Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “I was running late. I told Mr. Montresor I would be by to help him with any filing he needed in the counselor’s office since he can’t keep anything in order, but I was delayed by Robbie asking me incessant questions about getting published in the paper. I told him if he could learn to put two sentences together I might consider his work. I got to Mr. Montresor’s office five minutes late,” she said, taking a sip from her coffee. She waved for our waitress and got a refill.

  “Mr. Montresor wasn’t in the front office like he usually is. Nobody was. I could see his personal office door was open a crack. I thought I heard voices inside,” she shuddered.

  “I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I thought maybe it was some students playing a prank, or trying to look at confidential records. I thought about reporting them, but then I thought I would take care of it myself. I am the senior class president. Surely that title must command some respect, right?” she said.

  “Not really,” Mina said blankly. I shot her a harsh glare. She just replied, “What?”

  Courtney was undeterred. “So I opened the door, and I saw two of them standing there.”

  She took a breath that was clearly necessary to keep her voice so perfectly businesslike. “I heard the door close behind me, then one on top of the cabinet whispered my name and grabbed my hair. I fought it off.”

  “How?” Mina asked.

  Courtney pulled what looked like a thick pen from her purse, though where there should have been a cap was a white plastic nozzle.

  “I maced it. It reacted poorly, screaming, seizing, vomiting. The other two ran at me, so I threw a chair through the window and jumped out. One of them took my shoe when it tried to grab me. I ran, I saw you, and you know everything that happened after that.”

  We did, not that that helped any. Her story only raised further questions. What were the Splinters doing in the counselor’s office? Were they looking for her, or for something in the files? Both maybe?

  “Thank you for this information,” Mina said. “You have been very helpful.”

  “That’s it?” Courtney said. “You tell me about an alien invasion, you hear what they did to me, and you just send me on my way?”

  “Yes,” Mina said.

  “No!” I said quickly, looking to Mina. “We need her.”

  “No we don’t,” Mina said.

  I looked to Courtney, explaining. “Sorry, we’ve got some trust issues.”

  “I can see that,” Courtney said.

  I turned my attention to Mina. “Look, she already knows about Splinters, we know they’re interested in her, and we need every set of eyes we can get.”

  “We do, but we can’t trust her,” Mina said. The way she would talk about people like they weren’t sitting right next to us was really beginning to irritate me.

  “Please?” I said simply.

  Mina sighed, rooting through her bag and pulling out a cheap, prepaid phone. Flipping it open, she programmed in a quick succession of numbers and slid it across the table to Courtney.

  “This phone has numbers for Ben and myself on it. Should you see anything strange, or should you feel threatened, call us,” Mina said.

  “And we’ll keep you in the loop,” I added.

  “Provisionally,” Mina added quickly.

  I tried to smooth that over. “Don’t get me wrong, we really are glad to help you, and for whatever help you can offer us, but like I said, we’ve got some trust issues. For now, though, you have to act like nothing’s wrong, because if they think you’ll be a problem to them, they will be after you whether or not we’re protecting you.”

  She looked at me like I’d just asked her to pull out all of her teeth.

  “It’s not easy,” I said. “But you do get used to it. You have to keep your eyes open, you have to remember that not everybody is who they say they are, and that just by knowing this you might be in constant danger. But you also can’t let this run your life. If you let them change how you live your life, then they’ve won.”

  “So this is one of those ‘living well is the best revenge’ situations?” Courtney asked.

  “Essentially,” I said.

  Courtney put her head in her hands. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”

  I smiled, waving for our waitress so I could get another Cherry TimeWarp. “Welcome to the other side of the looking glass, Courtney.”

  Courtney caught a ride home with some of her friends at the Fountain. She offered us a ride, but we declined, deciding to walk home.

  “You could’ve been a bit nicer to her, you know,” I said. “She just wants to know what’s going on.”

  “She could be a plant. We need to screen her more before she can know anything,” Mina said, staring off into the distance. She looked distracted, unfocused. It was not a look I was used to seeing on Mina’s face.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Mina said.

  “What doesn’t?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said with finality. She looked at me like I should be able to put the pieces together.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m gonna need you to throw me a bone here,” I said.

  “Courtney. If she isn’t a plant, then her selection doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Makes perfect sense to me. She’s class president, which means she at least holds some token influence at school, she has a finger in almost every extracurricular activity. Honestly, if you’re looking to recruit, she seems ideal.”

  “But that’s it, the fact that she makes so much sense is what makes no sense,” Mina said. “Splinters select people who better enable them to blend into a crowd. The small-town drama teacher, the hobby shop owner, the mailman, the short-order cook, nobody pays any attention to these people. Julie’s analogy of Splinters as tourists is crude, but it doesn’t look that far off. They’re all over the world, perhaps in every major city of influence the world has seen, and they have not taken over.”

  “Maybe they’re just waiting,” I said.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She nodded. “My point exactly. And then there was the nature of her attempted abduction. In the cases I have been able to study, every time a person is taken, it’s usually by someone they know and trust, or, like Haley, they’re taken in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t use those blank alien faces to conceal their identities, they wouldn’t attack in broad daylight. Nothing about this fits the profile of a typical Splinter abduction. Meaning this was either a faked abduction for our benefit . . .”

  As the pieces came together in my head, I finished her sentence. “Or this isn’t a typical Splinter abduction.”

  We still knew next to nothing about the rogue faction of Splinters that Billy and Splinter-Haley had been a part of. We knew they had set us up, attempted to frame us for murder to spur on an invasion of Prospero, and they had mostly failed, but other than these simple facts we were completely in the dark.

  “They’re recruiting,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Mina said. “We interfered with their first plan to invade Prospero, so they may very well be taking a more subtle approach now. Taking over influential people in town to better facilitate a backup invasion plan. Probably looking up student records for their targets.”

  I shook my head. “Great, so now we’ve got Splinters and Slivers to worry about.”

  “Slivers?” Mina asked.

  “Well, they’re quietly getting under the town’s skin, they’re even worse than regular Splinters, and the name kind of sounds creepier. Slivers. Just say it, it does sound creepy, right?” I said.

  “That’s a terrible name,” she said.

  “Hey, I didn’t start the whole Splinters thing,” I said.

  “Neither did I,” Mina said, almost smiling. It was good to see a little optimism sneaking through.

  “Are we sure Courtney’s safe now? If they really ar
en’t playing like regular Splinters, will anything prevent them from taking her again down the line?” I asked, trying to get back on topic.

  “I don’t know. Again, this is assuming that this isn’t all a big charade to blind us to some other plan they have going on,” she said.

  “Of course,” I agreed.

  “Still,” Mina said, smiling a bit wider. “If she is human, her connections and access would make her a valuable asset.”

  Though her ability to look at people as people could have used some work, I was glad to see her smiling again. I knew it wouldn’t last long. I knew she would retreat back into that fog she’d been in ever since we escaped from the Warehouse. For now it felt good to be human with her again.

  7.

  Too Close to Ignore

  Mina

  Dad never did mention Courtney to me. I didn’t feel like contemplating whether this confirmed that she was an infiltrator or just the target of a faction of Splinters (Slivers) that didn’t report to Dad. I barely had the energy to think wistfully of the days when there hadn’t been as many options to consider.

  My cognitive faculties were still deteriorating steadily, and by Tuesday morning of the third week of the semester, I was too busy trying to will my monitor in the computer lab to show me what was really on it under all the imaginary, Splintery, sickly-looking centipedes crawling all over it.

  Help me.

  My neural malfunctions were becoming more vocal as well as more frequent, and this was one of the preferred phrases. “Help me,” along with “freak, loser, dead girl, your fault,” and a few others, spoken in a rotating set of voices, unintroduced, but always familiar. Identifying them hadn’t made them any quieter when I’d tried, so I was doing my best not to look for the face to match the tone, not to picture Mom or Dad or Ben or The Old Man or . . . (Shaun) . . . whoever else the sound might be imitating.

  That’s why Robbie had to flick an empty white-out dispenser across the desk at me before I connected him with his hiss of, “Hey, Mina, can you help me out with this?”

  No, I almost hissed back. No, you have no idea how sincerely I can’t.

  “Why me?” I complained, keeping my head to my hand as if I were simply exhausted or slightly sick.

  “Uh . . . ’cause you’re smart?”

  I almost hoped I was imagining the imploring, expectant way he was looking at me, the way non-Network members hardly ever did, almost like an equal. I wanted to blink and find in a brief flash of clarity that he hadn’t really used my name. I searched for any sign of unreality in the way he followed it up with, “Come on, please?”

  “With what?” I asked.

  “With Excel. It keeps changing all the example phone numbers with extensions into these weird equations.”

  “Scientific notation,” I explained, without needing to be able to read the screen to understand (and without adding that a mathematical expression requires an “equals” sign to be called an equation).

  “Yes, that. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.”

  I glanced around, sure that someone else must have had the same problem by now and had somehow solved it, since they weren’t complaining, but our mismatched computer lab hadn’t had a uniform overhaul in over a decade. Robbie had one of the nicest computers. Everyone else probably had an older, more sensible version of Office.

  Or maybe none of them were actually bothering with the half-hearted suggestions that passed for Computer Sciences assignments.

  I dragged my chair over to his. At the moment, all his menu options appeared to be written in Arabic, or at least what Arabic looked like in my brain since I don’t read Arabic, and clumsily scrawled in glitter pen, but I was pretty sure I remembered the steps.

  “Go to ‘Formulas,’” I began.

  “Oh, sorry, go ahead,” Robbie said, scooting back to give me room to use the mouse.

  I squashed my silly flutter of panic. “No, you go ahead. You’ll remember better that way.”

  Robbie looked tempted to laugh at my didactic tone, but he took the mouse back and I heard it click. I had to congratulate myself a little. My talent for hiding the symptoms was developing nicely, almost keeping pace with their severity.

  “Okay, ‘Formulas.’ Now what?”

  I searched through my memory of Aldo teaching me exactly this function, hoping I’d actually listened to all the information, meaning that it was there in my head somewhere.

  “‘Calculation,’” I named the first menu button I could picture clearly, hoping it was the right one.

  The ceiling was made of occupied spider webs, the teacher’s legs and lower torso had turned into a glimmering golden filing cabinet, and Robbie, who had never paid me a shred more attention than school projects required, was sliding his chair closer to mine, very close, his pretty boy actor’s face studying mine intently, raptly, almost as if he were excited—excited by formatting a dummy spreadsheet at the same computer with me. Along with that fresh deluge of obvious impossibilities came a crystal clear snippet of the voice I was trying the hardest to tune out.

  Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?

  “You’re not Sh—” I snapped at the voice, cutting off the moment I realized I was speaking out loud.

  Robbie startled and rolled his chair backward, raising his hands theatrically off of the mouse and keyboard and smiling defensively. “Not what? Sorry, I swear I’m not trying to screw it up, just show me how to do it.”

  “You’re not—”

  I froze for a moment, looking at the monitor that probably hadn’t become a vortex of swirling raw Splinter matter, but was probably about as far from the right function as it could get. The other students probably weren’t stretching out their newly grown, misshapen batwings, but were probably staring at us after my outburst. I scrambled through the rest of the tutorial memory for any possible way out.

  “You’re not sh-showing the dashes in the phone numbers!” I blurted out, cuffing Robbie lightly across the shoulder as if wanting Excel to work without dashes were the dumbest mistake anyone could have made. “Put them in the way you’d really write a phone number and watch!”

  Robbie took the mouse. I heard a few clicks and the tap of a few keys, and then he clapped his hands as if this obvious little cheat were the most brilliant bit of programming he’d ever witnessed.

  “You’re a genius, Mina. Thanks!”

  After gym, I reached the entrance of the girls’ locker room to find a solid quarter inch of water flowing out into the hall and several caution signs blocking the way. The spray of the overhead sprinklers continued to patter against the water’s surface for a moment, then faded to a trickle and died out while I watched.

  “Great,” someone muttered behind me. “Who’s been smoking in here?”

  At the light tread of Haley’s tennis shoes behind me, I tried to cut ahead, past the signs, into the vast puddle. One of the janitors wheeled a cart right in front of the entrance just then, gathering a tall pile of already grimy-looking towels in her arms and starting to spread them out on the floor.

  I tried to turn back to make a break for Room 12 and come back later, but for once, my ability to stay ahead of the crowd proved a disadvantage. A forty-foot-thick wall of irritated girls and curious boys had formed behind me to survey what could be seen of the damage, and not one of them seemed to notice my desire to leave distinctly enough to move slightly to one side or the other. Even Haley had to struggle to get through them toward me, but she had always been better at parting crowds than I was.

  My current window of clear perception was closing, shortened, maybe, by the sudden stall of purposeful action. The water was sloshing and rippling in ways the stationary floor and still air couldn’t cause, thickening to a Splintery consistency, its quarter-inch-deep bottom dropping away into an unfathomable ocean trench.

  Ignoring the janitor’s noise of protest—as well as the way she suddenly morphed into a living version of that bulbous, tentacled statue from the Warehouse—I sp
lashed away into the water anyway, my shoes instantly soaking through, finding the floor that my eyes insisted wasn’t there.

  “Mina, hold on, please!” Haley splashed after me. “I need to—sorry,” she apologized over her shoulder to the janitor that she could still see. “I need . . .”

  The slapping of the water helped me tune out her latest request for reassurance and explanations I couldn’t give.

  I was fast, but Haley’s legs were longer, and she didn’t have to override her own vision to coordinate her movements. I reached my gym locker only two rows ahead of her, not even enough time to get the padlock open before she caught up.

  “Mina! Please, don’t you think you owe me at least—?”

  This time I didn’t need any sound, real or imagined, to help me ignore her.

  The inside of my locker was drenched, the towel and canvas outer surface of my bag soaked through, but the homemade plastic liner had done its job and kept the books and electronics dry. The only damp thing inside was the plain white envelope that had been sandwiched between two of my textbooks, my name printed on it in plain black letters.

  The ocean under my feet instantly settled back to being a quarter inch of plain, clear water. The world was, for a moment, as normal and simple and comprehensible as I’d ever seen it, and the envelope was still solid and opaque in my hand. I turned to Haley before opening it, interrupting some analysis of how much I’d certainly want to talk were I in her position.

  “Do you see this?”

  Haley stopped and looked at it, annoyed and slightly curious. “It’s an envelope. And it’s addressed to you.” I nodded and slit it open without stopping to respond to her question of, “Am I supposed to know what that means?”

  The hunter obituary inside was just like all the others, except for the handwritten scribble in the margin of this one.

  Guess who I’m saving for last?

  I didn’t bother trying to hide it, or arguing with Haley’s little gasp as she read over my shoulder. I just shoved the clipping back into the envelope and the envelope into the front pocket of my shorts and started examining the damage to the rest of the locker’s contents. The good phone I’d left out in my pants pocket when I changed was soaked through, and I’d given Courtney my last burner.