This Shattered World

by Amie Kaufman

  “Where’d you find him?” I bark, gazing down at Cormac’s face, what can be seen of it behind the oxygen mask strapped there.

  “On the other side of the blast site.”

  “Your best guess?”

  “Concussion, minor smoke inhalation. He’ll live.”

  And then they’re gone, and Cormac with them, headed for the hospital.

  He was here. He was at the blast site. Could he have known what was about to happen?

  But I don’t have time to take the thought any further, because something else catches my eye. The floodlights are erasing the monochromatic orange glow turning everything to ember-red. I can see colors now.

  And at the edge of the field of bodies underneath the sheets, I catch a glimpse of neon pink.

  I’m moving before conscious thought has time to prompt me. I ignore the burning in my abused lungs, the shaking of my legs. I’m sprinting, the world narrowing to that tiny flash of color. It’s a mistake. He’s alive. They’ve put him with the bodies by accident in the chaos. It happens all the time, they’re sitting there identifying a field of dead men and some of them just get up and walk away.

  I need to get to him so he can get treatment.

  I throw myself down, sliding in the mud, and rip the sheet away. Alexi’s eyes stare skyward, one cloudy and pale where it’s set in a sea of ruined, scorched flesh. The other half of his face is untouched, almost serene, as beautiful as it was when we first met during training.

  My hands hover, trying to find some way to smooth away the damage to his face, to his neck and shoulder. His hot pink hair is muddy and stained with ash, and I run my fingers through it to try to dislodge some of the grime. His voice comes abruptly, painfully into my mind. I wouldn’t be caught dead looking like this.

  I’m still trying to clean him up when hands close around my shoulders and try to pull me away. I scream at whoever’s got me, fighting to be released. Voices are shouting in my ear, but I can’t hear them. Then a fist catches me across the jaw, sending me sprawling into the mud, head spinning.

  I gasp for air, spitting saliva and blood and then descending into a fit of coughing as my abused lungs catch up with me.

  This time the hands that reach for me are gentler. I lift my head. It’s Commander Towers, her blond hair straggly and tied roughly at the nape of her neck, her uniform rumpled and sweat-stained. Her hand is raw and bleeding where she hit me.

  “Get yourself together, Chase,” she shouts at me, taking me by the shoulders. Her face is only a few inches from mine. “Get out of here.”

  “Sir, I have to—”

  “That’s an order!” Her voice is nearly as rough and hoarse and raw as mine. “You don’t get out of here now, I’ll court-martial your ass, you hear me? You’ve done your work and you’ll probably get another slew of medals out of it, for all the good that does any of us, but right now you have to go. You’re done.”

  I gape at her, my head swimming. I nod, and we struggle to our feet together, slipping and sliding in the mud. I stagger away, leaving her to return to whatever she was doing before someone came to tell her Captain Chase had gone insane.

  Alexi’s ruined face threatens to blind me again, but I push it aside. Because I know where I’m going now. Concussion, minor smoke inhalation. He’ll live.

  He’ll be in the makeshift sick bay, not the hospital, with minor injuries like those. I spit out another mouthful of mud and bile and blood, scrubbing my sleeve across my face. I reek of sweat and soot and death, but it doesn’t matter.

  Because if Cormac knew about this, if he sat there and smiled at me and touched my cheek so I wouldn’t notice the rebels infiltrating the base—then I’m going to kill him myself.

  This dream is about the ghosts on Verona. The girl remembers them, but only when she’s asleep, because there’s no such things as ghosts when you grow up.

  She’s at school. The teacher, a tall willowy woman with blond hair in a bun, fights for the students’ attention against sirens and drone engines and, once, the crackling, powdery echo of a distant explosion. Eventually, the teacher gives up and puts down her reader, shutting off the display on the front wall.

  “I think that’s enough for today,” she says, her lips pinched tight, her eyes darting toward the clock and back. “Do you want to talk about what’s happening instead?”

  The girl looks out the window. For a moment she thinks she’s seeing the reflection of her face—but then it moves, becoming a tiny ball of light, visible only because the window lies in shade. It darts away, then comes back, then darts away again, waiting for the girl.

  The green-eyed boy in the desk behind hers leans forward. “Don’t follow it,” he whispers. “It’ll lead you into the swamp.”

  The ghost shivers and then zips away. A few minutes later a fire breaks out on the next block, and the girl is herded with the other children to safety.

  MY EYELIDS FEEL LIKE SOMEBODY’S glued them shut, and there’s a sharp pain as I force them open. Light jabs at me like a knife, and I squeeze my eyes shut again, waiting until the pulsing dulls a little.

  When I try again, it works a little better. A dirty gray ceiling swims into focus overhead, and I know immediately I’m not at home, where all the ceilings are carved from rock. My ears register a high, mechanical beeping, and I struggle for a few moments before I can place it. It’s a medical monitor.

  I turn my head a fraction, but the haze of light starts to blur and sparkle, and I’m forced to close my eyes. There’s something over my nose and mouth, making it hard to breathe. I reach up and feel with my fingertips, encountering soft plastic, and start to tug it away. There’s a sharp catch in my throat, but before I can start coughing the mask is back over my face, someone else’s hand over mine.

  When I risk opening my eyes again, I find Jubilee looming over me, holding the thing over my mouth. She’s filthy, hair mussed, black smudges all over her face, eyes flashing. She’s in combat gear, the dull, semi-metallic gleam of her armor-suit marred by grime and soot.

  “Did you know?” she hisses. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you right here.”

  I stare at her, trying desperately to swim toward understanding, but it feels like wading through waist-high mud. “What happened?” I ask, and she eases the mask away so I can speak. My voice is a wheeze, my throat raw, and it catches and constricts as coughing takes over my body. My vision starts to darken at the edges, and the black creeps in as I struggle for air, my pulse pounding through my temples.

  She shoves the mask back in place, holding it there until the panic starts to recede. I blink back the tears, waiting for her answer.

  Her voice is flat, furious. “A rebel managed to sneak onto the base. Planted a bomb at Bravo Barracks, killed over thirty soldiers while they slept.” She leans in, eyes locked on mine. “While I was talking to you.”

  The shock that goes through me is a physical thing, the adrenaline surge rushing down my arms until my hands tingle. “No.” The plastic of the oxygen mask swallows my voice. “Oh God, no. I didn’t know. You know I wouldn’t—”

  She’s gazing down at me, Stone-faced Chase, absolutely unforgiving, soot and ashes streaking her face like war paint. For a moment I half expect her to pull out her gun and shoot me on the spot, the anguish in her face is so clear. Then she breathes out slowly, dropping her head, and I realize she does know.

  “You have smoke inhalation and a concussion, but they won’t have had time to check beyond that,” she says, softer, duller. “Does anything else hurt?” She reaches out to run her hands down my arms, watching for a wince.

  “I don’t think so.” I ache all over, and I just want to close my eyes and let the pain carry me away. It has to have been McBride, or one of his lackeys. Everything’s spinning out of control, and I don’t know how to move, let alone steady Avon’s course.

  I manage to turn my head, scanning my surroundings. “I don’t think I should be in a room full of soldiers when these guys wake up,” I rasp. My shirt
’s been cut away, and there are electrodes stuck to my chest. I can hear my heartbeat on the monitor beside my bed.

  She shakes her head in a sharp movement, running her hand up my leg and patting along my side to check my ribs. Only a few days ago I was doing the same for her. Maybe we’ll never meet without one of us ending up in the hospital.

  “Nobody here knows who you are,” she replies. “You were still in uniform.” Her jaw squares, and I know this is another tiny cut, another betrayal that’s scored a line across her heart.

  “I have to get out of here.” I shove the mask aside so she can hear me better. “I have to try to stop this from getting worse.”

  She reaches for a bottle beside my bed, angling the built-in straw so I can take a sip. My throat burns as I swallow. “Keep drinking this, it will heal your throat. As soon as you can move, I’ll help you get out, for whatever you can do out there.” She sets aside the bottle and reaches for an adhesive bandage from a rack above my head. As I watch, she starts wrapping it around my forearm, covering my genetag. My heart skips. What would I have said if someone tried to scan it?

  She finishes smoothing the bandage down, expression grim and locked away, then straightens. “I have to go. Anybody wakes up, say you’re from Patron. A new boatload came in yesterday, nobody knows their faces yet.”

  She turns to walk away, her purposeful stride reduced to a weary shuffle. Even locked in a cell, beaten and bloody and tied to a post in the ground, she never let the steel go from her spine; now her shoulders are bowed, her hands trembling before she eases them into her pockets. And I know what’s sweeping through her, stripping away her strength, because it’s sweeping through me, too.

  We’ve lost. The ceasefire is over.

  She’s there again when I wake, after a night spent choking down mouthfuls of the sweet, cloying gel that starts to heal my burned throat, and pretending to be asleep to avoid questions I can’t answer. Trying not to imagine Sean back home, making up some story about why I’m gone, covering for me and pacing, panicking about where I really am. I hope that’s the worst that’s happening. If this bombing was McBride’s opening salvo, then all-out war could be breaking loose out there in the swamps.

  In her combat gear it’s impossible to think of her as anything other than a soldier, especially after staring down the barrel of her gun. But she’s pulled a hard plastic chair up to my bedside, and now she’s got her head pillowed on her arms, crossed on the edge of the bed. My eyes don’t sting anymore, and one of the meds they gave me has dimmed the pounding headache enough that she’s surrounded by only a faint aura of light.

  From what little I can see, she’s washed her face, but the soot stains are still there around her hairline, and she hasn’t taken off the filthy combat suit yet. Which means the base is still worried that the bombing was the first stage of an assault. I push down the oxygen mask, taking an experimental breath. I can manage, if I don’t inhale too deeply. So close, she smells of sweat and ash and grief, and I want to lift my hand and reach out to her, ignoring the ache in my arm. I don’t, and a few moments later she seems to sense I’m awake, lifting her head.

  She blinks at me once, and then comes alert faster than seems possible. She clears her throat. “He’s dead. The bomber. Died in the blast.”

  I force myself to breathe in slowly. The air reeks of disinfectant, sharp on my tongue. My mind seizes on that fact, putting off learning what I don’t want to know. It could be anyone from our camp. I don’t want it to be anyone I know, not even the worst of them. “Was it—” My voice is still a rusty whisper.

  “McBride?” Jubilee interrupts, saving me from speaking further. “No. There weren’t any usable fingerprints left, but the dental records say it’s a man called Davin Quinn. There aren’t any arrests on his record, not so much as a fine. He lived in town.”

  She pauses to let me absorb the significance of that. In town. Not a rebel, not a soldier with the Fury. And I knew Davin Quinn, I know his daughter. He’s not even a sympathizer. He’s nothing to do with us.

  She continues, frustrated and bewildered. “He was only in the system because he got a tooth pulled a couple of years ago. How did your people drag a man like him into this?”

  It’s a ridiculous reaction, but I want to laugh, disbelief still crashing over me. “We didn’t. Quinn was about as likely to blow up this place as you. He must have had other business on the base. It wasn’t him.”

  “It was.” She leans in closer, keeping her voice down so the others in the ward won’t overhear us. “He had the detonator on him. We’ve got security footage showing him talking to a girl as if nothing was wrong, then turning around and walking into the barracks a minute or two before the blast.”

  “Then somebody made him do it,” I tell her. “He has a daughter my age.” Sofia Quinn’s face as it was when we were children swims up in my mind too, smiling in my memory. I wonder if she’s the girl he was talking to on the security footage. “He wouldn’t do this to her, Jubilee. He had no reason.”

  “Mori had no reason to fire on a civilian in the town,” she says quietly.

  “But that was the Fury,” I press. “This is completely different. Your soldier was an off-worlder; Davin was born here. No native’s ever snapped from the Fury.” But something icy stirs inside me at the thought. I never doubted our belief that the Fury was a trodairí excuse until Jubilee looked me in the eye and swore it was real. But Davin Quinn was a man of peace, a man with no battle to fight and a daughter to live for.

  “You’re right about one thing. This wasn’t the Fury. When our people snap, they grab the nearest knife and stab their friends and anyone else near them, Cormac. They don’t build bombs.” Her voice comes quick and sharp, and it’s only after glancing over her shoulder at my unconscious roommates that she takes a breath and quiets again. “Building a bomb takes time, planning, deliberation. The Fury is…savage. Brutal. As quick to strike as it is to pass again.”

  I shake my head, gritting my teeth. “It wasn’t him. I’ll swear it on my life. Something, or someone, must have made him do it.”

  Jubilee gives a frustrated sigh, scrubbing her hand across her face. I can see she’s troubled; it gives me hope that perhaps she believes me, perhaps there is something more to what happened on the base tonight. But then I realize she’s watching me, her expression tight. I’m coming to see her better, to understand the nuances of her closed-off face—and I know this isn’t the only news she came here to share.

  “Just tell me.” My voice won’t come out right. The smoke I inhaled has turned it to a raspy parody of itself.

  Her brown eyes fix on mine for a brief moment before flitting up to focus on the wall beyond my head, expression registering a fleeting but intense struggle. I’m afraid speaking will cause her to shut down again, so I wait, and let her fight her battle alone.

  “You have to understand, Cormac. You’re my enemy. I don’t share information with rebels.” She unzips her combat suit enough to reach into her pocket, hand emerging with her fingers curled tightly around something. “I was focused on escaping back to base—” Her voice breaks off abruptly, and instead she just holds her hand out to me.

  I reach out automatically, and she drops the object into my palm.

  “I found it when you brought me to the facility out to the east.” She won’t look at me. “The one that wasn’t there.”

  I ought to be furious—I ought to want to punish her somehow for deceiving me. But I’m holding proof I’m not insane, and I can’t find the anger anywhere. It’s an ident chip, a little like the kind the soldiers carry embedded in their gear. Proof, surely, that something was there at one point. One side is covered with foil circuitry, and I turn it over in my hands, taking in the bar code on the other side. I wish I had a scanner. “Is this military?”

  She shakes her head. “Ours are newer. This one’s old, maybe twenty years out of date.”

  “You’re telling me I somehow stumbled across a twenty-year-old facility t
hat vanished a few hours later?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs, watching me. “But I will say that while the older models don’t carry as much information, they’re more easily encrypted. This one would require a very specific scanner, one we don’t even carry anymore. There’s no way to scan this and figure out whose it is.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because this is what you’ve been looking for. Proof. And I’ve been hiding it from you.”

  I try to read her face, but she’s watching the wall now and I can’t meet her eyes to decipher her expression. “Jubilee—”

  She interrupts me with a shake of her head. “I saw something there; a flash, a vision, like the memory of the facility that used to be there. I don’t know how, if it’s gone now, but I did.”

  Hardly able to believe what I’m hearing, I drop my eyes to the chip, turning it over and over in my hands like I might be able to divine a new clue from it, some explanation for what’s going on or where to look next.

  “Wait—stop!” Jubilee lurches from her chair, her fingers closing around my wrist. I freeze, but her eyes are on the chip. “Turn it over.”

  I do as she says, and her fingers guide me, turning my hand just so. I see a flash as the foil catches the light. She makes a small noise of shock and then leans down so she can bring her line of sight alongside mine.

  For a moment I’m utterly distracted by her closeness, despite the soot and the smell of burned chemicals. Then she’s angling the chip so I can see what she saw, and all thoughts of her face next to mine vanish.

  There’s a letter hidden in the circuitry, visible only when the light hits the reflective surfaces the right way. It’s a V, and we both stare at it, trying to figure out what it means.

  “VeriCorp?” I whisper. But the logo for VeriCorp is both a V and a C, and they’re not a big enough corporation to have their own ident chip manufacturers.

  Jubilee’s breath catches, and she reaches out to take the chip from me. Before I can protest, she’s twisting it in her fingers—turning it upside down. Abruptly, it stops being a V. There’s not a soul in the galaxy who doesn’t know that symbol. A lambda.