Yvonne folded her hands together and then separated them, anxious. She shouldn’t be here. “Ms. Scalone, thank you for agreeing to meet on short notice. I know that...” She trailed off, unsure of where to begin.
“Monica is fine,” the other woman said. “And I have to admit, I was curious. You’ve every reason to hate me.”
“And you me,” Yvonne said.
“That’s not as convincing a case. I’d be lying if I said you didn’t make my life easier.”
Yvonne hesitated at that. “Will you tell me about him?”
Monica’s eyes widened in surprise. “Kevin? Why would you care? Why would anyone care at this point?”
She stared at her hands. “Just... Please.”
“He was a terrible boyfriend.” Monica shrugged. “That’s for sure. We dated on and off again for six years. He always said he loved me, but we both knew he loved his damn job with White Void more. I tried to act like it didn’t matter, the things he did, and maybe that says something about me, but when he finally killed your husband, I was done. No more. I cut him off for good that time no matter how many times he came back begging.” The woman leveled a stare at Yvonne. “His boss came calling after he died. Gave me a couple thousand dollars that he said Kevin was owed. He said you were the reason.” She paused. “I said he probably got what he had coming.”
He had got what he deserved. Yvonne knew that. Monica knew that. She looked at the table. “My part was a little more complicated.”
Monica sighed and played with the ties of her wadded-up apron. “Was it? It doesn’t matter at this point to me. I had feelings for him for years. Convinced myself I’d loved him on more than one occasion. But both of our lives are better for him being gone, and nothing you say, no twisted sense of pity is going to change that.”
“So that’s it then,” Yvonne said. “He was just a monster and nothing more.”
“Well...” Monica drawled. “I wouldn’t change what happened. Don’t get me wrong.”
The diner’s front door opened, and Monica gestured in that direction. A boy, maybe six years old, weighed down by a backpack that was too large for his tiny frame, ran in. “Mom!” he shouted as he dove into the booth and gave Monica a hug. Yvonne’s mouth went dry, but she remained silent, not daring to interrupt.
“School okay?” Monica asked. The boy nodded with a smile that showed all his teeth. “Good. Head on to the back. Mommy’s got to finish this conversation first and then you can tell me all about it.” That wasn’t to the kid’s liking. His backpack had fallen to the floor, and he grabbed a strap and dragged it toward the back of the diner. “Pick that up! It’s going to be filthy!” He whined but obeyed and disappeared into the back with slumped shoulders. Monica returned her attention to Yvonne. “My mother drops him off after school and my manager lets him stay in the break room till my shift is over. He’s good to us.”
“I can see that,” Yvonne said. She waved her hand in the direction the boy had gone. “Is he...” She couldn’t even bring herself to say Kudzu’s birth name.
“Yes,” came the simple reply. “I had Bryce a year after Kevin and I started dating. And that was the cause of the first of our many breakups.”
Yvonne had nothing to say to that. After Tomas had died and she had saved Kudzu’s life, she’d briefly met Monica when the woman came before she’d sent him to a hospital. The thought had never in her darkest dreams crossed her mind that he might have been a father. She felt the old bitterness creep in that she and Tomas had never been able to have children. Even a man like Kudzu, or well, Kevin, had been a father.
“And if you have to know,” Monica said, “the only reason I kept taking him back was for Bryce. I wouldn’t say that Kevin was a good father, but I think he wanted to be. He always made Bryce’s birthdays even if we were on the out at the time, even if I forbade him from showing his face. He loved his son, I think, more than he ever did me.” She sighed. “Look. Ms. Naude, I don’t know why you’re here, but I can’t help think you’re looking for a reason to feel guilty. Don’t. He deserved what he got, but if you gotta feel bad about something, Bryce is it. The one noble thought that Kevin ever had was that he wanted to be a good daddy and...” She shrugged and turned her face away. “He never got to do that. Just like everything else, he got in the way of himself. And that’s the end of his story.” She stood, tucking her apron under her arm. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go spend the rest of my break with Bryce.”
Yvonne nodded slowly. “If there’s ever anything you need—”
“We don’t need your help, Ms. Naude. We’ve got a good life.”
She pursed her lips. “I understand, but if that ever changes, you’ll always have an escape so long as I live.”
Monica nodded, but Yvonne saw in her eyes that she was only being polite. She turned and left, disappearing into the back of the diner. Yvonne stared after her, unwilling to move. After a minute, a soft hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed it gently.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Elizabeth asked.
“My question was answered,” she said, so softly that she could barely hear her own words. What that meant was a mystery she had not yet even begun to contemplate.
“I hate to interrupt,” Davey said, “but we’re going to need to go. “I can’t get a hold of Grace.”
“She’s probably being careless,” Yvonne said, but she did stand to her feet. “Let’s go home.” She felt Elizabeth’s eyes on her, but she ignored them and walked through the front door out onto the street. She’d hoped to stop by the old clinic to see what had become of it, but that was going to have to wait for another time. As usual, they were rushing from one crisis to the next, even if this one was a teenage girl who had thoughtlessly left her comm in another room.
“SEE,” YVONNE SAID AS they entered the hangar. “The Sparrow is still sitting there in one piece.” She’d felt the worry radiating off Davey as they drove back across town. At least it distracted her from her own troubling thoughts.
He didn’t sound convinced. “She still hasn’t answered the comm,” he said, as he pulled the bike up under the ship.
“Perhaps she decided to take a nap,” Elizabeth suggested.
“She’s a light sleeper,” Davey said, a fact that Yvonne knew to be true. Another trait the kids picked up from their street days. He dug a fob out of his vest and activated the lift. “I swear if she’s goofing off—”
“Then we’ll take appropriate measures,” Yvonne said.
When the lift bottomed out, they pushed the bike onto it and started the ascent into the hold. The conversation fell dead in the air. Davey and Elizabeth still felt awkward around her, but at least they’d had an excuse to ignore each other during the bike ride.
They crossed the plane of the hold, and Yvonne saw several things all at once. They were in the middle of a crowd of people, almost all of them were armed in combat gear, and Grace and Whitaker had been roughed up and handcuffed nearby. Davey drew his gun in a flash, but the subtle mechanical rustle of over a dozen weapons aiming at him caused him to have second thoughts, and he slowly set the revolver down.
Yvonne breathed slowly, trying to come to terms with the scene. If there was a way out of this, it was going to have to wait for a more opportune moment. This one would have to be played by ear. Her eyes drifted to Grace and Whitaker, and she wondered just what he’d done to bring this onto them. “Are you okay over there, Grace?”
“I’ve been better,” she said, her voice ragged. “I couldn’t stop them, but I made them earn it.”
“She did that indeed,” a voice with a familiar British accent said, “a fact with which I’m rather annoyed.” Alexander Logan stepped into view from behind a shipping container that hadn’t been there this morning. “She killed three of my men and severely wounded six more. I’m sorry that they were rough with her, but she left me little choice.”
“That’s a pity,” Davey said. “I would have killed a few more if you wer
en’t such a coward to attack when only a teenage girl was left on watch.”
“It’s almost as if that was deliberate,” he said, almost playful. “Let some useful information fall into the right hands, insinuate that the Sparrow was being tracked, and Cole and the Shield Maiden rush back to Mars.” He stepped forward to retrieve Davey’s gun. “You being absent was a bonus, though I very much doubt you would have affected the outcome.” He stopped in front of Elizabeth. “New recruit?”
“Old recruit to be precise,” Elizabeth said. Yvonne felt herself smiling in spite of the situation and not just for Elizabeth’s cheeky response. Despite Logan’s masterful job at maneuvering them, again, his intel wasn’t perfect if he hadn’t been expecting Elizabeth’s presence. They had beat him at Ceres. They could beat him again.
“What’s one more prisoner? Lock them up.”
Yvonne struggled as men grappled her from behind. “What’s this about?” she asked as they were stripped of any useful equipment.
“As I already told Grace, I need the Sparrow. You will be kept in confinement for now and released in a few days when my need has passed. Well, maybe not the one you call Whitaker. I may dispose of him out the airlock when this is over, and I’ll hardly be the only one to celebrate his demise.”
Whitaker hadn’t said a word through any of this. His cold eyes merely shifted back and forth as the conversation ebbed and flowed. It looked like he had been severely beaten. He was dragged after the rest of them to the foreign shipping container. As Yvonne was forced through the entrance, she realized that it was a furnished prison cell, complete with bunks and a small private bathroom.
“You’ll notice I even made an attempt to see to your comfort,” Logan said when the last of them stumbled in, and the barred door was shut. “I wasn’t expecting the old recruit or the trickster to show up, so I’m afraid you’ll be short a bed. Knowing how virtuous this crew is, you’ll all volunteer to sleep on the floor.”
“Your generosity knows no bounds,” Yvonne mocked. “I’ll need a first aid kit from my cabin. Second one on the right,” she said and turned her back on him. “Grace, let me look at you.”
“I’m fine, I promise.” Grace tried to lay down on one of the bunks, a difficult task considering her arms were twisted behind her back and cuffed with multiple sets of binders. To Yvonne’s surprise, she still had her miracles. Grace saw her staring. “They couldn’t get them off, and I wasn’t going to volunteer to help. So they had to improvise after they pinned me.” Yvonne knelt by her and began to probe at her cuts and bruises. Nothing severe, though several were still slowly oozing blood.
Davey was near frantic. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, sis.”
“There wasn’t anything you could have done. We were overwhelmed when he let himself in. Logan said something about a backdoor program he installed at Ceres.”
“Wonderful,” Yvonne said. That would be a fun problem to deal with on a future day.
A few minutes later, to their surprise, the first aid kit was delivered by a messenger. Yvonne set it by Grace, but the teen just shook her head. “He needs it more than me.” She inclined her head to the furthest corner of the cell, where Whitaker sat silently with his eyes closed. Even from here, Yvonne could see the severe laceration at his hairline. Logan must have really had it out for him.
“Grace says I need to take a look at you,” she said, kneeling by him.
He opened a single eye. “I’ll live.”
“I believe I’m the only one professionally qualified to make that judgment,” she retorted.
He coughed out a single laugh, but his shoulders slumped in acceptance. Besides the cut, and several more like it, he had three broken fingers, a possibly fractured ulna, a sprained ankle, and a dislocated shoulder. She did what she could for him, stopping the bleeding and wrapping the ankle and fingers. For the shoulder, she recruited Davey to help her reset the joint. Whitaker bore it with hardly a grimace and no complaints, despite the extreme pain he was most likely experiencing.
As they finished, they were interrupted by the rumble of the engines.
“It seems we’re leaving Ceres,” Elizabeth said.
Yvonne shook her head. “Not yet. They’ll need me for that. Logan’s little program may have given him control of the Sparrow’s security, but the frameshift device is on an isolated system. It’s a quirk in the design of the Model 42.”
Davey tried to pace the cell, but Grace put a stop to that as soon as it started. “There’s not enough room.”
“Sorry. I just don’t know what to do,” he said.
“Nothing,” Whitaker said, “until we know what Logan’s plan is. Then we reevaluate.”
Davey didn’t seem impressed. “And just what are we going to be able to do from this cell?”
Whitaker stared at him for a moment and then shrugged. “Depending on the stakes, I can have the Sparrow destroyed.”
Yvonne’s blood boiled. It was enough to have one mad man on board, but how had they gotten so unlucky to have two? “So Logan takes over our computer,” she bit out, “and you’ve smuggled a bomb aboard, is that it?”
“It’s nothing so primitive,” he said. “And I rather hope that’s an end we won’t reach. I intend for all of us to walk away from this, minus Logan and his men.”
They fell into silence. Outside of wringing more information out of Whitaker, which seemed unlikely at the moment, there wasn’t much else to talk about, and if Yvonne had to guess, they were all going to be stuck in close quarters for the foreseeable future.
Sometime later, Logan reappeared outside their cell. “Ms. Naude, if you’ll come with me, please.”
There were armed men, so she didn’t bother to protest. They herded her up the ladder to the main deck. When she reached the common room, she whistled in appreciation. “You weren’t kidding about Grace causing you trouble.” The room that had been so big a part of her domestic life for the last couple years had been utterly destroyed. Smashed furniture, broken appliances, dented walls, bullet casings and holes everywhere. A few of Logan’s men looked to be getting started on cleanup, but it was going to take hours.
“She effectively put a third of my team out of commission,” he replied. “And then we couldn’t even relieve her of her weapons without irreparably harming her.” Yvonne didn’t mind at all that he sounded tired and frustrated.
They passed through to the cockpit. Yvonne’s eyes flitted across the navigational displays. They were in orbit over Ceres. “No doubt you want me to access the frameshift,” she said. “I don’t think I will.”
“I think you’ll see my side of things,” Logan said, “I can have a tug here in a couple of days in the worst-case scenario. I’ll still get the Sparrow where I need it, and you only lengthen your internment. Or you can unlock the system, and you and yours are treated well and eventually released.”
“And what do you need the Sparrow for?”
“I’m not interested in death and body counts. You know that.”
“I know that thousands died when the Prodigal detonated at Ceres.”
He shrugged and leaned against the doorframe. “And tens of thousands more would have died and a city burned had I not interfered. What I want with the Sparrow is irrelevant to whether or not you unlock the frameshift. I’m going to ask again and I want a straight answer. Will you cooperate, or will I reconsider the respectful treatment of your crew.”
She gave him a hard stare. A delay could put enough of a monkey wrench in his plans that they could find a way to escape or foil it. But then a delay he wasn’t expecting could be far more devastating than the one he was. She leaned over the side console with the frameshift and unlocked it, making sure her body blocked their sight of the screen.
“Happy?” she asked.
“Overjoyed,” he slid into the copilot’s seat and nodded at the man in the pilot’s. “Let’s get out of here. Is the heading set?”
In the split second she’d been in the system, she’d cleared the
most recent diagnostic on the system warning screen.
The lattices in the frameshift were still cooked from frame-skipping. She’d been babying them for months, keeping to slower speeds that wouldn’t cause a burnout. It was an expensive repair they’d been putting off for a later day. The pilot leaned back and she stepped away as he keyed up the frameshift, setting a speed that would lead them to dropping out in a couple days. It was standard procedure if you didn’t want to crawl across the solar system.
Only when they dropped out this time, they’d do catastrophic damage to the entire system.
She smiled grimly to herself as she was escorted back to the hold. Maybe there would be a way to capitalize on the delay, or maybe it would just be a nuisance to their captors. Either way, it gave a few more days for Matthew and Abigail to figure something out. Once they realized the Sparrow had dropped off the grid, it was only a matter of time before they were on Logan’s trail again. She just hoped it would be fast enough. But that meant that they would have days of boredom, in a cramped cell, with Whitaker of all people. Days alone with nothing but her thoughts to accuse her.
As she tried to sleep that night, one thought refused to be silenced. Like a tiny flame, it burned into her sanity. Monica had answered her question. The man that killed her husband was a human being.
When she finally did fall asleep, she dreamed of a boy that had lost his father.
Wormwood: Part 3
I.
ELIZABETH COLE KNEW with certainty that her son was gone when he failed to message her on Christmas Eve. It was his habit to sit down after every mass he gave and write to her. And he never once missed. She waited up long into the night, knowing it was futile. A rational part of her argued that a distraction had arisen or that he had been delayed. Perhaps Hueso Rojo had attacked Villa María on the holiday, hoping to catch them off guard. But then Matthew would still have sent the briefest of messages if it were humanly possible. Perhaps there was still a chance that any moment now, her comm would ping, and he would let her know that he was okay.
After Moses: Wormwood Page 36