Entanglement (YA Dystopian Romance) - By Dan Rix Page 0,79
Clive.” She paused, waiting for him to answer.
But he couldn’t.
“Are you even going to acknowledge me?” she said.
“Amber . . . I . . . ” His voice choked up.
“I know I hurt you, and I’m sorry. Obviously, what we did together hurt me too, but will you please let me get on with my life?”
“You’re lying,” he said finally. “You’re trying to protect me. I know what we had.”
She sighed again, more exasperated this time. “I knew you would say that. I liked you too, Aaron. I even thought I loved you at one point. You were fun, and I really needed that during that time of my life. You helped me through a lot. But I’m eighteen now and I have a half. What we had is over . . . and I want you to promise me you won’t try to contact me again.”
“So you love Clive?”
“Of course I do, he’s my half,” she said. “I told you that like a thousand times. Aaron, will you please just promise me?”
Aaron shut his eyes and loathed the words that came out of his mouth. “If you love Clive, then yes. I promise.”
“Trust me,” she said, “you’ll be happier without me screwing up your life. Bye, Aaron.”
Then she hung up.
***
At ten forty-one on Tuesday morning, three days after his appointment at the Chamber of Halves, reddish sunlight slashed through the dust and scorched Aaron’s retinas as he crossed the street to his doorless Mazda. He would drive away. No idea where. He would just drive. He pressed his phone to his ear, and one more time, he listened to Amber’s terrified message, the one she left while his phone was off.
“Aaron, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this—I’m so sorry—you have to run away—”
He slid the phone off his cheek, and it occurred to him in stabbing thrusts. That message was his last memory of her. They weren’t halves, they weren’t supposed to be. They had no connection to each other. She didn’t love him.
And that was the end of it.
Casler had tried to lure him into a trap; it hadn’t worked. Sure, he could toy with her clairvoyant channel, cut her open, reconnect her like the plastic pieces of a marble maze. But not to him—never to him. Amber didn’t even want them to be halves.
In this world, he had no right to love her. Casler could drain her into a vial, and Aaron had no right to stop it. She was Clive’s half, and in the eyes of the Juvengamy Brotherhood, his property—his possession.
Aaron’s cell phone rang again.
He let it ring in his pocket, thinking instead about the half-baked plan he had been formulating when Amber called. First, he would have driven to Dominic’s house and made sure she was okay. Then he and Amber would meet Dr. Selavio in the dungeon. Aaron would volunteer for the machine first. Amber would go next. When it was done, they would be halves again.
They would leave here and travel somewhere faraway, like Spain, or Sicily.
Thinking back, it was all a delusional fantasy. Every second he spent with Amber—fake. His body had been confused, fragile. It hadn’t been love.
Aaron eased himself into his car, taking shallow, pinched off breaths, and his phone rang again. Only this time he felt goose bumps forming along his forearms.
Aaron dragged the phone out of his pocket. It was Tina.
“What is it?” he said.
“Aaron—” Her voice crackled over the speaker. “It’s Amber, she’s in trouble!”
“What do you mean?”
“She heard Clive’s father visited you,” she said. “She’s scared he’s going to hurt you—”
Aaron’s heart jerked. “What did she do?”
“Amber made a deal with him,” she said. “He promised to leave you alone, but now she has to go through with it.”
“Go through with what?” said Aaron.
“They’re doing it in fifteen minutes,” she said. “The machine . . . they’re going to drill into her head and drain her clairvoyance. They’re going to make her like the other juvengamy women!”
FOURTEEN
Plus 2 Days, 23 hours, 45 minutes
“No—” he gasped, “talk her out of it, tell her she can’t.”
“We tried,” said Tina, “but she’s not thinking straight. She heard Casler say he could use your clairvoyance to make his machine work, and she freaked out. She volunteered herself instead.”
“But she knows what it will do to her,” he choked, barely forming the words. “She doesn’t have any left to give.”
He heard Dominic’s voice in the background, and then the rugby player came on the line. “Number eleven?”