Chameleon Moon

by RoAnna Sylver

  Regan opened his mouth but no sound came out. He folded his arms across his chest, tight; it felt heavy again. The words should have made him happy—and he was. It was a wonderful thing to know. One of the best in the world. But now he knew he’d had something once, and didn’t anymore. That realization hurt more than anything he’d felt since this began.

  Before, he’d almost been frightened of what he would discover once he regained his memory. What did he know of himself? Hans, a terrifying ghost. Parole, a terrifying city. Garrett Cole, the man he may have murdered. He had assaulted an innocent boy. He didn’t want to see these things; he didn’t want to know them. They almost made him not want to know himself. If that Regan was a killer surrounded by—no, made of ugly things, maybe it was better to have lost him. Leave him behind. Wipe the slate clean, become someone else with a new life.

  Now, he had something to lose. He had lost it. He wanted to know who had given him that song, and if he deserved the love he felt in its echoes. He wanted to look into the eyes of the familiar cat that followed him wherever he went, and know who was really looking back.He wanted to know the name ‘Chimera,’ and if that name should inspire pride or guilt. He wanted to know why he could look at a silent, hooded figure in black made of stitched-together corpses and feel safer than he ever would by himself. He wanted to escape Hans’s cold grasp and find every single answer he’d been denied, everything that had made up the person he’d been, the ugly and the sublime, hold them to his aching chest and never let them go.

  It had almost been easier not to know he’d been loved, or had a life. Because now Regan knew he would never be able to rest until it was his again

  ❈

  Music held promises of safety, and Evelyn had never trusted silence. Just like she remembered, this sprawling place was silent every minute of every day. Methodically, she made her way through the Turret House, trying the thumbprint lock beside every door. Unlike the one that had opened to the kitchenette with the water, every one she met was locked. The stairwells were open, as was the elevator—to the main floor and the single approved one. She could travel up and down, but what actually lay on the off-limits floors was infuriatingly beyond her reach.

  Still, there was only one door she had to open. As long as that one was still open, none of the other mattered. Evelyn thought about lullabies, about old memories, and went in search of hers.

  It wasn’t hard to find the door she wanted. But it was harder to turn the knob. She stopped in front of it, at the end of a long hall, and paused with her hand raised, praying it wouldn’t be locked. For years, that door had been closed, but never locked, not to her. When she was at her darkest, the only thing that made her feel better was stepping through.

  She lifted her hand to knock on the door, but it opened before she even made it. A tired smile spread across her face.

  “Hi, Mama.”

  Liam paced in front of Hans’s bed, jaw and fists clenched. Ten full minutes, he waited, when it didn't even have to be one. Hans was letting him stew. Playing with him, like always.

  “Sorry about that,” The voice reverberated through Liam’s skull and he clapped one hand to his chest. “My appointment calendar is just, really, super full lately. I’m not used to being such a popular guy! But I could probably get used to it.”

  Liam fought to catch his breath, leaning heavily on the metal bar on the foot of the hospital bed. “You are not sorry. You've never been sorry. You don't know what that means.”

  “Ow. That hurts me. It does.” Hans drawled, floating around Liam’s vision like a speck in his eye fluid—look directly at him, and he’d disappear. “You’re always such a downer, Liam. Li-Li. Lima Bean.”

  “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Uh-huh. Hey.” He sank down to float horizontally at Liam’s eye level, and pointed to one of his eyes. “Check out the eyeliner. I was just thinking, hey, I’m a mental projection, right? I can look however I want. Why the hell didn’t I do this years ago?”

  “Years of following,” Liam continued, but he wasn’t talking to Hans anymore; his tone was quiet, scrutiny turned inward, and from the deepening of the lines on his face and clenching of his fists, he didn’t like what he saw. “Following where? In my father’s footsteps? Down a road of good intentions? Everyone knows where that leads. And then once I dare deviate, do I strike out on my own? No. I find another leader going in another direction—but the antithesis of one vice isn’t always a virtue, is it?”

  “Hey, look!” Hans stuck out his tongue. “Instant tongue piercing. Like it?”

  Now he looked up. “I can’t trade one set of sins for another, Hans.”

  “Okay, listen.” Hans’s voice softened; and everything about his mental presence became the tiniest bit gentler. “None of this comes back to you. It's all me, I’m in charge here. I’m doing the hard shit so nobody else has to! You’re fine.”

  “No. I’d like to believe that, but I can’t, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just put out the fire! That’s all I want!” A flare desperation shot through Liam like an electric shock. It wasn’t his own.

  “You don’t want to stop everything right now, set everything right? You don’t want to wake up?”

  “Don’t you get it? I am never waking up!”

  “Nonsense. Say the word and it’s over. I know we decided it’s safer if you remain dormant, but—”

  “Oh my God, you really think I’m doing this because I want to? Believe me, if you want a job done right, you do it yourself, and I’d love to! Don’t you think I’ve tried? Don’t you think I’d love to just walk on over, take what I need, do it all, save us with my bare hands? Come on, Liam! Think! The only reason I’m putting all this time and energy into herding this bag full of cats into doing what I want is because I can’t do it myself!”

  Liam fought down nausea for a few slow beeps of the EKG. “You’ve never said anything about this before,” he said at last.

  “It’s been ten years,” Hans said at last, mental voice faint like a distant memory Liam had to concentrate to remember. “After everything my body’s been through, I don’t… I don’t know if I even can get back… in it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why would I give you one more thing to worry and feel bad about? When you worry and feel bad about stuff, you come in here and start… worrying at me.”

  “I thought… I thought you just…”

  “You thought I enjoyed floating around out here? For ten years? I’m a ghost. I don’t exist anymore, except in peoples’ brains—you’re imagining me right now! I’m a hallucination! I float around, yeah, I jump out and go ‘boo,’ I have a little fun, sure! But at the end of the day, I have to watch while everybody else burns up, and falls through the cracks. And they do not come back as ghosts.”

  Liam shut his eyes and spent a long moment in silent contemplation. When he opened his eyes again, they were hard. “I still can’t let this continue. For all our sakes, but… now yours as well.”

  “Mine?” Hans sounded genuinely surprised.

  “If what you say is true, if your body is too damaged for you to return to it, then yes, it is just one more thing for the Turrets to add to their litany of crimes.”

  “Oh no. No, no, no, you’re not using me and my ghostliness to back out of this now!” Hans floated around to ‘stand’ in the air directly in front of Liam’s face, arms firmly crossed. He had to hover a good four or five inches in the air to glare at him at eye level. “We had a deal.”

  “The circumstances have changed.” Maintaining his professional demeanor was becoming more difficult with every word. Liam grasped one wrist behind his back to hide the shaking in his hands, though there was little point in trying to keep a brain-projecting ghost from detecting just about anything so obvious. “My original intent was to mitigate harm, not exacerbate it. As our continued partnership would lead to grievous suffering, the only humane course of action is to see our business concluded a
t this point.”

  “Blah, blah, losing your nerve, breaking your word, breaking your promise, blah.”

  “I am trying to spare innocents needless pain,” Liam said through clenched teeth. “Including… including you, Hans.”

  “That’s real sweet and all, especially you calling me innocent, but for real… we’ve been over this. Can we please skip to the part where you go back to following the plan?”

  “Not this time. I don’t know why I ever agreed to this madness in the first place. I don’t know why I ever listened to you; you’re a tortured soul, and I’m only making it worse.”

  “You don’t know why? Okay, small words. I have what you need, and you have what I need. Actually, together, we could have what the whole city needs, which is… not to die, right? Now, I need people to walk through the fire. I need someone who can make guns and bombs that are actually alive. I need someone who won’t burn, because they’re already dead. And most of all, I need people who won’t betray me, because they don’t have a choice.”

  “You can’t do it.” Quiet desperation crept into Liam’s tone, uninvited and easily as a thief in the night. “I can’t let you.”

  “And you told me you needed way to make up for everything. You want to do some good, Liam? This is good! We are gonna be so good together!”

  “No. No,” he shook his head faster now, voice growing louder, more certain, more strident. “I don’t know what we’re doing anymore, but ‘good’ isn’t a part of it. Maybe it never was. All we’re doing is continuing the cycle. More suffering. More death. More lives destroyed, burned.”

  “Hey, suffering comes from above,” Hans said, casually as if he were relating some proverb or favorite saying. “We’re just dealing with the stuff that falls off the roof. It’s not like you’re at the very top of this whole big evil monster system.”

  “No, I’ve just stood idly by and watched while the Turrets created it. While my—while the Major, who is the very head…” He forced air into his lungs. “As you so astutely mentioned… Parole is now all under one roof. We built it, along with this house. And the Turrets… are the very sharp, highest point. We have a fine view from up here. If the smoke ever were to clear, my father would be able to see a very long way. But all I can see… contrary to what I told my cousin… all I can see is the blood on our hands.”

  “Hm.” Hans thought for a moment, floating by him like a leaf on the surface of a stream. “Your cousin. She got to you, didn’t she?”

  “She's right.”

  “She’s the most ridiculously positive human being I’ve ever seen in the entire universe. It’s incredible. And annoying.” Hans made a face. “She’s like a nuclear explosion of rainbows and sunshine and ‘hey yeah, the world doesn’t totally suck in every way, everything’s gonna be okay, ‘cause I’m gonna save you, ‘cause I’m Evelyn, and I’m a super—’”

  “That’s enough,” Liam said sharply. “She’s done more for this Godforsaken place than you could even comprehend.”

  “Oh, okay, you’re the only one allowed to be a douche to your family. I get it.”

  “You don’t save yourself by throwing someone else into the fire,” Liam murmured, ignoring the latest round of Hans’s frustrated snark. “Rule one.”

  “Her rules, not mine. Look where following the rules got her. Look what it got everyone!” Hans raised his voice when Liam didn’t look up. “If we want to survive, we have to forget about the rules, and make our—”

  “My father. The Major. He brought you here to use you.”

  “Darn skippy.”

  “Like you’re using me.”

  “What, our work together is torture now? That hurts.”

  Liam shut his eyes. He didn’t need to see Hans’s face to know that when he opened them, his nearly ever-present toothy grin would be gone. The shiver reverberated throughout his consciousness, the feeling of regret as soon as the words were ‘said,’ the desire to rewind time just a few seconds. But slips of the tongue weren’t reserved for people who physically had them, and the damage was done. “So that’s it, then.”

  “No—hey, no,” Hans started, pitch of his projected voice rising with an urgent, stinging hum in Liam’s head, almost like an electric shock. “I didn’t say anything about actual torture, that was all you. I didn’t confirm or deny, you can’t take that from what I said.”

  “This is why you can’t return to your body, isn’t it?” Liam’s voice was brittle, almost as dry as Zilch’s death-rattle rasp. “He went too far. He always goes too far.”

  “Aw come on… Liam, co—nothing’s changed! This isn’t new information, the plan’s the same! We still go down into the fire, put it out, boom, that’s done. Then we move on just like before, second verse, same as the first—are you listening? You’re not listening. Liam!”

  He wasn’t responding either. Or hearing. His eyes were open but out of focus, so he likely wasn’t seeing anything either. At least nothing in this room. The hands behind his back clasped each other tighter, but shook anyway.

  “Hey. Don’t go there, okay? You really don’t have to.” Hans said in a rare, gentle voice, almost a mumble. “Nothing you can do about it, anyway. Nobody can. So just let it go.”

  Nothing. Liam was still and silent as the young man in the bed, at whom he’d been staring since he opened his eyes.

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault, Liam.” Hans slowly floated down to the floor until he appeared to be standing next to him, solid as any living soul. “None of what happened was your fault. Nothing that’s happening now is your fault.”

  “It is. What he did to you—and what you’re doing to them now—”

  “Hey. It’s gotta happen.” Hans only came up to Liam’s shoulder on the floor and he couldn’t tap him to make him turn, so he resorted to floating in front and at eye level again. “If we want to live, it has to be done.”

  “No!” Liam gripped the metal bar on the end of the bed, swaying as if it were the only thing keeping him standing.

  “For real, man, you gotta let it go. Just stick to the plan—”

  “Stop!” Liam cried, voice taking on a note of hysteria, harsh and discordant in the quiet room. “You can’t do this—”

  “I know you’re way messed up in this too, and I don’t want you to get hurt—”

  “I can’t let him—I can’t let you—”

  “Okay, maybe I should just… yeah, I’m gonna go. I’m gonna give you some space.” Hans began to fade, then stopped, spoke as soothingly as he knew how. “It’ll… everything’s gonna be okay. I… promise. Trust me, okay?”

  Hans vanished, but Liam couldn’t stop shaking. He fell to his knees, grasping at the bed, at the still hand on the white linen.

  “Damn you, Hans—come back! Come back! Help me!” Hot, bitter tears flowed down his gaunt cheeks and pooled on the immaculate sheets. “I’m sorry…”

  Nobody came.

  ❈

  Evelyn didn’t even try to fight the tears that stung her tightly shut eyes. “I missed you so much!” she sobbed, feeling like she might collapse with relief and the exhaustion that suddenly hit her like a ton of bricks.

  There were warm arms around her, holding her close and returning every bit of love. Cassandra Turret lifted up the semi-opaque black veil over her face and draped it over Evelyn’s head, welcoming her into her safe cocoon. “I missed you, darling. I miss being your mama!”

  “You’re always my mama.” Evelyn buried her face in Cassandra’s shoulder, snuggling as close as she could, surrounded by her mother’s arms and the familiar smell of her lilac soap. The black veil Cassandra wore was warm and soft, and it fell around Evelyn like a protective shroud. Although her mother hadn’t always worn the veil, the old and familiar feeling remained one of Evelyn’s strongest associations with home. “Always! I’m sorry, I’m sorry for running, I’m sorry for leaving you behind!” Most of all, she was sorry she’d never gotten a chance to say this until now.

  “You had to go.�
�� Cassandra held her close, one hand on the back of her daughter’s head. “You did what it took to survive. Sometimes that means running. Escaping. I was the one who said no when you asked me to come with you.”

  Evelyn shook her head and made herself speak; if she didn’t focus on forming words all that would come out were sobs. “Still. I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you.”

  “It’s not you who’s not here, honey. It’s me. I’m not here. More and more, I’m… seeing other places. That’s what the veil is for. It helps me not see so much.”

  “I’m glad it’s helping. I’m glad that something’s helping.”

  “I still see them. All the different paths, all the endings. Not enough happy ones. But today… I want to see you.” Slowly, she removed the veil to look into her daughter’s eyes for the first time in years. The lines Evelyn remembered had deepened, and new ones had appeared, spreading out from her eyes and mouth like spiderwebs. Her once-full cheeks were gaunt; her warm brown skin had taken on an unhealthy grey pallor. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the slow smile that spread across her face as she held Evelyn’s in both of her hands, and the light that gradually came back into her eyes. “Well, would you look at that. There’s still one beautiful thing left in this God-awful place.”

  Now the words wouldn’t come. Evelyn shut her eyes so the next thing wouldn’t be tears.

  “Hurry. I’m still fighting, but. It’s getting harder to stay in the moment. Even when the moments are bad, they’re better than where I…” She shook her head and forced her eyes to clear. “Your turn, baby. Go!”

  “I’m home for now—not long, probably. I’m—we’re fugitives,” she made herself say the word, and watched her mother’s face for horror, shock, disappointment, anything, and it didn’t come. “You know already, don’t you.”