Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  “Bleeding in his brain, I think,” Tobin said, then broke down. “I can’t help him! I can’t!”

  “Why not?” Kieran screamed. The morphine suddenly cleared away and he could stand on his own two feet, his entire mind crystallized on a single point: saving Philip Grieg. “What would a doctor do?”

  “Drill into his head!”

  “Then do it!” The room got quiet, and every eye turned to him. Kieran was calm now.

  “You don’t understand!” Tobin cried. “Everything I’ve needed was in the manuals until now! There’s no training video for brain surgery!”

  “Anyone can see he’s going to die if you don’t.”

  “He’ll die if I do.”

  “Give him a chance,” Kieran said.

  Tobin stood over Philip’s quaking body, panting, his short neck bulging out at the veins. Finally he said, “Okay. Bring me a shaver and a scalpel, and, uh, iodine. And … I don’t know. Find a drill.”

  His two helpers stared at him, openmouthed, until he yelled, “Go! We’ve got no time.”

  He went to the sink and washed his hands, scrubbing with a small white brush up to the elbows. One of his helpers put rubber gloves on him while the other wheeled in a cart holding an array of instruments, each one more frightening and complicated than the next.

  “We’ve got to get the adults back,” Kieran said quietly to himself. But then he remembered, there were adults on the ship, in the long-term care section, still recovering from radiation poisoning. “Is Victoria Hand conscious?” he asked the room at large, but no one answered.

  “Turn him over,” Tobin said. The boys gently turned Philip’s scrawny body, and gasped when they saw the huge bump on the back of his head, swelling out like a grotesque balloon. There must be so much blood in that young skull. Tobin closed his eyes, pushed all the air in his lungs out from between pursed lips, then his helper tied a surgical mask over his nose and mouth. “Everybody out,” Tobin said.

  “You don’t need help?” said his assistant, wide-eyed.

  “I can’t do this with someone watching,” he said.

  Matt took hold of Kieran’s elbow and drew him out of the room. Matt headed for Kieran’s bed, but Kieran planted his feet, pulling against the boy’s grip. “Let’s check on the adults.”

  Matt held firmly to Kieran’s elbow as the two of them walked past the doctor’s office and into the next room, a large space with a row of eight beds, every one of them occupied by the ailing adults. It had been weeks since Kieran had come down to check on them. Two of them were hooked up to ventilators that puffed their chests up, making them look like dolls. Tobin’s mother was one of them. No wonder the boy never seemed to leave the infirmary; he was working hard saving other people so he wouldn’t have to think about how he couldn’t help his own mother. That Tobin was able to keep these adults alive at all showed how intelligent and capable he and his helpers were.

  In the far corner of the room lay Victoria Hand, a nurse, the sole surviving member of the Empyrean’s medical team. Next to her bed dozed her son, Austen, who had become the de facto nurse of this ward, along with the other children whose relatives were here.

  “How is she?” Kieran asked Austen, who straightened in his chair when he saw Kieran. He rubbed sleep out of his eyes with his long fingers and sniffed. “She sleeps like twenty hours a day, and I have to do dialysis on her every day.”

  “How did you guys know to do dialysis?”

  “She told me.”

  “So she’s talking?”

  “When she’s awake we can ask her questions.”

  No wonder the medical ward was running so well.

  Kieran leaned over her and took her hand. “Vickie? Vickie, wake up.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, but they closed again. Her skin was puffy, and she looked as though she’d aged twenty years in the last few months. She opened her mouth a few millimeters, and with a soft gush of air, said, “Kieran.”

  “Vickie, we’ve got a severe head injury in the other room.” Her eyes fluttered closed again, until Kieran knelt down and said loudly into her ear. “Tobin Ames is about to drill into Philip Grieg’s skull.”

  Her eyes flew open, and she focused on Kieran. “His mother will never consent—” she began, but then seemed to remember that Philip’s mother was dead.

  “If I get you into a wheelchair…,” Kieran began, but she was already nodding, struggling to sit up. Austen threw his weight behind her and pushed her.

  “Mom, are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she rasped. “Just get me there.”

  Now that she was upright and the light shone on her scalp, Kieran realized that her hair had fallen out and been replaced with a weak-looking peach fuzz all over her skull. Through her thin infirmary gown, her back showed every rib; she looked as though she were made of sticks.

  Austen, biting his lower lip, brought a wheelchair, and Matt lifted Victoria into it. She swooned, and leaned over the side of the chair to vomit a thin, watery substance, which dribbled onto her hospital gown.

  “Mom!” Austen cried.

  “Just from being upright after so long on my back,” she said faintly.

  Everyone in the main room of the infirmary stopped to stare as she was wheeled to Philip’s operating room. Kieran could see through the glass door that Tobin was shaving Philip’s hair. Victoria picked up a surgical mask. “Tie this on me,” she told her son, who bent over her, his features twisted with worry.

  “Mask on you,” she rasped, pointing at Matt, who quickly tied one around his own face, then he pushed her inside the room. Austen stood back. He clearly didn’t want to go in at all.

  Kieran watched through the glass of the door. When Tobin saw Victoria, he cried out in relief. Matt wheeled her around so she could get a look at poor Philip’s misshapen skull, then he quickly left the room and came to stand next to Kieran. They watched as Victoria pointed at the boy, and Tobin listened closely. Tobin picked up a large swab with iodine on it and began to smear it over Philip’s head. Then, with sweat pouring down his face, he picked up the scalpel.

  “Tobin is brave,” said a voice, and Kieran turned around to see that Seth was watching from his bed. “I could never do that.”

  “Me neither,” whispered Waverly, who was also watching as tears trickled from her eyes.

  They seemed much better now that the medicines had a chance to work, though their voices both sounded squeezed.

  Kieran stumbled over to his bed, his eyes on Seth, who eyed him back. Seth had lost weight, Kieran could see, but of course that only brought out the definition of his muscles, the finely carved bones of his face. Was Waverly so stupid that she could be taken in by nothing more than physical beauty?

  “Matt,” Kieran said, and beckoned to the boy with a finger. Matt leaned down, his back straight, and Kieran whispered in his ear, “Go down and tell the guards in the brig to notify me when the terrorist regains consciousness. No one is to talk to him until I get down there.”

  “Okay,” Matt said.

  “And bring back a couple guards with you.”

  Matt looked stonily at Seth and nodded.

  “So I guess I’ll be going back to the brig,” Seth said, though he couldn’t have heard what Kieran said.

  “But now you’ll get a trial,” Waverly said. “Right, Kieran?”

  Kieran stared straight ahead, ignoring her.

  “Seth figured out how to capture the terrorist,” she rasped.

  “He modified the forward sensor array to carry a voice transmission,” Seth said matter-of-factly. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”

  He sounded so smug, so arrogant. Kieran wanted to choke him all over again.

  “How did you two happen to be there?” Kieran said quietly.

  There was an awkward silence. Kieran turned to find Waverly looking at her hands, her mouth stubbornly set. She raised her eyes to his and said evenly, “I was bringing Seth food.”

  “Under threat,” Seth
put in. “I forced her to do it.”

  “No one can force me to do anything,” Waverly said, glaring at Seth before turning to Kieran. “I was doing it because I didn’t think he should go back to the brig after I saw the way you threatened Sarah. I thought he was in danger, so I helped him hide.”

  “How kind of you,” Kieran said, and turned away from her. How disgusting she was to him now.

  Soon Matt walked back into the infirmary, Harvey Markem and Hiro Mazumoto trailing behind, looking nervous.

  “Matt, Hiro, take Seth to the brig,” Kieran said. The two boys looked hesitant, but when Hiro took hold of Seth’s arm, Seth took the oxygen hose off his face and got out of bed willingly enough. He seemed shaky on his feet, and he swayed a bit, so Kieran said, “Better bring down an oxygen tank with you.” With his free hand, Hiro picked up a tank and walked Seth toward the door.

  “Harvey,” Kieran said. “I’m placing Waverly under arrest for obstructing justice and aiding a fugitive.”

  He ignored her hoarse cry of outrage as Harvey reluctantly pulled on her arm. She lay still at first, seeming to consider whether to fight, but finally accepted that she couldn’t win. Harvey picked up her oxygen tank and pulled her toward the door.

  “Kieran, we’re sick,” Waverly said. Kieran heard clicks inside her throat when she drew a breath. “We should be here in the infirmary, not in the brig.”

  “You’ll get medical care,” Kieran said.

  Seth was just about to stumble out the door when he pulled against his two guards, resisting them long enough to look back at Kieran with a murderous glare. “You’re no better than I was,” he managed to say before they overpowered him and pulled him away.

  Once they were gone, Kieran looked to his left to find Arthur’s steady blue eyes on him.

  “I have no choice, Arthur. You see that, don’t you?”

  Arthur turned away and hunkered down under his covers. Kieran kept his eyes on the door to the operating room, where Tobin and Victoria were working on Philip. Right now, all he cared about was that little boy’s life.

  RELEASE

  “We’re too sick to be down here,” Waverly said to Harvey, who dragged her along the corridor. Even to her own ears, it sounded like an excuse, but she knew it to be true. The steroids Tobin had pumped into her had revived her, but what about when they wore off? The fleshy insides of her throat could swell together again, and she might suffocate. She needed to be in bed, and she needed medical care. She could see only the back of Seth as he staggered between his two guards; she was afraid he would fall. “Harvey, I’m not kidding. We almost died!”

  “I know,” Harvey whispered through the side of his mouth. “I’m going to call a Central Council meeting. Sit tight.”

  He pulled her into the corridor that ran between the cells of the brig. Waverly looked into the first cell on her left to find the man who had nearly killed her lying on the cot, snoring loudly.

  “I don’t want to be near him.” She shuddered.

  “He’ll never know you’re here,” Harvey said.

  She stumbled, almost fell to her knees when, with surprising strength, Harvey scooped her up and carried her the rest of the way down the corridor and laid her on the cot in the cell at the end of the row, across from where they were putting Seth.

  She and Seth would be able to see each other and talk. Kieran wouldn’t like that. Harvey and the other guards probably knew it, too. Was this their way of acknowledging Kieran’s unfairness?

  Waverly lay still as Harvey fixed a tube under her nose and turned the dial on the oxygen tank. She felt somewhat revived.

  “You okay?” she heard, and turned to see Seth looking at her, his oxygen already on. The whites of his eyes were red from burst blood vessels, and his skin was gray. Did she look that pale? Were her bruises as ugly as his?

  “I’m okay I think,” she said, but she was still out of breath from walking down here. “You?”

  “I’ve just been choked by a gorilla, so, yeah. Feeling great.”

  Waverly looked at the ceiling because she couldn’t look at Seth’s bruises any longer. She was afraid to close her eyes. She might die in her sleep if her throat closed again.

  I’m still scared, is all, she told herself, trying to calm down. Sleep will heal me.

  But when she closed her eyes, all she saw was that animalistic face twisted with fury as iron hands squeezed her throat. Every detail of him was crystallized in her mind: his receding hairline, his large, oily pores, his rotten breath, the sweat that had run in streaks down to the tip of his nose, where it lingered, then fell in droplets that splashed on her face, her neck, her hair. Her vertebrae had ground together under his fingers, and she’d heard the crackling of her larynx. She forgot Seth was in the room. She forgot where she was. She was dying, alone with her killer. She’d kicked, trying to twist out of his grasp, but he was impossibly strong, and he was huge.

  She’d known fear before, of course, but this terror at the end of her life had been new. It hollowed her out, debased her, turned her into nothing more than airless lungs and bloodless brain. A gray cloud had crept into the borders of her vision, and a voice inside her had screamed, I’m dying! I’m dying now!

  When she had wakened in the infirmary, she couldn’t feel her own body. There were people leaning over her, talking about her, shouting at her, but she couldn’t speak to them. She wasn’t sure she was in the same space with them. They were the living, and she was dead.

  Then she must have turned her head, and she’d seen Seth in the next bed over, looking at her.

  I’ve come back, she’d thought. I’m alive again.

  After all that, Kieran had sent her down to this cold, comfortless, lonely place. He’d banished her.

  He must really hate me.

  Waverly shook her head, wincing at the pain in the base of her skull. She felt tears running down the sides of her face, across the indentations of her temples, into her hair. She’d known Kieran didn’t love her anymore. That had been clear for a while, and she’d accepted it. But now he’d become her enemy.

  I knew this might happen, she told herself fiercely. She didn’t like her own grief. She longed for the time to come when she no longer mourned the loss of her old life, when she no longer cared so much about the future. At some point she had to become hardened so that it wouldn’t hurt anymore. She felt parts of herself starting to break, like fibers in a twisted palm frond giving in little by little. What would happen when she finally gave way?

  “I’ll go crazy,” she whispered, and opened her eyes.

  She’d lost some time somehow. Had she slept? Someone had turned off the lights. Now her cell was dim, with only a small bulb glowing over her metal sink. The only sound was the hiss of her oxygen tube.

  “No you won’t,” she heard, and turned to Seth.

  He was looking at her in the faint light as he lay on his cot, breathing in short bursts that hollowed out his belly. He smiled meagerly.

  “Somewhere along the line,” she said through the pain in her throat, “after everything we’ve been through, we’ll break.”

  “Then what?”

  She shook her head, then cried out from pain all through her neck, in the muscles and the bones. Her hand flew up to her throat. If there had been someone nearby, a guard or a medic, she’d ask for a pain reliever, but there was no one. “Then,” she whispered, “it might be a relief to go crazy.”

  “Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “But you won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “By now you’d already be crazy.”

  She closed her eyes. Maybe he was right. But she wished sometimes that she could just give up and forget about all the things she felt obligated to fight for. Let someone else worry about it.

  “Waverly,” Seth whispered.

  She turned to look at him.

  “There’s a bag buried in the conifer bay, in the juniper grove. It’s marked with a branch of holly on top. Lots of red berries. Easy to
spot if you’re looking for it.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “What are you talking about?”

  “If something bad happens, you’ll need what’s in it.”

  “What’s in it?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t want to say, so she knew.

  “It won’t come to that,” she said quietly.

  He raised one eyebrow at her, and she felt foolish for saying such a naive, childish thing.

  The hallway light blinked on, and Waverly heard footsteps approaching. She was surprised to see Tobin Ames come to stand outside her cell. He swayed on his feet, looking utterly spent, and held up a syringe with raised eyebrows. “More anti-inflammatory for the lady?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He pulled a key from a hook on his belt and turned the lock to her cell. When he crossed the threshold, the lights flickered on, and Waverly squinted against the brightness. Tobin swabbed her shoulder with alcohol and sank the needle into her muscle.

  “You’re good at that,” she whispered.

  He didn’t acknowledge the compliment, and instead handed her a couple of pills with a cup of water to wash them down. “For the pain,” he said.

  She studied his face. “How’d it go with the little boy? Philip?”

  “You wouldn’t have believed the blood,” Tobin said. “But now there’s room in his head for his brain.”

  “Is he going to be okay?” Seth asked from across the hallway.

  Tobin shook his head. “Victoria Hand says he might survive, but he’ll probably never be the same again.”

  Waverly let out a whimper, and fresh tears ran down her face.

  “Hey.” She felt a thumb on her chin, and she looked at Tobin. “Cry later, okay? Being upset right now isn’t good for you.”

  She nodded and took deep breaths through her ragged throat.

  Tobin left her cell, locked the door behind him, and stood outside Seth’s cell.

  “You going to let me treat you without any trouble?”

  “Why, you scared of me?”

  “You could crumble me up like dry leaves,” Tobin said frankly.

  “Not now, I couldn’t,” Seth said, and lifted a limp arm to show how weak he was.