“I’ve only been out for a few days and you’re already showing me up,” Nate says. He carefully adjusts the knot of the sling around his arm that keeps any sharp movements or bleeding wounds at bay. The second floor balcony is a little cold once it’s shaded by late afternoon, especially without anything wrapped around his torso but the sling; but wrestling a shirt over his wounds, no matter how loose, would be a losing game. Anything is better than being confined to a hospital bed. A sedentary lifestyle does not agree with him.

“I got a child to stop crying,” Adya responds.

“And you gave her someone to look up to. Someone who looks like her.”

She rolls her eyes and leans over the balcony, trying to focus on each car for as long as possible as they speed down the road below. 

“Do you want to go down to the cafeteria with me?”

“Can’t. Ten-hour fast before my procedure.”

“You can’t eat before they perform surgery on your shoulder?”

“It has something to do with the anesthesia. Ask Elora, she’d know.” He chuckles and runs his thumb over his palm, where his bruises and blisters are finally starting to heal. “I would ask you for advice on how not to be nervous about a bionics procedure, but I don’t think that this is something you’d have experience with.”

“You’d be right.” She lets out a huff of air and grins dryly. “But I can try. Do you want the short truth or the long truth?”

He sits down on the edge of a planter, but Adya remains half-hung over the edge of the balcony. “Give me the long one first.”

“I know your shoulder is only a small part of you, but you might look in the mirror and feel… detached. Like you’re missing something, and whatever’s there to replace it isn’t working,” she explains, still listening to the landscape. “Takes a long time to get used to being synthetic. No matter how much. I would look in the mirror and literally not recognize myself for the first two weeks.”

“Really?”

“Really. I was like a stranger in someone else’s body. Granted, I’m kind of an extreme case, but it can happen to anyone.”

“I can do without a second identity crisis in my twenties. What’s the short truth?”

She taps on the edge of the balcony. “Don’t let people tap their fingers against your new bionics for a while just because they wanna hear the clink sound. It will not feel nice and it will drive you nuts.”

Nate lets his shoulders drop and laughs. He rakes a few strands of long hair from his face, unfond of how greasy it’s gotten since his self-care routine is limited by his wounds.

Her expression shifts to solemn curiosity. “Did you really mean what you said? About always being ready to die?” she asks.

“When did I say that?” he says, eyes narrowing.

“The other day, after you told me about the Brotherhood. You were pretty drugged up so I don’t know how much you remember--”

“I told you all of that?”

Adya folds her arms across her body and turns around. “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell anyone. I just didn’t know whether to chock it up to the morphine or if it was a sober thought.”

“No, no, I’m not worried about that. I own up to who I used to be. I just didn’t expect to tell you so soon,” he responds with a huff of laughter. “I vaguely remember some of it-- you talked about your mom teaching you how to do henna designs. And about blacking out.”

Adya sits down beside her mentor and wipes the nonexistent sweat of her palms onto her pants. “What if I told you that that isn’t the full story?”

“What?”

A nurse pokes his head through the door and shakes a tablet in the air, smiling broadly at his patient. Nate lifts himself to his feet with a grunt and nods.

“Tell me after,” Nate says. “As in after I stop being pumped full of painkillers.” He wraps his good arm around her shoulders, which she accepts carefully. His skin is still ghostly pale and his hands shaky, but he’s still him-- comedic, easygoing, selfless.

Maybe a little too selfless. They have that in common.

Adya collapses into the overgrown grass and watches a cloud pass over the setting sun. She runs her hand over the callouses on her feet; her mother insists she wear shoes when she goes running out across the field, but the soles were already caked in mud from a handful of explorations earlier in the week. Growing up in a suburb means that vast, empty landscapes are few and far between.

“Adya Milana, your mother is asking for you!” someone calls from the top of the hill.

“Tell her I’m busy!” she answers.

She chuckles and descends the hill. Tucked in her arm is a basket filled with citrus from the small grove on the other side of the house. “I’m surprised you didn’t want to go into town with your cousins and your father. I don’t know a single seventeen-year-old who would pass up the opportunity to go shopping and not have to spend her own money.”

“Auntie, I live there. I’m used to it.” She snatches a grapefruit from the basket and begins to peel it, enduring the ‘eating thirty minutes before dinnertime’ glare from her aunt. The rest of the family is bound to get caught up in their shopping and delay the meal, anyway.

A bright yellow catches Adya’s eye deeper in the grass: a wide patch of weeds that bloom with beautiful flowers. What is normally a nuisance to the earth lives unobstructed on this side of the field, where there are no crops.

“How come everything is so… much over here?”

“This chunk of land was a weapons testing zone, once upon a time. The soil is bad on this side for anything but grass. Everything I plant dies so I don’t bother anymore. At least it’s useful to someone.” She ruffles Adya’s chest-length hair. The sun sits halfway beneath the mountains off in the distance. Its summer rays become softer and softer, climbing across Adya’s skin like silk rather than sandpaper. “Your cousins hounded me when I told them we were moving to the countryside. It was like they were terrified of a little dust and dirt. Now, I practically have to beg my sons to come inside. It’s no wonder you get along so well with them.”

Adya hugs her knees to her chest and picks the dirt out from between her toes. “Mama calls me the family babysitter. I think she’s just exaggerating because I’m one of the older kids.”

“You’re a nurturer, just like her. Always looking to do some good. You’re not as arrogant, though I could be biased in that observation. It might just be the sibling rivalry talking.” She laughs. “Don’t go too far, Adya. Your mother will throw a fit and you and I both will never hear the end of it.”

Another pat on top of Adya’s head and her aunt disappears back up the hill and into the house. Carefully navigating between jagged earth and sharp weeds, she wanders closer to the patch of yellow flowers. Her steps are light and practically float across the dirt, but after only a few dozen feet of walking, her foot lands on something cold and hard and she stops. 

Through her toes, she looks at the metal container. Its round edges with a short, cylindrical top. Its tightly welded, yet rusting seams; even in the age of bionics, some artillery remains rudimentary. By nature, that’s exactly what these landmines are. Built to detonate, built to destroy-- but only once the pressure is removed.

Ten thousand thoughts come spilling out at once. She’s not sure if it’s her own foresight or fear that’s keeping her frozen in place. The cicadas, the birds, and the swishing of the long grass all disappear; all Adya can hear is her aunt’s voice. A weapons testing zone, once upon a time. Following close behind it is her mother’s voice, clear as day, from the back door.

“Adya Milana!” she calls. “Five more minutes and then I need you back in the house, love!”

“I’ll be there soon,” she says, almost mechanically. She can’t let anyone else worry about this. She’ll be stuck out here all night if someone else finds out. They’ll call the police, fire department, and every hospital in town to try and prepare for the inevitable. They’ll cry into their sleeves and Adya will all but stop them. The time will come for her to step off and they won’t hesitate to watch.

A tightness closes around Adya’s throat. If not her, it would’ve been someone else. Her aunts and their young children. Two twin boys with dreams of playing professional football, and one teenage daughter who writes poetry that can bring people to their knees. They would’ve wandered out into the field, chasing a ball or admiring the stars, too focused on the task at hand to realize.

All that hope, gone in an instant. 

The sun finally disappears beneath the mountains, leaving her body eclipsed in the shade. A dove coos quietly from the trees on the other side of the field. The road that leads into town still lies empty. The arrival of her cousins won’t be for a little while, as expected. The less people that have to hear this, the better.

Adya steps forward and makes it six feet before the ground shakes. Her body is thrown up into the air. Like the setting sun, she disappears in the shade and the world plunges into darkness.