This Shattered World

by Amie Kaufman

  After an interminable silence, the speakers give a tiny crackle, and light blossoms against my closed lids.

  “What?” The voice is surly, annoyed, sleepy.

  I open my eyes, and there he is. It’s dark on his end, like it is in my room now, but I can see him lit by the glow of his computer screen. The gloom makes him seem pale, ghostly.

  Despite the low light, he looks good. Better than I remember. He’s not wearing a shirt, and his dog tags are gone. He’s let his hair grow out, and there’s an ease about the set of his mouth I don’t remember being there before. Like he’s found whatever he was looking for—whatever any of us is looking for, in the trenches and the bunkers and the swamps.

  “Sir,” I manage, my throat suddenly going dry.

  His eyes open a little more, blinking in the light. “Lee?” He sits up a little straighter.

  A muffled, sleepy voice comes over my speakers—not his voice. “Tarver,” it says, petulant. “Come back to bed.” Someone else is in the room with him. Someone female.

  Merendsen glances over his shoulder, but his camera shows me only darkness beyond him. “Go back to sleep, Lilac.” Despite the brusque words, there’s a tenderness in his voice that, strangely, makes my heart constrict. I feel my face warming—I never would’ve expected to hear that tone from him. Suddenly, I wonder what I’m interrupting. He could be naked on the other side of the computer for all I know; the camera only shows him from the chest up.

  Then he turns back to me, frowning, and the tenderness is gone in favor of sleepy exasperation. “Lee, do you have any goddamn clue what time it is here?”

  I hadn’t thought to check the time differences. I hadn’t thought at all, beyond the desperate need to see a face I knew I could trust. “Sorry, sir.” He’s not military anymore, but I could never call him anything else.

  Now that he’s more awake, I can see confusion starting to blossom across his features. I can’t blame him. We haven’t served together in a year, haven’t spoken to each other in nine months.

  “What’s going on, Lee?”

  I hesitate, listening for sounds of life in the room behind him. I can hear none, but I’m all too aware of Roderick LaRoux’s daughter lying in Merendsen’s bed, hearing every word I say. “Is there another room you can pick up in?”

  Merendsen pauses. “She’s asleep. It’s okay.”

  I shake my head, swallowing, not daring to speak.

  Merendsen’s eyes are slightly downcast, staring at my face in his screen and not at his camera. I lift my own gaze to the pinhole above my screen so he can see my eyes.

  He doesn’t speak, but pushes away from the desk and gets to his feet. It turns out he is dressed, wearing drawstring pants that hang low on his hips, but I can tell I hauled him up out of bed. He leaves the immediate circle of the monitor light, and as the camera auto-adjusts, all I can see is a shadowy form crossing to the bed and leaning over it. I hear Lilac LaRoux make a whiny sound of protest, see a pair of arms reach up in an attempt to pull him down with her.

  Quiet conversation. Merendsen’s soft chuckle. A sigh of capitulation. Silence. Then the soft, unmistakable sound of their lips parting.

  He returns to the computer. “One sec.” There’s a jumble of noise and light, and I realize his computer’s a mobile unit, that he doesn’t have more than one, that he’s not somewhere with screens in every room.

  The jumble calms after a minute, and I see his face again. His camera blurs and refocuses, adjusting for a different level of light, and it turns out he’s outside. It’s night, the landscape beyond him silver and blue with moonlight. All I can see is a field of flowers.

  “Okay, Lee.” Merendsen takes one of those deep breaths I know is a bid for calm. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  My throat’s closed so tightly I can’t speak. He’s all at once so different and exactly the same that I feel an odd shyness creep over me that hasn’t touched me since before I left Verona.

  He leans forward. “Did you really call me in the middle of the night to stare at my bedhead?”

  That particular streak of humor is so familiar that my heart hurts. I shake my head again. “Sir—can I still trust you? What you told me when you were reassigned, does that still hold true?”

  Merendsen sobers. “Always, Lee.” His voice is firm, the voice I remember. The voice of a real leader. “Always, you hear me?”

  My vision swims as though I’m drowning, struggling to get enough air. “Your fiancée. How much do you know about her?”

  “I know more about her than anyone else does, Jubilee,” he responds, though his tone is cautious. His use of my full name is deliberate. He knows only my family called me that, knows the pain it causes—he’s testing me. Testing my resolve, testing how badly I need his help. “Why are you asking me about Lilac?”

  I lift my chin and gaze into the pinhole lens of my camera. “I need information about her father’s corporation.”

  “You want me to spy on my future father-in-law?”

  I try not to cringe; hearing the words now, I regret ever having called my old captain at all. “No, sir. I meant—”

  “Because Lilac and I have gotten very good at that.”

  My eyes snap to the screen, surprise robbing me of speech.

  “You don’t want to get involved with LaRoux Industries, Lee. Whatever you’re into, just…let it go. Fight your instincts and walk away.”

  “I can’t. People are dying, and I think it’s because of LRI. I had someone—but he’s gone now. It’s just me, sir. There’s no one else to chase this.”

  “Lee,” he says slowly, voice softening to match my own. “Where are you?”

  “Avon.”

  He doesn’t answer right away, but his expression shifts. Though I can’t understand why, there’s fear in his gaze. Concern. Somehow, across the millions of light-years between us, he’s seen the echo of what’s happened here in my face.

  “Avon?” he echoes finally, his voice rough. “You’re still on Avon?”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak. I feel like crying with relief. Until Flynn came into my life, I hadn’t cried since Verona. Now it feels as though I’d just been storing up the flood for this moment. But Merendsen’s the last man in the world I want to see me cry.

  He’s shaking his head. “Nobody lasts there more than a month or so—I barely lasted two.”

  “I’m okay,” I lie. “But their planetary review with the Council isn’t far off, and things are heating up here. And LaRoux Industries might be involved.”

  “What’s happening?”

  I want to tell him about the impossible disappearing base I saw with Flynn in the swamp, but the words refuse to form. “The Fury.” I start there instead. “It’s getting worse. Stronger.”

  “Get out of there,” he says instantly. “Leave. Request a transfer. Go AWOL if you have to.”

  “AWOL,” I echo, my voice halting. It feels as though the floor below me is heaving. “Sir, I don’t—”

  “You’re not wrong, Lee. About LaRoux.” Merendsen’s voice is grim, his eyes shadowed. “I saw documents that mentioned Avon, back on—around the time I met Lilac. I assumed his experiments there were long over, though. I thought we’d ended them.”

  “What experiments?”

  He hesitates, watching me in his screen, brows drawn. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says finally. “Lee, just hang on. I’m going to figure out a way to get there.”

  “No,” I reply, leaning closer to my screen as though he’ll hear me better. “Sir, I wasn’t asking you to come. The situation with the Fianna is too dangerous, and you’re a civilian now. I’m only looking for information we can bring to the higher-ups to get answers.”

  “I’m not going to sit here and wait to find out you’ve been quietly erased for asking the wrong questions.” Merendsen’s voice quickens, a rare display of intensity. He leans in too—we’re inches apart, if worlds away. “Some things I can’t say over a comm line, no
t even a secure one.”

  The relief at his response to my suspicions about LaRoux Industries is rapidly draining away, leaving a tight, cold dread in its place. What could be so secret—so much worse than the Fury, than spying on his father-in-law and admitting to having seen long-buried documents—that he’ll fly halfway across the galaxy to a war-torn planet to tell me?

  “I’ll be there,” he continues. “Transports don’t come here often, but I’ll figure something out. I’ll have to leave Lilac here—I can’t bring her into this again. There’s no telling what might happen.”

  I resist the urge to tell him that the last thing I want is for him to bring Lilac LaRoux here.

  He’s still talking. “Wait for me, will you? I’m serious, Captain. Don’t run off and do something Lee-ish until I get there.”

  I nod. “Yes, sir.”

  “You swear?”

  Bizarrely, Flynn’s face flashes in front of my eyes. It could be weeks before Merendsen hops a ship to get here—What if, against all odds, Flynn sends for me through Molly because he needs me? How can I promise to sit here and do nothing when the idiot’s life could be in danger?

  But then it strikes me: it’s not like me at all to think this way. In what universe would Captain Lee Chase risk life, limb, and the safety of her people for one exiled rebel and the planet he’s willing to die for?

  There’s nothing Lee-ish about any of this.

  I nod slowly, ignoring the sick feeling in my gut as I speak. “I swear not to do anything Lee-ish.”

  Merendsen eyes me, not trusting my hesitation. But then he nods and leans back. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  The monitor goes black, flashing the white text SESSION TERMINATED. I press against the keyboard, and the whole thing folds back up into my desk, noiselessly hiding itself away. As if nothing ever happened.

  I try not to think about what Flynn would say if he knew what I’d just done. In the morning I’ll leave him a message at Molly’s. I don’t have much to tell him, except that I might have a way forward soon. It won’t be enough. It could never be enough, and I keep imagining his grief, his frustration, his loathing of me and my world.

  I know he won’t get my message; I know he’s on the run and this base is the last place he’d return. But leaving word is solace, somehow. Hope. A sign I haven’t given up. That if he comes back…

  But he’s gone now. I’m alone.

  “Xiao jie, mei kan jian ni lai guo zher.”

  The voice stops her short—it’s been years since somebody spoke to her in her mother’s language. She turns to see an enormous, intimidating mountain of a man covered with tattoos standing behind the bar. It’s her first night off duty since she was transferred, and now she’s wishing she’d gone straight back to the barracks.

  “Sorry,” the girl shoots back automatically. “I don’t speak Mandarin.” It’s not a lie. She hasn’t spoken it since her parents’ deaths.

  “Right,” the bartender replies, his grin friendly, but knowing, like he can read her thoughts. “Well, I’m Molly. Welcome to Avon.”

  The girl can’t stop staring, too confused by how strange his friendly voice feels against the backdrop of tattoos and muscle.

  He laughs, as though he’s used to people misjudging him. For a moment he looks a little like her father, though they’ve nothing in common. “We’ve all got pasts,” he says, lifting an arm and indicating the tattoos, which seem to shift and change as she looks at them. “But here you get to choose what you hold onto.”

  THE PATROLS HAVE TRIPLED IN the last few days I’ve been hiding out in no-man’s-land, and I suspect every one of them has been issued a picture of the rebel who abducted Lee Chase from Molly Malone’s.

  What they don’t know is that sooner or later McBride and the Fianna will strike back in retaliation for Jubilee’s massacre—an act of war the military don’t even know took place—and when that happens, hunting for me will be the least of their priorities.

  I’ve been careful to keep on the move, never too close to the perimeter, never too far away. The military base is like a squat, sharp monster crouched on Avon’s horizon—Avon, a world of gently curved waterways and slow-moving clumps of algae. Against its foggy backdrop the prefab buildings are unnatural, made of right angles and rusted metal and plastene. I’ve always imagined the base like a scab needing picking away, full of booted feet treading the ground into bruise-colored slush. When I was little I always half imagined the scab would fall away one day and there’d be Avon again underneath, shiny and new and healed.

  I give it a wide berth before finding a place near solid ground to hide my boat. A half hour later, I’m slipping between two buildings on the outskirts of town, avoiding the searching eyes of the soldiers on guard duty.

  In the security footage from the bombing, there was a girl with Davin Quinn right before he used the detonator. I need to know if it was his daughter, Sofia. We played together as kids, and I think maybe, just maybe, she’ll trust me still. I have to find out if she knows anything about what turned a peaceful man like her father into a killer. What turned Jubilee into a killer. That question—and the image of Jubilee’s face, her eyes black like they were on the island, her features blank—has been my constant companion the last three days.

  The town is a grid of worn prefab buildings divided by dirt roads, street signs showing only numbers. Normally there’d be people about, but this place is mostly locked down. A combination of curfew and caution. I wish I could say they were only afraid of the military’s heavy hand, but more townspeople have been caught in the crossfire than anyone on my side would care to admit. I hurry past shuttered homes, head down, the collar of my borrowed jacket up to hide my profile. Clad in gray, I’m just one more shadow.

  A dog comes skittering past me, hurrying for home or some bolt-hole. I turn my head automatically to check the way it came from, and freeze. Something’s moving back there, something too large to be a dog. My heart kicks up a notch, and I force myself to move slow and smooth as I melt back toward the street beside me and the shelter of the buildings. That’s the key—no quick, jerky movements to draw the eye.

  There are three figures making their way up the street, and they’re not trodairí. They don’t step in time, beating Avon down beneath their feet. But they do move carefully, stealthily, and I recognize that movement an instant later: they’re Fianna. McBride leads the way, flanked by two others; one of them I don’t recognize, but I know at a glance who’s walking on his left. It’s Sean.

  I ease back against the wall of a house as they approach the crossroads, bowing my head so my gray coat blends with the walls—in the dark, holding still is my best chance.

  McBride stalks along like he owns the town, the other two close on his heels. He’s headed away from the base, toward the edge of town; whatever his business was here, he’s concluded it. Sean’s hood is drawn, but I can see his always laughing, smiling mouth—now a grim line, jaw squared. Without Fergal, without me, he has no one.

  I ache to reach out for him—I can imagine myself stepping forward, calling out—and I hold still, curling my hands to tight fists as the three of them disappear into the gloom. My heart tugs me after Sean, but I force myself to turn away. I came here for a reason, and if I want to help him—help all of them—I have to keep moving.

  I nearly step straight into the path of a trodairí squad. They’re still a block up, but with my mind squarely on my cousin, I spot them only seconds before crossing the street. Mentally cursing, I sink back into the shadows, watching as they approach. They move differently than the rebels, purposefully, and in that instant I understand they’re moving after the rebels. They’re following Sean and McBride.

  I stoop, groping around in the mud until my fingers close over a stone, small and slippery. In a quick movement I send it flying up the side street, withdrawing into the shadows as the trodairí change their course, abandoning the receding figures of the rebels to go after this newer, closer sound. It’s
all the head start I can give them, and I hope it’s enough.

  I slip away, ducking up the third street along and counting the houses until I reach Davin’s house. Sofia’s, now, though not for long. She’s not sixteen yet, not technically an adult. Odds are they’ll have her on the next transport leaving the spaceport. I square my shoulders and knock quietly, keeping an eye out for more soldiers on curfew patrol.

  It takes her a long time to answer—long enough that I know she must have been listening for the sound of my footsteps retreating. Then the door opens a crack to reveal a sliver of the girl I knew, slender and strawberry-blond. She sports a bandage that peeps out of the collar of her dress, and another encircling her wrist, and I’m reminded that the girl in the bombing footage was not far away when the explosion occurred. The pale skin of Avon’s sunless skies is ghostly on her, black shadows standing out beneath her eyes in exhausted half circles. Grief has hollowed her out.

  She barely looks at me, her eyes sliding away to rest on the muddy street. “Thank you,” she says wearily, her voice hoarse, “but I really don’t need any more food.” The door starts to shut.

  “Good,” I say, pulling my hands out of my pockets to show they’re empty. “Because I don’t have any. Sof, it’s me, Flynn. Let me in before someone sees.”

  Her gaze snaps into focus, lips parting in surprise, and for a heartbeat the grief is gone. There’s a code between the people like her family—the townies—and the Fianna. They might not be with us, but they turn the other way when we pass by, and tell the soldiers they didn’t see a thing. Not so secretly, plenty of them would like us to win, and though Davin was a cautious man, I’m desperately hoping the girl who used to steal books from the classroom and then spin fantastic lies to wriggle out of trouble has more fire in her. And that she has any of that fire left at all now.

  After a moment that stretches into forever, she leans out to look up and down the empty lane, then steps back to invite me in. The house is small, exactly like all the others in town. You can see Sofia’s little touches here and there—the bright red kettle on the stovetop, a strip of imported silk hanging on the wall. Otherwise the walls are painted the usual calming pale yellow, and the bland furniture is standard-issue. Her father’s waders still hang by the door, along with his testing kit. Before his new job in the base warehouse, Davin scooped samples for a living, bringing them back to the labs so the technicians could confirm that, as ever, Avon is missing most of the bacterial life she needs to become a proper world. The small table in the center of the room is piled high with dishes and pots, offerings left by neighbors and friends with no other way of showing their sympathy for Sofia’s loss.