Last Song (Heinlein's Finches Book 3)

by Robin Banks

  They talk for a few minutes. Eve gets upset at first, but Quinn calms her down in no time. As soon as they finish talking Eve gets her coat and walks out even though her shift isn’t over. Her eyes are wet but her jaw is set. I think she’ll be alright. She’s got enough for a new start, and enough left to get back if she can’t manage. I made sure of that.

  Eve walks right past me without spotting me. A few minutes later Quinn does the same. She heads back to our ship, maybe to change into her street clothes, maybe to have a bit of a cry. She does that sometimes. I know it, ‘cause her eyes don’t hide it well at all. I hope she’ll feel good about this, though. She fucking should: she could be saving Eve’s life. She’s definitely unfucking it. I bet Asher will make her feel good about it, if she doesn’t on her own. He’s good like that.

  Watching her fail to see me is the best and the worst thing ever. It’ll be just like this when this is over, her going on about her life without thinking about me and my crap. It’ll be like I was never here in the first place. It’ll be good for her.

  It’s not a great feeling when the best gift you can give someone is your absence. It’s better than nothing, though. I’m no fucking good, but at least I can do good. That’s something.

  I peel myself off the wall and walk away from the main street. I haven’t got anywhere I want to go but I don’t want to be here. I walk around aimlessly for a while, the alleys getting smaller and dirtier, until I totally lose my bearings. I’ve lost track of time but I must have being walking for a while because I’m so hungry I’m starting to feel dizzy. I haven’t worked all my crap out of my system yet and I don’t want to head back, I don’t want to face her and the next installment of whatever the fuck this is, but I don’t want to pass out either. When I spot a bench on a corner, I sit myself down.

  I feel like crap. I’ve just done the best thing I could think of, and I still feel like crap. It’s like it doesn’t matter what I actually try to do: good or bad, it always turns out like shit, and I always get trounced in the process. The end of this trip and the end of this prophecy cannot come soon enough. I’m so fucking tired of it all.

  There’s no point in me being here, and I don’t mean just on this station, on this trip. There is no point to me. I can’t make myself happy, I can’t make anyone else happy, and it’s not that I don’t try: I just fuck up.

  I stay sitting down ‘cause I can’t stand up. I let the crap flow through me ‘cause I don’t have the energy to stop it right now. Anyway, I don’t care anymore. I’m not trying to achieve anything. I don’t think I ever will again. I give up on not giving up.

  It’s ironic but I should have seen it coming: I’m in the perfect frame of mind to find what I’ve been looking for all along, or rather for it to find me.

  18. Quinn

  When dinnertime comes and Luke isn’t back yet, I start to worry in earnest. I’ve been worrying all day, though I’m not sure that’s the right word for it. I feel his absence and it feels wrong, but I can’t tell what I am feeling or why. I could be feeling my own concern, because it’s unusual for him to be gone for this long. I could be sensing his discomfort; that happens with my guys and the kids, but it seems unlikely with someone I barely know and through his shields and mine. I could be upset because of how things went between us. I am not used to falling out with people and I am particularly not used to being at fault when it happens. This time I was definitely in the wrong. If I end up permanently losing him as a friend, or whatever he is, it’s entirely on me.

  There is an option I’m studiously ignoring: that I am upset simply because I miss him. I don’t want to miss him. Missing him would make no sense: what am I missing? The constant irritation he causes me? The endless bickering, the patchy making up, the uncomfortable truces? But I do miss him, or at the very least I resent his absence. Whatever it is, it’s gnawing at my insides, and its bite gets worse with every hour that passes without me seeing those blue eyes avoiding mine.

  I manage to be angry at him in short but intense bursts. I wouldn’t feel so bad if he was here, if he’d told me where he was going, if he hadn’t said what he said yesterday, if I hadn’t said what I said… And that forces me to be angry at myself, too, because I’ve been such an ass around him.

  What I really want is for him to turn up so I can stop thinking about him. If he were here I would forget all about him, I’m sure of it, but he isn’t, and his absence feels bigger with every passing moment.

  When Asher turns up after work, tired but happy, it only gets worse.

  “What do you mean Luke is not here? Isn’t he cooking?”

  “No.”

  “He’s never missed a meal.”

  “I know.”

  “Did he say he was going to be out?”

  “No.”

  “This is very strange.”

  Having my concern validated, and by Asher of all people, doesn’t make me feel any better. Alya and Raj are still off being official and there is no knowing when they’ll be back, so I rustle up some food for the two of us, though I’m not really in the mood to eat it. Our evening ‘home’ alone, which should be heavenly, turns into a wake. Every time I look at the time my heart sinks a little bit more.

  When the ship door opens, I find myself clutching at Asher’s hand. One set of steps coming towards us makes me hope that everything is ok. I’m just starting to rehearse a heated speech about inconsiderate assholes who go off without telling anyone and worrying everyone sick when Luke’s head pops through our doorway and I realize that nothing is ok.

  Something is seriously wrong with him. He’s holding on to the doorframe as if he couldn’t stand up on his own, he’s covered in a sheet of sweat but shivering, and his pupils keep pulsating, dilating and contracting rhythmically.

  “Asher? I need help. Now. There should be antidotes in the med kit.”

  “Antidotes to what?” I squeal. Luke ignores me completely.

  Asher gets up and races off to the bridge to get the kit while Luke lurches towards his cabin. When he stumbles I go to catch his arm, but he yelps and pulls back.

  “Don’t touch me! Too much… Just don’t.”

  He manages to get to his cabin and drops on his bed.

  “Quinn, you’ve gotta listen. This guy Devin should come looking for me tomorrow. If I can’t talk to him, he’ll talk to Asher. He thinks Asher is my brother Tom.”

  Asher rushes in with the med kit. “Tom?”

  “I couldn’t use your real name and it was the first name I could think of. The guy is a local dust dealer. Dunno what else he deals. You should be able to get some info from him. Maybe you’ll need to shake it out of him. Raj can do that.” He rolls up his sleeve. On his forearm there’s a square patch, like a plaster. The skin around it looks inflamed, red and swollen. “Tweezers and a box. Any box will do.”

  Asher hands them over. Luke seems to struggle to get his hands to coordinate, but he manages to peel the sticker off his arm.

  “Don’t touch this. There are tiny needles underneath it. Drug release system. Pretty good, too, if that’s your thing.”

  “Why the fuck was that on your arm?” I sputter.

  “When you’re trying to make friends with the local drug dealers and someone offers you a free sample you take it, ok? Snitches get stitches. Alya may be able to get fingerprints off that, or run tests, or do something, anyway, so don’t touch it. Got an antidote to dust in there?”

  Asher has been rummaging in the box all the while.

  “Here. You weren’t sure she had some and you still took that stuff?”

  “Alya plans for everything. If not, I could just enjoy the ride.”

  “How much of the stuff did you take?”

  “Dunno. Full dose, I guess. Nothing but the best for guests and potential business partners. It could be problematic: I have no tolerance for it.” His whole body seems to spasm. “Man, this is really not my thing. So not my thing.” He looks at the syringe Asher is handing over. “Intravenous? Are yo
u shitting me?”

  “Do you want me to do it?”

  “You’ll have to. I can’t tell where my fingers end.”

  He flinches when Asher ties a strap around his arm, but he manages to stay still for the needle. Halfway through the injection he looks away, catches me staring at him, and explodes.

  “Get the fuck out of here! This isn’t a fucking sideshow! Get out and stay out!”

  Asher mumbles something at him, but whatever it is doesn’t stop him looking at me like he doesn’t want to see me now and never wants to see me again. I stumble backwards out of his cabin until I feel the hallway wall behind me.

  When Asher pulls the needle out of his arm and releases the band, Luke wraps his arms around himself.

  “This is gonna suck.” He looks up at Asher. “Don’t let Alya send me to a med bay. They’ll treat me and then they’ll arrest me and send me to prison and if that happens I’ll kill myself. You tell her that, ok? If I can’t.”

  “It may not be a good idea.”

  “I don’t care. You ever been in a Fed institution? Promise me.”

  Asher shakes his head. “Alright.”

  Luke looks up at me again and suddenly I feel all of him: his feelings, his pain, and where they come from. Up until then, I’ve felt only a fraction of what he felt, and everything else I thought I knew about him was extrapolated from that. It never occurred to me that there can be a whole bunch of different ways people can get to the same place. It never occurred to me that all the shit he was pulling, all the ways in which I thought he was fucking up, were symptoms of the hurt he was carrying. He’s not a spoilt brat making a mess of everything because he doesn’t care or because he doesn’t know any better: he’s giving us his all, and I’ve been throwing it back at him as if it wasn’t good enough for me, as if he wasn’t good enough for me.

  He frowns at me. “No. You were alright. You were always alright.”

  I realize he’s in my head as I’m in his and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t shield away from this and I feel so small in front of him. He smiles a little, then he moans and slides sideways on his bed, his eyes clenched tight in pain, as I slide down to the floor.

  19. Luke

  When I open my eyes, the first thing I notice is how much everything hurts. I feel as if I’ve run too fast and too far: all my muscles are sore as fuck and my lungs are burning. The second thing I notice is that I’m not dead. I thought I was gonna die, and I didn’t. I’m sore and I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m alive. That’s something.

  The third thing I notice is Quinn sitting on the floor in the hallway right across my door. She’s leaning against the wall and she looks exhausted. She also looks happy and pissed off and relieved and desperate, though, so I don’t fucking know what’s going on, but I know she shouldn’t be there. She’s looking at me, too.

  My mouth tastes like blood, but it still works, kinda.

  “We must stop meeting like this.”

  She nods. “Have you considered passing out less often? That may help.”

  “I don’t plan these things.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. I’d worry about you otherwise.”

  “And now you don’t?”

  “Right now I don’t have the energy. I’m glad you’re up, though.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Three, four in the morning. I stopped checking.”

  “Why are you up?”

  “Raj gave Alya some pills to knock her out, so somebody needed to keep an eye on you. You were screaming too loudly for me to sleep, anyway.”

  “Fuck. I was screaming? You could have shut the door.”

  She tilts her head. “Yes. That was the problem. Not that you were hurting so much that you were screaming, but that people could hear you. You are something special, you know that? Anyway, only I could hear it. It was some kind of psi-projection.”

  “I can’t psi-project. I can’t psi-anything.”

  “Tell my migraine that.”

  I look at her properly. Her face looks all droopy and weird, like she can’t hold her own features up. Her eyes are the same, though. Maybe burning a bit hotter than normal.

  “I’m sorry I kept you up.”

  “Luke.” She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. “You were very, very unwell. Raj and Alya had a fight about taking you to a med bay. Will you shut the fuck up about spurious stuff?”

  “Ok. Sorry.”

  “Me too. Are you feeling ok?”

  I run a quick check. “Yeah. Tired. Sore.”

  “Join the club.”

  “Why the fuck are you out there?”

  “You ordered me specifically to stay out of your room. I wasn’t about to ignore that just because you were passed out.”

  “And you lecture me about spurious stuff? I’m fine now. Get to bed.”

  “I don’t want to wake Asher up.”

  “You can’t stay out there all night.”

  “I can if I want to.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Get in here.”

  “Your floor is as comfy as this one.”

  “Get into bed!” That comes out a bit sharp. Shit. “Ok. Look.” I swivel so I’m lying sideways on the bed, with half my legs dangling off it. “Plenty of room. I’m not contagious.”

  “And you’re ok with me coming in?”

  “I’m more ok with that than with you staying out there not getting any rest because of me.”

  She disentangles herself off the floor. Normally she’s so poised, so graceful, but now she seems stiff and awkward. I’m not sure how much of that is spending too long on a hard floor and how much is that she doesn’t want to be near me. I slide to the end of the bed anyway, just in case. It still seems to take her an eon to lie down, and it feels like she’s ready to bolt at no notice. That’s kinda insulting, but I don’t have it in me to worry about that right now. I can’t think of anything I can do to fix it, anyway.

  My thinking isn’t great, to be honest. All I can think of is that I didn’t die. I thought that was it, I thought I’d walked myself to my end, but I didn’t. I’m alive, and it feels like the best thing ever.

  I want to go and tell Alya that I love her. I want to say something to Raj, too, but I don’t know what. I want to move my body, I don’t care doing what, because I can. I want to do everything and see everything. I also want to stop hurting – the more awake I get, the more my body feels fucked – but there’s no way in hell I’m taking drugs for that now. I don’t want to blunt anything: I want to feel it all, and if it feels like shit that’s nothing compared to the fact that I’m still here to feel it.

  Quinn lets off a bit breath and seems to soften in the bed. I’d almost forgotten she was there.

  “Am I still projecting?”

  “No. I don’t know. I’m shielding and I can’t feel a thing.”

  “I still don’t get how I could have been projecting.”

  “Something in the drug, I guess. Alya ran a few tests, and it wasn’t straight dust. It doesn’t match the info we had, anyway. We don’t know how it would work in general, but for you it seemed to amplify whatever latent psi-bility you have.”

  “But only you could feel it?”

  “Right.”

  “So how do you know it wasn’t you all along?”

  She turns her head to glare at me. “I know how my brain works. I was shielding as tight as I could, because I know you don’t want me near you like that, and still I could not stop it. Your projection was so strong that I couldn’t block it. You still don’t think you should get that checked out?”

  “I told you: as soon as I get home I will.”

  “Ok, then.” She sighs and relaxes a bit more. “Alya lost it when she got here. Apparently you neglected to inform her of your little mission. She had some unkind words to say about it, about you, and about Gwen for suggesting it in the first place. Mostly she riffed about how obvious it was that sending you sniffing after drugs would result in you en
ding up taking some and about how nobody with any brains at all would ever contemplate it. Raj had to point out about a dozen times that you would have done everything you felt you could do without any help from Gwen before she stopped screaming. Then him and Asher had to stop her dragging you off to the nearest med bay, because you’d crossed the line between twitching and convulsing.”

  “Raj and Asher did?”

  “Asher had promised not to let you get taken. We actually take our word seriously.” She says that kinda sharp, as if I’d questioned it. “Raj pointed out to Alya that your word is your bond, too, and that if you said you’d kill yourself in prison then you’d find a way to. He thinks a lot of you.”

  I shrug. “He’s nice.”

  “No, he’s not,” she snarls. “Way I see it, he’s another fool in this increasingly unbearable show. Collectively and individually, your priorities are badly messed up. But he thinks a lot of you. He believes you’ll do whatever you put your mind to.”

  “Oh.” I guess that’s kinda true. I just mostly don’t put my mind to much, and most of the time when I do I fuck up, but I do get stubborn like that. I never thought it was a good thing, though.

  “So Alya went to run every test she could on that damn plaster thing, because she couldn’t get any rest while your condition wasn’t stable, and hoping it may reveal something that could help with your recovery.”

  That makes me feel bummed out. I thought she’d stay by me.

  Quinn turns to look at me again. “It was the only way she could help you right then. She needed to do something. You get that, right?”

  “I guess. I’d have done the same.”

  “Too right. You’re both fools. Anyway, there were too many prints on that thing, but she did get a precise composition of the drug. We don’t know yet whether that means anything or not for the purpose of the mission. She’s going to run a few more tests tomorrow. Today. Is there anything that woman can’t do?”

  “Tons of stuff. Cook. Play the violin. Take orders.”