The Second Rebel, page 42
“Then what… what do you need me for?” he asks.
“I need a weapon,” I say. “I need a way out.”
“The podships…”
“First I must deal with Aunt Marshae.”
Rian’s hand goes to the small, high-energy laser gun at his hip. The larger railgun rifle is kept in the armory and only issued during patrol hours, so the pistol will have to do. “That’s why you need the weapon?”
Ringer passes from one shadow to the next behind him, and I am reminded of the kitchen knife in my pocket beside the box containing the Mother’s neural implant. But we both know I cannot confront Aunt Marshae and her two armed guards with a knife.
“Yes,” I say at last. “I have to stop her from… from harming anyone else the way she did Eden.” And the hundreds—no, thousands of other girls.
Rian withdraws his gun and holds it at his side, debating. I bite my tongue, allowing him to consider all I have told him. But when he brings the gun up, it is not to offer it to me, but to point it directly at my face.
My breath leaves me in a rush. “Rian?”
Rian clears his throat. Does his best to appear big and in control with the gun between us. “First Sister, they’re looking for you, and I have to take you in. I won’t help you kill someone.”
Ringer! I cry. I reach for him in desperation, the way I have a hundred times before—when Eden blackmailed me, when the Mother revealed the truth of the neural implants on Ceres, when I attacked the guard at the brothel—but the dizziness that comes from his control never hits me.
Ringer, please! I beg, desperate that he save me, the gun pointed at my face so very real, but the black hole that is his presence never eclipses me.
Ringer?
He is gone from the shadows, gone from the room. What happened to his promises, the whispers that he would be there for me when I needed him? All broken.
I want to spit and curse at him. Damn him, for abandoning me when I need him. But as the rage from my core blooms and burns, that creature behind my ribs unlocks its cage. Stretches its limbs along mine. Settles into me through my blood and bone.
No, Ringer is not gone. His promise is not broken. I am Ringer, and Ringer is me, and I am both a Sister and a soldier. And I know exactly how to deal with a scared boy in this chapel where I have a thousand times before. I know exactly how to deal with Rian.
“First Sister?” he asks as I let tears fill my eyes. As I look at him, with all the hope and begging I can muster, a face meant to break hearts. You’re a wildfire, Astrid. And I am more than what I appear to be.
Rian hesitates. Are his hands shaking? No, the gun is steady, even if his eyes are not.
“I am sorry,” I tell him, and I mean it. Oh Goddess, I mean it. I do not even need to fake the sorrow that rises in my voice, because my fear of him has melted, leaving only pity.
I brought him into my bed because there is a hole in me, and maybe that hole formed when Hiro left, or maybe I always had it within me and it only became apparent then. But I called for him because, more than anything, regardless of who I hurt and the act itself, I wanted to be wanted.
And I thought I could use him again in this chapel, manipulate him into helping me. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and now he will have to pay for my mistake.
Finally he drops the gun. Holsters it. His hand finds handcuffs on his belt and withdraws those instead.
He does not understand that my apology is not for what I have done. It is for what I am about to do.
“Give me your hands,” he says at the exact same moment I pull the weapon from my pocket. My movements smooth, I lunge forward with the knife, over the cuffs in his raised hands, past his wide shoulders, and, refusing to make the same mistake I did at the brothel, plunge the blade into his neck. No trembling. No hesitation. The same surety in my body as when I pulled the trigger and shot the Mother.
His eyes jerk wide, but he does not move. Does not try to speak around the knife in his throat. Does not fight me as his body goes into shock. I pull the blade out, and it is only then that he shudders and falls to the floor. Dead.
The fire in me does not just burn him; it consumes.
I am sorry, I think once more, and Ringer smirks with my mouth. This was not how I wanted this to go.
Then I set to work stripping him of the things I need.
CHAPTER 39 LUCE
The Asters have sent us a video, sir, and trust me when I say you’re going to want to see this.
Message from High Commander Beron val Bellator to Souji val Akira
“Shhh, Luce. Don’t cry.”
Lito’s face appears over the edge of my bunk bed. Even in the dim golden glow of the nightlight, I can see the purple bruise that mars half his small face. It makes me cry harder.
“Shhh, shhh,” Lito whispers, stroking my hair. He’s only recently gotten tall enough to reach me on the top bunk without having to stand on his mattress. “You’ll get in trouble if they hear.”
I clutch my bunny to my chest, burying my face in its soft head in an attempt to stifle my sobs as the paper-thin walls shake around us. I don’t know what my parents are fighting about now—I never know—but I know that if we interrupt them, if we get between them, we become their targets, as evidenced by Lito’s face.
“Come on, Luce, let’s go to the sea cave.”
My sniffles slow, and I sit up in bed. “You mean it?” It’s the middle of the night, I think. We usually only go to the sea cave during the day.
“Yeah, come on,” Lito says. He waits until I start down the ladder before grabbing a few blankets off his bed.
“Can I bring Hopscotch?” I say, holding up my bunny.
“Of course. Do you want your pink blanket?”
“No.”
“Okay, these will do, then. Let’s go.”
A glass shatters somewhere in the apartment as Lito takes my hand and tugs me toward the closet. He doesn’t let me enter until he’s arranged a few things, pushing our few clothes to the back, spreading our blankets on the floor, forming the sea cave for us to sleep in.
“Okay, ready,” he says.
I bend down and enter on my hands and knees, Hopscotch the bunny tucked in the crook of my arm, imagining the cave entrance is small, too small for our parents to get in. I know I’ve reached the heart of the sea cave when I feel the blankets beneath my hands. Then Lito wraps another blanket around me to keep me warm.
“Can you see the stars, Luce?” he whispers.
“But we’re in the sea cave. We can’t see the stars.”
“We can. There’s a hole riiiight there. It leads all the way to the surface, and you can see the stars through it. See them?”
And as my eyes adjust to the calming blackness of the closet, I do see the stars, little pinpricks of white in the darkness. “Wow,” I say, setting Hopscotch on my lap so he can see too.
Something heavy thuds in another room, and I jump. “It’s just the sea,” Lito says quickly. “A whale jumping up and falling back into the ocean. Playing.”
“We can hear the sea?”
“Of course we can. We’re in the sea cave.” Lito’s hands reach for my face, fingers warm and comforting over my cheeks, before they cover my ears. As soon as his hands are in place, I can hear the soft rushing of the sea, the coming and going of the tide.
“Nothing can hurt you in the sea cave,” Lito whispers, and I nod sleepily along with him.
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”
* * *
THERE’S A RINGING in my ears, high-pitched and jarring. Everything else sounds muffled through layers of stone walls and cotton blankets.
The world around me is black. Not peaceful, but swallowing, devouring black.
No, not totally… There is a small place with pinpricks of white light like stars. An opening in the sea cave, something in my mind supplies.
My head aches. My chest is tight. I am sweating and yet shivering at the same time. I want to reach for my face, but I cannot find my hands. Do I even still have hands?
“Lito,” I say aloud. At least, I think I say it out loud. But when I try to repeat myself, my mouth fills with salty ocean water that dribbles down my lips and pools on the floor. I have to cough it out of my lungs if I want to speak, if I want to breathe—I’m going to choke on it all.
Something lands on my chest, two dead weights. My hands, I realize as I force them into movement. But beneath them, my chest cracks, and little flakes of skin and bone, like ashes or snow, fall up into the sky where the black hole swallows the pieces of me and grows.
That’s important, I think. I was naked because someone wanted to see me peel my skin off.
My hands move to my face, to my burning cheeks. Reach for my mouth to clear it so I can breathe, but find my hair instead. I seize it and pull it away, and it comes out in chunks. Hair the purple of a supernova falls soft as rain, up and up, and the black hole swells.
I want to scream. Am I coming together or falling apart? With another look, it can be both. For a star to be born, another must die. I must not be so different.
I no longer have a body. My chest has caved in, and inside of me there is no heart. Only a storm released, lightning flashing and thunder growling, and the black hole calls for it too—for whatever is left of me, my anguish and rage. I want so badly to let myself sink into it. To let the storm that beats me bloody and raw go, so I can disappear into the black hole—
But someone told me to hold on to the storm, so I do. The storm is the only thing I have left, and it is better than nothingness—even if it is dark, there are shades of purple and navy, clouds of the deepest charcoal gray, unlike the black hole. The storm is anger and hatred and violence, but it is life, and I let it batter me.
And when I think I can hold on no longer, when even the anger has faded and the storm grows quiet, Lito is there with his hands covering my ears, and I hear it, the roar of the sea, wild in the wake of my storm. But there is no question in me, no hesitation in what I do.
I throw myself into the ocean and sink down, down, down, away from the black hole and into the pain, the womb that birthed all humanity.
* * *
A SCREAM WAKES me.
I come to in an instant, and realize the noise came from my throat, ripped and tattered.
My eyes dart around the room, but everything is blurry and my head pounds with a headache, so I focus downward, on where the rest of me should be. Sure enough, there’s a body there, covered in a white robe. Two gray arms plugged with needles. Two gray legs battered with darker splotches like bruises. I rub at my eyes; something feels different about my vision.
“Lucinia,” someone says at my side, and I jerk my head up. I know this woman. I should know her. It takes me several seconds to recall her name.
“Ofiera,” I say at last. My voice is cracked, strained from a raw throat.
“Yes,” she says as if proud. “You’re alive. You’re okay.”
Those two things are not necessarily connected, and only one of them seems true to me. Being alive does not make me okay. I have so many questions and so little strength with which to ask them. Everything is washed in a terrible gray shroud. “What happened?”
She’s quiet as she considers, perhaps deciding how much to say, but before I can protest that she tell me everything, she begins. “You took the virus. You had some sort of seizure. We stabilized you as well as we could as the rest of you… changed.”
She must see the question in my eyes, the question I do not need to ask, because Ofiera reaches for something at the bedside—a mirror—then holds it just out of reach. “Hemlock and Castor thought it best not to show you until you felt better, but I argued that you would not rest until you had seen yourself. The change is… Well, it may disturb you. Are you sure you wish to see?”
I can barely nod.
She holds out a picture of someone for me to look at.
“Who is—” I look back to her, and the picture shifts with my movement.
It’s not a picture. That’s the mirror.
“Oh.” My eyes sting and burn, though the tears never come. My anger kept me alive, but at what cost?
I am a ruin.
My purple hair is gone, leaving my head bulbous-looking. My eyes are swollen and veined, likely from the crying. And my cheeks, once full of shimmering freckles, are now scarred with pockmarks. Everything I had changed at the geneassist has been stripped away—no, not stripped—attacked by the Genekey virus, and twisted into this new form.
I am hideous. More a twin to Hemlock than to the brother I love. And still my eyes ache as if I’ve spent too long staring into a bright light.
“Oh,” I say again. It is the only thing I can say as I drop the mirror to my lap and rub the heels of my hands against my eyes.
Ofiera takes the mirror from me, and I let her. I don’t think I want to look at myself again, not for a long, long time.
“Did it work?” I ask, my voice rough like I swallowed gravel.
Her face, that well-trained duelist mask, doesn’t even shift. She is gray with her illness, yet compared to me, she looks like a picture of health. “We haven’t heard anything from the Icarii yet. We gave them twenty-four hours after sending the video, and it’s only been twelve.”
So I’ve been lying here for twelve hours… It feels like it’s been only minutes. Or maybe a lifetime.
“You’ll be the first person to know when we receive word,” Ofiera assures me.
I lean back into the bed, too tired to even thank her. The walls are covered in gray plants, their bioluminescent glow a hazy white field. The mushrooms are dull, not like I remember them… slowly, a thought rises in me, a crack of fear that splits me in half.
“Ofiera,” I say, and she must hear the seriousness in my tone, because she straightens as if threatened by a knife. “What color is the lantern?” I gesture to the light at my bedside, so like the other lanterns lining hallways. It too has lost the vividness I remember.
“Red,” she says.
Not anymore. The crack widens into a chasm, and I tumble down into it. Fear becomes anguish as I realize what has happened.
“Thank you,” I say, and close my eyes on a gray world.
The world of paint splashed on canvas, of dreamed images brought to life, is gone. My gray limbs. Ofiera’s gray countenance. The gray plants grasping. This is the new world.
I can’t see color anymore.
* * *
OFIERA GENTLY WAKES me. “The Icarii have responded,” she says. “They want to talk.” She’s brought the gravchair for me. Despite her wound and how much shorter she is than me, she helps me into the chair, bracing me as I struggle with my trembling, weak limbs. Once I’m sitting, Ofiera shows me the simple controls, and we are off, the slightest touch of my hand guiding the chair along the stony Vesta hallways.
Everything is unfamiliar. My surroundings. The woman who comforts me. My legs, once strong from running, now waver like flags in the wind. I wish I understood what has happened to me with any sort of clarity, wish I could read my genome, that mysterious map, and see how one letter became another. But that wouldn’t make me feel any better, I know. The only thing that would is knowing that my sacrifice, this gray world I’m trapped in, was worth something.
We return to the room where I was changed. There’s no evidence of what happened to me here. I suppose they would have cleaned it, afterward. The familiar group has already gathered—the Aster Elders, Hemlock, Sorrel, and Castor—their eyes finding anywhere to be but on me.
As we cross the threshold, Sorrel, always attuned to his wife’s presence, almost knocks Castor over in his haste to reach us.
“You should have called for help, Ofiera,” Sorrel chides, but his tone is that of a worried lover, no heat behind it. “You shouldn’t be struggling with heavy things.”
I hardly seem like a heavy thing, I wish to complain. But that’s not true. Perhaps my body is a shell—light as air—but the pressure I feel is that of worlds, heavy on my shoulders. Pressing me down into my grave.
“What did,” I start, having to pause to take in a deep breath, “they say?”
Attention lands on me, then hastily flickers away. Only Hemlock holds my gaze. He is the only one who hasn’t changed from one world to the next. He was always a wash of gray, his eyes black and glassy like two pits of onyx, his skin lumpy and faded, his hair white like bone.
“They sent us a brief video stating that they’re willing to negotiate, and we’re preparing our response,” Hemlock says in his low, hissing voice. It is comforting, in its own way, perhaps because we are now two of a kind—one human, one Aster, both marred beyond recognition. Outsiders to our own people. “It’s thanks to you that they’re listening to us, Lucinia sol Lucius.”
Castor steps toward us, his shoulders squared with tension. His eyes bounce between Hemlock and me—jealously? Guiltily?—before landing on the ground. “The Icarii requested to see you, Lucinia.” Not Luce, never again Luce.
This is what I bought with my body. My health. My beauty. I remember our demands like they’re written on my skin. Now it’s time to see if the Icarii will avoid unnecessary bloodshed, if they’ll make peace with the Asters. If they’ll return my brother to my side, where he belongs.
They frame the shot as they did before, only now I am clothed. Sorrel stands on one side of me, Castor on the other. The Aster Elders lurk in the shadows. Hemlock stands near the camera, his compad in his hands. “There will be a five-second delay,” he says, and I wonder if it’s because of the thick stone surrounding us. We all know the Icarii are just outside Vesta, guns pointed in our direction.
“We’re beginning… now.” Hemlock nods to us when the recording begins.
“We are the Asters, and we speak with one voice.” Sorrel’s tone is just as steady as it was, though his face is far more somber. Perhaps he wants to look like he feels guilty for his part in my destruction.
