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Jonathan

Mas is not happy with me.

I am in the waiting room. Mas shot me up with Narcan as soon as he picked us up, so I am out of the woods now. Eva is in surgery.

She said she loved me. I said I loved her. We tried to kill each other, but that seems less important.

I never thought I would meet someone. In fact, I would say I actively worked against it. I am so fucked-up that I never thought I could hope to find someone who understood me, but she does. I understand her, too, and that is worth something.

I jump the moment Mas comes in. “Is she okay?” I ask.

He shakes his head at me. “Not yet, but she will be.”

I hug him. He is taken aback.

“What the hell happened?” he says.

“I told you—she’s a trained assassin; she was assigned to kill me.” She is still assigned to kill me, but I have not dealt with that yet. All the minor details will have to work themselves out. “But I don’t want to hurt her. Again.”

“Right. Well. You two need to have some kind of talk or something. Maybe several different ones.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “In fact, we need to have a talk.” He gestures me toward a chair.

I sit. I keep my mouth shut. Mas and I have needed to have a talk for years, but one of us was always avoiding it.

He takes the seat across from me and fixes his eyes above my head. “Do you know why I joined the army?”

“Because you’re a saint.” I am not joking.

“Yes. But also because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know how to exist in the world. How to be like everyone else. A little like you, I imagine?”

I nod, not wanting to interrupt.

“But that’s not the only reason. I wanted to understand you better. You were still in jail; we weren’t talking.”

“I was talking,” I have to clarify. I sent him letters all the time. I had no one else to send letters to.

“The less said about those letters, the better,” he says. I will admit, those letters were a little disturbing. I was a minor in prison for murder, pleaded down to voluntary manslaughter. I had grandiose delusions that I did it all for Mas. I had to kill our father so he could never hurt Mas again. It was maybe a little less than charming after a while.

He takes a deep breath. “I thought joining the army would help me understand why you were different. But you know what I learned? You’re not different. Everyone is exactly like you. Everyone can do what you do. I don’t mean just soldiers. I mean civilians. Children.

“Our father put you in survival mode and you never left it. You never turned it off. You’re trapped there, always thinking something terrible is around the corner.” He sighs. “You need therapy. Intensive therapy. With the right therapist this time.”

I know he is right, but I have never admitted to him what I am about to admit: “I don’t want to be fixed.” I swallow hard. “I might need it.” That is the problem, the principal issue. I do not want to be cured. I might need my darkness. I might need my fear. I might need my trauma to protect my life.

And the truth of the matter is, right now, I do need it. I am up to my eyes in a network that kills. I am in danger all the time. Better to be sick than to be dead.

“I know,” Mas says.

His understanding makes me feel so much better. For years I wanted Mas to believe I did not have a choice in the matter, that my urge to kill was beyond my control, because the truth was so much worse: I chose it. I chose not to repair myself. I chose not to get fixed. When given the choice between a future and a murder, I chose murder every time.

“But you can’t have a life like that,” Mas says, laying it out exactly right. “Do you think she’s gonna put up with it?” He nudges his thumb toward the exam room, toward Eva.

“We’re the same.”

He thinks it over. “That sounds dangerous.”