This Shattered World

by Amie Kaufman

  “No,” he says in a calm, collected voice. There are flecks of Carmody’s blood on his neck and chin. “Not anymore.”

  I stand there, unable to move, unable to breathe as he stoops, collecting the gun from Carmody’s lax hand. He inspects it, not bothering to keep an eye on me. When he looks up, there’s nothing in his face but blank serenity.

  “It was supposed to be me,” I whisper.

  “We need you,” says the thing in Flynn’s mind. “We feel you are the better choice.”

  My legs tremble—with anger, with fear, with exhaustion—and I reach out for the wall for support. “What does LaRoux want with me?”

  The Flynn-thing regards me flatly. “You are speaking of the one who binds us?” His head tilts slowly to one side, in a mockery of thoughtful interest, until it stops at an odd, unnatural angle. “We are not acting under his orders anymore.”

  My throat tangles with a brief, insane flicker of hope at those words—but then my heart plummets as the barrel of the gun swings over to point at me.

  “We are not acting under anyone’s orders anymore. We have seen what humanity is: beyond salvage.” There’s no violence, no hatred in his voice; the calm there is more terrifying than if he came at me screaming and spewing threats. He gestures with the gun toward the door, nudging Carmody’s body aside with one foot to clear his path. “And you will be the one to set us free.”

  My hand closes on empty space as it reaches automatically for the gun that isn’t there anymore. I take a step back toward the door, not taking my eyes off of Flynn. Off of what used to be Flynn.

  Don’t think, don’t crumble. Just keep moving.

  “You don’t understand,” I say as his eyes follow me. “We want to stop LaRoux too. We’re not like him.”

  “You are all like him.”

  I grasp for the handle behind me, but don’t turn it yet. The creature keeps his distance, too smart to come close enough for me to think about wresting the gun from him. Flynn, I could probably disarm and disable. But after seeing what he did to Carmody…No human can move that fast.

  “Lilac said you helped them,” I murmur, shooting a quick glance at the hallway through the window in the door. It’s empty, as it was before.

  Flynn’s blank expression doesn’t shift. “We know this one you speak of. She was with us in the darkness for a time.”

  With us? But I seize on that recognition, speaking quickly, trying to moderate my voice the way Flynn would. If only he were here, with his passion and his diplomacy; I’m only good for fighting. “Then you know her. You know she’s not like her father. Neither am I—neither is Flynn.” My voice chokes on his name.

  “All patterns of data contain anomalies.” Flynn halts, though the gun doesn’t move. “Continue walking.”

  I ignore his order. “Why lead us here?” I think of the light in the swamp, the green glow that looked so much like the November ghost in my dimmest memories. “Why not just force the scientists, force LaRoux, to let you go?”

  “Our keeper never comes near enough for us to take him. These others, he has operated upon and made it difficult for us to inhabit their minds with any precision.” Flynn nudges Carmody’s body again, this time to roll him over onto his stomach. Beneath the mess of blood and hair, just below his ear, is a tiny scar, too straight and precise to have been from an accident.

  I swallow down my nausea, jerking my eyes away from the bits of skull protruding from Carmody’s head.

  He doesn’t flinch. “Before we were brought here, we existed as pieces of a single entity, part of one mind. Our keeper has learned that to be sundered from each other is the worst kind of agony we can know. When we displease him, he puts us into the dark place.” The whisper’s face, Flynn’s face, shows me nothing. No fear, no hatred, not even the flicker of remembered pain. “He will not do so again after we are free.”

  It’s getting harder to breathe, my chest tightening with a kind of panic I haven’t felt in years, not since my first time in combat. No way out. No way through. I close my eyes for half a breath, focusing on the air moving through my lungs.

  “Why should I help you?” I have to fight to speak my next words. “You’ve taken away the one thing I had left. You’ve taken him—”

  “Because he is still in here. Because if you set us free, we will return him to you. And we will save you, and this planet, for last.”

  My heart starts again with a lurch that makes my eyes water. But the rest of the creature’s words ring in my ears. “What do you mean, ‘save us for last’?” I whisper. “What will you do when you’re free?”

  “We will start with our keeper,” the whisper replies, dead-eyed and soft. “We will give him the same pain he has given us. We will take his family from him, and all he knows, and every soul who has ever touched him. And then we will spread this death, as your kind has spread, and we shall make him the last of your species. And then, once he has realized the thing he has done—then we will leave him, howling, in the dark.”

  My eyes blur, stinging with tears of horror and grief. “No,” I whisper. My voice shakes, but behind the tremor there’s iron, and I can feel its strength as I straighten. “No, I won’t help you. Shoot me if you want, but I’m not setting you monsters free.”

  Flynn merely looks at me, mouth lax, eyes empty. He looks like a mannequin, like a doll of himself, and my heart tries to claw its way out of my chest. “All right,” he says calmly.

  And turns the gun on himself, pressing the barrel to the underside of his chin.

  “No—!” My voice tears from my throat, stabbing the air as I jerk forward half an inch, hand raised. “No, stop!” I gasp for air, nausea sweeping through me to follow the path of my fear. “What are you doing?”

  The Flynn-thing doesn’t even flinch, watching my distress without reaction. “If you refuse to do as we ask, then we have no further use for this vessel.” I can see the barrel pressing hard enough into Flynn’s neck that the skin around the metal edge is turning white.

  “Okay.” The word comes like a sob, wrenching from my lungs so painfully I have to take a breath, and another, before I can speak again. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  It’s been ten years, and every night the girl keeps searching for the November ghost. Sometimes she finds her mother or her father; sometimes the girl finds friends she recognizes, and enemies she doesn’t. She finds the green-eyed boy everywhere, and sometimes he helps her look.

  She’s wandering the swamps of Avon now, alone, gliding on the water in an old, narrow boat. She’s searched the entire world and found nothing—no green-eyed boy, no people at all—and no November ghost. She looks up at Avon’s empty sky until the anguish is too much, and she drops back down into the bottom of the boat, resting her forehead against the wood.

  Then something makes her lift her head.

  In the water below she sees a million stars reflected, and the swamp becomes the sky, and her boat a ship. The stars are blinding, welcoming her, each one a tiny, dancing ball of light. All around her the swamp is illuminated.

  MY MIND IS TOO WELL TRAINED. It keeps trying to find a way out, some tactic with which to disarm the creature, to gain the upper hand. Move more quickly around this corner, surprise him when he follows; duck inside that doorway, then slip out behind him when he passes.

  But even if I could do it, even if I could wrest the gun from the thing that killed Carmody with its bare hands—what then? I can’t hold at gunpoint a creature willing to kill Flynn simply because he’s no longer useful. Even if I could point a gun at Flynn. Even if I could…

  But he’s not Flynn anymore; the boy I knew is gone. There’s no warmth in his gaze, no life in his voice. It’s not him. Even if the creature was telling the truth, even if they could bring him back to me…could he forgive me for what I’m about to do? I clench my jaw. Keep it together, Jubilee.

  I was never supposed to be the one on the outside of the mind control. That’s Flynn’s job. I hit things, I shoot things, I pass on
the orders that are passed to me. He was supposed to be the one having to make this call, to kill me if I wasn’t coming back, to decide if I was a lost cause.

  I can’t make this kind of choice alone. Flynn would never want me to sacrifice humanity to keep him alive for a few more years—or weeks, or days, I don’t know. Not even for Avon. But I cannot watch that thing pull the trigger; I can’t stand here and watch it blow Flynn away. I could more easily cut out my own heart. Flynn, what do I do?

  The corridors ahead of us are empty. It isn’t until the thing controlling Flynn leads me to an elevator and I press the button that I glance back—and freeze.

  Shuffling after us, filing out of the rooms and down the corridor, are the facility’s staff. Dozens of them, filling the hallway; some in the white coats of the lab techs, others in combat gear like mine. They’re silent, blank-faced, moving with a strange, disconnected gait, shoes dragging against the floor. Their slow, sluggish movements are so different from Flynn’s, hampered by the surgical procedure LaRoux used to prevent the whispers from being able to fully control them. And every single one has eyes like marbles.

  The thing controlling Flynn motions me into the elevator when its doors open, and for the first time I move quickly, my spine prickling and skin itching with horror. I press my shoulder blades against the far wall of the elevator, turning in time to see the half-controlled facility workers come to a stop just inches away from the lip of the door. They say nothing, only continue to gaze at me while the elevator doors close between us.

  The elevator descends, and then the whisper leads me through a security check manned by a still, blank form seated at the desk, with the same black-eyed stare as the sentries up above. Then he leads me to a second elevator; we go down again, down farther, down staircases and ramps, down into what feels like the heart of Avon. The farther I walk into the belly of this secret facility, the heavier the air presses in all around me.

  Flynn doesn’t speak to me again.

  We reach a door with another security pad, though this time there’s no one there to wave us through. This door is different from the others—it’s round, designed to dilate open. If it were a regular door I might be able to force it, but these are the kinds of doors they use on ships as fail-safes. Airtight, absolutely secure.

  Flynn comes to a halt beside it and turns to me expectantly. Finally we’ve reached a place with no others, no witnesses. Nobody here but us. I wait, but Flynn does nothing, simply gazes evenly at me. I get the uneasy impression I could stand here forever waiting for him to speak and he would never crack. I clear my throat. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Open the door.”

  “It needs a key, and I don’t have one.” My terror is dimming to a kind of dull numbness, my whole body aching with tension and grief.

  “You are incorrect,” the Flynn-thing says coldly, the dilated pupils fixed on my face. “You have had a key all this time.”

  I swallow, my eyes blurring. Hearing his voice is like a constant searing fire—knowing it’s not him in there, that he’s not speaking to me. “What? How could I—” But then I stop short, heart pounding in the silence. Because I do have a key. I have the ident chip we found the first time Flynn brought me here—I reach into my pocket to fish it out.

  Though my skin crawls, I force myself to go nearer to the Flynn-thing to examine the security pad. There are numbers for a password, but also a small rectangular indentation on the bottom right. I press the ident chip into the slot, and it fits perfectly. The keys all light up green with a cheery beep, and then the door whooshes open.

  The inside is so bright that for an instant my eyes are too dazzled to see. A hand between my shoulder blades propels me forward, and the touch is so like Flynn’s—and so unlike it at the same time—that I’m too dumbfounded to resist. I stumble over the lip and into the room, blinking.

  Flynn follows, and the door whooshes closed again. I turn, heart seizing in alarm. I’m trapped. But before I can react, Flynn goes crumpling to the ground.

  I give a wordless shout and throw myself down next to him, grabbing at him before his head can hit the solid plastene floor.

  “What the—Flynn? Flynn, wake up. Please.” I give him a shake, but his head lolls back. I bend my head close, putting my ear to his lips—he’s breathing, but only barely. His pulse is slow.

  Cradling him against me, I lift my head and look around. I’d expected machinery, transmitters, a central hub crawling with technicians. Instead, the room is empty. We’re in a large white dome with no visible light source, despite the brightness reflected off the curved walls. The floor and ceiling are made of plastene panels that tingle to the touch, as if they’re somehow conductive, except that plastene is an insulator by design.

  As I draw in a ragged breath only to have the sound swallowed by the space, I remember another property of plastene: it muffles noise. No matter how loud I scream in here, no one’s ever going to hear me.

  My fingers run through Flynn’s hair, desperate for his touch even if he’s unconscious. Even if he’s not him anymore. Don’t leave me here alone, Romeo.

  Then, as if in answer to the thought, a breeze traces along the back of my neck. I shiver in response, jerking to the side. There’s nothing there, and when I lift a hand to rub at my neck I realize the collar of my shirt would prevent a breeze from reaching my skin. Nevertheless, the hairs are rising on my neck and my arms.

  I know this sensation too well to ignore it.

  We’re not alone.

  “I know you’re there,” I say, trying to sound harsh and competent. “Show yourself. Now.” But no one answers; all I can hear is my own breathing.

  The light is too bright to be sure, but for an instant I think I see a faint green glow hovering only a few feet in front of my face.

  Then Flynn stirs with a tiny groan, and my attention snaps back down. He lifts his head from my lap, pressing one hand against the floor.

  “Flynn?” I duck my head to try to see his face. I can’t afford to hope.

  His eyes open, showing me only blackness, and my heart sinks. I swallow the sob that wants to escape, and scramble back from him, getting my feet under me and reaching for the gun he dropped when he collapsed. He finishes picking himself up slowly.

  “We are sorry,” Flynn whispers, almost to himself, his movements slow and measured.

  “Sorry?” I stare at the creature, the gun clenched in my grip, though I can’t make my arm lift it.

  The Flynn-creature finally swings his gaze over toward me. “Yes. We—I—” The word is slow to leave his lips, as though it feels wrong. “I am sorry. You must listen, we don’t have much time. The others will know I have interfered.”

  I press my back against the sealed door. “Others,” I repeat, so confused I’m only able to echo his words. “You mean you’re not the thing that took Flynn?”

  Flynn shakes his head. There’s nothing to suggest he’s changed; his eyes are still black, his face still devoid of emotion. “Once, we were all the same. Part of each other. But that was when the rift still connected us. Now we’re alone. And I do not wish for the kind of freedom the others want.”

  For the first time since Flynn turned those empty eyes on me, my heart flickers with hope—a tiny, guttering flame that makes my eyes burn. I want so badly to believe the creature. I want so badly not to be alone. But I tighten my grip on the gun as panic sweeps back through me. “It’s a trick,” I spit. “You’re trying to—I don’t know. If you really were different, you’d let Flynn go. You’d give him back to me.”

  “We can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t? Upstairs you said you would let him go if I helped you.”

  “The others have learned deception. It is a human art, and we have had a very clever teacher.” The thing makes Flynn shake his head. “When we take a mind this deeply, for this long, there is no going back. His mind is still here, but it would be damaged beyond repair if I tried to leave him now.”

 
; Despair surges in me. “You took me over for hours and I’m still here. You made me go to the rebel hideout, and I came back, and I was fine. My mind’s intact.”

  “You’re different.” Flynn’s eyes stay on mine, watching me. There’s an odd, probing quality to his gaze. I can’t shake the disturbing feeling that he can see my thoughts.

  “Different. Soulless, like the men say?”

  “The opposite.” Flynn’s mouth curves into something not very much like a smile, but far from being comforting, it’s just a reminder that it isn’t Flynn, not really. That smile should be his, for me. Not an echo summoned up by the creature infesting his mind. “You and I have met before.”

  “You’ve got me confused with someone—”

  “We do not have time for me to be gentle,” the whisper interrupts. “I cannot hold off the others forever. You must remember. You are Jubilee Chase, daughter of Mei-Hua and Noah Chase, and we have been together for a very long time.”

  It’s like someone’s punched me in the stomach. I can’t breathe, I can’t see—my vision blurs, my hands lose feeling. I gasp for air.

  Flynn isn’t done. He’s watching me curiously, as though he’s a scientist observing a particularly fascinating chemical reaction. “You’ve felt our touch before, when we were first learning to understand your kind. When you were young and malleable. This has made you different. This has made your mind stronger. Your soul stronger. We remember you.” He pauses, hesitation briefly so human, so familiar, that I ache. “I remember you.”

  “I wasn’t imagining it all.” The fragments of memory refuse to coalesce, leaving me with pieces of truth, too fractured to help me now. “There were whispers on Verona; I thought they were ghosts. I remember….” I swallow a sudden, dizzying sweep of grief. “Then it was the Fury that caused the riots there. You made those people kill my parents?”

  “Death does not exist for us. How could we have understood, then, what our keeper was forcing us to do?” His jaw is squaring now, black gaze locked on me.