This Shattered World (25 page)

I give it a wide berth before finding a place near solid ground to hide my boat. A half hour later, I’m slipping between two buildings on the outskirts of town, avoiding the searching eyes of the soldiers on guard duty.

In the security footage from the bombing, there was a girl with Davin Quinn right before he used the detonator. I need to know if it was his daughter, Sofia. We played together as kids, and I think maybe, just maybe, she’ll trust me still. I have to find out if she knows anything about what turned a peaceful man like her father into a killer. What turned Jubilee into a killer. That question—and the image of Jubilee’s face, her eyes black like they were on the island, her features blank—has been my constant companion the last three days.

The town is a grid of worn prefab buildings divided by dirt roads, street signs showing only numbers. Normally there’d be people about, but this place is mostly locked down. A combination of curfew and caution. I wish I could say they were only afraid of the military’s heavy hand, but more townspeople have been caught in the crossfire than anyone on my side would care to admit. I hurry past shuttered homes, head down, the collar of my borrowed jacket up to hide my profile. Clad in gray, I’m just one more shadow.

A dog comes skittering past me, hurrying for home or some bolt-hole. I turn my head automatically to check the way it came from, and freeze. Something’s moving back there, something too large to be a dog. My heart kicks up a notch, and I force myself to move slow and smooth as I melt back toward the street beside me and the shelter of the buildings. That’s the key—no quick, jerky movements to draw the eye.

There are three figures making their way up the street, and they’re not trodairí. They don’t step in time, beating Avon down beneath their feet. But they do move carefully, stealthily, and I recognize that movement an instant later: they’re Fianna. McBride leads the way, flanked by two others; one of them I don’t recognize, but I know at a glance who’s walking on his left. It’s Sean.

I ease back against the wall of a house as they approach the crossroads, bowing my head so my gray coat blends with the walls—in the dark, holding still is my best chance.

McBride stalks along like he owns the town, the other two close on his heels. He’s headed away from the base, toward the edge of town; whatever his business was here, he’s concluded it. Sean’s hood is drawn, but I can see his always laughing, smiling mouth—now a grim line, jaw squared. Without Fergal, without me, he has no one.

I ache to reach out for him—I can imagine myself stepping forward, calling out—and I hold still, curling my hands to tight fists as the three of them disappear into the gloom. My heart tugs me after Sean, but I force myself to turn away. I came here for a reason, and if I want to help him—help all of them—I have to keep moving.

I nearly step straight into the path of a trodairí squad. They’re still a block up, but with my mind squarely on my cousin, I spot them only seconds before crossing the street. Mentally cursing, I sink back into the shadows, watching as they approach. They move differently than the rebels, purposefully, and in that instant I understand they’re moving
after
the rebels. They’re following Sean and McBride.

I stoop, groping around in the mud until my fingers close over a stone, small and slippery. In a quick movement I send it flying up the side street, withdrawing into the shadows as the trodairí change their course, abandoning the receding figures of the rebels to go after this newer, closer sound. It’s all the head start I can give them, and I hope it’s enough.

I slip away, ducking up the third street along and counting the houses until I reach Davin’s house. Sofia’s, now, though not for long. She’s not sixteen yet, not technically an adult. Odds are they’ll have her on the next transport leaving the spaceport. I square my shoulders and knock quietly, keeping an eye out for more soldiers on curfew patrol.

It takes her a long time to answer—long enough that I know she must have been listening for the sound of my footsteps retreating. Then the door opens a crack to reveal a sliver of the girl I knew, slender and strawberry-blond. She sports a bandage that peeps out of the collar of her dress, and another encircling her wrist, and I’m reminded that the girl in the bombing footage was not far away when the explosion occurred. The pale skin of Avon’s sunless skies is ghostly on her, black shadows standing out beneath her eyes in exhausted half circles. Grief has hollowed her out.

She barely looks at me, her eyes sliding away to rest on the muddy street. “Thank you,” she says wearily, her voice hoarse, “but I really don’t need any more food.” The door starts to shut.

“Good,” I say, pulling my hands out of my pockets to show they’re empty. “Because I don’t have any. Sof, it’s me, Flynn. Let me in before someone sees.”

Her gaze snaps into focus, lips parting in surprise, and for a heartbeat the grief is gone. There’s a code between the people like her family—the townies—and the Fianna. They might not be with us, but they turn the other way when we pass by, and tell the soldiers they didn’t see a thing. Not so secretly, plenty of them would like us to win, and though Davin was a cautious man, I’m desperately hoping the girl who used to steal books from the classroom and then spin fantastic lies to wriggle out of trouble has more fire in her. And that she has any of that fire left at all now.

After a moment that stretches into forever, she leans out to look up and down the empty lane, then steps back to invite me in. The house is small, exactly like all the others in town. You can see Sofia’s little touches here and there—the bright red kettle on the stovetop, a strip of imported silk hanging on the wall. Otherwise the walls are painted the usual calming pale yellow, and the bland furniture is standard-issue. Her father’s waders still hang by the door, along with his testing kit. Before his new job in the base warehouse, Davin scooped samples for a living, bringing them back to the labs so the technicians could confirm that, as ever, Avon is missing most of the bacterial life she needs to become a proper world. The small table in the center of the room is piled high with dishes and pots, offerings left by neighbors and friends with no other way of showing their sympathy for Sofia’s loss.

She closes the door behind me, then turns to face me. Last time we spoke we were almost the same size, and she was trying to wrestle me to the ground in the muddy school yard. Now I’ve got a good three or four inches on her. I’m searching for words, some way to show her I’m sharing her pain, but she speaks first.

“What the hell happened to you?”

To my surprise, I laugh. And though it’s a soft, sad sound, my chest loosens. I haven’t spoken to another human in three days. “The swamp happened to me,” I say, and her mouth quirks a little. “I’m so sorry, Sof. I wish there was something I could say that would make a difference. I know there’s not.”

Her mouth tightens to a thin line as her eyes slide away. She looks so tired. “You shouldn’t have come here, Flynn. Your face is on every holoboard in town. Kidnapping an officer? What’s going on?”

“It’s an incredibly long story. Listen, Sof, I’ve got nowhere to go. I came here because…because I thought you might understand.”

“Nowhere?” Her brow furrows, and I realize no one’s told her about the massacre, about my choice to save Jubilee. “But the caves…”

I swallow hard. Three days, and I still can’t speak about it. “McBride and the others want me even more than the soldiers do. I made a choice, and they don’t understand why.”

Sofia’s eyes widen a little, but she’s too good at concealing her feelings to show me anything else. “What did you do?”

“I saved a soldier’s life. After she—” I clench my jaw, trying to keep control of myself. “It was the Fury.”

Her gaze shifts, falling on the oversize waders by the door before coming to rest on me, her own grief welling up in response to mine.

“I just need a place to sleep for a night,” I whisper. “And some answers. I know it’s dangerous. I’ll be gone by morning.”

“Come,” she says softly. “I’ll draw some water, and you can get clean. You can borrow some of my father’s clothes.” She speaks without a hitch in her voice, but despite the long years we’ve been separated by this fight we’ve inherited, I still know her well. I can see the pain drawn clear on her face. “You’ll stay here with me as long as you need to.”

My heart thuds hard, fear and relief warring with each other. “I can’t accept that, Sof. They find me here and they’ll arrest you too. How can you—”

“Because you tried to save her from this Fury,” she interrupts, voice quickening with the same fire I remember from when we were children. “Because if someone had tried to save my father, I would’ve kept them hidden until the soldiers came to drag me from this house.”

It takes four basins of frigid water before the dirty washcloth wrings out clear, but Sofia keeps bringing new buckets from the pump anyway. Though the shirt and trousers she finds for me are far too large, the feel of clean, dry fabric without a trace of blood or grime is bliss. But once I’m sitting on the floor in front of the tiny stove, my thoughts return; my eyes are on the cuffs of my trousers, which have been carefully mended over and over again. The stitches are neat and orderly; the thread is a faded butter-yellow.

When Sofia sits down, handing me a thick, doughy slice of what we locals call
arán
, I notice the thread mending her father’s cuffs matches the color of her tunic, which is a few inches shorter than it ought to be.

I close my eyes, the
arán
suddenly tasting like ash in my mouth. This isn’t her fight—and yet it is. It’s all of ours. I just wish it weren’t coming to this violent end.

“Don’t you need to eat too?” I ask once I’ve managed to swallow.

She shrugs, eyes on the glowing red coils of the stove. “Seems like all I do now is eat and sleep. People keep bringing me food. But I can’t eat it all—there’s only me now, after all.”

It’s always been just Sofia and her father, since we were children. Her mother left when the first rebellion started heating up, and as far as I know, Sofia hasn’t heard from her since. I glance at the table piled high with offerings from the town. “It was you, wasn’t it?” I lower my voice, though we’re alone. “The girl in the security footage, right before…right before.”

Her face tightens, eyes closing as she swallows hard, cheeks flushed. I want to take her hand, show her I feel this agony too, but the tension singing through her body keeps me still. “You know,” she whispers, “you’d think the worst part about this would be the looks I get. It wasn’t all soldiers who died in the explosion. People here lost family too. They all look at me like I should have known it was about to happen, or stopped it. But I don’t care.” Her voice thins and catches roughly. “I just miss my dad.”

Her grief catches at mine, resonating hollow in my chest. Loneliness shouldn’t be the worst of this; the thing that makes my heart hurt shouldn’t be how much I miss the trodaire I’ve only known for a few weeks. Because the Fury took her from me too. “There was nothing for you to know,” I murmur. “This never should have happened.”

She inhales sharply, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. “It wasn’t him, Flynn. I know they’ve got footage, I know they’re saying he had the detonator. But he wasn’t planning anything. He didn’t want any part in the fight. He’d been vague, tired, but I thought it was just the stress of his new job on the base. He’d never have done anything to risk my life, and even if somehow he was forced, I’d have seen it in him.” Her gaze is distant, replaying those last minutes. “I would have known.”

“I believe you, Sof.” My eyes fall on the bandages again.

“Well, if you believe me, you’re the only one who does.” She meets my eyes, the sharp edge of bitterness showing through. “The trodairí say the families always deny their loved ones are capable of violence.”

“This Fury—this thing we thought was a trodairí excuse—it’s real. I’ve seen it.” I force myself to take another bite of the
arán
. I’m ravenous, and yet each mouthful is a hard lump in my throat. “And if it touched your father too, then it’s getting worse.”

“I was the one who got him the job on the base.” She’s still, betraying nothing with her body language. “Taking samples, being in that cold water all day, it was making his arthritis so bad he could barely walk in the mornings. I talked the military supply officers into hiring him as a stocker.”

Even as a child, Sofia’s silver tongue could get us out of any scrape.

“If it weren’t for me,” she whispers, her hollow eyes fixed on the waders still standing by the door, “he wouldn’t have even been there.”

In the morning, I’m ripped from sleep by the clatter of hail on the roof, and I lurch up with a rush of adrenaline. Shabby prefab walls surround me, and for a wild moment I’m completely disoriented. Then it comes to me: I’m at Sofia’s, sleeping in her father’s old room.

And that sound isn’t hail. It’s distant gunfire.

I clamber from under the thin blanket, dazed, stumbling to my feet and hauling open the back door. The muddy, makeshift streets of the town are full of people rushing this way and that as civilians try to find cover. The gunfire’s echoing from beyond, out in the swamp. The military’s increased patrols must have found McBride and his men—or else McBride has drawn them into a trap. Tactics my sister invented. Tactics I helped hand down.

Whole platoons of soldiers run double-time toward the sounds of fighting. There’s no sign of Jubilee, but I’m not sure I’d be able to tell if she was among them. When they’re all wearing their helmets and their body armor and power packs for ammo, it’s impossible to even tell the men from the women. They all look alike.

A hand wraps around my arm and jerks me back. “They’ll see you,” hisses Sofia, face flushed with sleep and fear. She throws her father’s shirt at me, making me realize I’m still half naked, sleep dazed, then shoves me away from the back exit.

The door slams, but I can still hear the smattering of shots fired, far away.

The fighting continues throughout the day, echoing from different spots; the shifts mean McBride’s still out there, if not winning, then at least holding his own. The military have advanced weapons, greater numbers—but McBride and the Fianna know this land far better than soldiers who can’t last more than a month or two before being reassigned.