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MAYBE I CAN BE HELPFUL
I wish I could say I instantly fell asleep after Mace advised I should rest, but sleeping with two strangers in my bed wasn’t normal for me. In fact, I’d been all but trained not to sleep if it meant my partner’s needs might not be met, which meant I continued to be wide awake.
And so did they.
Minutes passed before I spoke again. “Can you just fall asleep anytime you want to? Like, if you had to go to sleep, could you force yourself to do it?”
“We need very little sleep,” Gunnar supplied. “Much less than you, but we tend to try to quiet down into acting like we’re going to bed around two in the morning every day to keep a similar sleep-wake schedule as the regular humans. Years ago, if we were ordered to bed, I could sleep instantly because of an order.”
Mace snorted. “Or else we did a really great job of faking it.”
“Did you?” Gunnar shifted to stare at Mace. “Did you really manage to fake it?”
With a shrug, Mace answered him. “I did. I was never the type to just knock out when my head hit a pillow. Unless they put me in cryo, because then, obviously, yes, out cold till they thaw us.”
I tried to make sense of his words, but he lost me with about half of them. “Cryo?”
“Back before the company went under, we used to be put in extended sleeps. They basically halted our aging until they woke us, pretty much a cold freeze. It sucked, but those days are long over.”
The idea seemed unfathomable to me. Our home was very low tech, sometimes no tech. It was there, if Clarke and his people wanted to use it, but it wasn’t for us. Freezing people technology? How did that even work? There were med machines, but other than for my sterilization, I never got in one. Apparently, they also got into some sort of machine to keep themselves from wanting sex, a mind-boggling idea for technology. Then again, since we had so little, it didn’t take much to impress me. If I were being honest, they amazed me with their constant electricity and hot water.
It was like time stopped and started moving backward when the enhanced became part of general society, or at least that was how it felt on my world. Or maybe I was overthinking things? Maybe they just were what they were.
“I have a question. When you talk about us, you call us the enhanced.” Mace leaned on his elbow, his head tilted in careful consideration of my face. “Why that? I’ve never heard the term before. We’re just Super Soldiers. It’s what we were always called, and you guys are normal humans.”
At least one of their questions was easy to answer. “Clarke doesn’t like the term Super Soldiers. He finds it offensive, so we call you enhanced. He prefers that. Every once in a while, I think or use Super Soldiers, because my mother always said it, but I’d say ninety percent of the time, I don’t even think it.”
I hadn’t heard that term spoken since my mother died when I was ten—a decade without her. I knew grief cooled. Even if the pain never really left, we got used to carrying it. Will that happen now? Can anything ease the ache that was in the place in my heart Stone and Amias used to fill?
Gunnar rubbed his eyes. “Do I want to know why he finds it offensive?”
I shrugged. “You’re not soldiers anymore. Now you’re out in the world and you’re just better. More gifted. Stronger. Better able to exist.”
Mace scrunched down in the bed. “Our so-called better comes at a huge price, and the price seems more offensive than using the name we were gifted when we were made. I don’t know. Clarke was always such a douchebag.”
I laughed and then covered my mouth. “Sorry.”
“Why? I’m the one who said it.” Mace shook his head. “You woke up apologizing. What do you think is going to happen to you if you do something wrong?”
My head swam. Maybe I really was tired? “Anything could happen. You have to be careful to never offend your betters.”
“We’re not your betters.” When Gunnar spoke, he actually sounded sad, even though his face remained passive. “Did Amias make you feel as if he was better than you in some way? Like he expected you to treat him as a superior?”
I shook my head, almost laughing at the idea of it. “No, he was my best friend. Taught me to play games. I helped him clean up when it was called for, made him laugh. We talked all the time. He made sure I was okay after jobs. He loved my brother but didn’t leave me out of their life together.”
Mace nudged me. “I hear a but in there.”
Did he? Is there one? Yes, there was. “It feels disloyal to say it.”
“He’s dead. The only person you have left to be loyal to is yourself.” Gunnar sighed. “The dead don’t care if we tell the truth or if we lie for them. They aren’t here anymore to deal with any kind of consequences. They’ve left it all for us.”
I knew that was true. First my father had been taken down by Clarke’s men in the initial surge. Then my mother and then my brother, both gone from illness. Now, Amias from his attack on Clarke. The dead never came to tell me what to say or not say, and perhaps all I owed them was the truth. It was so much easier, anyway.
“I’ve always wondered why he was there in the first place. You had that question, too. Why would he come work for Clarke? If he didn’t fall in love with Stone, would he have hurt us like all of the rest? None of them ever cared what happened to me at one of my appointments. What would he have been like?”
I spoke the words aloud for the first time, and then I burst into tears. I hadn’t felt them coming, hadn’t known it was going to happen, but there it was. Tears flooded out of my eyes, streaming down my face as sobs wracked my body. My grief swallowed me whole, and I didn’t have it in me to fight it.
Wasn’t I the most selfish person ever? What did it matter that he came under different circumstances? What mattered was he’d stayed and been my friend. I cried harder.
