This Shattered World

by Amie Kaufman

  Then Sean lifts his gun—and aims it at me. His red-rimmed eyes meet mine for half a second before my cousin pulls the trigger.

  The shot goes wide, screaming through the cavern and breaking the spell.

  McBride roars and steps forward, Gleidel trained on Jubilee once more. I dive for her, grabbing her arm and dragging her to her feet, my body between her and McBride. The laser shrieks. I keep my iron grip on Jubilee’s hand and lunge for the passageway behind us.

  My feet know the way, taking over from eyes blinded by images. Fergal’s behind me, so unfamiliar in his stillness, and Turlough’s still back there with Mike, and Sean, my Sean, is pointing a gun at my face. If I let go of Jubilee she’ll fall. I wrap my arm around her, ignore her cry of pain when my hand squeezes the wound where my bullet grazed her side, and pull her on into the dark.

  It comes in fragments. Her mother’s scream. The smell of something burning. The counter vibrating as something hits the floor, hard. The sharp, shattering crack of gunshots. Someone’s voice, saying, “That’ll be a bitch to clean up.” A little girl screaming from far away. The taste of metal.

  She was supposed to be brave. But the girl was only eight years old, and she wasn’t brave, and when the operatives from the orphanage came to get her, no one had bothered yet to clean the blood from her hands.

  FLYNN’S GRIP ON MY WRIST is ice-cold and unyielding. I try to focus, to understand where we are, what’s happening—my mind automatically tries to run through the checklist that’s been drilled into me since basic training. Taking stock of the situation, location, hostiles, injuries, obstacles…It all blurs together, my eyes streaming and my breath gasping in and out of my lungs. He breaks off from the corridor and pulls me through a narrow fissure in the rock, the stone scraping my chin, my arms.

  My thoughts keep reaching for images where there are none; I see the hospital bed where I left Flynn, I see myself deciding to take a patrol boat to look for him. But the only thing beyond that is blood; blood burning in my pores, metallic on my tongue, singing through my own veins. When I close my eyes I see the cavern, painted with blood, more than I’ve seen in a lifetime of fighting. Blood like art, declaring victory over the Fianna, the hardened, monstrous rebels too young or too crippled to fight back. Blood glues our hands together, Flynn’s and mine.

  All I can see is that child, half curled under another rebel who must have been trying to shield it. I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I don’t know—I don’t know.

  My body sags with the weight of the empty holster at my hip, the weight of what I’ve done. My knees give way and I go down, dragging at Flynn’s hand. He’s forced to halt, nearly jerking my arm out of its socket trying to get me back on my feet.

  “Stop,” I gasp, choking on the smell of blood on my skin. Now I understand that metallic taste, the shaking in my limbs; now I know what the Fury tastes like. Blood. “Stop—Flynn, please. Let them take me.”

  “Like hell,” he says through gritted teeth. His face is unreadable.

  He won’t listen to me. Right now I don’t have the strength to argue with him. He’s made his choice, and if I keep slowing him down he’s going to die for it.

  I drag myself to my feet, leaning on him heavily. He grunts with effort, or pain, or acknowledgment, and we set off down the corridor once more.

  The shakes hit me like a mag-lev train, ten times worse than on the island Flynn showed me to the east. Worse than after my first combat mission. Because this is nothing like that. No part of my training told me how to comprehend the massacre of unarmed innocents. Of children. My mind is tight and cold, like Flynn’s hand around my wrist, and I can’t break out through the narrow bands of panic and horror. Everywhere I look I see blood, smell blood. On my skin, my clothes, in my hair. I fight down my nausea, simply because I can’t stop, not while we’re running for Flynn’s life from people who think he’s turned on them.

  Abruptly I see the end looming, the point at which I can’t function—exhaustion, shock, guilt, and grief tangled together. It’s like a rapidly approaching cliff, and I know that if Flynn pulls me off the edge I might never find my feet again.

  I wish he’d just let them have me, and go. Anything would be easier than this.

  And then he does pull me forward, wrapping his arm around my waist and leaping from a ledge. For a wild, confused moment we’re falling—and then we hit frigid water. It closes over my head, and my mind goes numb.

  In her dream she’s choking, gasping for air where there is none, the vacuum of space closing around her. There are no stars, because there are never any stars here, only a thick darkness that rushes down her throat and into her heart. She dreams of drowning.

  I KEEP AN ARM AROUND HER, struggling through mud and water as I drag her forward. Dimly, I hear McBride shouting some distance back, trying to find someone who can fit through the same crack I pulled Jubilee into. Silent but for soft splashes, we disappear into the dark.

  I can almost feel Orla with me as I find my way to our rock. She had me rehearse the route so many times when I was a child, so I could get here with my eyes closed if there was ever a raid. The rock is about six feet long and only a couple of feet above the water. Not even Sean knows this secret.

  I pull Jubilee closer in the water, inspecting her face. There’s still more shock than sense there; bracing myself, trying not to recoil, I cup a hand under Jubilee’s chin to turn her face toward me. I keep my other arm wrapped tightly around her, afraid she’ll sink beneath the water if I let go. Her eyes open when I squeeze her.

  “Jubilee, are you listening to me?”

  She doesn’t answer, her eyes darting around in the darkness, panic making her tremble in my arms.

  “Soldier!” I bark, keeping my voice as quiet but tense as I can.

  Her eyes widen, and I watch as the soldier takes over, her chin lifting a little.

  “This rock here is hollow inside. I can pull you, but when we go under you have to hold your breath. Understand?”

  She nods again, lifting one hand to rest it against the rock for balance and leaving a red smear behind it. The water hasn’t been enough to wash the blood away.

  I suck in a lungful of air, my throat threatening to close or catch in a coughing fit again. The water closes over my head, and I keep hold of Jubilee’s wrist as I guide her in with me. The water carries the distant shouts of my people directly to my ears until we surface, choking, inside my tiny shelter. There’s only a small space that’s water; the rest is the natural rock and the ledge Orla built for me when I was Fergal’s age.

  I push Jubilee’s arms against the rock until she instinctively grabs at it, leaving me free to reach up and fumble in the dark. The netting with emergency supplies is still there, and my heart slows a little in relief. I grab the tiny cylinder of the flashlight dangling from it and turn it on; the beam bounces around the two of us as I help her scramble up onto the little ledge and then crawl up after her. We huddle there in a space meant for a child, her breath coming in sobs.

  I grit my teeth hard. I have to think of a plan, but my misery keeps tugging me back toward Sean. I need to be there for him as he grieves. I want to tell him I’m sorry I didn’t get there in time, that I couldn’t save Fergal. Instead, I cower here as Jubilee’s tension starts to ease a fraction, and I angle the flashlight to see part of her face. Her lips are parted, eyes staring, water dripping unheeded from her nose and her chin. I have to get her moving. I have to put enough life back into her to get us both out of here. Swallowing my grief and my revulsion, I lift my hand to brush her wet hair back from her face.

  She jerks away from my touch. “Please, Flynn, don’t.” She looks half her age, except for the bloodstains on her face. If any of my heart was left untouched, it would break right now—that this is the time she chooses to finally use my name. When I can barely stand to look at her.

  The soldier I’ve come to know never would have done this, and yet her hands are smearing my family’s blood on the stone.
“Don’t check out,” I tell her. “You have to stay with me. I can’t drag you to safety or they’ll find us both.”

  “You should have let him have me.” Her voice is empty and aching.

  “It wasn’t you.” I have to force the words out. “It was the Fury.” It wasn’t her. My own thoughts repeat it, over and over, unwilling to face what I’ve seen. Wanting it to somehow reduce my pain.

  “I don’t remember anything.” Her voice breaks, and as she curls in on herself she’s still shaking, but this is different. It’s not the trembling that came with the dilated eyes or the jerky movements. This is shock, and my arms move haltingly to wrap around her and keep her from sliding back into the water. Suddenly I’m not holding Captain Lee Chase, but a terrified girl who wants to press her way into the stone around us and stay there forever. “I killed your people. You should—you should kill me yourself, why aren’t you?”

  “Because it wasn’t you.” I’m repeating the words in her ear, desperately trying to make it true for both of us.

  “You can’t know that!” Her whisper is fierce. “Stop it, Flynn, you can’t—just stop it.” Her fingers wind into my shirt, at first to push me away, but her resistance crumbles, and she lets me pull her in close until she’s clinging to me, shoulders shaking as she weeps against my chest.

  Hot tears track down my cheeks too, and my throat closes as I swallow hard, fighting for composure. I wish that for one moment I could forget what’s happened and hold her and let the contact between us heal us both. But I can’t. Even her scent has changed; her hair smells like gunmetal.

  My heart wants me to wrap my arms around her. My heart wants her to suffer for what she’s done.

  Her shivering worsens, and as if in answer, my body starts to shake as well. I reach up and feel around in the netting until my fingers close over a warming pouch; I activate the seal, then press it between our bodies to slowly heat up.

  Now and then the murmur of a distant voice carries through the water and stone to our ears. It’s not until there’s been silence for some time that Jubilee speaks.

  “What do we do now?” It’s barely a whisper.

  I want to have an answer. My heart slams against my ribs, tempting me to panic, to give in to grief and fear and exhaustion. Now that I’m still, my abused lungs ache. “I don’t know.”

  “The LaRoux Industries chip,” she says, eyes staring in the dark. “When I picked it up on that island, it was the same feeling—the same taste in my mouth—”

  The same unseeing, dilated pupils I saw in the cavern. I squeeze her before she can start shaking again, trying to keep fear from joining my grief in overwhelming me. I cannot think, now, about the possibility that a corporation is responsible for the madness plaguing my home.

  “I have to get to the base,” Jubilee says with a sudden, hollow urgency, as though reciting steps in a manual. “I have to report…. I have to tell them.”

  My head jerks up. “Jubilee, you can’t. They ship soldiers off Avon when—” When they turn into murderers. My lips refuse to make the words real.

  She blinks at me, haunted. “It’s protocol. It’s all I know.”

  “Listen to me.” I grab at her shoulder, gripping it tight, until her eyes focus once more on mine. “You’re all I have now. You’re the only one who can help me stop whatever’s happening to my home. I can’t be on the base, looking for answers, but you can.”

  “I can’t—oh, God.” Her eyes glaze, and I know she’s not seeing me anymore. She sees blood, and bodies, and the barrel of a gun pointed between her eyes. “I can’t.”

  “You can,” I snap, my voice quiet and fierce.

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because you’re Jubilee Chase,” I murmur. “Not whatever the darkness makes you.”

  The gentle swaying of the dangling flashlight makes the hollows of her features shift and change, making it impossible to read her face until she looks up at me again. She gives a shudder, then nods. My breath comes a little easier, seeing finally a flicker of the girl I know in there, a flicker of the soldier I’ve put all my hopes on.

  “Take me back,” she whispers.

  We switch off the flashlight and slip into the frigid water once more, leaving my sister’s hiding place cold and empty behind us.

  The boy who’s not supposed to be in her dreams is lying next to her on the hood of a hovercar on the outskirts of town, a blanket binding them together. The boy has pink hair this time, though when she runs her fingers through it, it changes in response to her touch, growing longer, falling in gentle curls over his temples.

  They’re looking up at the sky.

  “That one we’ll call the huntress,” says the boy, laughter behind his voice. “See, there’s her gun, and that nebula is her hair, and this cluster is that line she gets between her eyes when she’s yelling at me.”

  “Shut up, I do not.”

  “Your turn.”

  The girl watches the sky, but it’s empty. The only constellations on Avon are the ones they imagine.

  “I can’t,” she whispers, shutting her eyes. “I’m bad at this game.” She knows what happens next in this dream. He’ll kiss her and they’ll lie there together, and when they sneak back onto the base she’ll go back to work, and be unchanged, except perhaps a little colder without the blanket.

  But this time the green-eyed boy takes her hand, and when she opens her eyes, the sky is full of stars.

  THE UNDERGROUND HARBOR IS TEEMING with rebels. They’re like ants swarming around a nest, like repair drones clustering around a damaged Firebird. Some of them are marked with red and rusty brown, but they don’t move like they’re injured. There are too many people wearing their loved ones’ blood.

  “McBride doesn’t have them organized yet.” Flynn speaks in my ear, grounding me before images of the massacre can cripple me again. “We might be able to use that confusion.”

  Even through a whisper, I can hear his heartbreak. He should be with his people. He should be helping them figure out what to do. And he can’t, because he’s the one they’re after. Because of me.

  I search the dark waters of the harbor until I spot what I’m looking for, floating a few yards from the near bank.

  “The boat I came in,” I whisper back, pointing to where it sits, out of reach of the lights in the harbor.

  A muscle stands out along his jaw. He doesn’t look at me, or at the boats. His eyes are on his people, aching for them. But then he nods, gaze snapping back toward the clusters of little boats moored along the docks.

  We wade through the water with painstaking slowness to avoid making telltale ripples, slower still as the water level rises to our knees, our hips, our waists. My training takes over, forcing exhausted muscles to function long enough for me to keep each movement careful and controlled. Stealth, I can do. It’s a task to focus on, something to keep my mind away from—from everything else.

  We’d be spotted if we climbed in now, so when we reach the boat, we each take one side of it and start walking it toward the gaping mouth of the harbor. I’m about to let my breath out in relief when a light swings across the surface of the water and blinds me.

  Flynn gasps a warning in Irish at the same time my muscles tense, reacting to the threat before my mind has time to process it. A shout echoes through the cavern, and the swarms of people head our way.

  For an instant, we move as one. I grab on to the gunwale, steadying the boat as Flynn hauls himself up into it—then, leaning his weight to the side, he reaches for my hand and drags me up after him. He’s fumbling with the motor. With the searchlight blinding me, our pursuers are little more than blurry shapes in my streaming eyes. Flynn jerks the ignition cable once, twice. The motor sputters to life, and he guns it too fast, briefly sending the nose of the boat skyward. A bullet punches through the gunwale, and shouts echo in the cavern. We both throw ourselves down into the bottom of the boat. Instinct takes over, and I lunge for him—for the gun he took from me.

>   I look up and see a fleeting ribbon of fear cross Flynn’s features. Fear—of me. He says nothing, not even silently, not even a mute appeal. But with that same flash of connection that got us working together to climb into the boat, I know what he’s seeing as he looks at me, still bloody, holding the weapon that killed half a dozen of his people. I feel sick, violated down to my bones by what I’ve done; I’d give anything, in this moment, for him to not look at me like that.

  We speed toward the exit, but the rebels have found boats themselves, and they’re in pursuit. Too close for us to lose them in the swamp beyond the harbor. Close enough to shoot us—and close enough to be shot at.

  Flynn jerks his eyes away from me as I lift my head, looking for a clear shot. I’m not killing any more people today, not when I’m me, myself. Not even if they’re shooting at me first. But they’ve got the searchlights pointed at us, and I can’t see.

  My eyes lift, seeking a break from the blinding white light in front of me, and I see the ceiling of the harbor. Rough stone, naturally striated and dripping with condensation. The Gleidel won’t touch the stone, but it’ll vaporize the water seeping through the cracks. I lift my gun and brace myself against the bench so I can shoot over Flynn’s head, placing myself in clear view of those firing at us. Flynn shouts at me, but I can’t hear him as my world narrows, focusing on my target.

  The Gleidel leaps in my hands and I throw myself down again before the rebels can get me in their sights. Its scream echoes back at me from the cavern, followed by the crack of stone split by steam, and then the roar of boulders striking the water. Then the frantic revving of motors thrown into reverse, as the rebels zigzag wildly in an effort to avoid the stones now jutting out of the shallow water at the mouth of the harbor.