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He nods once. “You too, Taraven.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
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FRANKIE
I guess travel by mystery bubble is at least better than walking.
We climb into the glass sphere, water rushing around it but never slipping past the hatch. Malix catches me in his arms as I land on my feet inside, a little too short to climb in comfortably, and the hatch closes overhead as he holds me.
I take a shuddering breath.
“Is now a bad time to tell you I’m a little claustrophobic?” I ask.
He frowns. “I don’t know what that—”
“I don’t like tight spaces,” I say. “And this is…well, does it feel a little like we’re being buried?”
The water closes in around us as the bubble sinks, the canal deeper than I thought it was. The water is silty, practically opaque and a strange shade of pale turquoise. The light is strange inside, the water glowing from something beneath us.
My stupid brain tells me it’s definitely a giant anglerfish about to swallow us up, and I gulp down my paranoia. Malix goes to step away, but I hang on, giving into the moment of weakness.
“It…makes me feel better to have you close,” I say. “Is that okay?”
Malix rests his chin against my head. “I would hold you for a lifetime if you let me,” he murmurs into my tightly-bound hair.
I bury my face in his chest and inhale his scent, saltwater and hibiscus. The weird gravity of the sphere makes my stomach twist, and I find myself seasick though I’ve spent most of my life aboard ships.
Maybe we’re close to the core right now; it feels like we’ve been going down, down, down…
It makes me feel a hell of a lot worse.
“So what’s the plan once we get to the other side of the temple?” I ask, not opening my eyes. “From what you described, it sounds like we’ll meet with heavy resistance.”
“I’m not sure,” he says. “I’m…beginning to doubt myself, actually. It feels like it was all a dream.”
“And yet you somehow called us a cab and now we’re jetting toward certain doom,” I mumble. “Unless we drown. We could always drown.”
“I don’t think we will,” he says. “This vessel is eerily similar to the public transit system we have on Logos—albeit, with a slightly more barebones design. I wonder how all this got here.”
“I would have to guess it was put here by the same people who built your first cities, placed beacons on our planets, and engineered a sex wall that likes to preach about a ‘biological imperative,’” I mutter, fisting my hands in Malix’s tunic. “Is it just me, or are you starting to feel like a puppet too?”
“What’s a—”
“A person that isn’t fully in control,” I say. “Like…someone else is calling all the shots, determining your course of action.”
Malix kisses the top of my head, rubbing my back in a slow circle. I wish there was somewhere to sit down in here; I’m fucking exhausted, and tired of listening to the puppet masters.
“You and I have differing notions of agency,” he murmurs. “On Logos…no one is in control. Our lives are determined by the Directorate, our very birth engineered in such a way that sets us on a pre-ordained path until the day we die. In fact, I have never felt…”
He trails off, and I open my eyes to look up at him. “You’ve never felt what?”
“I never felt as if I had a choice in anything until I boarded Jaya,” he says. “Until I met you and Taraven. And it was like…the course of my life changed entirely. Suddenly, I made my own destiny.”
“And do you still feel that way?” I ask.
He nods once. “I’m making my own destiny right now,” he says. “And I’m truly not sure if I will return to Logos at all when this is over. Maybe I’ll stay.”
