Emergence (Eden's Root Trilogy) (41 page)

Fi clung to the
words in desperation, hoping they would stop her freefall. “He’s a hero, you know, Aunt Lucy. He saved little Hannah. He threw himself in front of her…” She swallowed a laugh that turned into a sob. “…Like he would.”

Lucy nodded, her breath rattling through taught lips
, and Fi’s heart split open, her guilt and regret spilling from her like a fresh wound. Lucy had looked just the same when Sean’s sister Rachel had hovered on the brink of death, and she’d looked just the same when she’d held Fi’s hand while the sun set over Maggie’s forest grave. Fi forced herself to meet and hold Lucy’s gaze, to share the agony of an unbearable possibility, an unforgiveable casualty even in the cruelest of worlds…a boy, a brother, a son, a friend…and a hero.

Asher put his hand on her shoulder.
“Should we take care of Luke, babe?”

She nodded, grateful for the distraction that a hungry baby presented.
Luke didn’t know that his Uncle Sean was in grave danger. And he didn’t know that people had died. All he was focused on was life. Fi sighed and followed her husband into the forest with her son at her chest and her little sister in tow.

#############################################

A few hours later, when Luke was sated and sleeping, the reunited Grey family found itself adrift on a nauseating sea of anxiety. There was nothing to do with the time: each minute stretched into eons while they waited for news. It was excruciating. When Asher finally suggested that they pay their respects to the dead Fi thought he’d lost his mind. It seemed like an absurd suggestion — as if diving into the deep end could somehow alleviate her sorrow.

But when sh
e met his troubled eyes and saw that he was serious, she knew that he was right.
There was no way around sorrow,
she thought,
there was only through.
It was the reason she’d also decided to bring Kiara. Others might have thought it was because she wanted to keep Kiara close, but if she’d had her choice, it would have been just the opposite. She would have spared her “baby girl” this, the sight of friends and compatriots torn apart, shredded by greed and revenge.

But the moment that Kiara said she’d heard about Sean, something in her voice had caught Fi’s attention.
There was granite there, a honed stone that could carve an edge. She remembered in a flash that Kiara would be turning ten this spring.
Ten
, she thought sadly. In the old world she would still be a baby, but in the new one the woman-to-be was already rising from the furnace, her youth chipped away as she was heated and battered and beaten into the mettle of Famine survivors — a “baby girl” no more. They picked their way through the makeshift morgue together and this time…this time Fi didn’t hide her tears.

In the end, the
thing that struck Fi most that afternoon was the quiet. After a night filled with non-stop screaming and explosions, the day dawned still, with only the mourning doves to wail. Of the Army of Eden’s total ranks of four hundred and sixty, forty-nine were dead, and over eighty more were wounded. That didn’t include the ninety-some Lobo and Truther dead. Fi hovered over the bodies, laid out in neat rows in the snow beneath blankets.
As if they might one day awaken
, she thought,
if only they were kept warm
.

Crouching,
she said a prayer for each one, and each was more painful than the last. Even Asher’s stoicism was utterly broken. Tears streamed down his cheeks as they crouched over the still form of their Commander.

“Do you remember him, Ki?” Fi said, gasping through her tears.
But of course Kiara wouldn’t remember him. She never saw him pin Fi down with his gun. She never met him before the siege. She’d never know the man who had saved her life. The man with the movie star looks in a movie-less time. Fi touched his cold cheek, still greased with war paint. “He saved our lives, Ki. He saved our whole Family.” She swallowed an angry laugh. “Twice.”

“He was
a true soldier,” Asher agreed, his voice thick. “You know, even though he was young, he…he kinda reminded me of my dad.”

Fi squeezed her eyes shut.
How many more mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers had to be lost? When they rose, they had to step aside to let Zykeem and Titan pay their respects…along with a long line of others that snaked away into the forest.

It seemed that every surviving member of the Army of Eden was waiting to say goodbye to the Commander
. He’d led them despite his vow to avoid war and violence. He’d led them through the darkness and the fight, to victory. He just hadn’t gotten to see it himself. Fi wiped her arm across her eyes. Curses rose and died just as quickly before they reached her lips. The lilting cry of the mourning doves served as reminder. There was a beauty in death, if the survivors had grace.

When she’d stood at her brother’s grave, she’d been too young for cu
rses. All she’d known was pain: raw, and whole, like the molten burn of the sun. Children are closer to that pain, the kind that breaks their mothers in two, the kind that means only sacrifice. They have no shield yet to block it out, no carefully constructed wall of decorum. She knew now that they were lucky.

They moved two rows over to a body that had only one visitor at the moment, an older woman with greying c
urls who hovered on her knees like a guardian angel.

“Hello, Georgina,
” Fi said quietly.

Georgina Ferrar looked up, her eyes red.
“Hello, Fi. Asher.” She nodded at Kiara as she rose. “I’ll give you both a moment with him.”

She started to turn and Fi grabbed her hand.
“Georgina?” she said, and then stopped. She’d meant to say a hundred things about how wonderful Darryl was, but her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Her husband stood at her side, her child hung at her breast, and her sister clutched her hand. She had so much…
so much
. What could she say to someone who’d just started to discover love only to have it ripped away? What could anyone say? “He…he was a good man.”

Georgina
nodded, her eyes filling. “I’d hoped to help him believe that.”

She
walked away and Fi sank to her knees beside Dr. Darryl Heil. Like she had with Julius, she touched his cheek. She couldn’t stop herself. She had to feel the icy skin or else, like a fool, she’d have begged him to wake. “I wish I knew what to say to him. ‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t seem like enough.”

“What are you sorry for, Fi?” Asher settled beside her.
“You cared enough to draw him back to life, to friends, to family. If you hadn’t done that, would he have found a love so important to him that he lost his own life defending it?”

Fi flinched
.

“Are you sorry for making sure
that the entire world recognized him for his brilliance and dedication and not just his mistakes?”

With each new question, the agony bent her more as she doubled over the small man, now somehow smaller in death.
There was a time when she’d been angrier with this man than any other on the face of the Earth, when she’d held him responsible for billions of deaths. But it wasn’t his fault. And this war, this outcome, this loss…it wasn’t hers either.

Asher’s tone was kind, but it didn’t make
it easier. No matter what she’d done, through all this time and all this effort, she’d never be able to make it all right. And now, neither would Darryl.

“C’mon
, baby,” Asher urged. “Let’s go back to visiting the living, ok?”

Her heart seized as she was reminded of one person
in the world who still lived. For now.

------------- Sean -------------

“Did he move?
I swear I saw his eyelids move.”

The voice was odd
— familiar, but strained — like it was coming through a speaker.

“It’s ok, Sara.
Doc says he’ll wake up soon.”

Definitely weird.
It was like the words had “wah-ah-ah-ah” behind them. He wanted to open his eyes, but they were glued shut. He tried to move and lightning blazed in his chest. “Ow!” He was sure he’d screamed, but it came out as a whisper.

“SEAN?”
The familiar voice changed, like a mouse caught on one of those awful glue traps. Squeaking. Screaming. “Help him, Doc! Please! He’s in pain!”

He grunted, wanting to roll away from the fire, but finding the
crackling pyre on all sides. A hand found his: cool, sure, his anchor in a storm-tossed sea. Pain knifed through him with each breath, tightening his every muscle to the limit. He felt like he would snap in half.

Muffled
voices murmured “CCs” and his pain evaporated…the seas calmed.
Thank God.
For a moment, he lay with his eyes shut tight, his chest heaving. The relief was insane. Like someone had branded his chest, only to bind the wound with the softest blankets imaginable. So fluffy that they felt of nothing.

He tried again to open his eyes.
They were puffy and sticky and weighed a ton, but this time they creaked open. He stared into two sets of tear-filled eyes, one dark and one golden. Sara and Fi.

“Sean.”
Sara’s tears fell, one landing on his cheek.

The voice sorted itself out.
The trapped mouse was Sara. Her hand was shaking in his. He shook his head, confused. Maybe he was the anchor and she was the storm?

“Oh, Jesus, thank God.”
Fi choked.

Sara collapsed onto his shoulder, sobbing, her grip tightening.
He closed his eyes and tried to reach his arm to hold her, but he couldn’t lift it. He could barely feel it. If he hadn’t been able to see his own fingertips, he would’ve sworn they’d floated away. “Wha…what happened?”

His tongue was dry and fuzzy
, like a mitten. He searched his memory. Dark. It had been so dark. And his lungs burned. Sara. Sara had come. His heart leapt, thumping through the anesthetic. They were on the battlefield. There was a scream and then he was running... “Hannah!” he cried, wincing as a needle of pain found its way through the morphine. “Is she ok?”

Sara sa
t up, tears still streaming. “Thanks to you, Sean. You saved her life.”

“But I couldn’t save
Mr. Darryl.”

The world wobbled as
Sean turned his head. The edges of his vision blurred and his stomach turned. “Whoa.” When his eyes came into focus again, he saw Hannah sitting on a milk crate beside him, her eyes as puffy as Sara and Fi’s.

She was filthy, her face and blond hair matted with blood.
“I’m sorry, Sean. I almost killed you.” She slumped and picked at her zipper. “I’m glad I didn’t.”

“Shh, Hannah,” Fi chided her.
“That’s enough. A Lobo almost killed Sean…and you.”

“But
if I’d kept my promise to you, Fi, this wouldn’t have happened.” Hannah’s tears welled, threatening to break their bonds.

Sara sniffed.
“Look, Hannah. I’m tired of this guilt crap. I really am. I have other things to think about. If you don’t stop blaming yourself, I’m never gonna train with you again, you hear me?”

“Oooooh,”
Sean murmured, woozy. “That sounds serious, Hannah.”

Sara’s face softened as she turned back to him. She smoothed his hair back from his brow. “I mean it, Sean. The only reason they let her be here was so you could see that she was alive. Otherwise, she’s on medical duty. We couldn’t have set up this hospital without her help.”

“Hospital?”
Sean’s eyes tracked farther out. Around him people were scattered — a human confetti covering the tables and floors of the Main Cabin. Makeshift privacy walls had been erected with sheets and precious IV bags hung from whatever hook, stand, or chair that could be found. Doctors bent over the moaning casualties, trailed by volunteers carrying cloths and buckets. For a moment he thought he saw Truther volunteers, but no, that couldn’t be right.

“So what did happen to me, then?”
He tried to think, but his brain kept turning soupy.

“You were shot, baby.”
Sara’s face faded out for a second and then sharpened again.

“S
hhhhot?” His tongue wasn’t working right.

“If Hannah hadn’t stuffed rags into your wound
s right away,” Sara said, rubbing his fingers with shaking hands, “you would’ve bled out. She saved your life.”

He tried to nod, but the morphine was taking hold.
At first it was just his fingertips that had flown away, but now it felt like all of him was coming apart, the pieces letting go and setting him spinning, spinning. “Thanksss, Haaaannah. Thankssss for sssaving my liiiife.”

His eyes closed.
Hannah scooted her chair closer and took his other hand, her touch alighting like a butterfly at the edge of his consciousness. “Thanks for saving mine.”

------------- Fi ----------------

With Sean settled back into a medicated sleep, Fi got up to visit the others. Kiara volunteered to help Doc Ron and Fi decided to let her. If she wasn’t her “baby girl” anymore, then she wasn’t. Period. Still, Fi found her eyes following that blue-black shadow around as it tailed the good doctor. It was a habit she expected to find hard to break. Like biting one’s nails or scratching a fussy patch of skin. The urge would last long past the need.