by Rich Larson
Sneaking along behind an othermother and smashing the last few windows of her favorite rock target, an old place with panes that shattered like sugar brittle, cleared her head. As she headed back to the theater with a mismatch of cans and boxes, she decided she would act like nothing had happened at all, like she didn’t even remember it. Then she saw Wyatt walking into the entry, unslinging his backpack, and the big idiot smile was back like it had never left.
“Hey,” she said. “Long day at the office?” Stupid thing to say—her ears were heating up already.
Wyatt turned. “Hey, Vi,” he said, glancing at the bag in her hands. “Forage go smooth?”
“Smooth, yeah,” Violet said.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, some secret sexy look to pass between them, or a second-too-long hug, or something, but he only smiled and cocked his head for her to go in first.
“Going to talk to everyone in the theater,” he said. “Want to round them up?”
Violet rounded them up, interrupting the evening card game with a little less patience than usual, grabbing Alberto and Saif off the roof and sending Saif to get Quentin out of the bathroom. She knew Wyatt was right to act like nothing had happened at all, like he didn’t even remember it. Same thing she was doing. She just fucking hated it, that was all. When everyone was in the theater, squeezed up in the front rows, she sat two back.
Wyatt swung himself up on the stage, and everyone went quiet. “This whole time, they’ve been fucking with us,” he said. Nobody had to ask who he meant. “Treating us like lab rats,” he continued. “They locked us up and drugged us and put the Parasites in us. But now we finally have a card to play. We have one of them. And we can make the rest of them understand, for the first time, that we are not to be fucked with.” Wyatt’s eyes were hard as granite. “We have a way to send them a message.”
His words bounced around the theater, and everywhere Violet looked she saw teeth bared, eyes fixed, shaved heads nodding. She even felt it herself a bit, the adrenaline ache in her chest. Wyatt always had a way with words.
“We’ve got one of them now,” he repeated. “And we couldn’t have pulled this off without every single Lost Boy here. Who made the trap? Who sharpened the hooks and tied the cords? Who held the pod long enough for Bo to drop a tank on its big ugly head? We needed everyone, right? Everyone.”
Wyatt paused, scanning the room.
“I need all of you,” he said. “You’re my family. I killed my othermother, remember? We all did. We can’t go back to how it was. We can’t make the wasters human again. This is our family now.”
Violet felt a dart of ice up the back of her neck. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at everyone but her.
“And it’s more important than ever that we keep each other safe,” Wyatt continued. “That we don’t endanger our family. When we do things that endanger the family, there’s a consequence.” His eyes traveled up and down the row and landed on Elliot. “Elliot knows, don’t you, El?”
Elliot’s cheeks went red. He nodded.
Violet’s heart started to pound. Her Parasite flexed.
“No one person is more important than the all of us, right?” Wyatt said. “Even if it’s someone who should know better. Someone who should be a better example.”
He finally looked right at her, and Violet felt like she was crashing into cold water. Other heads started to turn. Gilly, eyes wide and hurt. Bree, boiling over with righteous fury. Bo, feigning anguish even though he’d been the one who snaked on her. Bo had told Wyatt. Bo had betrayed her. Violet felt a hot sick feeling in the pit of her. She stared at him until he looked away, shaking his head. Her hands were clenched hard enough to draw crescents of blood off her palms.
“Violet’s been taking care of a pair of wasters,” Wyatt said flatly. “She’s been sneaking back to her old house at night.” He blinked hard, looking off to the side for a moment, then back to her. “Aren’t we enough for you, Vi?”
Violet tried to hold her anger, tried to bore it right through the back of Bo’s shaved head. But she felt it slipping into fear, and the worst one, shame. Wyatt jerked his head, motioning for her. Feeling dazed, Violet got up. Her legs were trembling underneath her. She walked up to the edge of the stage, feeling the collected gaze on her back like a tightening vise. An eternity later she was standing in front of him. His stormy gray eyes were full of pity.
“They don’t love you,” Wyatt said, low enough that only Violet could hear. “We do.”
Violet realized she was ready to cry. It was building behind her eyes and sinuses like a mudslide. Maybe he was right. Maybe they’d only ever loved Ivan, or the idea of him. And even if the Lost Boys won, there would be no going back to how things were. Not for anyone, and especially not for her.
Wyatt put his hand on her arm, just above the elbow, warm, firm, forgiving. Violet took a shaky breath. She was ready to apologize to him, to everyone. Maybe she was even ready to forget the parents who couldn’t see her and never had. Wyatt loved her. That was way more than enough.
“Take your shirt off, Vi,” Wyatt said.
Violet stared, disbelieving.
“Your shirt,” Wyatt repeated.
Violet saw the length of electrical cord wrapped around his free hand. She traced up his lean arm, his perfect shoulder, to his unconcerned face. The theater was graveyard quiet, but Violet’s ears were roaring. She thought of all the times she’d imagined slowly undressing in front of him, seesawing her jeans down her hips, letting him help pull her shirt up over her head. All those stupid little fantasies. She thought of the feel of his lips on hers.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she choked.
“Consequences, Vi,” Wyatt said calmly, and she saw it creeping behind his eyes, the dark thing she knew came from sadness, from trauma. From the same kind of hurt she had. But Wyatt had done something different with his. She knew, with ice-cold clarity, that he was going to enjoy this. He was going to enjoy beating her like he’d enjoyed kissing her.
Wyatt’s grip on her arm tightened, hard enough to mark her skin. She stared at his hand. The fury came back in a white-hot flume. This, after the rooftop. This, maybe because of the rooftop.
“Let go of me,” she said.
Everyone was silent. Jon wasn’t here; he’d been sent off to watch the pod—Wyatt would have planned it that way. Jon was the only one who might have stood up to him. Violet stared at Wyatt’s hand, focusing on the shape of it, the muscle and tendon. Her teeth were clenched tight. Then, as he started to speak again, she shifted it.
There was a sharp wet crack and blood flicked into the air as mist. For a split second Wyatt’s face was drained white and there was nothing but raw meat and jagged bone where his forearm ended. Then his hand was back, but hanging crooked and swollen with pooled blood. It slid limply off her arm and she pulled away, feeling nauseous. Neither of them moved. Wyatt’s face was pale with shock as he slumped to one knee. None of the things she wanted to scream at him made it past her lips.
She turned and saw Gilly clutching tight to Bo’s arm, staring at her like she was an alien, or something new and worse. Bo looked shocked as the rest, mouth open, no sound coming out. Violet wanted to ask why he’d snaked. Why he’d wrecked everything for her. It had been so stupid to take him along with her. She couldn’t form the words, so she started to walk. The Lost Boys watched her as she stumbled up the aisle, all of them frozen in place. She seized her jacket with shaking hands.
“Bo!”
The sound of Wyatt’s voice made Violet look back, even knowing she shouldn’t. He was standing upright again, his wrecked hand dangling at one side. His face was contorted but his next order came perfectly clear:
“Don’t let him leave.”
Him. The one little word carved Violet open and scooped her hollow. She swayed there for a second, staring back in shock, unwilling to believe it. But Wyatt’s lips were tugged back off a savage smile and she knew she’d heard right.
&n
bsp; Violet didn’t wait for Bo to shake Gilly off and come after her like a good little Lost Boy, to club her with a blackjack or vanish her in a rush of static. She ran, out of the theater, out into the night.
12
The first breath of cold night air seared her lungs. Her heart pounded; her Parasite shuddered. She didn’t know if anyone was following her. She didn’t hear them but she didn’t stop either, not until she was off the ave, through the park, and finally bent double outside the small brown house with a gravel drive. Her shoulders heaved. She was sobbing, gasping for breath. Wyatt’s final words were still chasing circles in her head. She’d come here on automatic, not knowing where else to go. But there was nothing for her here.
She put her shaking hand on the doorknob and turned it. Inside was pitch dark. She didn’t have her flashlight, so she picked her way carefully through the entryway, kicking aside a pair of old shoes. As her eyes adjusted she saw her mom washing dishes in the dark, or at least going through the motions, head bent over the sink, scrubbing a dry plate with a dry sponge. It was sad and stupid and put another sob in Violet’s throat. She took a step forward, unsure what she wanted. To rip the plate out of her mom’s hands and smash it over her head. To wrap around her from behind and hug her and tell her everything that had happened.
Then she saw it. Crouched off to the side of the counter, statue-still, head twisted toward the sink on a long flexible neck. Her othermother’s warped face was only inches from her real mom’s, eyes wide and unblinking. Studying her. Violet’s anguished noise caught hard in her chest. The othermother’s head swiveled toward the sound.
Violet’s fingers curled for the bat she didn’t have. The othermother stared at her, and she felt fear sweat under her arms. She realized it was the silence that was most frightening—she’d never heard an othermother silent. It was eerie. Violet swallowed, trying to slow her heart, calm her Parasite. She needed a weapon. The kitchen knives were across the counter, out of reach. The empty beer bottles were in the living room. Othermothers were clumsy in tight spaces, but still fast, and there was no way she was getting past it.
The smart thing would be to leave. To shut the door behind her and start working on a hiding spot, on food, on somewhere new to sleep where the othermothers and the Lost Boys wouldn’t find her. More pills too; the ones in her jacket would last only a few days. But Violet couldn’t bring herself to leave her mom with this horrible doppelgänger watching her, maybe for the whole night. Not daring to turn her back, she crouch-walked backward until she could grope the spare key out from under the ratty welcome mat. She clenched it between her knuckles.
The othermother lurched forward, making Violet jump, then stopped in place. Violet’s heart thumped hard. Her othermother extended one spiny hand, and Violet saw there was something clutched inside.
“A letter came for you today,” she warbled. “Isn’t that nice?”
She opened her hand, revealing a dull black orb.
“A letter came for you today, Violet,” the othermother said. “I have to get going, though. Isn’t that nice?”
Slowly, delicately, she set the orb down on the floor. Then she straightened up, legs flexing and clacking, head pressed up against the ceiling. Violet tensed as the othermother came closer, but she didn’t reach for her with her long sharp fingers. Instead she shuffled past, ducked to fit through the door, and left.
Violet let the key drop from her fist. A breath she didn’t know she’d been holding came out as half sob, half sigh. Her heartbeat slowed, and for a long minute the only sound was her mom scraping the dry sponge rhythmically against a metal bowl. Violet looked at the black orb on the floor and realized with a jolt that the othermother hadn’t called her Ivan. She’d called her Violet.
She took a slow step toward the orb. Nothing happened. She plucked it off the floor. The metal, or whatever it was, was smooth and warm in her clammy palm. There was a pulse to it too, like a heartbeat. Violet hefted it up and down in her hand, thinking how maybe it was a ticking bomb and that it was a few moments from exploding in a mass of shrapnel. At this point, though, getting blown up didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.
The orb wasn’t smooth solid black all over. Her thumb found a concave, and when she held it up to her face she saw a small circular window of red glass or maybe plastic. Things were swimming inside, tiny things that looked like bacteria through an electron microscope. Violet realized there was a rubbery ring around the red circle. She was supposed to press her eye up against it.
Maybe it would shoot a needle through her eye and blind her, or maybe suction her eyeball out of its socket entirely. Maybe not. A letter came for you, the othermother had said. Violet looked at her real mother one last time, blinking away saline, then put her eye up against the red window.
“You understand why I had to do that, right?” Wyatt asked softly. His wrecked hand was wrapped in bandages, but Bo could see slivers of puffy purple flesh through the gaps. They were sitting in the theater auditorium alone, everyone else sent out to the lobby.
Bo kept looking at the hand. He didn’t know what to say. Kept thinking back to what he’d seen on the rooftop, or thought he’d seen. And then farther back, to the first day he’d met the Lost Boys. Elliot, twitchy Elliot, who’d waited for everyone else to be asleep before he took his shirt off. Bo remembered the vivid red marks he’d thought were maybe a dream.
He didn’t understand. Not at all. “What did Elliot do?” he asked.
Wyatt’s face didn’t even flicker. “The same thing,” he said. “Endangered our family. He was trying to take people’s clamps out. Figure out how to deactivate them. The wasters aren’t human anymore, and they won’t ever be. Clamp’s in the head, better off dead.”
“What happened?” Bo asked, still feeling numb, numb.
“To the wasters?” Wyatt asked. “The ones he practiced on? They died. Or seized up frozen and then died. He unplugged their brains.” Wyatt’s voice was harsh. “I could have made him do his parents. Made him show everyone there’s no way to bring the wasters back. But I didn’t. I was nice to him, right? I took him aside. Private. And gave him his lesson.”
Bo looked at the unspooled electrical cord on the stage and nearly wanted to laugh. “She didn’t make me go with her,” he said. “You should beat me too.”
Wyatt shrugged. “You didn’t know where you were going,” he said. “Violet did. And she’d been going for months. She had a delusion. You know what a delusion is?”
Bo hesitated. “When you’re crazy.”
Something close to a snarl rolled over Wyatt’s face, almost too quick to catch. “It’s a false belief,” he said. “One that fucks up your life, and other people’s lives too. Believing you can be loyal to the living and the dead at the same time, that’s a delusion. The wasters are gone. That’s that, right? They’re gone. We have to focus on the living. That’s us. The Lost Boys.”
“You kissed her,” Bo finally said, feeling his breath come high and fast how it did before he cried. “I saw you on the roof. I thought. You loved her.”
“You little sneak,” Wyatt said, with an easy white grin, then turned serious. “I did, Bo. I love everyone who’s part of my family. But if someone decides they don’t want to be one of us, that they don’t want to be a Lost Boy, then how can I still? Violet decided. Not me.” Bo watched as Wyatt’s bandaged hand moved onto his shoulder to sit there like a spider. “Violet picked dead people over you or me. Picked them over your sister too. Over Lia.”
Bo gave a start. He hadn’t heard her name out loud in a long time. He hadn’t thought Wyatt even knew it. It cut through the fog in his head and gave him some kind of clarity again.
“That’s who we need to focus on,” Wyatt said, slowly nodding. “Forget about Violet. Violet made the wrong choice, and the consequences are going to catch up eventually. With or without our help.”
Lia was more important than any waster. More important than Violet, even. Their mom had made them promise
to always look out for each other, even when they hated each other, but he hadn’t. Bo was with the Lost Boys, and his sister was rotting in the warehouse.
“We’re going to free her?” Bo asked. Wyatt had been right about other things. Maybe he was right about Violet, about her delusion. Stopping her from going to her old house night after night, maybe that was the right thing to do. For her own good. And if Violet had taken the punishment, maybe Wyatt wouldn’t have hit her hard. Maybe he barely would have hit her at all.
“This is a war, Bo,” Wyatt said. “We’re going to need soldiers, right? And we’ll find them in the warehouses.”
Bo wanted to feel happy. He wanted to feel like Violet wasn’t important, not the way the war was, not the way Lia was. But his Parasite wouldn’t stop sliding around no matter what he did, and Wyatt’s hand on his shoulder felt heavy as lead.
“There’s going to be more tough things,” Wyatt said. “More tough decisions. That’s why we’re here, Bo. We can make those.” His gray eyes drilled hard into Bo’s. “So you understand now? Why I had to do that? Are you with me, Bo?”
The electrical cord, the gloomy storage unit, the red marks on Elliot’s back—Wyatt would have hit hard. He was more dangerous than any whirlybird or othermother or flying pod. Bo knew it with a cold hollow feeling in his chest. Something had changed Wyatt even more than the invasion had changed the Lost Boys, and it was Wyatt’s word that came back to Bo’s mind now: damage.
But Wyatt was going to help him free Lia, and that was more important than anything.
“Yeah,” Bo said. “I get it. I’m with you.”