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For the first time in my life, everything had gone according to plan.
The children were out of the Abyss. El and Kali had returned from Vecna’s mindscape, and Dustin and I had set the bomb beneath the exotic matter.
All we had to do was flip back to the Rightside Up.
Dustin passed through the rift first. He pressed one foot through the thin membrane, applying pressure until it snapped under his weight. Before the barrier could be reformed, he leapt through, his sharp yell cut off by the writhing vines.
I was next. A new membrane had already formed by the time I pressed down, but this one snapped easily beneath my boot. Freedom and fresh air wafted from the opening.
We won. We really, really won.
I dropped down. My leg fell through, then the next, and—!
I caught myself. I didn’t know why, at first. It was involuntary. Once my rational brain caught up, I looked around, clueless. Why hadn’t I let myself fall through? Everything was going according to plan. Nothing around me looked amiss. If nothing was wrong, then what was this feeling?
I glanced over my shoulder, and something too sour to be simple recognition flickered through me. El and Kali were no longer right behind me, but several paces back, exchanging intense whispers.
“Guys?”
They whipped around to face me. I don’t know what expression I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. El’s eyes widened, then neutralized, like water dosed over a fire.
“Go on, Mike!” she called. “We’re coming.”
Liar. The thought hit me instantaneously, and I knew it to be true. Some have described El as hard to read, but they’re wrong. Her emotions shine through in subtle, unconventional ways. Instinct over culture.
And “liar” was written all over her. In the glistening of her darting eyes, the subtle wobbling of her lip. In her too-bright tone of voice.
El Hopper was lying to me. And it didn’t take a genius to guess who had encouraged her to.
I turned to Kali, my fear stoking my growing anger. “What did you do?”
She said nothing. El’s face danced between trying to keep up her facade and knowing what Kali’s silence told me. I stomped forward, confused and enraged and needing answers.
“What did you do!” I shouted, so close I could see the split-second of terror pass over her. Angry as I was, I could see what memories I invoked in her. Memories of the bad men killing her friends. Memories of labs and cages and torture. A reel of secrets I was never supposed to see.
Then, she blinked, and all that was left was rage.
“I told her the truth!” Kali stepped forward, but I held my ground. “I did what you and your policeman and everyone else were too cowardly to do! You think you protect her by lying to her face, about your dazzling futures and sunsets and waterfalls—!”
The word caught in my ears. “How do you know about that?”
She spoke over me. “You know nothing of our lives. Nothing! And you think you can promise her a future?”
“Kali—,” El’s voice shook.
“You will never know what it was like!” Kali spat. She seemed to keep growing, stretching upwards until she towered over me. My anger rang too loudly for me to even notice the impossibility of it all. “To be poked, prodded, used! Born and bred to be a subject! And Jane—!”
“El!” I shouted over her. The argument was so irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I had to say something. I would’ve said anything to get her to stop talking. “Her name is El! You think you know her so well—!”
“You gave her that name, not the other way around!”
“That’s bullshit!”
“You think that because you found her all those years ago, that you have a claim over her. That you have authority over what Jane wants, what she needs, but you don’t.” Kali’s voice lowered dangerously, treading a path she hadn’t yet been willing to cross. “In that way, are you really any different than Papa?”
I froze. The accusation hung in the air, so thick I could hardly breathe. No, I thought. I’m nothing like him. Everything I had ever done was for El. I loved her from the moment I met her—I meant that when I’d said it. I’d been stupid and selfish, sometimes. I wasn’t perfect. But I loved her.
But…would Brenner have said that, too?
“No.”
Kali and I broke our stare. We turned to look at El, for the first time since we’d started arguing. She was crying.
“No,” she choked out. “How could you say that? Why…how could you say that?”
Her tears doused the fire in my chest. I wasn’t angry anymore. I could never be. I ran and threw my arms around her, my fingers stringing through her hair.
“Hey…hey,” I whispered, pressing a quick kiss to the top of her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t… I’m sorry.”
“You’re not,” she sobbed into my chest. “You saved me. You have been…everything good in my life. All of my happiest moments, you were there. You are nothing like him.”
The building warmth withered in my chest when I noticed it. It was so small, such a potentially unimportant thing…but it terrified me. I was so scared, I wanted to keep it to myself. Tuck it away somewhere so far that maybe even El would forget about it. But I wasn’t so naive.
I held her tighter. “...’Have been’?”
She went still in my arms, and everything in me ran cold. I pushed her away while she was still warm. I wished I hadn’t. I wished I had never had to see that expression on her face.
Defeat.
“El?” I croaked. I sounded so pitiful, but I didn’t care. The pieces of a fucked-up puzzle were slotting together. What Kali had said about the lab, El and I’s moment by the salt bath, their hesitancy at the rift. I knew what it all meant. I knew it, and I couldn’t stand it. “El—!”
“Mike,” she put her hands on my cheeks. They were so warm. “I love you. I love you so, so much.”
“Please, El, please…” I sobbed. My vision swam. I tried to blink it away—horribly, acutely aware that this could be the last time I see her face.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. But I need you to leave. I need—!”
“Fuck that!” The scream ripped out of me unexpectedly. El blinked, watery-eyed. I couldn’t catch my breath, I couldn’t breathe. “I need you! Don’t you get that? I need you! I’m nothing without you—!”
“You are, you’re so much more—,”
“You’re everything to me, El, please—!”
In the distance, bouncing off the walls of Hawkin’s Lab was the ending of Human Cannonball. El’s face shattered as my desperation threatened to consume me.
“You have to go,” she cried. “Please, Mike, please!”
“I’m not going without you. I’m not. I’m not, El, so don’t make me. Come with me, or die with me. I don’t care.” The words fell out of me, both foreign and entirely true. For once in my crazy, unbelievable, fucked-up life, I felt like the person I’d wanted to be. Mike the Brave.
“I want to go to school with you. I want us to go to the stupid dances and complain about our teachers. I want to go grocery shopping and argue over name-brand or generic, ‘cause I don’t know the difference.” I could barely get the words out. My throat was thick, and my voice wobbled, but it felt so real. Like a reality I had seen, but not yet lived.
“Mike,” El’s voice cracked. “It’s not—”
“Possible,” I interrupted. “It’s not possible. Okay.” I reached up and grabbed her shoulders, lowering myself to her level. I locked our eyes together, willing her to please hear me. “Then I want to run with you. I want to live our life with tired legs, showering in creeks, and eating berries we’re only half-sure aren’t poisonous. I want to dodge bullets and hide in wolf dens and be chased across the world, I don’t care! I want to live with you, El!”
Our faces, wet with tears, were only inches apart. Her red-rimmed eyes flickered between mine, like she was searching for the truth. Did I really have it? Could I be happy this way? Could we be happy this way? Yes, I willed her to hear, yes!
“Please…” my voice was quieter now. Gentler. “...try with me?”
In the distance, the last line of Human Cannonball played.
And tonight you’re probably feeling…
El’s arms latched around me. Before I could register the feeling, we were launched across the clearing, back toward the edge of the rift. Kali dipped in first, then El—no way was I letting her go last, again—then me. Gravity flipped beneath our feet. We collapsed in a pile on the green grass of the Rightside Up.
“What happened?” Dustin scooped us all into a hug, caught somewhere between anger and pure relief. He sniffed against the tears that’d formed in his eyes. “You all scared the shit out of me! Fuck!”
Head still spinning, I writhed in Dustin’s grasp until I could see her. El, looking exhausted as she wiped the blood from underneath her nose. She smiled weakly, and I was gone. My sobs were like screams, exhausting all the anxiety and presumed grief from my chest.
Dustin held me tighter, and I felt El’s hand intertwine with mine. It was so warm. Alive.
Alive, alive, alive.