Splinters

by Matt Carter

  Finally, I broke through. My hand met cool air, gripping a thick patch of dry grass and weeds. I cheered, and I could make out Mina smiling in the near darkness behind me. I grabbed at the edges of the hole, trying to widen it.

  Then I felt powerful hands wrap around my wrist and pull. Every nightmare image possible hit me all at once. An army of Splinters waiting to take us back down into the nightmare, ready for our blood. Billy standing by to tell us that his aid was nothing but one great, big cosmic joke.

  When I emerged from the ground, I saw my savior was none other than Kevin Brundle. His presence didn’t exactly instill me with feelings of warmth and confidence.

  “Hang tight, brother. I have you,” he said as he pulled me from the earth. I looked around wildly, trying to find something, anything to use as a weapon, when he looked over his shoulder and called out, “Aldo! I got them over here! Get the blankets out of the trunk!”

  Looking at my state of dress, he smiled and added, “There should be some sweatpants and spare sandals in there, too. Grab those!”

  “Got it!” Aldo cried out somewhere far away.

  I still didn’t trust Kevin, but if Aldo had brought him . . . maybe it was time to take a chance on him.

  “Mina and Haley?” he asked.

  “Right behind me,” I explained.

  “Are they . . . them?” he asked, hesitantly.

  “Yeah,” I said. Without hesitation, he dove headfirst into the small tunnel opening. My respect for Kevin was growing by the minute.

  He came out seconds later, gently dragging Haley into the cool night air. By this point Aldo had joined us, carrying a pile of fresh blankets and the clothes Kevin had called for. He looked at me, and though he clearly wanted to laugh at my lack of pants, the burns shut him up.

  “It’s that bad in there?” he asked as he handed me the sweats and sandals.

  “Worse,” I said as I gingerly pulled on the sweats.

  Mina was the last out of the mine. She silently nodded at Kevin. He returned the gesture.

  “We need to get out of here quickly,” she said, instantly authoritative. “After what we did, this area should soon be swarming with Splinters. Haley needs someplace to recuperate. My house is not an option, nor do I think hers is.”

  “My parents are out of town for the next couple days,” Kevin offered.

  “Perfect,” Mina said. “We’ll need to debrief her, find out what she knows and fill in the gaps on what she doesn’t. We’ll need to tend to our wounds, and find out what happens next.”

  “This isn’t over, is it?” I asked.

  “No,” Mina said without elaboration.

  25.

  The New Treaty of Prospero

  Mina

  “No one can see her until she’s ready to play along.”

  It took me the better part of an hour to communicate the importance of this to Ben.

  “You expect her to pretend, after all of this, that she’s been herself the whole time and everything’s okay?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t have to say so alone. Kevin and Aldo tripled my voice.

  Haley was half-unconscious, half-delirious, tossing and turning on the couch in Kevin’s pool house, the four of us kneeling around her, trying to guess how long ago she had known the names she kept calling out, how close she might be to putting her ransacked mind back in order.

  “Whatever they chose her for, it’s over,” I explained.

  “What do you mean, ‘whatever they chose her for?’” Ben repeated. “That thing tried to make Splinters out of us! If it hadn’t been for Billy—”

  “The point,” I said, stopping him, “is that now that we know about her, she can’t be used the same way as before.” I wasn’t prepared for another round of debating Billy’s actions while I still couldn’t come up with a single explanation that fit. “And the Splinter who had her body isn’t coming back for it. So, there’s a chance, a tiny chance, but a chance, that they might decide she’s not worth the trouble and leave her alone. But if she starts drawing attention to herself, talking about what happened, acting like she might remember where the mine is and maybe even go looking for it, that chance becomes zero. She’ll spend the rest of a very short human life fighting to keep the next minute of it.”

  Ben looked like he wanted to argue, but I could tell in the way he swallowed that he was starting to understand.

  “They know we know where it is,” he pointed out.

  “We chose to go looking for it. She didn’t. And it’s too late to do anything about it for us.”

  “Yeah,” said Kevin. “Everyone remember to thank Mina for the short, violent, paranoid life.”

  But there were no signs of regret in the small, sad smile he gave me, or the way he tucked the afghan closer around Haley’s shoulders when she rolled over again. It was the same look of acceptance he’d worn when Aldo had admitted to gambling on his help, partly due to how likely he was to agree to any plan involving the words “Haley” and “rescue,” but mostly due to his access to cars and how easy the bike tracker (and its thoroughly un-incriminating archives) made him to find.

  Ben looked Haley over again, too.

  “She needs medical attention.” He picked a few flecks of dried blood out of Kevin’s carpet (where I’d accidently let my shoulder drip on it) to make his point. “We all do. We should at least—”

  “Medical center’s not an option,” Aldo said before I could. “If they could replace us all quietly right now, that’d be a cleanup job well done. The three of you check into that place at the same time, and you might as well jump back down the mineshaft and hook yourselves in.”

  “Okay, fine,” Ben conceded, “but this isn’t going to cut it.” He closed the lid of Kevin’s parents’ first aid kit over its useless supply of Band-Aids, sanitary resuscitation masks, and dried-out tubes of calendula ointment.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll have to go get my kit.”

  The blister fluid soaking into Ben’s borrowed sweat pants was turning an unsettling color, and I was in no mood to gamble with any part of my future dexterity when there were perfectly good sutures, tweezers, and antiseptics under my bed. “I think I even have some feverfew tea. If we can chill it and get her to swallow any, it might help. I don’t know.”

  “No one’s going anywhere alone.”

  I thought Ben was hinting at Aldo to put down his diagram of Haley’s pod wounds and come watch my back. Aldo must have thought so, too, judging by the newly hurried rate of his sketching, but by the time I was finished double-checking every phone and tracker in my bag and clothes and arranging my tasers and flashlight in easy reach, Ben was the one who’d left his spot by the couch.

  I’ve never really liked being helped to my feet. A hand doesn’t make as steady an anchor as the ground, even if it is more conveniently placed, but I didn’t object, especially not when I was gripping Ben’s elbow with my currently preferred right arm for several extra seconds of support while the muscles all down my left side cramped, tensed, and spasmed against the sharp edges that didn’t belong in them. Without the aid of fresh adrenaline, they had become all but unusable.

  Ben glanced back once at Haley, dozing under Kevin and Aldo’s riveted observation. Aldo looked up from the diagram at us.

  “Don’t stop now,” Ben advised him. “We’ll need to bandage her up when we get back.”

  My mind wasn’t at its sharpest, but I know Ben and I spoke on the walk to my house. At least, Ben spoke. He recalled every detail he could of Billy’s “help” and then told me what felt like every word the Splinter Haley had ever said to him, as if he felt the need to confess.

  I listened and answered mainly with, “Yes,” and occasionally, “No,” doing my best to stand up straight enough that he wouldn’t try to hold me up again, all my new unanswered questions skipping and rotating around my head, which was oversized, unsecured, and largely empty again.

  Most of them were about Billy. Like exactly how lon
g ago the real one had slipped out of my sight. Or whether I’d ever really known the real one. Or exactly where the hell the Splinter one had disappeared to after we’d escaped the mine. Or how long it might be before I made some other fatal error on the ECNS list.

  If I ever needed to add a new adult again, I wouldn’t just let him kill a Creature Splinter in front of me and call it proof. That was certain. But if my mistake had been somewhere else, I’d learned nothing to prevent the next one. And even if I could pin down how I’d missed that he was a Splinter, it didn’t get me any closer to reconciling that fact with the way he’d let us go in the woods behind Dr. Westlake’s, armed us to the teeth before sending us down into the mine, and, according to Ben, helped him fight off the Splinter Haley.

  I didn’t doubt Ben’s honesty, or his judgment under normal circumstances, but I was seriously wondering if the odd little reality distortions in the Warehouse had somehow temporarily done something to his perception.

  I thought about all those minds in the pods, too, now missing from mine. For several full minutes, I had known them all, and for the first time in my life, there had been more information in my senses than my memory could record all at once. It wasn’t just disorganized and lost in my head now. It wasn’t there at all. No matter how tightly I packed my consciousness, whenever I tried to remember who they all were, all I found were vague impressions without shape or sound.

  I couldn’t distinguish my father’s mind.

  I didn’t know if that was because there were too many, because I had been separated from his for so long, or because his was one of the blank, drained, old ones. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  There was a part of me that was absolutely sure that if I’d stayed hooked in for another half a second, I could have found him.

  Another part wondered if that same half second would have killed me.

  Splinter reject. I wondered about that, too. ECNS for life. Too strange and broken and somehow wrong in the head to be replicated. It wasn’t that I’d ever had any illusions of total normality. The past cases of Splinter rejection had been a small, unspoken source of hope to me for exactly that reason, but for the most part, I’d always assumed that I couldn’t be quite that different, quite that wrong. I’d certainly never planned to find out.

  I tried to focus on being relieved, proud even, that my brain could break a Warehouse pod, but unpleasant questions about that worked their way into the cycle, too—how deep my defect might go, how it might change with age, whether it might lessen my competence to perform my work in some way I wasn’t even capable of understanding, whether everyone who had ever called me crazy might technically be right.

  I kept doing long division in my head, going over dreams and memories to check that they were still easy to tell apart, testing every cognitive function I could think of to make sure they were working the way I remembered them.

  Everything seemed to be the same, including the way it all changed when I looked at Ben, whether closer to or further from how it was supposed to be, I wasn’t sure. That’s why I had my eyes to the ground while I let us in the door at the bottom of the stairs into my room. I was double-checking my ability to find A above middle C without visual packing peanuts, and it wasn’t until I heard the door slam behind us and Ben breathe in very sharply that I realized I hadn’t checked around the corners the way I usually did.

  The thing that had been waiting for us was in full human form—at least, it was after the extended leg that had kicked the door closed had receded to a natural length—yet it looked less like my father than it ever had before.

  He was sitting on my bed, surrounded by my utterly useless amulet and herb collection, arms folded and resting on my closed medical kit, all tentative, hopeful imitation of my father’s warmth drained from his face.

  Ben took a step in front of me, his grip tightening on the flashlight, ready for another fight, and cautiously extended one hand, summoning that easy, charming smile that was always at his disposal.

  “Good evening, Mr. Todd. I’m really sorry to drop by so late, but—”

  “This will be a great deal easier without the pretense, Mr. Pastor,” Dad cut him off.

  Ben returned his right hand to the base of the flashlight, and I reached for the flap of my bag.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” said Dad. “Not tonight,” he added. My hand was on the half-empty can of air freshener, but I didn’t pull it out. “I’m here to let you two know how close you came.”

  “To what?” I asked. Wanting to sound strong and composed, combined with seven years of wanting to scream terrible and very unpretentious things at him, made my voice sound a lot like my mother’s again, but I didn’t mind so much this time. “To finding out how to stop you?”

  “To ending the peace your mother and I have devoted our lives to preserving,” he said very calmly.

  I sidestepped out from behind Ben so I could see him properly. There were plenty of problems I wanted to point out in that sentence. I started with, “Where is Mom?”

  “She’s safe.”

  I had to fight back a horribly vivid image of Mom “safely” encased in one of those pods before Dad clarified.

  “She’s staying with a friend tonight. Don’t worry. She won’t leave your surveillance range.” He smiled grimly when he said this, and I tried not to let any surprise show on my face. “We’ve agreed to give this one more try. I believe she’s already selected a marriage counselor.”

  I didn’t respond to that, just stood there trying to decide if I was glad Mom was coming home or disappointed that she’d given in again, imagining some poor therapist trying to scratch the surface of my parents’ differences.

  “All we ever wanted for you was a normal life,” Dad told me. “That might be the one thing we never disagreed on. Relations between humans and my people . . . you could say it’s a family business. But we did everything we could to keep you out of it. I hope you’ll remember that. Of course, that clearly isn’t going to happen now, so you need to know what it is you’re playing with.”

  This sounded sickeningly like an initiation speech, so I stopped him there.

  “My ‘business,’ ” I said, “is humanity, not Splinter-human ‘relations.’ ”

  Dad smiled, almost laughed, and then stopped himself. “Sorry. It’s just been quite a few years since your mother’s said those words to me. I’d almost started to miss the sound.”

  “Mom may be able to forget what you are for long enough to have relations,” the word summoned images that brought the beginnings of the killing feeling, and I fought it down, “but I never will. I know what you do to people. I know—”

  “I’m well aware of what you know, Mina, and of the much longer list of things you don’t know. For example, you don’t know about the meeting currently in progress where I presented my argument not twenty minutes ago against your execution.” He held my gaze for a moment to let the words sink in before turning to Ben. “And your replacement. My associates came to see my point of view. Barely.”

  I didn’t bother hiding my skepticism. “Why would you do that?”

  Dad looked back at me. “You’re welcome. Your mother and I have been able to extend you a great deal of diplomatic immunity, Mina, but there is a limit. If my people get word of your involvement in one more fatality, I will not be able to protect you.”

  “I never asked you—”

  “And before you start planning out ways to martyr yourself, you should know—”

  “I don’t want y—”

  “I wouldn’t even have been able to do it this time! Not if you’d done the killing yourself again! You have no idea how lucky you are that Ben beat you to it!” He looked at Ben. “Of course, that’s not so lucky for you.”

  “Do you expect me to be grateful?” I was shouting louder than I like to, having to fight too hard to keep the aerosol can in my bag. “For being allowed to get away with taking back one little piece of what your people have taken from—”

/>   “Do you want your answers or not?” Dad shouted over me. “Or are all those bugs and cameras just an idle exercise of Aldo’s technical prowess? You want to know how things are? Then for once in your life, Mina, shut up and listen to me!”

  I shut up, and I listened, and after waiting an infuriating length of time to make sure I would stay that way, Dad explained.

  “Prospero has always been . . . something of an embarrassment to my people. It’s a small backwater burg with nothing to offer in terms of entertainment, power, or culture, but in spite of its inconsequentiality, our rate of permanent death here is astronomical, to say nothing of the rate of emergency replacements for security purposes.”

  I didn’t blink even though it was clear he already knew enough to blame me.

  “I’m . . . what you might call a lawman, to my people, the unfortunate lawman tasked with supervising this problematic little colony since its inception, and I’ve seen it through times you can’t possibly imagine. Yes, we butt heads with the humans here. Yes, we’ve found it necessary to come to a formal arrangement with some of your respected representatives, and yes, we offer them and their families consideration in the donor selection process. The latest revision of the Treaty of Prospero was signed just under two years ago, after your most extreme transgression, and most of the new verbiage was intended to deal with our . . . vigilante problem. The next time a human acts against us in a pattern, two kills or more, the treaty is void. There are many of the opinion that what happened tonight came close enough to qualify, given your obvious influence over the situation. I was able to convince enough of them to sign a new draft. After the debacle with Sheriff Diaz, you two are to be kept alive and aboveground, for now, as a sign of good faith. But neither of you can set foot outside Prospero again.”

  Ben opened his mouth to object, and Dad held up a hand.

  “We’re already making the arrangements with your mother. It’s a wonderful job opportunity. And as long as you cooperate, she’ll be left to pursue it in peace. But make no mistake, either of you.” He leaned forward over the kit, looking back and forth between us, his fingers elongating just slightly beyond their human shape along the catch. “If you try to leave, or if you kill again, you forfeit the deal for yourselves and your kind, and within a day, there won’t be a single human left in Prospero over the age of twelve.”