Shards
Page 1
Table of Contents
Front Matter
1—Psychological Warfare
2—What I Did on My Summer Vacation
3—Things I'll Never Say
4—Home of the Poets
5—The Catalyst and the Class President
6—Courtney's Story
7—Too Close to Ignore
8—Some Scum, Hold the Villainy
9—New Assets and Other Necessary Evils
10—Homecoming
11—A Better World's Priorities
12—Two Legends for the Price of One
13—Splinters, Slivers, Shards, and the Other Things Under Our Skin
14—Second Worst Month of My Life
15—The Second Worst Night of Mine
16—Day of the Dead
17—All Hallow's Eve
18—Getting the Band Back Together
19—My Kingdom for a Digital Video Recorder
20—Looking for Help in All the Wrong Places
21—The Need-to-Know Newsletter
22—Thanksgiving
23—My First Christmas Party Invitation From Hell
24—Cry Havoc
25—The Bogeyman
26—Leverage
Back Matter
Copyright © 2015 by F.J.R. Tichenell and Matt Carter
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior return permission of the publisher.
First Paperback Edition: June 2015
For information on subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher at rights@jollyfishpress.com.
For information, write us at Jolly Fish Press, PO Box 1773, Provo, UT 84603-1773, or info@jollyfishpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
THIS TITLE IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Titchenell, F. J. R., 1989– author.
Shards / F.J.R. Titchenell, Matt Carter.
pages cm. — (The Prospero chronicles ; II)
Summary: A precarious treaty exists between the remaining humans like Ben Pastor and Mina Todd, and the shape shifting aliens they call the Splinters, but a new faction seems intent on breaking that treaty by killing off humans who were once Splinter-hunters—and somehow the epicenter of activity in Prospero is the high school that Ben and Mina attend.
ISBN 978-1-63163-018-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Extraterrestrial beings—Juvenile fiction. 2. Shapeshifting—Juvenile fiction. 3. High schools—Juvenile fiction. 4. Friendship—Juvenile fiction. [1. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 2. Shapeshifting—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. Science fiction. 7. Horror stories.] I. Carter, Matt, 1985– author. II. Title.
PZ7.T522Sh 2015
813.6—dc23
[Fic]
2015004063
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Fox & Dana,
Thank you for making us want to believe.
Praises for Splinters, The Prospero Chronicles I
“One welcome difference to the archetypal ‘final girl’ formula of flaxen hair and virginal naïveté is that Mina is tough, possibly insane, definitely brilliant, and has already been terrorized and tormented by the body-snatching Splinters long before the story begins. A snapping, crackling, popping homage to classic horror that alludes to no optimistic resolution—all the more reason for a series.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A promising series opener, this will satisfy those readers who like their scary stories to be as clever as they are chilling.”
—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“There is a lot to like in this ambitious debut. Mina is captivating, and it is fun to watch her change and grow as a character. The book has a massive scope, which leads to some intriguing implications for future installments.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
Also by F.J.R. Titchenell and Matt Carter:
Splinters, The Prospero Chronicles I
F.J.R. Titchenell & Matt Carter
Provo, Utah
1.
Psychological Warfare
Mina
Marian Kelly died in a one-car accident near her home in Turtle Lake, Montana, on August twentieth, at the age of forty-two.
Marian is predeceased by her parents, Rand and Millicent “Millie” Kelly, and her brother, Christopher.
Marian was born in Prospero, California, and studied Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. She held black belts in multiple martial arts and was an accomplished member of the Turtle Lake Hunting Club.
I skipped the details of Marian’s perfunctory funeral service, put the newspaper clipping back in the plain, unstamped envelope it had arrived in, and filed it out of sight; not that this did anything to clear the smudged print from my vision. Alone, it was unsettling. In a stack of six other recent obituaries of other Splinter hunters, in six other anonymous envelopes with my name stamped on the front, it sent a very clear message.
I’m no stranger to death threats. And at the time of Marian’s death, it had been less than a month since the Splinter who poses as my father told me to my face that if Ben or I fought back again, if we even tried to run, the humans would be wiped out of my infested little town of Prospero completely.
I’d fact-checked each obituary as it came in.
Every one of the hunters had died under circumstances that looked very much like suicide. Most of the obituaries didn’t say so, exactly, but after the few that did, omissions of the cause of death and euphemisms like “one-car accident” and “chemical overdose” were easy enough to decipher. Sometimes, when the deaths had been a little more bizarre or had occurred on slow news days, there were more details to be found when I looked up the rest of the news sources in the area.
These weren’t suicidal people. They weren’t quitters. Wondering how someone could possibly have made it appear as if Drake Tymon had slit his wrists and throat alone in an industrial freezer that was later found barricaded from the inside was filling my head quite effectively with distractingly disturbing scenarios.
But the thing bothering me most about the obituaries was the fact that all seven of their subjects were currently loitering around my bedroom.
Sometimes, if I stared directly at them for long enough, they seemed to remember that they were supposed to be dead and vanish accordingly, temporarily. Otherwise I could see them, silently and blankly watching me work, as clearly as I could see my bookshelves, my bed, and the stark beige walls and end tables that, until recently, had held my very large and very useless anti-Splinter amulet collection.
Nightmares are no more new to me than death threats. That’s not what these were. A hunter would die and join the rest of the hallucinations in my room the day after the obituary arrived, and then another one would die and join him without fail. If things carried on this way, my room was going to become unmanageably crowded quite soon.
It wasn’t even as if I were going to miss the hunters. A few of them, like Drake, I’d known pretty well years ago, but I’d stopped assuming they were still alive—never mind still human—long before they’d turned up dead. Others, like Marian, I only knew by reputation in the first place.
Not knowing them well only made it stranger that they were here, after everything I’d lived through and lost without having suffered from any sensory distortions before.
Ready? The text scrolled across my phone’s screen after Ben’s name.
Almost. I texted back.
I wasn’t looking forward to conducting the upco
ming meeting for my entire Network, a roomful of people who had nothing in common other than their knowledge of Splinters and their confidence in my judgment and clarity of perception. Ben had insisted, though. A lot had changed, and people needed to be brought up to speed.
Billy was gone, lost to the Splinters, if we had ever even had him. Whatever had been passing for my absentminded ally had been using us to breach the peace, such as it was, for no one knew how long.
Ben hadn’t even met some of the others yet. Our discovery of portals to other parts of the world in the Splinter Warehouse had put an end to the Effectively Certain Non-Splinters list, or at least had reduced it to a uselessly small number of people. The only people in town I could really be effectively certain of anymore were myself and Haley, since we’d both recently been ripped directly out of replication pods. That wasn’t enough to work with, so I’d had to downgrade my entire Network to Extremely Probable Non-Splinters and start training myself to live with that because the alternative was not getting anything done at all.
Ben was still stubbornly under the impression that Haley’s presence on the list alone qualified her as a Network member. I disagreed.
Most important, we now knew more terms of the Splinter-Human treaty and exactly how precarious our position was. Two human-on-humanoid Splinter kills by the same human would mean all-out war, and Ben and I each had one strike already. And no matter how careful we were, Billy and any like-minded Splinters would find a way to incite that war sooner or later. We were counting on an unforeseen miracle to make the human side a significant power before then.
As someone who doesn’t believe in miracles, this wasn’t news I would enjoy delivering, even on my best day.
I finished up some new touches on the map over my desk—the new world map I’d posted under the map of Prospero to track probable Splinter activity at the other portals—and blinked hard, hoping the illusion of the hunters would fade out at the usual time. Their faces were already getting blurry around the edges, right on schedule.
That was something, at least. I was going to be able to function for another day. If my Network, the few humans still invested in finding or building that miracle, found out what was happening to me, it would probably be the end of what hope we had. They would give up on the one thing they all agreed on, my reliability, and maybe they’d be right to do it. I’d probably do the same in their position.
But even if I couldn’t see a difference between the walls and furniture that constituted my room and the dead people that my brain had decided to superimpose in front of them, at least I still knew the difference. I still knew what was rational and what wasn’t. Before the first hunter had appeared, the evidence of my senses had been the basis for almost everything I thought and did. It was going to be difficult to get used their new fallibility, just like the fallibility of the ECNS list. As long as the inner workings of my mind were still in order, it was worth at least trying to do my job.
At least, that’s what I told myself for the thirty-seventh time when I recognized Ben’s knock on the front door above.
2.
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
Ben
My life flashed before my eyes.
More than anything, I regretted how little there was to flash.
“Brakes, brakes, BRAKES!”
In Mina’s defense, she did hit the brakes before she could knock over the stop sign, but not before she drove the front right wheel of my mom’s SUV up onto the curb. The car jolted to a stop, and, not for the first time since Mina had asked me to show her how to drive, I was glad I was wearing a seatbelt.
After a second’s consideration, she said, “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re still learning,” I said.
“Not very quickly,” she grumbled.
She was having another one of her bad days. She was having them more frequently, days where I could tell she hadn’t slept and she was more on edge than usual. It had to be what happened to her in the Warehouse, some kind of post-traumatic stress. I still remembered yanking her from that pod, watching the tendrils that had burrowed beneath her skin, into her mind, trying to make Mina one of them, dissolving away in trails of green slime.
Splinters. The word brought up feelings of disgust and hatred. They made her this way. They broke her. I couldn’t fix her, not yet. That was bound to take a lot longer than the nearly-healed gash in her side and the burns on my legs. But at least I could try to make her feel better.
“Yeah, well nobody’s perfect. My mom’s been driving for more than twenty years and I’m still amazed they haven’t taken her license away,” I said. “You should’ve seen us driving up here. She tried to steer the U-Haul into a drive-through and ran down a guy dressed like a chili dog. Squashed him like a bug.”
She goggled at me for a moment, then said, “You made that up.”
“Replace ‘ran down a guy’ with ‘barely clipped a guy with her side view mirror,’ ‘squashed him like a bug’ with ‘ran over part of the sign he was carrying’ and ‘chili dog’ with ‘chili cheese dog’ and you’ve got it,” I said.
Much as she tried not to, I caught a hint of a smile sneak through.
“Maybe if we want to make it to Kevin’s on time and alive and without having to explain to your mother how you allowed an unlicensed driver to damage her SUV, you should drive,” she said.
“Fair enough,” I said. We got out and switched positions. Though the SUV made a terrible clunk when I reversed it off the curb, it still drove just fine. So neither my mom nor Mina would kill me. Not today.
Not bad.
That just left the rest of Prospero, California, to look out for.
Back when Mom and I were just visiting, that was a stress I thought I could live with. Now that we were effectively imprisoned here for the rest of our lives, surrounded by Splinters, I hoped I could handle it. I was pretty sure I could handle it. Whether or not I actually could was something I’d yet to figure out.
The Splinters’ plan for us was working, so far. Shortly after our break-in at the Warehouse, they’d made a job offer to my mother. Nothing too flashy, a clerical position at the town hall, but she jumped at the opportunity as a way of getting out of her rut in San Diego. They even lined up a nice, affordable little house for us that coincidentally happened to be right across the street from the Todd family. I’m sure this was Mina’s father’s way of keeping an eye on me.
We made it to Kevin’s place a few minutes after I took over. Compulsively, I looked to the backseat. The bags of binders I’d so meticulously put together were still there. In them was everything we knew about Splinters: all of Mina’s notes and lists, the brief history of them we’d been able to put together, and a world map of other possible Splinter cities we had seen linked to the Warehouse. Spread out among the group, at least everyone would know everything.
Mina caught my hesitance. “There’s no reason to be nervous. Everyone here already knows of the existence of Splinters. You don’t have to win them over.”
“I’m not worried about winning them over. I’m worried about winning you over,” I said as I began to get out of the car.
“You know I know about Splinters,” she said, getting out and helping me gather up bags.
“You know that isn’t what I meant,” I said.
She said nothing. I took that as a yes.
The meeting was all my idea. Mina’s Network was a loose collection of individuals who knew about Splinters and helped her undermine their efforts. Until this point, Mina had kept all of the members on a need-to-know basis, distributing only scant bits of information as she saw fit. When it became clear we were facing the possibility of an all-out war with the Splinters, I argued that it would be a good idea to get everyone as prepared as possible to put up a unified front.
Eventually, I was able to talk her into at least this one get-together so I could meet everyone.
Kevin had made it clear that he was providing his parents’ backy
ard for the meeting strictly as a friend and not as a Network member. His claim of neutrality didn’t set the best tone for our purposes, but it was the safest place we had.
We had just started up the walkway to his house when we heard it. A god-awful squeal of metal and gears mixed with what sounded like a machine-gun coughing. An ancient sedan that looked to be held together by rust and duct-tape rounded the corner, followed by a cloud of blue, black, and white that occasionally belched out of the tailpipe. Whoever was driving was doing a rather remarkable job, considering that the driver’s compartment was murky with white smoke.
“Ah. They’re here,” Mina said. The car lurched to a stop within inches of my mom’s SUV. Then it jolted forward, tapping the bumper hard enough to rock the vehicle back and forth. I winced as I jogged back to the cars.
A tall boy with shoulder-length black hair and an old army jacket stepped out of the driver’s seat, looking first at the van, then at Mina. His red-rimmed eyes and easy smile reminded me uncomfortably of Billy.
“Hey, Mina, hey . . .” he said, snapping his fingers.
“Ben,” I said.
“Yeah, Ben, cool. This your car?” the boy asked.
“No, my mom’s,” I said.
“Oh sh-, oh darn,” he said, correcting himself as if I were a child. He looked at my mom’s SUV appraisingly. “I think you’re fine, really. Barely kissed ya. I know a guy who could buff it out if there’s any real—”
“I’ll be fine,” I muttered. “I don’t really think—”
“Wait, you’re the Eagle Scout, right?” he asked, that easy smile disappearing astonishingly fast.
“I never made it that far,” I corrected. This didn’t improve his mood. He looked to Mina.
“How can you trust this guy? You do know that the Scouts in all their forms are the earliest levels of indoctrination into the New World Order’s personal strike force? This guy could be—”
The passenger door opened, nearly falling off and letting out a wall of white smoke. A sickly sweet, high-pitched voice called from within. “Oh come on, Greg, that’s no way to make friends now, is it?”