We Make Mayhem [boyxboy]

Chapter Forty-One

The tires finally touched down and I slowly opened the door. I could breathe—that was what really mattered—but I didn't really feel like I could see. Short, fluffy grass covered the ground as far as I could see, a golden color so pale it was almost white. It undulated slowly in the slight breeze, looking more like fur than grass. The sky was bright, like an overcast spring day at home, but there didn't appear to be any clouds.

There also wasn't a sound other than the wind.

I sat back down in the Edison. "Simone, where are we? Where's Noah?"

Simone brought up a map of the terrain within a mile's radius of us. A dot blipped some distance ahead—north, I guessed.

"Noah Lord is approximately three hundred feet from our current location," she said.

"But there's nothing here," I said. "I can see everything for miles, there's nothing. Or..."

Nothing to see, anyway. What if...

I took the vial out of my pocket, uncorked it, and swallowed its contents. As it hit my stomach and the bots entered my bloodstream, I felt that strange, warm knowing again, but this time, it was different.

I felt immediately that I wasn't just swallowing the bots to play with them, like on Manor Island. Here, I was taking the dose to integrate into a world that, at its very foundation, was built on them. As the bots filled my body, I began to sense the world that was really around me, though invisible to the eye, but I couldn't understand it. There were... buildings and rooms, I supposed, but not physical buildings and rooms. They were abstractions—they were somehow the spirits of buildings and rooms. Buildings kept things safe and separate; rooms organized them, kept them private. 2613 Solarii was not a physical place. It was a place of ideas.

If you had an idea, you could find it in these conceptual buildings and rooms. My physical heart raced: if I could grasp the idea, the concept, the spirit of Noah, I could find him.

The spirit of Noah was a sweeping flair for the dramatic, a carefully crafted showmanship. It was the way he loved ideas, loved to spin them around and examine them from every angle like something he was picking up in a curiosity shop. It was his playfulness, a streak of rebelliousness a mile wide that constantly had to wrestle with his sense of duty and devotion to his family. It was his shyness, too—how he loved the spotlight but didn't wholly enjoy being seen. It was the way he played his cards close to his chest, but the gleeful joy with which he let me into his life. His certainty about me, the way he never had any doubts about letting down his walls for me. The way he curled up with me on the floor of my truth room after telling me absolutely everything. It was the way he was willing to carry his burdens to the end.

That was Noah.

I bit my lip, but it didn't matter: I was crying. Because there he was.

"Riley?"

I opened my eyes. I was in a physical space: a room that, though comfortably furnished, was as colorless as the planet's landscape. It was the planet's landscape, I realized, just repurposed for human comfort. Elise and Ben and the twins sat huddled on a bed in the corner, the kids all asleep.

Noah stood in the middle of the room, hands pressed over his mouth and eyes closed in relief. I rushed to him, gathering him against my chest.

"You're here, you're here, you're here," Noah whispered.

"I'm here. It's okay." Was it? "Is everyone all right?"

He nodded. "We're fine."

"Where is he?"

Noah knew who I meant. He pointed. At the far end of the room, Decker Lord lay on a couch, seemingly asleep. There was something different about his face. Beyond the slackness of sleep, his mouth looked lighter, his brow relaxed.

"He's not in there anymore," Noah said. "We arrived in Solarii and they immediately... arrested him, I guess. They removed him from the body and took him away. They didn't like that he came back. He wasn't supposed to."

Decker's chest rose and fell very, very slowly.

"So is... is the real Decker Lord in there, then?"

"We don't know," Noah said. "We don't know if he's just asleep, or brain dead, or what."

He looked quickly over his shoulder at his mom. Elise—I couldn't think of her as Mrs. Lord anymore; she was so much more—stroked the sleeping Daisy's forehead. Her expression was blank, and it looked like she was trying very hard to keep it that way.

"We have to get them home," I said. "Them and your dad. Right now."

Noah squeezed my hand. "Riley... I don't know what to do. Dad... my real dad. Is he even my real dad? Fuck, I don't know. What, do we bring him? His body? What is he, to us?"

"We can't leave him here," I said. "If there's any chance of him waking up, we can't leave him alone with no idea how he got to be thirty-five years old and stranded on an alien planet."

"So, what, we let him slow us down?"

"I can carry him."

"What if we have to run? What if we have seconds to get out of here?" Noah lowered his voice, so his mom wouldn't hear. "Riley, I'm not willing to lose you in exchange for him. I don't even know him. I need you."

Maybe it was too much, to build a relationship from the ground up, or risk being cast aside if Decker was too angry at everything that had been done to him to even attempt a relationship. Maybe it was easier to lose his father completely.

Maybe I didn't know him, either, but my heart squeezed at the thought of a human left, stranded, so very far from home. It was the same instinctive feeling that had spurred me on while making Letters to Intrepid II. These were our fellow men. We couldn't abandon them. We owned them. Decker Lord's humanity was enough reason, to me, to bring him back to Earth with us. It was his home, the same way it was ours.

"Your mom and the kids are the priority," I said. "They need you. You lead them, I'll carry him, but if anything happens—"

"I refuse to leave you behind, Riley. I refuse."

This was not the time to get stubborn, but the set of his jaw and his tightly pursed lips told me he wasn't going to react kindly to me telling him that. We were wasting time.

"Let's just focus on getting them out of here."

"I need you to promise me you won't sacrifice yourself for him."

"Fine," I said. "I promise, okay?"

His expression didn't soften. I ran my thumbs along his jawline. He relaxed, just a bit. 

"You need to lead them," I said. "Go out that door and think about your car. You should be able to find it."

Noah nodded. "Mom?"

Elise shook Daisy awake. Ella woke as Elise shifted to the edge of the bed. Without missing a beat, the girls rubbed their eyes and scrambled to their feet. Ben stayed mercifully asleep.

There was nothing else to do. A smile flickered on Noah's lips. He leaned in and kissed me quickly. I wanted so much more than time and present company and the fact that we were about to try to escape from an alien planet would allow. Wanting more of him would be the main propellant to get me the fuck out of here.

"Let's go," he said.

He strode to the door.