Unbelievable, Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen: Recrimination

I had healed completely by the time we reached the top of the lane, Arun carrying me easily in his arms. Feeling a little like a headstrong damsel in distress, I struggled free as he stopped.

‘I’m fine, really,’ I said firmly, trying to disguise the fact that I was shaking all over. Not with fear or panic, but with the realisation that knowledge, once gained, can never be lost.

‘Did you learn anything?’ enquired Elyssa.

‘You tried to stop me,’ I went back over the moments preceding the crash. ‘Why? I mean, you went on about my latent mortality, but you knew I’d survive, didn’t you? Because, however much a part of me was seeking one last shot at oblivion, I knew it too. So, if we all were completely confident that I would emerge, heal, and become one whole, undamaged piece, why try to talk me out of it?’

‘Such a waste of a good car,’ she laughed, spinning in the road to see the stars. ‘Cassiopoeia agrees, see how she twinkles?’ She was being flippant on purpose, and she wasn’t fooling me.

‘Tell me why!’ I demanded, reaching out to arrest her in her spinning. For a precarious moment, I was unbalanced, until she grabbed me, ceasing her motion.

‘What did I try to tell you?’ she sounded exasperated. ‘Why won’t you let yourself learn from our mistakes? What is the point of knowing others like yourself that have done this longer, if you won’t take advantage of what we can teach you?’

‘Some things we have to find out for ourselves?’ I ventured. ‘Call it teenage rebellion. Remember that?’

‘No.’ she said, shortly. ‘They didn’t have ‘teenagers’ as a concept in my day. Why don’t you tell me why? Why, Neo, why did you drag us through this silly crash reconstruction, this amateur forensic experiment? What did you want to find out? How you survived? You already know how. Why the others didn’t? You already know why. What do you know now that you didn’t know before?’

We stood there, fronting up, like two feral creatures. Arun studied us; I could feel his eyes weighing up the situation, his deliberate abstinence from either sound or movement. He waited. Elyssa waited. I sheathed my claws.

‘I know that I caused it.’ I whispered the words, afraid to make them real. ‘I know now that I killed my friends. I know why I did it; I didn’t want to live longer, younger, better than them. At the time, the idea of complete immortality, being forever eighteen, didn’t even occur to me. Why would it? My Mother and my Grandmother are ageing, albeit more slowly than they should be. I wanted the five of us, the Famous Fucking Five of us, to spend eternity together, equals, the same. I believed that I could see a pathway to eternity, to paradise, to Heaven. So bloody naïve.’

‘And now?’ she prompted, carefully, softly, like a therapist.

‘Now I realise that they’re there. In Heaven, in paradise, destined to spend an eternity together. A complete backfire, of course, because I’m never going to get there, am I? I can’t die. Ever.’

‘We don’t know for sure,’ Arun decided to speak. ‘You never know; we might be able to kill each other. It might be the only way. But why would we do that? We have only each other. Perhaps there are others, hostile others, that would do it for us. Who knows? Personally, I’ve developed a taste for living forever.’

‘But those who leave you behind? Or those you leave?’ I questioned, glancing to Elyssa for support.

‘I don’t.’ he said simply. ‘I don’t have Elyssa’s past, remember? Because I still can’t. Ever since I regained consciousness, all those years ago, in that bed in Bath, I’ve lived only for the moment.’

‘Jealousy.’ Elyssa suddenly said.

‘What?’ I turned to face her once more.

‘Your overriding feeling is jealousy. Jealousy that you can’t reach them. Jealousy that the four of them are together without their fifth.’ She smiled, a touch of wickedness playing at the corners of her mouth.

‘What?’ I spat. ‘What? What? What?’

‘You regret killing them. You regret that you can’t follow where they’ve gone. You regret that you wasted the time you had with them, that you cut it short; you had years left, you know, before the unchangeability would have started to become obvious.’ Her smile was infectious. I smiled back; I couldn’t help myself.

‘Yes?’ I stared at her, her face half-lit by the moon, under the vast expanse of country sky. In the distance, behind her, the orange stab of flame marked the spot where the car lay burning.

‘Jealousy and regret.’ She intoned, slowly. ‘Aren’t you missing an emotion?’

‘Missing an emotion?’ I frowned, still smiling, which felt odd; my face didn’t seem to be behaving properly. Perhaps it was still healing, the skin not yet at full flexibility. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Interesting,’ Arun said, as if he agreed, moving to stand beside Elyssa. He started smiling too, watching me.

‘That’s what I felt, when my friends aged past me,’ Elyssa began, as if confiding a secret. ‘When they died. And then, eventually, when I left them. That’s what I felt before I knew the truth; that once at maturity, I couldn’t touch a human man the way I wanted to touch him. It happened a few times, before I truly understood. It was so confusing, with nobody to advise me. You’re lucky, in that you have your Grandmother. I had nobody.’

‘What did you feel?’ I was lost. I was once again the third wheel, the odd one out, the Third: the one outside the circle of secrets.

‘Jealousy and regret.’ She qualified. ‘Jealousy that they had gone where I could not. Jealousy that they could experience what I could not. Regret that I could not stay with my friends. Regret that I had, through no fault of my own, been the cause of my lovers’ deaths.’

‘You killed men?’ I gasped, then clamped my hand across my mouth to stifle my own reaction, for who was accusing whom of what, here? I felt as if the pair of us were caught in a process of recrimination, for we had both, apparently, become murderers by accident. My reaction had been a judgement, and from her manner, I felt that I was likewise being judged.

‘I did not know.’ She reminded, touching my hand with hers. It didn’t feel cold, for once; just another hand, a comforting touch.

No, she hadn’t known; she hadn’t known the extent of her strength, her power. And neither had I.

‘I still don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.’ I admitted, trying to get past the shock. Trying to get past the idea that, if David hadn’t been inhuman, then I might have killed him in the same way…

‘Guilt, Neona.’ Elyssa finally uttered. ‘You don’t feel guilty. And neither do I.’

I racked my heart for the emotion, but she was right. The thing that should overwhelm me was absent without leave; when did I agree to this? Was this what they meant? Had I been wrong in accusing the pair before me of cutting themselves off from emotion? Was guilt an innately human quality that I had now left behind, so far advanced was I on the path to… Becoming?

‘I think…’ I faltered, unsure of the next move. I stared from Arun to Elyssa, then back at the fire, flickering, glimmering in the distance, across the moonlit fields and hedgerows. Where was there to go from here? And then it came to me, snaking through the night, a silent, tempting serpent, clutching the apple of an idea. Perhaps it was time to unite my forces. ‘I think,’ I began, on a stronger note, ‘that it’s time you met my Grandmother.’

*

We waited by the main road, waited on a passing car to stop at the request of Arun’s cold, white thumb. Initially, when he had suggested that, should the experiment go to plan, we hitchhike back to civilisation, I had been cautious.

‘Hitch-hiking’s dangerous,’ I had pointed out. ‘Who knows what sort of person will stop!’

‘And who is most in danger, do you think, Neo?’ he had laughed. ‘The poor psychopathic mass murderer or we three immortals? Is this what your mother has taught you? To be a nice, normal girl, afraid of walking alone at night and taking sweets from strangers? If only she had equipped you for the reality of being you!’

Not for the first time, waves of resentment had raced through me. He had a point. Even if she wanted me to appear ‘normal’ to the prying eyes of the outside world, why couldn’t she have taught me about using what I was, what I had, behind closed doors?

Now, waiting, a different fear raised its head and breathed in my face.

‘What are we going to tell them?’ I demanded. ‘Whoever picks us up will want to know what we’re doing out here so late at night. What’s our story?’

‘We got lost, walking home from a party. Our car broke down, a few miles back, down a country lane. We crashed our car. We were kidnapped, and now we’ve escaped.’ He listed excuses. ‘Tell them what you want, Neo. It doesn’t matter. The kind of person that’ll pick us up won’t be interested in asking questions of us; they’ll be too concerned with not answering our questions about them!’

Mass murderers. Psychopaths. Weird people who pick up strangers on roads at night. Odd to think that I had nothing to fear, now.

‘We could always walk?’ I suggested.

‘We could,’ agreed Elyssa. ‘It’s several miles, but we won’t get tired.’

Arun struck off at a fair pace, walking boldly, his thumb still raised, his arm outstretched.

‘If only you hadn’t made me destroy our only form of transport,’ he sighed. ‘It was nice, having a car again.’

‘Where did you steal it from?’ it suddenly occurred to me to ask.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he turned to smile back at me. ‘It won’t be reported.’

‘Of course it’ll be reported!’ I was horrified. ‘This is the twenty-first century, remember?’

‘And the date is precisely why we’ll get away with it, no questions asked.’ He looked smug. ‘You see, it wasn’t insured, so they can’t claim any money for it, and there wasn’t a tax disc, so when the police trace it; they’ll be in trouble anyway. Joy riders are the least of their worries.’

‘Joy riders?’

‘Untraceable Joy Riders. We burned the evidence, remember?’

‘They have sophisticated DNA tracking stuff nowadays,’ I sighed. ‘Let’s just hope it burns and burns and burns.’

‘Neo…’ began Elyssa. ‘I think a little more knowledge needs to come your way.’

‘What now?’ I almost shrieked. ‘What else have you been keeping back from me? Can’t you just tell me everything, in one go, so I can get my head round this?’

‘I think a little at a time is proving quite enough, don’t you?’ pointed out Arun.

‘Fine. Next secret!’ I scoffed. ‘Bring it on!’

‘DNA.’ Elyssa caught my hand once more, turning it and tracing her fingers over the pores of my skin. ‘You might not have noticed, but you don’t sweat.’

I stopped dead, my head spinning, as the weight of what I already knew about myself but hadn’t yet acknowledged sagged onto my shoulders. No, I didn’t sweat; I never had.

‘Fingerprints work because of the sweat secretions from the pores in the fingertips. DNA works because the skin sheds. In a body like yours, where you are constantly healing, the skin doesn’t shed, and there is no need to sweat out toxins.’

I stared down at my mutant hand. It lay in her palm, white in the moonlight, looking ever more similar to hers.

‘Your DNA wouldn’t be recognised either; it’s not human. You might not even have it, I don’t know. And for us, of course, and soon you, there’ll be no blood to leak it anyway.’

‘Saliva?’ I asked, seeing a flaw. ‘Other bodily fluids?’

‘Inhuman.’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows what they make of it. Perhaps they think it’s animal. Think about it, Neo; I’ve killed men, accidentally. Arun’s killed women. We’ve never been caught. There must be a reason.’

‘Government agencies!’ I shouted, nearly. ‘Top secret facilities. Tests. They know, Elyssa. They know we’re out here!’

‘What do you mean, ‘They know’?’ demanded Arun. ‘Who knows, and what?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I confessed. ‘Maggie said that members of our family had been caught, that the Government had the and were conducting research into what they were…your DNA, or whatever it is instead, is probably on file somewhere.’

I turned to Arun, catching the lack of qualification after Elyssa’s revelation that he had killed women.

‘Who did you kill?’ I demanded. ‘And were they accidents, too? Did you know that you’d kill them if you…’

‘At first, no,’ he bit his lip, hesitantly. ‘They died, I didn’t know why. I was in a drunken, drug-fuelled haze; it took a while for the realisation to get through. And then, when it did, I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except the pursuit of oblivion. I felt what you felt: jealousy. Jealousy that they died and I did not.’

‘Don’t pretend you’re anything like me!’ I hissed. ‘That’s just sick!’

‘Who is sick, Neo?’ he challenged, eyes flashing in the moonlight. ‘They meant nothing; I barely caught their names. They were nothings. But you, you killed the four people dearest to your heart, and you intended to!’

‘Enough!’ Elyssa flung herself between us, still holding my hand. ‘We have all caused death by…let’s call it ‘misadventure’. We did not know. We had no teachers. Who is to blame? Not us. Those who could have taught us, and yet didn’t.’

‘Like her Grandmother.’ Arun’s voice was cold and hard and as silvery in quality as the moonlight. ‘She could have taught all of us a few things.’

‘M…me, p…perhaps, yes,’ I stuttered, shocked. ‘But my mother probably didn’t let her. I don’t know who is responsible for Elyssa; I still haven’t been allowed to hear her full story. And you? Well, that man, whoever he was; that’s who was responsible for your education, and he might have done it, if you’d stuck around long enough to let him!’

‘Alright!’ Arun huffed, glaring at me with baleful eyes. ‘We’re all damned by past mistakes. Perhaps we’d better hurry home to Granny, before we cock up anything else.’

A silent glance of agreement passed between us all, and then we resumed our silent trudge along the main road. Arun had given up his thumb, so we just walked, and walked, and walked through the night.