This Shattered World (15 page)

Jubilee sleeps on her side, one long brown leg curled up on top of the covers, one hand in a loose fist under her chin, the other tucked up underneath her pillow. I can see her dog tags against the sheets, hanging on the chain around her neck. She even sleeps in military khaki, though it’s just a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. At rest, she looks gentler. I grip the sill and whisper her name. “Jubilee.”

She comes to life, making it clear why she sleeps that way—her hand comes out from under her pillow gripping her gun, her legs kicking free of the covers as she sits bolt upright, lifting the weapon as she blinks away sleep. A second later she spots me, her mouth opening in shock. I actually see her finger tighten convulsively on the trigger, though not quite enough to shoot. “Cormac.” She gasps my name. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m alone,” I tell her. “And unarmed. Don’t shoot me, you’ll have a hell of a time explaining what I’m doing in your bedroom.”

The seconds drag out as she stares at me. Then she grunts assent, lowering the gun—though she doesn’t let go of it. She keeps a wary eye on me as I slither through and drop to the floor. If she has a comment for my stolen uniform, she doesn’t make it.

It’s a small room, furnished only with a narrow bed, a clothes press, and a rickety bedside table holding a framed photograph. It’s the only personal touch I can see in the entire sparse room. In the faint light through the window, I can make out a man, a woman, and a child I suddenly realize is a tiny Jubilee Chase. The man who must be her father is tall and lean, his skin much darker than Jubilee’s, and her mother looks Chinese—I can see her features reflected in the face of the daughter who stands arm in arm with her in the photo. In the face of the girl watching me from across the blankets. I wonder what her parents are like and what they’d make of the two of us, tense and silent.

I break the quiet first. “What the hell happened last night?” I don’t mean the words to sound like a jab, but I can’t take them back, and they hang there in the silence between us.

“It was the Fury.”

Always hiding behind their so-called Fury. I can’t hide the doubt in my expression. She sees it, her lips tightening. Her gaze slides away from my face to fix on the wall. A guilty reaction. “I didn’t move fast enough.”

That hits me like a lead weight. “You were there? That was an innocent civilian who died, he didn’t have anything to do with—”

“I
know
that,” she snaps. “I don’t need one of your speeches, Cormac. It shouldn’t have happened. I should’ve stopped it.” There’s strain in her voice.

Our truce is shaky at best; I shouldn’t be provoking her. Slowly, reluctantly, I mutter, “You didn’t pull the trigger.”
No, you just stood there and watched it happen.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s my fault when it’s my man blowing someone’s brains out.” She shakes her head. “She’d only been here a few weeks, she wasn’t reporting any of the dreams yet.”

“What do dreams have to do with anything?”

“They’re the only warning the Fury gives us that someone’s about to snap. If we get them off-world in time, they’re fine. But every soldier posted to Avon gets them eventually, except—” She stops, but I know what the end of the sentence is.
Except me.
Even the Fianna know her reputation for being the only unbreakable trodaire on Avon.

Jubilee closes her eyes. “This time there was no warning, it was over in seconds. She didn’t remember what happened, afterward.”

How could she not remember?
I sink down onto the edge of the bed and notice how tired Jubilee looks; there are circles under her closed eyes that weren’t there that first night I pulled her out of the bar. Her eyelids are puffy, face drawn. With
grief
. She’s telling the truth. Or what she sees as the truth

“What’ll happen to her?” I ask finally.

Jubilee’s jaw clenches as she opens her eyes again. “She’s already on her way to Paradisa. Desk duty, most likely, until she retires.”

How convenient.
No trial for that soldier, no punishment for outright murdering a teenager. They hide her away somewhere quiet, and no one will ever know what she did. I want to scream at Jubilee that her side has it wrong.

But what if she’s right? She seems so sure. What if the Fury does exist, and it isn’t just an excuse for the military to persecute and murder civilians? I’m reminded abruptly of what she said when locked in a cell in the bowels of our hideout:
There are never just two sides to anything.

“Cormac,” she sighs, breaking into my thoughts. “Why are you here? Felt like a little chat with your favorite
hired gun
?” Her voice is bitter as she echoes the words I used.

“I’m sorry I said that.” And I find I am. There’s more to her than that. “I came to warn you.”

“We know the ceasefire’s on shaky ground,” she replies, her voice shifting to that slow, dry lilt that conveys absolutely nothing. “Don’t need you telling us this makes things worse.”

“It’s not about the shooting.” I lean forward, reaching down the collar of my stolen uniform for my sister’s key. I draw it out for her to see. “This is the key to our munitions cabinet. The bulk of our weaponry was locked up there. Keeping it that way was our way of ensuring nobody took action without agreement.”

Jubilee’s expression shifts a little. “Was?”

She could turn me in, she could demand I tell her base commander. She could pull her gun on me again. I swallow. “Someone destroyed the lock and broke in. The guns, the explosives, the ammunition—it’s all gone.”

Her expression freezes; only her lips twitch, revealing the same wash of icy fear that swept over me when I discovered the door half blown away. It takes Jubilee only moments to come to the same conclusion I did. “McBride?”

I nod, trying not to look down at her gun, which is still in her hand. “It has to be.”

“How many supporters does he have?” Her voice is tight and cold, quick as gunfire.

“At least a third of us,” I reply.
You’re doing the right thing,
my brain reminds me, even as the rest of me recoils from sharing this information. “More, now. After your escape and the boy in town.”

“I need names,” she replies, voice swift and decisive.

“No names.” I clench my jaw.

“If we know who we’re looking for, we could start grabbing them before they’ve got a chance to—”

“No names,” I repeat more sharply. “You find McBride out there, you can have him with my blessing. I’m not ready to give up on the rest of them yet.”

Jubilee lets her breath out slowly. “God, Cormac. This is—why are you telling me? If we’re ready for them, your people are only going to end up dead.”

My stomach twists, guilt stabbing through it. “He’ll come at you from the town side of the base. He’ll come at you from the town side of base, but not tonight. It’ll take him some time to get organized, which gives you time to increase security there, put out some more patrols, bulk up armaments on the perimeter in a visible way…If he sees you’re anticipating an attack, he won’t risk it. He wants a fight, but he’s not suicidal.”

Jubilee doesn’t respond immediately, pinning me in place with a long, even stare. Then her chin drops a little and she closes her eyes. “Smart,” she admits, lifting her empty hand to rub at her forehead. “Does anyone know you’re here?”

“Hell no.” I try for lighthearted, but in the quiet, in the dark, I just sound small. Every inch as small as McBride claims I am. “I’m not suicidal either.”

Against all odds, I spot the tiniest lift at the corner of Jubilee’s mouth—the tiniest hint of a grin. It’s gone immediately, though, as she sucks in a quick breath and exhales it briskly. “I’ll speak to the commander about security, but you should get back.”

I hesitate, my chest heavy. “I didn’t just come to warn you. Jubilee—”

“It’s Lee,” she replies, her voice sharpening.

“Only when you’re a soldier,” I mutter. “I’m hoping today you’ll be something else.” When I look up, she’s frowning at me. But I have little choice, and I push on. “Look,” I start slowly, “you need to talk to your people. Figure out some
small
thing that you can give us. Something I can point to and say, ‘See, they’ll talk to us.’ Otherwise McBride’s supporters will only continue to grow.”

“Cormac,” she begins, exasperated, “even if I had the power to do anything about your situation, I wouldn’t, not now. There are reasons behind everything we do. Real, honest security risks we’re trying to avoid. The regulations are there to protect you as much as they are to protect us.”

“Closing the schools? Limiting medical access? Shutting down the HV broadcasts?”

“We didn’t do that,” replies Jubilee quickly. “Avon’s atmosphere interferes with the signals.”

“But you’re the ones who changed all the access codes to TerraDyn’s retransmission satellites. We can’t send or receive a signal at all now—we’re totally cut off. If you could just give us that—not even newscasts. But movies, documentaries, any window beyond this life to show our children.”

Her hand tightens around the grip of her gun. “Do you know how they organized on Verona ten years ago, Cormac? It was clever. They used a kids’ HV show, broadcast across the galaxy. Coded messages out of the mouths of animated mythological creatures.”

“I don’t even know where Verona
is
,” I retort. “And we’re paying for it here, a decade later, light-years away. We have no sun, no stars, no food or medicine, no power or entertainment for relief, and no one will tell us if it’s ever getting any better. They’ve swatted a fly with a sledgehammer.”

“A fly?” She’s fierce, every line of her tense, holding herself in check with an effort. “That’s what you call the largest rebellion in the last century? They chose the slums of Verona, where people were most crowded. Where there’d be maximum damage. They smuggled guns, dirty bombs, you name it. When the uprising came, whole cities from November through Sierra were up in flames before anybody knew what had happened. Those the rebels didn’t kill, the looters and raiders did. Thousands. Tens of thousands of people—they can’t sing or tell stories at all now.”

I feel like something’s pressing down on my chest and preventing me from taking a proper breath. I can’t imagine a single city that size, let alone half a dozen of them on fire.

She waits for me to respond, and when I don’t, she gives a quick, tight shake of her head. “There are reasons behind every rule, whether you see them or not. Perhaps some of them are too harsh—that’s not my call to make. But if you could spare one child the loss of her parents by swearing an oath, by upholding the law no matter what it took…” She swallows. “Wouldn’t you?”

To hear a trodaire speaking of justice, of protecting people—it makes my head ache. McBride would say she was lying. Sean would say she was blind. Watching her in the meager light from the window, I don’t know what I would say, except that there’s a pain in her words as deep as ours. She’s silent, and as I watch, her features are returning to that neutral composure everyone else is so used to seeing. But an awful certainty is starting to solidify in my thoughts. “Where are you from, Jubilee? Your homeworld?”

She takes a while to answer, and when she does, her voice is oddly detached. “I’m from Verona. I grew up in a city called November.”

For a long while, the only sounds are the background noises of the base: shuttles taking off and landing in the distance, people moving to and fro, the faint strains of music coming from one of the barracks.

I’m beginning to understand this soldier a little, the fierceness there, the rage underneath that stony exterior. My sister would have loved her.

Well, no,
I correct myself.
Orla would’ve wanted her strung up as an example to the other trodairí.

But if Jubilee had been born one of us, Orla would’ve been her best friend.

I glance once more at the photograph on her nightstand. I don’t even have a picture of my sister—I have only the blurry-edged memory of her laugh, her dark braid over her shoulder. Little things, like the way she tied her boots; and big, horrible things, like the look on her face when she said good-bye to me the day before her execution. It’s not enough. It won’t ever be enough.

Jubilee’s watching me as the silence stretches out between us, until finally she breaks it. “I didn’t tell them anything about you.” She sounds halfway queasy about it, irritated and confused, but I believe her.

I’m trying to cling to the anger and desperation that brought me here, but it’s growing harder to believe that Jubilee’s the enemy, even one held at bay by a grudging truce. “Why didn’t you?”

Her eyes dart toward mine, a brief glimmer of the lamp outside reflected there before she looks away sharply. “I don’t know.” Her fingers twist around the sheets, betraying the conflict behind her calm voice. “Because if your people listened to you, there might not be insurgents laying booby traps on our patrol routes. Because if you were arrested, maybe more of them would start.”

I want to put my hand over hers and ease that white-knuckled grip. My eloquence fails me; there aren’t words for the impossible strangeness of this, sitting on a soldier’s bed in the middle of the night, wishing I could touch her. But I just look at her hand, fixing my eyes there, not trusting myself to look at her face.

Strangely enough, my voice is steady when I speak. “That’s what scares me about dying. Knowing what will happen here afterward.” Her hand tightens, and I breathe out. The words come from somewhere deep and hidden—not even Sean has heard them before. “And I think I will die, sooner than I want to.”

She’s quiet so long, I begin to think she didn’t hear me. When she does speak, it’s a murmur. “So will I.”

I lift my head to find her watching me, her brown eyes intent on my face. The half-hidden empathy in her gaze ought to feel strange, coming from my enemy; the only strangeness is that it doesn’t. “Why doesn’t this Fury touch you?” I find myself asking. “Where are your dreams?”

Her eyes fall, tension seeping back in along her shoulders. A muscle in her jaw twitches before she speaks. “I don’t dream.”