Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “Mina!” Ben called out more desperately, alone on the empty stage. “Haley! Kevin! Anybody!”

  I tried calling back. I tried shaking him, slamming the underside of my fist against his chest until it should have made him gasp for breath, but he was utterly numb to me.

  “Mina!” Ben tried again.

  She won’t be there for you, Robbie’s voice answered. She won’t be there at the end. Not the way you were for your father. She’s too smart to volunteer for what you and your mother went through.

  For the first time since I’d stopped coughing up blood, I saw Ben’s control break. Not just a momentary, reflexive falter, but a shattering. His knees shook and then refused to carry his weight. In elapsed time, quicker than Courtney’s pregnancy, I watched him wasting away, staring with horror down at his own limbs as his tough, powerful layer of muscle dissolved, leaving sickly, quivering skin and bones.

  She won’t care. She can’t care about losing people. It happens too often. She doesn’t get attached. She doesn’t trust anything outside her own body. But you know that’s the last thing you should trust, don’t you?

  Ben ran a nervous hand through that impractical, distracting, and yet so fascinating heartthrob hair, the way I’d seen him do countless times. This time it came away in his hands in thick, sprinkler-wet clumps.

  You wake up fine in the morning, and a routine checkup later, you find out you’ve got nothing left but a few miserable months, and then it’s over. Every hope, every plan, everything gone. No reason, no point, no noble cause.

  Both Ben’s hands went to his newly skinny chest as he drew a wet, rattling breath.

  But you don’t get the small last comfort of dying in a loving partner’s arms. Not the way he did. There’ll never be time to find one. No normal, innocent girl wanted the wanderer’s son, and they certainly won’t want the Splinter hunter. And she won’t be there.

  “I AM HERE!”

  My voice would have reached every seat in the house, even to Alexei’s satisfaction, but it couldn’t reach Ben. I knelt next to him and pulled him into my lap, trying to stop the shaking.

  “I won’t look away, not this time,” I said, to Ben, or Robbie, or myself, I wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t. For a minute and forty-seven seconds, I looked at him, without even glancing to check behind me.

  In the end, the puff of smoke came to spirit him away in an ordinary, unavoidable blink.

  Alone at last.

  Robbie laughed, and I shot a burst of flame over my left shoulder, just in case he was standing there. He wasn’t.

  I forced my legs to straighten and carry me away from where Ben had vanished, starting a slow circuit of the stage. Flamethrower poised, ready. Focused (I feel nothing) on the creak of the floorboards, the rustle of the curtains, my finger on the trigger, nothing else. There would be an error, a clue. There would be an opening, and I would use it to whatever advantage there was left to have. That was all.

  That’s right, said Robbie’s voice. I circled a little faster, more deliberately, trying to detect any change in his volume with the change in our proximity. Now you’re in your element, aren’t you? Don’t pretend you didn’t always think it would be easier this way. No one else left to worry about.

  “So where is it?” I projected into the auditorium’s broad space, hoping to keep him talking, tiring, fluctuating. “The grand finale? What’s it going to be? What’s my deep, secret nightmare?”

  Don’t you know yet?

  My foot brushed something alive, and I hurried to make out the shape of it before Robbie could shore up his block on my senses.

  Ben. I reached down to touch him, half expecting him to vanish on contact and become undetectable again, but wherever my fingers confirmed his presence, he only came into sharper focus, like brushing dust off a photograph. The illusion of illness was gone, and I could see him as he was, strong and healthy-looking in all ways except for the fact that he wasn’t moving. His hands were warm, a pulse easily detectable in his wrists, but there was no sign of breath.

  I remembered the illusion of being strangled, the way my diaphragm had refused to draw breath even with nothing real in the way, and I slapped him gently across the face to cut through the imaginary fluid in his lungs. Nothing happened. I slapped him harder, hard enough to make his head snap back off the wooden stage. Nothing.

  I knew my first aid books, knew the obvious and urgent next step. I tucked the flamethrower into my bag so I could put a hand each on his nose and chin, tipped his airway open, and (I feel nothing) sealed my mouth over his.

  Stupid. The stupid act of a friend, and one I knew perfectly well I’d repeat in the unlikely event that I ever got another chance.

  That’s when the illusion around him did in fact break, and he stopped being Ben.

  Robbie sank his teeth into my lower lip and flipped me onto my back like a rag doll, if a rag doll could have a fresh concussion to aggravate by hitting the ground too fast. The side seams of the costume he was wearing, the Ghost of Christmas Future’s black and red robe, split open. Two Splintery, fleshy wings stretched down from him to the stage on either side of me, one of them cutting neatly through the strap of my bag and flicking it out of reach. The contents scattered out in front of it, the way the Splinter-Shaun had fatally forgotten to do in my most often raided memory. Two extra wing prongs at his shoulders grew claws and pinned my empty, useless hands.

  Robbie pulled back from my face just enough to look at me.

  I AM your nightmare, Mina. Someone you can’t hold at arm’s length. Someone you can’t keep out.

  The wings started to seal themselves over me, crushingly tight, an inch at a time, anchoring themselves into the stage with the force of an industrial staple gun, so close to my skin that each anchor caught the edge of my clothes, sending frays and ladders through the fabric. I almost expected him to transform enough to start doing the same along the inner seams of my jeans and immobilize me completely, but the half of him occupying the space between my legs remained a mocking imitation of human anatomy.

  A small, defeatist fragment of my mind flicked to Ben, where his hallucination might really have taken him, what would happen to him without me in this town where I’d trapped him, if he lived through the night? Then to Aldo, and then, of all places, to Dad—not my real father but my Splinter dad—suddenly painfully curious whether he would laugh or cry if he could see this.

  Oh, he’d fly off the handle pretty bad, Robbie answered me. And the others would back him up. They just love to nitpick the rules for people like me, for the special ones, to make sure they’ve got us in line.

  So the plan would have worked. Would work, if I could just find any advantage. If I could just move.

  But the Queen understands what it’s like, he told me.

  “Queen?” I repeated, searching my aching head for a place where the word fit and finding none.

  The rule followers did the same to her, Robbie thought fervently. So she made me a better offer. Just add you to my list, and I get a body to keep after the job, courtesy of the revolution. Just between us, I think she’s overpaying me. I knew the moment she pointed you out that I’d have done it for free.

  “Too tired to do it from across the room?” I stalled aimlessly. “Isn’t that the trick they— she hired you for?”

  He put one hand to the side of my face, slowly eased my glasses off, and set them aside on the floor.

  Oh, I wouldn’t miss this. You’d never have met anyone who wants you for your mind the way I do, Mina. I’ve broken a lot of them. They’re like playing connect the dots in a child’s coloring book. Yours is like quantum physics micro-etched into the facets of a perfect volcanic geode. When I finish with you, I’m going to find out what a brain like that feels like crushed between my fingers.

  There was another ripping sound of fabric somewhere between us, and I decided that, if nothing else, I would ruin one small detail of his plan as he’d so vividly explained it to me.

&nbs
p; I would not scream.

  I stared over his shoulder at the out-of-focus ropes and pulleys overhanging the stage and (I feel nothing I feel nothing I feel nothing) waited for what came next.

  What did come next was a jolt of electricity so sudden and intense that I had the brief, irrational impression of having been struck by lightning.

  No, of course it had to be something Robbie was doing to me. But that wasn’t right either. I could feel him twitching too, and the theater around us flickered with his convulsions—movement, people, flicking in and out of existence. I didn’t understand until Robbie reached back and pulled the cattle prod out from between his shoulders, where it had lodged like a harpoon, and a real voice echoed down from the catwalk.

  “Lying down on the job, Robin?”

  Mad, instinctive relief flooded my system, and I tried to scramble backward. I got less than a foot before Robbie regained enough shape to secure me again, and all hints of other company vanished. Robbie squinted up toward the catwalk where The Old Man was hiding and threw a hand out in the direction his voice had come from.

  It sprouted batwings and detached from his wrist, flapping off in search while a new one grew in its place.

  Reality set in. The Old Man was there, the way Robbie had wanted, so either he was going to die because of me, or I was going to live because of him. After the way our last meeting up in the hills had gone, neither option had the potential to be pleasant. And so far, I still couldn’t move.

  I was just able to make out the click of an electric dart through my muffled ears before it struck with another paralyzing, agonizing shock.

  (I feel nothing I feel nothing)

  “Stop doing that!” I shouted at the ceiling.

  “You’re welcome!” The Old Man shouted back through another flicker in Robbie’s concentration. This one was longer and clearer. As well as The Old Man shifting positions to stay out of sight, I could hear multiple sets of footsteps and make out the shape closest to me.

  Ben.

  Ben was alive, along with at least a few others. He was on his feet, looking for me, the way I’d been looking for him, but he didn’t find me in the flicker.

  “A little help?!” I called out.

  There was no answer. Ben was twelve feet away and couldn’t hear me. The Old Man was thirty feet above and wouldn’t come any closer. My hearing kept fading in and out. The Old Man was moving around, trying to stay ahead of Robbie’s multiplying drones, shouting down at me, getting progressively more annoyed.

  “Get up, Robin! W . . . the f . . . think you’re doing? Get up bef . . . someone starts to think . . . enjoying yourself!”

  “I’m trying!” I snapped.

  “You want h . . . think you’re f . . . slow? You try one way, a . . . doesn’t work, what do y . . . Little Girl?”

  Try a different way.

  Absolutely no alternatives to kicking and battering at the unbreaking Splinter layer around me presented themselves.

  “Such as?”

  The Old Man didn’t stop to help analyze my options.

  “You gonna g . . . up and fight b . . .? Or y . . . take this lying on your back and m . . . your mother proud? Got j . . . one left.”

  “Please don’t,” I said pointlessly.

  I heard the click of the dart and tried not to moan.

  I feel n—

  “I hate you!”

  The forbidden word surged out of me when the electrical current released my seizing jaw again, dragging along a rush of the white-hot, churning, uncontrollable killing feeling that came with it.

  I felt Robbie recoil slightly on top of me, not from the electricity or from the hate itself, but from the sudden, total absence of fear.

  “Hate m . . . all you w . . . just get it done!”

  Hate is worse than fear, more dangerous. It killed Shaun, and it let the Splinter-Haley get a pod around me. That’s why I don’t feel it, don’t give it its real name, don’t let it command my life the way The Old Man does. But that’s the one advantage it has. It displaces fear. I simply can’t feel both at once.

  And The Old Man was right about one thing. Feeling fear and nothingness wasn’t working.

  So I let it in.

  “I hate you both.”

  Robbie was stunned enough to allow me to wriggle one hand free, and I reached up to claw his face, grasp for any possible way to hurt him.

  I found it. I felt it, not in his body language or the timbre of his projected voice, but through his skin.

  I could feel what he meant for me to feel, his glee and anticipation, the way I could from across the room, but in the places where the physical contact amplified it, the places where even an ordinary Splinter could push thoughts across, I discovered that I could push back. Not only push, but reach in and pull.

  “You’re scared, Robbie!” I read him out loud.

  It had never occurred to me to try to heighten any kind of contact with a Splinter, but when he jerked his upper body away from me so hard that it freed my other hand, I grabbed him by both ears and dug into him, skin and mind, as deep as I could reach.

  “You’re more afraid than anyone else in this room!” Excess hate spilled out of me in a sound that was a lot like laughter, but carried none of the same relief. “They’re alive, aren’t they? Every one of them!”

  The laughter came harder, more jagged and painful. Nothing about this was funny, not remotely, but with every vocal exhalation, every sharp little “ha,” I could feel Robbie’s pompous, bombastic ego crumbling like dried mud in my hands.

  And it felt good.

  “Of course they are! If anything real had happened to them, you’d never have let me miss it! You wanted so badly to make them kill themselves in front of me. You just weren’t up to it!” My hands found more stinging words and I grabbed them eagerly. “You knew you were too weak! So you locked them all in their nightmares, deep enough to keep them apart, and you went right for me, right for the bare minimum victory you needed out of tonight, and you can’t even do that right! You’re too terrified that someone’s going to wake up and realize they’re not alone!”

  Robbie’s concentration flickered, and Ben saw me. He met my eyes and said my name, and behind him I could see enough shapes to account for everyone else stumbling closer. Then he lost track of me again, confused.

  I grabbed for more of Robbie’s mind, barely listening to the words that continued to spill out of my mouth. They came from him, not me, the very last things he wanted to hear, pre-constructed and waiting for me to take them and give them sound.

  “What happened to unwrapping me like a Kit-Kat?” I snarled into his ear, which fell off in my hand, allowing the rest of him to pull further away. The batwings of his lower half still caged me carefully, as if I were a venomous insect, avoiding as much of my newly bared skin as possible, pressing down harder on what clothing was left.

  “You’re not afraid to touch me, are you, Bogeyman?” I couldn’t catch my breath. The laughter was too strong. “What happened to eight or nine hours? What happened to ‘if he shows, he dies too’? You got your best case scenario! You got your targets, your senile Old Man and his Little Girl sidekick, and now you’re too tired? Too scared? Let’s see what else you’re hiding in there!”

  I grabbed for his head again, and he pulled back further, kneeling almost straight up, a look of pure terror on his face. It only made me laugh harder.

  I splayed myself flat on the stage, reveling in the free space he’d put between our upper torsos, more than an arm’s length, and in the fear pulsing out of him and in through the holes in my jeans where he was still gripping me.

  “You want me, Robbie? I’m right here! Time’s running out! What are you going to do with me?”

  The illusions died, all of them, all at once, leaving my eyes and ears perfectly clear to take in the welcome presence of my entire Network standing around us.

  Robbie’s hands were clasped together over my head, shaking with panic, gathering matter from the
rest of him, forming into an executioner’s ax blade, raising higher, ready to finish me as quickly as possible.

  The urge to laugh died too, no longer needed.

  “Get him,” I said.

  And they did.

  Ben’s sledgehammer caught him just above the left ear, knocking him clean off of me and crushing his skull like an egg on the floor. The rest of my Network was on top of him like a pack of feral dogs before the puddle of blood and brain could begin to reclaim its shape.

  “Aldo, wires!” Ben called, wrenching Robbie’s temporarily lifeless arms behind his back, but Aldo was already ahead of him, coiling the copper wiring of the makeshift containment field around Robbie’s legs, weaving between Courtney and Kevin’s restraining hands.

  “Give me the switch!” I shouted at Aldo the moment the coil was finished, when Robbie’s re-formed eyes started to blink open.

  The killing feeling (hate) had built to a pounding, feverish pitch during the endless sixteen seconds it had taken Robbie to regain the ability to feel pain.

  Aldo passed me the switch to the contraption, and finally, I turned it on.

  Robbie’s scream and convulsion into a series of unnatural shapes was a relief akin to cutting into a swollen blister.

  I let up for a moment to give him shape again, and Ben knelt down next to him.

  “Like I said, you might want to come quietly,” he advised, pulling out a clean, new burner cell, and holding it next to Robbie’s face. “First, we’re going to need you to call your friends to set up an emergency meet—”

  I turned the switch back on.

  “Uh, Mina?” Ben looked up at me. I could sense my Network’s looks of triumph shifting to wariness of me, but I had no room to care. I was too busy watching Robbie twitch.

  “Heads up, kiddos!” The Old Man’s voice called from the catwalk above.

  Most of my Network jumped away from Robbie fast enough to avoid the worst of the shower of gasoline that poured down on him. Ben was soaked jumping over him to force the switch off and out of my hands before the stream could hit the live circuit.

  “Now there’s the Robin I know!” The Old Man slid down one of the catwalk ladders like a fireman’s pole and was at my shoulder before I could calculate the right move to retrieve the switch.