The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 51

Ziggy stood with his back to the city. Cold wind buffeted him, and he tightened his hold on the heavy wheelchair. He didn’t want to be swept off the roof without her. They must fall together. They had come into the world together, and they must leave it the same way. Their destinies had always been intertwined.

“Is there really poison gas in there?” she asked.

He knew she wanted him to lie to her, to tell that her Tesla was safe, but he wouldn’t. Not now. “Of course.”

“You can’t kill him.” A touch of panic, quickly controlled. Zag was always tougher than he.

“He’s killing himself. All he has to do to save his life is take a few steps and open the door. It’s simple.”

“You know he can’t go outside.”

“The drug makes it harder, perhaps, but who’s to say he can’t overcome it with enough power of will? That he can’t choose to be otherwise?” Perhaps Tesla could succeed in changing his nature, even as Ziggy himself had failed.

She twitched her head violently. It was the biggest movement that he had seen from her in weeks, and it reminded him how trapped she was inside her ruined body.

He leaned down to whisper in her perfectly formed ear. “What about you? What do you choose?”

“I choose for you to save him.” She hadn’t hesitated before she spoke, and he hated her for it. She cared so much about that man.

“He must save himself. Those are the rules. We will watch to the end, to see if he changes his mind.” They would stay because Ziggy longed to watch the life drain from Tesla’s eyes, and to make sure she knew that Ziggy was the last man in the world who loved her.

“I’ll go off the roof with you.” Her blue eyes held no guile. “Gladly.”

“I know you will.”

“But only if you let him live.”

He stroked her cool cheek, and she didn’t move away. “You’re too stubborn, Zag.”

“I want to go off the roof with you,” she whispered. “We have reasons for wanting to die, but we can’t take Joe with us.”

“This is a kindness. If he loved you, he wouldn’t want to live without you.”

“Nobody else loves me like that,” she said. “Just you.”

Warmth welled inside him. She loved him, and she knew that he loved her. It didn’t matter what that man had told her. She still knew what was most important.

But then he went cold. Her words were true, but they felt like a lie. She would manipulate him to save Tesla. She would do that. Even now, she would do that.

“I won’t go to him,” he said. “I can’t. He has to make his own choice. Just like the women in the tunnels. Just like us.”

She rested her cheek against his hand. Even wasted by the disease, she was so beautiful. Suffering had tempered her into something delicate and fine. He smelled her hair and recognized the shampoo she had started using in her teens and never changed, cucumbers and lemon. It smelled fresh and clean in the cold wind.

“Please don’t kill him,” she said. “Leave him alive to remember me.”

He slapped her perfect cheek so hard her head rocked back against the wheelchair’s headrest. Tesla wasn’t supposed to remember her. That man’s memories of her as the artist, the woman, the lover must die, too.

“Please,” she said, “let it be just us. Zig and Zag.”

The red imprint of his hand marred the alabaster perfection of her cheek, and he couldn’t look at it.