This Shattered World (21 page)

His finger shifts on the trigger, and I surge to my feet, lunging at McBride and colliding with him; his shot goes wide, the scream of the Gleidel shattering my ears.

“Lower your weapon,” I gasp before he can try again. My voice sounds different, my throat burning for each word. “There’s something happening that’s bigger than this—we need her.”

Recovering his balance, McBride’s starting to lose his veneer of calm. “Get away from her before I go right through you.” He keeps the barrel of his Gleidel pointing square at my chest, his other hand coming up to steady it.

Behind me, Jubilee stirs, her skin scraping against the stone. “Just let him have me,” she whispers, the sound sharp as shattered glass.

“No.” It’s like someone else is speaking. Someone above this hatred, this grief; someone who doesn’t care that the sound of Jubilee’s voice makes me sick, that her betrayal has broken something beyond repair. Someone who cares only that I need her to save my planet.

Sean gropes for his own gun, hands shaking violently as he holds it at his side, uncertain. “Flynn,” he calls, hoarse. Straight from his lips to my heart. “Don’t do this.”

“What did she offer you?” McBride demands, voice thick with disdain. “You’ve always been weak, Cormac, but even I thought you were better than this. To give up your family for a taste of a trodaire.”

I still can’t take my eyes off of Sean. His chest is heaving, the gun trembling wildly now.

Hands shaking, I lift Jubilee’s gun, flicking off the safety. The soft whine of the battery powering up fills the cave. For a moment, everything is still. Turlough, hunched over Mike’s body. Sean, standing still, his eyes on my face. Jubilee, eyes closed, waiting for an end. For an endless instant, there’s only the choice I’ve just made.

Then it’s over. “Traitor,” McBride whispers as I aim it at him, and the word goes through me like a knife.

I look past McBride, my eyes falling instead on Sean, still standing with his gun at his side. “This won’t bring Fergal back. This wasn’t her, it was the Fury. It’s real. You’ve trusted me all our lives. Trust me now.”

The world narrows, and all I can see is my cousin’s face, and all the years behind it, the cocky smiles, the shared grief, the quiet moments without any words. He’ll see. He’ll recognize the truth, that the Fury’s real; that our planet is diseased and the madness could come for any of us now, that Jubilee is our only hope to find answers. He knows me. He
knows
me.

Then Sean lifts his gun—and aims it at me. His red-rimmed eyes meet mine for half a second before my cousin pulls the trigger.

The shot goes wide, screaming through the cavern and breaking the spell.

McBride roars and steps forward, Gleidel trained on Jubilee once more. I dive for her, grabbing her arm and dragging her to her feet, my body between her and McBride. The laser shrieks. I keep my iron grip on Jubilee’s hand and lunge for the passageway behind us.

My feet know the way, taking over from eyes blinded by images. Fergal’s behind me, so unfamiliar in his stillness, and Turlough’s still back there with Mike, and Sean, my Sean, is pointing a gun at my face. If I let go of Jubilee she’ll fall. I wrap my arm around her, ignore her cry of pain when my hand squeezes the wound where my bullet grazed her side, and pull her on into the dark.

It comes in fragments. Her mother’s scream. The smell of something burning. The counter vibrating as something hits the floor, hard. The sharp, shattering crack of gunshots. Someone’s voice, saying, “That’ll be a bitch to clean up.” A little girl screaming from far away. The taste of metal.

She was supposed to be brave. But the girl was only eight years old, and she wasn’t brave, and when the operatives from the orphanage came to get her, no one had bothered yet to clean the blood from her hands.

FLYNN’S GRIP ON MY WRIST
is ice-cold and unyielding. I try to focus, to understand where we are, what’s happening—my mind automatically tries to run through the checklist that’s been drilled into me since basic training. Taking stock of the situation, location, hostiles, injuries, obstacles…It all blurs together, my eyes streaming and my breath gasping in and out of my lungs. He breaks off from the corridor and pulls me through a narrow fissure in the rock, the stone scraping my chin, my arms.

My thoughts keep reaching for images where there are none; I see the hospital bed where I left Flynn, I see myself deciding to take a patrol boat to look for him. But the only thing beyond that is blood; blood burning in my pores, metallic on my tongue, singing through my own veins. When I close my eyes I see the cavern, painted with blood, more than I’ve seen in a lifetime of fighting. Blood like art, declaring victory over the Fianna, the hardened, monstrous rebels too young or too crippled to fight back. Blood glues our hands together, Flynn’s and mine.

All I can see is that child, half curled under another rebel who must have been trying to shield it. I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I don’t know—I don’t know.

My body sags with the weight of the empty holster at my hip, the weight of what I’ve done. My knees give way and I go down, dragging at Flynn’s hand. He’s forced to halt, nearly jerking my arm out of its socket trying to get me back on my feet.

“Stop,” I gasp, choking on the smell of blood on my skin. Now I understand that metallic taste, the shaking in my limbs; now I know what the Fury tastes like.
Blood.
“Stop—Flynn, please. Let them take me.”

“Like hell,” he says through gritted teeth. His face is unreadable.

He won’t listen to me. Right now I don’t have the strength to argue with him. He’s made his choice, and if I keep slowing him down he’s going to die for it.

I drag myself to my feet, leaning on him heavily. He grunts with effort, or pain, or acknowledgment, and we set off down the corridor once more.

The shakes hit me like a mag-lev train, ten times worse than on the island Flynn showed me to the east. Worse than after my first combat mission. Because this is nothing like that. No part of my training told me how to comprehend the massacre of unarmed innocents. Of children. My mind is tight and cold, like Flynn’s hand around my wrist, and I can’t break out through the narrow bands of panic and horror. Everywhere I look I see blood, smell blood. On my skin, my clothes, in my hair. I fight down my nausea, simply because I can’t stop, not while we’re running for Flynn’s life from people who think he’s turned on them.

Abruptly I see the end looming, the point at which I can’t function—exhaustion, shock, guilt, and grief tangled together. It’s like a rapidly approaching cliff, and I know that if Flynn pulls me off the edge I might never find my feet again.

I wish he’d just let them have me, and go. Anything would be easier than this.

And then he does pull me forward, wrapping his arm around my waist and leaping from a ledge. For a wild, confused moment we’re falling—and then we hit frigid water. It closes over my head, and my mind goes numb.

In her dream she’s choking, gasping for air where there is none, the vacuum of space closing around her. There are no stars, because there are never any stars here, only a thick darkness that rushes down her throat and into her heart. She dreams of drowning.

I KEEP AN ARM AROUND HER
, struggling through mud and water as I drag her forward. Dimly, I hear McBride shouting some distance back, trying to find someone who can fit through the same crack I pulled Jubilee into. Silent but for soft splashes, we disappear into the dark.

I can almost feel Orla with me as I find my way to our rock. She had me rehearse the route so many times when I was a child, so I could get here with my eyes closed if there was ever a raid. The rock is about six feet long and only a couple of feet above the water. Not even Sean knows this secret.

I pull Jubilee closer in the water, inspecting her face. There’s still more shock than sense there; bracing myself, trying not to recoil, I cup a hand under Jubilee’s chin to turn her face toward me. I keep my other arm wrapped tightly around her, afraid she’ll sink beneath the water if I let go. Her eyes open when I squeeze her.

“Jubilee, are you listening to me?”

She doesn’t answer, her eyes darting around in the darkness, panic making her tremble in my arms.

“Soldier!” I bark, keeping my voice as quiet but tense as I can.

Her eyes widen, and I watch as the soldier takes over, her chin lifting a little.

“This rock here is hollow inside. I can pull you, but when we go under you have to hold your breath. Understand?”

She nods again, lifting one hand to rest it against the rock for balance and leaving a red smear behind it. The water hasn’t been enough to wash the blood away.

I suck in a lungful of air, my throat threatening to close or catch in a coughing fit again. The water closes over my head, and I keep hold of Jubilee’s wrist as I guide her in with me. The water carries the distant shouts of my people directly to my ears until we surface, choking, inside my tiny shelter. There’s only a small space that’s water; the rest is the natural rock and the ledge Orla built for me when I was Fergal’s age.

I push Jubilee’s arms against the rock until she instinctively grabs at it, leaving me free to reach up and fumble in the dark. The netting with emergency supplies is still there, and my heart slows a little in relief. I grab the tiny cylinder of the flashlight dangling from it and turn it on; the beam bounces around the two of us as I help her scramble up onto the little ledge and then crawl up after her. We huddle there in a space meant for a child, her breath coming in sobs.

I grit my teeth hard. I have to think of a plan, but my misery keeps tugging me back toward Sean. I need to be there for him as he grieves. I want to tell him I’m sorry I didn’t get there in time, that I couldn’t save Fergal. Instead, I cower here as Jubilee’s tension starts to ease a fraction, and I angle the flashlight to see part of her face. Her lips are parted, eyes staring, water dripping unheeded from her nose and her chin. I have to get her moving. I have to put enough life back into her to get us both out of here. Swallowing my grief and my revulsion, I lift my hand to brush her wet hair back from her face.

She jerks away from my touch. “Please, Flynn, don’t.” She looks half her age, except for the bloodstains on her face. If any of my heart was left untouched, it would break right now—that this is the time she chooses to finally use my name. When I can barely stand to look at her.

The soldier I’ve come to know never would have done this, and yet her hands are smearing my family’s blood on the stone. “Don’t check out,” I tell her. “You have to stay with me. I can’t drag you to safety or they’ll find us both.”

“You should have let him have me.” Her voice is empty and aching.

“It wasn’t you.” I have to force the words out. “It was the Fury.”
It wasn’t her.
My own thoughts repeat it, over and over, unwilling to face what I’ve seen. Wanting it to somehow reduce my pain.

“I don’t remember anything.” Her voice breaks, and as she curls in on herself she’s still shaking, but this is different. It’s not the trembling that came with the dilated eyes or the jerky movements. This is shock, and my arms move haltingly to wrap around her and keep her from sliding back into the water. Suddenly I’m not holding Captain Lee Chase, but a terrified girl who wants to press her way into the stone around us and stay there forever. “I killed your people. You should—you should kill me yourself, why aren’t you?”

“Because it wasn’t you.” I’m repeating the words in her ear, desperately trying to make it true for both of us.

“You can’t know that!” Her whisper is fierce. “Stop it, Flynn, you can’t—just stop it.” Her fingers wind into my shirt, at first to push me away, but her resistance crumbles, and she lets me pull her in close until she’s clinging to me, shoulders shaking as she weeps against my chest.

Hot tears track down my cheeks too, and my throat closes as I swallow hard, fighting for composure. I wish that for one moment I could forget what’s happened and hold her and let the contact between us heal us both. But I can’t. Even her scent has changed; her hair smells like gunmetal.