by Matt Carter
I thought hard, trying to remember if we still had the emergency kit in the back of the SUV. There should have been some thermal blankets in there, thin, but capable of reflecting the body’s heat back in, something which might help save—
One of them was leaning up against a tree in front of us. The man in the hoodie. The Reaper. His vaguely insectoid face stared at us curiously with four shimmering, black eyes. Glossy black quills poked through his sickly green scalp where he should have had hair, and where his mouth should have been was an ungainly mess of muted, worm-like tentacles. Horrible though his face was, it was that left arm that truly held my attention, that long, curving sickle of bone jutting out from the stump that used to be his hand. It was utterly lethal-looking, and if he decided to leap at us with his powerful, grasshopper-like legs, I’m sure he would have taken us.
Instead, he cocked his head slightly, and the corners of his face contorted into what could have been a smile.
“Go,” he croaked deeply.
I looked to Mina for confirmation, expecting to see her reaching for a weapon, only to see a look of surprise and confusion on her face I didn’t know was possible.
“Go now!” he croaked more urgently, waving his bone-sickle toward the town. As if to emphasize his point, he leaped through the air in the direction of our last pursuer. Mina looked like she wanted to fight, but with this chase and half-frozen, she didn’t have the energy.
We didn’t talk much as we walked back to my mother’s SUV. We didn’t have to. I’m sure Mina was running over everything we had just seen, probably tallying off names and faces against her various lists.
My train of thought was much more simplistic. Between reliving the various moments I’d cheated death that day and trying to raise my core body temperature while I drove her home, I had a hard time shaking one fact: a Splinter had saved our lives.
Something felt very wrong about that.
19.
Deal Breaker
Mina
I didn’t try to be quiet when Ben dropped me at home. He stayed a few extra seconds after I’d gotten my bike out of the car, as if he were actually thinking about coming in with me, and I had to wave for him to get away while he could.
I wouldn’t have bothered trying to get back in through the window even if my mother hadn’t conspicuously pushed the living room curtain aside to look out at us. Bag over my shoulder in plain sight, camera within easy reach in the front pocket, still shivering and dripping river muck with every step, I walked straight inside the best way I could—through the front door.
Mom was sitting on the couch the way she always did, as if it were a throne and even stiffer and more uncomfortable than it was. She had spread paperwork all over the coffee table, and she was poring over it intently. For a moment I remembered much too vividly the long afternoon she had spent teaching me chess at that coffee table, back when the sight of her there had been something to look forward to. I did my best to forget it again quickly.
She waited just a few seconds longer than I expected her to before addressing me, the way she somehow always could.
“Good evening, Mina.”
I didn’t flinch, and I didn’t lash out. I didn’t think about what state my room was probably in after she’d searched it in an inevitable fury. I just stood there.
Finally, she looked up.
“Exactly what the hell is wrong with you?”
“We need to talk,” I said.
“You’re damn right we do.”
“Just let me get a couple things.”
She didn’t get up, but she stopped me before I could start down the stairs to get my lists and anything else that might make it easier for us to share notes. “Unless you need a blanket or a toothbrush, you won’t find any ‘things’ down there.”
I backtracked to the spot across the table from her and the mud puddle I’d already started there. This was worse than I’d hoped but not worse than I’d anticipated. It wasn’t time to fight her or worry about rebuilding. It was too important that she listen to me.
“Okay,” I said. “Then we’ll just talk.”
“You first,” said Mom, but she didn’t wait to listen before telling me exactly how to go first. “What’s gotten into you lately? How long have I been putting unwarranted trust in you? Where were you tonight?”
“You know where I was, Mom. I was spying on potential Splinters.”
It had been years since I’d spoken that word out loud in front of her, and I saw it catch her off guard for half a second.
“There’s no such thing as—”
“Yes, Mom,” I said firmly, “there is. We both know there is. And you need to know what they’re—”
“Enough! You’re finished this time, Mina. I mean it.” She looked at me steadily over the table, still without standing, and I knew she was telling the truth. She knew I would retaliate and there would be nothing more she could do to me in return, and she was prepared to rescind the deal anyway. “No more Splinters. No more cameras, no more bugs, no more Ben, no more Aldo, if that’s what it takes. You’re going to stop pretending to know what you’re talking about and leave it alone. Or—”
“Or you’ll hand me over?” I suggested, carefully, without raising my voice.
“To a shrink, maybe,” Mom threatened, determined to misunderstand me. “See how far you can get in life as a documented paranoid schizophrenic.”
I’ve never been to a psychiatrist, but I’ve been called crazy more than enough times to prompt me to do some research on the subject. I know if she ever decided to send me, I’d be branded with something and medicated to the hilt, but I’m confident I’d be able to lie well enough to dodge heavy antipsychotics.
“Okay, Mom,” I said. “Hear me out, and you can take me wherever you want. You—”
“It’s over, Mina!”
“I heard you. I just—”
“What part of ‘no more Splinter talk’ do you not—”
“Sheriff Diaz has been replaced, and I can prove it!” I shouted this at her so loudly and rapidly that I startled myself as much as her after the rest of our hushed argument. Then I shouted it again, even louder but more slowly, just in case I’d said it too rapidly to be understood the first time.
For several seconds, Mom didn’t move. Her voice was hushed when she answered, but not nearly so calm.
“I asked you to stop pretending to know—”
“I do know!”
I scrambled to turn on my camera and scroll to the right picture before she could collect herself and block me again. When I’d found it, I pushed the view screen under her nose, not caring how much water I dripped over the papers in between us, not caring if she took the camera away along with everything else, as long as I could be sure she looked at it first.
She did look. Her eyes narrowed on the picture, and she raised a hand to the camera to steady it. I let her.
I lost count of the seconds she spent simply staring at it.
“Mina,” she said finally and very, very softly, “you have to be absolutely certain about this.”
I spared her my analysis of the nonexistence of absolute certainty and simply nodded.
“I can’t play around with theories and speculation here,” she said.
It should have terrified me, how scared and serious she looked. She was a collaborator, yes, but she was still human, an informed human, and if she was worried, that meant there was reason for me to worry, too. For a few moments, I was only ridiculously pleased that the two of us were finally talking about the same thing, at the same time, out loud, in plain, simple words.
“I saw him,” I told her. “I heard his voice. It was him.”
She handed the camera back to me, and in the fraction of a second it took me to get a grip on it, I was almost certain I felt her squeeze my fingertips.
Then she looked away and became the mother I was used to again, her cool, sarcastic, commanding voice already echoing across the room, perfectly familiar, even if
its words were anything but.
“Dearest, darling, light of my life, get your counterfeit, two-faced, underhanded, interdimensional ass in the sitting room, now!”
Interdimensional. It was nice, in a way, finally knowing the correct term.
Dad came in from his studio the way he always did when he was interrupted unexpectedly, picking craft glue off his fingers and looking ridiculously, nervously hopeful that someone might be about to say, “It’s okay. It’s okay that you’re here. No one’s blaming you.”
Mom finally stood up, as tall in her chosen set of heels as he was in his socks, and set her stance in front of him.
What she really said was, “I want a divorce.”
It had seemed like such a fragile, delicate operation, getting my parents to fight over dinner. Three hours into their second fight of the evening, all I wanted them to do was stop.
Neither one of them had so much as glanced at me when I grabbed my power cord and phone out of Mom’s open briefcase, pulled down the door to the attic, and started gathering the rest of my equipment. I had my room almost back to its normal setup, minus a few old notes Mom had torn beyond repair, and had adjusted all my lists based on the progress at the meeting, and they still weren’t showing any signs of letting up.
Both were shouting at the tops of their lungs. Mom’s usual self-control was fracturing noticeably, and Dad’s usual charade of reasonableness was all but gone.
“We had a deal!” Mom’s voice was perfectly audible from my room and probably from the street outside. “You have your Council, and we have ours! You take what we agreed on, and you leave us alone to make adequate lives out of what’s left!”
“It was considered a necessary security measure,” Dad said with no decent amount of regret.
“You lied to me!” Something glass or porcelain broke against the wall with Mom’s words. “We’re supposed to be partners! You told me we’d be peacemakers! And I believed you!”
“We are peacemakers! If this isn’t peaceful enough for you, I promise you, it’s only because you haven’t seen enough of the alternative!”
“It was supposed to be a truce! But it’s really an unconditional surrender, isn’t it? I let you take everything from me! I let you have Sam, and I couldn’t even let the world see I’d lost him!”
I wanted to turn up the backlogged feeds in my ears to block out her voice, but just like I could never bring myself to delete old files with even the remotest chance of becoming useful again, I couldn’t throw away the information reverberating freely through my ceiling.
“I gave you every little evidence adjustment you ever asked me to arrange! I signed away my family and my self-respect in that treaty, and I never asked for any of it back! But your people take back whatever you want, don’t you? And you expect us to deal with it!”
“No!” There were a few echoing, wood-like cracks, and I could picture Dad transforming back and forth in agitation. “It was only Diaz, and only after the last fatality!”
“You lied!” Mom repeated. “And I’m finished making good! I can’t trust you with Prospero, and I won’t trust you with my daughter!”
There were a few seconds of silence, but there was no relief in them for me.
“She’s my daughter, too.”
If Mom hadn’t answered for me with the ringing slap of her hand on his face, I might have shouted back myself, right from my desk chair.
“No, she isn’t!” Mom snarled like a cat standing guard over newborn kittens. “You can wear my husband’s face, and keep his shop, and sleep in his bed, and have people call you by his name, but you will never be him, and she will never be yours!”
The tight, wet heaving in my chest was reaching an alarming frequency, and I got up to lock the door, in case someone saw fit to wander in before I could make it stop. Something else hit the wall above. It sounded like Mom was piling things, probably Dad’s things, next to the door.
“And neither will I!” she added. “Never again!”
“You know, you weren’t exactly my favorite part of the arrangement either!”
“Oh, you poor thing!” Mom sneered. “Trapped for a few lousy years of immortality in a diplomatic marriage! Is that all you’ve had to put up with?”
“Diana, think for a moment. You don’t want to do this.”
“Get away from me!”
“Think about the cleanup. You’ll spend the rest of your life in the Warehouse. We’ll have to set up another human representative. And where do you think Mina will be then?”
I couldn’t turn it off. My peripheral, packing peanut trains of thought wouldn’t fade out and leave everything else in a harmless blur because none of it was truly peripheral. Above me was the confrontation I’d been waiting for for years, one I’d listened to and picked apart for countless hours before it had ever even happened. In front of me were the notes and equipment I’d been deprived of for days with hours of material to sift through.
And in fresh memory, there were new pieces to fit together. Some of them I didn’t see how I ever would.
A Splinter had let us go. A Splinter had let us go.
There had to be a logical explanation, of course, but it made me realize just how low a spot I was in, the fact that a concept so uncomfortably contradictory to every other reliable detail I’d ever collected was the one thing on my mind that was contributing the least to the sore, clicking lump in my throat.
I’d wanted Mom to call Dad out for nine years. I’d expected to be happy when she finally did.
I’d been wrong.
Instead, I was just tired and sick and disappointed, disappointed in a tiny hope I hadn’t even known I’d been holding out, that my real father’s situation might somehow be less desperate than that of a very probably irretrievable Splinter hostage, or at least that it wasn’t really all my collaborating mother’s fault.
I had no expectations for how the mystery of The Reaper, Ben’s fitting nickname for our rescuer, would resolve, on the other hand, so there was still the chance it would be in some tidy, satisfying, or even helpful way.
If only I could think of some place to start to get it there.
I was arranging my notes on every distinct Splinter ploy I’d ever documented, looking for the slightest connection, trying not to feel any more of Mom and Dad’s circular screaming in my upper respiratory tract, when my newly reclaimed favorite phone vibrated in my pocket.
I cleaned some stray droplets off my glasses and tested the steadiness of my voice, in case I was about to need it, but it was only a text message waiting under Ben’s name.
Don’t know when you’ll get this, will try visiting tomorrow if I don’t hear back. Haley’s getting worse and remembering more. She NEEDS to talk to YOU, asap.
The nervous twinge in my stomach was automatic, the worry that he was too close to her, physically and emotionally, that any day she would decide take him, and he would let her, out of some outdated feeling of trust.
But that evening, it felt like almost as sensible a lead as any other I’d been able to find.
I texted back.
Off the hook for now, long story. Soda Fountain of Youth, tomorrow, 10 a.m., both of you.
20.
Convincing Mina
Ben
I almost expected Mina not to show. I knew she believed Haley to have been compromised by the Splinters. I also knew that she hadn’t seen Haley for more than a few minutes since she had appeared at the funeral. I was sure that if she could just talk to Haley for a few minutes, if she could just hear how afraid she was, that Mina would see that Haley was human.
Maybe.
Okay, I wasn’t sure at all. But the idea of leaving Haley helpless and uninformed in the raving, panicked, trauma-
flashback state I’d found her in when I got back from the Splinter barbeque was unthinkable. Without even changing out of my soaked clothes, I’d contacted Mina the moment it had been safe to take my arms from around Haley’s shaking shoulders.
&nbs
p; Haley looked at me nervously now, taking occasional sips off her root beer float, but without much conviction. She was lucid and reasonably collected this morning, but like any sane person in Prospero should, she kept darting her eyes around periodically, scanning the room for anyone watching her. Aside from us, Billy, the two tourists taking a picture of a stuffed Sasquatch in the corner, and the stuffed jackalope next to our table, we were alone in the Soda Fountain of Youth.
I didn’t blame her for her paranoia. While we were waiting for Mina, she’d seemed as mentally prepared for the worst as someone could be, so I had given her a crash-course on Splinters as I knew them, fully admitting that Mina was the true authority on the subject and that she’d fill in all the gaps when she got here.
I had to admit, Haley took the news a lot better than I expected.
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” she said.
It looked like she was going to get teary. I made to grab a napkin to hand to her. Before I could, however, Billy slid smoothly by our table, a broad smile on his face and a napkin in hand.
“Feel free,” he said, handing it to her. “But if you do, please don’t make too much of a mess, since I’m the one they’re gonna make clean it up, and lemme say, nothing makes me wanna blow chunks more than seeing someone else’s, you know what I mean?”
Haley looked up at his broad smile, slightly confused.
“Thank you. I think I’ll be fine,” she said dubiously.
“Right on, right on,” Billy said as he looked at Haley, then me. “You two together?”
“No,” I said.
He turned to Haley. “You eighteen yet?”
Haley looked scandalized. “No!”
“Never hurts to ask.” Billy laughed, looking up as the bell jingled above the front door. “Ah, Jailbait! Got an early parole?”
Mina stormed into the Soda Fountain of Youth looking like she was ready to go to war.
