This Shattered World (22 page)

My heart wants me to wrap my arms around her. My heart wants her to suffer for what she’s done.

Her shivering worsens, and as if in answer, my body starts to shake as well. I reach up and feel around in the netting until my fingers close over a warming pouch; I activate the seal, then press it between our bodies to slowly heat up.

Now and then the murmur of a distant voice carries through the water and stone to our ears. It’s not until there’s been silence for some time that Jubilee speaks.

“What do we do now?” It’s barely a whisper.

I want to have an answer. My heart slams against my ribs, tempting me to panic, to give in to grief and fear and exhaustion. Now that I’m still, my abused lungs ache. “I don’t know.”

“The LaRoux Industries chip,” she says, eyes staring in the dark. “When I picked it up on that island, it was the same feeling—the same taste in my mouth—”

The same unseeing, dilated pupils I saw in the cavern. I squeeze her before she can start shaking again, trying to keep fear from joining my grief in overwhelming me. I cannot think, now, about the possibility that a corporation is responsible for the madness plaguing my home.

“I have to get to the base,” Jubilee says with a sudden, hollow urgency, as though reciting steps in a manual. “I have to report…. I have to tell them.”

My head jerks up. “Jubilee, you can’t. They ship soldiers off Avon when—”
When they turn into murderers.
My lips refuse to make the words real.

She blinks at me, haunted. “It’s protocol. It’s all I know.”

“Listen to me.” I grab at her shoulder, gripping it tight, until her eyes focus once more on mine. “You’re all I have now. You’re the only one who can help me stop whatever’s happening to my home. I can’t be on the base, looking for answers, but
you can
.”

“I can’t—oh, God.” Her eyes glaze, and I know she’s not seeing me anymore. She sees blood, and bodies, and the barrel of a gun pointed between her eyes. “I can’t.”

“You can,” I snap, my voice quiet and fierce.

“How can you know that?”

“Because you’re Jubilee Chase,” I murmur. “Not whatever the darkness makes you.”

The gentle swaying of the dangling flashlight makes the hollows of her features shift and change, making it impossible to read her face until she looks up at me again. She gives a shudder, then nods. My breath comes a little easier, seeing finally a flicker of the girl I know in there, a flicker of the soldier I’ve put all my hopes on.

“Take me back,” she whispers.

We switch off the flashlight and slip into the frigid water once more, leaving my sister’s hiding place cold and empty behind us.

The boy who’s not supposed to be in her dreams is lying next to her on the hood of a hovercar on the outskirts of town, a blanket binding them together. The boy has pink hair this time, though when she runs her fingers through it, it changes in response to her touch, growing longer, falling in gentle curls over his temples.

They’re looking up at the sky.

“That one we’ll call the huntress,” says the boy, laughter behind his voice. “See, there’s her gun, and that nebula is her hair, and this cluster is that line she gets between her eyes when she’s yelling at me.”

“Shut up, I do not.”

“Your turn.”

The girl watches the sky, but it’s empty. The only constellations on Avon are the ones they imagine.

“I can’t,” she whispers, shutting her eyes. “I’m bad at this game.” She knows what happens next in this dream. He’ll kiss her and they’ll lie there together, and when they sneak back onto the base she’ll go back to work, and be unchanged, except perhaps a little colder without the blanket.

But this time the green-eyed boy takes her hand, and when she opens her eyes, the sky is full of stars.

THE UNDERGROUND HARBOR IS TEEMING
with rebels. They’re like ants swarming around a nest, like repair drones clustering around a damaged Firebird. Some of them are marked with red and rusty brown, but they don’t move like they’re injured. There are too many people wearing their loved ones’ blood.

“McBride doesn’t have them organized yet.” Flynn speaks in my ear, grounding me before images of the massacre can cripple me again. “We might be able to use that confusion.”

Even through a whisper, I can hear his heartbreak. He should be with his people. He should be helping them figure out what to do. And he can’t, because he’s the one they’re after. Because of me.

I search the dark waters of the harbor until I spot what I’m looking for, floating a few yards from the near bank.

“The boat I came in,” I whisper back, pointing to where it sits, out of reach of the lights in the harbor.

A muscle stands out along his jaw. He doesn’t look at me, or at the boats. His eyes are on his people, aching for them. But then he nods, gaze snapping back toward the clusters of little boats moored along the docks.

We wade through the water with painstaking slowness to avoid making telltale ripples, slower still as the water level rises to our knees, our hips, our waists. My training takes over, forcing exhausted muscles to function long enough for me to keep each movement careful and controlled. Stealth, I can do. It’s a task to focus on, something to keep my mind away from—from everything else.

We’d be spotted if we climbed in now, so when we reach the boat, we each take one side of it and start walking it toward the gaping mouth of the harbor. I’m about to let my breath out in relief when a light swings across the surface of the water and blinds me.

Flynn gasps a warning in Irish at the same time my muscles tense, reacting to the threat before my mind has time to process it. A shout echoes through the cavern, and the swarms of people head our way.

For an instant, we move as one. I grab on to the gunwale, steadying the boat as Flynn hauls himself up into it—then, leaning his weight to the side, he reaches for my hand and drags me up after him. He’s fumbling with the motor. With the searchlight blinding me, our pursuers are little more than blurry shapes in my streaming eyes. Flynn jerks the ignition cable once, twice. The motor sputters to life, and he guns it too fast, briefly sending the nose of the boat skyward. A bullet punches through the gunwale, and shouts echo in the cavern. We both throw ourselves down into the bottom of the boat. Instinct takes over, and I lunge for him—for the gun he took from me.

I look up and see a fleeting ribbon of fear cross Flynn’s features. Fear—of
me
. He says nothing, not even silently, not even a mute appeal. But with that same flash of connection that got us working together to climb into the boat, I know what he’s seeing as he looks at me, still bloody, holding the weapon that killed half a dozen of his people. I feel sick, violated down to my bones by what I’ve done; I’d give anything, in this moment, for him to not look at me like that.

We speed toward the exit, but the rebels have found boats themselves, and they’re in pursuit. Too close for us to lose them in the swamp beyond the harbor. Close enough to shoot us—and close enough to be shot at.

Flynn jerks his eyes away from me as I lift my head, looking for a clear shot. I’m not killing any more people today, not when I’m me, myself. Not even if they’re shooting at me first. But they’ve got the searchlights pointed at us, and I can’t see.

My eyes lift, seeking a break from the blinding white light in front of me, and I see the ceiling of the harbor. Rough stone, naturally striated and dripping with condensation. The Gleidel won’t touch the stone, but it’ll vaporize the water seeping through the cracks. I lift my gun and brace myself against the bench so I can shoot over Flynn’s head, placing myself in clear view of those firing at us. Flynn shouts at me, but I can’t hear him as my world narrows, focusing on my target.

The Gleidel leaps in my hands and I throw myself down again before the rebels can get me in their sights. Its scream echoes back at me from the cavern, followed by the crack of stone split by steam, and then the roar of boulders striking the water. Then the frantic revving of motors thrown into reverse, as the rebels zigzag wildly in an effort to avoid the stones now jutting out of the shallow water at the mouth of the harbor.

I lever myself up again in time to see the mouth of the harbor retreating away from us, half lost in the spray of our wake, and the cluster of boats attempting to navigate through the new maze of boulders trapping them.

I glance down, and Flynn’s eyes flick up from mapping our route to meet mine for a split second. We’re out.

We don’t speak. There’s nothing to say anymore, even if we had the strength to shout over the roar of the motor. I look back at him once and see a jumble of white face, red-rimmed eyes, tears mingling with the spray from our bow wave—and look away with a jerk. I don’t try to look at him again.

The sky’s just beginning to shift from ink to charcoal by the time the distant lights of the base rise, mirage-like, from the horizon. Flynn shifts the motor down, its roar muted to a purr. We weave our way through the corridors of water until the bow of the boat slides up onto mud with a sickening lurch. The motor cuts out.

The silence rings in my ears, like afterimages hovering after being dropped into sudden darkness. There are no frogs, no insects on Avon, nothing to color the quiet. I stare at the lights of the far-off base until my vision blurs.

“Where will you go?” I ask in a whisper that splits the silence.

“I don’t know.” His voice is rough. From disuse. From cold. From grief. I can’t tell which. “I’ll find somewhere.”

I reach for my jacket, abandoned in the bottom of the boat, and press it into his hands. He’ll need it more than me, out here with no shelter and no heat. “Molly, the barman. He can get a message to me if you—” My voice tangles and sticks in my throat.
If you need me.

He nods, but I’m not sure he really heard me. I can feel shock trying to grab hold of me again, cold fingers sliding up my spine and seizing my muscles. My training didn’t prepare me for this. Nothing prepared me for this.

If it were only me, I could just lie here until the boat rotted through and sank and the muck claimed my bones. But I can’t. I swallow hard, pushing it away with every ounce of strength I have left. Flynn was right—I’m the only one who can get onto our base and try to find out more about what’s happening to Avon.

I force my stiff muscles to move and carry me over the edge of the boat, to land in hip-deep water. I grab the gunwale to steady myself as my knees threaten to buckle in the cold.

“Flynn.” It ought to feel strange to say his name. I avoided it for so long, striving to keep a distance between us. But instead I find I’m absorbed by the way it affects him. He’s less guarded, though the sadness in his eyes doesn’t recede; he looks back at me again, jaw tight.

“Flynn—I want you to know I never would have done that. To your people.” I keep my voice low, too afraid to say these things loudly. It comes out tight, fierce. “I would never. I’d die myself first.”

He watches me in silence while my heart pounds in my chest, painful, too large. When he does speak, his voice is low to match mine. “I know that, Jubilee.” He levers himself up onto his knees so we’re eye to eye. “I know who you are.”

He knows. He
knows
, I believe that. But he can’t even bring himself to look at me for more than a few seconds.

And I can’t look away. “Don’t give up.” The words are as much for me as for him. “All you need is one true thing to hold on to. Something real in all of this.”

He’s looking at my hands on the gunwale—hands still sticky with blood, too congealed for the water to have rinsed clean. I start to pull back and hide them in the shadows, but he reaches out first, taking one of them gently in his. He scoops water over my skin and starts wiping the crusted, vile mess away.

My arms feel limp and heavy, like a doll’s limbs, like they don’t belong to me anymore. My eyes burn, vision clouding and blurring. All I can feel is Flynn’s touch, rubbing at first one hand, then the other, slowly working the life back into them. Washing away every last trace of the blood claiming me for the Fury.

When he’s done, he halts, looking down at my hand resting in his. The moment stretches long and thin, until it snaps and he lets go, pulling back, his grief-stained face turning away from mine.

My breath catches, responding to an unfamiliar pull in my chest, an ache in my soul. I shouldn’t miss him, but I do; this boy who had every right to pull that trigger, and instead threw himself between me and death. This boy, the only one who believes I’m not what they say I am, what I believed I was: a soldier without a soul, a girl with no heart to break. He’s the only one who’s proved me wrong.

There’s a desperate want somewhere inside me, a longing for his touch, for the quiet he finds in the midst of this chaos, for healing. For him.

But instead I just stand there, the meter of space between us as vast as any canyon. I wish the dawn had come, bringing light enough to see his features as more than shadow. Despite my words, I know he won’t send for me through Molly. I know he won’t come back. In my heart I know I’ll never see him again.