The Color of Rain

by Cori McCarthy

  He takes my hand. “They’re not used to seeing non-Mecs on their ship, but they’re friendly.”

  A Mec approaches from the opposite way, resembling an older, trim-bearded Ben. His mouth is stern but his eyes have a kind glint to them. “Rain, it’s good to see you up and walking. I’m Keven.”

  “My uncle,” Ben adds. “He’s been looking in on you.”

  Keven holds out his hand. “We owe you. Never would have brought down that son of a bitch without you, or so Ben tells it.”

  I release Ben’s hand and shake Keven’s. I find that I don’t know what to say. The last thing I want to do is bring up the subject of Johnny or my status on Imreas, but before I can say anything, the whole ship wavers beneath my legs, and I have to grip Ben’s arm to stay on my feet. My heart hammers like we’re under attack. “What was that?”

  “We’ve reached the end of the Void,” Keven says. “That’s what it feels like to slow down.”

  “We’re there?” I ask. “Really?”

  “Had to happen sometime.” Keven claps Ben on the shoulder. “Well, I better make sure we don’t crash into anything in Edge space. Keep her comfortable, Benson.” He continues down the hallway, and I turn to Ben.

  “Benson?”

  “Yeah.” His cheeks pink. “You can pretend you didn’t hear that.”

  “Sure thing . . . Benson.” I swallow a small laugh, and he knocks his elbow into mine. “He’s not as harsh as you made him out to be.”

  Ben watches his uncle turn out of sight. “He feels guilty about almost leaving us to die. He didn’t even know we were alive in Melee until we sent that second transmission. And he’s changed. Something happened while I was gone, and I haven’t sorted through it yet. He says that he thought he lost me for a while.”

  I remember the weeks on Imreas when I was Johnny’s Scarlet Siren . . . the weeks I spent wondering if Johnny had actually let Ben live after our stunt on Entra, too terrified to ask. I take Ben’s hand, but his fingers adjust and readjust around mine. All the while, I feel the ship moving underfoot.

  Slowing.

  “I have to warn you about Walker, Rain. I wasn’t lying when I said that we could help him. I promise I wasn’t . . . but . . .”

  Ben touches the wall and a doorway slides open in the middle of the glass.

  The room is more complicated than the one I woke in. Chirping machines crowd most of the free space and a control screen full of scrolling information covers one wall, but the most complicated thing is my brother lying on a bed beneath a host of wires.

  His chest moves up and down.

  Breathing.

  CHAPTER

  33

  I step toward him, but the closer I am to Walker, the worse he looks. There’s something very wrong in the slack lines of his face. Something more vacant than the widest eyes of the Touched.

  “We unfroze him and got his circulatory system working. He needed a new heart, but that wasn’t the hard part.” Despite his incredible words, Ben sounds depressed. He takes most of the wires off of my brother’s scalp, and I reach out for Walker without touching him.

  “It didn’t work,” I murmur. My brother’s been scrubbed clean, and his cheeks have a hint of pink in them, but he’s not behind them. “He’s gone.”

  Ben taps a few things on the control panel. “He’s brain dead. We’ve tried everything, but there was so much damage and that disease kept stripping his neural net even when he was frozen.” His eyes are rimmed with an exhausted red. “But we haven’t given up.”

  The machines tick and chirp, and I close my eyes. “You can’t remake his brain.”

  “Not his memories, but maybe if . . .” Ben keeps talking, but no matter what he says, I can’t hear him anymore.

  I sit on the foot of my brother’s bed and look away. “I need some time. Please.”

  Ben leaves, and I curl up beside Walker’s small body. He lies beneath a screen of wires while a clear tube pumps air through his neck and into his chest in a steady rhythm. Every piece of him is smaller than I remember: his nose, his chin, his bony chest.

  Tears swell until I can’t see him. “Why did you have to be so ready?” I touch his cheek. “Why was it so easy for you to leave?”

  He answers with silence, and I close my eyes and press my face to the robotic up-and-down motion of his chest. I don’t want to remember our last moment together, but like so many leaden memories, it sinks through my consciousness.

  Walker on the diving board . . . “Remember when Dad used to call me Night Bird?”

  I begin to shudder so hard that his body shakes with me. I squeeze my eyes, and my mind falls into a much older memory of being so young, kneeling by our apartment window. Behind me, Jeremy reads to himself, mouthing words. By the kitchen table, my mother cuddles Walker’s wiggly baby body. He makes the worst sort of chirping noises, and I can’t concentrate on my lesson.

  My dad chuckles. “Night Bird. That’s what we’ll call the little squawker.” He pinches my chin and points to the fog on the window glass. “Now, what’s your letter?”

  I draw an R into the condensation, and then add a W. “And that’s our letter,” I tell him.

  My tears soak into the gown over Walker’s chest. I know what I have to do, but my fingers are slow to disconnect my last link to the family who made me so damn special. Still, the wires fall away one by one until he is only joined to this life through the tube at his throat.

  I ache not only for Walker but also for the sense of home that lives within him—and within the memory of Jeremy, my mom and dad. I wasn’t ready to lose them, but then, maybe no one ever feels ready. Maybe grief is like running the Void. You never notice that you’re in it until you’re coming to the end.

  “Go on then, Night Bird.” I detach the tube from his neck.

  The last of his air slides from his lips like a tiny sigh, and I hold my brother’s body, and I weep.

  It’s still night when I bring the sheet over Walker’s head and kiss his lips through the soft material. I cried myself dry, but relief comes like a slow tide, coating my drained courage.

  I twist my red bracelet, noticing for the first time that I’ve developed blisters beneath the metal, and some of those blisters have already hardened into calluses. “Can’t run between the raindrops,” I say, remembering my dad’s, and ultimately Walker’s, warning for me. My brother’s hand slips out from beneath the sheet, and I squeeze it.

  He’s already growing cool.

  I leave the room without having anywhere to go. Where now? What do I have left? I don’t even know my way around this weird, all-white ship, but my eyes catch on a piece of paper stuck to the wall. In Ben’s bold letters, it reads:

  Rain →

  I follow the sign, turning right. At the end of the hall, another note has me turning left. And then another right at the end of that one. The signs lead me to a wide room where several uniformed Mecs stand at posts before a variety of control stations, a command deck very unlike Imreas’s.

  I glance around the room and find Ben’s uncle beckoning to me.

  “You can have a seat.” Keven motions to a bench. “Benson took the cab over to Imreas. He said he’d meet you back here.”

  “He did what?” I almost shout.

  Keven raises his eyebrow. “Thought it was peculiar myself. He said he needed something, but I can’t figure out what. All the passengers are onboard Holmes until we reach the Edge, and as I understand it, they just about looted the place bare before we seized control of the ship.”

  I squeeze my elbows. “What could he need?”

  “This,” Ben says, appearing in the doorway. He tosses a small square of metal through the air. I catch it, and then almost drop it when I recognize Johnny’s silver lighter. “Or I should say, I needed what was on it.” Ben has a great smile on his face. He motions for me join him by the front of the room, away from his uncle and the other Mecs.

  He’s still grinning, but I can only think of Walker. After all I went t
hrough and all that Ben did to bring my brother back to me, I pulled the plug.

  “Ben, about Walker . . .”

  He smile sinks. “You said good-bye.”

  “I had to.” I want to reach out for him, but I glance at the wall, touching the cool glass instead. The room reminds me so much of Johnny’s command except for the view screen—and I find myself missing it.

  “How do you have a command deck without a window?” I say and gasp.

  The whole white wall listens and turns transparent, revealing the green and blue marbled surface of a beautiful planet. We’re so close to it that only a hint of star-speckled black edges the screen.

  “Oh!” I exclaim.

  “The Edge,” Ben says, his smile returning. He leans against the glass. “There were so many days when I thought that I would never see home again.” The joyful look in his eyes tugs on me as I realize that we’re over. If this truly is done, he will go his way, and I will have to find mine . . . whatever that may be.

  “You’ll go back to your family.” My throat grows a little tight on the words.

  “To my mom,” he says. He leans up from the window. “And you’re coming with me. She’ll love you.”

  I look down, twisting the terrible scarlet bracelet. “How’s that going to work, Ben? You going to say, ‘This is Rain. She was a prosti—’”

  “I’ll say, ‘This is Rain White.’ No qualifiers required.” He steps even closer, and I can’t make myself face him. “They’re granting you amnesty, Rain. It’s rare, but they . . . we, I guess, are so appreciative of what you did. You’ll be able to stay on the Edge, live there, and go to the university. You have choices now. You can do anything.”

  I almost laugh. “I can’t just start over. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Without Walker, I have nothing.”

  “If you can’t start over, start better.” He holds out a small frame of glass, and it takes me a moment to figure out what it is. The thumbprint device.

  I turn it over in my hand. “This was broken.”

  “I had a hell of a time rebuilding it. That’s why I had to go back to Imreas for the lighter. I needed something with Johnny’s print.” His voice falls. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

  I bring the frame to the bracelet, but my fingers tremble, and I can’t line up the plate with the clasp. “Can I help?” he asks, holding it over the lock but waiting for me to take the final step.

  I press my thumb over the glass, and the click takes forever, but when it comes, the metal circlet falls to the floor.

  Ben touches my blistered wrist. He digs a med disc out of his pocket. “Want me to fix that?”

  “No thanks.” I take the final step, closing the distance between us. “I’ll just heal the old-fashioned way.” I rest my head on his shoulder.

  Through the window, white clouds draw wispy lines along the swirling green and blue surface of the Edge. The green reminds me of Walker’s eyes, while the blue is so similar to the lights of the pulse engines high above the spacedocks on Earth City. Both colors make me smile.

  Ben slips an arm around my waist, his finger twisting into my belt loop, and all the while, his words sing through my thoughts: You have choices now. You can do anything.

  “‘Reck’d or unreck’d,’” I whisper, feeling those words for the first time. “‘Duly with love returns.’”

  Somewhere by my feet, the silver bracelet lies where it fell, finally devoid of its stained light. I press a curl of my hair against my lips, the color no longer feeling so damning. After all, red is more than lust and blood. It is the hue of the heart and the standing proof of my unique family.

  It is the signature of my hope.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, thank you . . .

  . . . To my husband, Christian, who enables all of my words, and my Maverick, for prodding me along in utero to write this book with not-so-gentle kicks.

  . . . To my loving parents, Mark and Joan, who encourage my writing dreams, and my brothers, Conor and Evan, who give me scores to write about.

  . . . To my best friends, Amy and Missy, who run up their phone bills with their support, as well as my brave and inspiring “little sister,” Julie.

  . . . To Karl Norton, who introduced me to Whitman, my literary gateway drug, and who then became my very first reader.

  . . . To Vermont College of Fine Arts, my Hogwarts, particularly my esteemed advisors and my literary family, the Bat Poets.

  . . . To three brilliant readers/writers/friends, Kelly Barson, Anna Drury, and Amy Rose Capetta, as well as Tirzah Price, for long coffee chats and blog support.

  . . . To my agent, Sarah Davies, who fought for this edgy premise, and my editor, Lisa Cheng, for giving me the strength to push this story to its finest edge.

  . . . And, finally, to the boy who taught my young heart to thunder and filled my universe with the most poignant rain.

  My words are for you, because of you, and always in gratitude of you.