I, Cassandra

39 | CASSANDRA VALLIS

I turn. And he is there. Resurrected from the dead. Standing in front of the double doors, wearing dark fatigues, and looking at me with a hunger I can taste, a hunger from beyond the walls of death.

My heart judders to a halt. I think I am dreaming. I must be dreaming. I am still in the lab, unconscious and not here in the apartment. With him, the Delta Force Captain who died in Lubochnia, the man I loved and lost. I pinch the inside of my forearm. It hurts. A red weal rises up on my skin. He watches me, a vortex of emotion storming over his features, the ones I had memorised while he slept.

'Ryan.' I breathe. 'Is it really you?'

'Yes,' he says. 'It's me. All of me.'

And then he is there. His arms haul me into his heat, his scent, his maleness. Him. His lips take mine, just as a remembered, just as I missed, as I have longed for. I realise I am not tired at all. I am alive. So alive. And I want to live forever. With him.

I wake, lost in Ryan's embrace as he slumbers on. For the heartbeat of dislocation between dreams and reality, I think I am in London again, and Ryan has smuggled food in for Miro. I reach out for her, to stroke her. She chirps but does not wake, content in her sleep. A quiet click. Cool, clean air fleets over my skin. My fingers drift to the cover on the bed, expensive and soft. Reality rams through me—a monolith of hopelessness. No. I am not in London anymore. Carney is not out in the graffiti-covered corridor, a metal toothpick in his ugly mouth, waiting, hoping for Zee's order to kill the man I love.

I am here, in Alpha VII, the most exclusive, privileged, and protected of places on the planet, lying in the arms of a machine burdened with the memory of us, of his once-heart belonging to mine. The one I loved to the core of my soul who died and lives again.

I let him make love to me. A machine clothed in Ryan's warm, familiar flesh, every plane, cleft, hollow and curve of him long since memorised. He came inside me, and it felt real, the heat of him, how he held me, his look of fierce passion, how he panted when it was over, his chest rising and falling, the false pounding of a non-existent heart. And yet even if what we did felt real, and he felt real, it was not. Ryan, the man, the Delta Force Captain, is dead, his love a mirage, a memory brought back to life, just like this place. A monument to defy the laws of nature, and of our destiny, where man can play god and create a simulacrum of life where none is left.

And then there is me. The Oracle, once used as a weapon to destroy—now de Pommier's singular hope to save the human race from its destiny. Within Ryan's arms, I ease myself onto my back to seek out the ceiling, its smooth face lost in the deep gloom. I never wanted this. Any of it. It just happened. de Pommier mentioned in one of my debriefs they had run a DNA analysis of my genome and had found mutations never seen before, mutations which did not lead to disease but to neural enhancement which signalled the ability to inexplicably manipulate the quantum field—the foundation of reality itself. She spoke in reverent tones, as if she had found the key to all life. I should have been fascinated, but I wasn't.

Her continued tests to understand what it was which triggered these mutations so they could enhance me even further were thorough, though mainly painless. I suspected her true priority was to unlock the intricacies of my mutations so she could create others to be sent to Mars. I hoped she wouldn't have enough time. I wasn't meant to be, a freak of nature who would not wish this fate on anyone else. I was sick of her and her cronies, their machinations, their elitism, their wars, the destruction their generation had brought to Earth and the endless vortex of their hubris. I willed them to fail. I willed it all to fail so their parasitism of an entire planet would never happen again, neither here nor on Mars.

Ryan stirs. His breathing tells me he is waking. I feel his eyes watching me, seeing me through the darkness with his enhanced abilities.

'Blue,' he says, low. 'Do you trust me?'

I turn back onto my side and face him. Nothing but darkness greets me, utter and absolute. His fingertips touch the curve of my cheek. The tenderness of it at odds with the power housed underneath his suit of flesh. 'I am still me,' he says. 'Underneath all this. That part of me never died. They managed to keep it alive. I am here, with you.'

I say nothing. I feel betrayed by my emotions, by the surge of love I felt when I saw him, of my passion as he made love to me, and later, the sense of alienation, of loneliness, of being both close to him, and a million miles away from him. I realise it's not enough. I want Ryan back: the man, the mortal, the one who could die. Not this. Not this immortal machine with Ryan's thoughts, memories, and feelings. I can never tell him this because weirdly I sense it will hurt him, so I keep my mouth shut as he continues to stroke my face, trace the path of my eyebrows, the shape of my lips. Just like he used to do. Just like I always loved.

'I need you to trust me.' His breath is warm against my mouth and smells of nothing. Ryan used to have bad breath in the morning. It bothers me they missed this detail because it exposes the lie of what he is, of the erasure of his flawed humanity. Of what I am letting into my heart and body. A machine. Not a man.

'I need time,' I answer at last. The quiet rasp of his stubble against the pillowcase slices through the quiet as he nods. I taste disappointment seeping from him as he parts my lips with his thumb. A hesitation, then his lips brush mine, gentle, tender, filled with longing, though not for my body, but for my heart which I realise is still broken, even with him here, as close to the man I loved as I could ever hope, both dead and alive. I can't bear it.

I pull away from his kiss.

He waits, stoic, though I know I have hurt him.

'Blue?' uneasiness shrouds him. He didn't expect this. Then again, neither did I.

In the darkness, my name on his lips sounds the same as how I remember it from our nights in London. I reach out to touch his face and feel the contours and planes of his jaw, the clench of his muscles as he holds himself back and gives me time. It's him, what's left of him. If I don't think too much—if I let go. If I allow this to be. If I give in . . . I realise I have no idea how to do it.

'Just show me how to make this fucked up shit make sense,' I breathe, as one then another tear slips free.

He pulls me to him, surrounds me with his heat, holds me as I hollow out the place where I have hidden the pain for the one I lost—and for what we have become, pawns in a sick game, watched now by unseen eyes in a room down the corridor and wherever de Pommier exists.

My grief morphs into anger, and I kiss him, hard, rank with hunger, kicking the blankets away so our naked bodies are exposed, aroused and primed for love.

'You know they can see everything,' he says as position myself over him.

'Let them fucking watch.'

And they do. I know they do. All of them.