Crux

18 FRIENDS

Friday October 19th

Rangan woke, curled up on the floor in a corner of his cell. He’d eaten the traitor’s meal they’d given him, but refused the new, restraint-free bed. It was better than he deserved.

He blinked to shake off sleep. His dreams had been strange. Ilya fighting faceless figures with push/pull. Ilya dying in the dark, crying, alone, her heart stopped, all of her fading to nothing. And children. Strange children. Confused children.

Rangan pulled himself up to sitting. He was stiff from sleeping on the hard surface. His hip hurt and his left leg was half asleep. He rubbed his calf absently as he struggled back to wakefulness.

Ilya. Ilya was probably still resisting. She’d never give in. She had the heart of a fighter. His dream was guilt. Guilt that he’d given up, that he’d turned informant, when his friend would never put her own life ahead of her convictions.

Had they told her that he’d broken? Would they go easier on her now? It was something to hope for. What would she think of him, once she found out? Would she despise him? Hate him?

And Kade? Wats? What would they think of him?

He’d always had the easy life. Rich parents. Good looks. Success came easy, in school, in music. The Indian golden boy. Boy wonder scientist by day, hot DJ by night.

And the women. God, how he loved women. And they’d loved him. Woman after woman after woman. He could leave a club most weekend nights with a party girl, sometimes two. He’d jerked himself off to sleep so often the first few weeks here, calling up memories of their faces, their bodies, the kinky things they’d done for him. Memories remembered naturally. Memories he’d recorded with Nexus, without ever asking their permissions.

Such an easy life. Rangan Shankari, international playboy.

Yeah, right.

He was pathetic, he saw now. What had he ever done for anyone else? He’d lived his whole life as a taker. Taking money from Mom and Dad. Taking sex from girls whose names he barely remembered, girls that he honestly didn’t give a fuck about, except that they were hot and fun in bed and good for his rep.

The only thing he’d ever done that was worth a damn was Nexus. His one impact on the world. And had he fought for that? When they’d busted the party in SF he tried to run. And now, in this stinking cell, they’d given him a second chance. He could show this time that he had the strength of his convictions. But no. They tightened the screws a bit and he folded, just like that.

What did it even matter that he was going to die here? His whole life was a self-obsessed joke. He’d been so goddamn self-centered that he might as well not have existed at all.

Fucking pathetic.

Fuck!

Rangan slammed his hand against the concrete wall of his cell and then swore as he felt the pain.

Then he felt something else.

Another mind.

Faintly. A young mind, weird and warped, and reaching out for him…

Bobby closed his eyes and he could feel his new friends in his head – Tim and Tyrone and Alfonso and Pedro and Jason and Jose and Parker and all the rest. They were like him, autistic. But more than that. He could feel them in his head. They were real.

There were grownups here who came in and gave them tests, but he couldn’t feel the grownups in his head at all and he knew why it was because they didn’t have NEXUS and so they were stupid and they weren’t real people at all.

Sometimes the grownups took one of his friends away to give them a test, but Bobby and the others could still feel whoever they’d taken, like when they took Nick and gave him tests on Math and English and Bobby could feel him taking the test and even though Nick didn’t know some of the answers, Nick got them right because he had his friends there in his head.

But then later they took Nick further away and he was GONE from Bobby’s head and Bobby was scared that they had HURT him or KILLED him but they brought Nick back and Nick said they’d only given him special tests and so Bobby felt better.

The next day they took Bobby away and gave him tests on Math and English and Science, and made him play games and solve puzzles and he could still feel all his friends, but then after that they took him to a special room and they closed the door and he COULDN’T FEEL HIS FRIENDS and he started to get scared, but he remembered that Nick had come back and Tim said that all the other boys came back, and so he’d probably come back too.

Then they put a cap over his head and gave him a test of Spanish, at least he thought it was Spanish, because he didn’t know Spanish and he just guessed and did really badly at the test, but that wasn’t his fault if they were testing him on something he hadn’t studied.

And then they took him back to the room with all the others and he was glad when he could feel them all in his head again and they asked him to tell them all about it and he SHOWED them the and the and the where you couldn’t feel your friends in your head and the and he was happy he had friends – friends that could understand him and he wanted to always have friends like this.

And that night he dreamed in Spanish and dreamed he was Pedro or Alfonso or Jose and the next day they took him away to the special room again where he couldn’t feel his friends and tested him in Spanish only this time he KNEW THE ANSWERS and even when they asked him questions they hadn’t asked yesterday he KNEW THE ANSWERS TOO.

And he knew it was because of Pedro and Alfonso and Jose and the Nexus in all their heads.

And that night, when they made him go to bed and he lay down and closed his eyes he felt something, another person, far far away, a sad person, alone, a person who felt less like his friends and more like his daddy. And Bobby reached out to that person so sad and so far away and tried to say hello.