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Maker Space Page 34

by Spangler, K. B.


  “Did they ever admit what happened to him?”

  “No. But the CID has kept his story alive. His, and hundreds like his.”

  Jason was shocked. “This happened to hundreds of soldiers?”

  “Same basic story, plenty of changes to the setting, characters, plot… If it had just been Rothbauer, we probably could have gotten the Army to move, but with so many who were hurt, or raped, or killed… I personally worked a dozen cases like his. Public pressure works best when it’s focused on one cause. There were just too many causes, too many victims…

  “But we did get them to stop lying to us,” she said, and now she was pretty sure she wasn’t talking to Jason any more. “It’s not perfect—they still send us off to die—but now they have to tell us why. If we keep at it, if we keep pushing back, we’ll hold them accountable for things like this, too.

  “That’s why we remember Rothbauer’s name,” she finished, her mental voice soft.

  “You told his father you used to be CID.” It wasn’t a question: Jason had figured out why Howard Rothbauer had taken a bullet for her.

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “He must have known how we fought for his son. When we were trapped in the stairwell, he kept saying he didn’t know it would ‘be like this.’ I thought he meant he had never expected a riot to be as bad as it was. I didn’t realize he was saying he was responsible for it.”

  They watched Rothbauer’s chest rise and fall with the aid of the ventilator.

  After a few moments, Jason asked, “What do we do?”

  She reached out through her implant to caress the IV morphine drip running into the vein on Rothbauer’s arm.

  “No!” Jason was still holding her hand, and his panic leapt within her. “Don’t!”

  Rachel gently pulled his mind into her perspective. “Look at him” she told Jason. She focused her attention on the shape on the bed, and brought the other Agent into the emotional spectrum. “You see that red? You see how he’s nothing but red? That’s all pain,” she explained. “There’s no soul left in him. No identity. No sense of self. He’s never coming back, and what’s left of him is suffering.”

  “This isn’t your decision to make.”

  “This isn’t something to decide,” she said. “This is what’s right.”

  “This is what’s right to you,” Jason said. “But our faces are on the security feed. If he dies through spontaneous equipment failure, they’ll come after OACET.”

  Fuck, she thought.

  Jason heard her, and his anxiety eased as she took her mind away from the morphine dispenser. He looked back at the soldier on the bed, and his conversational colors wove in and out of themselves as he weighed the options.

  “Not while we’re here,” he decided. “And not for at least a month, until they can’t connect us to it.”

  She laughed, sharp and cruel. “Your idea of mercy sucks.”

  He was still sharing her perspective, and he closed his eyes so he could see Rothbauer. “I know.”

  After a moment, he asked, “What do we do now?”

  Rachel didn’t answer him.

  “Rachel?”

  “It was a good plan, if you think about it,” she said. The numbness she had felt since the stairwell was fading as the shock wore off, and it was getting harder to ignore the pain. She wanted to go to the mansion and sleep within a cocoon of the collective for the next decade. “Sort of a… a subverted form of false flag terrorism.”

  “Yeah,” Jason sighed. “Make the public think the government staged an attack on its own people to justify its budget.”

  “And the public would demand greater transparency and oversight within the military,” Rachel finished. “Rothbauer could rationalize Gayle Street as the cost of the greater good.

  “Oh God,” she said aloud, and started giggling at last. “He would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those darned national security scandals!”

  The giggling was unsustainable; her ribs throbbed with each breath. Even with Jason carrying half of the load, it hurt too much. The fit burned itself out almost immediately, and she slumped against the wall.

  “So,” she asked him. “What do we do?”

  And then Jason’s eyes went wide and his colors went white, and she knew he understood why she had brought him. Not Santino, who could reason his way through any ethical quagmire and still come out on the side of a passive good. And definitely not Phil, who didn’t quite understand that this was a world in which blood was a commodity, and not always a precious one.

  “Oh, Rachel…” he whispered aloud.

  He started to pull his hand away, but she dug her fingers into his and pulled him close. “Do we let this happen?” she asked him, as quietly as she could, and out of the link to make sure no one else in the collective might hear. “It won’t come back on OACET—no one else will ever know how we put the pieces together.

  “And maybe things need to change. You saw those riots! The country can’t go on this way without breaking. Maybe it would be better to have a small break now and let some of the pressure escape, instead of allowing it to build so it explodes. Good things could happen. Legislation could be written,” she said, and then placed her hand against the window to Rothbauer’s room. “People might finally be held accountable.”

  “Why are you asking me? You don’t even like me!”

  “Because I know you can keep a secret,” she whispered back. “And this isn’t a black or white question. It’s a decision, but it’s too big for one person to make, and you’re the only other Agent who’s part of this who knows that the ends can sometimes justify the means.”

  She watched an ugly rainbow weave itself together within his conversational colors. Anxiety and anger, panic, fear… and excitement. Finally, Jason shook himself. “No.”

  “Why not?” she whispered back.

  “Because if I agreed to let this happen, it’d be to make Congress pay for what they did to us.”

  “That’s a pretty good reason.”

  “That’s a shit reason!” Jason snapped. “Rothbauer’s dad might have been doing it for revenge, too, but he was also doing it to avenge his son. If we’re going to let the country burn itself down, it should be for better reasons than to scratch our itch.”

  “Okay,” she said, and let Jason pull his hand out of hers. The full measure of pain rushed back into her; she grabbed the window sill to keep herself on her feet.

  “That’s it?” Jason asked, his colors an angry yellow-orange. “Just… okay?”

  Rachel shrugged. “That’s what I was thinking, too, but I needed to hear it from you.”

  She turned her back on Rothbauer and walked away, Jason stumbling after.

  They had almost finished the hour-long drive back to the mansion before he said anything. “There’s no guarantee.”

  “Hm?” She had shut down the emotional spectrum once they left the hospital, and Jason couldn’t drive while nursing phantom pain. With emotions off and their link closed, Jason had turned into a mystery.

  “I came up with a better reason.”

  Rachel kept the grin off of her face. “Which is?”

  “If we did let it happen—let the country blow off steam, that is—there’s no guarantee the right people would go down. The fallout would be random.”

  “Well, yeah.” Rachel was surprised it had taken him this long to think it through. “That’s what war is.”

  His head snapped towards her, and she didn’t need any cyborg tricks to feel the fresh wave of disgust as it rolled off of him.

  “Jason,” she said, as she sighed aloud. “You realize you and I are already at war, right?”

  “With each other?”

  “No, idiot. OACET is at war. It’s us versus them. Mulcahy thinks it’ll get better if we keep working at it… I don’t know about that. He might be right—I hope he’s right!—but if he is, it’ll be a long time before we stop fighting.

  “I do know everything we do now is tactical. S
trategic. Because if we fuck up, they’ll pull us down. Do you agree?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are your limits on what you’d do to keep us safe?”

  He didn’t answer, but the lines of his face and body softened.

  “We don’t need to fight Rothbauer’s war for him,” Rachel said. “We could let it go until it burns itself out. And after that, we could probably turn what he did to our advantage, maybe discover that one critical piece of evidence that no one else found—”

  “He died in front of you, so it’d be plausible if you started digging into his history.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “We’d be heroes. OACET put the pieces together and discovered who was responsible for Gayle Street when nobody else could.”

  “But?”

  “But I’d rather not fight more than one war at once,” she admitted. “OACET’s already working with limited resources, and all of our existing plans hinge on knowing who the key players are. Tactically, it’s safer to turn Rothbauer in, and use him to prove that Homeland wasn’t responsible. What happened on Gayle Street was home-grown domestic terrorism, plain and simple.”

  “Yeah,” Jason sighed, as he turned onto the mansion’s front driveway. “You ever think you’d get to this point in life? Plotting whether or not to go through with a minor coup d’état?”

  “Honestly? Yes,” she said. “But I thought I’d have been appointed Secretary of Defense first.”

  He stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Mostly. Suppressing Rothbauer’s involvement and letting the riots burn themselves out might not work, anyhow. I’ll bet our team is probably already done sifting through Rothbauer’s office, and if I know Santino, he’s already found what he needs to wrap this mess up.”

  “Not what I meant,” Jason said. When she smiled at him, he shook his head and sighed.

  “Can you brief Administration?” she asked him. “I’m really starting to hurt. Where I fall, that’s where I shall be buried.”

  “What?”

  “It’s from Robin Hood, sort of… The arrow and the grave?” Jason stared at her blankly. “Never mind,” she said. “Just tell them about the connection between Gayle Street and Rothbauer once I pass out. And call Santino? Our team needs the same information.”

  He nodded.

  The front gates were locked, but swung open before either she or Jason could ping them; someone was waiting for them.

  Many someones, actually: Rachel felt a large number of the collective standing by the curve of the driveway. When the car stopped, she stepped out and into Josh’s arms.

  “If you hug me right now, I will shoot you,” she warned him.

  “I know,” he assured her.

  The others surrounded her and took the pain away. She flipped on the emotional spectrum to see if they could bear it, and found herself immersed within that same odd teal.

  Oh, she realized, as her heart broke a little. Teal means family.

  They waited for Jason, and then they all went down to the skull cellar together.

  The medical lab was filled to capacity. Jenny Davies and the other physicians were scrambling to keep up with the damage; even Hope Blackwell was there, stitching up a long gash on an Agent’s arm. Every member of OACET who had been involved in the riots seemed to have been injured in some way or another. These injuries were mostly minor, but four out of the five hospital beds in the back were occupied, and Rachel had a sneaking suspicion she knew why that fifth bed was still empty.

  Jenny glided up, all professional whites, and assessed Rachel with a hawk’s eye. “Three cracked ribs, internal bruising, distal radius and metacarpal fractures… Good, I can finally put you in a proper cast.

  “Take a shower,” Jenny said to her. “Josh, Jason, go with her, and make sure you scrub the blood out of her hair. I’m not treating her like this.”

  The three of them made their way to the community bathroom. Phil was already there, half-dressed and with bruises down the left side of his body.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “You should see the other Buick,” he replied, and came over to help her out of her jacket.

  The back of his knuckles brushed against her bare arm, and she felt love, belonging, relief... The tension Rachel hadn’t known she was carrying vanished as she learned the sourness between them was gone.

  The four of them stripped and showered. It might have been somewhat awkward for Rachel if Josh hadn’t been there: as he was, and as he had recently gone to Aspen with seven members of the U.S. women’s ski team, it was easy for her to get lost in his stories instead of letting her prudish nature fret itself sick. By the time he got to the part about his underwear and the wild elk, she was clean, dry, and the shared pain from Rachel’s laughter had them all begging Josh to stop.

  They raided the community closet, and shuffled back to the medical lab in ill-fitting clothes. Rachel was wearing an old t-shirt of Mako’s, and the hem hit at her knees. When they reached the lab, Jenny pointed wordlessly at the empty hospital bed in the back room. The men helped Rachel into the bed, Josh gave her a kiss on her forehead, and they finally let her rest.

  She flipped off the visual spectrum, and let herself float within the warmth of the collective.

  Clean sheets and family, she thought. Is there anything better?

  “Not that I’ve found,” replied Patrick Mulcahy.

  She jumped as she turned visuals back on: Mulcahy was looming over her.

  “Shit! Sorry,” she said, and tried to stand.

  He put a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Don’t,” he said. “I just came by to thank you.”

  She didn’t need the emotional spectrum to know that was a white lie; he was multitasking, his own fresh bandages hidden under his shirt.

  “Thank me?” she asked, surprised he already knew: Jason must have flown through the debriefing.

  “Do you know who you rescued?”

  “Res—Oh, right. Bolden, the Lexus dude.”

  “You mean, Deputy Assistant Director Franklin P. Bolden, from the Department of Homeland Security.”

  She couldn’t keep herself from chuckling. A Deputy Assistant Director was almost as high up the bureaucratic food chain as it got. “I did not plan that,” she promised.

  “I know. If you had, I’d be giving you a bonus,” he said. She flipped emotions on, and saw he was smiling.

  “Out.” Jenny Davies appeared, brandishing a pair of medical shears at Mulcahy.

  “Jenny—”

  “Patrick? Tonight, she’s my patient. Out.”

  Mulcahy nodded. “Heal fast, Penguin,” he said to Rachel, and turned to leave.

  “Oh, Mulcahy?” Rachel called. “I also solved the Gayle Street bombings. Jason has the details.”

  He didn’t bother to turn back as he left the room, but she saw him cover his mouth with a hand as he turned a vivid purple, and dropped out of the link so the others wouldn’t feel him roar with astonished silent laughter.

  Jenny sighed. “Did you really learn what happened on Gayle Street?”

  “Yeah,” Rachel replied. “I think so. I feel like there’s something I missed, but it’ll come.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She did. The horror of what the Rothbauers had endured had been locked away in the back of her mind since she and Jason arrived at the mansion, and it came flooding out in the telling. While she spoke, Jenny poked and prodded, cutting off the old thermoplastic cast to set Rachel’s wrist and rewrap it in cotton, and coaxing her out of Mako’s comfy shirt to tape up her ribs. The only time Jenny faltered in her work was when Rachel mentioned the extent of Keith Rothbauer’s phosphorus burns, and Jenny’s professional whites gave way to a nauseated green.

  When Rachel reached the end, she realized she was fading, her head rolling down as she tried to stay awake. “Not exactly a bedtime story,” she said to Jenny. “I think it’s time for you to dope me up so I can go offline.”

 
; “Adrenaline crash,” Jenny said, pulling the sheets over Rachel’s new hospital gown. “And I’m not doping you. Activate the biofeedback autoscript, and tell the timer it needs to keep you under for eight hours. It’ll knock you out, but you’ll stay online so we can manage your pain.”

  She was too tired to argue, but not to barter. “If the autoscript doesn’t work, then can I get some drugs?”

  “Yes, Rachel. If the autoscript doesn’t work, I promise I will personally dope you into oblivion.”

  “Good,” Rachel said, and summoned her newest script. “Ready?” she asked Jenny. Her eyes were already heavy.

  “One last thing,” Jenny said, brushing Rachel’s short hair behind her ear with the back of her fingers. The familiar sense of Jenny’s love and strength crossed into her, and she heard Jenny ask, “You said you were nearly shot?”

  “Yeah?” Rachel replied, holding the autoscript lightly within her mind.

  “You didn’t run.”

  It took Rachel a moment, and then she understood. “Yeah,” she said, smiling, as the autoscript carried her away.

  TWENTY-THREE

  SHE AWOKE A FEW HOURS after dawn, her good hand clasped firmly in Shawn’s. The room was dark, the only light coming from the low glow of the wine fridge and from the tiny reading light dangling over Shawn’s head. If she’d had her old eyesight, she might not have even noticed that Shawn was wearing an old football jersey but was completely naked from the waist down.

  Shawn must have felt her wake; he leaned back and gave her a wide grin. Combined with the reading light bobbing around on its suspension wire, the grin gave Shawn an eerie similarity to an anglerfish.

  “Hello, Shawn,” she said.

  “Hello, Rachel! I’m supposed to tell Jenny when you wake up!”

  “Thank you,” she said. The cotton wrapping on her left hand had been swallowed up by an old-fashioned plaster behemoth of a cast. There was writing on it: Rachel flipped frequencies to read STOP FUCKING AROUND!!! in thick block letters an inch tall. At the foot of her bed was a canvas sling the right size and shape to cover the cast: Jenny had finally found a way to immobilize Rachel’s hand while she was at work.

 

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