I work my hand like a pendulum as fast as I can, releasing the com so that if flips and tumbles, sinking into the vat of fish goo. “Yes!” I whisper.
“AH!”
I yank my arm out of the water, dragging the body of the red-jawed fish, its hooked teeth clamped to my forearm. I grab the ridge of its back fin and rip it away, slamming it back into the tank with a mighty splash. I slide the lid closed and jump from the console, gripping my arm.
The fish eyes me from the other side of the glass. A knowing, fishy glare.
“Sneer all you want!” I huff. “Damn fish!”
I look over the bite in the light of the tank. The spot oozes pus and blood, and I close my hand over it. I can’t drip. Can’t leave a trail.
I jog out of the command deck to where the girl waits with my candle. “I’m sorry, but I need some of this.” The sleeves of her flight suit are already torn, and I rip a strip of fabric to make into a bandage for my bite. When I try to take the candle back, her hand doesn’t open right away. “Give it to me,” I say, a sudden ache pounding inside my skull.
But the flame burnt down while I was gone, and her finger burned into the wax, bad enough to raise small welts across her knuckles.
I rip another piece of her uniform to bandage her finger. “I’m sorry.” My headache surges, and I grit my teeth to keep from groaning. I wonder if she can even feel pain. I squeeze her bandaged finger, and her cheek twinges.
Yes, she can feel pain. She could feel her finger scorching, but I told her to hold it. No doubt that sick Leland bastard exploits their inability to fight back. No doubt he enjoys making them suffer through their blankness.
“Take me to Leland,” I manage, pulling my hair out of my eyes as we descend the spiral staircase and further into the gloom.
My arm burns from where that freakin’ fish bit me, and my head buzzes heavily. The Touched girl leads me through the corridors of Stride until we come to a wide room strewn with old couches and pillows.
If it had color or life, it might resemble the Family Room.
I sneak in, drawn to the back corner where a window sheds the fog’s light over a huge striped mattress—and Leland’s sleeping form. I raise the candle a little higher, and its light reflects off the eyes of the two green girls.
They hunch at the far edge of the bed, holding on to each other. The smaller blonde gasps quietly, but the tall girl squeezes a hand over her lips to stop it. I wave at them, but they don’t move. The tall one shakes her head back and forth. She points to Leland and draws a finger over her throat. So they think that if they move, they’ll be killed. . . . They’re probably right.
I pull the dose rod out of my sock and creep toward Leland. His chest is bare, revealing more muscle than his brother, but like Johnny, they both exude a striking beauty that doesn’t match their darkness. Like their mother was a lovely angel, and their father was the Devil himself.
I want Leland to be worse than Johnny, but as I approach his sleeping form, I know they are more similar than different. Johnny manipulates people into obeying him and girls into sleeping with him, while Leland forces his will over the Touched who have become his slaves.
They are both a kind of rapist. Johnny is just better at hiding it.
I shake a sudden dizzy spell from my eyes and step so close to Leland that I’m standing over him. I turn the setting on the rod from green to black—the death dose—but as I lower it closer to his pale chest, the candle illuminates patches and patches of ugly scars.
They stripe his torso: a ragged, horrible chaos of long-term abuse.
My breath draws in fast. Who could have done this to him? Surely he didn’t do it to himself? My mind trips over all the horror stories about Johnny’s father that slip out when he’s in a drunken stupor. . . .
And I lower the dose rod. Somewhere behind me, one of the girls whimpers.
My hand shakes. I can’t leave him here to wake and stop us, but I can’t kill him either. I don’t want to be a killer. No matter what kind of monster he is. I switch the rod’s setting to green and click out the needle. I have to trust that if our plan works, Leland will be caught by the K-Force as soon as his ship leaves the Static Pass. I’ll let them judge him, although I’m pretty sure he won’t escape death for long.
I bring the syringe to Leland’s stomach and press the button. He jolts awake, snatching my wrist. One of the girls screams, and I twist and twist to get out of his icy touch. His eyes look black, but they droop until he drops back to the bed like an oily rag.
I turn back to the girls. “We have to go. He’s knocked out.”
The tall girl slips off the mattress, clutching her ragged clothes. “Go where? With you?! You’re Johnny’s Scarlet Siren!”
“Oh, shut up. You want to be rescued?” I hold my arms out. “I’m right here. But if you want to stay . . .”
The little girl gets off the bed. “Come on, Gen.” She sniffles and scrubs at her face. “I’m going with her. Anywhere is better than staying here.”
I cross the room to take her arm. “We have to hurry.”
The tall girl called Gen takes the smaller one from me. “Where are we going?”
“Back to Imreas.”
The Touched girl leads us through the shadowy paths of Stride until we reach the familiarity of the airlock. I bring out the glass plate and take the blonde girl’s wrist.
Gen stops me. “What are you doing? You’ll give her a shock if you try to take it off!”
“First of all,” I hold up the plate, “this was made from Johnny’s thumbprint by a Mec. And secondly, we’re in the Pass. These things are dead here.” I wave my own colorless bracelet in her face. “Just trust me.”
Gen turns her own bracelet around on her wrist and gives a stiff nod.
I press my thumb over the glass, waiting for the clink of her bracelet’s release. “You’ll have to be stowaways and get off this ship the first chance you get. It’ll be too hard for you to stay together, so I suggest that you split up.” I drop the blonde’s wristband, hearing it roll and then slip through a rust spot on the airlock floor. “Do you know the engine room?”
The girl looks from her wrist to her friend’s face. “Gen?”
“Answer her,” Gen says.
The small girl nods.
“Good. Go there and ask for help from the old man with the beard. He’ll be gruff, but tell him that Rain sent you and that you need a place to hide. He’ll help. He won’t like it, but he’ll help. Understand?”
She nods.
“Then go! Now!” The girl takes a few wary steps backward, and I almost shove her. Finally, she turns and runs through to Imreas’s airlock.
“I’ve got a splitting headache.” I start to fall over, and Gen grabs me. I blink to clear my eyes and use the glass plate to free her from her tag. “Try to sneak onto the first passenger deck. There’s a place called the Rainbow Bar. The bartender’s name is Lionel, and he’s got a storage room. . . .”
My mind fuzzes out of focus.
“And I should tell him that you sent me?” Gen concludes.
“Yeah. You might have to sleep with him or wait on him, but hey”—I say and then almost fall over, and she shoulders me up again—“we’ve done worse, right?”
I swear the ship is growing darker, and I shake the candle like that’ll make it give off more light.
“You’re about to pass out,” she says. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t know.” I manage to get the dose rod out of my sock and hold it up to her. “Can you put this on red and shoot me? I can’t see for some reason,” I slur. I should be terrified. I should be panicking, but all I want is to lie down. If I close my eyes, maybe the pain in my head will stop . . .
The shot jams through me like a knife, and I jerk back to the airlock and the tall girl with straight hair. I slip the rod back in my sock. “Thanks. Like I was saying, he has a storage room, and I’ve hidden some credits beneath a can on the lowest shelf. Use it to bribe someon
e to get both of you off this ship once we reach Edge space.”
She rubs her freed wrist. “Why are you helping us?”
“Because I’m not Johnny’s girl. Not really.”
She backs up toward the other airlock. “Sure you’re okay? What will you do?”
“You care now?” I press my aching temples and sigh. “I’m going back to him before he wakes and realizes that something’s wrong. If we’re lucky, Leland will stay under long after we’ve undocked from Stride.”
“I should thank you.” Her tall body draws a thin shadow, reminding me of Lo.
“Don’t thank me.” I touch Lo’s picture in the front of my shirt. “Just survive.”
The Touched girl takes me back to the room with the smoldering embers of the fire. I can see the outline of Johnny’s sleeping form, but I can’t go in.
I have one more task for this endless evening.
I lead the girl down the hallway until I find a small storage room. I shut the door behind us, remembering Lo in the storage room on the crew deck. She would tell me to do this, and I ache from wishing that she were here now to help me.
“Sit,” I command, and the girl obeys. I set the candle in the center of the small space and kneel before her, her eyes staring blankly. I could tell her to stay in this spot until she died. That would save me from having to do what I know I should do, but that would also mean dying of hunger and thirst. Dying through pain.
I take the rod out of my sock and turn the setting to black. “I’m sorry, but this is best for you.”
I hold the needle to her arm, but I can’t press it.
“Give me your hand.” I mold the rod in her fist, roll the ripped sleeve of her flight suit up and position the needle on her skin. Then I take a step back.
Press the button, I want to say, but I can’t.
I kneel before her again and hold the sides of her face. She’s cold, but she doesn’t shiver. Her deep, wide eyes are rimmed with exhausted red lines, but she doesn’t blink. I take the dose rod out of her hand and hold it to her neck. I should say something, but all my words are useless. If there’s anything left of this girl in her body, she needs to know that I’m not trying to hurt her. I’m trying to set her free.
Ben’s words come from the buried memory of where all this started.
“Dream of somewhere else.” I take a deep breath and inject her.
She dies within seconds, and nothing changes except for the rise and fall of her chest, her eyes as glassy in death as they were during her stolen existence.
CHAPTER
29
I am kicked awake.
“Rain.” Johnny’s voice beats into my head. “Why are you all wet?”
I open my eyes and sit up beside the still smoldering fire. My arms and shoulders quiver, and my clothes are soaked and stuck to me in patches. “I’m sweating.”
“No shit,” Johnny says. “You look sick. How did you get sick?”
I push clingy strands of hair off my face. The fish bite throbs, but I pull my sleeve over the bandage instead of looking. “Maybe—maybe there is something on this ship that I’ve never been exposed to.”
“Maybe.” He frowns and squeezes his temples between two fingers. “You don’t think those creatures are carrying some kind of plague, do you?” He looks over the shadows of the Touched crew members, and I swear I see him shudder. “I don’t know where my brother disappeared to, but I’ve got a smashing hangover. With or without him, I’m getting that shipment off Imreas so we don’t have to stay connected to this metal heap any longer.”
I get to my feet and grab Johnny’s arm to keep from tripping into the fire.
He shrugs me off, holding his sleeve out like it’s been infected. “I really don’t like sick people.” He snaps his fingers at a crew member who’s old enough to be his father. “Tell my brother that our business is done, and he can join me by the locks if he cares.”
Good. Maybe he won’t be expecting Leland to join him. Maybe we will have some luck after all. Maybe that drug hasn’t worn off, and I’ll never have to see that scarred creep again.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
He squeezes my arm. “You said, ‘that scarred creep.’ Did he touch you after I passed out?” I freeze. Can I really be so out of it that I don’t know when I’m speaking out loud? “Did you fuck him?”
“Damn, Johnny! No!”
His grip relaxes. “You better not have.”
I struggle to follow him through the chasms of the ship. Several times, I bang into a wall, making him give me dirty looks over the lighter in his hand.
A familiar crew member waits on the catwalk in Imreas beside a wavering line of candlelight. Johnny claps a hand on his shoulder. “Ah, Jeb, I could kiss you. Got them out and ready?”
“Yes, Captain,” Jeb says. He steps aside, and I look into a sea of ghost faces lining the catwalk. They’re locked together on a chain, and Jeb wastes no time in pushing them through the airlock toward Stride.
“You’re just going to set them loose in there?” I shake so hard that I have to grip the handrail.
“They’re bound. What harm could they do? Plus my brother enjoys it when they hide. He hunts them.” The candlelit catwalk swings beneath me, and I can’t tell if it’s my fever or the weight of the Touched marching by. So many faces.
A woman passes who could be my mother.
“Mom?” I whisper.
Johnny shoots me with his eyes. “I thought I might enjoy making you watch this, but you’re really out of it, aren’t you?”
I can’t respond. I see the two blonde girls, skipping hand in hand in the procession. But then I blink, and they are gone. But then, they were never there. Johnny dropped them out the airlock. . . . I squeeze my eyes and peer harder at the end of the crowd. Walker shuffles among the last of them, and I reach out to touch him, but my hands fall through the empty air.
Johnny punches me in the shoulder. “That was pathetic,” he says as the last of the Touched leave Imreas, and the airlock bangs shut. He faces the trio of crew members who handled the line of prisoners. “Get us undocked within the hour. As usual, your silence about this business is your paycheck. Break your silence and I sell you.”
He takes me by the back of the neck and hauls me to his quarters.
The screech of metal on metal and vibrating shudders announce our undocking from Stride. Johnny watches at the window while his brother’s ship coasts further away. “Bastard. Just like our father,” he says. “Selfish bastard. I’m always too happy to see him, and he’s always the same damn asshole.”
I collapse on the sheets while the ceiling swings left to right. “Being rocked to sleep,” I say through my fever. “Johnny, did your father do all those cuts on Leland? Looks like someone used him just to dull up a knife.”
“What?” Johnny steps over, glaring down through all his dark glory.
“So scary. Johnny is a devil.” I giggle.
He slaps me, and my eye socket bursts with pain. “You were with him! How else would you know about his scars?”
The candlelight adds a sudden harrowing depth to him, and my fear lets me focus through my aches and chills. “I didn’t! I swear!”
He hits me again, his hand coming away covered in my saliva. He wipes it off on the front of my shirt. “You’re a mess. Didn’t think I’d ever have to say this again, but I might have to summon the Mec to take a look at you. Then we’ll talk about what you did with my brother.”
“You can’t.” I can see white, hovering spots in the dim room. “Can’t summon him. Ben doesn’t have his thing on.”
“What?”
Even through my fever, I know the magnitude of my mistake. I push up on my elbows. “I’m hallucinating, I think. Give me a second.” I stumble into the bathroom where a candle has burnt down to the very last nub of its wick. The dim light throws a shadowy halo around my gaunt face in the mirror. I splash water on my cheeks and eyes. Then I take out the dose ro
d from my sock. I fumble to turn it to red and give myself a shot of adrenaline.
I’m blasted by my headache as my pulse begins to pound through me. Still, my vision clears and my brain shouts orders: Can’t rat out Ben. Can’t let Johnny know about the com.
Can’t be sick.
But I am sick. I peel my sleeve back and check the fish bite. The bandage I tore from the girl’s flight suit is stuck to the wound by a yellowish pus, and I run it under the water until Johnny bangs on the door.
I really must be hallucinating now because I think I see a tiny fish fall out of the faucet, dancing through the stream and down the drain. . . .
“Come out!” Johnny yells. “I’m taking you to medical before you spread some plague on this ship. Or worse—” His voice cuts out, and he bangs on the door even harder. The sound sends horrible gong-like vibrations through my skull.
“One second.” I refasten the bandage and fumble to get the dose rod in my pocket. He bangs again and rattles the door. I open it and push back my sweaty hair. “I’m feeling much better.”
“You look like a ghost, Rain. Your eyes are all shiny and . . . you’re from Earth City!” he jerks back like I’m contagious. “Are you going Touched?”
“No!” I pull at my sweaty clothes. “I told you, I’m just sick. Going Touched is very different.” The adrenaline makes me stomp in circles. “You know nothing about those people you buy and sell, do you?”
“That’s not my interest.” He watches me with raised eyebrows. “Leland is the one who finds them so fascinating. I’d rather push them off a cliff.”
The lights flick on.
Outside the window, the crimson fog sags behind us, and the engines begin to whirl and hum through the metal skeleton of Imreas. But I’m hanging on Johnny’s words. Push them off a cliff?
I cling to the edge of the bed as my first memory of Johnny overtakes me. His black-suited profile. Walker dangling over the edge of the pier, his small feet jerking in the air . . .
“That day on the pier . . . you said you were keeping him from jumping, but you were tossing him out of your way, weren’t you?”
The Color of Rain Page 23
