almost smell it, a cool, metallic scent. “And when you leave here?” he asked. “Then what?”
“I won’t leave until I know you’re safe,” she said, touching his arm lightly, infusing her voice with sincerity and compassion.
He smiled, gazed at the river. “Once I’m safe - will you go home?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
He turned his face to hers. “Alone?” he asked.
She saw her apartment as if it was reflected in his eyes. The empty refrigerator. The frozen dinner waiting for her. Last night’s leftovers still on the coffee table in front of the TV. Alone.
Alone. Utterly and absolutely alone is how you’ll live and die, and you will die after coursing out your meaningless life trying to kid yourself that you matter at all. That anybody matters. But deep down you know there’s an abyss waiting for you, waiting for us all.
A spiral of darkness began to unwind in her belly. She knew what he meant. Friday afternoons when she was done with her last client, looking forward to her walk, and suddenly the emptiness of home seemed an appalling wasteland representing not only the whole of her life, but the whole of life itself. Every client she saved would only die someday. Every hope of happiness would only be dragged into loneliness sooner or later. Not love or money or a friend or a cause to fight for made a dent in knowing how pointless it all was. There was an abyss waiting for her. The hole in the middle of the universe that spit life out at random for no apparent reason, sucking it back into nothingness for reasons that were equally random. She would fall into it and disappear, as if she’d never been.
She pretended otherwise. She did her job, went out with friends, took her walks and told herself she felt good, good good. Then, the hollow place inside her would open, and she knew herself for a liar. The sorrow she expressed for this man was really sorrow for herself, and maybe that was true of all the clients she pretended she could help. But she couldn’t help. There was no cure for the sorrow of existence. There was only compassion, and companionship among those who shared the tragedy.
“Nothing ever gets better,” he said. “It looks like it might for a while, then you see it never will.”
“Yes,” she whispered. He was right. The news this week was about too many suicides, a Pesticide bombing in the mall, and the Death Sisters – three women arrested for gruesome murders. This town hadn’t seen so much destruction since the Killing Times, and everyone was nervous, eyeing each other with suspicion.
So many dead, and it was so horrible, yet they were all destined to die anyway, so did it matter? Did this clinging to life matter?
She reached over and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, pressing the stone into her palm, then pulling away.
“I’d like you to have this,” he said. “To remember me by.”
She stared down at it. It was very plain. Smooth and oval, a greyish white. It was small, but it had substance, the weight of it pulling her into a centered place. A calm place where this despair didn’t matter.
“You’re going to jump,” she said, not trying to talk him out of it. He had his reasons, and as far as she could tell, they were good.
“Yes,” he said. “Will you sit with me for a few minutes before I do?”
She swung her leg over the rail and joined him. Sat next to him, stroking his arm. The dying and the newly born both needed touch. No words meant anything to them, really.
They sat together like this, while the sun blazed its last red and slipped below the horizon. Holding the small stone he’d given her, the warmth from his hands still palpable in it, she recognized the truth of all he’d said as if a mystic revelation had made itself known.
She was grateful to him. She’d spent too many years fighting to save what could not possibly be salvaged, too many years cheerleading for the already damned – including herself. She didn’t have to do that ever again.
He placed a hand gently on her arm. “We could go together.”
She blinked over at him. Go together. The stone in her hand was weighty, and as comforting as his words.
Go together. Yes. Of course. She should have thought of that herself. She should have done that with her brother. He asked her to, didn’t he? Said he didn’t like to go alone, but she’d refused him, and felt guilty ever since.
That’s what she longed for on those Friday afternoons. Someone to go with.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Let’s do that.”
He nodded at her. “It’s better that way, isn’t it?”
He held her hand and helped her to stand on the railing next to him, each of them clutching a girder as they got their balance and looked out one last time at the silver of the river, the rising moon, the recession of light into darkness.
“Take a good look,” he suggested. “Let it all be in your eyes for the ride.”
She laughed. “Yes. All of it, in my eyes.”
He squeezed her hand. “Ready?”
“Ready,” she said. They stood, just touching fingers and spread their arms wide. She swallowed moonlighit into her retina, and dove toward the rushing water, the cement parapets, the rocks, the currents, the end of her life.
The ecstatic freedom and horror were so great she didn’t even notice that the young man still stood on the railing, clutching the girder of the bridge.
He watched her swan dive into the cement parapet, saw her skull crack like an egg on the side before the water took her. He could imagine the rest. Her body floating down to the bottom of the river, her hand loosening its grip on the stone which would float beside her, down and down into that slowness, into that silence.
He lowered himself slowly to sitting, then swung his leg up over the side of the railing and walked down the footpath. Kept walking down the road.
He pulled a stone out of his pocket, tossing it up and down as he moved forward, looking for the next bridge
Chapter 1
Planetoid 3, Zone 12, Toronto Replica City
The narrow corridors of the training maze were only dimly lit by the intermittent red lights that blinked at the line between ceiling and wall. Jaguar Addams kept her back pressed against the black padded walls as she made her way slowly and silently toward the corner. She saw motion ahead, a shifting of shadow. She lifted her weapon, but she knew she’d have to come up with a better move than open attack if she wanted to win. And she always wanted to win, even if it was just a training game.
She supposed that was why her supervisor, Alex Dzarny, put her on training assignments. She played to win, and she didn’t play by the rules, something the new Teachers and team members of Prison Planetoid Three had to learn to deal with. If they expected the criminals they worked with to follow the rules they could end up dead fast.
Jaguar looked at her weapon and considered her options.
Very limited. The best one was to turn off her shield. The small blinking lights along the top gave her opponent something
