Chapter 52: 52 Merge All, Part Six

Three weeks before impact

She was tired of running, hair in disarray, body drenched with sweat, but that didn't mean she wanted to stop, because of this: Thanh's skin a greenish pale, his shaking hands damp with blood, sitting there begging her.

"This isn't fair, Thanh! I can't do this," Tabitha said. Face sore from crying and trying not to let her body shake.

"Just do it!" he yelled. "Just shoot me!"

*

Four months after impact

Tabitha had cleverly managed to avoid him for days by hiding in the library and getting her tea at the hospital in the early hours of the morning, but finally her luck had run out. Just past seven am according to the digital clock on the outside of the hospital building, she sat at a table in the cafeteria eating and Andrew Nguyen announced his presence with the faint scraping of chair legs against the linoleum floor. She looked up, recognised him, and sighed. Tried not to let her posture collapse in on itself too much.

His smile was apologetic.

"I suppose it was inevitable," she said.

"We missed you, Tabitha."

"I sincerely doubt that."

His expression remained small as he sat. His movements undramatic. "You should talk to Maria. She's been worried about you."

It would be easy to mistake him for timid, but she knew better.

"Has she?"

Tabitha looked away.

The robots had been eerily still most of the time since the two sides of the camp rejoined. So they remained as she stared at them, instead of at Andrew and his look of faint concern. She kept waiting for Angharad to notice what was wrong with her robot friends but Angharad seemed distracted with her new friend from the other side. Now the robots just looked like shop mannequins, as if they'd never looked faintly alive at all. Tabitha could almost be sad about it, if she was sure she remembered how to feel sad.

She looked back at Andrew, the thin line of his mouth, his bland brown hair, the faint creasing around the outer edge of his one remaining eye.

She smiled, wide and sharp. "You don't really like me, Andrew. You feel guilty because your best friend died trying to find me. I have no interest in your guilt."

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"Thanh loved you, so you must have something special about you. He died saving your life."

She laughed. Or at least she thought it was a laugh until it came out of her mouth sounding like some sad hitching breath. "Well, I'm dying anyway, so I don't know why he wasted his time."

"He wouldn't have made any other choice."

"He should have. What a stupid man. I didn't even... He didn't love me and I still don't know if I loved him. The whole thing is such a stupid, pointless waste. He should left me there."

"You know it's funny," Andrew said, "you still thinking you didn't love him after he died, and me not realising I loved him until the moment I heard he was dead."

He laughed, once, and then he started to cry, in huge, ugly sobs.

She pushed away from the table and walked out, as fast as she could, not looking back even once.

*

Tabitha made her way to the hospital roof, unnoticed by anyone. Everyone else was too consumed with their own pains, their little lives.

She leaned against the metal fencing around the edge of the roof that kept her from tumbling down. Up that high there should have been a breeze, but there was nothing. Nothing to hear and smell but the sound of the barrier crackling above their heads. She couldn't even hear the sound of her own breathing.

How many months of breathing did she have left?

People below moved around their small world. She saw Sophie in the company of a deeply tanned man in shabby clothes. Eventually Andrew shuffled out of the cafeteria and walked toward a building on the far side.

Gemma seemed to be talking to a boy behind the library. She leaned back against the wall and tilted her head back with a smile, and then the boy shuffled slightly closer. Clever girl, subtle invitation of interest. Tabitha had used the same move a dozen times.

That pig Mackenzie was arguing with a tall woman beside one of the larger buildings, all large gestures and too big expressions. The tall woman leaned in aggressively. Mac shoved her back. Now, that was almost interesting to Tabitha. But then Mac looked around her and dragged the tall woman somewhere Tabitha couldn't see, and the free entertainment was gone.

Tabitha looked away from the empty spot to that big space between the hospital and the buildings that surrounded it, sure to fill up later. The only figure in that space at that time of the morning was mechanical. Not quite humanoid enough to make her uncomfortable. It seemed to be adding pieces to its own arm as it walked, building the shiny white surface of its forearm. It stopped and looked up.

Tabitha felt like she'd been seen. She stepped back from the edge and rushed her way downstairs.

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