This Shattered World (33 page)

I DON’T REMEMBER THE WALK
back to my quarters. But abruptly I’m there, my head still spinning, skin tingling. It’s easy enough to run myself through the motions as I get ready for bed, my routine ground into me through years of being too tired at the end of the day to do anything else. I can’t let myself think, can’t let myself dwell on the fiery adrenaline surging through me. I can’t let myself replay what happened with Flynn.

I can’t let myself continue to fall for a boy who represents everything I’ve been fighting against since I was eight years old.

But since I can’t actually stop myself from doing any of those things, at least I can stop myself from touching him ever again.

I’m not on duty the next day until mid-morning, but I wake at sunrise anyway, the habit too well ingrained to set aside. There’s no word from Merendsen about our next move, giving me no outlet for the need to act, to keep my thoughts away from dangerous territory. I should be giving my body as much time to recover as I can before I’m out on the fences again. It’s cold, wet, hard work out there; the rebels are invisible in the swamp, the bullets coming from nowhere. They keep too close to the base for us to call in an airstrike, but too far for us to pick them off from behind our fortifications. We’re forced down low, and the mud oozes inside my combat suit, itching like mad once it dries, and I smell like a swamp no matter how hard I scrub afterward. When we follow them farther into the swamps they vanish into nowhere, drawing us onto unsafe ground like will-o’-the-wisps.

It’s hours before I’m on duty, but my skin’s crawling for action, and every time I sit still—every time I close my eyes—Flynn’s there.

One true thing,
he said, his lips finding a hidden spot behind my jaw.
This is real.

I throw on the fatigues I was wearing yesterday, wrinkled and untidy—but laundry is the last priority on the base right now, and no one’s about to judge me for looking disheveled while going for a run. Hesitating only briefly, I buckle on my holster and my Gleidel. Awkward to jog with, but this is the wrong time to go anywhere on Avon unarmed. I choose my running shoes over my regulation boots and duck out into the misty, cold dawn. With Avon’s overcast skies sunrise is slow to take, as though the light itself is slowed down, oozing over the landscape gradually. It’s still dark, but I can see the fog lit overhead as the diffuse sunlight peeks through.

It’s too dangerous to do the usual training run, the eight-klick perimeter of the base that culminates in the obstacle course by the gym. There are rebels beyond the fences who know the land better than we do, and I don’t relish the idea of running ten feet away from someone with a gun pointed at me that I can’t see.

So instead I weave through the buildings, ignoring the way the mud splashes up at my pants legs. It’s a struggle not to push myself harder, to get to the point where I don’t have the focus to think about anything but one foot in front of the other, but I can’t waste all my energy while off duty.

I head past security, my breath steaming in the clammy air, and aim for the road that heads toward Central Command. It’s less torn up than the other paths, not as muddy. Easier to run on.

My path takes me straight up past Central Command in time to see Commander Towers disappear into her office. I stop short in a spray of mud. We need proof of what’s happening—Lilac LaRoux said as much. And while she and Merendsen might be content to put our fates in the hands of some hacker on the other side of the galaxy, I’m not used to waiting for someone else to save me.

I know Commander Towers knows more than she’s telling me. And I can’t believe she’s dirty. If she was in LaRoux’s pocket, why would she have warned me about telling Lilac’s fiancé what was going on here?

I wish Flynn were here. I hate the idea of leaving him in the dark, especially after seeing his anguish last night at having to continue hiding instead of finding justice for the massacre. But I’m not ready to face him yet; just the thought of him makes my cheeks burn. I shove his image away and turn toward Commander Towers’s office. My feet thud in time with my heart against the wooden stairs up to the prefab trailer.

“What?” Her voice shouts from inside; she’s not happy about being interrupted.

“It’s Chase, sir. Can I speak with you?”

The silence from the other side of the door stretches a fraction too long. “Of course. Come in.”

I shove the rickety door open and slip through. “Commander.”

“Shut the door!” she hisses, standing by her desk.

I blink, taken aback, but instinctively slam the door behind me.

“Sorry about that, Captain Chase. But you can’t be too careful. You don’t know who’s watching us.”

I suppress a shiver and take the seat she gestures at, expecting her to take a seat behind her desk. Instead she starts to pace, her eyes on the door instead of on me. I wait for her to gather herself, to speak to me, to let me explain why I’ve come—but it’s like she’s completely forgotten I’m in the room.

“Uh—sir?”

She stops pacing mid-stride, turning toward me. Her blue eyes are glittering, too bright. I don’t think she’s slept since I last spoke to her. “I’m sorry, Captain. You wanted to speak with me?”

“Yes, sir.” I swallow, my mouth suddenly gone dry.
Trust what you feel,
Lilac LaRoux told me. I believe in Commander Towers. “Sir, I know what’s going on. I know about LaRoux Industries, I know there was a hidden facility to the east, and I know it all has something to do with the Fury. And I know you know something about it.”

The silence is broken only by the frantic pounding of my heart, echoed briefly in the distance by a patter of gunfire. Commander Towers watches me, her breath coming rapidly, the circles under her eyes more pronounced than ever. I find it hard to meet her gaze; there’s fear burning behind her blue eyes, the desperation of a woman on the edge.

Then she closes her eyes. “God, Lee, you don’t know what a relief it is to hear you say that. This can’t leave my office, but…” She trails off, shoulders drooping as if with the weight of her secret.

My own relief is like a gust of fresh air, letting me breathe again for the first time since I stepped through her door.

She turns away, leaning on her desk. “I know you went out to that facility; I know that’s why you were asking about it. I was afraid of what you might have seen there. You don’t know what they do to people who know too much. They know everything—they can see inside your mind.”

Lilac LaRoux’s warnings echo in my mind, and I try not to let my own fear rise in response to my commander’s. “Sir,” I begin, “LaRoux Industries is—”

“LRI?” Towers stares at me. “I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the—the things that are out there. In the swamp.”

My skin wants to crawl, remembering what Merendsen said about his whispers, things we could never hope to understand. “If there ever was anything out there, sir, it’s gone now. There’s nothing to see but empty swampland.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re gone,” she mutters, raking her fingers through her hair and disheveling her normally neat bun. She takes a few more pacing steps, then whirls abruptly and crouches in front of me.

All her blinds are drawn, making her office seem even more cave-like than most of the buildings on Avon. Now that I’ve had a chance to look around, I can see empty ration packets strewn about, dirty coffee mugs littering the drinks station and her desk. It looks like she’s been holed up here for a week.

Her voice is ragged when she answers. “Everyone goes mad, everyone. Except for you. Why don’t you? Why
don’t
you?” She leans forward, bracing her hands against the armrests of my chair, her face only a few inches away.

I
did,
I want to scream.
I killed over half a dozen people.
Except I didn’t. Tarver Merendsen proved that.

“I don’t know,” I whisper instead.

“The facility you saw wasn’t military,” she says finally. “It belonged to LaRoux Industries.”

My pulse quickens—I have to tread carefully to get the answers I need. “Why? What interest do they have in Avon?”

“They approached me when I was first assigned here, said they were working on a way to stop the Fury. They said all the base commanders for the past ten years had been allowing them to do their research here.”

But why? To what end?
I open my mouth, but Towers is still talking, her head down, mumbling in a low, droning voice that frightens me.

“We find them out there sometimes,” she mumbles. “Soldiers taken by the Fury. Drowned or buried in quicksand or dead with guns in their hands and bullets in their brains. They go east, into no-man’s-land, if there’s no one nearby to kill when they snap. They’re looking for it. They’re looking for the place. But it’s moving, always moving. It’s never in the same place twice. I tried to find it, but…”

If I didn’t have reason to believe in at least some of what she was saying, I would tell her she’d lost
her
mind. Her gaze is wild, her eyes sunken, lips chapped. She hasn’t been taking care of herself. She clearly hasn’t been sleeping. She looks like I did, drowning in guilt the morning after the massacre at the rebel base, when I believed I’d killed all those—

I freeze. “Sir, what have you done?”

Commander Towers shakes her head. “It seemed like nothing at the time. An extra bonus finds its way into my account every month, and I provide copies of our medical records. Sometimes the bodies disappear, the ones we find in the swamp. You have to understand, LaRoux Industries conducts such revolutionary medical research, and no one else is helping us, helping my soldiers. I thought they might have an answer to the Fury. You understand that, you know what it is to live and die with your platoon.”

“Yes, sir,” I say cautiously, keeping my voice free of judgment. I’m not sure I would have done differently in her position, and I want her to keep talking.

But it’s like she doesn’t even hear me.

“I can’t do it anymore,” she’s whispering. “That place, the things they study—the Fury’s only getting worse. Taking civilians now, like that man Quinn with no history of violence. I’ve told them I won’t cover for them anymore, Lee. And I’m telling you, in case…” She swallows, taking a deep breath that restores a little of the sanity to her expression. “In case something happens to me.”

My palms are sweaty, pressed against the seat of the chair. “Why me?”

“Why you,” she repeats. “That’s what they want to know. I’ve figured it out. LRI wants to know why you don’t snap, why you never get the dreams. That’s why you’re still here. Lee, they didn’t just pay me to look the other way. They paid me to watch
you
.”

Dread grips my throat, chokes my voice away. “Who? Who’s doing this?”

She gazes back at me, still standing close. Her mouth opens, then closes. I watch as her eyes focus past me, then snap back, then blur again. “Lee,” she whispers—and then again, this time with an odd urgency.
“Lee.”

“Sir?” I force myself to move, to break out of the fear holding me down so I can reach for her. “Sir, what’s happening?”

As I watch, her pupils dilate, her muscles beginning to tremble. It’s what happened to Mori, how she looked as she blew away that teenager in the town. I reach for my gun, but my fingers seize when they touch the familiar grip; I know I can’t shoot my commander.

The first time I watched a fellow soldier die was a few weeks after I went on active duty. We were on a patrol, and he stepped into a poorly constructed—but effective—booby trap leftover from the long-ago rebellion there, and it blew him half to pieces. But there was a moment, after his foot tripped the wire and before the explosives ignited, when we both knew what had happened. His eyes met mine, and that instant unspooled into an eternity stretching between us, the knowledge unfurling on his face that he was about to die, the helplessness on mine, unable to stop it. It was only a split second, but it lasted forever.

That moment comes back to me now as Commander Towers meets my eyes. For an instant, she knows she’s falling.

I brace myself, waiting for the violence to erupt.

Instead, the moment passes, and she straightens. I’m left tense, watching her, waiting for her to snap like Mori did. She gazes through me, her pupils still dilated—and then, giving herself an odd little shake, she turns away and reaches for a stack of files on her desk, walking sedately around to her chair.

I stare as she goes back to work, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never does. Though her pupils still seem unusually large, the rest of her body language and movements are utterly normal. More normal, in fact, than she was acting when I first stepped into her office.

“S-sir?”

She looks up, blinking in surprise. “Captain,” she says mildly. “I didn’t notice you come in. How can I help you?”

It’s like a blow to the gut, and I’m left searching for words, floundering for understanding. “Sir, I came in here to speak with you. You were telling me about the medical records. About LaRoux Industries.”

“I was?” She frowns at me, reaching up to neatly tuck a lock of hair into place. A habitual, familiar gesture I recognize, but a tad too jerky. Just a little bit wrong. “That doesn’t sound right.”

“Sir, the records—the facility to the east—”

“I have a lot of paperwork here, Captain,” she says gently. “Can it wait?”

If I hadn’t just seen her ten minutes ago, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell anything was wrong. But looking at her now, I can see it—little signs, here and there. All her gestures are right, the inflection in her voice, her turn of phrase. But it’s all muted. Muffled. It’s like she’s herself, but somehow…
less
.

“Yes, sir,” I stammer, backing toward the doorway. “I’ll—thank you, sir.”

She doesn’t look up as I salute and hurry through the door.

It’s all I can do to walk back toward the other side of the base and not run; it’s all I can do not to find the nearest shuttle and get as far away as I can from this place.

I don’t know why LaRoux Industries is here on Avon. I don’t know why my commander was being paid to watch me. But whoever she really was behind the bribes and the guilt, that person is gone now. Because the thing that just politely showed me the door—that
wasn’t
Commander Towers.