couldn’t get any worse, what with the complete fucking meltdown of Cathedral City, I am not so pleasantly surprised to find out that I was wrong. Things can get infinitely worse if you’re losing your mind.”

“You had a knife,” Lincoln prods. “Why did you have a knife?”

And I don’t know what makes me look—a feeling? A premonition? Something in the dreams I was having over the course of my convalescence?—but I look. I lift up the sleeve of my t-shirt covering my left arm, and look.

“What the fuck is that?” Lulu asks, leaning across me to get a better look. “That wasn’t there yesterday when we…” She blushes and trails off.

“Is that a scar?” Lincoln asks, turning on a small light on an end table.

And yeah. It’s a scar. All those months of cutting and every time it heals over completely within minutes. But the one time I need it to not be there, there it is.

“Did you carve that?” Finally, something in this room has Thomas’s full attention. He walks over to me, holding my arm up so he can get a better look. “Why?” he growls. “Why did you do this?”

I sigh and look at Lincoln. “It’s got me too, Linc.” He screws up his face in confusion. “The heat, brother. It’s burning me up from the inside out. And the only way to make it go away is to cut out the light. I don’t know why I carve this symbol onto my body. It’s us? It’s the past? It’s the present? I don’t fucking know. It’s just habit. But when I make the cuts, when I let the blood flow out in a river and take the heat and the light with it…” I sigh. It makes no sense. I get it. But it’s all I have in the way of explanation. “It feels good. Eases the pain. Cools me down. Makes the light go away.”

Everyone in the room just stares at me. Blank expressions turn to uncertainty, turn to pity.

“Every night, when the sun goes down, the heat, Lincoln. You understand, right? How the heat takes over? And every night I go up on the roof, naked, dying of fever. And I carve myself up until the blood turns to red light and the heat turns to comfort. And when that’s done, it closes up. That stupid jellyfish shit makes it all go away.” I stand up and walk over to Lincoln, who actually takes a step back when I reach for his shirt, fist the thin cotton in my fingers. “It seals it back up, Lincoln. It’s trapping this shit inside me. Get it out,” I say, pleading with him. “Get it the fuck out of me.”

“Hey,” Lincoln says, voice low, eyes more serious than I’ve ever seen. He clamps a rough hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “It’s OK. I don’t know what’s happening, exactly. But we’re gonna figure it out.”

We pause. All of us standing motionless and silent.

I shake my head. “No. I don’t think we will. I think this is something new.”