This Shattered World (12 page)

We have search grids for times like these, with a level of organization that would surprise the soldiers. We know the places the swamps can channel a boat, and we know where they send you if you’re lost. What I wish I knew is how long a head start Jubilee has, and whether she
is
lost.

All around me the Fianna are pairing off and climbing down into currachs, the first wave of searchers already gone. The shouts that set off bursts of pain behind my eyes are urgent, but disciplined—there’s anger, but no panic. I press two fingers gently to the side of my head, finding the lump there as the O’Leary brothers cast off, their boat vanishing into the dark of the night.
Damn her.

“Well?” I look up and find the last wave of searchers standing over me, lanterns in hands. It’s Connor Tran speaking. “Do you remember anything yet, Cormac?” There’s a frustration in his tone echoed in all their faces, and I’m pinned to the wall by half a dozen pairs of eyes. “You must have seen something. You must remember some part of getting up here.”

I start to shake my head, then think better of it when the room starts to spin. “I don’t know what happened,” I murmur. I know it sounds weak, but the truth would be worse.

“He knows nothing.” McBride pushes his way through the crowd to look down at me. His voice is calm, cutting through the others with an easy authority, but his gaze is for me and holds nothing but contempt. “It’s not his fault. He’s young; no one could expect him to defend himself against a trained fighter. What matters now is whether she makes it back to her base and, if she does, whether she’s got our location.”

And just like that, I’m sidelined from the discussion.

“We’re trying to get an update from someone at the base,” Tran replies as all eyes swing toward McBride. “We radioed Riley, but he doesn’t have a shift on the base for another two days. They’ll look at him too closely if he tries to get in before then.”

“Who else, then? Forget the janitors, maybe someone who does deliveries.”

“Davin Quinn.” That’s Mike Doyle at the back. “He’s got a new job in the warehouse on base.”

Davin’s weathered, grinning face flashes up before my eyes. He has a daughter not much younger than me, and he wants nothing to do with our fight. I refuse to drag more innocents into this. I brace myself against the wall as I ease up to my feet, raising my voice before McBride can approve Doyle’s suggestion. “Quinn’s too old to move fast enough for us. Speak to Matt Daly. He sells his
poitín
to the trodairí. They’ll let him onto the base if it means more of his moonshine. There’s a chance she was too injured to keep track of where she was. She might not know anything.”

There’s a quick murmur of agreement from the group. I start to straighten, and Tran’s hand comes out to steady my shoulder as the concussion threatens to send me staggering.

When I turn my head, McBride’s gaze is waiting for me again, still burning. But the idea’s a good one, and it’s not the right time to speak against it—against me. “Try him,” he agrees, and like that, they scatter. Back to work.

And hours pass. Search teams report in with no luck, and I can’t escape the thought of Jubilee, broken ribs and all, lost in Avon’s ever-shifting waterways. The thought shouldn’t stay with me the way it does—I shouldn’t care whether we’re empty-handed because she drowned or made it back to base. Her words are still echoing in my ears.
There are never just two sides to anything.

We all work through the night. My concussion proves minor, and as my eyesight starts to clear, I focus on the maps, handing out new coordinates to tired teams. As each reports back, I dread hearing they found her, and I dread hearing they didn’t. On my breaks I help load currachs for those evacuating, afraid she’ll lead the trodairí to our door.

If she hasn’t found her way back to the base by now, then she’s probably dead. Avon’s waters are treacherous, and if she ran out of gas and ditched the currach she stole, then the bog most likely swallowed her. And yet, every time I hear the sputtering of an engine returning to the harbor, I have to swallow the bitter fear that it’s her, and that she’s brought an army with her.

She knows my face now, too. Nobody says it, but it’s in their glances, their pauses. She knows my face, and if they catch me in town after she reports back with my identity, I’ll be lucky to spend the rest of my life locked up.

McBride’s out with the search parties most of the night—if he’s the one to find her, it will cement his leadership for good, and he can’t miss that opportunity. But he returns now and then, ostensibly to refuel. I see him mingling, moving among the people left behind, dropping the right words in the right ears. Talking, reassuring, quietly fueling their anger under the guise of sharing their concerns. His tone’s always calm, but I can’t forget the contempt I saw in his gaze, the venom. He’s not finished with me. I wish I could guess at his next step—figure out what speech or trick he’ll use to win the rest of my people to his cause.

When he lays his hand on my shoulder, I lose my patience, shrugging him off and turning away from the table where I’m standing to stride away down a hallway. I can hear his voice behind me, but my head’s pounding, and the words I’m biting back will only make things worse. Letting him take a jab at my receding back is the lesser of two evils. I brought her here, I let her get away, and if I want a chance to be heard at all, I know it won’t be tonight.

I turn right, away from the main cavern, automatically making for Sean and the classroom. He’s got the children sleeping in there, little mattresses lined up, their bodies small lumps under the blankets. He’s standing silent watch over our innocents as they sleep, his expression unreadable. I wonder if he envies them.

Then he spots the shifting shadow as I pause in the doorway, and he turns to make his way over to me. “How’s your head?” No hint of his usual tease, his gaze searching.

“Sore, but thick-skulled as usual. Takes a harder hit than that to kill me.”

Sean’s voice remains low, thoughtful. “I’ve spent all night thinking it over, trying to work out how the trodaire escaped. Doesn’t make sense, especially since you had the only key to the door.”

A heavy weight settles inside me, and when I look up, his gaze is waiting.

He speaks again, almost inaudible. “If I figured it out, how long do you think it’ll take McBride and the others to get there?”

“Sean, I—”

“You’ve signed our death warrants, Flynn. All of us.” The note of betrayal in his voice cuts me far deeper than the anger.

“This is how we start to find common ground,” I reply, hoping my face doesn’t show how guilty I feel. “She’s not what you think. She’s different from the others.”

“Different?” Sean’s jaw tightens, eyes shadowing abruptly with horror. “God, you
like
her. Flynn, please. Tell me you don’t think—”

“Of course not,” I snap, then lower my voice with an effort when a few of the children behind my cousin stir in their beds. “But if there’s a chance she’ll help us, I have to take it.”

“She’s a
trodaire
.”

“I don’t think that means she deserves to die for doing her job.”

“Her job
is
to die,” he hisses. “Or make sure we do.”

“She didn’t kill me when she escaped, and she could have.”

He watches me for a long moment, and I can feel my heart thumping to count out the seconds. “Give me the key,” he says finally.

“Key?”

“To the cell she was in.” He holds out his hand, gesturing with his fingers for me to hurry up. “They find it on you, and you’re done.”

My breath rattles out in an unsteady sigh, and I fish around in my pocket for the key I used to let Jubilee out. Sean takes it and shoves it into his own pocket, scanning the corridor beyond me before moving past to head up the tunnel.

“Sean.” My voice makes him pause. “Thank y—”

“Don’t,” he interrupts. “Just—stop.” Then he’s gone, no doubt to find some place to stash the key where no one will find it.

I walk slowly down the corridor and take a left, ducking away from the noise, the people. Except as soon as I find quiet, I can hear Jubilee Chase instead.

Now what, Romeo?

I make my way down a set of stairs, into the darker, quieter parts of the cave complex. Somewhere I can think.

Here, the rough surfaces of the rocks aren’t smoothed back, and stretches of plastene cover holes to other caverns that would let in drafts. It’s only when I round a corner that I figure out where my feet are taking me—toward the munitions storeroom, where thick metal doors still stand between McBride and outright war. To look at a solid, physical reminder that he hasn’t won yet.

The fear Sean was right thumps hard in my chest. If he worked out I helped Jubilee, how much longer can it be until McBride does? Still, he lacks the proof, and while I have breath, I can keep fighting.

I just wish I knew what I was fighting
for
. What the world I want would look like. The fear and anger in the air tonight make clearer than ever that any chance of peace is vanishing right before our eyes. McBride’s gaining followers, and soon the tide will turn.

I pull a lantern from its hook on the wall, turning the last corner.

There’s a twisted hole where the lock used to be on the munitions storeroom doors, jagged edges burned and blackened by a blowtorch. All I can hear is my pulse pounding.

My hand flies up to my neck, scrabbling there for the chain that holds the key. It catches against my fingers and I haul it out, the edge pressing into my skin as I grip it. But now my brain’s translating what it sees, and I realize nobody needed the key to do this.

McBride isn’t waiting for the tide to turn, not anymore. He’s not waiting to win over the hearts and minds of all our people.

I acted alone, and now he’s done the same. The cabinet is empty. All our guns, our explosives, everything he needs to provoke the trodairí into all-out war—they’re gone.

She’s hiding under the counter again, and the green-eyed boy is there too. They’re listening to the girl’s parents fight.

“If we just give them what they want, they’ll leave us alone.” The girl’s father speaks in a tight, sharp voice. His fear calls to the girl’s fear, and she swallows, her palms sweaty.

“Let them win?” Her mother is afraid too, but her anger is stronger. “Let them use our shop, our home, to stage their rebellion? What about our daughter? Do you think she should help them with their plans?”

“We could go to Babel, visit your father. He hasn’t seen Jubilee since she was a baby, I’m sure he’d take us in for a few weeks.”

“I’m not letting them turn our home into a war zone.”

The girl shuts her eyes tight, trying to block out the voices. The boy reaches out and grabs her hand, making the girl stare at him in confusion.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she whispers. “You were never in November.”

“I’m not your enemy,” the boy whispers back. “And you don’t have to do this alone.”

THE PRIVATE ON PATROL WHO
finds me a few klicks out from the base isn’t one of mine, and I don’t know his name. With soldiers coming and going every few weeks, there’s no way to know them all. We try to study photo rosters, to keep rebels from taking advantage of the base’s high turnover rate, but we still can’t really keep up.

I’m bustled onto the base, greeted by a blur of shocked and relieved faces, shoved into the hospital. I hear words like
exposure
and
fractures
and
signs of internal bleeding
. I’m surrounded by concern over my ribs, the gash in my side dressed with mud, the knot on the back of my head. I want to protest that if I wasn’t dead after spending the better part of a day struggling through those damn swamps, a few more minutes probably isn’t going to kill me. But I’m too tired.

I get about five minutes of silence when the medics retreat before a horde of my soldiers come through, all shouting and saluting and reaching for my hand. They don’t know whether to be relieved I’m alive or furious that I’m so damaged. If I had the energy, I’d tear them a new one for letting their commanding officer get abducted right under their noses, but I can barely even follow the conversation going on around me.

You get to know one another pretty quickly out here on the edge. As my old captain used to tell me, “Learn fast, or don’t.” For a moment I miss him, his practicality; I miss having someone I trust blindly to tell me what to do. As officers, we’re tasked with tracking our soldiers—with monitoring them psychologically as well as physically, to make sure we catch them before the Fury kicks in. It’s only our vigilance that keeps this base operational.

But as well as I know my guys, it goes both ways. They know me too, and they can tell that I’m not okay. They can tell I’m barely staying afloat.

It’s Mori who realizes I’m falling apart, and she starts pulling the others out of my room. A few seconds later Alexi comes through, his shock of neon hair jerking me from my daze. He finishes clearing the room and then shuts the door on the crowd outside.