Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
He hadn’t cried. He’d already learned not to cry. His mother wouldn’t hear him, and if one of her friends was in the room and conscious, it might result in a slap to the face and an order for him to shut up.
Not all his mother’s friends took the “special medicine” she’d given him after he asked her for food. The medicine ones weren’t so bad—they mostly just sat there with strange smiles on their faces, their eyes holes with nothing behind them. He didn’t like the dead eyes, but those friends were better than the ones who were wide awake and full of meanness.
That day, however, he’d seen he was alone with his mother—but he still hadn’t cried. Instead, he’d hungered for the crystalline flower, for the pretty and warm place without boundaries—unlike his real world, in which he was either trapped inside small filthy rooms or huddled under a blanket on a street corner, with a woman who had eyes of dazzling blue and hair of black.
“My baby boy,” she’d say as they shivered under the blanket. “Tomorrow will be different, just you wait. I have a line on a great job.” Red veins in her eyes, trembling hands. “We’ll buy you all the eats you want, get you a nice fluffy bed. It’ll be like a dream.”
Swallowing hard, he thrust his hands into his pockets and told himself to call Arwen back, turn around. But he didn’t. Because that was part of the test. To stand here in a place where he knew he could buy the drug with a single nod, a single moment of eye contact, and not do it.
The doctor who’d watched over him since Grandmother brought him home had told him to stop baiting himself this way, but Ivan had no intention of doing that. He understood what Dr. Raul didn’t—Jax seduced with counterfeit beauty, forged happiness. Each time he stood in a place like this, with hollow-eyed people stripped of pride and sense of self, he understood the truth: that Jax was a leash, same as Silence.
There was no freedom or beauty in the crystalline flower.
A junkie was a junkie, regardless of whether their drug of choice was heroin or Jax. Once hooked, they’d do anything to feed their hunger … even sell their “precious baby boy.” It had happened only once, that cold calculation on his mother’s face, and though she hadn’t gone through with it, Ivan would never forget.
Jax stole everything.
“Back again?” croaked a man of about five feet whose face had shriveled inward, his once-pale skin now mottled and discolored by dark marks—the remnants of old scabs he’d picked at until they bled. He hugged a plush blanket around his shoulders, a battered paperback in one hand.
Ivan had bought him that blanket, after seeing him on the street one day looking into the window of a shop that sold them. It wasn’t that Clarence didn’t have access to a blanket, but he’d wanted that particular green one.
A small enough thing, but it had made him light up from within.
Ivan had the feeling the other man was actually much taller than five feet. But he’d been walking hunched over for so long that he’d forgotten how to straighten up. Regardless of his physical state, however, his small brown eyes were sharp, his mind present; Clarence had taken up the assistance of the halfway house, given up walking the crystalline flower.
“You better be careful,” the older Psy man said, “or cats will start to think you’re here jonesing for a fix.” A hacking cough, followed by a jerk of his head. “And bringing soft creatures like that one around. What were you thinking? You throw deer to wolves, too?”
“He’ll be fine.” Arwen might be soft of heart, but he could be paradoxically tough when it came to helping wounded birds; the girl with the previously blank gaze was already whispering to him. “You’re well.”
Another rattling cough, but Clarence nodded. “Body is fucked up from all the poison I shoveled into it, but I do have better days—gives me hope.” His eyes shone. “She still calls to me, that crystalline bitch. Still tells me of all the splendor I could experience, all the pathways I could dance.”
Clarence had once been a scholar of mathematics, but literature had been his “one true love.” A love he’d been forbidden from pursuing under Silence. Too much emotion in stories, too much passion, too much empathy.
These days, Clarence read story after story, novel after novel. The halfway house had given him a computronic reader, but he treasured paperbacks, hoarded any he was able to trade for or buy.
Tonight, Clarence looked Ivan in the face, a sense of weight to him. “You’ll never understand, young man. You can’t. You’ve never seen the searing wonder that exists when Jax lights up the neural pathways.”