Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  It did. It sounded real good. I liked building things, and I could learn a lot from Mr. Finn.

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “Good. Now, the bell’s gonna ring in a few minutes and I got a class to get ready. Think there’s something you need to do before lunch is out?”

  I nodded, running for the door and thanking him profusely as I went. I felt almost like my old self again, and it felt good.

  Real good.

  Things would be tough, at least until we figured out how to deal with Madison and the rest of the Splinters. If I could reconnect with the world, at least I wouldn’t be fighting this fight on my own.

  I had to talk to Kevin.

  I had to talk to Haley.

  More than anything, I had to talk to Mina.

  I just hoped it wasn’t too late.

  17.

  All Hallow’s Eve

  Mina

  Silly question: do you want to talk about it?

  Except for class, Aldo hadn’t let me out of his sight all day until his dad had come to pick him up from school, but we hadn’t talked much. He seemed to be hoping I’d say something first, so I’d managed to avoid this silly question until now, after dinner, when it popped open a video-free Skype window that we would both pretend wasn’t hiding whatever part of his face needed to heal before tomorrow. The illusion from the night before was gone, but that didn’t mean I was any stronger or nobler than it had given me credit for.

  Not really.

  I’d asked him to watch me for a few hours. I’d slept for nine. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept for nine hours at once. I wasn’t sure when I’d last slept for two hours at once.

  Aldo’s typing icon flicked on and off for a while before the next message appeared.

  I almost woke your parents last night, you know. I almost thought you’d be safer in the med center. Of course, then I realized that’s INSANE, but I thought about it.

  I’d woken up fully clothed, with full sunlight streaming in through my window, my face stiff with dry salt, every potentially lethal object in my room gathered and locked in the closet. Aldo had been propped up, bleary-eyed at the head of my bed with my glasses folded safely over the neck of his shirt and his fingers resting in my hair.

  And I might have become aware of all this thirty or forty seconds before I opened my eyes and had to push him away.

  I’m glad you came to your senses, I typed.

  Uh, yeah. You, too.

  I’d lectured him the entire time we were cleaning ourselves up for school about not waking me sooner, about how much unnecessary trouble he’d be in for staying out all night. It hadn’t made me feel any better.

  I was too grateful to feel better.

  The screen was still for a moment. Seriously, what happened to you?

  I started to type “nothing,” felt ridiculous, deleted it, and settled for,

  I don’t know.

  Are you okay now? Not going to go all Evil Dead II on me again tomorrow?

  I don’t know.

  Silly question 2: Can I help?

  I don’t think so.

  My phone vibrated for the twenty-third time that day, and for the first time since lunch, I forced myself to look at it. When it displayed a message with Haley’s name on it yet again, I very nearly deleted it unopened. As always, the compulsive need for the advantage of maximum information won out.

  Need help, PLEASE. Ben and Kevin aren’t answering. At the historical cemetery haunt. Hurry.

  A jolt of adrenaline forced its way out of my reconstructed mental armor. The productive kind.

  Back to work. I wasn’t sure I was up for it, but an entire night stuck on the receiving end of Network protection had me itching to be useful again.

  Besides, Haley and whatever was currently menacing her didn’t care whether I was ready to protect again or not. I had my bag already fully restocked and on my shoulder when I turned back to the keyboard.

  Going to the cemetery, duty calls.

  I can’t go, Aldo typed back, eliciting another stab of guilt.

  Not a problem. I’ll handle it.

  Good luck, be safe, take no shit and all that.

  I debated for a moment before pressing Enter on my sign-off.

  You, too.

  Prospero holds its Halloween Haunt at the historical cemetery because apparently gold-rush era graves are considered creepier than fresh ones. The historical cemetery is also much larger, more hilly, and more heavily wooded than the active one, making it less than ideal for fighting Splinters at night.

  I half expected to arrive to find that the haunt had devolved into a full-fledged Sliver massacre with Haley and maybe a few other humans barricaded in the nearest sturdy structure, but when I set my bike in the rack and started to scout out the edges of the festivities, it looked like any ordinary gathering of humans and well-hidden Splinters on the one ridiculously irresponsible night a year when no one even considers coming to help when someone screams.

  Emanating from the maze were the ordinary flashes of light, laughter-punctuated shrieks, and other sharp noises, mostly metal on wood.

  I scanned the crowd quickly for Shard suspects and other possible threats. The only ECS I could see was Madison, standing in line at the caramel apple stand, wearing bunny ears and far too little else for the temperature, cooing over the plastic pirate sword her dazed-looking date was carrying.

  I was ready for the surge of anger, ready to contain it. It wasn’t until I recognized the edge of disappointment in it that I realized how much I’d been hoping that she’d be the one I’d get to rescue Haley from, the more violently the better.

  I shook off the unproductive thought.

  Patrick was near one of the edges, surrounded by some of his usual associates, pretending not to stare at Madison. His costume was dirtier than it had been at the beginning of the school day, and he had a fresh cast on his right hand. I was going to have to look into that later.

  I spotted Julie in her elaborate witch’s costume at one of the photo-op sets and almost approached her for backup, before I saw Zach, her ten-year-old brother, making faces for her camera. She’d never forgive me if I involved her with him around.

  Courtney, professional-looking as ever, was manning a ticket booth for the haunted hayride, which meant the perimeter of the activities was wider than what I could see.

  I checked the tracker archives for Haley’s phone on mine. It hadn’t been near the Warehouse, and it was still somewhere in the cemetery. I just had to hope it was still on her.

  Where are you? I texted back.

  I only waited a few seconds.

  Girl’s bathroom. Stone building by the back of the maze.

  I circled the outside to reach it, hand on a Taser in my bag, ready for a trap. I’d convinced her when we’d first gotten her back to put a password on her phone, but if someone was threatening her, there was still every chance she wasn’t the one texting from it.

  There were a few people milling around near the bathrooms, but not many. Theater kids and someone I couldn’t identify behind a Sci-Fi spacefarer mask. Robbie glanced away from the cluster of girls who were admiring what I guessed was his attempt at a vampire costume, the new kind with the fangs and cloak replaced by messy hair and makeup that made him look like a syphilis patient. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw him looking at me in that improbably interested way I’d imagined in class last month, but then he was back to whatever joke he’d been telling them.

  The bathroom itself had one of those dark T intersections, perfect for an ambush, but I made it to the door on the girl’s side without incident.

  It was ajar, almost pitch black inside. It opened outwards.

  I pulled, shielding myself with it, and shone my flashlight around it into the room.

  “Haley?”

  Movement.

  Haley, sitting on one of the sinks in her pale, bodiced, Old West ghost costume, bent over her own glowing phone screen, looking hopefully up a
t me.

  I beckoned to her.

  She beckoned pleadingly to me.

  I wanted to get out of those dark, stone corners as fast as possible, but if she wouldn’t move, there was only one option. I swept the corners quickly with the light, checking the empty floors of the two open stalls, and went in after her.

  “What happened?” I whispered, looking her over for injuries or restraints. There were none.

  I heard him, saw him out of the corner of my eye, just as I got too close to Haley to run back to the door in time. The boy in the mask, sprinting down our side of the intersection. I lunged, grabbed a notebook from my bag, and jammed it in the door just as he slammed it shut.

  “Sorry, Mina.”

  The sound of the voice behind the mask froze me just long enough for him to kick the notebook away, latch the door and click a padlock over it.

  “Kevin? Kevin, unlock this door!”

  “Not a chance,” he said, still apologetic. “I’ll be back when you two are done talking things out.”

  I kicked the door once, testing its formidable sturdiness, then turned on Haley.

  “You said you needed my help!”

  “I do need your help!” Haley got down off the sink and stepped toward me, squinting against my flashlight. She gestured around the dank, unpleasant-smelling park bathroom. “Does this not scream desperation loudly enough for you?”

  “I thought you were being attacked!”

  “I’m sorry!” she said, without the slightest sign of relenting. “I’m sorry I had to resort to this, but I did have to. Now, since you took so long getting here, I have to get back to scaring the riders in fifteen minutes. You can either spend that time hearing what I have to say, or shocking me with that thing in your purse. It might make you feel better, but I told Kevin to give us some space, so if you’re thinking about trying to make me scream for him to open the door to rescue me, you’re out of luck.”

  She announced all this with an absolutely straight face, without a single quiver that I could detect by the light of my flashlight and the echo-y acoustics.

  I removed the hand that wasn’t on the flashlight from my bag and showed it to her under the light. Empty.

  “Speak,” I said.

  She took only one breath to gather herself.

  “First of all, you need to know that Ben has been a complete wreck lately, and that I, for one, am absolutely disgusted that his best friend doesn’t want to be there to see him through it.”

  My armor dented but held in place. “Ben doesn’t want to talk to me,” I said as neutrally as I could. “You already know that. But he doesn’t mind talking to you. Maybe you should be ‘seeing him through it’ instead of wasting my time with false alarms.”

  “Oh, believe me, I’m trying, but what he needs is you.”

  I couldn’t categorize this statement as either true or false without cracking through the iron, so my brain simply rejected it unanswered, leaving me momentarily mute.

  “Yeah, that’s the second thing you need to know,” Haley continued. “At first I thought you just didn’t care. I didn’t think someone as smart and brave as he’s always saying you are could really be stupid enough not to figure that out, or chicken-shit enough not to do anything about it. Then it hit me, when Ben told me you were just doing exactly what he told you to do, that maybe you really don’t get it. Maybe you actually need someone to tell you that he didn’t mean it.”

  I needed to be somewhere private to think about that. “Thank you for the information,” I said. “Are you finished?”

  Haley stared at me hard, waiting for something more. I didn’t give it.

  “That was the really urgent part,” she said. “But as long as I’ve got you here, there are a few things we’ve needed to talk about for a while.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as why you don’t like me.”

  There were too many things wrong with this question.

  “You mean other than the way you just lured me into a park bathroom under false pretenses?”

  “Yes, other than that.”

  I searched for a new way to deflect.

  “How I feel about you doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me how you treat me,” she said pointedly. “And don’t give me that ‘I have a mental condition that makes me a bitch to everyone’ bullshit. I know you’re not the same with everyone. You talk to Aldo. You used to talk to Ben. You even talk to Kevin. Maybe not as much as they’d like, but at least they don’t have to pull a stunt like this to make you acknowledge that they exist! And don’t give me your ‘trust issues’ speech either because I know you’ve been watching me every minute since you two rescued me from the pod. You know I’m human, so that’s not it either. Have I done something to offend you?”

  “No.”

  “Is it because of Ben? Because this part, the you-and-me part, has nothing to do with him!” she exclaimed. “If you think this is all about crowding in on your friendship, or some pathetic attempt to be more like you for his sake—”

  “I would never think so little of you,” I said honestly.

  “Then what is it?!”

  Her knuckles were white where her hands folded over the strap of her purse, shaking with a terrible need that I understood too well to trust it.

  “I think you feel too much,” I said.

  “For Ben?”

  “For everything.”

  The glare she gave me didn’t help. She looked exactly how I’d felt eight years ago. I’d made a lot of mistakes thanks to feeling like that, mistakes that no amount of advice or supervision could have kept me from. I’d survived them through sheer luck.

  “A little anger is good,” I explained. “A little fear, a little pride in your associates and your species, that’s necessary to keep you going, but you’ve got too much. It goes too deep. They hurt you too badly, and you’re not going to be able to handle it.”

  Haley folded her arms, almost stopping the shaking, but the desperate rage was still obvious on her face.

  “So you’re the only person they’ve hurt who’s allowed to fight back?” she demanded.

  “You don’t want to be like me, Haley.”

  “No! I don’t! But it’s already too late for me to just go on with a normal life, and I’d rather be like you than be hurt and helpless!”

  If there’d been another way to make her understand, I would have used it. Instead, I rolled my right sleeve up to the elbow and turned my flashlight on it.

  Haley stared for a moment at the thick, twisted, discolored gouges circling my arm before recovering herself. “You can’t scare me away just because I might get hurt. I don’t care—”

  “Believe me, the two surgeries and four skin grafts it took to save my arm were the easy part. The hard part was burning the Splinter who did it alive.”

  “I could kill a Splinter,” Haley insisted.

  “It’s not just the Splinter!” I said. “Look, the only other people who know this are Kevin and Aldo, and I’d like to keep it that way, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “I killed the person it took, the one who was still in the pod. We were involved. Romantically.”

  Haley swallowed hard, still staring at my scar. I could see her adding up the timeline, the only disappearance that matched up.

  “You don’t mean . . . Shaun? Oh God, Mina, I’m so sorry.”

  I turned the flashlight back on Haley and advanced on where she’d cornered herself between the sinks, wanting to shake her, wanting to cut through her anger and sympathy to what had to be inside, to what was always inside mine, to the little nine-year-old girl who still wanted to go hide under her bed and wait for all the monsters to go away.

  “I don’t want you to be sorry! I want you to think about doing that!” I shouted. “I want you to picture it! Think what would happen if the Splinters took someone you . . .” I took a breath to brace myself for the word, “someone you love.”

  I hadn’t pronounced
it out loud for two years, not since Shaun. And before that, not since I’d been able to say it to my father. But for Haley’s sake, I had to be absolutely clear.

  “If it were Ben, or Kevin, or your mother,” she winced just slightly when I reached the last suggestion, so I jumped on it, “if one of them looked like your mother, sounded like her, smelled like her, remembered things only she could know, could you kill her if you had to?”

  Haley was shaking a little again, and for a moment I thought I’d won, but when she answered, it was with absolute certainty.

  “Yes.”

  That was when we both heard the unmistakable crack of a Splinter transforming, just outside the door.

  “Kevin?” we shouted together.

  No answer. But we turned out not to need him to let us out. Two strikes of what must have been a transformed Splinter appendage—it was heavier than a rock—and the door swung open, the warped remnants of the padlock falling to the concrete below.

  I drew a flamethrower and positioned myself in front of Haley, waiting for the Splinter to come in and find us cornered.

  And waited.

  Nothing entered.

  “What are we waiting for?” Haley asked from behind me, pulling out a pitiful bottle of mace and trying to push past me. “It’s right outside!”

  I grabbed her by the flimsy top of her costume with my flashlight hand and held her back. The beam fell across her face at a distorting angle.

  “See, this is the problem! You think you could kill a Splinter of your mother if you had to? Okay, let’s try a harder one. Could you not kill her if you didn’t have to?”

  Haley just looked confused. I repeated the question.