Splintered

by Jon McGoran

  Claudia bristled. “Yeah, if I can get my hands on a decent socket set.”

  Kiet looked at me, as if for confirmation.

  “I’ve seen her in action,” I said. But I was distracted by several thoughts coming together in my mind at once.

  “Cool,” he said, with a shrug. “Didn’t mean to doubt. I know a guy in Gellersville who might lend me some tools.”

  “Great,” Claudia said, smiling until she turned and saw the frown I could feel dragging down the bottom of my face. “What’s wrong, Jimi?”

  Our surroundings seemed familiar to me. The woods around us were still dusted with ice and snow—the real thing, not that other stuff—but they seemed greener. The air had a slight haze of fog.

  “Cornelius had that breathing mask, remember?” I said, still thinking things through. “Doc said it smelled toxic, like the air inside it was bad. But if Cornelius went through OmniCare and got sent into the mines, if he could breathe the atmosphere down there, maybe he couldn’t breathe the air up here. Maybe the only way he could escape was to bring some of that bad air with him.”

  Claudia put a hand over her mouth. “That’s horrible. It’s bad enough they’re being imprisoned in those mines, but to be left unable to survive in natural air?”

  “It’s monstrous,” Kiet said. He looked devastated, obviously thinking about Devon.

  “Kiet,” I said. “Where exactly are we?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Just what I told you, that we’re heading away from OmniCare. Toward Belfield.”

  Claudia and I had followed him into a clearing where the gentle slope grew steeper. I stopped, taking in my surroundings even more closely. Taking stock of how I felt, whether I was confused or groggy. “Are we anywhere near Centre Hollow?” I asked.

  Claudia shot me an alarmed look.

  “I have no idea,” Kiet said, oblivious to our sudden tension. “Why? What’s Centre Hollow?”

  “Do you feel okay?” I asked Claudia.

  “I think so,” she said, but she didn’t seem sure.

  “What’s Centre Hollow?” Kiet repeated, walking back toward us.

  Before I could tell him, a blur of color flashed between two trees down in the woods on the far side of the clearing, so fast and so far away I couldn’t be sure it was really there. “Did you see that?” I said, pointing.

  Claudia turned and followed my gaze, staring intently into the woods.

  “See what?” Kiet asked, looking around. “What’s going on?”

  A voice called out from the distance. “Kiet?” It was faint and faraway, but the emotion in it was loud and clear.

  Kiet froze. “Devon?” he said, the name catching in his throat as he spun around, trying to place the voice.

  A figure emerged down in the woods on the other side of the clearing. It looked like a boy, but he was too far away to make out much in the way of details other than his dark hair, oddly gray complexion, and grimy, disheveled clothes. I couldn’t even tell if he was a chimera. But somehow I could see the emotion in his eyes, a roiling mixture of pain and fear and love and joy and sorrow. I could have seen that from a mile away.

  “Devon!” Kiet cried. He started running down the hill, but Devon held up a hand.

  “Stop!” he called out sharply as Kiet approached the middle of the clearing. “Stay back!”

  “What do you mean?” Kiet said, slowing but not stopping, as if his feet wouldn’t follow the command.

  “You can’t come any closer. It’s not safe.”

  “You come here, then,” Kiet said, still inching forward.

  “I can’t,” Devon said, the sorrow in his eyes more acute than ever. “I’m farther from town than I should be. And you’re closer than you should be.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kiet said, his feet finally stopping.

  “Is this Centre Hollow?” I asked, stepping up next to Kiet.

  “The outskirts,” Devon said. “You should be okay where you are, but you shouldn’t stay long. And you can’t come any closer.”

  “What the hell is Centre Hollow?” Kiet demanded, looking back and forth between me and Claudia and Devon, confused and angry, the only one in the dark.

  “Was it you who saved us earlier?” I called out.

  “Me and my friends.” He looked to his left. “Rajiv,” and then to his right, “and Georgie.” Two other guys appeared on either side of him, one spliced with raccoon to his left, the other, spliced with lion, to his right. They were grimy and disheveled, and had the same gray cast to their skin.

  “Thank you for helping us,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t have come back,” Devon said.

  “We didn’t mean to.”

  Kiet threw his head back and yelled at the sky, “What the hell is going on?”

  I didn’t know that much more than he did, and probably none of the part he cared most about. I kept my mouth shut and met Claudia’s questioning look with a tiny shrug.

  Kiet took a step forward, but Devon cried out, “Stop! I mean it.”

  For a brief moment, they stood staring at each other, tears rolling down their cheeks. Then, without warning, Devon gave his head an exasperated shake and ran up across the clearing. Rajiv and Georgie both reached out for him and followed a few steps trying to stop him.

  One of them called out, “Devon! No!”

  But Devon sprinted across the snowy ground, toward Kiet.

  Kiet took two steps forward, then they met, practically tackling each other, but staying on their feet, twirling around, hugging, whispering into each other’s ears.

  Despite his gray pallor, Devon was beautiful. I thought at first he was spliced with fox, but as he got closer, I suspected it was red panda. It was a subtle splice, mostly a faint blush of fur, white, black, and russet over white skin. He had soft blue eyes, full lips, and prominent cheekbones.

  I wondered if he’d been as good-looking before the splice, or if red panda simply agreed with him.

  They pulled away from each other, just enough to kiss, lingering long enough that I could tell that as far as they were concerned, the rest of us—the rest of everything—had disappeared.

  But then it all came rushing back.

  Devon pulled away first, running a hand through Kiet’s hair, his eyes scanning Kiet’s face, as if he was memorizing every detail.

  “You look so thin,” Kiet said.

  “You look perfect,” Devon replied. He smiled, and so did Kiet, just for a moment. Then Devon’s smile faltered, followed by the rest of him. His breathing became shallow and fast.

  “Devon?” Kiet said, growing alarmed. “Are you okay?”

  Devon smiled feebly and said, “You always did…take my breath away.” Then his knees buckled.

  Kiet caught him. “Devon!”

  Rajiv and Georgie ran up and skidded to a stop on either side of Devon. They looked like they were holding their breath as they grabbed him by the arms and hauled him back down across the clearing.

  Kiet began to follow them until Georgie coughed and said, “Stay there!”

  Rajiv said, “We’ll be back in a minute.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Kiet watched, stricken, as Devon’s friends dragged him off into the brush. Then the woods were silent around us. For five minutes, we stood there silently waiting and watching and hoping. Finally, we saw and heard movement in the distance. Devon returned, walking on his own, flanked by Rajiv and Georgie. They came just to the edge of the clearing, then Devon sat heavily on the ground and leaned back against a tree.

  “I’m fine,” he said, barely audible from where we stood. He was looking directly at Kiet, whose face was etched with worry and fear, his body leaning forward as if straining against an invisible leash.

  “Devon?” Kiet said, his voice sounding even farther away, though he was standing right next to me.

  “I’m fine,” Devon repeated, louder, followed by a raspy cough. “Sort of,” he added. He stared at Kiet for a moment, then he said, “I�
�ve changed a bit. I’ve been changed.”

  “What happened?”

  Devon looked down at the ground between his outstretched legs. “You remember when that cut on my arm got infected, and I went to OmniCare to get it stitched?” He bent his elbow to look at his forearm. “They did a good job with that, actually,” he said with a snort. “But they sedated me to do it. I woke up, briefly, in a big room half filled with chimeras sleeping in beds. When I woke up the second time, the room was full, twenty or thirty of us, all chimeras, all sleeping, all strapped to our beds. I was so weak I couldn’t have gotten up anyway. There was a doctor carrying this big tray, taking notes or something, a few beds down, and I tried to ask what was going on, but I was too tired. I don’t know if she noticed that I was awake. If she did she ignored me.

  “As I watched, she leaned over one of the chimeras and covered his mouth and pinched his nose with one hand. In the other hand, she was holding an inhaler. One of her assistants called it a splinter inhaler. After a few seconds she slipped her hand off the chimera’s mouth, stuck in the inhaler, and blasted it.”

  “A splinter inhaler?” I said.

  “That’s what they call it and that’s exactly what it feels like, too. It’s kind of like an old asthma inhaler. I was barely conscious when she did me. The mist tasted sweet, but it burned my lungs like I was breathing in needles. We all got the treatment, then her assistants came into the room and started moving us. I was in and out, but they seemed to be hurrying.”

  Kiet and Claudia were staring at Devon with eyes as wide as mine felt.

  “When I woke up, I couldn’t tell if it was the same room or not,” he continued. “It smelled different. The others all looked gray and washed out. I guess I did, too. I felt different. My chest was raw, like I’d had a really bad cough. I was still tied down—this time even more securely. Someone came in to examine us, but I couldn’t tell who because they were wearing a breather.

  “When I woke up after that, I wasn’t tied down anymore, but two guards in exosuits and heavy-duty breathing masks were poking us with rifles, telling us to get up. They also had shock batons and clubs, dart guns. They marched us all onto this giant elevator and took us down into the mine. There were all these other chimeras working away with picks and shovels and they put us to work. We were still dazed, but I recognized some of the other chimeras, from when I checked in.”

  He started crying, but no one said anything. It was clear he wasn’t finished. Rajiv, the raccoon chimera, squeezed his shoulder. Kiet and Claudia were crying, too.

  Devon took a deep breath and continued. “There was this girl I’d met in the waiting room. She was smart and funny, kind of tough. She said no.” He paused and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “She said they were crazy and they needed to let us all go. The guard shot her, practically tore her in half.”

  Devon stifled a sob, then got himself under control. “The rest of us were terrified…so we got to work.”

  “But you got out,” Kiet said.

  Devon nodded. “Kind of, I guess. When they splintered us—with the mist they made us breathe—it didn’t just make us able to breathe the gases down in the old mines. It also left us so we couldn’t breathe regular air, at least not for long.”

  I felt sick. It was pretty much what I had feared, but hearing it from someone who had lived through it was a million times worse than I had imagined.

  Devon paused and looked at Rajiv and Georgie before continuing. “Every now and then, someone would run for it, up through the main gate. It wasn’t even that hard, either. The guards were careless, because they knew once we’d been splintered we couldn’t survive outside, and they knew we knew. The guards use oxygen tanks, because they’re down in the mines for hours at a time, but the medical staff don’t come in for long, so they use refillable breathers with built-in compressors, so they can just go anywhere with regular air and refill them. We figured maybe we could fill it with whatever it was we were breathing.”

  “Is that how you got out?” Kiet asked.

  “Kind of. The breathers didn’t hold much, so we knew they could only get us so far. But there was a guy in the mines named Henry. He grew up around here, and knew about this ghost town, Centre Hollow—he called it Creepy Hollow—that had been condemned and evacuated, not just abandoned, like the zurbs, but forcibly evacuated because the air was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned how?” Kiet asked.

  “The town was built in a little valley, on top of an old coal mine. The mine companies pump all those chemicals into the mine to liquefy the coal they couldn’t mine, then they pump in CO2 to force it out. It turns out the coal they liquefied had been holding the mine together, so cracks started forming and the CO2 and other gases seeped up through the ground.”

  “Enough to displace the air?” Claudia asked.

  He nodded. “It’s like a little valley, protected from the wind. The gases would just kind of sit there and collect. Anyway, Henry figured maybe we could breathe there. He figured the vents should let out close enough to Centre Hollow that someone with a full breather could get there.” He smiled sadly and a haunted look seeped into his eyes.

  “So it worked?”

  “We were only in the vent for ten or fifteen minutes, tops.” He smiled sadly. “On our way out, we saw…well, actually, we saw a lot, but we actually found the master controls that could open all the doors, even the main gate. There was even a master for the cameras, all right there. But we knew it was useless because it wasn’t the gates that kept us trapped in there, it was the air. The main entrance would have been way too far from Centre Hollow. Luckily, Henry was right and the vent let us out close enough that with breathers, we made it here without passing out. Luckier still, he was right that we could breathe once we got here.”

  “The vent you came through. Was that the one with the…snow or whatever?” Claudia asked.

  Devon turned grayer. “Yes. But…that’s not snow.”

  “How many people got out?” I asked.

  “There were six of us in that first group. Three more groups came later, the same way. Rajiv and Georgie slipped out the main entrance and managed to steal a car and drive it here. They passed out while driving and crashed on the edge of town. Luckily, we heard it and got them here before they suffocated. That brought us up to twenty.”

  “You could have been killed,” Kiet said.

  Devon tilted his head, looking at Kiet fondly but almost condescendingly. “I’d probably be dead by now if I’d stayed.”

  “Are they doing this to all the chimeras who go to OmniCare?” I asked.

  Kiet started to speak, but Devon said, “Just the ones that had no family, no emergency contact.” He smiled bitterly. “The ones no one would miss.”

  “Don’t say that,” Kiet said.

  “Not you,” he said. “But my family…they’re not going to miss me.”

  Claudia looked around. “What have you people been eating?”

  “A couple of the gardens are still producing,” he said with a smile. “Kind of amazing, they’ve been reseeding all these years. Maybe it’s the CO2. But mostly we’ve been eating canned goods we found in the elementary school basement. Past its prime but we’d have been screwed without it. There’s not much left, actually.”

  “We’ll get you more food. But why didn’t you tell us all this when you found us earlier, so we could help?”

  He smiled dismissively. “Well, you were unconscious, for one, and if we’d waited for you to wake up, we would have been unconscious too. Or worse. Rajiv actually came back with a note, but you were already gone.”

  “We were down there yesterday,” I said. “In the mine.”

  “What?” Devon said, horrified.

  “And in the hospital basement, too. We saw it.”

  “It was terrible,” Claudia said.

  “How the hell did you manage that?” Devon asked.

  “We stole a key card from one of the guards,” I said. “Then Kiet showed us how to g
et down there.”

  Devon looked even more confused at that.

  “I got a job mopping floors,” Kiet explained. “To look for you, try to find out what happened.” He smiled. “I’ve been there two months, but I hadn’t made much progress until these two showed up.”

  “Three,” I said. “There were three of us.”

  “Right,” Kiet said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I didn’t want him to feel bad about it, I just wanted to make sure we didn’t forget about Rex for a minute.

  “Their friend Rex was the one who got us the card,” Kiet explained to Devon. “He’s spliced. He was arrested as we were leaving.”

  Devon sat up. “By the guards?”

  “The police,” Kiet said.

  Devon nodded and relaxed slightly, which I found reassuring.

  “We need to get him released, though,” I said. “And we need to get everyone out of that mine, too. We need to get word out about it, and shut it down.”

  Devon seemed excited by the thought and yet somehow dismissive, like it was a great idea but he didn’t think it possible. And I knew he might be right. Ever since GHA and the whole Humans for Humanity movement, there were people who thought they could get away with anything when it came to chimeras.

  “Devon, what were you mining?” I asked.

  Kiet frowned at me like I was being insensitive, and maybe I was, but I was also trying to figure out what was going on.

  “What?” I said, feeling defensive. “I want to know. The coal’s all gone, isn’t it? I’m wondering what’s so valuable someone would do this to get it.”

  “Yttrium,” Devon said. He seemed to be getting tired again, but this was important.

  “Yttrium,” I repeated.

  He nodded. “It’s a rare metal.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, distracted. “I think we saw them loading it onto a truck outside the mine.” I leaned against a tree as I considered the implications of Devon’s words.

  “Well I don’t know,” Kiet said. “What is it?”

  “It’s used in high-end tech,” Claudia said. “I think they used to mine a lot of it in China.”