In the last year, I’ve experienced a lifetime’s worth of change.
I am hardly recognizable as that man who said goodbye to you in our kitchen. I suspect you would think I’ve become aloof, withdrawn, and interior. Maybe even cold.
The rain has stopped. The clouds are breaking up. Sunlight hitting the sea stacks. One of those rock outcroppings, if I squint my eyes just right, resembles a ship carved out of rock.
Here is the truth, which, once upon a time, I promised to always give you: If I let myself, I could spiral into a very dark place. I could let our separation and my loneliness tear me apart. But I’m too strong for that now.
These are hard things to write.
I am afraid I will never see you again.
And I am equally afraid that I will, and that our connection will have changed too much.
* * *
—
I set the pen down, closed the notebook. It was filled with similar letters—some to Beth, some to Ava. Writing to them had become a form of self-discipline. I wrote letters I would never share in order to remember what it felt like to be a member of a family. To remember what it felt like to be human. To be driven, at least to some extent, by sentiment. My ability to feel was an atrophying muscle, which, if I completely stopped using, I would lose entirely.
It was early evening, and I was hungry.
I fired off messages to the cyber, private, and corporate investigators I’d enlisted to find Kara. Then I stood, stretched, and grabbed my rain jacket off the coat rack by the kitchen door.
I headed outside across a stretch of emerald grass to the edge of the bluff.
Waves thundered against the rocks, ninety feet below.
As I followed a precarious path that angled down to the beach, I thought of Kara for the eighth time today.
When my sister shot me, the bullet had entered my left deltoid, shredding through muscle but missing my clavicle and brachial plexus. It came to rest in my upper left pectoral, two inches above my heart. Two inches from a kill shot.
I had very nearly bled to death in my mother’s crashed pickup truck on what passed for Main Street in the village of Vallecitos.
I was medevaced to a hospital in Santa Fe, where doctors saved my life.
New Mexico didn’t have mandatory gunshot reporting, and I could only hope that the medical staff would respect my doctor-patient confidentiality and not call in law enforcement to interview me about what had happened in Vallecitos.
But there was no way to be certain.
Every second I lay in that hospital bed I was risking capture.
Twelve hours after my admittance, I willed myself out of bed. My clothes had been cut off me in the operating room, and stumbling around Santa Fe in a hospital gown in the middle of the night sounded like a surefire way to get myself discovered and detained.
So I rifled through the dressers in the other patients’ rooms until I found an older gentleman’s change of clothes that fit me.
I walked out of St. Vincent hospital at 3:45 A.M. into a frigid night with a little over five hundred dollars in cash from my time with Kara.
I had no ID. No credit cards. No phone.
It was the hardest night of my life.
Harder than prison.
Harder than the uncertainty of the vivarium.
I was in agony.
Exhausted.
Freezing.
Without my upgrade, I’m sure I would’ve died.
I walked into the train station when it opened and bought a one-way ticket on the first Rail Runner down to Albuquerque. Santa Fe was much too small for me to be lingering in, and Albuquerque seemed to be the kind of place where enough violence was happening on a daily basis that I might have a chance at flying under the radar.
The light coming through the window warmed my face.
The gentle rocking of the train car sent me off to sleep.
The conductor shook me awake when we rolled into Monta?o station.
I stumbled out of the train, threw up in a trash bin.
I bought gauze, first-aid bandages, antibiotic ointment, and Tylenol at the first pharmacy I saw.
Took my shirt off in the bathroom. I was bleeding through the last round of bandages I’d gotten at St. Vincent. I held a paper towel to the entry wound until it clotted again, doused it in antibiotics, and rewrapped everything in fresh bandages.
By the time I’d finished, I was too tired to even stand. I slept for several hours in a stall, leaning against the side of a filthy toilet until a store worker found me and kicked me out.
Outside again, my predicament bore down on me.
I was broke. Homeless. Badly injured. Wanted.
Because I couldn’t stop seeing patterns all around me, I was painfully aware that nothing I was experiencing was new. How many people have been tired, broken, cold, and alone on the streets? And none of them had the considerable resources of my upgrade to save them.
The bell tower of a church loomed in the distance, profiled against a heartbreakingly blue New Mexican sky.
I gathered myself as best I could and walked into the front office.
A kind woman took pity on me and let me use their phone.
The third shelter I called had a bed available.
* * *
—
After a few days at the shelter, my gunshot wound was healing rapidly, and I could finally walk without wanting to collapse.
My focus turned to stopping Kara. Before I could do that, I needed freedom of movement. To have freedom of movement, I would need a bulletproof identity, and that would take time and money.
The money problem was a conundrum.
With my upgrade, I could have gotten any job in the world.
Except I couldn’t.
I was Logan Ramsay, and there were people turning this country upside down to find me.
Robbery, stealing, fraud—it all seemed destined to work against my efforts to remain invisible.
But according to my internet research at the library I’d been visiting during the day, there were six casinos in Albuquerque.
So I bought some clothes at a thrift store, cleaned myself up, and walked into my first casino one week after Kara shot me.
The cameras made me nervous. They were everywhere. My dermal fillers would last at least a year, but I would find out in short order if the alterations I’d made to my face in West Virginia were enough to fool the facial-recognition AI that was undoubtedly scraping CCTV databases all over the country.
But in light of everything, it didn’t really matter.
I needed money. I had no other options.
The slots would be a complete waste of time. When it came to blackjack, a math genius like myself could certainly count cards, but against a shoe—which contained between six and eight decks—it would simply take too long. Any success would be purely driven by luck.
Poker, however, presented an interesting opportunity. I’d played my fair share and had never been much good at it in my previous life.
But now…
Calculating pot odds was suddenly effortless. And sitting at the table, I could instantly call upon the seven poker strategy books I’d speed-read yesterday at the library, which focused on how to read an opponent’s range based on their bets, how to bet in the big blind versus the small, versus late positions.
This was a game that rewarded computing horsepower and the ability to absorb a multitude of specific sets of rules quickly. And beyond the mathematical mechanics, poker was ultimately just reading people. Their excitement, their attempt to conceal that excitement, their fear, their boredom, their deceit, their regret. And then making choices accordingly.