This Shattered World

Her voice is flat, furious. “A rebel managed to sneak onto the base. Planted a bomb at Bravo Barracks, killed over thirty soldiers while they slept.” She leans in, eyes locked on mine. “While I was talking to you.”

The shock that goes through me is a physical thing, the adrenaline surge rushing down my arms until my hands tingle. “No.” The plastic of the oxygen mask swallows my voice. “Oh God, no. I didn’t know. You know I wouldn’t—”

She’s gazing down at me, Stone-faced Chase, absolutely unforgiving, soot and ashes streaking her face like war paint. For a moment I half expect her to pull out her gun and shoot me on the spot, the anguish in her face is so clear. Then she breathes out slowly, dropping her head, and I realize she does know.

“You have smoke inhalation and a concussion, but they won’t have had time to check beyond that,” she says, softer, duller. “Does anything else hurt?” She reaches out to run her hands down my arms, watching for a wince.

“I don’t think so.” I ache all over, and I just want to close my eyes and let the pain carry me away. It has to have been McBride, or one of his lackeys. Everything’s spinning out of control, and I don’t know how to move, let alone steady Avon’s course.

I manage to turn my head, scanning my surroundings. “I don’t think I should be in a room full of soldiers when these guys wake up,” I rasp. My shirt’s been cut away, and there are electrodes stuck to my chest. I can hear my heartbeat on the monitor beside my bed.

She shakes her head in a sharp movement, running her hand up my leg and patting along my side to check my ribs. Only a few days ago I was doing the same for her. Maybe we’ll never meet without one of us ending up in the hospital.

“Nobody here knows who you are,” she replies. “You were still in uniform.” Her jaw squares, and I know this is another tiny cut, another betrayal that’s scored a line across her heart.

“I have to get out of here.” I shove the mask aside so she can hear me better. “I have to try to stop this from getting worse.”

She reaches for a bottle beside my bed, angling the built-in straw so I can take a sip. My throat burns as I swallow. “Keep drinking this, it will heal your throat. As soon as you can move, I’ll help you get out, for whatever you can do out there.” She sets aside the bottle and reaches for an adhesive bandage from a rack above my head. As I watch, she starts wrapping it around my forearm, covering my genetag. My heart skips. What would I have said if someone tried to scan it?

She finishes smoothing the bandage down, expression grim and locked away, then straightens. “I have to go. Anybody wakes up, say you’re from Patron. A new boatload came in yesterday, nobody knows their faces yet.”

She turns to walk away, her purposeful stride reduced to a weary shuffle. Even locked in a cell, beaten and bloody and tied to a post in the ground, she never let the steel go from her spine; now her shoulders are bowed, her hands trembling before she eases them into her pockets. And I know what’s sweeping through her, stripping away her strength, because it’s sweeping through me, too.

We’ve lost. The ceasefire is over.

She’s there again when I wake, after a night spent choking down mouthfuls of the sweet, cloying gel that starts to heal my burned throat, and pretending to be asleep to avoid questions I can’t answer. Trying not to imagine Sean back home, making up some story about why I’m gone, covering for me and pacing, panicking about where I really am. I hope that’s the worst that’s happening. If this bombing was McBride’s opening salvo, then all-out war could be breaking loose out there in the swamps.

In her combat gear it’s impossible to think of her as anything other than a soldier, especially after staring down the barrel of her gun. But she’s pulled a hard plastic chair up to my bedside, and now she’s got her head pillowed on her arms, crossed on the edge of the bed. My eyes don’t sting anymore, and one of the meds they gave me has dimmed the pounding headache enough that she’s surrounded by only a faint aura of light.

From what little I can see, she’s washed her face, but the soot stains are still there around her hairline, and she hasn’t taken off the filthy combat suit yet. Which means the base is still worried that the bombing was the first stage of an assault. I push down the oxygen mask, taking an experimental breath. I can manage, if I don’t inhale too deeply. So close, she smells of sweat and ash and grief, and I want to lift my hand and reach out to her, ignoring the ache in my arm. I don’t, and a few moments later she seems to sense I’m awake, lifting her head.

She blinks at me once, and then comes alert faster than seems possible. She clears her throat. “He’s dead. The bomber. Died in the blast.”

I force myself to breathe in slowly. The air reeks of disinfectant, sharp on my tongue. My mind seizes on that fact, putting off learning what I don’t want to know. It could be anyone from our camp. I don’t want it to be anyone I know, not even the worst of them. “Was it—” My voice is still a rusty whisper.

“McBride?” Jubilee interrupts, saving me from speaking further. “No. There weren’t any usable fingerprints left, but the dental records say it’s a man called Davin Quinn. There aren’t any arrests on his record, not so much as a fine. He lived in town.”

She pauses to let me absorb the significance of that. In town. Not a rebel, not a soldier with the Fury. And I knew Davin Quinn, I know his daughter. He’s not even a sympathizer. He’s nothing to do with us.