“Oh, don’t look shocked. You know I can’t stand those empty shells of humans. And shit, Rain, you look way worse in the light.”
I face his angles. His body as lean as a knife.
“So do you,” I say.
His expression goes dangerous. “If you think I won’t punish you just because you’re sick, you’re wrong.”
“Try it.”
Johnny sweeps at me, knocks me into the bed quicker than I can blink. His hand strangles my neck, but I slam fists and legs and knees into him over and over. He grunts through my attack. That shot must have given my muscles some crazy strength, but the adrenaline isn’t enough; I still need air.
My limbs go slack, and he lets all his weight pin me. He releases my neck and takes both of my wrists in one hand.
“Can’t believe I’m enjoying this.” He moves his hips to tug his pants open. “You better not get me sick.”
Through the blinding halo of my fever, I feel hot tears sliding from my eyes to my hairline. “No!”
“Just when I was starting to get bored with you, you want to play the ‘force me’ game. Damn it, Rain, I love you.” He’s laughing, and his lips try to seal mine.
But I shake my head. I won’t do it. I won’t let him.
I won’t do it ever again.
“NO!” I slam my knee into his balls, making his body double up in pain, and my hand slips to the dose rod in my pocket. “Never again!” I click the needle out and jam it into his back. It could be black—the death dose. Or adrenaline red, in which case he’ll crush me with one hand. But I know which color I want it to be, and for once, the cosmos are on my side.
Johnny howls and falls to the floor. He grips his crotch, shrieking with pain. “You—you just—”
I check the setting, ready to see yellow.
It’s yellow.
I stand. “That should keep things limp.”
He tries to get up, but the pain keeps him on the floor. My sickness has come raging back, and I begin to slip off the bed, unable to catch myself on the satiny sheets. Johnny surges after me, and I run from the room, hearing him scream my name in a voice quivering with madness and aching and rage.
Breathing too fast, I can’t get enough oxygen out of the air, and when I reach the elevator, I stumble through the doors. I have to make it down to the docking bay. To Melee.
Ben and I have to get off this ship.
But I’ve only gone a floor or two when the screeching blare of the alarm brings me to my knees. This time, for once, there’s no doubt that I triggered the sirens. And now I’m trapped in the elevator . . . and the scarlet glow of my bracelet begins to flash like someone is doing something to it. Will he kill me now? Zap me?
No, he’ll want to do that in person.
The siren shuts off only to be replaced by the crimson lockdown light. I struggle to get back on my feet, but a strained voice comes over a loudspeaker and glues me to the spot.
“Red tag alert. All crew ordered to capture and seize. Kill her if she resists.” Johnny’s voice slips into a mocking tone. “You can hide, Rain, but now you can’t run.”
“Try and stop me!” I scream at the hidden speakers. I jam my fingers into the cracks between the elevator doors. I saw that crew member shimmy out of here my first day on the ship, and if he could do it, so can I.
I strain to force the massive doors apart and resort to giving myself another adrenaline shot. My heart throbs like it wants to explode, and my muscles tense beyond their limits . . . but I get the doors open a few inches and then a foot. I’m halfway between floors, and I have to crawl up and over to get through to the next level.
But it’s the first passenger level. I’m still three floors from Melee. . . .
I make a break for the stairs, dashing and falling down a full flight. I exit by the docking bay, wanting to run straight to Melee, but I can’t.
I’ve forgotten about Walker.
I haul open the wheeling lock on Walker’s airlock, slipping through the door in the moment that a pack of crew members runs down the catwalk behind me. I throw the door closed and find that I’m in my own personal hell. The airlock. Alone with Walker’s pod.
I can barely make out his thin face and gray skin through the clumps of frost, but even at a distance of only a few inches, my brother has never looked so distant. So gone. “Walker,” I whisper.
And that’s when I hear it. The roll of the clanks.
Is Johnny dumping me? I run back to the door, but I can’t leave Walker! I try to push his pod as the airlock doors echo a snap. And I freeze. And the moment seems to freeze with me. This is where I die. Walker and I together. Into the stars.
I close my eyes, listening to the last clanks, but a realization crashes over me: I don’t want to die. Not now. Not with Ben still on this ship and the Touched waiting helplessly on Stride. I’m not finished!
But I’ve waited too long. The airlock is about to fly open. . . .
I turn back to the door, and I would never have rolled it open in time, except that it is already opening. I leap out, and the door bangs shut. I have just enough time to spin and see the outer doors rip open, flinging my brother’s frozen prison into the Void.
Ben stands in the spot where he slammed the door behind me. “Rain . . . I’m—”
Crew members yell, cutting him off. They’re coming at us down the catwalk.
His hand finds mine and we run to Melee. He shuts the door and locks it, and I don’t know if it’s been five seconds or five years but I’m on the ground. Everything has gone wobbly, like my whole existence is made out of the ghostly strings of the wormhole, and I’m only now seeing them.
Walker is gone!
A thought occurs slow and strong. There are no real colors after all, just ash against a very black universe.
“Walker is gone!”
“What in hell happened?” Ben leans over me, but his face and the ship behind him begin to shake violently along with my vision. “Rain, what’s wrong with you? Are you—you’re having a seizure!” Clanking and bashing echoes through the hull, and Ben shakes me. “They’re going to cut their way into the ship to get at us, Rain. I need you to get up. We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”
“Exit strategy,” I say. “Nothing left to lose.”
“Are you sure?”
The banging on the hull stops and Johnny’s voice calls out. “I know you’re in there with your love toy, Rain. Enjoy your last moments because I’m going to crack this ship in half, slit his throat, and drown you in his blood.”
“Nothing to lose,” Ben agrees.
He jumps into his captain’s chair, and his fingers fly over the command panel. Within seconds, the whole vessel vibrates with the sound of whirling engines. I picture the crew members jumping away from the ship, realizing that we’re about to blast ourselves against the wall. Maybe Johnny fleeing for his miserable life.
I struggle to my feet and hold the back of Ben’s chair. Maybe we’re about to die. The least I can do is go out standing.
Ben grips the controls but doesn’t move them. “I don’t think I can—” He never gets to finish because I grab his hands, throwing the steering forward. The engines strain on the chain net for just a moment before we’re slingshot into the side of Imreas. . . .
And my body explodes backward.
“Get up, Rain!” Ben yells. “Get up! You have to see this!”
I’m nailed to the floor, but somehow, I manage to lift my head. Ben stands before the cracked front window of Melee, and beyond, three ship-shaped fish swim before the wink of distant stars. “Those’re big fish.”
“What in hell are you talking about?” Ben jabs a finger toward the corner of the windshield where the smallest fish floats on its side with a hole through its guts. “That’s Imreas! We took out the whole lower docking level. She’s a sitting duck!”
“Poor duckfish.”
Ben points to the two even bigger ship-shaped fish on the other side. “And THAT is Holm
es—my uncle’s ship—right there behind Stride. We’re saved! They’ll come pick us up before they track Leland, and Johnny isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.”
He swings out of his chair and picks me up, squeezing me in his arms. “We’ve got some leaks, but we’ve got at least a few hours. I’ve already messaged Holmes. They should pick us up and . . . Rain”—his voice falls—“you’re burning up.”
“S’those damned fish,” I slur. “Bitme.”
Ben turns me by the shoulders. “What happened to you?”
“Should they be leaving?” I point out the windshield at the large fish that looks like Stride. Its engines have swollen to a brilliant blue, and it blasts away. Within seconds, the one behind it does the same.
“They left us!” Ben’s voice digs into my skull like a nail. “My uncle left us!”
“Stupid fish.” I pat his shoulder, my body collapsing inch by inch. “Poor us.” My eyes close against me.
“Poor Walker.”
CHAPTER
30
The Void was a dream.
But when I broke into it, I found a nightmare, and then another nightmare within the first. And then another . . .
I burn from the inside, my veins aflame, and I’m only aware of Ben’s occasional yell. His mouth lowers over mine again and again, giving me breath that I do not want.
At some point, my eyes open, and I’m beneath a cascade in a white world. Water streams over me—water that hits me cool, then steams from my skin. Ben’s hair drips onto my nose as he speaks meaningless words that can’t beat the rush of the downpour. He looks so scared, and I want to calm him, but I slip into the dark instead.
I crack into another layer of the nightmare and find my little brother waiting. He squats on an endless black canvas, his elbows propped on his knees and his green eyes blaring. So after all that, you still lost me, he says.
No! I tell him, but I don’t have lips to make words. Or eyes.
I’m completely without a body.
And that’s because I gave it away a long, long time ago.
A constant wheeze—the sound of air leaving. It reminds me of Walker’s breaths at the bottom of the pool, which were so nearly his last.
Maybe these are mine.
I open my eyes, and the noise grows louder. It’s coming through the hull—the leak of our air sliding through the cracks of Melee. I push myself up; my head feels like it’s been cracked in pieces and then glued hastily back together. Ben is asleep beside me. His cheek rests on his folded forearms on the edge of the bunk, his body curled on the floor.
I get up without disturbing him and take shaky steps until I drop in the captain’s chair. Outside the cracked windshield, the Void dances, showing off its gossamer strings, and in the near distance, the profile of Imreas issues some kind of gas through its punctured docking bay.
We did that, I sort of remember. I rub my aching head.
We broke through. And that fish that bit me threw my body into some kind of tailspin fever. There’s a new bandage on my arm along with one at my elbow. So Ben must have given me some of his special Mec blood. Is that what saved me?
I pull at the foreign bulkiness of my clothes. I’m wearing one of Ben’s shirts and a pair of his pants. So he redressed me . . . but he didn’t strip me of the silver bracelet. My wrist glows scarlet even though we have drifted far away from its source.
How could everything go so wrong? The Touched left in the hands of that Leland . . . Johnny trying to rape me—and then kill me? And the K-Force leaving us here to die . . . and Walker.
What have I done?
I gasp so loud that Ben wakes with a start. “I lost him, Ben! After everything, I lost him!”
He rubs his eyes with the back of one hand. “Welcome to the land of the living, Rain.” He gets to his feet, shuffling as though each boot is filled with concrete. He leans against the control panel. “What do you remember?”
“My brother!”
“Out the airlock, just like you were about to be. I still can’t believe I got to you in time. I was in the engine room when I heard Johnny’s orders over the speakers.” He shakes his head. “I’ve never been so scared. But I knew where I could find you. I knew you’d be with him.”
I begin to cry, turning away from him so that I don’t have to face his slow, hopeless sort of tone. Outside the window, the image of Imreas gets a little closer. But before it—only a stone’s throw away—something else. Something like a rectangular box.
“Ben! It’s Walker! Look! It’s Walker!” I jump up. “Can we get to him?”
Ben doesn’t say anything.
“You’ve got to have like a space suit in here. You can just send me out there and I’ll try to grab him. It’ll work!”
He looks away. “All the storage compartments are leaking. We’re lucky we have air. For now. We can’t open any doors. It’d be over in a heartbeat. Crumpled like a hollow shell.”
I turn back to Walker. He’s so close, but then, he’s never been so unreachable. I always thought of that pod as his prison, but the truth is that it has been his casket since the moment the lid closed.
He’s become a fading face. A memory like the rest of my family. My breath is stinging fast as my longing for him eclipses the way I miss my father, only to swell bigger than my body, than the Void. Than the entire known universe.
It’s too much and it’s all at once, and then—it’s gone.
I stop crying, feeling very, very cold. Something clicks in my brain, and I can’t spare one thought for my little brother. Not one. Not now. “Okay,” I say stiffly. Move forward. Keep going, I tell myself. I’ve got to keep going.
“Rain, it’s a shock, I know, but we tried. He knows how hard you tried.”
I don’t hear him; I finger my bracelet. Time to get this damned thing off. I pat my pants down, looking for the glass plate with Johnny’s print, but only find Ben’s deep pockets. “Where are my clothes?”
He squints at me for a long moment before pointing to the shower. I cross to the tiny bathroom, finding my clothes jumbled in a wet heap at the bottom of the shower. Clumpy bits of paper are stuck to my shirt, and it takes me a minute to realize that they’re the remains of Lo’s picture. So I couldn’t even save that much.
I sort through my things until I find the glass plate, but it’s cracked in half.
“No!”
“What?” Ben calls from where he’s collapsed on the bunk.
I return to his side, looking down at him. “What happened when I got onboard? How did this break?”
He shuffles up on one elbow. “Let’s see. It could have broken while you were running amok under the alarm on Imreas. Or when you had a seizure on the floor. Or when you slammed against the back wall when we broke through the side of a starship. Or—”
“Okay already.”
His voice rises over mine. “Or how about when I had to hold you in the shower to keep that fever from cooking your brain?”
I blink, trying to remember the last part. “You took me in the shower?”
“And gave you CPR and restarted your heart twice and gave you about a gallon of my blood.” He waves his arm at me where the crease in his elbow is now bandaged. “I’ve never met anyone so determined to die.” He falls back on the bunk, and I sit next to him.
“Thank you.” I touch his arm, wanting him to reach for me, but he doesn’t.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t remember much after I dosed Johnny with Limpicilin.”
He laughs hollowly. “Of course you did! Wow. Why else would he have gone so psychotic? Speaking of which”—he says as he pulls the dose rod from his pocket—“you never get one of these again. Do you have any idea how much adrenaline you shot into yourself?”
“I had to keep going,” I say.
“Your heart almost exploded. And what in hell bit you? The antibodies in my blood were barely strong enough to control the poison.”
“It was Leland’s weird fish. I hid your com
in the tank right on his command deck. I figured it would be an unlikely spot to be searched.”
“It must have worked. The K-Force took off after Leland, tracking that frequency, no doubt.” His voice drops to a new low. “They left us here to run out of air or become Johnny’s playthings. I can’t believe it. I can’t.”
I cross to the windshield. “But Imreas seems far away. Isn’t that a good thing? And wouldn’t it be smarter for Johnny to turn tail and run when he’s fixed up?”
“You know that Johnny will come for us. He’s out there right now frothing at the mouth as he watches our leaking ship.” Ben shuffles out of the bunk and stretches his arms over his head. “Besides, we have no engines. We burnt them out on escape. So when he’s ready, all he has to do is swing by and pick us up. If we haven’t asphyxiated by then.”
“So we’re just waiting?” I begin to pace around the small ship. “We’re just waiting for Johnny to get patched up and then that’s it?”
“Pretty much.” He rubs his scalp, sending his hair every which way.
“I hate waiting,” I say.
“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” he asks. I finish my pace around the command area and look at his arms held out, palms up—a sort of “I give up” with a hint of an invitation. “If we wanted to be smart, we would sit still and breathe as shallowly as possible, but that might just make it so that we live long enough for him to capture us.”
I shake my head. “No. We have to do something. He can’t win everything. He doesn’t get to kill you and Walker. He doesn’t get to have me over and over. . . .” I let the words fall. “He doesn’t get to win.”
His blue eyes catch on mine in such a way that I look to his mouth. His full lips. “Okay,” he says slowly.
And that’s all it takes.
We fly at each other like magnets. Ben kisses me hard, and my hands pull through his hair while he presses my whole body against his. This is nothing like the passion in the lake. This has gone wild. We steal each other’s breath, and I tug his shirt over his head.
The Color of Rain Page 24