Page 118 of Never Lost

But maybe I was. Because here I was, reaching for something I couldn’t touch, haunting a life that wasn’t mine anymore. Because whenever I had a blank, a field, a void—whether on an electronic device or in my own mind—I entered it in: my eternal question. My god particle, my universal story. Sought it, dreamed about it, ached for it, closed my eyes and grew toward it. While drawing a clumsy heart on top of a cappuccino or while jerking my lolling head off the open pages of my textbooks. In every empty moment of the day, and in all the hollow spaces of the night.

Where are you?

“That reminds me,” said Rebekah, and I raised my head with a start. “Rowan from the clinic asked about you the other day.”

“The med student?” During breaks while volunteering, I’d chatted with him a bit, mostly about the clinic. Mostly.

“Yeah,” said Rebekah. “He’s cute. And he cares. He’s not just virtue signaling, like some of them.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “You’re right. But?—”

“It’s okay,” said Rebekah, handing back the joint. “I know. Believe me, I know.”

And we both turned back to the view.

The front door was stuck again. I shouldered it open, juggling two iced lattes and a bag of dry noodles, the kind Rebekah pretended to turn up her nose at but always slurped up anyway when we were too tired or lazy to cook, which was often, even though we both said we had to learn.

“Bex?” I called, kicking off my shoes.

No answer.

Then I saw the chain on the table.

Heavy, scuffed metal. Thick links. The kind you attach to a slave's restraints to drag them along.

I froze, one hand on the coffees, the other on the bag, and just… stared.

“Lou.”

Her voice came from the sofa. Low, steady. The way she sounded when she was trying not to lose it.

I turned.

Rebekah sat ramrod straight, fists clenched on her knees. Beside her was a boy.

No, not a boy.

A young man.

As a teen, I'd only seen him from a distance a couple of times. But here he was, still in gray detention scrubs, larger and stronger and taller than I'd pictured, muscles tauter from years of hard labor, his hair longer, thick and dark and tangled. His face ashen and bruised, his expression thunderous. The kind of furious that comes from being pushed past breaking again and again. From expecting to be dead long ago and half-resenting that he wasn't. His ankles were chained, the cuffs clearly tight enough to bite into his raw skin. He had red marks on his neck and face, ones I recognized now—they'd collared and muzzled him at one point, too. He was still breathing raggedly from whatever ordeal he'd just been through. All in all, he resembled a rabid animal about to be put down, except—his eyes.

In fact, it was only his eyes that I’d had right. Golden green, like dappled leaves in summer sunlight. Bex had described them perfectly.

The bag of noodles hit the floor.

No one moved.

“I had to,” she explained. “They were going to terminate him. Publicly. As an example after the uprising in the mine.”

“Does your mom know about —”

“She gave me the money,” she said.Money?

Then I remembered watching Rebekah get ready that morning, more conservative than usual in her tweed jacket and tortoiseshell hair clip, saying she had to attend an economics lab downtown on “corporate procurement models,” which I realized now was her euphemism for a discount slave auction at the detention center. But bored already and rushing off to class myself, I’d thought little of it.

“But how?—”

“After I fed her some bullshit about how executions are barbaric and that showing mercy to the ringleader of the uprising would boost her progressive image.” She took a deep breath.