“What happened to my mother?” I asked him.
He hesitated. He wasn’t going to say.
“Tell me!” I insisted. “Why is everyone hiding everything from me? Tell me!”
“Ember, she died. That’s all you need to know.”
“Don’t be a coward!”
“Okay. All right.”
He kneeled in front of me, his arms now crossed over his midsection. His shoulders were shaking. A line of sweat poured down his temple.
“Fighting didn’t turn me, so my command needed something else. Tucker showed them letters. Ones I had written back to you. I thought they’d been mailed but… he’d been hoarding them. They learned who you were. That I didn’t end it with you like I was supposed to. They told me I had to buy in or… Jesus. Or you’d be hurt. So I cut a deal. No more fights. No more you. And they’d promote me to show the others that the system always wins. I did whatever they said. I thought it would work, that they’d leave you alone, but it didn’t matter.
“It was the final test. Your extraction. They used you to break me.
“We took your mom to a base in Lexington, with all the other Article 5s in the state. She was put in a detention cell. My unit leader, Bateman—he was pissed off by what happened at your house. That I didn’t follow orders and stay in the car. He said I was out of line. I was a failure as a soldier. He reported me to command.”
He stopped there and leaned over his knees like he might vomit.
“Finish,” I demanded. I could barely hear him over the screaming in my brain.
“They brought me in front of the board for discipline. My CO was there. He told me that it was time to put my training into effect. That I could still make captain someday. He told me I could redeem myself by… by executing the detainees, starting with your mother. I told him no. I’m just a driver. I just transport. I told him to kick me out. Give me a dishonorable discharge.”
Chase punched his thigh again. I wept softly.
“He told me to follow orders. That if I didn’t do what he said, someone else would. That they’d pull you from school and do the same. I didn’t know what to do. The next thing I knew, Tucker was escorting me to her detention cell, and I had a gun in my hand.”
I wanted to scream at Chase to stop. But I had to hear. I had to know. The tears ran from his eyes freely now.
“Your mom. God. She had been crying. Her shirt was all wet. She saw me and she smiled, and she ran over to me and grabbed my jacket in her hands and said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Chase.’ And I was there to kill her.
“I held the gun up, and she backed into a chair and sat there, watching me. Just watching me. I thought for a second I was going to do it. That I had to. But nothing happened. My CO was behind us. He told me to pull the damn trigger or I’d watch them murder you. Your mom heard him. She grabbed the gun in my hand, and she leaned in close and told me to find you, wherever you were, and take care of you. ‘My baby,’ she called you. She told me not to be scared. She told me not to be scared.
“And then he shot her. And… she died. A foot away from me. I don’t even know what happened afterward. I ended up in a holding cell for a week.”
Silence. Long, suffocating silence.
I felt my brain twisting, trying to understand, even as it was trying to erase the last thirty minutes.
“Maybe if you would have talked to your officer. Maybe if you had tried to tell him that she didn’t deserve this….” My voice sounded small.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“You don’t know that! You didn’t even try! You could have talked to them and… and… you could have never come home…. In training you could have not been so… you! You could have told us to run!”
I felt as crazy as I sounded.
“I know.” He had no conclusion to this statement.
A frozen hammer against my skull. I knew the truth, even if I didn’t want to.
“She’s dead,” I realized.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“You lied to me. You let me believe she was alive. In some safe house!” I screamed suddenly. Now there was anger. Hot and vicious and poisonous within me.
“I know.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I would have, once you were away from all this. Maybe not all of it. I didn’t want you to know all of it. No one should have to hear all that.”
“So you can take it but I can’t? She’s my mother, Chase!”
“I didn’t mean you can’t handle it. I just mean… I don’t know. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“You’d rather me believe a lie than be hurt? Who the hell gave you that authority?”
“I don’t know.” He was honest. He didn’t know what he was doing. His hands lay open on his knees before him, begging for some shred of direction to which he could cling.
I was rolling now. A snowball plunging down a hill. Knowing that at the bottom there was a brick wall that would smash me. That would break me into a million pieces.
“You knew all this from the very beginning. From the day you got me at school. You knew she was dead. You’d seen her dead. And you kept that from me.”
“Yes.”
Faster, I rolled on.
“How could you do that?”
He shook his head.
Twisting inside of me. Nothing is real.
“You said… you said all those things… and… I believed you.”
“Wait. Please. That was the truth,” he was pleading now.
I shook my head. There was no truth.
“Ember, I love you.”
His words hacked a bright new pain into me. I stared at him for a full second, horrified, recognizing that this was the first time he’d said these words. Thinking maybe the opposite was true. That Chase might actually hate me. That was why he lied about everything. That was why he kept hurting me. How could someone be so cruel?
His eyes were filled with what I’d once thought was honesty.
“I shouldn’t have said that now. It’s too much. I’m putting too much on you. But… Christ. I mean it, I—”
“No! I trusted you, and I thought it was right and it wasn’t right. It was a lie.” I felt ill then, disgusted by my own self. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, to leave it in this dirty room with its ugly truths.
“It wasn’t like that. You know. Please know.”
His reached out to touch my hand.
“No!” I bawled. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare touch me. Not ever again.”
I struck the wall. My world was crashing down. Everything I believed was scattered. False.
I didn’t think. I couldn’t. I rocked forward and hit him as hard as I could. My hand seized with pain from where it had connected to his jaw. I hit him again. Again. He didn’t try to stop me. He placed his hand beneath my elbow, giving me the strength to hit him harder.
When I had no punches left, I folded over my reeling stomach. I was no better than Roy, hitting my mother. I wanted violence to resolve my anguish. To show Chase how wrong he was. The parallel made my reality infinitely more devastating.
“It’s okay. Hit me. I deserve it.”
As though that would make it better. As though that would fix anything.
“No more,” I moaned.
He lifted his hands in surrender. “Ember, I’ll do whatever you want. Just please let me get you somewhere safe. That was the whole point in this. I knew that once you found out, you’d want to get as far away from me as possible, and if you believed your mom was in South Carolina, you’d let me take you there. I told you in the beginning, if you want me gone after that, I’m gone.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Please. Just let me get you somewhere safe.”
All the slashes of pain inside. All the losses. My mother. Chase. Beth. Rebecca. Trust. Love. I had nothing left but the skeleton of integrity.
“No.”
“If you won’t listen to
me, do it for her. Lori wanted you away from all this.”
“Don’t!” I cried out. I could not bear to hear her name.
He hung his head. “I’ve messed everything up. From the beginning. I’ve done nothing right by you. By your mother. She loved you so much, Ember.”
“She’s dead because of you!”
And what was worse was that she was dead because of me, too. Because if I’d never told Chase to leave, he wouldn’t have gone into the military. They never would have targeted him. They never would have used us to break him. Through some twist of fate, I had killed my own mother. The shame was so thick I could not speak it.
He rocked back onto his heels and then stood. I knew I had wounded him. I had done so deliberately. I wanted to injure him. To make him hurt as deeply as I did. But how could he?
“Yes,” he said simply. “She’s dead because of me.”
“Get out. Get away from me.”
Minutes passed. But he did leave. I heard the door close softly behind him.
* * *
I SOBBED for hours huddled in a clenched ball. I cried until the tears dried up. And when they did, my body cried without them.
Every image that entered my mind pained me. Every thought led me to the same conclusion.
I was alone. Absolutely alone.
When I could breathe again, I forced myself up and stumbled toward the window. I could hear other people in the hallway asking Chase what had happened. He didn’t answer. It didn’t matter.
My arms were heavy. My head felt heavy. Bloated.
Air. That feels nice, I thought absently.
I slid over the ledge and out onto the fire escape, needing the cold to stop the fever. The balcony was too small. I could climb down the ladder. I could get to the street. It looked like a black hole from up here. Maybe I could disappear inside it.
The rain was soothing. The first soothing feeling I’d felt in what seemed like an eternity. It soaked through my clothing, my hair. It washed away the salt on my face. It entered my eyes by way of my matted lashes and cleansed them.
I walked. And walked. Unable to focus on anything. Remembering nothing.
The lights didn’t surprise me. They barely roused my curiosity. But soon the car had stopped alongside the sidewalk where I stood. Men got out. They spoke to me in harsh tones I didn’t understand. They grabbed my arms. They dragged me into the backseat, where the rain no longer reached me.
* * *
A CLANG on the metal door. My eyes blinked open, unfocused. A fluorescent light directly above my head buzzed and flickered. The ceiling was pocked with dried peels of white paint. Mildew and body odor soiled the mattress I laid upon. I had no pillow. No blankets.
Where was I? How long had I been here? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
“She won’t eat.” Someone’s voice came muffled through the door.
“I don’t give a damn.” Another male.
“Me neither,” the first scoffed, “but she’ll be dead before her trial if she keeps this up.”
“Then she’ll be dead. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
I closed my ears to their callous disregard. I closed my mind to all consciousness.
* * *
A HAND was shaking my shoulder. Then a hard pinch to the sensitive skin on the underside of my arm. The pain snapped my eyes open. Apparently I could still feel some things.
“You need to get up. Get up!” A woman’s voice now, warped with annoyance. I moaned and rolled away. My face pressed against the cool, cement wall.
“If you don’t knock this off, I’ll get in trouble for it.”
“Leave me alone,” I managed weakly.
“You’ve had three days of that already. Now you’ve got to get moving.”
She shook my shoulder again. When I rolled onto my back, she grabbed my arms and pulled me into a seated position. My head went very fuzzy and dim.
“Hey.” She slapped my cheek lightly. “Are you going to throw up?”
“No,” I said feebly.
“Hmph. You’ve got nothing to throw up anyway.”
She shoved a plastic bowl onto my lap. It was filled with something that resembled soupy oatmeal. I stared at it blankly.
“Unbelievable,” the woman said. She picked up a spoonful and shoved it into my mouth.
I sputtered and choked. But the tasteless, lukewarm mush slid down my throat and entered my starved stomach. Soon my mouth was watering for more.
I ate, focusing for the first time on the woman. She had gnarled, arthritic bumps on her hands and deeply etched creases beside her mouth. Her face held a look of concern it seemed would never fully dissipate, and her eyes were almost translucently blue. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she were blind, but her movements dictated otherwise.
Her hair was gray and wavy, and she wore a navy pleated skirt and button-up blouse. The uniform covered her sagging body the way a burlap sack covers potatoes.
Haven’t you ever seen the Sisters of Salvation? I heard Rosa say in my mind. They’re the MM’s answer to women’s liberation.
It was like I’d never left the reformatory.
In the tiny cell, the narrow bed reached out from the wall and nearly collided with a metal toilet at its foot. There was barely enough room for the woman to remain standing in front of me without our knees touching.
“Where am I?” I asked her. My voice cracked. It had not been used in some time.
“Knoxville Detention Facility.”
So I had been captured after all.
It won’t be long until they kill me, too, I thought, in a completely detached way.
“Finish up, Miller.” She slapped the side of my bowl, and some sloshed onto a paper gown, like the kind people wear in hospitals. Somewhere along the line someone had taken my clothes.
“You know my name.” My haircut hadn’t disguised me in the end. Oh well.
She huffed. “Put the dress on. You can’t stay in that.”
With no notions of modesty, I stripped down to my undergarments and slid into the oversized Sisters of Salvation uniform, forgoing the handkerchief. My appearance now matched the clear-eyed woman.
“Now what?” I asked.
“You wait until someone comes and gets you.” She knocked twice on the door. It opened from the outside, and she slid out of view.
I stared at the wall across from me, my mind blank.
* * *
SOMETIME later I heard keys jangle against the door, then a metallic squeal, and the barricade was removed, revealing a lean soldier with a broad chest. He had a slight face. Piercing green eyes. Golden hair slicked to one side. One large hand held a clipboard and a pen. His other arm was casted from the elbow down.
He had a gun holstered beside the nightstick on his hip. I wondered if he was here to shoot me, the way Chase’s commanding officer had shot my mother. I was surprised that I didn’t much care. At least this nightmare would be over.
There was a dreamlike quality about him. I felt like I recognized him from somewhere. Pieces began to pull together, one at a time.
“Your knuckles look like hell. What have you been doing, cage fighting?”
I glanced down, thinking that my hands actually looked pretty good. The scabs had peeled, leaving behind thin, white scars. Most of the darker bruising had faded. I wiggled my fingers. Just a dull ache.
“You have no idea who I am,” he said, stealing a look back toward the door.
I saw three discolored lines on his neck. Fingernail scratches. My scratches.
“Tucker Morris.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly. As if this were the most obvious thing in the world.
Silence.
“Aren’t you even curious why I’m here?”
“Does it matter? I’m sure I’ll be executed either way.” My voice was flat. Emotionless.
“That’s morbid.”
“Am I wrong?”
He smirked. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know w
ho you mean,” I said with my jaw locked.
“Withholding information won’t help your case.”
“What will help my case?” I asked sourly.
“Being nice to me might.” There was a buoyancy in his tone. Almost as if he were flirting. I nearly gagged.
“I will not be nice to someone who participates in the murders of innocent people.” The words burned my tongue but did nothing to my dead heart.
“So he told you? I thought he’d chicken out. Just like he did with her.”
There was a flash of anger. I wanted to claw at him again, like I had when he’d taken my mother. But then the desire was gone. All that remained was bitterness.
“You’re a bastard, Tucker.”
“I should say the same.” He grinned at his own cleverness. “But watch your mouth. You can’t talk to a soldier that way.”
I scoffed. What was he going to do? Kill me? Get in line.
He hesitated. “Jennings already has abduction of a minor, assault with a deadly weapon, theft of federal property, and at least ten other petty charges tacked onto his AWOL. This isn’t someone you want to protect. He obviously wouldn’t return the favor.”
I hadn’t given him the chance to protect me—I’d left when he’d been guarding my door. By the time he realized I was gone, I’d probably already been thrown into this cell.
I wondered what my charges were. Something about running from the reformatory. Theft and assault. What else? Fraud for our non-government-approved marriage? For some reason, I found the tally mildly amusing. I didn’t even care if they pegged me as the sniper now.
“Why are you even here? I thought you were in a transport unit or something.”
“I made rank. I’m on a fast track. I’ll probably be an officer soon.”
“Congratulations.” I said. My tone didn’t faze him.
“Your trial’s been moved to the end of the week.”
“Damn. You couldn’t fit me in today, huh?”
“I bought you three more days to ponder your fate. I’d like to make sure you get the full experience of incarceration. That’s as a favor to our mutual friend.” His jaw twitched as he spoke.
Tucker was flat-out evil. He was even more despicable than Chase.
“I’m detailing you to cleanup until your sentencing.”
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