The Soulmate Curse

Courage - Part 3

"Let me see," said Zhen.

Finn allowed her to gently raise her T-shirt and look at the post surgery wound. It was swathed in bandages that were still pristine. Zhen lowered the T-shirt, satisfied that the wound was still sealed.

"See? It's all good," said Finn, her voice slightly hollow. She was in pain, that much was clear.

Zhen just shook her head. She reached into the bag that Finn had packed and searched through it for anything useful. She found the painkillers that had been prescribed to her and handed her the right dose and a bottle of water. Finn took the medicine and then laid her head back on the bed, staring at the ceiling as she waited for it to work. Zhen leaned back on the office chair. Her mind went back to the last few weeks.

Most of that time was lost in a haze of psychedelic hallucinations in the company of Jesse and a lack of sleep. Every trip had been disorienting, yet powerful beyond belief. She'd watched the world bend and twist and disappear around her along with her very sense of being. Despite the intensity of the experiences, she'd valued each one and had come out of them transformed. That heaviness of the guilt that she'd thought would never disappear had become infinitely diminished. She could still and would probably always feel threads of it tangled through the core of her being, but it wasn't as suffocating as it used to be.

The very first thing she'd done when Jesse had left was design that mechatronic leg for Finn, drawing from an image she'd received from one of her psychedelic trips.

"What are you thinking about?" Finn asked, breaking through her reverie.

Zhen looked up at Finn, her thoughts still so far away.

"You look sad," said Finn.

It took a few moments for Zhen to find the words.

"My mum died when I was thirteen," she started, feeling detached to the words as they came from memories jolted out of her past on a few of her trips. "It was a car crash. A trucking company had skimped on their AI software updates and one of their autonomous delivery trucks failed. It crashed into our car. We rolled. Everyone survived, but we were trapped. My mum freed herself and then freed each one of us from the cabin. My dad and my sister were unconscious. I could have helped her, but I remember just being frozen the whole time. Totally afraid. Totally paralysed. I watched her struggle to drag my dad out before she collapsed, snuggled up to him."

The emotions were bleeding into her words now. She drew her legs up against her chest, leaning back on the office chair.

"They told us that by choosing to pull us all out of the car, my mum had saved us. The car's battery had burst shortly after and filled the cabin with a plume of toxic gases that would have clogged our lungs and killed us all," Zhen continued. "My mum suffered severe internal injuries. They tried to save her, but they couldn't. They said she would have probably survived if she hadn't chosen to put her body through the strain of pulling us all out."

"Zhen, that's..." Finn didn't have the words. Zhen couldn't blame her. What do you say to that?

"I could have helped her," said Zhen. "She could have survived."

"You can't take that on," Finn said.

"My dad broke apart after that," Zhen continued. "I couldn't tell him the truth. He was already teetering on the edge of sanity. I remember thinking about how dangerous it was to love someone so much that losing them broke you into a million, trillion pieces. I remember thinking that I could never allow myself to do that."

Finn didn't say a word, but she sat up fully on the bed and continued to listen. Zhen stretched her legs out again. The words were tumbling out now, unaided, and unstoppable.

"You asked me to explain how you made me feel," said Zhen, baring her soul and everything else for her to see. "Do you remember?"

Finn nodded.

"You make me feel like if I lost you, I would break into a million, trillion pieces," she said with a melancholy smile.

Finn smiled and said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's the best feeling in the world," said Zhen, smiling back. "Especially because you never hid the fact that you feel the same."

"There're a lot of things I can do, from designing engines and building robots and starting fires in the wild using only a ferro rod and even surviving being crushed by a boulder," said Finn, laughing. "But pretending I'm not head over heels in love with you is the one thing that I can't."

Zhen smiled sadly. "I should have let you go down the boulder first. I almost lost you. Almost gave up on you when I went to get you help. I remember being so tired. I remember thinking about your promise to find me in the next lifetime. Thinking that maybe I could just let go. That it would be okay because I could just come find you in the next simulation or whatever."

"I don't resent you for any of that, if that's what you're worried about," said Finn. The sincerity in her voice and her smile melted Zhen's insides and lifted a truckload of weight from her shoulders. Finn stretched out her hands motioning for Zhen to come in for a hug.