“You did that!” the harbor master cried. “You killed them all!”
For a moment, Jillybean saw spots in her vision and heard the rustle of feathers in her mind. It sounded something like mocking laughter.
“All hail, Queen Jillybean!” someone cawed, right at her elbow and she jumped, afraid that it hadn’t been a person at all, but some feathery beast with wet, black eyes and a beak for a nose. Thankfully, it was not. It was Fi Findlater, one of the ex-slaves from Sacramento; one of the few ex-slaves left alive. A rapturous sigh escaped her, which Jillybean found unsettling in the presence of so much death.
All those who had bowed or curtseyed did so again. Some even kneeled. It was too much for Jillybean who couldn’t remember what great thing she might have done to deserve any of this. She remembered lighting the smoke bomb on the causeway the night before, and she remembered the desperate fighting and what felt like merciless killing; neither of which were grounds in her eyes for such adulation.
As her own memory gained traction, a memory of Eve’s slipped in as well. The softly whispered words: Stu hasn’t woken up yet and his veins keep blowing, drifted into her mind, causing her to twitch again. This had to be the reason she had woken with such a pressing need to hurry. Stu was dying!
Or he’s already dead, Eve said, laughing in her ear. And it’s all your fault. You were the one who left a stupid, backwards kid like Jenn Lockhart in charge of the clinic. If he’s dead, it’ll be all on you.
Jillybean knew that she wasn’t wrong about that—it would be all on her. Just like every partially sunken boat, every blood splatter and every corpse in the bay was all her fault. Suddenly, her guilt over-powered her anxiety and she swayed and might have fallen if wasn’t for the throng pressing in close.
What seemed like a thicket of bodiless arms and straining hands surrounded her. Despite the way they pushed to get at her, the touch of those hands were soft, almost like caresses. There was no pinching or grabbing, though someone got a ring caught up in her wild hair and her head was jerked back.
The people around her touched her as though they were trying to reassure themselves that she was even real.
The fawning adoration mixed strangely with what had been near overwhelming guilt, and now Jillybean’s mind was a confusing mash-up which only added to her anxiety.
Still, she couldn’t just push through her people. They had needs which only she could provide. With a fake smile as camouflage to hide her confusion, anxiety, and her guilt…basically, everything that was real about her, she went among them pressing the flesh as quickly as she could without seeming over-eager to get out of there.
And she had to get out of there, not just for her own sake, but also for Stu’s. With every passing second, her memory of the night before was firming up. He’d been shot in the arm, the bullet just nicking his brachial artery. She had thrown a few sutures on it which should have been enough to save his life. So why were his veins blowing?
“I have to check on the wounded,” she said, repeatedly. “Sorry, I’m needed at the clinic.”
They weren’t holding her back, but at the same time, they wouldn’t move either—not until she raised her voice. “Step aside!” she finally ordered. “Let me through.” Her voice had been sharp with an edge to it that suggested she was on the verge of becoming truly angry. Although she had expected some resentment and maybe some snide muttering, she received only bowed heads and sincere apologies.
It was strange, and instead of rushing through them, she eased by cautiously. They followed her down to the clinic and for a moment she thought they would try to come inside with her but, as though a ward had been placed across the entrance, the group kept just back from the front doors. Oddly, many of them wouldn’t even look in the direction of the clinic at all.
Jillybean guessed that seeing the wounded would remind them of the heavy price they had paid for their victory.
It was a price Jillybean couldn’t escape from. She had known what the cost in lives would be well in advance. She had known it for the last half-year when she had made the decision to end the threat of the Corsairs before they became too powerful even for her. Although she had known the price would be paid in blood and bodies and the tremendous guilt that came with them, she hadn’t expected love.
She hadn’t expected to be loved or to love in return. And she certainly hadn’t expected to be crushed by love, either.
Just walking into the clinic tested her mettle far more than facing the Corsairs. Death was easy compared to love. Easier and far less messy.
She paused just inside the doors, afraid to meet Jenn’s stern and very critical gaze, which she assumed would come with an earful of nastiness, all deserved, of course. Then Jillybean knew she would have to be abused by Stu who would, in all likelihood, not say a word, which would be its own torture.
Her only comfort would be that Mike wouldn’t be able to yell at her, though she was sure he would try.
None of this came to be. The clinic was as lifeless as a morgue. Only eight patients remained and all were sleeping, as was Jenn, who was hidden under a mass of blankets beside Mike’s bed. The one part of her that showed from beneath the blankets was her beautiful hair, the deep auburn color giving her away.
The only person awake was Colleen White and with her hair piled to one side of her head, she looked as though she had just woken up.
She stared hard at Jillybean for a long time with her own confusion showing on her face. “Sorry if I don’t bow,” she eventually said. “You don’t deserve it. You-you did all of this.”
“In a way, I did.”
“In a way?” She had been loud but she caught herself and repeated in a whisper, “In a way? Is that in the same way you killed One Shot? The way you injected him with whatever that stuff was.”
Jillybean had been gearing up to ignore Colleen and start making her rounds; she had even turned away to look for gloves, but the accusation struck home. She glanced over her shoulder at Colleen, who was nodding, a nasty look on her normally pretty face.
“Yeah, I know it was you. Jenn told me. She told me everything, but for me that was the worst because I get the feeling that it was you who shot him in the first place.”
“As you were there, this isn’t much of a revelation.”
Colleen smirked in a knowing way. “No, I’m talking about you, not some made-up person in your head. Everyone says how terrible Eve is, but she sure seems to do your bidding. I think if she was really bad, she would’ve killed One Shot right off the bat. But no, he gets shot just perfectly so you can come back and save him. That’s what gave you away. Everything was too perfect. The surgery, the hidden needle that might suggest someone else poisoned him.” As she said this, she jerked a thumb at her own chest.
“You were going to blame me or maybe hint at it just enough to keep the Coven from killing you right off the bat. It was perfect, just like the escape and the fire. That fire was a nice touch. It kept us trapped here.”
“You actually think that I’m so smart I can control a fire like that?” Jillybean asked, with a little laugh. “I wish I was that smart. If I was that smart, I would’ve known you would react this way and I would’ve already set in motion some plan to stop you from shooting your mouth off.”
Colleen’s smirk fell away revealing an uneasy look. Jillybean went on, feeding off the look, “If I was that smart, it would have been nothing for me to sneak a team of Corsairs onto the island to kill you and it would be nothing to time your death to happen exactly right now.”
Jillybean turned and pointed towards the front door where shadows played along the edges. Colleen sucked in a long breath and took a step back. She was on the verge of bolting out of there when Jillybean let out a tired laugh.
“But I’m not that smart,” she said. “I think we can all be glad about that. I know I don’t deserve it, but do you think you can rustle up some food for me and maybe some tea? Plotting the downfall of the world has left me famished.”
“You know she’s going to do something to your food,” a dry voice said. It was Stu Currans. He glared at her with unforgiving dark eyes. “I know I would.”
Chapter 19
Jillybean
The one man she loved had just told her that he would do “something” to her food and yet she felt a flush of warmth and the tiniest bit of hope in her heart.
“Is that right?” she asked, softly so as not to wake anyone else. She didn’t want even this tense moment disturbed. He glared in answer and she even accepted this gratefully. A glare from Stu spoke volumes.
“I doubt it,” she said. The glare remained undimmed despite the flicker of confusion in his eyes. “You wonder which I doubt? You or Colleen?”
“Do what you want. Eat what she brings you for all I care.”
Jillybean moved closer to his side to inspect his wound. “But you do care. You warned me about Colleen’s terrible dark side, and yours as well. It’s why I doubt you’d do anything like that in the first place. You are not the skulking type. You’re too honest, too good.”
He shook his head, a small, sad smile playing on his lips. “Not any more. I think you’ll find you’ve changed me, and not for the better.”
Even though she doubted this as well, it still hurt to hear. “I warned you not to love me,” she replied.
“Is that any sort of excuse!” he hissed, and then blinked from even this exertion. His normal tan was now a soft grey.
“No.” It was as truthful as she could afford to be. She didn’t have any excuses because she didn’t need any. The only thing she would have done differently was not to have allowed herself to fall for the handsome, courageous Hillman—if that was even possible. He was easy to love. Even with all her brutally cold facts well in hand, she had to resist begging for forgiveness.
She quickly changed the subject. “Colleen’s too afraid to even stutter towards my soup. She thought about it. Heck, she may be thinking about it now, but she won’t. She thinks I can read her mind; which I can of course.” She added a smile, which was glared at.
“Your face might freeze like that,” she warned. The glare deepened, possibly the bones of his skull were glaring as well. “Maybe it already has,” she murmured as she squinted down at his wound with a bit of a glare of her own. Jenn hadn’t so much closed the incision as she had zippered it shut.
“Okay, I’m going to have to fix this.”
He yanked back his arm. “No. You’re going to have to leave me alone. I liked it a lot better when I thought you were dead. It was easier. I could call myself an idiot for ever having trusted you and then I could move on and get over you. Now…I guess I’ll just move on.”
With a long grunt, he tried to sit up. She pushed him back down. “You’re not going anywhere. Not yet, at least. You’re still in a hypovolemic state and you’d probably just end up fainting. Until you stabilize, you are my patient. And if I don’t fix these stitches there’s going to be problems. You’re looking at a possible infection, gangrene and maybe an amputation. It’ll be harder to spit in my soup with one arm.”
He said nothing and only turned away, which hurt worse than all the glares in the world.
She re-opened the wound, inspected it, cleaned it out and closed it again, this time properly. This was all done without the least anesthesia and without the least twitch from Stu. She sliced and stitched and, if she had to guess, she thought that he probably enjoyed the pain. For him it was a form of repentance. He blamed himself for having brought the curse of Jillybean on them.
After she re-closed Stu’s wound, she went to Mike, despite the fact there were more seriously wounded people in the room. Both he and Jenn were awake by then. Just like Stu, Mike glared. Jenn did her best to be civil, asking, “How’s your head? Is it a concussion?”
Jillybean touched the crazy mass of brown hair. “My head? The same as always, I suppose.” The answer did not sit well with either of them; Jenn let out a long pained sigh and Mike began making a hissing sound. Jillybean guessed why, “I take it that I mentioned an injury? Sorry, it wasn’t me, it was Eve.”
“You, Eve, what’s the difference?” Jenn asked. This echoed what Eve had said the night before so closely that Jillybean spasmed again. Jenn couldn’t help but notice and her young face came together in a grimace that gave a hint to what she might someday look like, perhaps with three young children racing around between her legs. It was not an unpleasant face by any stretch, just a harried one.
“I’m okay,” Jillybean told her and Jenn pretended to care for Mike’s sake. She even gave Jillybean an encouraging smile before looking pointedly at the wound. Jillybean took one look at it and said, “I will have to open this up. Sorry, Mike. It’s the stitches. They’re way too close, Jenn. See how the wound looks like it’s bubbling? That’s not good. It can lead to complications.”
Jenn’s smile grew into a thin tense line as she obviously bit back on more than a few choice words for Jillybean. They would be deserved. Jillybean had been so angry the night before that she had put a fifteen-year-old in charge of two very important procedures. It had been wrong and she couldn’t blame Eve this time. It was true that Jenn shared a part of the blame, but again, she was fifteen, and a furious, emotional, fifteen-year-old whose world had been almost completely destroyed by Jillybean.
Although she deserved to heap abuse on Jillybean, she kept quiet during the quick operation, except to repeatedly assure Mike, “That everything was going to be okay.” The two held hands and from time to time, Jenn would kiss the white knuckles that appeared to be crushing her small palm. Jillybean felt a pang of jealousy with each kiss.
At one point, a lock of Jillybean’s hair fell in front of her eyes and no amount of swishing her head this way or that would move the offending strands from her vision. Two days before she would have thought nothing about asking Jenn to help her. Now, it was too awkward. She was just about to take a break from sewing Mike’s wound close when Jenn exhaled in another long sigh.
“Do you want me to help with that?” Jillybean nodded and Jenn came around to puzzle over the strange mass of hair.
As much as Jillybean knew about the physical properties of this or that substance and as perfectly aware as she was concerning the laws of thermodynamics and other scientific principles governing the universe, she knew next to nothing when it came to dealing with her own hair. She found herself in a constant state of war with it and when it began to get the upper-hand, she would attack it with whatever lay within reach, be it berets or rubber bands or stray lengths of twine.
“What the hell?” Jenn swore as she poked about, trying to find a starting point. “Maybe you should cut it all off and start over.”
Jillybean didn’t like the sound of that. She was sure she would look like a boy if she did. “No, I just need to take a shower. Once we get the Floating Fortress back in place I’ll get the water pumps operating properly again. Then it’ll be showers for everyone.”
Jenn stiffened again, her fake smile snapping back in place. She said nothing until Mike’s wound was sutured and dressed with a clean white bandage. “Stu will get the pumps going again,” she told Jillybean as she was washing her hands. “He built them and he says he can fix them.”
Jillybean paused, awkwardly bent at the waist with her hands dripping over the lukewarm basin of water. “I’m sure he can, but I was hoping to shower today and he should be stuck in that bed for as long as we can possibly hold him there. I’d like for him to rest up for at least three days before…”
“You don’t have three days.”
Straightening and turning to the young woman, Jillybean said, “I have all the time in the world.”
Jenn was smaller than Jillybean. Smaller and weaponless. Still, she displayed a forcefully, icy demeanor. “You don’t,” Jenn replied. “If
you don’t leave right now I’ll tell everyone what you did. I’ll tell them the truth. I’ll tell them how you lied and manipulated them into a war they did not want. I’ll tell them how you started that fire on purpose to trap the Hill People in place. And I’ll tell them that their friends and loved ones are dead because of you. What they do to you will be exactly what you deserve.”
An image flashed in Jillybean’s mind: it was of her tied to a bare, limbless tree. Someone had sawed off everything leaving only the trunk. Piled around her were the branches and in front of her was Miss Shay, her sharp, hatchet-like face pinched in a look of perfect smug indignation. In her hand was a torch, which she put to the branches.
“Right now,” Jenn was saying, as the image in Jillybean’s mind roared into a shockingly white light, “only a few of us know. We aren’t saying anything just yet, but we will.”
Jillybean blinked away the fiery image. “I-I think you might be misjudging your people. For one, they know I’m crazy and for two, what did I really do? Think about it, Jenn. You came to me. You came begging to me to help your people. You said they were dying and that we had to get back here as fast as possible. We took that Corsair boat. You were just as much a part of all of this as I was. That’s what I’ll tell them, and not because…”
“What!” Jenn cried, her blue eyes feverishly bright. “That’s not true and you know it. I had no idea what was going to happen.”
“It’s what I will tell them and not because I’m worried about what they will do to me. They don’t have the guts to touch me. I’m worried about what will happen to them. The truth is, we haven’t won anything yet. We still have hundreds of Corsairs ranging all over this bay and if they can come together under a competent leader we are all doomed.”
The fire in Jenn’s eyes dimmed to a smolder. “Fine. I’ll wait, but I won’t wait forever. And your threat is meaningless, if I have to go down with you, so be it. What’s important is that you will come to justice one way or another, even if I have to do it myself.”
GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3 Page 98