Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “Could you let the monster that stole your mother’s life keep on living it, if that was your best move?”

  That one she couldn’t answer so easily.

  I explained as quickly as I could through this momentary gap in her raging deafness.

  “Love is dangerous when you live among Splinters.” I paused and wrapped my tongue around the second forbidden word as indifferently as I could, the one I’d added to the list when I left The Old Man. “Hate is just as bad. And the worst part is that you can never get rid of them completely. They’re like a cancer that goes into remission and keeps on threatening to come back. But you have to keep medicating them away, however you can. You can’t let them take over.”

  It was strange how this seemed to be getting easier to explain, even as it got harder and harder to demonstrate.

  Haley gave the door a longing look.

  “I’m sorry, Haley. You and I don’t get the quick, clean, easy revenge story. We don’t get to just grab a gun and shoot a few bad people before the cops take us down. This doesn’t end that easily. There isn’t just one Splinter who hurt you, and if you destroy one, another one will break off and take its place, and they’ll barely feel the difference. If you fight them, you fight all of them, the whole infestation, the whole machine, and you can’t do that by knocking off the heads of nobodies in public whenever you feel like it. It’s a big, long job, and to make even a dent in it, you have to settle in, pick your battles, hedge your bets, and keep your head together.”

  Haley bit down on her lip, and I hoped she might simply cry, run off, fall into Ben’s arms, and never speak to me again, and that would be the end of it.

  Instead she nodded and looked at me, utterly clear-eyed. “I can do that. I promise, but we do still have to find out who broke the lock, right?”

  “Yes,” I let go, stuck the flashlight in my bag, and started for the door. “I do.”

  Haley kept pace right beside me as I followed the sound of the next crack out of the bathroom and further out into the periphery of the cemetery, toward the hayride track, heavily decorated, currently vacant, and shielded from the center of activity by a broad stretch of wooded hills and darkness.

  The broken lock, the undisguised sounds—it was obvious I was being deliberately led. I couldn’t pass up the chance to see the Splinter’s face, but whoever it was would be ready. Not a good time to have an amateur along.

  “You’ll draw attention,” I accused her.

  “I’ll draw attention?” She pulled something out of her purse, a headband with a pair of cat ears on it, and placed it on my head. “There. Now you sort of look like you belong. There are different ways to be inconspicuous, you know.”

  I felt the hallucination coming a moment before I saw it, the entire cemetery scene ahead turning green and purple, the dirt of the old graves moving, grey hands clawing their way up, and the shudder it sent through me made me wish harder for some way to lose Haley.

  Not again, please, not again.

  Then Haley screamed.

  It was a small scream, followed by a frantic effort to recover her composure for my benefit, but she was still staring at the graves, intently enough to give me the nerve to ask,

  “You can see them too?”

  She nodded.

  “And they’re not part of your show?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s . . . interesting.”

  “What is this?” she asked.

  But I didn’t have time to speculate with her because, at that moment, a fireball rocketed out of the trees, forcing us both to dodge and roll.

  I looked up to see where it had come from.

  The man in the distance had to be a hallucination, and not only because he was mounted on a jet black horse with red eyes. His costume was much like the rest of the hayride cast, an old west gunslinger all in black with a low, wide-brimmed hat, but his arms were far too long to be human and too rotten for the theatrical society’s makeup skills. A Splinter could have shaped those arms, maybe, but no Splinter I’d ever met could have worn a face like that. I could swear it was made of fire; it was black and green, emitting absolutely no light, except for the two bright yellowish points that passed for eyes.

  The horse started toward us at a canter, and the gunslinger twirled his lasso over his head once, twice. The rope brightened with red fire with each revolution until it hurled another fireball at us like a sling.

  I grabbed Haley and rolled behind the nearest tombstone for cover. The fire ricocheted off of it. I could hear the tap of hooves coming around, ready to make another pass at us.

  After my last episode this vivid, I was not at all sure that survival was reasonable to assume.

  Haley stayed crouched beside me, looking up, waiting for some kind of direction. “If you repeat this, I’ll deny it,” I warned her, and then I had no choice but to let the rest slip out. “The irrelevant fact is that I do like you, Haley. I never wanted you to do anything that would screw up my life’s work and make me change my mind about that, and I also didn’t want you to do anything that would result in me scraping charred pieces of you off of someone’s lawn.”

  Haley nodded as if these were the most reasonable considerations in the world.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I guess. But, see, the thing is, I’m going to be fighting back. It’s just the not-screwing-up-and-dying part I could really use your help with.”

  I may not be able to read faces the way normal people can, much less the way people like Haley and Ben can. Not everything is written in those quantifiable micro-expressions I have to look for and rely on, but it didn’t take any special, vague, elusive instinct to know that she was serious.

  It certainly didn’t feel like eight years since I’d given The Old Man the same ultimatum, just as sincerely.

  I pulled out an extra flamethrower and handed it to her.

  The gunslinger was almost on us again, and together we dodged sideways to a broader tombstone with a better angle.

  “What do I do with it?” Haley whispered. “Against this, I mean?”

  I thought about how I’d briefly made Shaun’s hand intangible with the knife. The whole concept of fighting things that weren’t there was frustratingly imprecise.

  “I don’t know, probably believe in it really hard, or something equally ridiculous.”

  One of the dead hands burst out of the grave beneath us and wrapped around Haley’s ankle. She summoned a look of intense concentration and gave it a burst of fire further up the arm. It shriveled almost instantly away.

  “Got it!”

  We’d picked good high ground. There was no clear path through the graves, so the gunslinger had to back up and take a running start. Haley and I exchanged a nod, ready to blast the horse’s underside together as soon as it got close enough.

  It was three graves away, two graves.

  And then it vanished. The world flickered and returned to normal, the green and purple tinges gone.

  The only thing out of the ordinary was the guy on the ground next to us—Robbie, I realized when my eyes adjusted—trying to crawl away from the figure looming over him.

  It looked like another boy, another one in a full mask, something hairy and monstrous. He was carrying a tree branch and looked very much like he’d just clubbed Robbie over the head with it.

  Robbie found his feet and sprinted back toward the parking lot without glancing back.

  The figure started toward Haley and me, crouching down over us.

  I steadied myself against the stone and kicked hard for where its nose should have been. It keeled over onto the grass, but before I could get in another shot, Haley jumped between us.

  “Wait!”

  She pulled off the monster mask before the guy wearing it could find the wherewithal to do so.

  “Ben?”

  Ben nodded up at me, still cradling his nose, which, for reasons I would have to look into, had already been bandaged. “Hi.”

  “What are
you doing here?”

  “I asked your mother where to find you,” he admitted.

  “Why were you fighting with Robbie?”

  “I saw you two freaking out, and he was just standing there with this creepy look on his face, and . . . and it seemed like a good idea at the time!”

  I looked back at the crowd where Robbie had disappeared. With an almost uncontrollable fit of nausea, I understood which voice was strongest in the amalgam I kept hearing.

  “It was,” I said. “He killed the hunters. He’s the Shard, and he did this to me!”

  “He’s what?” Haley gasped.

  It had been him in my head all semester. It hadn’t been myself that had tried to kill me. He hadn’t needed teleportation or some other physical ability to make the others look like suicides. He had made real suicides.

  It took every ounce of what was left of my will not to chase him through the cemetery, his own turf, with no preparation. The urge was almost as strong as the one to hurt Madison in that fair, alternate world. It brought bile to my teeth, standing still, following the essential advice I had just given Haley.

  Ben was standing there, watching me, Haley watching us both with a mix of dawning horror and hope. I allowed myself to wonder if what she had said about Ben wanting to hear from me was true.

  Ben was trying to say something, maybe to ask what I was talking about or quite possibly preparing another verbal kick if I left myself open again, but compared with the past month, that couldn’t frighten me enough to stop me from speaking first.

  I couldn’t watch him leave again no matter how quiet I could be.

  “He made me think I was going insane,” I explained. “It’s complicated, but I promise, I’ll explain everything, if—”

  “If we’re still . . .” Ben paused as if trying to remember the right word in a second language, “allies?”

  “No.”

  I’d told Haley two of the three forbidden words, but only in the abstract. That didn’t really count. The third word, the one I hoped would prove to be the smallest and most harmless, I said for real. I said it because, whether it was a good idea or not, it was inescapably the one I meant.

  “No, only if we’re still friends.”

  18.

  Getting the Band Back Together

  Ben

  None of us should have been there. Not after all this. We should’ve been scattered to the winds, and maybe we would’ve stayed that way, too, had Mina and I not gotten back together on Halloween night and started working out our differences. Maybe then we wouldn’t have all been gathered around Haley’s kitchen table sharing horror stories.

  It had been almost a week since Halloween. We had the house to ourselves for now; Aunt Christine was out on a date with some firefighter, which, if he was as handsome as Haley said, probably meant we had a good amount of time to work this out. We were able to pull together Aldo, Haley, Kevin, Greg, Julie, and even Courtney.

  Unlike the last meeting, this one was almost entirely Mina’s show. She took the lead in explaining everything that had happened, from Courtney’s near-kidnapping and our theory on Slivers to Madison and my month in hell to Robbie being a Shard assassin working for the Splinter Council. The only thing Mina left out was The Old Man, but I was willing to give her that one secret.

  I wish I could say things were easy after Halloween night, but I’d be lying if I did. I was upset with her for abandoning me. She had defended herself, saying she thought that was what I wanted. I told her not to take me so literally and next time to ask me what I wanted instead of assuming. I was also beating myself up for not being more sensitive to the fact that she had clearly been going through some tough times of her own (with the help of Robbie York’s mental powers). Over the past several days, we had yelled, we had cried (okay, maybe replace that we with I), we maybe even laughed a little. In the end, we worked out a lot of our problems.

  The way friends would.

  After that, it was a matter of figuring out a plan. We had worked out a lot of ideas, some simple, some not-so-simple, and it was clear that we would need to get everyone together. It took a lot of pleading, a lot of bargaining, and the promise of some fresh brownies for Greg (thankfully, Kevin’s a pretty good baker) before we were finally able to pull it off.

  The room was silent as Mina finished telling them of Robbie fleeing into the darkness on Halloween Night.

  Greg broke the silence.

  “War. They want a war, we give them a war,” he said.

  “Greg, sweetie, that ain’t exactly going to fix nothin’,” Julie said. Her pigtails and nails were orange and black now, fitting for both Halloween and Thanksgiving. Through her white makeup and black lipstick, I could see her concern.

  “No, but it’ll feel good,” he said, exasperated, pulling a joint from his jacket pocket.

  “Not in here,” Haley said quickly. “My mom’s gonna get back in a couple of hours, and I don’t want you smelling this place up anymore than you already have.”

  “You saying I smell?” Greg said, offended.

  “You do, hon’, not showerin’ for a week at a time and smokin’ reefer every day’s no way to make friends,” Julie said.

  “Who says I want friends?” Greg asked.

  Courtney spoke up next, irritated with the conversation’s turn. “Far be it from me to advocate a course of action like this, but I’m afraid I have to agree with Greg.”

  “Thank you,” he said. She ignored him.

  “What they do violates all of our fundamental human rights, and I cannot understand how you stand by and simply do nothing. They have kidnapped us! They have stolen our lives! And what have we done? We have stayed quiet, we have allowed them to put fear into our hearts. We can fight them. We can kill them. You have proven that, Mina. Show us what we need to do, and we can send them straight to hell where they belong!”

  Mina shook her head. “That’s not how it works.”

  Greg pointed a finger at her emphatically. “Then show us how it does work! Show us how to end this!”

  He looked to Courtney for validation. She didn’t give him any.

  “You can’t end this. You can’t fight this. Don’t you realize that yet?” Kevin said softly.

  “Why are you even here, collaborator?” Greg asked.

  Kevin slammed his hands down on the table. “I am NOT a collaborator! They’ve destroyed the lives of my friends! The Splinters killed my brother! They kidnapped the woman I love!”

  Haley stared awkwardly at the table, face slightly pink, and didn’t comment.

  “I hate the Splinters with every fiber of my being!”

  “Then why won’t you fight?” Courtney asked.

  Kevin laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “Because Haley was right. I am a coward. I’m afraid. I’ve seen what they do when you let them into your life. It’s not something you can come back from. I don’t want it to happen to me again. I don’t want it to happen to anyone.”

  He was looking at Mina as he said this. She didn’t let it get to her.

  “Nobody at this table is a fan of Splinters. We’ve established that,” said Mina. “But can we all agree that our most pressing problem at the moment is the Shard of Robbie York?”

  This point didn’t bring up any arguments.

  “Has anyone seen Robbie since Halloween?” Mina asked.

  Nobody had an answer for that. Haley said, “He’s been out sick. Rumors going around say he’s got mono.”

  “I heard the clap,” Julie added, getting a few snickers around the table.

  “He’s a Splinter, a Shard. He doesn’t get sick. That’s just a cover,” Mina explained. “He had every intention of killing us that night, but when Ben intervened and broke his cover, he must have gone into hiding. He hasn’t once tried invading my thoughts since then.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Aldo said.

  “It isn’t . . . and it is,” Mina said. “While I am glad to no longer have an outside party violati
ng and manipulating my thoughts, having him quiet worries me even more. We don’t know where he is, or what he is planning, and I believe that makes him more dangerous now than he ever was before.”

  “So what do we do? Track him down and kill him?” Greg suggested.

  “There’s an idea,” Haley said dryly. I had a hard time telling if she was snidely commenting on Greg’s suggestion, or if she was serious. I knew she felt pretty betrayed by Robbie turning out to be a Splinter. Kevin did too, though he was better at hiding it. He was good at hiding a lot of things.

  “That’s not our best move,” Mina said.

  “Why not?” Greg asked. “If he’s faking sick, he’s gotta be in his house. We can just burst in there and take him out. Or better yet, why not just burn the place to the ground?”

  “Because that’d be frickin’ stupid!” Julie said, twirling a finger through her black pigtail. “You wanna spend the rest’a your life in jail on an arson-murder rap? You’re cute, love, too cute for that and ya know it. Besides, if his mind-powers are anywhere close to as strong as what Mina and Haley say—”

  “They are,” Haley interjected.

  “Then you wouldn’t get within a hundred feet of that place before he made you cut yourself open because you think you got spiders under your skin,” Julie finished.

  Greg turned white, unconsciously rubbing his wrists through the long sleeves of his shirt. “Don’t even joke about that.”

  Julie shrugged. “You started it.”

  “Even if we could get to him and get away with it,” I said, “if we kill him, the real Robbie dies.”

  Greg shrugged. “Well, the real Robbie’s a dick.”

  Kevin, Mina, and Haley all stared daggers at Greg.

  “What?” Greg said. Julie smacked him in the back of the head.

  “Thank you,” Haley said.

  “No problem,” Julie said.

  “Can we take him from the Warehouse?” Haley suggested. “You got me out of there all right.”

  Again, Mina shot the idea down. “Also not an option. We were able to get in last time because Billy and your duplicate let us in. Now that they know we know, they’d be expecting us.”