“Sure as hell felt personal.” For a moment, Seth forgot what he was trying to do. He wanted to scream at the man, throw knives at him.
“Well, I’m sorry,” the guy said. He shifted his weight, making the cot he was leaning against creak. He straightened out his legs until the soles of his enormous shoes touched the bars of his cage. “I was just trying to stay alive.”
“And you tried to kill Waverly.”
“She killed Shelby.”
“That your pet sheep?”
“He was my brother,” the man said. There was a vulnerable quality to his voice that made him sound boyish. “We weren’t related by blood. Our neighbors took me in after Dad died, and Shelby was their son. A lot of kids would be resentful of a new kid in the house, but Shelby, he wrapped his arm around me and said, ‘I always wanted a brother.’ That was on the first day. I think he felt sorry for me, losing my dad and all, and he wanted to help.”
“Sounds like a good guy,” Seth said when the gorilla paused.
“He was a great guy,” the man said defensively. “He had a big crush on Pastor Mather, is all, did whatever she wanted him to do.”
“And you didn’t?”
“She never paid me much attention,” the man said, but Seth guessed he’d wanted attention from her.
“So why did she send you here?”
The man turned his head to look directly at Seth, who tried his best to hold his gaze. “What are you trying to do?” the man asked.
“What?” Seth said innocently. “You think I’m a spy or something?”
The man narrowed his eyes.
“Believe whatever you want,” Seth said, and turned on his side to go to sleep. He stared at the darkened wall at the back of his cell, the stainless-steel sink, the dented cabinet in the corner. His silence was all pretense, but his eyelids were heavy, and he decided it was best not to press the guy. So he let himself drift off.
He was woken by the grinding sound of metal on metal, and turned to see Kieran Alden sitting down in a chair across from the prisoner. The man looked at Kieran with hooded eyes. Being a tough guy himself, Seth could see that the gorilla’s angry posture concealed real fear. Maybe it was a good thing if the gorilla was afraid of Kieran.
“Do you need any additional medical attention?” Kieran asked the prisoner.
Involuntarily, Seth scoffed. Kieran hadn’t offered him so much as a cotton ball since he’d been down here. Kieran looked expressionlessly at Seth, then at Harvey, who stood with his hands clasped behind him, watching to make sure Kieran was safe. Seth knew Harvey would have to explain why he’d been moved.
Seth studied Kieran, who seemed smaller somehow. His skin had a greenish tinge, and he squinted against the light in the cell. He didn’t look healthy.
“How’s your head feeling?” Kieran said to the prisoner, who stared at a spot just above Kieran’s shoulder, ignoring him.
“I’ll have a medic bring down some pain relievers,” Kieran said. “You’re going to have to let him take your temperature, too. We need to make sure you don’t have an infection.”
“What do you care if I’m sick?” the man spat. “You ought to let me die.”
“If I did that, I’d lose the chance to talk to you.”
“I’m not giving you anything.”
“I know who you are,” Kieran cajoled. “You’re Jake Pauley. Mather told me.”
Seth perked up at this. He’d had no idea that Kieran was in contact with the other ship.
The gorilla seemed unsure what to do now. He obviously hadn’t expected Mather to reveal anything about him.
“I tried to use you as leverage,” Kieran was saying. “Negotiate an exchange. Our parents for you. But Mather told me that she doesn’t care what I do with you.”
It was barely perceptible, but Seth saw the gorilla’s eyes seethe at this.
“She was especially angry when I told her you killed one kid and tried to kill others.”
The man’s eyes flicked over Kieran, then landed on Seth for a moment before settling back on their nowhere spot, just over Kieran’s shoulder.
“So I don’t know why you’d want to be loyal to her,” Kieran said. “She’s a ruthless bitch.”
“She’s a woman of God,” the man said.
“Last I heard, it’s a sin to murder innocent people.”
“She didn’t expect the whole crew to be there,” the man started, then clamped his mouth shut.
“In the shuttle bay?” Kieran asked, too eagerly. He waited, but the prisoner said no more. “So she didn’t mean to massacre our crew?”
The man sealed his mouth, staring at the wall.
“Then why did she open the air lock in the shuttle bay?”
No answer.
“Jake, what’s your mission?” Kieran asked him.
“No mission,” Jake said, but then closed his mouth again and shook his head.
“Jake, I need to know. Is my crew still in danger?”
The man refused to answer, just kept staring at the spot over Kieran’s shoulder.
“What can you tell me about the location of the hostages on the New Horizon? Jake?” Kieran’s voice quivered with impatience now. “They’re our parents. We need to get them back!”
Jake just sat on the floor and stared.
Kieran stood up, leaned over him, and pointed a finger in his face. “If you think that I can protect you forever, you’re deluding yourself. There are two hundred and fifty kids on this ship who want to torture information out of you, and I’m not going to be able to keep them away forever. Unless I get some information from you that we can use.”
“Sorry,” the gorilla said, and rolled his eyes upward to meet Kieran’s gaze. Kieran straightened, motioned to Harvey to let him out of the cell, and marched off, glaring over his shoulder, not at the prisoner, but at Seth.
“He doesn’t like you very much,” Seth said to Jake with a chuckle.
“You neither, I think.” Jake laughed.
“Yeah, well, he thinks I tried to kill him.”
“Did you?”
Seth tucked his chin, took a deep breath, shutting out the ugly images from that day. “I was just trying to scare some sense into him by threatening to shove him out an air lock.”
“Maybe you could have thought that one through a little better.”
“Yeah. I think so,” Seth said with a crooked grin. He turned on his side, leaned his head in his hand. “Mather didn’t send you at all, did she?”
Jake’s gaze shifted to the wall of Seth’s cell.
“You came here all on your own like a crazy vigilante. You bucking for a promotion or something?”
The man sighed long and hard. “I didn’t think it out. I saw the shuttle leaving, grabbed a OneMan. Mostly I wanted to kill Waverly Marshall. I’ve just been waiting for the right time.”
Seth swallowed. At the mention of Waverly, he had a hard time hiding his loathing for this man. “She can be kind of a bitch,” Seth said casually. “Kind of stuck up.”
“There’s families aboard the New Horizon now,” the gorilla said distantly, as though he were reciting something he’d thought many times before. “They got to be protected.”
“You have kids?”
“No,” the man said bitterly. “I don’t have no kids.”
“But you want to protect other people’s kids. That’s good, I guess.”
“It’s what Shelby would’ve done.”
“And you’re trying to honor him,” Seth said, as though finishing the man’s thought. His throat was starting to burn desperately now. He needed to be quiet. “He’d probably like that.”
“I hope so,” the man said with quiet sadness.
“How did poisoning Max and me figure into that?” Seth said, and when the man looked at him, he held up a hand. “You can’t blame me for wanting to know.”
The gorilla’s mouth lengthened, and he tucked his chin into his barrel chest. “I wasn’t sure you two didn’t see me when I cam
e in.”
“I was asleep the whole time. And Max said he saw nothing.”
“I couldn’t be sure. I wanted you two as scapegoats, but if you were around to say there was a stowaway on board, I thought that might threaten my mission.”
“So you do have a mission,” Seth said in an offhand way. “And you’re just driving Kieran crazy on purpose. I like it.”
The man smiled, showing triangular gaps between his teeth.
He thinks we’re friends, Seth thought, and lay back on his mattress to sleep. Stupid son of a bitch doesn’t know he’s a dead man.
CLASH
Kieran sat at his desk, tapping the wood with his index finger. He leaned forward and jabbed the intercom button for the infirmary. “Tobin? Can you talk?”
“Here, Kieran,” Tobin said when the video screen flicked to his image. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“Any change in Philip’s condition?”
“No. Victoria and I are working on learning the EEG machine. As soon as I understand it enough I’ll take a reading and check on his brain function.”
“She’s helping you?”
“Kind of. She’s awake a few hours a day. She can’t do much.”
“Is Philip breathing on his own?”
“He’s still on a ventilator. We’re going to try disconnecting him as soon as his other vitals look strong enough.”
“Call me when you do, okay? I want to be there,” Kieran said, and hung up.
There were so many things to worry about, so many things to fear, but what kept him up at night was the memory of Philip’s swollen head, his bulging eye, the way his limbs shook like a marionette’s. Kieran should never have sent such a small boy on such a risky task. At the time, it hadn’t seemed dangerous.
It got dangerous because of Waverly. If she hadn’t been doing things she shouldn’t, Philip would be okay.
She was probably meeting with her Central Council right now. At least Arthur had recovered enough to attend meetings, and though he could barely speak, he was able to bring back faithful reports. Waverly wouldn’t be able to make a move without Kieran knowing. For now, that threat was neutralized.
Or was it? As he’d walked from his quarters to Central Command, he’d passed an especially vivid bit of graffiti that showed Kieran playing with himself while Waverly and Seth beat up the terrorist. Underneath if the caption read, Who is our real leadership? A few days before, there was a picture of Seth behind bars with a caption that read, This is how we thank our heroes. Maybe by incarcerating Seth, Kieran had made him a martyr for some people, but what was his alternative?
“Get our parents back,” he murmured to himself. “No one can complain if you do that.”
He trembled with apprehension, and his breath was quick and unsteady, but he made himself lean forward to log on to the long-range com system, and hailed the other vessel.
Immediately a bland-looking man answered his call. “Empyrean, this is the New Horizon.”
“I’d like to speak with Anne Mather, please.”
“I’ll see if the Pastor is available,” the man said.
Kieran didn’t have to wait long. Soon Mather’s face appeared on his screen. He was heartened to see her looking tired and worn, as though she was being kept up nights, too. “Hello, Kieran. I hope you have good news for me.”
“I want to know what your terms are.”
“All right,” she said, planting her elbows on her desk. “First, I want immunity.”
“For who?”
“For me. You might try to paint me as a war criminal, but if you do that to the figurehead of this vessel, you insult everyone on board. Peace cannot exist if we each try to persecute the other side.”
“I’ll consider it.”
She looked at him sharply but continued. “Next, I want to know that when we reach New Earth, both vessels will have a hand in negotiating territories.”
“To divide an entire planet among a few hundred people? Do you really think that’s going to be a sticking point?”
“We have limited data on ecosystems there, Kieran. There might be very little arable land. I can’t have my people stuck in a desert.”
“Okay. I can agree to that.”
“And I think that representatives from both vessels should take part at least once a year in a congress, hosted alternately by each vessel, or colony, in which information is traded and planetary governance is decided.”
Kieran began to realize that he hadn’t prepared any terms of his own other than getting the parents back, and that Mather was calling all the shots. “Pastor Mather—”
“Anne, please.”
He sighed, irritated by her friendly tone. “I’m going to need you to send your terms over to me in a text document so that I can go over these carefully with my people.”
“Your people?” she asked with a smug smile.
“My Central Council,” he said, just to buy time. “My crew. It isn’t right for me to make all these decisions for them.”
Mather leaned back in her chair, regarding Kieran. “You’re on good terms with your Central Council?”
“Of course,” he said with a tight smile.
She nodded, but Kieran suspected she didn’t believe him.
“So the terrorist—Jacob—was feeding you information after all?” he guessed. Why else should she doubt what he said?
Her eyes snapped to his, but her expression didn’t move a single micron. “No.”
“Because it sounds as if you think you’ve got information about this ship.”
“I’m sorry I gave that impression. No. My doubts about your relationship with your council stem only from my own experience. Like any governing body, they vie for power.”
“And you don’t want to give it to them,” Kieran said.
“They don’t always like what I do, but sometimes a leader has to make unpopular decisions. I would think you’d know that by now.”
The two looked at each other for a frozen moment. This woman was uncomfortably perceptive, and she knew just how to say the most unnerving thing. She reminded him of Waverly. But she’d revealed a weakness, hadn’t she? She’s afraid of being tried as a war criminal, he realized. How can I use that?
“I’ll send you my terms in a text document, Kieran. Take your time to review them, and we’ll speak again, soon I hope.”
“Wait,” Kieran said. “I want a manifest of every Empyrean crew member on board your vessel, or the talks don’t move forward at all.”
Mather sighed.
“Also, I want each of them to send a video message to the Empyrean, so that we can see their condition for ourselves.”
“That’s going to take time.”
“I want it in twenty-four hours. And they all better be in good health, or I’ll make sure you’ll be known through all of New Earth’s history as the first war criminal,” Kieran said, and ended the transmission before she could respond.
Let her stew on that for a while, he thought with satisfaction.
His intercom beeped, and he leaned forward, expecting to see Mather calling him back, but in fact the signal was coming from the infirmary. Kieran answered, and Tobin’s tired face appeared on his screen. “Kieran, his eyes are open.”
“I’ll be right there.”
He stumbled through the corridors and down the stairwell to the infirmary, where he found Tobin leaning over Philip, looking into his oval face. The little boy’s eyes were as opaque as coals, staring up at the ceiling without seeming to recognize anything.
“Can he speak?” Kieran asked anxiously.
“Not with that respirator in his throat,” Tobin said. “I could try disconnecting it.”
“Is that safe?”
“I was going to anyway. It’s the only way to see if he can breathe on his own.”
“Do it,” Kieran said, and stood back while Tobin carefully released a clamp around the hose. The machine above Philip’s bed made several alarming beeps, but Tobin switch
ed it off, irritated, and then leaned his cheek over Philip to feel for breath. Kieran saw the small boy’s chest rise and fall, then there was an agonizing pause until it rose and fell again. Tobin took several readings, then looked at Kieran, relieved. “He seems okay right now.”
Philip’s eyes landed on Tobin’s face for a moment, watching him speak, but then drifted back to the ceiling again.
“Philip,” Tobin said, “I bet you want that hose out of your throat, don’t you, buddy?”
The boy closed and opened his eyes, seeming unable to do more. He reminded Kieran of an antique doll owned by Felicity Wiggam, the one girl who had chosen to stay behind on the New Horizon. If she laid the doll on its back, its eyes shut with an unnerving mechanical swivel. Is Philip still in there? Kieran wondered.
“I’m going to pull it out in one motion, okay?” Tobin said loudly to Philip as he gripped the breathing tube firmly in his fist. “I need you to breath out when I do.”
“Have you done this before?” Kieran asked.
“Quiet,” Tobin said. Kieran understood that most everything Tobin did was for the first time, and his only hope of keeping his patients calm was if he pretended total confidence.
Tobin waited until Philip was about to exhale, then, with a swift motion, pulled the tube out of his throat. The boy coughed, little hacking noises that shook his shoulders. When he’d settled, Tobin picked up a spray bottle from the bedside table, gently opened the boy’s mouth, and spritzed a fine mist into it. Philip’s breath smelled rancid and stale, but Kieran leaned close to him.
“Philip, can you hear me?” Kieran asked, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. The boy’s lips opened and closed, making him look like a fish. Kieran leaned closer to him and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. It felt fragile under his fingers.
The boy whispered a dry, papery word that Kieran couldn’t hear.
“Try more water,” he said to Tobin, who sprayed a little more into the boy’s mouth. Philip mashed his lips together.
“Bright,” Philip whispered, blinking his eyes as though a light was being shined into them.
“Dim the lights,” Kieran said, and Tobin pushed a pad on the wall, reducing the brightness in the room by half.
Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel Page 19