Pair-Bonded (an Institute story)
by Wrestlr
5.
The truck bounces along the country road. Like many roads in the farming zones well outside Darvenek, this one suffers from insufficient maintenance. You lie in the back of the farmer’s truck, bouncing around the metal bed as the truck jumps and shudders over the potholes as if in an earthquake.
You’ll be bruised head to toe when this ride is over. Maybe it’s not that bad, you decide. It beats walking. You at least can cover more ground. Plus, there’s the bonus of being able to sneak small snacks from the produce that the farmer didn’t sell that day in Darvenek. The farmer will never know—he has to keep his eyes on the rough road, can’t look in the mirror to check on the two out-clan hitchhikers he picked up outside the city.
This is only the third time you’ve eaten in the four days since the attack, but you don’t eat much, just enough to quell your hunger so you can rebuild your strength, in case you need to use your Talent later. You don’t want to repay the farmer for his kindness by eating too much of the produce he has to sell to survive. You don’t have money to pay him. You spent nearly all of the money you made working for the Master on medical care for Don, a back-alley croaker but the best you could find in an emergency, one who knew to ask no questions in return for your cash. And the croaker’s trauma skills turned out to be better than you expected.
You understand now how Don felt all those years. The anger, always right there surging to be let out, tied in with a Talent that can damage and destroy. Giving in, letting it out, would be so easy for you. But if you do give in to the rage again, would you ever be able to rein it back in? Would you ever be able to go back to who you were before you became this weapon? Would you even want to? Don found a way to handle his anger, up until the attack when he unleashed it to defend the only home he had come to know, to defend the life he had with you.
Don sleeps in the truck bed alongside you. You eased his brain to sleep earlier when the ride started getting rough, to spare him the pain. The bullet wound in his side would cause him agony were he awake, and you only have a few painkiller pills from the croaker. You’ll save the pills for later. Better that Don sleep though this lurching ride.
It’s a tricky balance, keeping him asleep, because what affects him can leak through the bond and affect you, and you need to stay awake. You have enough fine control over your Talent now, thanks to the Master; you can do this for Don. You have to keep yourself alert and ready, in case.
The Institute is still out there. It will always be still out there.
At the warehouse, when you reached Don, he was still alive but barely conscious, bleeding, going into shock. You struggled to concentrate against the noise and danger and smoke assailing you externally, and the wall of red pain that threatened to overwhelm you internally through the bond. No time to think—you had to fall back on a familiar plan you and Don used often, one you’d used before and planned for shortly after you joined the Master’s cadre, just in case.
Attackers guarded the obvious exits: windows and doors. No one ever expected you to escape by going up.
You got a shoulder under Don’s arm, hefted him to his feet. He was nearly unresponsive. You had to get him away from the firefight still going on between the soldiers and the mercenaries. You needed a distraction. You’d never used your Talent on Don this way before—you’d always used it to calm him, but now you reached inside his brain, found the cells that generated the combustion. They spasmed under your stimulation. You unleashed his anger and his Talent together, using one to fuel the other. No finesse—just an invisible bolt of pure psychic rage. The far wall exploded in fire and smoke.
Suddenly everyone was running and yelling. No one cared about two unarmed youths, covered in blood, barely visible through the smoke, limping into the shadows away from the exits toward which everyone else was running.
You got Don upstairs, up more stairs, up to the flat roof. Over to the side of the building where a narrow alley, barely wider than your arm span, separated this warehouse from the nearly identical one next to it. You and Don, early in your time here, had left a thick wood board here. You deposited him as gently as you could. You could reach into him, quiet some of the fire running along his nerves. The most you could do was spare him the pain. You had no experience with shock, didn’t know how to stop it. And you still had to focus on your escape.
You cantilevered the board in place across the eight feet or so that separated that roof from the next one. The Institute would be watching the doors and windows for escapees. This side of the warehouse had neither. No one would be looking for you here, several stories overhead, over a narrow, empty alleyway.
The board was more than long enough to serve as a bridge, of course, but you and Don never planned on having to walk across it together, one of you practically dragging the other. It bent, but it bore your weight. Sliding your feet carefully, footstep after footstep, took forever; the closer you got to the middle, the more the board bowed under the weight of you both. But it held. You reached the other side.
You dragged the board and Don to the opposite side of the roof. Then you repeated the process to get to the next building. Prayed that the board would hold. It did. Now you were two buildings away, but not yet to safety.
The roof access door to this building was locked. You had to reach into Don’s head again, scared by how much dimmer whole sections of his brain were now. You had to use his Talent to burn through the lock bolt, which took longer than you thought, took more out of Don than you estimated. Unlike yours, Don’s Talent was not given to finesse, but you had to keep it focused on just what you needed to burn. Unlike the warehouse, you couldn’t risk setting this building alight. You couldn’t risk calling attention to yourselves with more smoke and fire.
Once the lock bolt burned through, you were inside. From there, you made your way to street level, an entrance on the side away from the warehouse, and you slipped away in the smoke and crowd of arriving police and firefighters and onlookers.
Don survived his wound, but the croaker insisted he could not be moved for days. So you retrieved all the money you and Don had stashed just in case in a safe place well away from the warehouse, a lesson learned from having to run many times before. You had barely enough to pay the croaker, only a little left over for food for yourself. You could go hungry if it meant Don would live.
This evening was the earliest the croaker felt Don could be moved. On a side road out of Darvenek, coming back from the markets in the darkening sunset, a farmer stopped. Your Talent tickled his brain, releasing little bursts of trust and the happy hormones like the Master taught you, and the farmer decided that, yes, he’d be willing to stop and give you two a ride, so throw your stuff in the back and climb in. He was going home to a farming town nearly two hours away; how far were you going?—And what’s wrong with your friend?—He looks sick—Well, just make sure he throws up over the side of the truck and don’t get it inside the truck bed, understand?
What next is the big question. It’s always the big question, because it always contains more smaller ones than you can answer, each answer leading to more questions and then still more. Can you leave being the one who touches behind and go back to being Ryan? Do you want to? Will Don recover? What will happen to you if he doesn’t?
You remember that boy you heard about, the one who could tell people exactly what would happen to them over the next twenty-four hours, the one who disappeared. You wonder what he would tell you about your future. You wonder if he is alive and happy.
The tip was good. That was what the solder said into his radio before you killed him. The tip probably came from the Master’s rival, but it makes you think you and Don may have been wrong all along: staying in cities meant more people to hide among, but maybe it also meant too much risk of being seen. Someone saw and knew what you and Don and the Master were. Time to change your pattern. Maybe you should avoid cities for a while.
Don was wrong, back at the warehouse; there will always be more running. The question is whether you focus on what you’re running from, or what you’re running toward.
Focus on the positive. You’re both still alive. You still have your freedom. You have each other.
You have options. You can see in the farmer’s memories that he needs help running his farm. Maybe you’ll stay with him a few days while Don recovers, trade your labor for food and a place to sleep in his barn, maybe some second-hand clothing if he can spare it. You’ve traded your body for less before. His little village of clan-standard people will be suspicious of two out-clan youths but your Talent can calm their distrust, just as you did the farmer’s. In the end, suspicion is just another mix of emotions, memory, and hormones, a cocktail you can control. The farmer knows of caves in the woods near his land. Maybe you could hide out in one for a while if you need to. He knows of abandoned farms where you might be able to squat for a while. If necessary, can you erase this farmer’s memories of you? Possibly; some memories can be manipulated at the cellular level, and the Master thought you had the potential for that kind of precise control. Or, if necessary, this road keeps going long past the farmer’s town, and you can follow it onward.
Don will recover. He has to. What will become of you if he doesn’t?
You check through the bond to confirm he is still sleeping. He is. And little parts of his brain are flaring—he’s starting to dream. A happy dream, from the mix of lights in his head. Maybe that’s something. Tweak the happy parts of his brain gently. You can’t tell what he’s dreaming, but you want him to have the best dream ever.
Pull out your music player. You estimate the battery has enough juice for another hour, maybe a bit more. Insert the ear-buds. You can worry about getting another charger later. Right now, you need to listen to the songs Ryan used to like. You need to do more than listen—you need to hear, to search through them for what Ryan liked about then, for the parts of him that were left behind in them.
You have options. Focus on the positive. Put the one who touches aside; focus on being Ryan. Don will need Ryan, you, more than ever while he heals. Make the bridge and cross it, one step, then the next. Take your tomorrows the way they’re given, one day at a time.