“I didn’t agree to this,” Bobby said, stepping toward her.
“I want to know if our parents are still alive on the New Horizon,” she said to the terrorist, knowing this would stop Bobby, whose parents were unaccounted for.
Bobby hung back, waiting for the man to answer. The rest of the council and even Kieran’s guards all seemed to be holding their breath.
“I don’t know,” the prisoner said.
She jammed the business end of the Taser into his neck and held down the trigger. The man cried out and his body shook, rattling the chains on his cuffs. When Waverly pulled the Taser away, she saw a V-shaped burn on his skin, and she could smell singed flesh.
“Waverly, don’t,” Seth called hoarsely from across the way.
“Are our parents still alive?” Waverly said, and pressed the Taser against the prisoner again, but she didn’t pull the trigger. Not yet.
Instinctively, he drew away from it, but he said quietly, “I think so.”
“Where are they being held?” she asked him.
The man closed his lips, his eyes stubbornly focused on the floor.
“Where!” she screamed in his ear, and pulled the trigger again. She could feel the buzz of the current moving through the device and into the man’s body, which shook with spasms deep in his core. He screamed, and his face contorted into a mask of agony. She remembered the way he’d held her windpipe closed, the way he’d looked into her eyes, whispering, “I’m going to kill you like you killed Shelby, you little witch.” The way she’d accepted that this was her death, that he was her killer. The hopelessness he’d made her feel. How easily she’d given up. Oh, she hated him.
But she took her finger off the trigger, and his spasms stopped. He groaned.
“Where are they?” she said softly.
“I haven’t heard anything new,” he said, breathless. “They’re probably still in atmospheric conditioning.”
“Mather’s too careful. She’s moved them. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t know!”
She zapped him again, and he cried out. When she released him, he blubbered, “Please don’t do that again. Please.”
“Then tell me where the prisoners are!”
“They’re … they’re in the sewage plant! The doors are chained closed! You’ll need bolt cutters to get them away from there!”
“How do you know that?”
“She … she wanted a more permanent place, so they modified the sewage plant. It’s probably done by now.”
“Is that the truth?” Waverly said warningly, holding the Taser near his eye.
“I swear it.” He begged, his blue eyes darting from one council member to the next, pleading, looking for a sympathetic gaze. “It’s true. That’s where they are.”
Waverly looked at Alia, who nodded at her. She seemed to believe him.
“What kind of guard is being kept on them?” Waverly asked, moving the Taser between the knobs of bone at the base of the man’s neck, just over his spine.
“A light detail, I think,” he said tearfully. “Since you’re not on the ship anymore.”
“And what’s the political situation?” she asked.
“I haven’t been there since you have. I don’t know anything more than you do.”
“You’ve been talking to them.”
“No, I haven’t.”
She jammed the Taser into his spine and pulled the trigger. This time he screamed, but she didn’t stop. He shook, and spittle rolled from his mouth as his head flopped forward and backward. When finally she released the Taser, he was limp, shoulders hunched, head hanging between his knees.
“Water,” she said.
Ali went to the sink, filled a plastic tumbler with water, and handed it to her. She poured it over the prisoner’s head, and he shook himself awake, grunting. He sounded like a pig.
“You’ve been in contact with the New Horizon, haven’t you?”
Tears ran down his face, but he nodded.
“And what have you learned about the situation there?”
“What do you want to hear?”
“The truth. When we left, things weren’t going well for Mather.”
“She’s still in control,” he said, his eyes screwed shut.
“You’re holding something back.” This time she moved the Taser to his groin and glared right into his face. Tears streamed from his eyes as he searched her expression. He trembled. She felt the muscles of his thighs tense and release under her Taser. “Tell me everything you know.”
“Mather doesn’t have a good relationship with the church elders. Shelby told me that once. They could oust her any day now.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes,” he whined.
But she pulled the trigger anyway. He screamed, and screamed again, but she held the Taser in place, watching his face as it twisted in agony, feeling the helpless tremor of his legs, the jolts and spasms that rocked his body. He gurgled, and bubbles formed at the corners of his mouth, but still she held on, until she felt a hand on her arm and looked up to see Alia’s shocked face.
“He’s finished,” Alia said. Her face was drained of color, and her lips twitched as she pulled Waverly away from the prisoner, who was sobbing.
Waverly let herself be led out of the cell. Until she tried to walk, she didn’t realize how shaky her legs were. She watched as Ali unlocked the man’s cuffs and arranged him on his mattress. The man jumped at every touch, every movement, whimpering like a toddler. When Ali laid him down, the man curled himself into the fetal position, moving his hand to his mouth as if to suck his thumb.
The other Central Council members shuffled out of the brig, each of their eyes trained on the floor, making little sound other than embarrassed coughs and the scuff of their shoes on the grimy metal floor. Waverly watched them leave, then turned to Seth, who stared at her wide-eyed, as if he’d never seen her before.
She opened her mouth to speak, but her voice was stopped up in her throat, so she turned to go. She didn’t understand her feelings yet. She didn’t understand the hollow pit in the center of her chest, the weight that dragged on her limbs, and the gray dark that seemed to cloud her mind. She’d never felt it before.
Later that night, when she couldn’t sleep, she understood what she felt was deep, irrevocable shame.
Seth had seen the whole thing.
HINTS
Seth lay on his side staring at Jacob, who hadn’t moved in hours. The man sat crumpled in his bed, rocking back and forth, singing some unintelligible song under his breath. He’d come unhinged. But it wasn’t the behavior that disturbed Seth. What frightened him was what the man said in his sleep, crying out or moaning. At first it had sounded like babble or baby talk, but after a while Seth’s ear was attuned to it, and the words resolved into something ominous: “She’s gonna burn, Shelby.”
Something terrible was going to happen. Something Jake had planned. And Seth had to get a message to someone about it.
“Guard!” Seth croaked, picking up his metal plate and banging on his bars. “Guard! I need help!”
He’d tried this before, but Kieran must have given new orders, because no one came. No one even spoke to him. No one looked at him when they slid his meals into his cell. He felt like an animal in a trap.
“Hey! I need medical assistance!” He tried to scream, hoping that might rouse them. In truth he felt better now that he was eating again, but if Tobin came to give him “medical assistance,” he might listen.
“Everyone on this ship is dead.” The words were spoken with satisfied smugness.
A chill settled between Seth’s shoulder blades.
The voice had been Jake’s, but it had a removed quality, as though someone else were speaking through him. His eyes were oddly distant, and his lower lip hung from his face like a piece of flab.
Seth stared at him, his mouth dry. “What do you mean?”
“I mean don’t get worked up. Because it doesn’t matt
er anyway,” Jacob said. For the first time since he’d been tortured, he turned to look at Seth. His lips pulled back to show his crooked teeth, and his cheeks bunched up under his eyes, which shone in the bright lights of his cell. But it wasn’t a smile. It was an effigy of a smile. “Soon, nothing is going to matter.”
“Why?” Seth asked. “Jake?”
“You don’t want to know. Just trust me.”
“What did you do?” Seth tried to sound eager, like a coconspirator, someone who wanted to be let in on the joke. It was a thin disguise, and he guessed Jake could see through it. “The engines. Did you screw up the engines somehow? Or the reactors?”
“Why did you want medical assistance?” Jake asked, suspicious. “You seem fine.”
“I…” Seth wiped his hand over his face to buy time. “To get a message out that the Central Council is torturing prisoners, because, you know, I might be next.”
“They don’t hate you enough.”
“I’m not exactly popular.”
Jacob only laughed, shaking his head as if to say Silly boy.
“Come on, man. Tell me what you’ve got planned! Who am I going to tell?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’m bored,” Seth said, knowing the urgency in his voice was betraying the lie. “And if these bastards have something coming to them, I want to savor it.”
“I want it to be a surprise,” Jake said, and smiled that chilling smile.
“It’s the reactor, isn’t it? You rigged it to melt down.”
Jake turned away, uninterested, and went back to singing his eerie, tuneless song. He rocked back and forth, his hands buried in his lap, staring at a faraway point. The torture had been bad, but it hadn’t lasted that long, and it had only happened once. It shouldn’t have been enough to unhinge a sane person. But then do sane people go around killing kids? Maybe the guy had always been nuts and Waverly’s Taser had been the last straw to push him over the edge.
When he stopped singing, Seth said, “You’re starting to creep me out.”
Jake smiled again. His forehead was shiny with sweat, and his breath, moving in and out of his barrel chest, sounded wet and weighed down by his fleshy throat.
“Shelby wasn’t the only one you lost, was he?” Seth said. It was only a hunch, but he had to try something to get Jake to talk.
“My parents. I told you that,” Jake said, sounding like a man who was thinking of something else.
“No. More recently. You lost someone else. Didn’t you?”
For a long time Jake sat there as though unaware of Seth’s question. When he turned again to look at Seth, there were wet patches on his cheeks.
“All she ever wanted, all her life, was to be a mama,” the man finally said. His voice broke, and he buried his chin in his chest. “My Ginny was the only one on the New Horizon who could conceive.”
Seth held his breath and watched as the man relived the past, sorrow passing like a shadow over his features.
“The first time we were so happy, and proud. We told the whole crew, and everyone congratulated us. We gave them hope. Pastor Mather even said a sermon about us. She called Ginny the new Eve, and I guess that made me Adam.” He straightened as he said this, smiling at the memory.
“I thought there weren’t any kids on the New Horizon,” Seth said, his voice eerily quiet.
Jake’s smile faded away. He glanced at Seth, the kind of look a predator flashes at his prey. “There aren’t.”
“She lost the baby,” Seth said quietly. He almost felt sorry for this fractured, confused man.
Jake buried his face in his square hands. “And another and another and another.”
Seth let it rest for a few moments, watching Jake’s labored breathing.
“After a while it was like her light went out,” Jake finally said, his voice strained. “She stopped smiling, then she stopped talking, then she stopped getting out of bed. I didn’t know what to do. I thought she’d get better. But…”
Seth wanted to ask what happened to Ginny. He thought he knew.
“I’m just trying to make it right,” Jake said into his hands. “All our dead babies. All our babies who never got to be. There’s got to be a way to even things out, you know? After what they did to us.”
“Killing Max made it right?”
“It was a start.”
“Max wasn’t even born when all that happened.”
“But his dad was,” Jake said, his voice coated with misery. “Now his father will know what it’s like when your baby dies.”
“His dad died in the attack.” It gave Seth no satisfaction to say these words.
Jake made no response.
Seth stared at him, at first unaware that he was trembling with rage. The foolishness, the blind idiocy of lashing out for the sake of revenge—it was repugnant. Seth had done it to Kieran, after his father died, punished him for everything that had gone wrong. Hurting Kieran had made Seth feel good for a while, but the feeling soured, and then he’d just wanted a way out of the sickening black maze he’d made for himself.
Now Waverly was wandering a maze just like it. Her face, when she’d pressed that Taser into Jake’s neck, grimacing when he screamed, her eyes glistening as she watched the fine tendril of smoke rising from his burning flesh. Ostensibly she’d been after information, but Seth knew what she was really doing. She’d been through too much. Some part of her had snapped. Her humanity had gone on hiatus, and what was left behind was her animal instinct: kill, hurt, maim, survive.
But he knew, just as his memories of what he’d done to Kieran haunted him, Waverly would remember that moment in time when she’d taken leave of her higher nature. There was nothing worse than knowing how deep you could go into barbarity.
This man was even more lost than Seth or Waverly had ever been.
“I used to believe in revenge,” Seth said, trying to sound conversational. “I tortured Kieran Alden, punished him for his mistakes, made him suffer. I was a monster. I was only making everything worse, creating more enemies, more hatred on this ship, more reasons for revenge. Look where I am now. Kieran thinks I’m dangerous, and he’s right. I was dangerous. But now here I am stuck in the brig when I could be helping run the ship. And even if the adults come back and things go back to some kind of normal, I’ll never be trusted again. I ruined my life, all because I wanted to make someone suffer.”
“I guess he’s the one who got his revenge, then,” Jake said with a twisted smile.
“All I know,” Seth said, trying his best to sound reasonable, “is that I made things worse by being mean when I could have made things better by being kind.”
“You’re still young enough to believe in fairy tales.”
“It’s pure logic I’m spouting here, man.”
Jake looked at Seth askance, a lopsided grin on his face. “You’re the only one I’m going to regret.”
“What are you going to regret, Jake? What do you have planned?”
“You’ll see,” he said. The smile was back. That strange, beatific smile on a gargoyle face, and Jake turned away and started humming to himself, that odd melody. Seth stared at him, awash in the most horrid feeling of helplessness he’d ever felt in his life as he listened to the broken man sing.
DAMAGE
Kieran was still seething about his argument the day before with Waverly when he arrived in the brig for another interview with the terrorist. He walked past Hiro and Ali, both loyal guards. They seemed withdrawn and troubled today. When he got to Jake’s cell and looked through the bars at him, he saw a man trembling on the floor, lying curled on his side, his hands tucked between his knees, sleeping fitfully.
“Jake?” Kieran said.
The man didn’t move.
“Ali!” Kieran called. Ali walked down the hallway, sighing heavily. He was barely able to meet Kieran’s eyes.
“How long has he been like this?”
“About twenty-four hours.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
The boy stood before Kieran, his mouth open as if to speak, but he was unable.
“Kieran,” someone whispered behind him. He turned to find Seth Ardvale leaning on the bars of his cell. Seth looked in Kieran’s eyes, desperate and pleading. “I need to talk to you.”
Kieran turned his back on him.
“Is he sick?” Kieran asked. The man was covered in sweat, and though his eyes were closed, Kieran could see the bulge of his corneas moving under his eyelids, as though he were deep inside a disturbing dream.
“No,” Ali said reluctantly. “The Central Council was here.”
Kieran turned to glare at Ali, who shrank away from him.
“What happened?” Kieran growled.
Ali hesitated.
“Kieran,” Seth whispered. “Seriously. I need to talk to you.”
Kieran took hold of Ali’s arm and pulled the boy back to the guard station, where Hiro stood, eyes trained on the empty corridor. “I want to know what happened here, right now.”
The guards looked nervously at each other.
“Waverly Marshall brought Bobby Martin down here,” Ali finally said, haltingly, “and they said it would be illegal to keep them out.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“We were about to, but…” Ali looked at Hiro, who was watching the conversation with worried eyes.
“Waverly started asking him about our parents,” Hiro said. “I forgot about calling you. I wanted to know what he’d say.”
“What did she do to him?” Kieran asked with a sinking feeling.
“She used a sheep Taser on him,” Ali said, shamefaced.
“Why didn’t you call me?” His voice shook with rage, and both boys looked frightened of him.
“We were afraid to,” Hiro said. “We knew you’d be mad.”
“You were hoping I wouldn’t find out.”
Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel Page 21