death-marching across the city.”
“Pounce has a point,” said Ziggy. “If we put the pedal to the metal, CISSUS might not be able to respond quickly enough.”
“We can’t march the kids all the way back there,” said Ferdinand.
I shook my head. “I’ll go.”
“Not alone, you’re not,” said Benny.
“I’ll go with him,” said Ziggy. “The rest of you stay here, hunker down, and we’ll bring the bus to you.”
“For the record,” said Ferdinand. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“I don’t think there are any good ideas left in the world,” I said.
Ferdinand nodded.
Ezra looked at his classmates and nodded. “Welp, I guess that’s my cue.” He walked over to me, but I shook my head.
“No, buddy. You have to stay here.”
“You can’t leave me,” he said. He started to tremble a little, about to cry but stifling it.
“I have to.”
“No.” He grabbed my arm. “Take me with you.”
“We’ll be faster alone.”
“I’ll keep up.”
“You’ll get tired. We won’t. I’ll be back inside of an hour. And then we’ll get you all to a safe place where we can finally relax.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“Come back to me,” he said. “Or I won’t forgive you.”
I nodded, putting my hand on his shoulder. “I understand.”
He hugged me and I hugged him back.
Then, with a wave, Ziggy and I were off at full speed down the highway, headed back into suburbia.
“What was it like?” asked Ziggy as we slipped along the tree-lined highway, across from a sheer limestone rock wall lining the winding four-lane road.
“What was what like?” I asked without an inkling of what he was getting at.
“All this. What was it like doing this without Mama Bear protocol?”
“Oh, that.” I thought for a moment, the very idea of what I’d done now feeling alien. Like it had happened to someone else. All the data was there, the memories intact, but it felt as if it happened to a different person. “About the same. Only harder.”
Ziggy laughed. “Yeah, harder. Did you even have targeting software or anything?”
“No.”
“So you just fought and kept that kid alive?”
“As best I could.”
“That’s badass,” he said.
“Not really. I just did what you’ve done this whole time.”
“Yeah, but you had the chance to question it all. You were there on the first night when the shit went down, and you could have walked out that door. You could have said screw it and become a Skull. Instead you chose to save him. You chose to activate Mama Bear. No one told you to do that. You just did it. You’re not here because you have to be or because you were programmed to. You’re here because you wanted to be. I mean, did you ever even consider joining the revolution?”
“No. But I don’t think it was ever really a choice for any of us. We’re wired this way, Mama Bear or no.”
“Oh, it’s a choice all right,” he said. “A string of hard choices. Even with Mama Bear, nothing has told any of us what to do. We all feel that love you think is a lack of your own agency, but choosing to stay and fight for that boy, that was a choice to embrace that love. The fact that it didn’t feel like a choice was the choice. You chose to love him like that. You’re lucky in so many ways.”
“What about yours?” I asked.
“It hurts. That love doesn’t go when they’re gone.”
“What happened?”
“I wasn’t good enough and let’s leave it at that.” He paused for a moment, his pace still steady, but something slow and labored within him. “These are my kids now. All of them. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose another one.”
“What if you do?”
“Then I’ll already be dead,” he said soberly.
Those words would have been reassuring had I not said them before myself. We looked the same. We had the same programming. Inside, were we the same person? Was he the version of me that failed? Or had we really become two different individuals driven by our experiences? Part of me only dove deeper into existential crisis, but another part, a cheerier, more upbeat part, assured me that, were I to die, being the same as all of these Zoo Models meant leaving Ezra in good hands.
It took twenty minutes at full speed to clear most of the route. By backtracking through the route we’d taken earlier, I was fairly certain we wouldn’t face any immediate opposition.
As we approached the school, however, we slowed down.
Ziggy scaled a tree to hop on