trying to make me more compliant. I didn’t know They couldn’t kill me. All right.”
“I need—”
“Because this is your fault, you can’t even tell me that you’re better than Them, different from Them,” I said. “The world can end. So long as you’re in it when it does. Or save it if you want. But you’ll have to save it without me. This isn’t love. This is Stockholm syndrome. I was so wrong. Neither of us knew what it was. Now I’ll never know.”
“Nick—”
I turned again, heart hammering, summoning every last ounce of breath in my body. “Don’t talk to me! Don’t you say another word to me, you son of a bitch! You bastard son of a bitch, you murdering motherfucker! I hate you! I wish everyone knew the truth, so they could hate you as much as I do! Now fucking die alone because it’s what you deserve!”
They both turned to watch me go. Neither followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE ROVER WAS as hot as an oven; I aired it out before I started it, then turned up the air conditioning to MAX. Half a tank would easily get me back to Erbil, to the airport, to civilization again, even with the AC that high. It was just an hour away. An hour to things that were two and five and ten years old, instead of six and seven thousand. To where I could die with humans around me—people, instead of the apprentice of monsters and its own little monster apprentice. I was shaking uncontrollably, as much as I tried to clamp down on it, trying to control the big vehicle on the empty road. The lane markings wavered in my headlights, then went steady.
I only had to pull over once to throw up, and then it was a straight shot back; the city lights were warm and welcoming. In the centre of the city, several mosques and part of the Citadel had been lit up in blue and pink and green; maybe an art installation, or maybe just something they did because it looked nice. It looked like the northern lights.
I had never felt so free as I turned into a parking lot to get my bearings. We had left this way; which way had the cab taken from the airport? I closed my eyes, retracing it. Didn’t need her for everything, leading me around the goddamn Middle East by the nose like a donkey, carrying her shit, silently following her, no reason to be here except that I could drive and lift more than her. Pack mule, human luggage, an ancient image in a racist encyclopedia of a brown boy in a sugarcane field, hefting a sack on his shoulders. Let the prodigy go her way, and I would go mine. Unprodigious. Human. All human. Forever, however long ‘forever’ was. Maybe just a few hours.
What would my life have looked like if it had truly belonged to me? I could have had friends, even girlfriends... I could have made my own decisions, gone my own way. I could have heard voices outside the soundproofed echo chamber that was her and me: a single other voice would have been enough. No chance now. The years she had taken from me—I would never get those back. Who could I have been if I hadn’t simply been a mute, shapeless stone to sharpen the blade of her mind against, wearing away under the harder material of her genius? What could the world have been? I would never know, no one would ever know.
Dad had hated her, quietly, and me through her. Never hid it. Because ‘gifted’ was what he wanted us to be, and we turned out so ordinary. Screaming at us for anything less than 90 on a test, when our white friends would have pizza parties for marks like that. He thought we were going to be special, exceptional: doctors, lawyers, scientists. And then we were washed out in the glare of his son’s best friend, the prodigy, the false god. I wished he was here so I could have told him she had been truly false, a liar, a made thing. So that he could have hated us less. Hated himself less for failing us. It hadn’t been him who had failed.
And she didn’t need me now anyway. Had there not, in fact, been a moment when I had the power of life and death over her, there in the ice? Or more than one? I should never have