This Shattered World (31 page)

“I’m me,” he replies instantly, an uncharacteristic hint of defensiveness in his tone. “I’m me, the same person I’ve always been. You know me.”

He’s right. I
do
know my captain, and he’s never been overly concerned with protecting himself by hiding the truth. The shiver is spreading, sending a creeping, cold certainty through my body. “What would happen if LaRoux Industries found out about you?”

Merendsen meets my gaze finally, and in his face I see the confirmation of my suspicion: fear. And I don’t think I ever saw him afraid in all the time we served together. “They’d take me away, Lee.”

I think of the girl in the monitor, the times Merendsen stopped her from speaking, how quick he was to come when he realized these so-called whispers were involved. All the little clues, the fragments in their conversation, the pieces Merendsen’s left for me to assemble.
It keeps anyone from thinking she’s hiding anything. They’re watching us. Trust what you feel. That’s my girl.

“I understand, sir.” My voice comes out fierce.

Merendsen nods. “Thank you, Captain.”

Flynn’s watching us with a wooden expression. I know he doesn’t understand what I’ve just promised my friend; you’d have to know Tarver Merendsen the way I do to begin untangling these clues. But Flynn knows
me
. He recognizes the intensity in my voice, the feeling in my expression. And when he sees me looking at him, he jerks his eyes away.

“Sir.” My voice shakes, and I can’t stop it. “When you were talking to Lilac, you said these whispers had caused a bunch of researchers to go mad before.” If it was one of these creatures controlling me, and not my own mind cracking and my insanity massacring those people, would it be any better? Would it matter to Flynn? The questions die on my lips as quickly as they come to me.

Because what if the answer is no?

Merendsen’s watching me. “You want to know if they could be the cause of the Fury?”

I don’t answer—I can’t, my throat so tight I can barely breathe. I want to look at Flynn, to see if there’s any chance this would change things between us. But I know it won’t. It was still my hand. My gun.

Merendsen sighs. “They didn’t do that to us. But we did find a…a record of sorts, of what happened to the original research station near where we crashed. And yes, Lee. It looked very much like the Fury.” His tone is quiet, even gentle, but I know him too well to believe it. There’s a steady anger hidden deep in his voice that makes me wonder what happened to him on that planet that he’s still not telling us. “Whatever LaRoux is using them for, perhaps the Fury is a side effect. Either way, LaRoux’s experiments didn’t end on that planet.”

I turn away, eyes sliding past Flynn until I can fix on the door instead, hands curled tightly against the lid of the trunk. I can still feel him there, the weight of guilt strung between us like a cord; bound together, held apart.

“Lee, give me your gun.” Merendsen’s on his feet, one hand extended to me. Soldier or not, it’s an order, and I comply, pulling it holster and all off my belt and handing it to him. He pulls the Gleidel out, as familiar with it as I am, and turns it over so he can reach the access panel. Flipping the cover up, he hands it back to me. “Take a look at the readout. When was this last discharged?”

I let my eyes fall to the display. “Four days ago. I shot at the ceiling to cause a rock fall to give Flynn and me time to escape.”

“And before that? How many times was it fired?”

My heart shrinks. “Please—sir, I can’t look, you don’t understand—”

“That’s an order, Captain.”

I force myself to drop my eyes and scroll the button backward, expecting to see twenty, thirty shots registering on its record. Instead there’s nothing. Not for days and days, and after a while I stop scrolling, and my hand falls into my lap, numb.

He leans over to rest his hand on mine. “A whisper may have brought you there, but it wasn’t to kill anyone. You never fired your weapon.”

My mind is reeling. “I didn’t kill those people.” I can’t think, can’t process. I’m struggling to breathe. All I know, all I can think of, is Flynn. I lift my head with an effort to find him looking straight at me, his face pale. I’m caught by that gaze, my blood thundering in my ears, frozen where I sit.

He tears his eyes away and stumbles to his feet. I want to speak, but I can’t, and he turns swiftly for the door, fumbling for the latch. He’s gone before I can speak, and I’m left sitting there staring after him, still trying to find my equilibrium.

Merendsen drops down into a crouch on the floor in front of me, reaching over to gently guide my face back toward his. He’s treating me the way we’re taught to treat disaster victims reacting in shock. Some detached part of my mind recognizes the training.

“I can’t believe you didn’t think to check its memory,” Merendsen says quietly, a smile in his voice. “You haven’t changed. Always looking forward, never back.”

“You weren’t there.” My voice breaks despite my attempts to find calm. “You didn’t wake up with no memory of how you got there, covered in blood. You didn’t see the—”

“Hey, shh.” Merendsen gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Now you know. And so does he.”

I glance toward the door, though Flynn’s long gone. “He left.”

“He needs time to understand.”

I shake my head. “Him and me both.”

Merendsen sighs. “You know he’s falling in love with you, right?”

My head snaps up, my eyes finding him again. If he wanted to cut through my shock, he certainly managed it. “Don’t be ridic—”

“Come on,” he interrupts.

I swallow, thinking of the night Flynn told me he could prove I had a soul, that I wasn’t heartless; the night he kissed me. I think of the way he washed the blood from my hands even when he knew he’d likely never see me again. I think of his face, standing in the back doorway of Molly’s, watching me with Merendsen.

“They all think they’re in love with me at some point or another,” I say finally, uncomfortably. There’s a difference between the way Flynn acts and the way the new recruits act when they first start taking orders from me, but I’m not ready to analyze that. “He’ll get over it.”

“And he’s like all your rookies?”

My heart pounds in the silence, stomach twisting. I feel sick, a hollow grief welling up inside me. “It doesn’t matter if he’s different,” I whisper. “We’re on opposite sides. We’re enemies, he and I.”

Merendsen’s mouth shifts to a faint smile. “You’re talking to the guy marrying Lilac LaRoux,” he points out. “Nothing’s insurmountable.”

That, at least, makes me smile a little in return. “I hardly think class differences are quite the same as ‘my people try to kill his people and vice versa.’”

His smile fades. “I said I couldn’t tell you everything that happened to us on that planet. Believe me when I tell you it wasn’t just that she was rich and I was poor.”

I swallow, dropping my eyes. “You didn’t have to wash the blood of your people off her hands. Some things you just can’t live with.”

Merendsen reaches up and takes my hands, wrapping them briefly in both of his. “Some things you can’t live with
out
.”

The girl wakes from a dream within her dream, safe in her bed above her mother’s shop.

The ghost is there, casting its soft, greenish light around her bedroom.

She sits up, but for some reason she isn’t afraid. Hovering halfway between sleep and dreams, she remembers that she’s seen it before, not only at school, not only in the alley, but everywhere.

“I know you,” she whispers, not wanting to wake her parents.

The little wisp of light sways gently, and the girl feels a shiver wrack her body, the taste of metal flooding her mouth; but this, too, is familiar, and she’s not afraid.

In between one breath and the next, the world around her changes; her wallpaper is water, her curtains seaweed, the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling now jellyfish of all shapes and sizes. She’s sitting on a bed of coral, and she can breathe the water like air. All around her is the world she dreams of, as real and vivid as life, and she laughs, delighted.

In front of her blooms a vivid purple sea anemone, and then another, and another, until there’s a road of violet leading away, into unexplored territory full of submarines and sea monsters, waiting only for her to discover it.

I HAVE NOWHERE TO GO
, no time to process. I stumble as I make my way down the muddy main drag of the base, my mind churning. My clothes are still soaking, and abruptly I’m freezing, my teeth chattering. I should be trying to comprehend what Merendsen just told us, his talk of creatures from another universe—but right or wrong, the only place my mind wants to go is Jubilee. The grief starts to well up, like it’s safe to let it happen now that I know it wasn’t her hand, her gun.

But there’s so much to think through—
if it wasn’t Jubilee, who was it?
—and I’m surrounded by trodairí. With my thoughts flapping around like loose ends in the wind, I only stop when a soldier nearly runs into me. Our eyes meet, and I ease my weight back, lifting my hands to claim the blame. His mouth’s opening to ask a question when I turn on my heel, striding away. I shouldn’t have run out of there, the one place I was safe. I need to find somewhere to hole up and think. The soldiers who see me here, out in the open, are all going to assume I’m supposed to be here—but if any of them talk to me, what will I say?

I slip into the alleyway behind Molly’s, wishing I could look over my shoulder and see if I’ve been followed. Looking furtive is always a mistake—one of Sofia’s tips. I force my shoulders down, make myself lift my chin instead.

Easing the door open, I step inside, thinking of the stacks of crates. I can hunker down there, probably find something to eat or drink, buy myself a little time to
think
.

And that’s when I come face-to-face with the bartender. He’s a wall of a man, looming over me, and as I stare at him, he reaches for a bottle, hefting it meaningfully in one hand.

“Wait.” I spit the word out before I have time to think about what to say next, and stop that bottle from connecting with my temple. “Wait, I’m with Jubilee.”

That’s enough to buy me a stay of execution, but his gaze bores through me like he can see all the way to the back of my skull. See the tangled confusion inside me, the mess of questions and hurt and need. “And why’m I believing that?”

I scrabble for an explanation that will reassure him. “She left a message with you—that was for me. Jubilee will vouch for me.”

The silence draws out, and I force myself to hold still and bite down on the inside of my cheek to stop myself from speaking. Finally, he rumbles, “You can stay here, an’ I’ll check with Lee. But if you do cause trouble, and anyone ends up dead ’cause of you, I won’t pause ’fore I call in the troops.” With a sickening lurch of my stomach, I realize he
recognizes
me. Either from the night I took Jubilee, or from the footage of my face being circulated around the base. But he’s waiting—because of Jubilee. His voice drops as he folds his arms across his chest. “And if you hurt
her
, even a little, I won’t bother calling the proper authorities.”

“Yes, sir,” I say quietly. I wish I could promise Jubilee would be safe with me. But we’d both know I was making promises I can’t keep.

He studies me for a long moment, and I study him back: shaven head, tattoos all the way up his arms in foreign characters that look like art, twangy backwater accent just like some of the other off-worlders. He’s a mystery. I wonder what brought him here.

“Come on out front,” he says.

“Out
front
?”

“You think I’m leaving you here unsupervised?” He claps me on the shoulder, and my knees nearly give out. “You can come an’ polish some glasses right where I can see you.”

I need to stop, to think. I need time, I need quiet. Because if Jubilee wasn’t the one who shot my people, I need to know who did. But the bartender’s posture makes it clear that in this, I have absolutely no choice. I swallow. “Yes, sir.”

Heart pounding, I follow him out into the bar full of trodairí. He jabs a thumb at the bin of clean glasses under the bar, so I get to work—and keep my head down, praying my tan and my hair are enough to hide me behind the scuffed bar top. But no matter how I try to clear my head, to stay focused, all I can see is Jubilee’s stunned face, her heart in her eyes as she looked at me. My world has been torn apart and stitched back together too many times, and now I exist only as a tattered patchwork of myself—unable to think, unable to feel anything other than numbness.

It’s about an hour later when the door swings open, and I look up to find Jubilee there with Merendsen. She looks ragged in a way she hasn’t since the massacre, and my hands fall still on the glass I’m polishing. Merendsen barely glances my way before heading for a table full of trodairí, but Jubilee freezes for the tiniest instant when she sees me. There’s relief there—the raggedness was for
me
—and then it’s gone, replaced by anger. She starts to head for the bar, but Molly casually steps in between us and she stops, looking up at him. He shakes his head a fraction—
not now
—and after a long, burning moment of hesitation, she nods. She turns her back on me and slides in to sit beside Tarver Merendsen.