“I…I didn’t. I…”
“Tell me, Carter, how did it feel to know that you’d made the decision about whether they all lived or died? Did you stick around and watch them as they struggled and faltered in the Wasteland? Did you grin as they ran to the woods, terrified?”
“No, I didn’t watch! I left right after…” He clapped his hands over his mouth.
“Yeessssss,” Fi hissed. “Now we’re getting to the truth aren’t we? And the truth is that you were a scientist, just like the people of Eden and Diaspora. The truth is that you worked for nearly a decade on Diaspora, planning and making the decisions side-by-side with those you then condemned to death. And when you figured out that Diaspora was real, that the Famine was coming and you’d been cut, you were enraged and you sought your vengeance.”
“Because it wasn’t right!” Carter exploded, leaping forward. Asher stepped between them, and Carter grabbed fistfuls of his own hair in frustration. “All that time they’d lied to us, told us Diaspora was a Goddamned think-tank. And then I found the secret plans and I saw the truth.”
“Including the fact that you were cut,” Fi said.
“Including the fact that WE were cut,” he wailed.
He turned and grabbed his Bible, fishing a photograph from between the pages. He threw it on the table and Fi’s stomach wrenched. Oh, Jesus…no.
“I begged them to take her, to take Bailey, and cut me instead. She wouldn’t need many resources. She was just a little thing. All she needed was the medicine and the food…she needed the food. It was her only chance. When her mother died of breast cancer, I promised her I’d make sure that Bailey was safe.”
Carter sank back against the wall as angry tears filled his eyes. “I was all she had. Her father never acknowledged her, and my wife left me long ago. Bailey was my sunshine, my baby girl. I lived every single day just for her. And when she got Sick…” his lower lip trembled as the tears poured down his face.
Fi felt like she was going to throw up. The photograph smiled up at her, the gap teeth and blue eyes twisting her heart.
“…When she got Sick I made the mistake of telling a Diaspora colleague. A guy I’d known for nearly ten years. TEN YEARS! It was just a confession over beers, an unburdening among friends. I didn’t know that he’d tell someone else, and that they’d tell someone else…and that they’d CUT ME because of BAILEY! Hell, when I told my buddy she was Sick, I didn’t even know that Diaspora was real, for Christ’s sakes. And then four weeks later, I’m staring at the same papers I’d sent to others, thinking that they were nothing more than a lay-off, a ‘Thanks, but we don’t need your expertise any longer.’ Only by then, I knew it was a death sentence.”
“For you,” Asher interrupted.
“For HER, you fucking idiot!” Carter exploded, punching the wall and then howled at the sickening crunch of his own bones. He clutched his maimed hand to his chest. “You want to know the day that I changed my mind? It was the day I went home to her and she smiled at me despite her bald little head, and I knew that one day soon, she’d be gone.”
Fi’s heart squeezed into her throat. She couldn’t breathe.
“And it didn’t have to be! It didn’t have to be! I swore that day that I’d make them pay…”
“Who, Carter?” Fi croaked, the tears welling in her own eyes. “The scientists? Diaspora?”
“EVERYONE! They all deserve to pay. She was little, but she was strong. She could’ve won, could’ve beaten it, but they didn’t give her a chance. They just decided to write her off to die. And they can’t do that! I’m the one! I decide! I DECIDE!”
He sank to the ground, sobbing into his hands as his agony poured out of him. Fi felt the hot tears on her own cheeks. She tried unsuccessfully to draw breath. She’d been right all along. All this was about a little girl. His baby girl. Bailey.
An eye for an eye.
She’d never been so sorry to be right in her entire life. Suddenly, she felt heavy, like she was one of those lead sinkers Uncle John always used to put on the line when he fished. Down, down, down, she sank, until the water turned biting cold and the shafts of sunlight no longer penetrated.
She drew a deep, shaky breath and turned to the radio, leaning down to the microphone. “Did you hear that everyone? I don’t know about all of you, but I vote that we stop killing each other and start fixing things…”
Fionnuala Marie Kelly Grey…Out, she thought. She switched the radio back to listening and spun the dial through the channels, both Nets and Truthers alike. It was pandemonium.
“…all this time he was lying to everyone…”
“…who is Bailey? What just happened? Did anyone else hear?”
“…sabotage! I knew it! I just knew it!”
“…can’t believe he would do something like that…not Father…”
“…should go to jail…he basically killed people…”
“…People are fallible, but do not give up on the WORD, Truthers!”
“…come up with a prison system of some kind…”
“…heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken…”
“…the girl’s right, we need to start focusing on the future…”
As the room filled with the outraged and saddened voices of the listeners, Carter’s meltdown came to an end. He sat still against the wall, unblinking, the tears drying on his cheeks. He seemed to shrink into himself with each shallow breath. He was the man become ghost, his flesh crumbling with his power.
The General opened the door. As it swung wide she heard the roar of conversation outside, the rise and fall of voices like a stormy sea. The Truthers had heard.
She met General Zelinski’s eyes. “So we did it, General. We won?”
“Yes, Mrs. Grey,” he said. “You did it. We won.”
Army members turned and saw them emerging from the radio room. A cry went up. “Long live Eden! Long live Eden!”
Tears pricked at her eyes again as she took in the scene. Hundreds raised clenched fists into the smoky air, triumphant. The battlefield looked like the surface of the moon, pocked and split with smoldering ruins, and in the distance, the medics and others were shuttling the dead and wounded on makeshift pallets. This, she thought. This is our victory. She shook her head. It had to be about more than Eden. This kind of sacrifice was bigger.
She stepped forward and held up her hand. The cry died as a wave of shushing crossed the settlement. From her vantage point, she could see the “Great Wall” extending all the way down the hillside and around the lake. All eyes were on her. And within their bounds, the shocked Truthers turned to her as well, unsure.
She pulled the small baggie of heirloom seeds from her waistband. When she’d tucked it into her leggings, she’d mostly meant it as a personal reminder. But it wasn’t just for her. This was what they had been fighting for in the end. Not just their children, but their children’s children, and their children after that. For all the children yet to be born. She thrust the bag of seeds aloft. “Long live Truefood!”
Her cry echoed in the thick air and then, it was more than an echo, it was drumbeat, a heartbeat, as hundreds of voices shouted at once. “Long live Truefood! Long live Truefood!”
She turned and saw that even the gruff General had joined the cheer, and her heart filled. The Truthers watched in stunned silence as the Army members screamed and cried and hugged one another. Perhaps, Fi thought, there was a chance for the Truthers. Maybe they would rather live in hope than fear. Maybe they would rather live in Truth than Lies.
She turned to see the General’s soldiers leading a cable-tied Carter from the radio room. The “Father” appeared nearly comatose as he trudged forward. Some of the Truthers cried out to him, but his expression never changed.
“Wait!” Fi cried, running back into Carter’s cabin. She came back out and ran to a startled General Zelinski.
“What’s wrong, Fi?”
She shook her head and turned to Carter. He didn’t meet her gaze. She took the phot
ograph of Bailey and tucked it into his pants pocket. As she’d imagined so many times before, she held his gaze, her eyes locked on his. Only this time, she wasn’t centering her gun between his brows as she’d expected.
His eyes were empty. She looked into them, but her vision slipped and slid inside of him and through him and out the other side to where he was falling, falling, falling over the cliff and into the river. Her throat tightened for this man who was nothing, one of billions, but who knew that one of billions could matter. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
He didn’t acknowledge her, not that she’d expected it. She stood still as the General steered her former enemy away. There was something strangely empty in it. It wasn’t just the cost of their victory, but the loss of the enemy himself. She didn’t know what she’d do now with the part of her heart that had burned in anguish and hate for so long.
“So, now what, baby?” Asher laid a hand on her shoulder gently.
She jumped, unsettled by the question coming at the precise moment she thought it. What was next? Her shoulders sagged. “Now someone needs to find me my children.”
“Fi!”
She looked up. A distant voice was screaming.
“Fi!” Sara came sprinting their way. “It’s Sean!”
Fi’s heart skipped.
Sara slammed into her like a battering ram, her arms clamping around her. “He’s been shot! He’s in surgery, but he…he…” she stopped, her sobs overwhelming her.
No. Fi’s mind glitched.
“Fi?” Asher’s voice was distant, foggy.
She sank to her knees.
Casualties
------------- Fi ------------
The words struck and bounced like pebbles off a window. Sean. Shot. Sean. Shot. Her brain was a white sheet, snapped clean of thought by the wind. Had the “nothing” returned? She blinked.
Then her mind peeled back like a blistering sunburn and she was staring down into a grave at a small white coffin. The lid flew open and five-year-old Sean grinned up at her. An electric flash of agony blew through her, sending her atoms scattering and spinning away.
Sean.
Shot.
Her chest heaved as she buckled, sliding from Sara’s grasp. She sucked and gasped, but every breath was a trickle of acid down a burning throat. She couldn’t get that grin out of her mind. Sean grinning, poking her on the bus. Sean, grinning, even when she’d put him down on the mat. Sean, grinning and pink as a seashell, when she’d introduced him to Sara. It was the first time she’d ever wished to have the “nothing” back. On her hands and knees, she gasped for air, pressing her forehead to the ground and begging it to swallow her up.
Somehow Asher tugged her to her feet and maneuvered both her and Sara to the makeshift hospital, but it was a blur. She was a balloon, tethered to Earth by her husband’s grasp on her wrist. Now she was the “nothing,” moving where told, nodding when spoken to. The faces floated past, as ephemeral and airy as a dream.
“It’s lucky that you’re O+, Fi,” Doc Ron Cooper was saying, sliding his glasses back up onto his nose as he connected the tube that ran from her arm to Sean’s. “It’s the most that anyone could do for him now.”
Her head bobbed but she couldn’t tear her mind away from the burn of her blood as it left her…and entered him. He was white, a shade most books would refer to as “waxy” or “chalky,” but it seemed more “deathly” to her and she couldn’t bear to look at him. She hoped her blood would fill him up, turning him pink from his toes to his scalp until his dark eyes opened and squeezed, ready to poke fun at her again.
Every whispered word from the medics drove her pain deeper, farther inside of her.
“Blood loss, that’s the real worry.”
Acid.
“…about secondary infection? Sepsis?”
Knives.
“Not enough morphine for all of them.”
Needles.
“Doc says he could still be ok, Fi.” This from Hannah Lemly, the only one whose eyes were darker and puffier than Sara’s.
Sara. Fi’s heart closed in on itself, folding into smaller and smaller bits until it became a single point, heavy and dense. The only thing clear in the entire world right now was Sara. She was a curled seedling, blackening and dying at his side. No tall Amazonian with streaming hair. No girl made of sinew and fire and spit. She was shadow, negative space, naught.
When the transfusion was done, Doc Ron insisted that Fi leave and get some rest. At this point, he said, they just had to wait for Sean to wake up. She started to protest when one of the medics reached for Sara. They wanted her to leave as well.
An alarm tripped and roared to life in Fi’s head as she took in the bobbed hair and tunic of the man reaching for Sara. There was a glint of metal and Fi lunged, slamming the Truther medic back against the wall. “Don’t,” she growled, unsure for a second whether she meant the struggling medic or Sara, who now stood behind her with her daggers in her hands and bloodlust in her eyes.
The Truther medic wrestled free of Fi’s grasp. He pointed at Sara, shaking. “She…she was going to hurt me and I’m only trying to help. We’re helping you. Even after you attacked us.”
Sara roared and Asher stepped between them, holding her back. “Enough! This is a hospital!” He turned to the medic. “Leave now. Go help others.”
Fi dropped her head, exhausted. “And the girl stays,” she added. She didn’t even have time to ask why the Truthers were helping. It didn’t matter. “We’ll go.” As they turned to leave she couldn’t help looking back, her gaze scanning the busy medics. Her eyes narrowed when they came across Dr. Rossi, the Truther who’d cut Sara at her Baptism, leaning over a soldier laid out on a picnic table.
Asher tugged at her sleeve. “C’mon, Fi. It’s ok. Doc Ron will watch over them.”
Fi didn’t register the words. All she saw was her sister, bent and broken over the body of her brother. She pointed at the Truther medic who still stood nearby, flushed and muttering. “You.” She took a step toward him and he cowered. She closed the gap in two more steps and jabbed her finger into his chest, her eyes locked on his. “You tell Rossi that if he touches either one of them, I’ll kill him. You get me?” Asher grabbed her wrist and dragged her out the door.
She almost fought him, her mind considering hammering his chest in protest as she had when she’d gone into labor.
“Fi!”
She whirled. Lucy was striding toward her with Luke in her arms and Kiara and Zoe in tow. Fi’s chest tightened. Already hollow from starvation, Lucy’s eyes had sunken inside of her. They were hooded, their spark hidden deep within, in a place where daughters got cancer and sons were shot saving little girls.
Luke fussed and snorted as Lucy handed him over. “This guy’s real hungry for a little thing.” Her eyes filled. “That’s good. Good appetite.”
Fi took her son gratefully, avoiding Lucy’s eyes. She held him and fought the urge to squeeze him too hard. He waved his fists, unmoved by her love while he still felt hunger pangs. She knelt to hug Kiara. “You ok, Ki? And Zo?”
“Yeah.” Zoe popped her thumb in her mouth, to Fi’s surprise. She hadn’t sucked her thumb in years.
Kiara hugged Fi fiercely and then let go. “I heard about Uncle Sean.”
Lucy’s face crumpled as she put her hand to her mouth and turned away. Fi didn’t move. She held her sister’s gaze. Something about the need in Kiara’s eyes kept her from faltering. “He’s going to make it, Ki. Did you hear that too?”
Kiara’s eyes filled as she shook her head.
“Well he is. All of our strongest people lined up to give him their blood, and their love…and their bones and flesh if need be.” She hugged Kiara tight. “Do you understand?”
Kiara hiccupped and nodded.
Lucy swept Zoe up in her arms. Her lips were white with pressure. “How is he?” Her words were clipped, staccato.
The tears came, against Fi’s will. “We don’t know. Doc says it’s a g
ood chance.” It was all she could manage. The acid was burning her throat again and her chest was falling in on itself, the breath pushing out, out, out, only, and never in. She turned and gulped. “A good chance, he said.”
Fi clung to the words in desperation, hoping they would stop her freefall. “He’s a hero, you know, Aunt Lucy. He saved little Hannah. He threw himself in front of her…” She swallowed a laugh that turned into a sob. “…Like he would.”
Lucy nodded, her breath rattling through taught lips, and Fi’s heart split open, her guilt and regret spilling from her like a fresh wound. Lucy had looked just the same when Sean’s sister Rachel had hovered on the brink of death, and she’d looked just the same when she’d held Fi’s hand while the sun set over Maggie’s forest grave. Fi forced herself to meet and hold Lucy’s gaze, to share the agony of an unbearable possibility, an unforgiveable casualty even in the cruelest of worlds…a boy, a brother, a son, a friend…and a hero.
Asher put his hand on her shoulder. “Should we take care of Luke, babe?”
She nodded, grateful for the distraction that a hungry baby presented. Luke didn’t know that his Uncle Sean was in grave danger. And he didn’t know that people had died. All he was focused on was life. Fi sighed and followed her husband into the forest with her son at her chest and her little sister in tow.
#############################################
A few hours later, when Luke was sated and sleeping, the reunited Grey family found itself adrift on a nauseating sea of anxiety. There was nothing to do with the time: each minute stretched into eons while they waited for news. It was excruciating. When Asher finally suggested that they pay their respects to the dead Fi thought he’d lost his mind. It seemed like an absurd suggestion — as if diving into the deep end could somehow alleviate her sorrow.
But when she met his troubled eyes and saw that he was serious, she knew that he was right. There was no way around sorrow, she thought, there was only through. It was the reason she’d also decided to bring Kiara. Others might have thought it was because she wanted to keep Kiara close, but if she’d had her choice, it would have been just the opposite. She would have spared her “baby girl” this, the sight of friends and compatriots torn apart, shredded by greed and revenge.
Emergence (Eden's Root Trilogy Book 3) Page 28