Chameleon Moon

by RoAnna Sylver

  “You little—” he sputtered, face flushing at the pair of them with a look of absolute betrayal and indignation. “How dare—I told you explicitly not to allow anyone in here!”

  “We had to.” Lisette’s voice shook, but her eyes didn’t waver. “It’s the only way to fix everything.” She fidgeted, looking nervous for the first time until Wren took her hand. “But it’ll be okay. We can even help you, Mr. Liam, we know you’re scared t—”

  “I don’t know what you thought you’d found out, but just keep your mouths shut.” His glare faded, replaced by a look of smug assuredness. “Well, I know at least one of you will.”

  Slowly, calmly, and with a nearly matching expression, Wren raised their middle finger.

  “They’re right, Liam,” Rose said, keeping her tone studiedly calm. She arranged her gentle words into a regular rhythm, like a heartbeat—a subliminal, calming effect. From here she could see a sheen of sweat standing out on his pale forehead, and his trembling hands worrying at the cuffs of his expensive suit. “There’s a lot more going on here than you’re saying, and you’ve got me worried.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said in clipped tones, voice steady despite the rest of his obvious unease. “I’m sure you understand the need for security.”

  “Of course.” Rose monitored his every inflection and poker tell. “This has been hard on you, Liam. Maybe harder than the rest of us, except Evelyn… and Hans.”

  “Who? Oh. Yes. Of course.”

  “I know how much you value having power over your own life. You must feel like it’s spinning out of control.”

  He didn’t answer, just folded his hands behind his back where she couldn’t see them shake.

  “Is there anything you’d like to talk to me about?” she asked quietly, and waited.

  At last, Liam looked up at her, and she saw that while he had never been a specimen of health and vigor, now there were more bags and dark circles under his eyes than she had ever seen. His eyes flicked wearily to the teenagers still in his private chambers, but he didn’t say a word, as if not dignifying his predicament with a request.

  “I need to talk to Liam alone,” she said, nodding toward the door. “Wait outside, okay? I’ll be right out.”

  As they joined hands with Lisette and started walking backwards, Wren held up two fingers, pointing first to their own eyes, then at Liam, glaring daggers with every step. When they left, it wasn’t through the door. Without a sound, they both disappeared into thin air.

  Feeling that to show surprise or any reaction at all would weaken her position, Rose gathered her thoughts and formulated her first tactic as she turned around. “Please. if you just tell me what’s been haunting you… you’ll feel better.”

  “I get the feeling,” Liam said stiffly, drawing himself up to his full height and standing ramrod-straight. “That you think you already know. You and those delinquents.”

  “I’d rather hear it from you, Liam.” The bridge between them was crumbling, and she could feel the distance growing larger.

  “What exactly,” he said coldly, turning three-quarters toward the window to catch the last rays of the fading sunlight. “Did you come up here to say to me?”

  Maybe bluntness would shake something loose. “Last night, Hans almost went into cardiac arrest.”

  “Yes,” he said in a near-monotone. “Thank God you were there.”

  Rose stared at him for a moment, incredulous. “I barely got to him in time. Luckily, Lisette and Wren showed up a minute later.”

  Liam said nothing. The silence in this wing of the house was truly rare for Parole; it was almost distracting. Almost like the entire room had been insulated, covered in a thick cloth as heavy as the hanging purple velvet curtains behind him.

  “At the same time, you disappeared,” Rose continued.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Someone tries to kill Hans, and then immediately afterwards you’re nowhere to be found? What do you think it means, Liam?”

  Again, Liam was silent—and now he turned back to the window to face the setting sun, hands still clasped behind him. With them facing her, Rose could clearly see his hands were gripping one another much more tightly than they had been before, and still shaking.

  “Liam, talk to me. I know we haven’t been in contact much since the… all those years ago, but I really believe you were…” she stopped, struggled for the words. “I believe you thought you were doing the right thing. I still think you’re trying to do the right thing. It’s hard to know what that is sometimes, it’s the hardest thing in the—”

  “You don’t understand.” He sounded like he was speaking through clenched teeth. “You can’t understand.”

  “Then help me understand. Tell me what happened.”

  “Say it!” He whirled around to face her, eyes wide, façade cracking before her eyes as easily as Parole’s fragile streets. “If you’re so damn sure of yourself, then say it!”

  “I don’t want it to be true!” As soon as the words were out, Rose realized exactly how desperately she meant them. It surprised her more than a little.

  “And what if it is?!” He fired back with just as much fear and far more despair.

  “Then I’m even more relieved I wasn’t too late, because I think I saved two lives that night!”

  They just stared at each other for a few seconds; Liam was almost panting now, as if he’d run a very long way very fast. “Say it.”

  Rose’s eyes filled with tears. She wasn’t surprised to feel them. She was surprised it had taken them this long to sting. “You poisoned Hans.”

  Liam closed his eyes. His mouth moved in what looked like a twitch, a spasm. Then he let out a whisper so faint she almost had to lean closer to hear. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to!” His head whipped up; some stray hairs were starting to spring out of his immaculate greying ponytail. “It’s my fault! It’s all my fault, this monster I created, this ouroboros we’ve become, devouring Parole, devouring ourselves, the blood is on my hands! What’s one more? Just one more life, to save so many more? To begin a cycle of redemption instead of destruction? To—”

  “Liam!” Rose kept her voice from becoming a cry, but it was harder to keep herself from rushing forward; she made it a few steps before stopping herself. “Breathe. Please, please take a deep breath. I want to help, and I want to understand. Just breathe. In, and—”

  “I’ve killed us all!” His hands went to his head, he gripped his forehead as if he were trying to hold the pieces of his breaking skull together. “I didn’t see, I didn’t see how dangerous he was, and people died! So many!”

  “How dangerous who was?” Rose asked, quietly but intensely; she was so close to unlocking this entire entanglement and the mystery at its heart she could feel it, but still had to tread so carefully.

  “No. No, no, I can’t—”

  “It’s just like before, isn’t it, Liam?” she continued, talking fast, somehow she’d break through, she would, before he withdrew again. “Eight years ago, when we were kids first getting Chrysedrine, you and Garrett Cole, you weren’t trying to hurt us, you thought you were doing the right thing. But you realized it was wrong—”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “You don’t save yourself by throwing someone else into the fire. Rule one.”

  “That’s what Evelyn says, yes!” Rose smiled despite the fear and tension magnified between them. “And you didn’t. You didn’t then, and you’re not now, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right. I had to stop him. I saw what he was doing and he had to be stopped.”

  “So you tried to stop him,” Rose almost laughed with relief. “It was to protect Regan and Zilch, wasn’t it? You saw what Major Turret and Hans were doing to them and how wrong it was, didn’t you? And how else could you stop him? Liam, it’s all right, I know what you were trying to do. Same as before, prote—”

  “No,” Liam said suddenly, looking up at her. Inst
ead of relief and catharsis in his eyes, she saw nothing but complete and total confusion. “I wasn’t trying to protect anyone from Hans. I was trying to protect Hans… from the Major.”

  “What?” Rose blinked, trying to make sense of this contradictory puzzle. “Protect him from… I thought… Liam, isn’t Hans taking orders from your father? Aren’t they working together to—Liam?”

  Rose didn’t think she could have possibly been more confused. She was wrong. Liam was starting to laugh. “Is that what you’ve been thinking… this whole time? That my father—that he’d work with anyone? Ever? Anyone, that he couldn’t order—or blackmail—or torture, into submission?”

  “What are you saying?” She asked, eyes wide and hands shaking. “What’s he—”

  “My father’s been ‘working’ with Hans for years,” Liam spat. “Trying to discern the specifics of his ability, what can be done with it. I don’t know what he wants. Hans doesn’t know what he wants. We don’t even know the effects of his experiments, only the results. Pain,” he said before she could ask. “Awful, excruciating agony. So unimaginable that it’s left Hans unable to return to his body. He can…”

  “He can’t wake up, can he? Even if he wanted to?”

  “No.”

  “God,” Rose whispered. “A monster.”

  “Yes,” Liam agreed. “I am.”

  “That’s not what I meant!”

  “Maybe not, but it’s what I’ve become! My father, the Major, made the decision that quarantined Parole from the rest of the world! We became our own brave new world, a world over which he crowned himself king! And when he ruled with an iron fist, crushing us in his grip, I stood by and watched the blood drain! And when I finally had the chance to atone, I sided with the ghost of a tortured boy—so twisted and broken that he sends more innocents to their deaths! Yes, I know what Hans has done! And that’s my fault as well! Instead of saving him, I stood by again, while my father used his pain to fuel his gears of war and suffering! We are never escaping our prison, Rose! Blood cannot quench fire, it can only stain!”

  By the end of his outburst, Liam was exhausted and Rose was dizzied and dismayed. The fight had drained out of him and he looked around ten years older, seeming to hang in the air like one of Jenny Strings’s puppets.

  “We can’t change the past,” she said at last, very carefully, still overwhelmed. Finding any words at all after all of that was a challenge. “But we can move on. And more death isn’t the answer.”

  “Better he die than suffer further,” he muttered, voice flat.

  “I don’t think you wanted him to die at all.”

  “What?” He looked up sharply.

  “You knew I’d be there. In the same room with Hans. You could have done it any other time, but you picked when you knew I’d be able to save him. You didn’t really want to kill him, did you?”

  “Of course I did. He has to die!” Liam paled, intensity returning in a rush, but not the same righteous, fiery passion he’d had a moment before. Now he almost looked afraid. “He does or—or I do!”

  “Or you do?”

  “Yes!” He took a step forward, and now he glared at her again. Rose did not step back, but she did awaken her thorns and spread her fingers. “His suffering ends, or mine. Either way, we’re both free.”

  “Liam, stop. You’re not thinki—” He charged her. Rose jumped back, forearms crossed in front of her face as her body’s leafy defense mechanism sprouted to life. Vines shot out of her sleeves and whipped toward Liam. They snapped around his ankles and wrists and tripped him. “Stop it!”

  Caught in the vines, Liam struggled against the thorns to get to her, face twisted into a mask of furious desperation. He ripped vines apart in his frenzy, ignoring the cuts in his clothes and skin as he freed himself one inch at a time.

  “I don’t want to hurt you!” He lurched forward again, and Rose gasped. She gave up her defensive position and stretched out her arms and fingers toward him. “But I will!”

  All her energy and focus and life rushed out of her in a tidal wave of thorny vines that surged across the room. Liam screamed in fury, then a wall-shaking thump shook her bones, and she looked up to see him pinned against the opposite wall by massive tentacles of vines. They curled tighter around him, pulling until his limbs were outstretched and immobile.

  “Yes, hurt me!” Liam shouted, his voice strangled, tears streaming down his face as he strained against the thorny bonds. He stared at Rose, his eyes now wide and pleading. His chest jerked up and down in frantic hyperventilation, and though his wrists were pinned to the wall, his fingers curled into trembling hooks. “It’s my fault! It’s all my fault! I should have stopped him!”

  “Relax, Liam,” Rose said quietly. “Just breathe.”

  “Please, just let it be over!” He sobbed, blinded by tears, his entire body shuddering with violent, overwhelming pain. Rose’s vines weren’t tight enough to hurt him. Every bit of agony came from within. His heart pounded so hard, Rose knew it’d speed the mild poison seeping from the tips of her thorns through his bloodstream. His trashing slowed as the strong sedative kicked in. Liam’s voice slurred and his limbs grew too heavy to struggle. “Let it be over…”

  “I’m sorry.” Rose wasn’t even sure which one of them said it. Maybe both. Liam no longer moved, just stared, locked gaze with her… then his head slowly fell to the side and his eyes slipped shut. She could’ve sworn fleeting gratitude passed through his expression as they did.

  “Are you okay?”

  Rose leaned wearily against the wall, too exhausted to keep herself upright. Lisette and Wren had once more appeared behind her, and stared at Liam, sprawled across the wall, with wide, horrified eyes.

  “Hi, sweeties,” she said slowly, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I think the worst is over, but he was in… a bad place.”

  “What happened? Did he try to hurt you?”

  “He… discovered some things about himself I don’t think he liked.” Rose said wearily. “He needs help, and he’s not used to asking for it. I think. That was his way of doing it.” She sighed, looking at the unconscious Liam. The harsh lines had finally faded from his face; she’d never seen such a peaceful look there. “Did you check on Finn? And Jack?”

  Wren shot Lisette a glance, raising their white eyebrows in a silent prompt, and she nodded up at Rose, a few times more than was absolutely necessary. “Finn’s fine. Everything’s cool. We’re good.”

  “Good,” Rose said in an accidental echo, and her voice cracked with fatigue. She was suddenly so tired. “I want to check on Jack… then I’ll come back up and figure out what to do with… him.”

  “Just go,” Lisette followed her gaze to Liam, who still hung on the wall, unconscious in his tangled restraints of vines and flowers. She sucked her lips in for a moment; neither of them actually laughed, but behind her, Wren made much less of an effort to conceal their overjoyed grin. “It’s okay, we’ll watch him. We got this.”

  “Those vines should hold against just about anything,” Rose made herself focus just a little longer, and ensured Liam’s bonds were firm and strong. “But if they don’t, come find me right away.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Lisette nodded, all seriousness and attention, and only a slight twitch at the corner of her mouth.

  “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.” Rose’s head spun as she walked out of Liam’s office and tried not to collapse in the elevator.

  As soon as Rose was gone, Wren ran right over to Liam’s prone form to see him close-up, grinning as they looked up at Lisette and back down again, as their fingers signed their appreciation of just desserts, satisfaction of good triumphing over evil, and a desire for selfies.

  “I know, right?” Lisette let out a little squeal and clapped. “But no time, now’s our chance, tons to do! First thing, let’s tell Ms. Cassandra!” They joined hands again, then spun around in a perfectly synchronized, hopping dance. In an instant they vanished, far more abruptly and completely
than Regan ever did when he simply hid from view. Liam was alone in the room once again.

  ❈

  “He’s gone.” Jack looked up as soon as Rose entered the room. She’d been hoping to find him asleep—no such luck. But even worse, that strange, faraway look was back.

  “Who’s gone, sweetie?” Anxiety gnawed at the back of her mind and tightened around her heart like a band.

  “He went down into the fire. Now it’s gonna fall,” he said, and Rose barely kept her mouth from dropping open. She’d never heard this tone of voice from him before—quiet and intense. So sure, so definite. No child talked like that. Certainly not hers.

  “What are you talking about, baby? Tell Mama.” What was happening? She was almost afraid of the answer. Afraid her baby son knew more than she did, and then a cold hard weight dropped in her stomach, confirming it. Something was definitely coming, and it wasn’t good.

  “All gonna fall. All gonna fall down. We gotta get out.”

  “Get out? Out where?”

  “Out of the house.” He looked up at her and his small hands went to the sides of her face, making her look directly into his eyes. He sucked in a deep breath, and screamed. “Out! Out! We gotta get out of the house!”

  Rose didn’t hesitate. She scooped him up and, yelling for Lisette, Wren, Finn, and anyone else who could hear her, she ran from the room.

  ❈

  The enormous sewer pipe they’d been walking in just ended, like a hollow log that thrust out over the edge of a cliff. They hung in the middle of nothing, suspended by rusted cables and scaffolding and rock that by some miracle, hadn’t yet crumbled. The ground just dropped away into a cavern hollowed out by years of detonations and fire… and the fire was still here.

  It still burned. Here were the last remnants of the precious oil that made Parole a rich city. Here was their lake of fire. The one Zilch and Regan had made together, when they couldn’t keep one young boy from falling. It stretched out below them for miles, a molten ocean of glowing slag and sharp black outlines of rock wrapped up in darkness and flames burning too bright to look at straight-on, everything a jumble of green and amber afterimages.