He turns his head and looks at me over his shoulder.
“You would have saved her yourself,” I say, confident of that.
He looks away, like he doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth. Like he sees himself as some sort of monster.
“Who was the girl in the dream, the one with the green eyes?” I ask, very soft. Because I think I already know, and my heart breaks for him.
“Lizzie was my sister.”
I remember so many things in a sudden, painful rush: Jackson’s hesitation when I asked if he was an only child. His guarded reply when I asked him if he could do what the Drau did, taking electricity through human eyes. The way he drove, so carefully, obeying all the rules, hands in perfect position on the wheel. The way I woke up from the nightmare, certain that I had killed Lizzie . . . no . . . that was Jackson’s certainty. . . .
Lifting my head, I find him in the dimness, standing far away from me, still as stone. Brittle stone. If I go to him, if I touch him, he’ll shatter.
I saw it in him right from the start. I kept thinking that Jackson knew something about pain, that he understood my loss. But knowing the truth only makes me wish I’d been wrong. Better that he not know.
“I’m sorry, Jackson.” I know from experience that those words don’t help, but it’s been bred into us to say them when someone dies.
Jackson paces another dozen steps away. I don’t like that he feels the need to put even more distance between us. He thinks I’ll hate him, that I’ll turn from him. Nothing he’s telling me would make me do that, yet that’s where he thinks these revelations will take us.
Images and words spin through my thoughts, memories of the nightmare and things Jackson said at different times since the moment we met. Things I said. All out of context, but when they come together, they make me wary. More than wary. My stomach knots with dread.
“The shells we terminated,” I say. “I didn’t just imagine they looked like you, did I? I convinced myself I was seeing things, but I wasn’t. Those shells were cloned from Lizzie’s DNA.”
“Yes.”
I close my eyes, lost in the horror of what that must have been like for him, terminating bodies that looked like his dead sister. “How many times have you had to do that?”
“That was the third batch I know of that they made from her DNA.”
I shake my head. “But the accident . . . I don’t understand. If she died in the car accident, how did the Drau get her?”
He makes a sharp, cutting gesture. Then he starts to speak, low and fast. “I was dying, impaled by three metal shards, pinned to the seat, bleeding everywhere. I think my legs were crushed. I know I couldn’t feel them. Lizzie was hurt. Maybe dying. I don’t know. I’ll never know. She was part of the game. I wasn’t. She kept talking about how she needed to hang on until she got pulled. That she’d make them pull me, too.
“I thought she meant we needed to hang on until paramedics came and got us out, but she was talking about the game. She figured the game would heal us both. I don’t think she really thought about what would happen after that.
“I was in and out of consciousness. At some point, we got pulled. We were healed. And I was twelve years old and part of a game I couldn’t understand. They left us on the same team. Lizzie watched my ass.” He huffs a sharp exhalation out through his nose and shakes his head. “First time out, I was stupid. Cocky. I was a kid. I thought I was invincible.
“My con went orangey red. We were nowhere near finishing the mission, nowhere near getting pulled. I wasn’t going to make it through.” He swallows, then keeps going, talking even faster. “Lizzie knew I wouldn’t make it, so she came up with this genius plan. She stared in my eyes and told me to take what I needed. To make like a Drau and suck some life out of her. Enough that I’d survive. Enough to change the color on my con. She said it was like boosting a car battery. That I just needed a little juice to get me through.” His voice breaks, but he keeps going as my heart shatters for him. “She said we were a team. That one of us wouldn’t go back without the other.”
No team. Every man for himself. Jackson’s mantra. The only way he could keep going. My blood thunders in my ears and I’m drenched in horror, knowing what he’s going to say next and wishing he wouldn’t say it. That it had never happened. If wishes were pennies . . .