LITMIR.BIZ

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notice his utility knife in the sand. He probably left it out to puncture the food packs. It’s still sheathed, but I’m fairly certain that I can get the blade out faster than he can get at me. He sees me look at the knife.

      Time’s up.

      Levi pounces as I jump for the knife. He lands where I just was while I somersault away again, taking the knife out as I do. I put the blade between my teeth so I can use my hands to do a back handspring away. This is a pretty show-offy way to distance myself from him, but it’s also something he’s not expecting, and I can get a tremendous amount of space between us because I’m using both my arms and legs for power.

      I don’t have time to bask in the glory of nailing the landing. I whip the knife out of my mouth and throw it. He’s not expecting this, either. He wants to kill me, but he wants to use his bare hands. He wants to strangle me or maybe punch my head until my skull shatters into a hundred pieces. You don’t think about knives or guns so much inside the Blood Lust, because the kill would be too clean, too unsatisfying. You want blood, and you want to feel that you caused it.

      The knife lands squarely in his right shoulder, exactly where I meant it to. I threw it hard and it’s now embedded deep inside the muscle. That’s an actual skill they teach during Citadel training. At the time I believed it was utterly ridiculous. Who has the luxury to stress about missing a vital organ when you’re fighting for your life? Sadly, since then I have honed this throwing talent and used it many times. Do I worry about being killed on the battlefield? Absolutely. But I worry more about killing unnecessarily. There are only so many lives you can take without it completely, irrevocably, fucking you up.

      My plan works. I watch Levi’s face change from fury to frustration to outright pain. He looks at the knife and I look at him. He closes his eyes and clenches his jaw.

      “I am so, so sorry,” I say as I walk toward him, picking up the med kit from the pile of our stuff on the way.

      “Ryn, stop,” Levi commands, with more defeat in his voice than I have ever heard. I do as he says. I want to keep on apologizing, but I feel like it’s better if I don’t speak, and follow his lead. “Just throw the med bag over here,” he asks softly.

      “Levi, come on …,” I practically plead. “You won’t be triggered again. You’re in too much pain. Let me help you.” I take another step.

      “Seriously, Ryn, back the fuck up!” I wince at his sudden burst of anger. I’m used to him like this, of course, but right now I’m feeling guilty. I’m vulnerable to his tone. I swallow hard.

      “Fine,” I tell him as I throw the bag. It lands at his feet and he squats down, opens the case, and grabs an anticoagulant gel, superglue, and a bandage. I can’t believe he’s going to do this by himself. I blow out in frustration and wish that I could turn away, but I have to make sure he patches himself up decently because he won’t let me help.

      Levi remains on his knees. He slowly pulls the knife out. I watch the blood drain from his face. Without the knife as a kind of stopgap, the wound begins to bleed profusely. Levi doesn’t even seem to notice. He rubs the anticoagulant on it and the bleeding stops within seconds while the wound bubbles and foams. He doesn’t have a mirror, so he can’t really clean the cut properly and he doesn’t even bother to try. Levi closes the slit as best as he can with the glue, though it’s still filled with coagulant and covered in blood. Then, he undoes a large bandage and slaps it on his shoulder.

      Using the sleeve of his uniform, he picks up his food out of the pot on the stove and opens the pack with the same knife he had just pulled out of his body. Gross. He pours it into a bowl and starts to eat in silence.

      There’s nothing I can do now. He’s going to blame me for this for a while, and I suppose it’s mostly my fault even if I didn’t mean to hurt him. I didn’t give him the Blood Lust. I didn’t even ask him to come along with me through the Rift. All I did was trip, but he’s the one parading around half-naked and acting like this is some sort of vacation. If he’d been acting normally, then I wouldn’t have been worried about this exact thing happening. I realize there’s a causality thing going on here that if I think too hard about will do my head in, so I dismiss it.

      The silence becomes increasingly awkward. We focus on eating our food and hydrating the cells in our weakened bodies. Regardless of our superhuman abilities, that last Earth pushed us to the limit. I know we need to get moving, but right now I just want to sit here. I’m exhausted from the drugs and it takes a lot of concentration not to think about what just happened. I’m so lost in my own thoughts that I am startled when Levi finally speaks.

      “We can’t do this,” he tells me solemnly.

      “We can. We just have to be more careful. Maybe we jump with our masks on next time or—”

      “No,” Levi interrupts. “I don’t mean the mission or the Rifts. And you know that I don’t. I mean, this—me and you together all the time, alone. I’m going to kill you.”

      “You won’t,” I assure him as I put down my canteen. “It was bound to happen once. Think of it as a warning shot. Now we’ll be extra vigilant.”

      “Jesus,” he says as he shakes his head. “For someone who is so smart, you really can be dumb as shit sometimes.”

      I throw him a nasty look. “You’re trying to bait me, but it’s not going to work. I made a mistake. I’m not going to make it worse by getting into an argument.” And then, he actually laughs.

      “Make it worse? Worse than a knife in my shoulder? Worse than the fact that I can barely do my job because I’m so friggin’ scared of accidentally touching you? What if we’re on another Earth and some poor girl who doesn’t know the rules puts her hand on my shoulder? What then? I just kill an innocent person because that’s how it is?”

      I slowly lean back, away from him. “What are you saying?”

      “Stop it!” Levi yells. “Stop playing dumb! You know what I’m saying. You know what we have to do, and don’t for one minute tell me that you haven’t considered it.”

      “No,” I tell him, and I shoot up, off the sand, onto my feet. “It is way too dangerous.”

      “More dangerous than what the fuck is going on right now?” Levi gets up, too, and faces me in a standoff. “You know,” he says with a sarcastic huff of a laugh, “if I thought you were saying no because you were afraid for your own safety that would be one thing, but that’s not you. That’s not Saint Ryn, leader of Beta Team, the savior of all Citadels. That isn’t the case. You won’t do this because of Ezra. You don’t want to cheat on your boyfriend. Look around you!” Levi yells as he points at the bandage on his shoulder. “Look at me! You think normal rules apply? You think life and death is more important than disappointing some kid?”

      I take a long breath in an attempt to calm myself, center myself. I told myself that I wasn’t going to let him bait me and I’ll be damned if I let him play me like that, even as I want to tear his face off for the contempt that dripped from his voice. I’m almost proud of myself for my restraint. He just has to think this through.

      Shit, I need to think this through.

      What would it mean, really, to deprogram Levi? He’s asking me not to consider Ezra, but that’s impossible. I could fight beside Levi all day long, but touch him? Softly? The way I let Ezra touch me? Alarm bells and sirens and a robotic Danger! Danger! voice goes off inside my head. He doesn’t know what he’s asking me. He thinks it’s something easy. That it’s something we can just do in all our spare time jumping from Earth to alternate Earth.

      He thinks, but he has no frickin’ idea.

      I have to handle this very carefully. I begin to talk, but I make sure to keep my tone level and empathetic. Well, as empathetic as possible for me: “Were you listening when I explained to everyone what the Roones and ARC did to us? We were fourteen when they figured out exactly what turned us on and exactly what we thought

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