Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “You don’t even go to lunch?” he asked.

  “I eat in one of the classrooms. It’s out of the way, easier to work on stuff there.”

  But that morning in the gym, watching Ben play opposite me, watching the perfect arcs and angles of his natural human body exploring its impressive normal capacities and the over-bright tint it gave my vision, so different from the labored clarity dodgeball gave me alone, the one possible correlating variable had clicked into place other than the aftereffects of the pod.

  Ben.

  Hadn’t I been noticing cognitive changes since before the Warehouse? No hallucinations yet, but there had been changes. It had felt healthy, at first. His presence had given me moments of clarity I could only have dreamt of before. It had also caused a few undeniable lapses, including what seemed very much like a precursor to my odd recent episode in Aldo’s room. The few minutes Ben and I had spent carrying my medical kit back to Haley, walking with our hands clasped together for no practical reason, had stirred up that same manic, reckless feeling in my chest that was returning more and more often.

  “Which classroom?”

  I tried not to hesitate visibly before answering, “Room 12. A few other people use it too. Aldo does now.”

  I stopped myself just short of adding, “You could join us, if you want.”

  I wasn’t about to put a stop to vital Network activity or cut Ben off from regular safety observation, but all these other things we did together, swapping nice but non-essential skills like driving and even frivolous things like gambling had to stop. Even these walks home—as soon as I caught Ben in a better, more credulous mood, I had to find a way out of them.

  The idea put a knot in my stomach. If he was the catalyst my latent insanity had been waiting for, reduced contact was my only hope to stall my deterioration long enough for me to come up with a more permanent solution.

  “You know, you could join us,” Ben offered, as if on cue. He wasn’t going to make this easy. “I mean, if you’re really making progress on the Splinter problem, by all means, share the wealth, give me a lead and tell me how I can help, but if that’s not why you aren’t there—”

  “It takes a lot of time just to keep the information we have up to date,” I explained. “It’s not exciting, but it has to be done.”

  “Haley knows you’re avoiding her,” Ben said.

  “And yet she keeps looking for me.”

  “She likes you, you know. And you really are the best person for her to talk to about what happened. If you’d just give her a chance, I really think you’d—”

  “I don’t dislike Haley!” I reiterated for the twenty-eighth time. “I’m not sure she’s got what it takes, but I don’t dislike her.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “I’m just saying,” he diverted the conversation slightly from the topic I knew he still hoped I’d change my mind on, “if you gave people a chance in general, you might like it. I don’t mean wandering off into the forest alone with a bunch of PSs or anything, but it’s pretty easy to be careful in a cafeteria.”

  “You haven’t seen me in a cafeteria,” I said with more honesty than I’d been able to afford on most topics lately.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw him give me a look that I’m sure was meant to be sympathetic.

  “I’ve heard the names,” he said softly. “Some of them, anyway. I figured it was just some hippie thing at first.”

  Raingirl.

  Like Rainman, but a girl. One of my better-constructed and, therefore, more enduring and popular nicknames. There are others, most of them less teacher-earshot-safe. They’re a minor inconvenience, the least of my worries, but for some reason the reminder bothered me more than usual, coming from Ben. I shrugged my acknowledgement.

  “But Haley’s friends, at least,” he went on, “they’re really not so bad. They wouldn’t give you any trouble. If they did, she’d shut them down. Or Kevin would, or I would, for what that’s worth.”

  I returned the only answer that seemed to fit—a shrug and a “maybe.”

  Ben sighed. “Look, if I’m being too paranoid here, just tell me, okay? I can’t make you talk to Haley’s crowd, and if you’re busy, fine, but just tell me you’re not avoiding m—”

  Ben cut off in mid-accusation, looking intently at something over my shoulder.

  We were a few blocks from the school by then, on a nearly vacant side street, and I turned around to look at the only other humanoid figure in eyeshot.

  Courtney Haddad had just stumbled around a corner into view and was awkwardly half-running along the sidewalk parallel to us with none of her usual senior-class-president composure. Even from this distance, I could tell her eyes were wide, shocked, and disbelieving, and with every third step, she turned to look behind her. When she noticed us, she paused a moment, debating between hope and further fear, and then continued the way she had been going.

  That’s when I saw that her left shoe was missing.

  Ben and I exchanged a glance, all trifling disagreement instantly set aside. We both knew that look. She had seen something.

  “Courtney!” I called across the street.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised when this only made her look more frightened and confused. I’d never addressed her directly before.

  “Hey, Courtney!” I shouted, and Ben picked up her name and echoed me.

  Courtney kept running, and we both took off after her.

  “It’s okay!” Ben called out.

  We had followed her only a block when a darkly-tinted SUV pulled out in front of her on the nearest cross street.

  She shrieked, skidded to a stop, and turned back the other way.

  Whoever was in that car didn’t waste any time pulling level with her. I couldn’t make out the face behind the wheel, but I could tell by its angle that it hadn’t spared a glance for us.

  Ben broke off from me and wandered briskly, though casually, into the street, right into the SUV’s path, causing it to brake suddenly and honk, giving Courtney another few strides’ lead on it, while I dug through my bag for a weapon—even when weighed down by both my backpack and my shoulder satchel, I felt naked with just what I dared bring to school, not that I thought I’d need it now.

  I was fully expecting the driver to give Ben a neighborly wave of apology for nearly hitting him and then drive on past, as if hurrying to pick someone up late from school, pretending until a more opportune moment that whatever we’d just interrupted hadn’t happened at all.

  Instead the SUV swung hard around Ben as if he were a six-foot-tall spike strip and went for Courtney again, the front passenger door swinging open toward her.

  I grabbed a half-finished bottle of green tea from the side pocket of my backpack (an insipid brand that’s mostly corn syrup and hardly any caffeine, which I buy mainly for its packaging), cracked the bottom open against the curb, ran out to meet Ben at the back of the SUV, and buried the glass in its rear tire.

  The force of the escaping air shattered what was left of the bottle, slicing me across the palm, thankfully missing all tendons and arteries, and the SUV wobbled badly, even at the six miles per hour it was taking to keep up with Courtney, drifting momentarily out into the middle of street, out of arm’s reach of her.

  Ben sprinted ahead to join her before it could straighten out, and when it did, when the door came close enough again, he reached in and, with one decisive, jerking motion, dragged something out onto the sidewalk.

  Courtney screamed again when the three of us got a good look at the thing that had been reaching for her.

  It was definitely a Splinter; nothing else could look so unnatural, but I’d never seen one look quite like that.

  Then, in the next five seconds, I saw it twice more when the SUV skidded to a stop and the driver and a second passenger disembarked.

  All three of them had to be connected to kidnapped humans in the Warehouse. The structure of their bones and the perfec
t fit of the muscles over them were too precisely human for a Creature Splinter’s best approximation, but any hints of which humans they might have replaced were carefully and systematically obscured. They were all uniform in height, a little shorter even than I was. Their skin was a blank, hairless grey, their ears, noses, mouths reduced to the simplest, most nondescript orifices, their oversized eyes made up of nothing but colorless, expressionless pupils.

  It took me a moment to realize why they looked so familiar. There were sketches of them all over the Soda Fountain of Youth for the benefit of visiting UFO enthusiasts.

  “Go away, Wilhel-mina Todd,” the driver hissed at me in its clicking, popping, characterless voice, the Splinter equivalent of a synthesizer, to go with their apparent equivalent of ski masks.

  Neither Ben nor I moved from the places we’d assumed on either side of Courtney, cornered against the nearest yard’s wrought iron fence.

  The Splinter on the ground, the one Ben had dragged from the car, grabbed for Courtney’s ankle. She squealed slightly and kicked it hard in the nose with her remaining shoe. There was apparently enough of its human structure left intact to make it recoil in pain.

  The response from the others came very quickly.

  The driver lunged at me, its simple, equal-length fingers elongating to a slashing claw to make me dodge out of its way. As soon as it passed me, before it could touch her, I grabbed my heaviest, sturdiest 3-hole-punch and clubbed it across the back of the head with my full strength, leaving a small, noticeable dent in the skull.

  The one on the ground was recovering, and when it went for her again, it shot a handful of sticky tentacle-fingers out in front, attaching to her wrist, beginning to spread the rest of its small body into a flat sheet, ready to envelope her. She twisted away, pushing against where its thumb should have been, but its new tentacles were too flexible to mind. With the hardest point of her free elbow, she went for its nose again. It was ready this time. Its imitation nerves rerouted, its face split into four, toothy wedges, hissing and spitting at her with twin forked tongues.

  To Courtney’s credit, if it had been human, she would have escaped. It wrapped around her legs, and Ben jabbed at it with the sharpest thing either of us had left, a ballpoint pen, tearing gashes in it that healed faster than he could lengthen them.

  When I finally reached the lighter in my satchel’s inner pocket, inconveniently hidden to keep me from being accused of something as mundane as smoking at school, I shot a flame at it from my most innocent-looking aerosol can.

  Body spray flames are more colorful than effective, but the long streak I burned down its back stunned it enough to loosen its grip and let Courtney kick it into the gutter.

  If the face of the other passenger Splinter had been capable of expression, I was pretty sure it would have looked exasperated when it stepped over the disabled bodies of the other two toward Courtney and me. Identical as they looked, this one was definitely their supervisor.

  Ben must have looked a little pathetic to it, crouching next to its most misshapen associate holding nothing but a pen. It pushed past him without acknowledgment. As soon as its back was turned to him, Ben signaled me with the slightest flick of his eyes and quirk of his eyebrow, cool and focused and far from helpless. I got the message.

  I dropped my weapons, shielded Courtney’s body with mine, and screamed, the loudest, shrillest, most desperate sound my lungs could produce.

  The supervisor looked automatically at the houses on either side of us, watching for humans coming to investigate a sound that no longer resembled rambunctious teenagers innocently and happily walking home from school. The instinctive need for physical protection momentarily overridden by the instinctive need to be able to look normal at a moment’s notice, the supervisor’s form was as solid and humanoid in appearance as its disguise allowed. Ben straightened up behind it, grabbed it by its shoulder and what passed for its chin, and, in an instant too brief to allow for a reaction, cleanly snapped its neck.

  I grabbed my things, and Ben gave Courtney’s shoulder a rough but encouraging squeeze to shake her from her shock.

  “Run,” he advised her, and the three of us took off around the nearest corner, back toward the school, back to the densest population we could reach.

  “Are they dead?” was Courtney’s first breathless question.

  “No,” I answered. I could already hear the wood-snapping sound of them re-forming, their consciousness recovering from the minor inconvenience of the damage we’d done to their imitations of physical brains.

  “What the hell were those things?”

  Neither of us tried to answer her just then.

  “We’re really sorry this happened to you,” Ben panted as we ran flat out along the fourth block from the SUV. “We’re on your side, and we’ll explain everything as soon as we get to a safer area.”

  He glanced at me, and I had to stall for a moment to consider, digging gauze out of my bag to bind my hand, before confirming or denying.

  The situation was unprecedented. The only people I’d ever spoken to about the Splinters (with the exception of Haley) had been selected through careful research, and the only people I’d ever helped save from them (again, with the exception of Haley), had only needed someone to make it impossible to take them inconspicuously, no fighting required.

  The boldness of this attack still had me shaken. It was possible it had been staged, that Courtney had already been taken and was playing on our sympathies as the first step of another Network infiltration, but after Dad’s very blunt lecturing of Ben and me, it was also perfectly possible that the Splinters simply didn’t care what we saw if we were the only ones.

  Already I was trying to guess at the repercussions of interfering like this with no long-term plan. Ben and I had responded automatically. The idea of looking the other way hadn’t even occurred to me until it was too late, and probably still hadn’t occurred to Ben.

  We hadn’t killed anyone, neither of us had incurred our second strike, so this wasn’t a treaty violation, but if I got home and Dad told me (now that we were sort of openly talking about this stuff) that we had to hand Courtney back over or he’d kill one of us or something, I had no idea what I was going to say.

  At this point, I decided I couldn’t see the harm in talking to her. It wasn’t as if the basic Splinters crash course would include any information about us that the Splinters didn’t already have, and if she was human, she might be able to tell us if there was something exceptional about her situation. At the very least, it never hurt to spread the knowledge to one more human who was in no position to call us crazy.

  I gave Ben a nod as we slipped back into the still-thick afterschool crowd, slowing to a brisk walk. The Soda Fountain of Youth was just ahead, a block down from the school, and when Courtney turned to check behind her again, Ben slipped a protective arm around her in that effortlessly comforting way he had.

  “You look like you could use a malt.”

  6.

  Courtney’s Story

  Ben

  The Soda Fountain of Youth was packed when we got there. We were able to get a table in the back and the attention of one of the part-time waitresses who was filling in until they could find Billy’s replacement. It wasn’t the ideal place for a debriefing, but it was public, which would prevent any Splinter-related interruptions.

  That just left trying to figure out how Courtney Haddad fit into all of this.

  Neither Mina nor I knew much about her, aside from reputation. Haley had pointed her out in the lunchroom when showing me the various important people in school. I knew Courtney was an overachiever; senior class president, editor of the school newspaper; counselor’s aide, member of about a half dozen clubs. She ran track in the spring, was almost a certain lock for valedictorian, and was still debating between Harvard and Stanford. Haley also said she was cold and not particularly friendly.

  I’m sure the three of us must have looked odd together, Mina and me nursing
our fountain drinks (a Cherry TimeWarp for me, an unholy-looking malt for Mina) while Courtney sipped slowly from a mug of black coffee. She listened silently as we told her what had just happened to her.

  After a while, her hands stopped shaking.

  “So let me get this straight,” Courtney said, taking a tentative sip from her mug. “For more than a hundred years, Prospero has been home to a race of shape-shifting monsters from another dimension who regularly kidnap people so they can steal their bodies and live their lives? And those Splinters that you rescued me from back there were trying to do that to me?”

  “That seems highly probable, yes,” Mina said. “Why were you scared?”

  Courtney’s face flashed anger. “I was being chased.”

  “Before that,” Mina asked. “The Splinters . . . what? Appeared on the road behind you without warning? What happened to your shoe? Where did it start for you?”

  Courtney looked over her shoulder, nervous. There were some eyes on us, but nothing exceptional. Mostly kids who looked curious as to why the three of us were sitting together. Courtney must have been satisfied that this wasn’t a problem, as she began to talk.

  “I don’t get scared. This wasn’t normal,” she started defensively.

  “It’s okay to be afraid. Being afraid means you’re still human,” I said, trying to comfort her. “I mean, I spent a good chunk of my summer fighting these things, and I still get scared. Mina here, she’s been fighting them her whole life, and even she still gets scared.”

  I motioned toward Mina, hoping for some confirmation. She had lapsed back into that distant, impassive look, like she was fighting a splitting headache. “Sometimes,” I clarified.

  Courtney sighed, pulling herself together as she recalled what she had seen.