•—•—•
An hour or so later, we’d moved to a couch in the small room Amos had designated the den. The old man was on his third beer of the night, and I was basking in the unfamiliar sensation of being uncomfortably full. I was halfway to sleep when he finally spoke again.
“I love this house. Hundred-plus years of history in its walls.”
“A hundred years?” I cracked one eye. “It was here before the Academy?”
That prompted a loud cackle. “Hell no! A century ago, these grounds were prime real estate, Banach. It was a place for millionaires’ mansions, not a humble little cottage like mine. After Jonathan started the Academy, I talked the young man into moving my cottage down from Santa Barbara. That was before half the town slid into the sea.” He chewed on his lower lip, eyes distant in memory, then shook his head. “Anyway, he wanted to just build me a new house, but hell if I was going to let this baby go.”
“Why?” It was a nice enough place… and a whole lot cozier than Mama Rawlins’ had been, but if Bard had offered to build me a new house…
“I told you already! History!” Amos scowled at me, then waved his beer to gesture at the space around us. “I’ve had to replace a lot of the furniture over the years, but this is the house my wife picked for us to retire in. Damned if I’m going to let it go.”
“You’re married?”
“Forty-seven years together when the Break happened.” He took another long pull of his beer bottle. “Funny thing is, we both survived it, up there in Santa Barbara. Two geezers making it through an apocalypse that claimed millions.”
“What happened?”
“Dr. Nowhere happened. Time happened. It took a while before we realized I wasn’t aging. I mean, at sixty-nine, who can tell, right? But after ten years? The truth got a little harder to ignore. She was getting older, and I was stuck where I’d been at the Break. Four years after that, and she was gone.”
As someone who still didn’t expect to make it to twenty, it was hard for me to imagine even knowing someone for sixty-plus years, let alone living with them, but the sorrow in his voice was impossible to ignore. “I’m sorry, Amos.”
“She’s been gone for decades now, and I still expect Alicia to walk through that door every morning.” He sighed into his beer. “She even liked my jokes. Woman like that’s a national treasure, young man.”
I didn’t say anything, but something in my silence caught his attention. He peered at me from his end of the couch. “Cat got your tongue? Tired of an old man’s ramblings?”
“Your wife’s name was Alicia?”
“Yeah. Pretty name for the prettiest damn woman you’ve ever laid eyes on. A real lady too. Why?”
“I just knew an Alicia once.”
“Knew?”
“She and her parents moved up to Palo Alto less than a year before Scarlet’s attack.”
Amos set his beer bottle down on the table in front of us with a thump. “She mean something to you, this Alicia?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Then we’re doing this right.” With a creaking of joints, he pulled himself back to his feet and tottered down the hall past the kitchen. When he came back, he held two short glasses in one hand and a small bottle in the other.
“That’s not beer.”
“Hell no, it isn’t. This here is a sample of the Dalmore 50.” He placed the bottle almost lovingly on the table. It was an odd shape, with a square base and rounded corners that persisted even as the bottle tapered up to the round cap and cork. The bottle’s interior was a lot smaller than the exterior, like a test tube suspended in crystal, and only half-full with a light, amber liquid. He poured an inch or so of alcohol into each glass.
“What is it?”
“One of the few benefits of outliving everybody I ever knew.” He raised the glass to his nose and breathed in, like he was sniffing a flower. “It’s whisky, Banach. Bottled pre-Break, 1978 on the old calendar.”
I took a whiff of my own glass, but all I got from it was an almost overpowering smell of strong alcohol. “Is it expensive?”
“Before the world fell apart, I’d never have been able to afford it. Now? Considering that the country it came from doesn’t exist anymore?” He rolled the glass around in his hand, watching as the whisky caught the light. “I’d say it’s damn near priceless.”
Oh. I took another careful sniff. When I looked up, Amos was watching me, his own glass raised high.
“To Alicia,” he said.
“To Alicia.”
The whisky burned all the way down.
CHAPTER 59
It was close to midnight by the time I started back to the dorm, the campus swimming unsteadily around me. First time I’d ever been totally sloshed. First time I’d let myself be, to be honest. Guess that was one upside of being the least impressive Low-Three Crow in existence; self-control no longer seemed all that necessary.
After twenty minutes of searching for the dorm, I gave up and found the nearest bench. The night was far warmer than it would have been in Bakersfield, but the aged concrete was cool even through my suit. I lay back and watched the stars slowly spin above me.
At the orphanage, Christmas had been some kids’ favorite holiday. While Remembrance Day had involved Cape vids and presents, Christmas was Mama Rawlins’ one attempt at making us feel like a family. Ten to twenty of us down in the living room, sitting in a circle on the floor and eating a double portion of synth-meat, the older among us telling bullshit stories about the good life, about the sort of foster parents we’d all end up with. One year, Mama Rawlins even put aside enough of her money to buy a bottle of sparkling cider. Another year, I talked Alicia into pouring out a big bucket of strawberry slushy, and before you knew it, there were twelve little kids—Nyah among them—with bright pink lips and tongues, every one of them sprinting around the house like Jitterbugs.
Maybe it was the whiskey, or maybe it was Amos’ talk about his own Alicia, but for the first time in a while, I found myself missing those little shits, some of whom I’d actively bled for. Even found myself missing Mama Rawlins and her eye-watering perfume that was at least half tobacco and stim-weed. At least in Bakersfield, I’d belonged. It was hard to feel that way at the Academy, where I was useless as tits on a bull. Hard to feel like I wasn’t alone when the only other person on campus was snoring on his couch. Dinner had been nice, but all the whiskey in the world couldn’t change reality.
Maybe I used my power as I was lying there, feeling sorry for myself. Maybe I didn’t. Given how drunk I was, it’s hard to say for sure. All I know is that when I finally dragged my eyes away from the night sky, Mom’s ghost was standing next to the bench.
I hadn’t seen her since that summer night with Sally, but Mom didn’t look any different for her absence. Same faded sundress. Same blissful smile under empty eyes. Sally had told me ghosts like Mom and Shane weren’t people anymore… that they were just empty shells of energy that my power animated like puppets. Sally had told me a lot of things, but given that she was a ghost herself, at least some of it had to be bullshit. I focused my blurry vision on Mom, and for the first time in years, spoke to her directly.
“Why are you here, Mom? Why did you come back when I was nine? There’s no way I could have called you, not at that age. I didn’t even know how my power worked!”
She stayed silent, still smiling, and a little bit of the old anger got me to my feet.
“Why won’t you answer me? What do you want? Are you just here to see how I’m doing, with you gone and dad rotting in the Hole? Because the answer is not fucking great! That’s what happens to orphans in this shit-stained world!” I clenched my fists and spun away. “You had to know what Dad was. Why the fuck didn’t you run?”
When I turned back, Mom was right in front of me, and for just a moment, for one fraction of a heartbeat, that smile was gone, and those eyes were dark and filled with something halfway between sorrow and rage.
&nb
sp; Then her ghostly hand swept up through my chest, and the world fell away.
•—•—•
I had just put the third and final pie into the oven when the front door banged open. “Damian, sweetie, is that you? I thought you were going to play with Mary a little bit longer?”
It was David, not Damian, who came through the door, his tie loose and dark hair a mess. If his coming home at two in the afternoon on a work day hadn’t told me something was wrong, the wild look in his grey eyes would have.
“Is everything okay, dear? Did something happen at the office?”
He brushed past me without answering, marching through the kitchen and into our master bedroom. I wiped my hands on my World’s Greatest Mom apron and followed him in to find his head and arms buried in the closet, pulling out boxes and tossing them aside.
“David? Love?” I took a careful step closer. “You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
His frenzied motions stopped suddenly, like a switch had been thrown, and I watched the tension drain from his shoulders. When his head came into sight, he was smiling that dopey, slightly crooked smile I’d fallen in love with on our very first date, so many years ago. “It’s alright, Elora,” he said, “Everything is going to be fine.”
That’s when I saw the knife.
“David, where did you get that?” The blade was six inches long and sharp along a single edge that tapered to a point. I’d never seen it before.
“I’ve always had it, packed away in a box.” He shook his head, as if in wonderment. “Only I somehow forgot it was there. Can you imagine?”
“Not really.” I swallowed hard and did my best to keep my voice level. “But what do you need it for? You’re not… you’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”
“Me?” He rolled his eyes and laughed. “Of course not, silly. That wouldn’t help at all.”
“Help what?” I shrank back as he took two steps across the room, but then he was past me, heading back into the kitchen. “Why do you need a knife?”
“It’s for Damian,” he called back over one shoulder, that same smile still on his face. “Our boy needs to die. You said he was over at the Smiths’?”
He was two feet from leaving the kitchen, ten feet from the front door, and at most a hundred from the Smiths’ house next door—Tom, Casey and little Mary—but somehow I got in front of him before he’d taken another step.
“What in God’s name are you talking about, David? Why would you want to hurt our son?”
He looked down at me in confusion. “It’s not about hurting him. Nobody wants that. It’s about ending him.”
I didn’t know what had happened at work, or what it was that had pushed my husband of nine years over the edge, but I felt my fists clench. “You listen to me, David Theodore Jameson. Put that knife down. Right. Now. We’re going to talk about this like adults or I’m calling the police and that will be the last you see of your son or me.”
He looked down at the knife in his hand and then back over at me, the confusion spreading. “You don’t understand, Elora. I’m doing this for you. I don’t know how I forgot, and I don’t know how she made me remember, but our son is meant for horrible things. If you knew what he was—”
“Put the knife down,” I said again, “and tell me.” I waved to the breakfast nook on the far side of the kitchen, conveniently close to the rolling pin I hadn’t gotten around to putting away. “If it’s as bad as you say, I’ll help. We can do it together. As husband and wife.”
“Together? I’d like that.” He started to lower the hand that held the knife when I heard it; a sound I’d heard thousands of times over the past few years; a young boy’s shoes flapping carelessly against the pavement as he ran up the driveway to our house.
“Mom! I’m hungry! Is that pie I smell?”
The light went out in David’s eyes. The knife came up and he took another step towards the door.
“Moooooooooom?”
“Damian, run!” I lunged for the hand that held the knife, and even though I was half the size of my husband, the impact staggered him. He turned from the open door, and something silver flashed between us.
I didn’t feel the blade the first time it entered, but as it slid back out from under my ribs, my legs turned to water. It was all I could do to hold on to that arm, trying to stay upright, trying to use my body weight to keep my husband from turning on our son, as the knife kept darting in and out.
“Dad? Mom?” Damian skidded to a halt on the red-splattered tile, eyes going wide as he took in the scene.
I tried to yell at him, tried to tell him again to run, but there was no breath left in me, just blood bubbling up past my lips even as it gushed down my stomach and legs.
My fingers went numb. I watched them slide free of David’s arm, watched the kitchen spin around me as I dropped helplessly to the floor.
In the doorway, little Damian opened his mouth to scream, but I couldn’t hear a thing. My head bounced off something hard, and blackness crept in from all sides until the only thing left was a blurred view of the man I’d loved, his grey eyes widening with the realization of what he’d done.
The world shrank even further. Pain. Confusion. Fear.
And finally, silence.
•—•—•
I came to on my hands and knees in the grass next to the bench. I hadn’t remembered Mom telling me to run. For thirteen years, all I’d remembered was the sight of her and the smell of blood and apple pie. Now, my own memory merged with Mom’s vision; the vacant look on my father’s face, the cold ice of the steel blade perforating her flesh, and the worst revelation of all… the thing I had never known:
Mom had died because of me.
I vomited up every bit of Christmas Eve dinner and Amos’ prized whisky, puking until there was nothing left in me and my body was wracked with dry heaves. I wiped my mouth with one hand, brushed my too-dry eyes with the other, and rose unsteadily to my feet.
Mom was still there, back to smiling like she didn’t have a care in the world.
I staggered away from her, bumped into the bench, and fell heavily to the concrete pathway, saved from another concussion only by my teachers’ many, many lessons in how to fall.
“That was real, wasn’t it? How did you do that?”
Mom’s ghost stayed silent.
•—•—•
I still don’t know if it was my power that kept Mom from leaving for all those years, that kept that one memory alive in her hollow shell for me to access when I was an adult… or if it was Mom herself that somehow held on; some tiny spark of left-over consciousness that allowed her to stick around to show me the truth of her final moments.
It’s one of the questions that troubles me on nights like this, when the dreams drive me from sleep, when there’s no one and nothing around except for ghosts like you. I can’t count the hours I’ve spent thinking about it, wondering. If it was Mom’s doing, why had she done it? If it was instead my power at work, how had I even known there was more to see?
Some questions don’t ever get answered. Some questions haunt you forever.
But at eighteen, still a little bit drunk somehow, those questions hadn’t occurred to me yet. My mind had space for one thought and only one thought, repeated again and again and again until the echoes sounded like thunder.
My father needed to die.
CHAPTER 60
You might think patricide’s the sort of thing that seems less attractive sober, but by the end of Christmas break, I was more committed than ever. I was never going to be a Cape and whatever Amos might say, I was never going to be a well-adjusted, salary-earning member of his postal service either. The Academy was free to members of the Cape program, but it was a long way from free for normal students, and I had fuck-all in the way of money or ways to generate it. After almost a year of school, I was right back where I’d been before Mr. Grey found me; no prospects and no future beyond the still looming and unavoidable descent into madness
.
About the only thing I could do was make sure my father got what was coming to him.
Father kills mother so son kills father.
Now there’s a post-Break fairy tale for you.
•—•—•
By the time students started trickling back onto campus, bright-eyed and eager for the last two months of school, I had a plan. Funnily enough, it was the government that made the whole thing possible. The Hole was as much a fortress as it was a prison, buried deep below the earth and entirely impregnable… but President Weatherly’s recent announcement changed that. On Remembrance Day, I would be able to meet with my dad, ask why he’d wanted to kill me, and send his homicidal ass to hell where it belonged.
Assuming I could get to the Hole, anyway. That was my first problem. I wasn’t concerned with Bard’s rules about leaving campus anymore—when it was all over, I sure as fuck wouldn’t be allowed back as a student, even if I survived killing my dad—but the Hole was way the hell out in the desert, and I didn’t have any transportation other than my own two feet and badly worn sneakers.
My second problem was even bigger. A day of quick research had told me that the prisoner meetings would take place in the Hole itself, in a subterranean space set aside for the event. Given the nature of the inmates, it was a sure bet that dampeners would be in place and running at full strength, preventing me from calling on my power. Worse, the whole place would be teeming with guards ready to put down anyone—inmate or visitor—who got out of line… and I was pretty sure trying to murder my dad qualified.
I needed a weapon, and it needed to be a guaranteed kill-shot, because I’d only get the one opportunity.
Planning a murder in one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the Free States would’ve been a challenge for anyone, let alone an eighteen-year-old who’d slept through a good portion of his first year at college, but like I said, I had a plan.
More importantly, I had someone I could ask for help.
See These Bones Page 31