Shattered: A Shade novella

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  I must get it out.

  A cramp comes over my hand, and I realise I’m still gripping the razor, so tightly it’s pinching the skin at the base of my finger.

  Yes. That will fix it.

  I’m not impulsive about the task. I finish my shave, then rinse and dry my face and the blade, savouring what I’m about to do, knowing I’ll feel better once it’s done. I couldn’t possibly feel worse.

  I search my bare arms and chest for the perfect spot, then decide this needs to stay hidden. So I remove my pyjama trousers and sit on the toilet lid, then position the razor blade against my thigh, where the thick, dark leg hair will cover the scar. But I’ll know it’s there, which is all that matters.

  The first small cut makes me gasp and shudder. I slice again, this time in a careful arc. Deep breaths help steady my hand and give it the control it requires.

  My heart beats faster. This is what I need. I can never write, speak, or scream what they did to me, but I can carve it on the one thing they didn’t break: my body.

  Two-thirds of the way through the 3, I notice I’ve formed a sort of Z, like my initial. A sign I’m doing the right thing. A sign we’ll always be one.

  I keep going, putting their mark on the outside where it belongs, pulling it from the inside where it’s killing me. A knock comes from somewhere, but my mind is singing a march of triumph melded with a symphony of mourning, so I don’t respond. I am Here and Now at last.

  The door swings open. ‘Oh. Sorry, I didn’t—’ Martin starts to retreat, then stops with the door half shut. I can see his face in the mirror as he freezes.

  He comes back in and quietly shuts the door behind him. ‘Put down the knife.’

  ‘It’s not a knife, it’s a ra—’

  ‘Put. It. Down.’

  ‘But I’m not finished.’ I’ve only just done the 3 and still need the A. Besides, my entire body is humming. Can’t he see it in my eyes? They’ve never felt so bright.

  Martin slowly raises his hands. ‘Just take a wee break? I need to talk to you about something, and that’s distracting.’

  Seems a reasonable request. ‘Awright.’ I drop the razor into the sink. ‘I should clean that.’

  ‘Got it.’ Martin snatches it up, calmly rinses it, then sets it back inside the cabinet. Then he retrieves a box of bandages and gauze. ‘You’re a fuckin’ mess, ye know.’

  ‘It’ll look cool once it’s healed.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’ He kneels beside me and rips the packaging off a square of gauze. ‘I won’t hurt you, I just need to …’ He presses the gauze against the cut. ‘There. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ His hair smells of cigarettes. ‘You’re still smoking?’

  He scoffs and presses harder. ‘Now’s really not the—’

  ‘Ow. Careful, don’t smear the three.’

  ‘I’m not smearing.’

  ‘You are, you’re—’ My voice catches as I see how much blood seeps into the gauze. Fibre by fibre, the white cotton drowns in red.

  God, it’s everywhere – streaming down the back of my knee, over my heel, pooling on the brown and green sandstone tiles. ‘Martin, wh-what did I—’

  ‘It’s awright, mate. It’s awright.’ He says this again and again as he staunches the flow, then cleans the wound. ‘Seems we’re always bleeding around each other, aye? First me on the treadmill, now this.’

  ‘But yours was an accident, while this was—’ I’m too overcome with shame to finish the sentence. ‘Please don’t tell Mum and Dad.’

  ‘Tell them what?’ he asks, tearing off a piece of bandage tape.

  ‘Thank you.’ I look away, to the array of cotton items on the sink. ‘I used to count the days with Q-Tips. When I was … in there. I’d save one every night when they dimmed the lights, keep it in my pillowcase.’

  Martin doesn’t reply right away, just tapes my bandage. When he finally says, ‘Clever of ye, mate,’ his voice is strained.

  We quietly clean my spilled blood off the floor and the sink – this room looks like the scene of a homicide – then I step back into the soft flannel trousers.

  ‘Now I’m glad you prefer unlocked doors,’ he says as he puts away the bandages and gauze. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to break this one down to save you.’

  If it were locked, he wouldn’t have known I needed saving. I wonder, would I have known in time to save myself?

  * * * *

  Back in my room, Martin closes the door, then takes the chair at the desk. ‘Talk to me about what happened in there.’

  I eye the door uneasily. ‘In the toilet?’

  ‘In that place where they held you.’

  I go to the door and check it’s unlocked. ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘Liar.’ His voice pitches up into a nonsense song. ‘Liar liar liar liar LI-ahhhh!’

  ‘Stop it.’

  He does it again, louder.

  ‘Shut it, you’ll wake Mum and Dad.’ I spread my arms across the door behind me, as if that will block the sound.

  ‘Then you’d better tell me, or I’ll keep going and add a dance. You’ve seen me dance. I’ve been certified world’s worst.’

  Good, a change in subject. ‘Not the world’s worst. Perhaps just the nation’s.’

  ‘I’m to start busking in subway stations with a sign says WILL STOP DANCING FOR FOOD.’

  My laughter makes me a wee bit dizzy, so I move back towards the bed. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to talk. But the people who held me, they said if I told anyone what happened, they’ll do the same to Aura.’

  ‘But couldn’t they do it to her whether you tell or not?’

  I sink onto the mattress, too exhausted for logic. ‘I can’t take the chance they’re not bluffing. I won’t.’

  ‘Okay.’ Martin watches me lift my throbbing leg up onto the bed. Then he says, ‘Where you were, did it have anything to do with you scaring away ghosts?’

  I freeze. ‘How do you know about—’ Then it hits me: an old fear has come to pass. ‘Finn told you.’

  He nods once. ‘My brother speaks so much rubbish, I was sure it was a lie. But then I started to wonder. After all, ye were born on the day of the Shift.’ He picks up the stack of fallen stars from my desk. ‘Is that why you’re like this?’

  ‘I think so.’ I don’t tell him about Aura’s corresponding power to help ghosts, or that we swap powers when we kiss.

  ‘Then when you didnae come home with yer ma and da this summer, I knew something was off. I never believed you were in prison.’ He sifts through the stars, as though looking for a specific one, then suddenly laughs. ‘I also know why you were aye so nice to Finn. He sorted out this secret of yours, didn’t he? When we were younger?’

  ‘He’s the one told me I had this power.’

  ‘And he blackmailed you? You bought him sweets and football shirts and all.’ Martin laughs again, so hard he starts to cough. ‘What a mad wee shit he was. Still is.’

  ‘Has he told anyone else?’

  ‘No one who believed him. As I said, he’s always speaking rubbish.’

  ‘Good. Nobody but Aura and the DMP know I’ve this power. I try to stay away from post-Shifters, and when I can’t avoid them, I make sure it’s in crowded places.’

  ‘What about yer da? Does he know?’

  ‘No.’ When I first returned home, I asked Dad careful questions to see what he knew of my captivity. Apparently the DMP never told MI-X about my peculiar nature, thus giving themselves an advantage.

  Part of me wants to tell MI-X, to level the playing field between the agencies. But one revelation has a way of leading to others. A wall of secrets has no superfluous bricks.

  ‘I promise I won’t tell,’ Martin says, ‘if you promise me you’ll never cut yourself again.’

  I frown at my leg, thinking of unfinished business. There’s still the A to come.

  ‘Zachary?’ he prompts, sounding like an impatient teacher.

  ‘I promise.’ I mean it too. ‘It won’t be easy.’
<
br />   ‘I know.’ Martin gets up and points to the other side of the bed. ‘Now move over, cos I’m not leaving you alone after what ye just tried.’

  I hesitate. This queen-sized bed is more than big enough for us both, and God knows it’d be a comfort not to sleep alone. But what if we accidentally touched and I panicked? I’d hate to hurt Martin like that.

  ‘I’m no giving you a choice,’ he says.

  ‘Awright, awright.’ I slide over, suppressing a hiss of pain.

  ‘You’ve a few minutes to prepare yersel mentally or whatever. I need a piss and to brush my teeth.’ He stops at the door. ‘Why don’t you ring Aura? It’s only, what, eleven there?’

  I look at the clock. ‘Ten thirty-six. She’d worry.’

  ‘Let her worry. She loves you.’

  Perhaps she’d stop loving me.

  While he’s gone, I lie here examining the pattern of stars on my ceiling. The Pleiades need to be closer to one another. It’s been bothering me for weeks, but I never remember during the day to fix it.

  Martin’s back in four minutes, in a pair of sleep trousers and a Django Django T-shirt. He leaves the door ajar and sets his phone on the bedside table, where he checks the notepad with my medication schedule. ‘Says here ye were due an hour ago for Klonopin.’ He pronounces it carefully. ‘It’s not checked off. What’s that for, anyway?’

  ‘Anxiety. Can you hand me it and the water? They’re all in the top drawer.’

  He gives me the glass, then opens the drawer and pulls out the pill bottles one by one, squinting at their labels. ‘Fuck’s sake, Zach. These all say not to take with alcohol. But you’ve ordered pints when we’re out.’

  ‘Only one each night. Keeps me calm.’ It also makes me feel far from my body, so I’ve never been tempted to have a second.

  ‘Right, these labels don’t say, “One Tennent’s is plenty.” They say “Do not fuckin’ consume alcohol.”’ He throws the Klonopin at my chest. ‘You’re cut off, mate.’

  ‘Yes, Mummy.’ I take out the pill and whip the bottle back at him, hitting him in the elbow.

  ‘Prick.’

  ‘Tyrant.’ I swallow the pill and take a few extra sips of water to minimise the dry mouth that always sets in overnight.

  He switches off the lamp, then gets into bed. I edge away, realising I can’t wrap the covers around me, now that I’m to share them. But rather than feeling unsettled, I feel, I dunno, secure. And sleepy.

  ‘Why do ye put up with me, Màrtainn?’ I drawl his Gaelic name, MARSH-teen, like when we were weans.

  ‘Cos you’re my best mate, ya numpty.’ He punches his pillow twice to fluff it, then flops down on his back. ‘And cos of Finn.’

  ‘Because I saved his life? You’re kind to me because you think you owe me?’

  ‘No, I’m kind to you cos I wasn’t kind to him. When he changed, I treated him like the dickhead he’d become. I didnae gie him a chance. And when they took him away, I was like, good riddance, even though it meant the end of his life as he knew it. Now I keep thinking, if only I’d been a better brother, perhaps things would’ve been different. He needed me, and I wasn’t there. Or rather, I was there, being pure awful.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He lets out a deep sigh. ‘So many times, Zach, so many times I wished you’d failed that day at the canal. I wished you’d let him go.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’ Under the covers, I run my thumbnail along the scar on my chest.

  ‘I know ye couldn’t. Even though it hurt you.’ Martin turns his head my way, the dim light from the hall catching his eyes. ‘Dinnae worry, mate. I’ll never let ye drown.’

  Chapter Eight

  Date: 19 October

  Weight: 67 kg

  Hours sleep in last week: 29

  Nightmares in last week: 3

  Flashbacks in last week: 2

  Panic attacks in last week: 2

  Days since 3A: 55

  Days until Aura: 62

  ‘How was Logan’s memorial last night?’ I ask Aura as soon as we sign on to our video chat, before I can forget. My memory’s slippery these days, but I’ve found ways to cope, thanks to my ever-present smart phone.

  I’ve even set up automatic I love you text messages to Aura every day at 8.06 a.m. her time, just before she begins school. The reminder app asks me to confirm before sending, so I do think of her at that moment. But it always comes as a brief surprise that she and I exist in the same world.

  ‘The memorial was beautiful,’ she says, ‘and so was the reception after. Logan’s older brother and sister played a song they wrote for him.’ She adjusts her screen, and now with better light I can see her eyes are a bit swollen.

  ‘Sad, though, aye?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Her gaze drops. I wish I could comfort her.

  ‘You miss him, don’t you?’

  ‘I miss you more.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  Aura brushes her thumb across her cheekbone, though there’s no tear I can see. ‘It’s probably hard for a pre-Shifter to understand, but it doesn’t feel to me like he died a year ago. It feels like he died on the summer solstice when he passed on. Dylan feels the same way.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I should feel jealous at the mention of Dylan, Logan’s younger brother and Aura’s junior prom date. But it seems a lifetime ago that she kissed him – or kissed me, for that matter. Anyway, I’m too tired and numb to feel the jagged green edge of jealousy, or even the orange-hot anger that drove me to assault Niall. Lately my head’s all grey inside (though on good days, I can manage ice-blue spikes of fear). ‘But I think I do understand, sort of. It wasn’t just your boyfriend you lost when Logan died. You lost your best friend.’

  Aura’s eyes soften. ‘Yeah. We met when we were six years old.’

  ‘I know. It’s the same age I met Martin. I can’t imagine losing him. Or rather, I can imagine it, and I do, all the time.’ Wait, does that make me sound paranoid? ‘What I mean is, when someone’s a part of your life for so many years, if they’re taken away, you might not be able to recognise your life at all.’

  Aura bites her lip and bows her head for a long moment. ‘That’s exactly it.’ She tucks her hair behind her ear, fidgeting with the end of the long, dark lock. Then she looks up at me. ‘It doesn’t bother you that I still, um, think about Logan?’

  Her um makes me translate ‘think about’ into ‘love’. But it doesn’t bother me. ‘I hope you always think about him. And if anything ever happened to me—’

  ‘Nothing will happen to you.’ She slaps her palm against her desk. ‘Ever again.’

  ‘But if it did, I hope you’d think about me, too, even after you’d found someone else.’

  ‘Zach, stop. Why do you always talk like this these days?’

  Do I? ‘Talk like what?’

  ‘All gloomy, like you can’t see a future for us. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ I push my sanity-score graph paper – with its disappointingly flat curve – farther from the monitor, though I know she can’t see it. ‘I’m fine.’

  She frowns. ‘How’s your dad, then?’

  ‘Also fine.’

  ‘Your mom?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘The weather?’

  ‘Same as usual. Dunno how I forgot it can rain so many days in a row. I mean, Scotland’s famous for it, especially the west. That’s how we make such brilliant whisky, didje know that? All the rain, it’s good for the barley.’ I stop when I see her mouth set into a tight line. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘So you can ramble on forever about the weather, but when I ask how you are, all I get is “fine”?’

  ‘Sorry.’ I rub the spot between my brows, where a headache is forming for the fifth night in a row. ‘Those are hard questions, with hard answers.’

  ‘I can take hard answers.’

  ‘Well, maybe I can’t take giving them,’ I snap.

  Her eyes grow shiny. ‘Zach, I love you. And I know—’

&n
bsp; ‘I love you too.’

  ‘—you’re hurting. But why can’t you talk to me about it? Are you afraid someone’ll overhear? I thought our chats were encrypted.’

  ‘It’s not that. Just please, let me explain.’ I shut my eyes to focus. ‘You told me once how Logan wrote you a song. He didn’t sing it for you as he was writing it. He didn’t show you all the shitty drafts of lyrics and crap attempts at chord progressions. He waited until it was finished. Cos it was a gift.’ I open my eyes and look straight into the camera. ‘I want to give you a gift too. Me, finished.’

  Her face turns crooked – from sympathy or disgust, I can’t tell. ‘Logan never played that song for me. He tried the night of his birthday, but he was too drunk to play guitar perfectly, so he made me wait. And then he died!’

  ‘Oh. Aura, I’m—”

  ‘So I don’t need you to be finished, you idiot,’ she whispers. ‘I just need you.’

  ‘You’ll have me, soon. Until then, there are things …’

  I cover my face. Why is this so hard? How can I make her see that her safety depends on my silence without jeopardising that very safety?

  I force myself to look into her wide-open eyes, at her chin set in fierceness. After all she risked – her freedom, her future, perhaps even her life – to release me from 3A, she’s ready to charge into battle again, with my secret as her crusader’s sword. She would fight to the death for me.

  ‘There are what things, Zach?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘Things you’ve got to trust me on for now. Do you believe in me enough to do that? Do you believe in us?’

  She appears to consider it, her lashes lowering as she scans my face on the screen. ‘I will always believe in us,’ she says finally. ‘I just wish you believed in us too.’

  The intercom on my bedside table beeps. My father’s voice crackles from the speaker. ‘Coming up.’

  I leap to hit the Speak button. ‘I’ll be right down. Wait for me this time, awright?’ He’s supposed to take the stairs only when someone is behind him (if walking up) or in front of him (if walking down).