Robin Wasserman - Torn

“It’s about that night at the temple,” I said. “There are some things that… you don’t know.” So easy to phrase it that way, passive and blameless. “Things you don’t know” as opposed to “things I didn’t tell you.”

We still sat cross-legged, facing each other. His hands rested on his ankles, and my hands rested on his. They were my safety line, my barometer. If I could hold on to them, I could hold on to him. If not…

I kept going. Eventually, I hoped, gravity would take over, dragging us down to the truth even if I changed my mind mid-fall and tried to pull us up again.

“I lied. About what happened. When I said the secops came before we signaled them—that we had no choice. That’s not how it was.” Keep talking . The faster I talked, the sooner it would end. “Auden found us, and I had to stop him from getting into the building, but then Jude wanted to use him as a hostage, and then—” It hadn’t been like this, one simple moment following another, cause and effect. It had been a fractured collage, and now, after so many months trying to forget, it was just a fog.

“Then what?” He spoke for the first time.

“Things got crazy. Jude was going to shoot Auden, so you… you had to stop him. Remember? You weren’t going to let anyone get hurt. So you…” I had told myself, all this time, that I was protecting him from the guilt. I was lying for him . But when had I ever been that altruistic?

“I what?”

“You shot him. With one of those pulse guns. And he passed out.” I wondered what it must be like to hear your life told to you like a story that had happened to someone else. To hear that you’d done things that you knew, deep down, you would never do. “But Auden had already alerted the Brotherhood, and then it was…” I shook my head. “Hell. We hid out inside the lab, and the Brotherhood was outside, and we didn’t have any choice.”

“So we called in the secops,” Riley said.

“Yeah. And we told them… if they came, if they rescued us and stopped the explosion and the Brotherhood, they could take Jude.” That wasn’t exactly right; it wasn’t how it had been. Saying it like that made it sound like a trade, like we’d given him up. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“We could have blown the place up,” Riley said. “With us inside.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“But you were too scared,” Riley said. “Right?”

I’d never admitted it to him. “It doesn’t matter now. We didn’t do it. We both agreed.”

“And then Jude blew the place anyway. With me inside.”

We were no longer holding hands.

“This is why I didn’t want you to know,” I said quickly. “I thought it would be easier—”

“On who?”

I deserved that.

“How do I know this is true?” he asked stiffly.

“It’s true.”

“How do I know?” he said again.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“For all I know, you’re lying now, and what you said before was true. Or none of it’s true. Anything could be true. I’m supposed to trust you?”

I reached for him, but he knocked my hand away, hard.

“I’m sorry!”

“It’s not that you lied, again ,” he said, frost in his voice. “It’s what you lied about .”

“I didn’t think you’d want to know—”

“The truth? Those were my memories, my life. Who gave you permission to screw with that? Do you know what it’s like, not remembering? Like a big, black nothing. You were supposed to fill it. I trusted you.” He screwed up his face, like he would have spit on me, if only he could. “I let you tell me what was real. I believed you. I gave you that. And you shit all over it.”

I didn’t mean to hurt you —my father’s lame words, on the tip of my tongue. I swallowed them.

“I made a mistake.”

This time he caught my hand in mid-reach, his fingers steel around my wrist. “Don’t touch me,” he said, and let go. “You could tell me anything,” he continued. “And I’d have to believe you, right? Maybe you set up Jude. Or both of us, for all I know. Maybe you were working with BioMax the whole time.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“They’re your partners , right? Your allies in the cause?”

My words; his bullets. He was better at this than I would have expected.

And I wasn’t allowed to fight back.

“Jude warned me.” He shook his head, furious. “He warned me not to trust you.”

“We both agreed,” I said, getting desperate. I had to make him understand. “ You wanted to stop Jude from hurting anyone. No matter what we had to do.”

He wasn’t listening. And part of me understood that the denials didn’t matter, because he didn’t really believe I was conspiring against him. It was the lying he couldn’t forgive. And I couldn’t deny I’d done that.

“Funny,” he said. “All that time you hated Jude, tried to turn me against him, and now he’s your new best friend. Maybe that was the plan? Get me out of the way?”

“You know that’s ridiculous.”

“So explain why you lie to me, and trust him.”

“I don’t! I mean, I do . Trust you. Not him. He’s nothing.”

Riley laughed. “Or maybe you’re lying again. Maybe while you’ve been screwing with me, you’ve been fucking him.”

It was the ugliest thing he’d ever said to me.

He didn’t mean it, I told myself.

He didn’t.

“Well? You want to deny it?”

“You really want to have this conversation?” I said, patience fraying. “With your ex-girlfriend camping out at the foot of your bed?”

“So we’re both liars,” he said. “I feel so much better now.”

I decided not to think too hard about that one, and trust that he meant he’d lied about her being there, not about why.

“We can start over,” I said. “No lies. You know everything now.”

He stood up. I was losing him.

“You honestly expect me to believe anything you say?”

Maybe I should have begged. Dropped to my knees. Clung to him. I didn’t expect it to work, but maybe I should have tried.

I didn’t.

We stood there, side by side, watching the water. I waited for him to walk away from me, and wondered how long it would take me to walk home from here. The thought reminded me that I didn’t have a home anymore; I only had Riley’s bed, and probably I didn’t have that anymore either.

“Riley, I—”

“Don’t.”

Minutes, hours, I don’t know. Mech bodies don’t get tired; mech legs don’t buckle. We could have stood there forever, as if rusted in place. A monument to something dead.

Finally: “I know you didn’t mean it.”

For a second I let myself hope. But even the anger was better than what was left in its wake. A vacuum. Every word clear, measured—empty.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he added.

“It has to.”

“It doesn’t.” He finally turned to me. Riley’s eyes were deep brown, not the slate gray they’d been when I first knew him. BioMax had done their best to match the new color to the photo I’d given them, but I couldn’t imagine that any org would have eyes like this. And certainly no org had the pinprick of amber at the center of the pupil. Like a keyhole. I watched his eyes and imagined I could see something there that said this wasn’t over, no matter what he wanted me to believe.

But I was done seeing what I wanted to see.

“It’s too hard,” Riley said.

“It” meant “us.”

“So that’s it? Because it’s too much work ?” I shook my head. No. No. No. “That’s supposed to be my thing, remember? I run away when things get tough. You stay. I’m the one who likes it easy, who gets everything handed to me—that’s what you think, right? You’re hard, you’re strong, I’m weak. So now who’s weak?”