Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  Ben turned his disapproving look on me when I stifled the laugh.

  “Wouldn’t be funny if you were standing there,” The Old Man said, dropping his own laughter and pointing to his bowl.

  “No, I know, it’s just that Ben nicknamed another kind of Splinter sort of the same way.”

  “Is that so?” The Old Man prompted Ben before I could babble embarrassingly about them having more in common than they thought.

  “Slivers,” Ben explained. “For the Splinters who don’t answer to the main collective.”

  The Old Man looked back at me with an expression I’d vary rarely seen on him, surprise mingled with very mild curiosity.

  “Yes, as long as we’re here, we should probably mention that, too,” I said. “The Splinters aren’t all working together anymore. A few months ago, Ben and I were targeted by a group that’s trying to destabilize the arrangements between the Splinters and the Council. The Slivers, we’re calling them, actually tried to sacrifice one of them to us to provoke the regular Splinters against the humans.”

  The Old Man took another spoonful and swallowed without comment.

  “This Shard,” Ben asked him, “if you’ve been keeping an eye on it, have you seen anything like that? Any idea if it might be working for the Splinters or the Slivers?”

  The Old Man shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. A Splinter’s a Splinter, whether it’s a Shard or a ‘Sliver’ on top of that or not. They all want us dead so they can steal what’s ours, they all melt when you burn ’em bad enough. If they want to help wipe each other out, that’s fine by me. It’s not going to slow me down any. Shouldn’t slow you kids down either. And don’t you dare chalk this up as me agreeing with a Splinter, but let ’em do their worst to the Council. Filthy collaborators.”

  “There’s no reason to invite any kind of Splinters to take the entire town if we can avoid it,” Ben said.

  The Old Man’s face went dangerously rigid, and there was silence for several seconds while I searched for the words to fix Ben’s argument. I wasn’t quick enough.

  “Is this the kind of placating, compromising shit you’re preaching to your people now, Robin? Or have you caught the habit of letting rookies preach to you?”

  “It’s not compromise; it’s strategy,” I clarified. “He means there’s no need to disrupt the only thing holding off a full-scale invasion until we’ve got more than a handful of people with flamethrowers to fight back with because that’s what we’re talking about if the Slivers succeed.”

  “Goddammit, Robin,” The Old Man slammed his hook against the recently bubbling pot with a clang. “I knew you’d lose your edge if you left me, but I never thought you could really get dull.”

  “Coming from a blunt object like you,” I could pretend it was my newly weakened mental filter that let those words out, or the fact that if I left Ben room to say anything more, the repercussions were likely to be worse for him than for me. The truth is that, when it came to The Old Man, my filter had always been a little faulty.

  “Your mother inducted you into the family business yet? Is she whoring you out to them already, or is she waiting to sell you off all at once to the highest bidder?” He looked back at Ben. “Is that what this is? Are you two all set to be the next pair of ‘peacemakers’ like your folks?”

  I dropped my bowl half a second before The Old Man dropped his and reached for the gun at my side. He dragged it away with his foot before the chili hit the ground, splattering across half his shirt along the way. I grabbed a Taser from my bag instead and aimed it at The Old Man’s chest at the same moment he grabbed one of his own from one of the countless hiding places in the cluttered shack and aimed it at Ben.

  I had to hold mine with two hands to keep it from shaking when I wedged myself into the small space between them, uncomfortably close to the fire, my back pressed against Ben, who was pinned to the rock. I remembered that Taser vividly. It hurt.

  “What do you need that for?” The Old Man asked with his cheapest imitation of calm. He tapped the side of his head with his hook, where the shrapnel that had forced the Warehouse to reject him was buried. “You know I’m human.”

  “So is he!” I shouted less composedly than I meant to. “And it’ll slow you down long enough for me to get my hands on something stronger.” I looked at the rifle he’d kicked away as if we didn’t both already know exactly where it had landed.

  “You came here because you felt responsible for keeping me alive.” He snorted, but it sounded more like a preparation to spit than laugh. “You’re not going to shoot me, Little Girl. You didn’t do it for the last Splinter boy, and you won’t do it for this one.”

  “He’s human!” I repeated

  “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Sam Todd was human once.”

  “You are wrong, and a Taser won’t tell you what he’s going to be anyway! He’s human now!”

  “I just want to check. It’s not like it’ll kill him.”

  I’ve never used electricity to test Network members. That was the second of The Old Man’s policies, after killing human Splinters, that I’d been quickest to abolish on my own. Partly because I prefer not to inflict a sensation on allies that I can barely tolerate myself, but also because it’s not foolproof. Electricity will wear any Splinter down eventually, most of them very quickly, but in my time with The Old Man, I’d seen a few take enough to stop a human heart before losing their shape.

  “You already know he’s human, or you wouldn’t have asked me to bring him.”

  “I thought I knew because I thought I could still trust you, Little Girl.”

  “I am not a collaborator!” I shouted. “And I am nothing like my mother! And even if I were, if I were in bed with a Splinter and planning to keep it alive, why the hell would I risk bringing it up here to meet you? Just because you might not listen to me about the Shard if I didn’t follow your instructions to the letter? Do you really think your life would be that important to me then? I don’t think there’s anyone on earth that dull!”

  In absolute silence, without the slightest change on his face, The Old Man leaned in to rest the Taser against my chest—Ben’s and mine, really, the way we were crammed together, one conductive circuit—ignoring the way the Taser in my hands jabbed into his sternum when he got close enough. My hand was ready to clench on the trigger in the first convulsion.

  It took the whole cavern of my mind to keep my breath and my gaze too steady to criticize.

  The Old Man lasted this way for seven and a half seconds before cracking into deep, hoarse laughter.

  “Oh, thank God you’re still making sense, Little Girl! You had me worried for a moment!”

  The moment I joined him, relief slipping out in unsteady breaths that only laughter could conceal, Ben wriggled out from behind me and ducked out through the open doorway.

  Saying goodbye to The Old Man was difficult for a multitude of reasons. There were his repeated protestations that I’d “just arrived,” that I was “getting too old to run away and cover my ears just because he’d said a few things I didn’t like to hear,” and that I’d “never be able to lead a successful resistance if I kept letting the pretty rookie boys lead me around by the tit.”

  All his words, not mine.

  There was the involuntary way I kept wondering whether this was the last time we’d see each other alive, and whether I wanted it to be.

  And then there was the fact that every second I spent trying to form that goodbye was another step Ben was taking down the trail outside.

  My last words were the same as the first time I’d left.

  “Let go of me.”

  Ben didn’t slow down for me. Even when I did catch up, it took seventeen of his strides for him to acknowledge me.

  “Tell me you don’t really think that guy’s funny.”

  “Not at the moment,” I answered honestly.

  Two more strides.

  “What was the point of all that?”

  “I told you—”
<
br />   “Yeah, I know, someone’s trying to kill him, and you, and who knows? Maybe me, too! I’m a resistor, aren’t I?”

  “I never got any threats against you.”

  “You don’t know that!” His pace quickened down the fifty degree incline. “You don’t know what ‘guess who I’m saving for last’ means! Or maybe you do! Maybe you have some undeniable proof! Only I don’t need to know about all that until you need me to dupe someone for you, or until he tells you, ‘bring the new boy.’ I don’t even need to know when your birthday is, but him you’ll warn, even if it means spending a day dragging me up here and letting him do whatever he feels like to both of us.”

  “He wasn’t really going to hurt you.”

  Ben rubbed his right shoulder where the recoil always hit. “Really? Because it sure looked like he was.”

  “I wouldn’t have let him.”

  “Great. Thanks a lot. That’s so comforting after you brought me here in the first place!”

  That wasn’t fair. I was sure it wasn’t, despite my overreacting nerves. “You’re the one who’s always complaining about not being included enough,” I pointed out.

  “Don’t even pretend you’re starting to listen,” he said, forcing an increasingly uncomfortable pace down through the loose dirt. “You brought me because he said to. How did you ever fall in with a jackass like that?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t lie again.”

  “I wasn’t going to!” I shouted. Without thinking about it, I grabbed him by the shirt to make him stop and turn toward me. He let me, barely. “I was nine years old when I lost my father!”

  “I managed,” Ben snapped. “Without picking Leatherface for a substitute!”

  “You had a mother who wasn’t the reason your dad was gone!” Any grasp I’d ever had on tact was gone, but I wasn’t finding honesty to be a problem. “Until very recently, my mother did nothing about it but tell me I was making it up! The Old Man was the only one who’d listen to me, who’d teach me how to protect myself when they came for me, which they have done, whatever Dad claims the arrangements were! I’d be dead more times than I can count by now if it weren’t for him!”

  “Well, he sure explains a lot about you if he’s basically your dad, I’ll give him that.”

  This produced a pain in my stomach, a compression from more sides than I could consciously catalogue.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’d be dead if it weren’t for me, too,” Ben reminded me. “At least a couple times. Doesn’t seem to compel you to leap to my defense at every opportunity.”

  “You’d be in the Warehouse if it weren’t for me! And what do you call what I just did?”

  “Damage control,” Ben answered, “and not much of it. When we get back down there,” he pointed down the hillside in the rough direction of town, “the Splinters, Slivers, Shards, whoever, are going to go right back to doing everything they can to make my life a living hell, and you’re just going to sit back and watch! Maybe if you’re feeling generous, you’ll take the time to tell me to suck it up!”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Anything!”

  The word echoed back off of the hills on all sides, and he waited for me to answer it. How, I didn’t know.

  “I promise, if there were anything that would make a practical difference—”

  That made him laugh, a more painful sound than the most mocking snicker The Old Man could manage. “Never mind, don’t bother.”

  He pushed me, not hard, but far enough to break my grip on his shirt, reached into his backpack for the last full water bottle, and shoved it into my hands.

  “Your mother will still pick you up if you call her, won’t she?”

  The stomach pain tightened.

  “Ben, you’ve been through a lot recently. I’ll understand, if you’re not feeling rational, if you need to discuss . . . whatever this is, later.”

  The laugh again.

  “No, Mina, that’s not what I need.”

  “Then what?”

  He took a step backward, zipping the backpack back up.

  “Ben.”

  “What?”

  The thin filter let an almost-whisper through.

  “Don’t do this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” No tact, no forethought, just instinct and honesty; it was alarmingly difficult to switch off. “I . . . need . . . you.”

  “For what?”

  “There are too few of us already.”

  “To fight them, you mean? Try again.”

  For some reason, I was more afraid of this than I ever had been of a Taser. “Please tell me what you want.”

  Ben lowered his voice, as if he were helping me cheat in class, against his better judgment.

  As if he ever would.

  “I want an answer that doesn’t involve Splinters.”

  My sore, unkempt brain exploded with nonsensical answers to be sorted and purged and edited, things too jumbled and stupid to be allowed out, especially in my current condition.

  Because I’m forgetting how to be without you, and I don’t think I want to remember.

  That was the closest I could get to an acceptable, coherent thought. I put my hands on either side of my head, as if I could manually squeeze the space small enough to use. “I can’t—”

  “No,” Ben said. “You really can’t, can you?”

  He took off again, cutting toward a steep wash at the edge, not even a trail, leading down to a lower plateau.

  “You’ll get lost,” I called after him.

  “Boy Scout, remember? I’ll be fine.”

  “These aren’t regular hiking trails!”

  He spun around and pulled out his phone, walking backward unsettlingly close to the edge. “You know where the Warehouse is. Watch my tracker. Or don’t. I don’t care, just stay the hell away from me!”

  Ben’s fast, but he doesn’t have my stamina or my balance on uneven ground. If I’d tried to chase him through the trees he stormed off into, to whatever parallel trail he ended up finding, he probably wouldn’t even have been able to break visual contact. I could have followed his steps until he ran out of breath, and then he’d have no way to shake me before we got back to town.

  But then what? Tell him I was sorry for everything I’d already apologized for and anything else he could think of to blame on me, whether it made sense or not? Tell him that I just wasn’t feeling myself lately, because maybe I really wasn’t myself anymore? Tell him he wasn’t the only one who could feel betrayed and abandoned?

  Scream?

  Hit him?

  Hug him?

  Cry?

  All the things I felt like doing were crazier than the voices and visions that could still reemerge at any moment.

  I couldn’t do that.

  I couldn’t follow people around only to beg them to tolerate my presence.

  I could handle being pushed away when I didn’t fight it. I could handle being alone. I could handle a Taser to the chest if it was absolutely necessary. But I couldn’t handle being that helpless, that pathetic.

  That hurt too much.

  So I fell back to the only alternative I’ve ever found. I turned toward home, opened the tracker app on my phone as I walked, and through the safe, impermeable surface of the Gorilla Glass touchscreen, I watched Ben walk away.

  14.

  The Second Worst Month of My Life

  Ben

  The calendar on my bedroom wall read October 28th. It was a Sunday afternoon. The trees outside my window were losing their leaves, breaking out in a brilliant rash of oranges, reds, and browns. I remember thinking, right after we moved in, that those trees looked so close, so clear, that I could reach out and touch them if I wanted to.

  I couldn’t see them now. My window was gone; in its place hung a semi-clear tarp and the duct tape that held it in the gaping maw where glass used to be. Jagged, glittering shards littered the floor. Mom
was on the phone downstairs talking to one of the town’s few window-repair places. She’d already called the police, and they said they’d send someone down to take a report, but I knew that their efforts would be token at best.

  Nobody would spend much time looking out for the town pariah.

  Kneeling down on the floor, being sure to mind the pieces of glass that still covered it, I finally found it. The rock had rolled beneath my bed. I grabbed it, rolling the worn stone over in my hands. I was not surprised to see a single word painted on it in bright, white letters:

  CONFESS

  Probably Patrick’s handiwork, or one of his goons’; “Confess” had become one of his favorite words lately.

  I tossed the stone in my trash can, too hard. The metal can fell over, spilling odd balls of paper on the ground. A couple rolled toward my doorway. Mom stood there, holding a broom and a dustpan. She forced a smile.

  “You know you’re going to have to clean that up,” she said.

  “How long before they can fix the window?” I asked harshly.

  Her sympathetic smile disappeared. “How about we try that again with a little less attitude?”

  In a heartbeat I was transformed into a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

  She continued. “I know you’re having a bad month, but I raised you better than this.”

  “You did, Mom. I’m sorry,” I said. I owed her so much. Through all this, she’d been one of the only people who’d been completely on my side.

  “It’s all right,” she said, her smile returning, mostly. “And to answer your question, they’ll be by on Wednesday to fix the window.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the broom and dustpan from her. Wednesday would be Halloween, the one day of the year I used to look forward to more than Christmas when I was little. There would be no candy or costumes this year, just barricading in and hoping to survive until the next morning. Like pretty much any day, lately. I didn’t want to think about it.

  She bit her lip nervously. “That’s assuming you still want to be here on Wednesday?”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.