This Shattered World

by Amie Kaufman

  “LaRoux Industries.”

  I want to ask her what it means and whether the military knows something we don’t about why LaRoux Industries, which has no terraforming stake here on Avon, would have constructed a secret base out in the middle of the swamps. But I can tell from her expression she’s as confused as I am.

  Before I can speak, the com-patch on the sleeve of her combat suit buzzes to life. “Security to Captain Chase,” it hisses, Avon’s interference rendering the voice unidentifiable.

  Jubilee looks at me for a split second and then turns away, but not before I see the alarm in her gaze. She lifts a hand to the patch, activating it from her end. “Chase here,” she replies, ducking her head a little to bring her voice closer to the receiver.

  “Can you report to the security office, sir?” It’s not an order, but a request; I can see her shoulders relax a little.

  “I’m a little busy,” she replies, tweaking the blinds over the window with two fingers so she can peer out at the base outside. “Is it more info on the bomber?”

  “No rush, but we could use your eyes, since you were there. We’ve got the guy who abducted you from Molly’s.”

  The words wash over me like fire, and I start coughing, my abused lungs refusing to cooperate. Jubilee whirls, her gaze landing on mine as though she half expects me to have vanished into military custody. She waits until I’ve got my cough under control before thumbing the com-patch again.

  “Say again?” she says, her voice as cool as stone. “Some interference on my end.”

  “The kidnapper from the bar,” comes the voice. “It took a lot of combing through security footage, but we’ve got some now that’ll help us identify him.”

  Jubilee’s confusion is draining away into dread. “And? Who is he?”

  “Well, the footage is pretty grainy, there’s a lot of static interference. We’re trying to clean it up now.”

  “You stay on the bombing,” Jubilee snaps. She swallows, and when she speaks again, her voice is calmer. “Whoever the guy in Molly’s was, he’s long gone by now. We need to know more about the attack on the base, and whether Davin Quinn was acting alone.”

  “Well, sir,” the voice on the com-patch replies slowly, “I’ve got most of my people on the bombing, but for base security we’ll need to know this guy’s face so we can identify him if he tries again.”

  Jubilee’s gaze sweeps across the room’s other few occupants, unconscious, unresponsive. “Okay,” she replies. “I’ll come by later and see if I can help.” She lets her arm fall back down to her side, eyes returning to meet mine as the com-patch goes silent.

  All I can do is stare at her, the bottom falling out of my stomach. The only sounds are the gentle beeping of the monitors and the muffled sounds of the base outside—vehicle engines, snatches of conversation, the whine of a shuttle landing in a launch bay on the other side of the base. It’s impossible to forget where I am: in the middle of enemy territory.

  With an effort, I wrench myself out of my exhausted stupor and shove the blankets aside. Then I’m trying to sit up, pushing through the dizziness and the nausea. I’ve got to run.

  “Hey—stop that!” Jubilee reaches out, grasping my shoulders and pushing me back down. Right now, she’s a lot stronger than I am, and I’ve got no choice but to let her. “If they were on their way here to grab you, do you think I’d be sitting here looking at you? I’d be dragging your ass out the back door by now.”

  I can’t answer, my throat catching and drawing up a racking cough.

  Jubilee waits it out with her hands still on my shoulders, bracing me. When I’m finished, she pulls them back slowly. “We’ve got a little time. Your lungs won’t take a long trek through the swamp.”

  I swallow, making sure my throat’s clear before I try speaking this time. “How long do I have?”

  “I don’t know.” Jubilee paces a few steps to the foot of the bed. “Yesterday it would’ve been top priority, but now they’re a little distracted. You can thank your man Quinn for that. I need to think.” She closes her eyes, lips pressed tightly together.

  “They’re going to figure out that you haven’t told them everything.”

  Jubilee’s jaw tightens, and she makes a slicing motion with her hand. “For now they believe Commander Towers that it was trauma, and that’s why I couldn’t remember your face despite talking to you for a good ten minutes before you dragged me out of there.”

  “Tell them you got hit in the head—tell them it’s amnesia or something. Be careful. If I lose you—”

  “I know.” Her voice is clipped, bitter. She hates herself for being here. For helping me. “You lose me, you lose your direct line into the military’s plans.”

  My brain can’t get past the if I lose you. I want to correct her, but I haven’t worked out yet what the real end of that sentence is.

  She sucks in a bracing breath. “Listen. I’m going to get back out there, but if I’m not back by morning, you need to find a way out of here on your own. Steal a boat if you have to.”

  I can’t read what’s going on behind her calm expression. But an edge in her voice is ringing an alarm. “What do you mean, if you’re not back?”

  She frowns, but doesn’t skip a beat. “They’re probably going to put me on duty soon. If it’s the dawn patrol, I won’t make it back, and you’ll have to get out on your own. What is it your people say? Clear skies.”

  Those words, coming from her, slice at my heart. She doesn’t give me a chance to reply and stalks toward the door. She pauses, bracing one arm against the door frame.

  “Why couldn’t you have just stayed away?”

  “We told you,” says the girl’s father, “we weren’t interested.”

  “Noah,” whispers the girl’s mother, “look at their eyes.”

  “Last chance,” says the man with the marble eyes. The girl is watching through the crack in the counter and sees him lift his tunic to reveal a gun tucked into his pants. “Hate to go back and tell everyone you’re a Lambda family.”

  “We don’t support either side,” says her mother. “We want no part of this.”

  The girl moves until she can see her parents instead, standing together in the front hall of the shop. “Please,” says her father. “We have a daughter.”

  The world slows to a crawl. The girl hears the telltale click of the pistol being cocked, and her training kicks in. She dashes from the space under the counter; she pulls out her Gleidel; she throws herself between the gunman and her parents; she takes out two of them before the lead gunman can aim her way. It only takes a few seconds before she’s got them all on the floor, disarmed, harmless.

  Except it didn’t happen like that.

  THE BASE IS STILL IN CHAOS. The air smells of smoke and acrid chemicals, and though all the civilian staff have been removed, it’s busier than I’ve ever seen it. Everyone has a job—or if they don’t, they’re hurrying in search of one.

  I only stop long enough to change my clothes. With Cormac’s assurance that Davin Quinn has no connection to McBride, it’s unlikely the bombing was a declaration of war. I don’t need armor for what I’m about to do. I peel the suit off with difficulty; it’s stiff and sour-smelling with smoke, and I kick it into a corner of my room to deal with later. Even after I’ve put on fresh fatigues and my faux leather flak jacket, I still smell like fire. I should take a shower—hell, I should take a nap. But Cormac probably doesn’t have that kind of time.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have lied to him. Maybe I should’ve told him what I was planning. But I’m starting to know Romeo, and how he thinks, and I know enough to see he’d never let me go through with it. Maybe he’s the smart one.

  The security office isn’t far from my quarters, but my legs are so tired that starting the walk there feels impossible. So I break into a jog, trying to inject a little life into my muscles through sheer force of habit. My lungs start burning almost immediately, and I can’t help but think what Cormac’s must feel like, ha
ving inhaled so much more smoke.

  When I reach the security office, it’s crawling with staff coming and going. Even though the bomber’s been identified and confirmed dead in the blast, our people are busy finding out everything about him, about the bomb itself, about how he did it. My heart pounding with unfamiliar uncertainty, I nod to the private stationed outside and then slip in through the door.

  Security was one of the first permanent buildings erected on the base. No flimsy composite walls, no prefab rooms. All thick, solid plastene and concrete. The main room is the surveillance room, and my eyes flick to the banks of screens connected to the various cameras around the base. The footage itself is stored and accessed on a server down the hallway, but I can see the feed for the camera monitoring Molly Malone’s.

  I half expected the bar to be a ghost town, but Molly’s is doing a stiff business right now. Another form of treatment, for the soldiers whose wounds can’t be healed at the hospital. I scan the picture, eyes narrowing. No wonder they felt confident they’d be able to clean up the footage enough to identify my abductor. The image is low res, but there’s a clear view of the spot where I usually sit, the spot where Cormac first pulled his gun on me.

  I swallow, pushing thoughts of him back down. I take a step backward, intending to head for the room where the footage is accessed, but I collide heavily with someone behind me.

  “Captain.”

  My stomach drops. “Commander.” I step away from her, stiffening to attention automatically.

  “I thought I told you to take the next couple days off.” For once, Commander Towers isn’t perfectly put together. Her blond hair is still tied hastily at the nape of her neck, her uniform still disheveled. Her face reveals none of her exhaustion, though, a quality I envy. I must look like I haven’t slept in a week.

  “Can’t do it, sir. Too much at stake.” That, at least, is no lie.

  She nods almost absently, as if she’d expected that response. She seems distracted, anyway, her eyes going to the screens I’d been studying. They oversee every inch of the base, from the barracks to the bar to the very room we’re standing in now. I can see myself at an angle, standing a few feet from the commander.

  “Will you come with me, Captain?” Her voice is oddly formal under the circumstances, making my heart skip a little.

  Stop acting like a guilty child, I tell myself sternly. They can’t read your mind.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Commander Towers leads the way down the hall, scanning the rooms as we pass for an empty one. Eventually, she just sticks her head through a doorway and barks, “You—out.”

  A pair of startled privates come spilling out, eyes flicking from the commander to me. I follow Towers inside, only to have my muscles seize up as I realize where we are.

  The security footage repository.

  Commander Towers heads for one of the desks, pulling out a chair and sliding it across the floor toward me. Then she retrieves one of her own and drops into it heavily. I sink down more gingerly, keeping an eye on the commander while trying not to be too obviously nervous. If they’ve finished cleaning up the footage, then I’m too late. They’ll have a clear view of Cormac’s face. They’ll know he’s right there in our infirmary, and I’ve been to visit him more than once. And Commander Towers will know I lied to her.

  But she isn’t looking at the screens or the servers. “Captain, I wanted to see how you were.” Her eyes meet mine, and though there’s sympathy in them, I can see something else behind it. A keen interest, sharp and perceptive. “You’ve had a lot to deal with over the past few days.”

  “I’m okay.” Another lie. A few weeks ago I would’ve been comforted by my commander taking a personal interest in me. Now it feels like she can see through my treachery, straight to the truths I’m hiding.

  Towers nods, watching me a moment longer before letting her eyes fall to the floor between us. “I’m sorry about Lieutenant Alexi. I know you two had a history.”

  I fight to keep my throat from closing. Giving my head a brisk shake to clear it of the image of Alexi’s ruined face, I say shortly, “Thank you, sir.”

  “We’re still trying to figure out how it happened. Why it happened. The bomber—this Quinn man—came out of nowhere. We’ve got footage of him walking toward the barracks, right up until the explosion happened, and there’s nothing. Our best behavioral researchers are analyzing it and there’s just nothing there—no hidden aggression, no signs of guilt, nothing to suggest he was about to murder dozens of people.”

  I grit my teeth. It matches what Cormac said, that Quinn couldn’t have been the bomber, that he wasn’t the type. And yet, he was found with the detonator in what was left of his hand. Could it be he didn’t know what he was doing?

  “This place,” murmurs Commander Towers, her eyes shifting to gaze past me. “It’s eating away at us, bit by bit.”

  “Someone has to be here, sir.” But it’s a pale comfort when even in the depths of the security office we can both still smell the burning plastene. It clings to our hair, our clothes, ingrained in the pores of our skin.

  Towers’s eyes snap back to mine, and she nods shortly. “Of course. Sometimes I just wonder how long it’ll take for Avon to consume us all.”

  It’s unlike her to be so pensive. It’s one of the things I like about the commander, that she and I are both outward people, preferring action to introspection, momentum to idle consideration. And yet here she is, her shoulders sagging a little, her eyes seeking mine as though I have answers for her.

  But I’ve got nothing. For a wild instant, the truth bubbles up inside me, begging to be let out. I press my lips together tightly.

  Commander Towers sighs, straightening. “Chase, I wanted to ask you about what you said during your debriefing after your capture and subsequent escape.”

  I try not to stiffen noticeably. “Sir?”

  “You mentioned that the rebel thought we had some kind of base or facility out to the east.”

  I lean forward a little, unable to conceal the sudden spark of excitement leaping inside my rib cage. She knows something. “Yes, sir.”

  She leans forward a little too, mirroring my body language, picking up on all my cues. She’s far more skilled than I am at interrogation and manipulation. I have to watch my step. I let my hands dangle where my elbows are resting on my knees. Casual. Easy.

  “I’ve been wondering why he’d think that,” she continues. “It seems an odd thing to believe. The locals know the terrain here so well.”

  I hesitate. She’ll see it, know it’s uncharacteristic of me, know I’m hiding the truth. But there’s too much to consider. On the one hand, Towers could be an ally. I’m only a captain—but she’s the commander of an entire outpost here on Avon, and if she’s alerted to the possibility of a LaRoux Industries facility out there below the radar, she could be the key to finding out more.

  But what if she’s in on whatever strange conspiracy is unfolding out in the fens? Surely the person in charge of the base would have to be a part of the con?

  I clear my throat. “That’s what he said.” I have to tread carefully, watching her face for any reaction, however small, that might tell of what she knows. “Sounded crazy to me too, but I went along with it while I waited for my chance.”

  Commander Towers doesn’t react, listening to me with what seems to be polite interest and no more. Still, there’s the faintest of twitches along her jaw, and my eyes seize on it.

  “I’m sure there was nothing in it,” I say dismissively, leaning back in my chair again. “Not unlike the fairy tales they tell to keep themselves company in the evenings. Stories about how they keep moving it and it’s never in the same place twice, that sort of thing.”

  Towers nods. “Anything else?”

  I shake my head. “Only rumors.”

  The commander straightens, running a hand over her hair and then getting to her feet. “Thank you, Captain.”

  I scan her face, looking for s
omething, anything, that will explain her sudden interest and her just as sudden dismissal. There’s little to read there—the men call me Stone-faced Chase, but I’ve got nothing on Towers when it comes to playing our cards close to our chests. But her gaze moves too quickly, lips thin, shoulders rounded more than usual. She’s on alert, edgy. And I don’t think it’s solely from the bombing.

  “Of course, sir. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, though. Just stories.”

  She nods, lips curving in the barest hint of a smile. “Understood, Captain. Carry on—I’ll be in touch.”

  I can’t explain why, but I have the strongest sense she’s not involved. That she’s every bit as driven as I am to find out what’s happening out there. Her movements are quick, jerky, anxious. She wants to be out of here as badly as I want her to go. I haven’t forgotten why I’m really here.

  For half an instant, I want to blurt the truth. But to do so would reveal my part in all of this; that I could have captured a key player from the Fianna and didn’t, that I’d let him escape from me not once now, but twice. It would reveal that I’d betrayed my purpose here.

  Most of all, it would betray Cormac.

  And so I bite down hard on my lip and get to my feet, flashing a salute at Commander Towers as she turns and strides from the room. I stand there, gathering my wits, and then close the door lightly behind her.

  By clearing the room of the techs, she’s unwittingly given me my opportunity.

  With one foot I nudge a desk chair over so that the door, should anyone open it, will hit the chair with a clatter. A locked door would scream guilt, but the chair might distract anyone entering long enough for me to distance myself from the consoles and hide what I’m doing.

  Drawing in a deep breath, I drop into another chair and start hunting for the files I need.

  It takes me several long moments to navigate to the places where the surveillance footage is stored, but that’s not the hard part. Deleting those files is the work of a few seconds. The real challenge is locating the places where the various files are backed up.