Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  He had to know that the imitation of innocent fatherly affection was useless, but he had an unsettling way of making me feel almost like he wanted it to be true.

  “Need help fixing something up?”

  “You could say that,” I said, then regretted it because it made him smile. “Did you really authorize a harassment campaign to coerce Ben into disassociating himself from me?”

  The smile and innocence vanished. I wished they’d take the fatherly affection with them.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, you really didn’t leave me much choice.”

  The phantom iron around my internal organs went surprisingly cold just then, as if I’d actually been hoping he’d deny it. “I didn’t leave you a choice?”

  “I do want you to have friends, believe it or not,” he said. “It’s what you do with them that’s the issue. And you do it a little too well with him. It had people frightened.”

  “You mean Haley? We talked about this. You said you’d made a deal for us. This wasn’t part of it.” I kept my voice steady through my own uncomfortable implication that I’d actually expected him to keep his word.

  “You didn’t stop,” he said. “We have word you interfered with a replacement on your first day at school together.”

  “This is about Courtney? Those weren’t even your people who were after her, were they? Your people are better at it than that!”

  “Yes,” Dad agreed calmly, “we are. But if it had been my people, would it have stopped you two?”

  I couldn’t pretend it would have.

  “We haven’t broken the treaty,” I said.

  “Neither have we,” Dad pointed out. “Sweetie, if I’d insisted on keeping the two of you untouchable and together after that, I’d have had a riot on my hands. One of my people would have turned vigilante on him by now no matter what I said.”

  “So you decided to provoke the humans into handling the vigilantism for you, is that it? You’re trying to keep your hands clean?”

  “The humans aren’t going to kill him!” Dad exclaimed, as if this were absurd.

  “Just make him wish they would,” I finished.

  “Exactly! And when he’s had enough, we’ll make it stop, I promise.”

  “‘Had enough’?” I repeated. “What are you asking him to do now to prove he’s ‘had enough’? Do you want him to help kidnap humans for you?”

  Dad looked appalled. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mina. Didn’t he even tell you our terms?”

  A small pulse of stomachache leaked through the iron as I understood.

  “You mean to tell me that he hasn’t even promised to stay away from me for good yet?”

  Hopeful, much? One of the more frequent voices in my head spoke up, louder than my own voice in the quiet workshop. It was male, young, and low. Beyond that, I couldn’t have identified it even if I’d cared to try. It felt like an amalgam of every young male voice I’d ever heard. I was sure one element was just slightly stronger than the rest, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Shut up, I thought back at it as loudly as I could without it showing on my face.

  “Not yet, but he will,” Dad said. “He’s a stubborn boy. I can see why you like him, but he’ll break, and once he does, he’ll be fine.”

  Not yet, though, huh?

  Shut up.

  “We’ll give him the best life we can here in Prospero. He can have anything he wants, except geographic mobility and, obviously, you. I know it’ll hurt him at first, but we’ll set him up nicely, I promise.”

  The corners of the workshop were becoming fuzzy and sparkly, and I knew I was on the verge of an episode more severe than an irritating voice in my head. I didn’t have much left of this coherent moment, not enough to argue properly for Ben the way I wanted to, but it had just occurred to me that there was one more quick question it couldn’t hurt to ask, for him and for me.

  Running on impulse, I pulled the full stack of obituaries, envelopes and all, out of my bag and handed them to Dad.

  What the hell are you doing? The male voice got sharper, almost panicked.

  Shut up.

  “Did you authorize this, too?” I asked. “And can you also promise me that it has nothing to do with him?”

  Dad’s eyes narrowed more the further he read.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “and no.”

  “What do you mean, ‘yes and no’?” I prompted, hoping he’d answer while my ears were still only slightly glitchy.

  “I mean yes, I’m aware of the purge of your old faction, we had to do something to show the other colonies we can still keep our house in order, and yes, Ben should still be fine, but no, I didn’t authorize this.” He pointed to my name on one of the envelopes. “You were not to be targeted, informed, or involved in any way.”

  “So if I am, then Ben could be too,” I finished.

  Wow, out of what he just said, that’s what bothers you?

  Shut up.

  “Sweetheart, listen to me very carefully.” Dad stood up from the bench and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to put a stop to this. You are not an authorized target. If anyone tries to hurt you, if anyone threatens you again, you tell me, and I’ll come down on them hard.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “I’m not finished,” said Dad, tightening his grip slightly when I tried to back away. “No one’s going to hurt you just because they think they can get away with it, but that doesn’t mean you get to be stupid about this either. Do not provoke the assassin.”

  “I get it.”

  “No, you don’t. This isn’t something you take under advisement. This is something you do. The people we use for this, they’re not like me.”

  “I know that.”

  Slight surprise crossed his face again. “Do you? I don’t know what you’ve seen or heard this time Mina, but our assassins, our specialists, they’re dangerous, even to us. Sometimes they’re the only things strong enough to get the job done. What we have to do to make them strong enough—” he broke off and started over. “They’re not stable. They’re not reasonable. You can’t bargain with them, and you do not want to get in their way.”

  What’s wrong with you, Mina? The voice hissed. Are you actually listening to this guy? The one who as good as killed your father? Grilling him about Splinter plots is one thing, but taking his advice?

  “Okay, Dad,” I said and pulled away, making a note to decide what really was and wasn’t okay later.

  “Please be careful!” he called after me while I navigated the glowing, rippling carpet to the stairs. “And you don’t have to wait so long to talk to me next time you have a problem!”

  The stairwell to my room was dark, much darker than it was supposed to be, and the room itself was pitch black. Even when I fumbled my way through the thorny, Splinter-bat-infested nets my skin and ears were convinced were hanging in my way, when I turned on both the desk lamps, and leaned over the heat of one of the bulbs, I couldn’t see.

  Darkness lacks boundaries. There are no edges to pack things in and make them sensible and orderly, so I can’t say exactly how long I stood in it, trying to think of anything it couldn’t prevent me from doing, before I felt a different hand on my shoulder.

  Light returned as I spun around and secured an arm lock. The colors in my room were too bright and the edges too soft, but otherwise it was almost exactly as it was supposed to be. There wasn’t even a crowd of dead people in it.

  There was just one dead person, the one I least wanted to see.

  “Hi, Mina.”

  I dropped the hallucination of Shaun Brundle on the floor and proceeded to the newly visible desk. I didn’t think about how long it had been since I’d seen even a photograph of him, or about how his resemblance to Kevin always made it feel more recent than it was. I didn’t try to comprehend how he could look exactly the way I remembered him at fourteen, same floppy, dirty blond hair covering his ears, same gawky-tall frame, same nose and Adam’s apple that he hadn’t quite grow
n into yet—would never get the chance to grow into—and simultaneously still feel exactly my age.

  A drawer opened behind me, and I didn’t need to turn to tell that he was digging through the old stalker-shots of Ben that I hadn’t felt up to cleaning out yet.

  “Nice to see you’ve missed me.”

  “If I didn’t miss you, you wouldn’t be here,” I snapped, and then tried to pretend I hadn’t just spoken to myself out loud again.

  “Same old Mina,” he laughed. “Can’t stand to give a compliment unless you can slap someone with it.” He closed the drawer again. “It’s cool. It’s not like I didn’t expect you to move on.”

  “You didn’t expect anything.” Just like when he was alive, it was hard not to answer where he left an opening. “Your capacity for expectations ceased when I set your Splinter on fire with you still in its pod.”

  “I forgave you for that, you know.”

  I swiveled around in my desk chair. “No, you didn’t!” I hissed. “You didn’t have time to forgive me because you were dead! You’re still dead! The thing I’m talking to is just a bundle of my own misfiring neurons, trying to make me feel better!”

  He smiled the sad, serious smile he’d always had in reserve. Serious enough to trust with life and death, but still a smile, a real smile, as if there was nowhere he’d rather be. “Under the circumstances, is that so terrible?”

  I turned back to the desk and started trying to guess which of the crawling, Splinter-arachnid icons on the screen would reopen the spyware. Shaun wrapped a very solid pair of arms around me from behind, and I didn’t validate their existence by trying to shake them off. I just stared at the incomprehensible screen and waited for them to disappear, trying not to feel their familiarity or the warmth of his breath on my ear.

  The iron around my torso started to crack, and wherever I tried to visualize it rejoining, more of it crumbled away, flaking like burnt out charcoal.

  The tears it had secured in my chest leaked out, and I let them.

  I’m alone, this doesn’t count. It’s just me and the rest of my brain.

  Shaun squeezed me tighter and kissed my quickly soaking cheek. I very nearly turned my head to kiss him back.

  “It’s okay. Hey, can we at least agree that I would have forgiven you?”

  My diaphragm gave an involuntary spasm, and tears splashed onto my keyboard and my chest, washing away streaks of the unexplained grime.

  “It’s been hard on me too.” He glanced, and I followed his gaze, to the kitchen paring knife I kept next to my keyboard for emergency defense, the same one I’d stabbed his Splinter with. “To be honest, I kind of thought we’d be together again by now.”

  I turned then, sharply enough to elbow his stomach.

  He looked back at me steadily. “Mina, look at you. You’ve done all you can. You’ve given everything. There’s nothing left. There’s no shame in that. When will you finally feel you deserve a rest?”

  We both looked back at the knife, and, for just a moment, it sparkled, reflected back a ghost image of both of us, and it was absolutely beautiful.

  As I’ve said before, it’s occasionally obvious, even to me, that it’s time to call for help.

  Shaun leaned in to kiss me properly. I tipped my desk chair over backward to get away. I briefly considered screaming for Dad, but for all I knew, there still might be nothing genuine in all his expressions of concern. I couldn’t risk dealing with him while I wasn’t myself.

  I grabbed for my phone instead.

  “What are you doing?”

  By the time I opened my contacts folder, the screen had turned to glittery gibberish again. Luckily, the name I needed would be the one at the top.

  “You’re not Shaun,” I told him again.

  He protested. I stopped him.

  “If the real Shaun still existed, any part of him, in any form, he’d be the first one to tell me to fight this!”

  The hallucination looked sheepish, and for a moment, I almost expected it to concede to my logic and vanish.

  Then it cocked its head to one side, then the other, with two horrible, Splintery, wood-snapping sounds, and grinned at me, suddenly colder than Shaun’s face, even the Splinter Shaun’s face, had ever managed to be.

  “Can’t let a guy be romantic just once, can you, Mina? Can’t take it slow and smooth, gotta get right down to business. Okay, fine!”

  He lunged at me, and on blind instinct, I grabbed the knife and turned it on him. It passed through his chest as if it were made of smoke—less than smoke—made of nothing, but the hands he closed on my neck felt perfectly real.

  “That isn’t where you need to stab me,” Shaun laughed, only he didn’t sound quite like Shaun anymore. It was that vague, familiar, male amalgam of a voice again.

  I listened to the ringing of the phone, hoping I hadn’t missed and hit the next name down. If the acuteness of my condition correlated at all with my emotional state, which seemed likely at that point, I might not have survived the sound of Ben’s voicemail message. But the voice on the other end was live, and it was the right one.

  “Now isn’t a good time,” Aldo whispered. There was an indiscernible raised voice in the background.

  My phone was elongating itself, becoming uncomfortably scaly. The earpiece hissed and snapped at me so suddenly that I almost dropped it.

  “I need you to come over,” I wheezed from a foot away.

  “Um, like I said—”

  “Please.” I brought it closer, and it latched its fangs into my ear. “Please.” I heard my voice crack, and I didn’t pretend to cough it away. “I just need . . . a couple of hours. I just need someone to watch me and make sure I don’t . . .”

  “Why don’t you say it?” Shaun squeezed harder. What was it you used to call it, Mina? The ultimate failure? The S word. The S-U word. Worse than submit. Worse than surrender. S-U-I-”

  “Make sure I don’t die,” I compromised with the last of the air in my lungs.

  If there was an answer, my brain wasn’t capable of processing it.

  “Aldo?” I shaped the name, but no sound came out. After a few moments of silence, I dug the phone’s teeth out of the side of my face.

  You can’t be strangled by your own imagination, I told myself firmly. Take a breath.

  I could, just barely. My throat and lungs fought the contradiction every inch of the way.

  On a sudden inspiration, I jerked the knife upward, toward Shaun’s left hand. It connected with nothing, but the hand flashed briefly intangible like the rest of him when the blade got close enough, long enough for me to twist away. I made a grab for the window.

  It retreated, further away the harder I reached for it.

  “You can’t run from me,” Shaun told me calmly, standing on stationary ground beside me while I scrambled ineffectively toward the far side of the room. “And you can’t hide, not even in a head as big as yours.”

  It will end, I told myself in my pathetically quiet little mental voice. It always does. I’ll wake up in the morning, I’ll go to school, and everything will look normal for hours at a time.

  “You know how this ends,” he said.

  The knife in my hand was getting bigger, harder not to look at.

  I don’t do that. I’m not a coward. I have responsibilities.

  “Responsibilities?” he snorted. “To what? Humanity? You don’t even like humanity, Mina! Not that you can do anything for them when you try!”

  That’s not true.

  I was suddenly at my desk, in front of the compilation of my life’s work.

  Shaun was leaning over me from behind again, this time with unnatural, Splintery angles in the arms he wrapped around me. “Name one thing you’ve accomplished! One person who was worth it!”

  Aldo.

  “You can’t protect Aldo from Splinters! You can’t even protect him from the lousy humans he lives with! You never even cared enough to try! One phone call, one mention to the school counselor, that’s all
it would have taken, but you couldn’t do it because you knew that if it worked, they’d take him away from you, along with all his fancy tech toys!”

  That’s not what he would have wanted.

  “He’s a child! He doesn’t know what he wants! You might as well trick a hatching duckling into thinking you’re its mother! He’s not old enough to understand that you don’t really love him!”

  I . . .

  “Can’t even contradict me!”

  They’re all worth it. Humans are worth it. The Network’s worth it. They need me.

  He pushed me closer to the board. The maps, the lists, all the words on them perfectly legible for the moment. The pushpins dug into my hands when I tried to steady myself against it.

  The short, sterile obituaries were all displayed there in a row.

  “How long do you expect before you’re one of these?” he asked. “‘Died suddenly,’” he read to me, “‘died in her home,’ ‘is predeceased by no one worth mentioning, survived by no one at all, so let’s skip that depressingly empty paragraph and pretend that her life was about hunting, or genetic research, or whatever other euphemism we can find for her obsession with a project so hopeless that no one even knows about it! In fact, why not just skip the obituary altogether, since no one can find anything to say about her!’”

  Just because a life wasn’t public doesn’t mean it was pointless.

  “So what was your point, Mina? Shaun is dead! The Old Man will be dead in days, and even you know he’ll deserve it! Haley will grow up a broken woman just like you would, if they even let her! Your mother considers you an inconvenience! Your father’s never coming back! Even if you could find him, he’d be nothing but a shell! And even if you could revive him, do you really think he’d be proud?”

  Courtney’s face flashed across the board, indignant and betrayed, typing in the code to bring up my less than heartwarming criminal record.

  “How long has it been, Mina? Since you felt close to someone? Any kind of someone? Was it this?”

  I was in Shaun’s room, before it had become an extra home office. He was kissing me, and I was kissing back, my body locked into the motion it had followed before. It had happened. It couldn’t be changed.