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I refuse to believe that he’s nothing more than a monster. I can’t watch him sink like this. I keep going because I need to find that boy again, the beating heart buried underneath his lie. I have to stop him in order to save him. He was once the hand that pulled me up. Now I have to be his.
Life is always like that—you don’t know when you’ll suddenly claw your way out of your circumstances, or when you’ll go crashing back down into them. “I’m not going to tell you it’s never too late,” I reply. “But, in my experience, it’s always the not doing that I regret more.”
“That’s different. Your parents are in love. And they weren’t fighting over the fact that your dad wants to control the world.”
A sheen of cold sweat covers my entire body. In my next life, I’m going to be an accountant.
We fight for survival with everything we’ve got, as if the oxygen mask and the seat belt and avoidance of a square of chocolate cake might be the thing that saves us. That’s the difference between the real and the virtual. Reality is where you can lose the ones you love. Reality is the place where you can feel the cracks in your heart.
When the world is murky, guide yourself with your own steady light.
“Has he?” Jax interrupts me, her eyes distant and bleak. “Zero isn’t real. He’s an illusion. Sasuke Tanaka’s real body died years ago on a lab gurney. What you’ve seen standing before you is a virtual projection. Emika, Zero is Sasuke’s human mind successfully transmitted into data. He is an artificial intelligence program.”
“You are forever a piece of my story. I couldn’t turn my back on you without turning my back on myself. I had to try.” My quiet words hang in the air. “I had to hold out my hand to you.”
“You told me you never wanted to see me again,” I manage to say. His voice is low and raw. “Because every time I see you, it takes everything in me to turn away.”
“You’re still here,” Tremaine croaks out. “Leaving any minute,” Roshan replies, even though I can tell he doesn’t mean it. “These chairs are the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever sat on.” “You and your sensitive ass.” In spite of everything, Tremaine still has the ability to roll his eyes. “You used to complain about my bed back in the Riders’ dorms, too.” “Yeah, it sucked. If there was ever a reason for you to leave the Riders, it was because of that damn bed.”
“See, here’s the moment after my speech when I’d like to either go right up to you or leave the room in a grand finale, except I’m kind of tied down to this stupid bed, so now it’s just awkward.
And that’s when I realize that, at the end, we’d all wish for the same thing. Just a little more time.
Maybe I should feel like a hero. But I don’t. It’s always easier to destroy than to create.
Every problem has a solution. But after every solution, there’s a new problem to tackle, some new challenge to take on. You don’t stop after you solve one thing. You keep going, you find a new way and a new path, try to do better and create better. Tearing something down isn’t the end; doing something great, or better, something right, is. Or maybe there isn’t such a thing as an end goal at all. You accomplish something, and then you shift, ready to accomplish the next. You keep solving one problem after another until you change the world.
