Laura Nolen - The Fall

Wait, stop . Stabbing. I needed to focus on stabbing now.

“Hope Eren didn’t take it too hard. So I thought to myself, Adam, we’re doing all right. Everything’s coming together. Isaiah may not ever come around, but we’re better off without him anyway. The only way the Remnant was going to achieve equal footing was by blowing everything up and starting over.”

He crossed his legs, studying my face. The fork was light in my hand. I shifted my grip without looking down.

“But you, Char. You were different. I thought, I can explain myself to her, and she’ll listen. Maybe not at first. But she understands what it’s like, being ignored. Being feared. She’ll know what to do. I didn’t even want to kill Isaiah, Char. Honest. The Remnant—the whole thing was his idea in the first place. It wouldn’t have been right.

“You didn’t have to be my enemy. But then Amiel was dead. And you walked right into my trap.” His head tilted. “And I decided to change tack.”

“You’re lying,” I said. “My family isn’t dead. The Remnant isn’t—”

“There she is!” Adam sat up straight. “Welcome back, Char. It’s been a long, hard year without you.”

“If you’re trying to scare me, give it up, Adam. I’m not afraid anymore.”

“A return to form!” Adam clapped. “This really is exciting. Can I tell you their last words?”

Don’t listen. Don’t listen. Don’t— I breathed in measured beats. Steady. I had a job to do.

“Do you ever wonder whether they were talking about you? Worried for you? I don’t think we got this far last year.”

Don’t listen dontlisten‌dontlisten. I breathed a little faster. The handle of the fork bit into my palm.

Adam leaned in, exposing the softest part of his neck, and lowered his voice to deliver another blow. “They didn’t die right away, you know. There was screaming.”

I rushed him, arm high, and made a sound like a burning pterodactyl. He jumped, predictably, and I drove the fork into his neck.

Or at least, I tried to.

At the last instant, a blunt weight tackled me from the left. I hit the floor harder than I expected. For some reason, I was unable to break my fall.

That’s when I remembered that my right arm ended just below the elbow, and I howled again, angry. Helpless.

The sound of Adam’s laughter filled my mind, and the Lieutenant shuffled me onto my back. She was armed in an instant.

I saw the needle coming for me, but Adam stayed his hand, savoring a final moment with me, his favorite prisoner.

“We can make this stop, you know. Tell me what happened to Ark Five, and I might let you stay awake this year.”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that? Seriously, I have no idea.”

The control room was like a slippery plastic slide, and I had the intense feeling of falling into a void beneath it. “Happy birthday, Char. And many happy returns.”

The corners of my brain went dark and began to expand. With my last cogent thought, I focused on the weight of the Lieutenant on my chest as she scrambled to secure my bad arm, which was pressing into her throat. Her breathing leveled off as I came under her control, but so did mine. She’d landed right where I wanted her. I focused my last seconds of consciousness into my remaining hand, which was already halfway to the black pack she carried across her flank, just under the flap of her uniform jacket, until my fingers touched steel. I hoped that she was a moment too late, that her nerves had made her overly concerned about the fork. I hoped desperately that I hadn’t dreamed the last few moments. That I wasn’t dreaming already.

And then, my moment was spent.

The slide grew steeper, and the Lieutenant relaxed her grip on my upper body. There was nothing left but the fall. My latest prison had no cells, no bars, and no hope of escape. So I couldn’t say I’d ever enjoyed the trip into mental stasis.

But this time, I smiled the whole way down.

In my dream, my mother held my hands—both of them—but she looked like Meghan Notting, the gritty old woman who’d died helping me escape Earth. I shook my head, trying to fix her face back, and in response, she offered me a screen stem.

It was almost black, like graphite, but harder, and bluntly tapered on one end. I recognized it immediately because it was covered in blood: Jorin’s. I pictured his ugly, sneering face and backed away. I didn’t regret killing him. I didn’t. But that didn’t stop me from thinking on the moment in horror whenever I fell asleep.

My mother-Meghan moved toward my face, and I resisted the urge to run. I could not account for her appearance as Meghan, but I knew that she was my mother all the same. Did this version of her have an open wound where Cassa had shot her? I looked away. I didn’t want to know.

Perhaps it didn’t matter. Perhaps the dead felt no pain.

“Your leg, sweetheart,” she said softly, pressing the stem into my palm. I picked it up with my other hand, the one from my bad arm.

“Mom, no.”

“Use this hand.” She put it back in my other hand, the one on my good arm, and closed my fingers around the sticky weapon.

“That’s gonna hurt. I stabbed someone with a stem before, Mom. It hurts.”

“Only the dead feel no pain, Charlotte. Your life was never meant to be so precious.”

A flare of anger. “You’re just saying what I’ve been thinking. You’re not even real.”

She started at a noise, then looked behind her. Her hair in my face was suddenly like my mother’s, long and dark, and I needed her to hold me. “Now, Charlotte,” she said. “Do it now.”

“Mom. I’m afraid.”

And then she did embrace me, and I was warm, and her hair smelled like I remembered.

But she was only a dream.

In real life, I had no mother. I had no right hand, either.

I lifted the screen stem in my left hand. She nodded approvingly.

I drove it deep into my leg, and when the pain came, I sucked it in through every pore. When I screamed, I breathed out the scent of her hair forever. It was my mother’s voice that shrieked, but I held fast to the red sensation taking root in my thigh, and my dream-mother grew distant.

This pain was mine alone.

“Charlotte. Hey. Wake up.” Eren’s face hovered over mine, awash in concern. “You’re having a nightmare.”

I rubbed my face and tried to get my bearings. I was sitting precariously on the edge of a bed, half-wrapped in a warm comforter. Navy blue. “Not exactly.”

“You okay?”

“How did you get in here? How did you find me?”

He was unsurprised by the question and spoke slowly, as if I were a child. “I live here. We live together, remember? Officially, anyway. You’re in our bed.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Our—what now?”

He reevaluated my coherency and adopted a less irritating tone. “I’ve been sleeping next door. The rooms are connected through the kitchen.” He waved an arm.

I stood up, intending to investigate, but he stopped me immediately.

“Woah.” His eyes here huge, and I followed his gaze to my thigh.

An empty syringe dangled from my bare leg.

I took a breath and pulled it out.

His eyes bulged nearly out of his head, but he put a finger to his lips, shushing me. I nodded wearily and began to limp around the room. It was cold, so I dragged the comforter with me. I lacked the energy to wrap it around me, so I just hugged it to my chest. It felt good.

The kitchen was just as I remembered it, but I did not recall the door, or the little room behind it.

It was pale yellow, with a generic-looking painting of a lamb grazing in a green pasture. There was a fluffy white rug in the center, just next to a tiny bed surrounded by bars. I frowned. The bars on the bed were decorated with ribbons.