by Matt Carter
Two kills or more and the treaty is void. No more rules, open season on humans. Finally, Billy’s angle was coming into focus, and I didn’t like the look of it.
Dad looked between us once more before holding the kit out to us. “Go on,” he said. “Take care of your friend. No one else is better qualified.”
Ben took the kit. “Will she—”
“She’ll be fine,” Dad told him. “Unlike the three-month-old you slaughtered over her.”
Ben didn’t flinch at the accusation. He turned to go. I wasn’t quite ready.
“I won’t apologize for rescuing a human being,” I said. “If what we did tonight was a crime, you might want to have a stern talk with some of you own people, too.”
“The matter with Billy Crane is an ongoing investigation,” Dad replied shortly. “But thank you for reminding me. If either of you happen to have any information about his possible next move that you’d be willing to share, it might make the lenience you’re receiving sit better with some of your more vocal detractors.”
“You mean you don’t know where he is?” I asked. I hadn’t imagined it possible for Splinters to hide from each other, especially not now that I knew how all those minds looked and felt and sounded hooked together like that, funneled into that one central pool, but of course I couldn’t remember it all. There could have been gaps anywhere.
Ben looked at me with a flicker of hope that meant he didn’t understand what Billy had done yet. He wanted Billy to get away.
“I mean exactly what I said,” Dad answered, watching us both expectantly.
“If I had the slightest idea where to start,” I said, “to find and destroy the Splinter who set us up, even you wouldn’t have to bribe me to tell.”
Dad nodded.
“Just making sure.”
The walk back to Kevin’s I remember better. My thoughts were clearer, one thought especially.
“We were used,” I explained.
Ben looked at me blankly. “Used how?”
“Billy meant for us to kill the Splinter who had Haley. Maybe I was supposed to do it, or maybe he thought you’d be enough to breach the peace as long as I was with you. That was his plan.”
Ben was silent for so long that I thought he must be formulating an argument, but when he finally reacted, he kicked the nearest tree with a cry of frustration so deep that it had to be fueled by every horrible bit of sudden understanding, along with what must have been a great deal of pain from disturbing his singed skin.
“I trusted him!”
“So did I,” I reminded him.
“He was helping us find the mine!” Ben shouted. “All along, he was doing it for this!”
“Probably called Sheriff Diaz himself,” I realized out loud. “Just to make sure we’d know exactly where to go but wouldn’t do it until Haley had us all ready to follow her.”
It took a few more blocks of walking, a few more stretches of silence and sounds of self-reproach before Ben was coherent again.
When he’d stopped looking angry and settled into looking dejected, I said, “I’m so sorry.” I might have gone on to repeat this a few more times than was helpful. “About trapping you here, I mean. That was never my intention. I’m sorry.”
Ben shrugged at the ground. “Hey, I’ve always wanted to be able to say for sure where I’ll be living next week and the week after.”
I was sure this wasn’t quite what he’d been hoping for, but pointing that out didn’t seem likely to make it any better.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Ben said suddenly after a few silent steps. “I’m sorry I haven’t said that before. I’m sorry about what happened to him.”
I shrugged back. “He’s down there somewhere. We could still find him. I’m sorry about your eye.” I could already see that it was going to blacken. Then something else occurred to me that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t said long ago. “And I’m sorry about what happened to your father, too.”
Ben shrugged and changed the subject again. “So, you’ve killed a Splinter before? One hooked into a human?”
“I told you that.”
“Yeah. Sort of. And that’s all you told me.”
For the first time since Kevin, I considered repeating the story, sure somehow that Ben would understand, but I was already worn out with the recent hours of thinking about it.
“Not tonight,” I said.
Ben nodded, and we continued in silence past a few more driveways before he asked, “So, what do we do now?”
I stopped walking so I could whisper and be heard even though there was no one in sight on the street. “There’s dissension among the Splinters,” I summed up quickly. “They’re not all of one mind, and tonight one of them dragged us in blind, unprepared, and way over our heads. Billy tried to use us to start a war between Splinters and humans, a real, open war, and we’re lucky it didn’t work because we weren’t ready, and we would have lost. But that treaty is a joke. Even my mother realizes that. And if someone’s trying to get it broken, it’s only a matter of time before they succeed, with or without us. I won’t play by those rules, not forever. There will be a war, and when it comes, I know what side I’m fighting on.”
“What side we’re fighting on,” Ben corrected me.
I hadn’t wanted to assume, after what helping me had already cost him, but I’d been hoping he’d say exactly that.
Ben shifted the first aid kit to his right arm and held out his left hand, the one closer to my side of the sidewalk, offering, not to shake mine, but to hold it.
And, in spite of Dad’s best efforts, it wasn’t until that moment that I truly realized how much danger I was in.
This was my last chance. If I didn’t find a way to stop, right then, run away or say something awful enough to make Ben withdraw the offer, I was, without a shred of doubt, going to find myself feeling entirely too much again, caring entirely too much about things other than the fate of humanity, too much for it to be possible to make every choice correctly. I was going to fall irrevocably, the way I’d known I might from the moment I saw Ben face-to-face.
I would stop the Splinters if it killed me. That had not changed.
But if it killed Ben . . .
Every passing second made it harder to answer that question.
Possibly, I was already too far gone, because Ben’s hand waited only a few short awkward seconds before I laced my fingers through it.
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to our amazing agent, Jennifer Mishler, for all her support and expertise, and especially in this case for helping us polish (and sand, and saw large bits off of) the first act of this book, so we could start The Prospero Chronicles off with a bang.
Thanks to our publicists, D. Kirk Cunningham and Marissa Shields, to executive editor Christopher Loke, and everyone else at Jolly Fish Press for all the work you put into making each book a success.
Thank you to Scott Carter for teaching Matt everything he knows about the importance of storytelling and character development.
Thanks to Denis, Katinka, and Heather Titchenell for all the support and many a night of brain-mending comedy games.
Thanks to all the wonderful readers, bloggers, and authors who frequent our blogs and pages.
Thanks to everyone who’s ever produced a work of art we’ve come in contact with, because you’ve all shaped our work in some way or other.
Finally, special thanks to everyone who attended our wedding back in 2011, because this book is what we were working on instead of writing thank you notes like civilized people. We hope you understand!
Matt Carter is an author of horror, sci-fi, and yes, even a little bit of young adult fiction. He earned his degree in history from Cal State University Los Angeles, and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, California, with his wife, best friend, and awesome co-writer, F.J.R. Titchenell. Splinters is his first published novel.
F.J.R. Titchenell is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction,
including Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of). She graduated from Cal State University Los Angeles with a B.A. in English in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband, coauthor, and amazing partner in all things, Matt Carter, and their pet king snake, Mica.
