The Prospero Chronicles by Fiona J.R. Titchenell & Matt Carter Book Tour and Giveaway :)
Splinters
The
Prospero Chronicles Book 1
by
Fiona J.R. Titchenell & Matt Carter
Genre:
YA Horror, SciFi
Under
normal circumstances, Ben and Mina would never have had reason to
speak to each other. He’s an easy-going people person with a
healthy skepticism about the paranormal; she’s a dangerously
obsessive monster-hunter with a crippling fear of betrayal. But the
small Northern California town of Prospero, with its rich history of
cryptid sightings, miracles, and mysterious disappearances, has no
normal circumstances to offer.
When
Ben’s missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, stumbles out of
Prospero’s surrounding woods and right into her own funeral, Ben
and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her.
Different as they are, their unlikely friendship may be the only
thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its
insidious invaders.
“A
snapping, crackling, popping homage to classic horror.” —Kirkus
Reviews.
“Whip-smart
dialogue... genuinely terrifying Splinters, the descriptions of which
will have fans of monster films utterly enthralled... A promising
series opener, this will satisfy those readers who like their scary
stories to be as clever as they are chilling." —KQG, the
Bulletin of The Center for Children's Books.
“The
stakes are high. The action is intense." —Washington
Independent Review of Books.
**only
99 cents!!**
1. The Funeral Crasher
Ben
I’d never been to a funeral without a
casket before. Then again, I’d never known a missing
person before. This trip was full of firsts. The funeral home had managed to fit
about eighty folding chairs into their cramped, stuffy parlor, and
they were all full of mourners and well-wishers. This wouldn’t have
been so bad if the funeral director’s promise of having the air
conditioning fixed in twenty minutes had actually been true. The
mid-summer heat had transformed the room into a pressure cooker that
smelled heavily of sweat and flowers. I couldn’t leave. I wanted
to, if only for a minute so I could clear my head, but I couldn’t
because I had to be there for my mother, and she had to be there for
the dead girl’s mother. Missing. Not dead. Missing. Where a casket would have been stood a
large yearbook picture of a pretty blonde girl wearing a nice,
not-too-fancy dress. Her smile was gorgeous and hopeful, unaware that
less than a year after the picture was taken it would be blown up and
surrounded by more flowers and teddy bears than you could count. Haley Perkins. We were friends, once. Not close
friends, not even good friends—when we were both six, we’d liked
each other well enough, and, since my mother was best friends in
college with her mother, we got used to playing together during my
mother’s infrequent trips to Prospero. It didn’t last long, as we
each soon entered the age where playing with the opposite sex was
considered gross, but we were nice enough to smile and say hello and
spend a few polite minutes together whenever our mothers would force
us to. I wasn’t that choked up about
her death (disappearance), but there was still something
surreal about actually knowing the person whose funeral you’re
attending. The program said that the services were
set to begin in ten minutes. Some of Haley’s friends and my mother
would deliver eulogies about how lovely and special a girl she was,
about how she had brightened all of their lives, and how the world
would be a much worse place for not having her in it. Standard stuff.
The kind of stuff that would break any audience into a chorus of
tears and moans of grief. Any normal audience at least. This
audience’s behavior was anything but normal. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty
of sadness to go around. About half the audience, mostly high
school-aged, probably Haley’s friends, were emotional and, if not
already crying, were on the verge of tears. The older members of the
audience, on the other hand, the parents, the select representatives
of the Town Council who had decided to attend… their reactions were
a bit off. While most of them put their best sad faces on, more than
anything else there seemed to be an air of fear, even frustration as
they occasionally whispered amongst themselves. Even stranger, I
could swear that a few of the older people looked happy, as if
this were a day of celebration instead of mourning. This is why I never really looked
forward to Mom’s trips to Prospero; it’s just oozing with small
town strange. Big city strange I can deal with. I expect it. In all
the noise and anonymity, I can avoid it.
Small town strange is another beast
entirely, that kind of strange where you know, you just know
that everybody’s watching you and judging your every move… I
don’t know how anyone could handle that for long without going
completely insane. Top it off with Prospero’s tourist-friendly
reputation for the bizarre….I needed some air. I tugged on my
mother’s sleeve. “Mom?” She looked at me, daubing her puffy
eyes with a tissue, “Yes, Ben?” “Can I go get some water?” She smiled, faintly, looking to the
woman wrapped in her arms, “Sure. Could you get a cup for me and
your Aunt Christine as well?” “Sure,” I said as I got up and
walked down the center aisle. Late arrivals milled around the back.
Among them was a gawky-looking girl in a long-sleeved black dress
that might have belonged to her grandmother, who looked like she had
only been told how dresses worked just in time for this memorial
service. Her curly red hair hung haphazardly around her face, a
striking contrast against her pale skin. A pair of thick,
black-framed glasses made her eyes look enormous. I couldn’t be sure, but she seemed to
be staring intently at me as I walked into the next room. I’d have
been unsettled even if the town itself hadn’t already put me on
edge. In the next parlor over, a buffet table
had been set out with a selection of hors d’oeuvres and bottles of
water in ice. I grabbed a few, cracked one open, and took a long,
grateful sip. When I turned to head back to the
service, the red-haired girl was standing in my way. I was startled,
almost dropping my bottle to the floor. Up close, I could see that
she stood barely five feet tall, and if it hadn’t been for the
intensity of her gaze, I could almost have tripped over her before
noticing she was there. She didn’t move. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she replied. An awkward
silence followed. Though I could already tell she was hardly the
world’s greatest conversationalist, given the day, I wanted to be
polite. “I’m Ben,” I said, holding out my
hand. She didn’t take it. She only said, “I
know.” Again, that unsettled feeling was
grabbing my stomach, but being too polite for my own good, I couldn’t
act on it. “Well, then you’ve got me at a disadvantage?” “Mina. Mina Todd,” she said
quickly, her eyes leaving me for a moment as if worried someone might
overhear her. Satisfied that she was clear, she smiled briefly. As
odd-looking as she was, she had a radiant smile. “Did you… did you know Haley well?”
I asked. Though this could have been a minefield, it did seem like
the safest conversation topic. “Better than she knew me,” Mina
said, shrugging. She did not elaborate. This was getting a little too weird for
my tastes. I could have doubled back into the parlor easily, but
considering the stifling heat, I decided on a different approach. I
reached for my pocket, pulled out my phone, and forced a surprised
look on my face. “My phone’s vibrating, I’ll be
right back.” “No it isn’t,” she said simply. “It’s very quiet,” I explained,
starting to turn away from her to make my escape. “No it isn’t,” she repeated. She
looked at me, worried, clearly wanting to say more. She was weird, I
understood that, but something really had her on edge. I quickened my pace. Thankfully, she
didn’t follow.
It was nice outside. Hot, but nice. A
faint breeze brought in the scent of the redwood trees that
surrounded Prospero. I realized then that, Prospero’s strangeness
aside, I could probably deal with summer in Northern California,
better than a lot of the places we’d lived at least. Better than
Virginia and Texas, and those three weeks we spent in Phoenix. That
quick escape was one of the few times I was glad my mom liked to move
around so much. I sighed, took another sip of water.
This trip was another excuse. I knew it. Mom wasn’t happy with her
job and she hated our landlord. When she said we were coming up here
to offer comfort to Aunt Christine and she didn’t know how long
we’d stay, I knew, I just knew that it would be her way of
quitting her job. Something would happen, she’d decide to stay
longer, and then, the way she had at least once every two years since
Dad died, she’d say it was time for a change. If it had been funny, I’d have
laughed. Instead, I kicked a stone across the funeral home’s
parking lot. It bounced harmlessly off the tire of a Jeep parked near
the exit. I watched it skip out into the street, wondering how far it
would go. Then I saw her. There was a girl walking down the
middle of the street, dirty and barefoot, wrapped in a tattered old
Army blanket. She looked like a zombie, unmindful of the cuts on her
feet, how little the blanket covered up her probably naked form, and
the car that was barreling down the road toward her. It was going too fast, and the driver
wouldn’t see her in time around the blind corner. I didn’t think; I just ran.
The car rounded the corner. The squealing of brakes filled the air. I collided with the girl, knocking her
off her feet. We fell into a ditch full of dry pine needles by the
side of the road. The car swerved, missed us by inches and ran into a
lamp post in front of the funeral home. Its hood crunched inward and
glass scattered everywhere. I don’t know what was louder; the
unending blare of its horn after the impact, or the sound of the
lamppost falling down and crunching another car in the parking lot. Someone screamed.
I looked down at the girl, rolling off
her when I realized, shamefacedly, that she had broken my fall. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant
to do that better. Are you all right?” She was coming out of her trance. The
vacant gaze was soon replaced by the look of a person coming out of a
deep slumber. Sitting up, I repeated, “Are you all
ri—” Then I saw her face. She’d lost some
weight, needed a shower and some shampoo, and was a little bloody,
but there was no denying it was her. “Haley?” I asked. Her eyes focused on me, shocked and
fearful. Letting out an animalistic scream of grief and fear, she
wrapped her arms powerfully around me and wept. Comforting crying
girls had never been one of my strong suits, let alone beautiful
girls who’d been missing for two months and declared legally dead
and then showed up naked outside their own memorial services. I like
to think I did my best as she hung on to me. People from the service had started
filing outside, checking out the accident. Some were already calling
911, which gave me one less thing to do, thankfully. “Can you walk?” I asked, getting
only loud sobs in response. I took that as a no. Carefully, I cradled Haley in my arms
and picked her up, making sure the blanket covered her. She was so
light. Too light. As quickly as I could, I made my way to the
accident site and the crowd that had gathered around it. “We need help here!” I called. With a car accident to look at, they
noticed us slowly, but when they did, we were swarmed. There were all
the reactions you’d expect on an occasion like this. Shock. Excitement. Elation. I set her down, and though she regained her
footing for a moment, she soon sat down on the curb, holding the
blanket around her protectively as people hugged her, questioned her,
or just stood around crying. People called for her mother, and soon
she came running out with my mom in tow. Aunt Christine screamed in surprise,
tears of joy running down her cheeks as she wrapped her arms around
Haley and me. She babbled incoherently as she kissed first Haley,
then me on the cheek, and though I was soon pulled aside by the crowd
for congratulations from a couple dozen strangers, I did catch her
saying the words “Thank you” and “hero.” Within minutes there was a police car
parked in front of the funeral home and, five minutes after that, an
ambulance to take Haley and the driver to the nearby medical center.
By then I’d had my hand shaken and my back pounded so many times I
was thinking of asking for a ride over there with them. It was right around the time they
started to load Haley into the back of the ambulance that I felt the
insistent poking on the back of my shoulder. I turned around,
expecting another well-wisher or congratulatory handshake. Instead, I got Mina Todd. She looked at
me, almost frantic, as she wrote furiously on her funeral program
with a marker and thrust it into my hands. “We can’t talk here. It’s not
safe. Just… call me, okay?” Before I could ask what she meant, she
darted off into the crowd and disappeared. I looked back to Haley as
she was loaded into the ambulance. She smiled at me, grateful, and
for a moment, it almost looked like she said “Thank you.” I was a hero. A hero. I gotta
say, it felt pretty good. They wouldn’t call me a hero for much
longer, not the guy who just saw her wandering in the street and
decided to help, but I was going to enjoy it while they did. It was almost an afterthought when I
finally looked at the message Mina had scrawled on the back of her
funeral program. Beneath her phone number, in large block letters,
she had printed three simple words.
THAT ISN’T HALEY
Shards
The
Prospero Chronicles Book 2
When
autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben hopes the normality of
the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s paranormal
horrors. Mina knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no
normality to be had in Prospero, but even she can’t prepare for
what the coming year holds.
On
top of the vivid hallucinations that have plagued Mina since the
attack on the Warehouse, and the brewing Splinter civil war that
threatens all of humanity, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben,
Mina, and their expanding Network face a vicious campaign to destroy
their friendship, and a mysterious assassin picking off human rebels
– an assassin with powers like no Splinter they’ve fought
before.
Ben
and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious old man hiding in the
woods outside of town; a living legend who may be able to teach them
how to fight this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming
he doesn’t kill the pair of them himself.
“Titchenell
and Carter hold nothing back in this solid sequel that thrills and
expands on its predecessor. Aided by swift writing, relatable
characters and unexpected scares, Shards is a chill-inducing
delight.” —David Powers King, co-author of Woven.
“Maintaining
the same level of popcorn-munching fun, Titchenell and Carter are
taking The Prospero Chronicles in a promising direction.” —Joe
Dell'Erb, Washington Independent Review of Books.
1. Psychological Warfare
Mina
Marian Kelly died in a one-car
accident near her home in Turtle Lake, Montana, on August twentieth,
at the age of forty-two. Marian is predeceased by her
parents, Rand and Millicent “Millie” Kelly, and her brother,
Christopher. Marian was born in Prospero,
California, and studied Psychology at the University of California,
San Francisco. She held black belts in multiple martial arts and was
an accomplished member of the Turtle Lake Hunting Club.
I skipped the details of Marian’s
perfunctory funeral service, put the newspaper clipping back in the
plain, unstamped envelope it had arrived in, and filed it out of
sight; not that this did anything to clear the smudged print from my
vision. Alone, it was unsettling. In a stack of six other recent
obituaries of other Splinter hunters, in six other anonymous
envelopes with my name stamped on the front, it sent a very clear
message. I’m no stranger to death threats. At
the time of Marian’s death, it had been less than a month since the
Splinter posing as my father told me to my face that if Ben or I
fought back again, if we even tried to run, the humans would be wiped
out of my infested little town of Prospero completely. I’d fact-checked each obituary as it
came in. Every one of the hunters had died under
circumstances that looked very much like suicide. Most of the
obituaries didn’t say so, exactly, but after the few that did,
omissions of the cause of death and euphemisms like “one-car
accident” and “chemical overdose” were easy enough to decipher.
Sometimes, when the deaths had been a little more bizarre or had
occurred on slow news days, there were more details to be found when
I looked up the rest of the news sources in the area. These weren’t suicidal people. They
weren’t quitters. Wondering how someone could possibly have made it
appear as if Drake Tymon had slit his wrists and throat alone in an
industrial freezer that was later found barricaded from the inside
was filling my head quite effectively with distractingly disturbing
scenarios. But the thing bothering me most about
the obituaries was the fact that all seven of their subjects were
currently loitering around my bedroom. Sometimes, if I stared directly at them
for long enough, they seemed to remember that they were supposed to
be dead and vanish accordingly, albeit temporarily. Otherwise I could
see them, silently and blankly watching me work, as clearly as I
could see my bookshelves, my bed, and the stark beige walls and end
tables that, until recently, had held my very large and very useless
anti-Splinter amulet collection. Nightmares are no more new to me than
death threats. That’s not what these were. A hunter would die and
join the rest of the hallucinations in my room the day after the
obituary arrived, and then another one would die and join him without
fail. If things carried on this way, my room was going to become
unmanageably crowded quite soon. It wasn’t even as if I were going to
miss the hunters. A few of them, like Drake, I’d known
pretty well years ago, but I’d stopped assuming they were still
alive—never mind still human—long before they’d turned up dead.
Others, like Marian, I only knew by reputation in the first place. Not knowing them well only made it
stranger that they were here, after everything I’d lived through
and lost without having suffered from any sensory distortions before. Ready? The text scrolled across
my phone’s screen after Ben’s name. Almost, I texted back. I wasn’t looking forward to
conducting the upcoming meeting for my entire Network, a roomful of
people who had nothing in common other than their knowledge of
Splinters and their confidence in my judgment and clarity of
perception. Ben had insisted, though. A lot had changed, and people
needed to be brought up to speed. Billy was gone, lost to the Splinters,
if we had ever even had him. Whatever had been passing for my
absentminded ally had been manipulating us to breach the peace, such
as it was, for no one knew how long. Ben hadn’t even met some of the
others yet. Our discovery of portals to other parts of the world in
the Splinter Warehouse had put an end to the Effectively Certain
Non-Splinters list, or had reduced it to a uselessly small number of
people. The only people in town I could really be effectively certain
of anymore were myself and Haley, since we’d both recently been
ripped directly out of replication pods. That wasn’t enough to work
with, so I’d had to downgrade my entire Network to Extremely
Probable Non-Splinters and start training myself to live with that,
because the alternative was not getting anything done at all. Ben was stubbornly under the impression
that Haley’s presence on the list alone qualified her as a Network
member. I disagreed. Most important, we now knew more terms
of the Splinter-Human treaty and exactly how precarious our position
was. Two human-on-humanoid Splinter kills by the same human would
mean all-out war, and Ben and I each had one strike already. And no
matter how careful we were, Billy and any like-minded Splinters would
find a way to incite that war sooner or later. We were counting on an
unforeseen miracle to make the human side a significant power before
then. As someone who doesn’t believe in
miracles, this wasn’t news I would enjoy delivering, even on my
best day. I finished up some new touches on the
map over my desk—the new world map I’d posted under the map of
Prospero to track probable Splinter activity at the other portals—and
blinked hard, hoping the illusion of the hunters would fade out at
the usual time. Their faces were already getting blurry around the
edges, right on schedule. That was something, at least. I was
going to be able to function for another day. If my Network, the few
humans invested in finding or building that miracle, found out what
was happening to me, it would probably be the end of what hope we
had. They would give up on the one thing they all agreed on, my
reliability, and maybe they’d be right to do it. I’d probably do
the same in their position. But even if I couldn’t see a
difference between the walls and furniture that constituted my room
and the dead people that my brain had decided to superimpose in front
of them, at least I still knew the difference. I still knew
what was rational and what wasn’t. Before the first hunter had
appeared, the evidence of my senses had been the basis for almost
everything I thought and did. It was going to be difficult to get
used their new fallibility, just like the fallibility of the ECNS
list. But as long as the inner workings of my mind were in working
order, it was worth at least trying to do my job. Or that’s what I told myself, for the
thirty-seventh time, when I recognized Ben’s knock on the front
door above.
Slivers
The
Prospero Chronicles Book 3
Ben
Growing
up is hard, and growing up in Prospero is even harder, but I think we
manage. I mean, yeah, my friends and I spend more of our time
fighting a race of shapeshifting aliens than we do hanging out, but
we have our fun. We go to parties, help each other with our classes,
maybe even fall in love…
I’ve
no illusions that we live ordinary lives, but they’re our lives,
and I’m going to make sure we make the most of them whether the
Splinters want us to or not.
Mina
The
truce is temporary. We will not humor the Splinters forever. It's
only until the Slivers can be stopped, until the army of Shards being
planted among our classmates can be disassembled, until we get our
hands on the thing I'd almost given up believing in.
The
humanity test.
For
the chance to know, once and for all, who can be trusted, some
dealings with monsters must be excusable. Inevitable. Just like this
feeling between Ben and me.
And
that has to be temporary too.
1. Sabotage
Ben
At the time, my instincts told me that
jumping onto the hood of a moving SUV was a brilliant idea. After half a second of trying to find
something to hold onto, I told myself I’d reconsider my instincts
when I got out of this. If I got out of this. A voice in my ear—I hadn’t lost my
Bluetooth after all. Haley’s voice, by the angry sound of it. “Ben, what the hell are you doing?” “I have no idea!” I yelled back,
finally grabbing the roof rack with both hands and holding on for
dear life, doing my best to block the windshield. The driver
accelerated down the empty suburban street, jerking the wheel back
and forth, trying to shake me off. I knew behind the tinted glass of
this anonymous, plateless SUV were the gray faces of Slivers. Today
they were supposed to be kidnapping one of Prospero High School’s
nicest teachers from her home, and we were going to stop them. It
wasn’t exactly a piece of cake, but we’d done it before and
should’ve been able to do it again.
I looked to the sidewalks, trying to
spot any other members of the Network. There was a heavy blow against the
windshield near my chest. The tinted glass spiderwebbed beneath me.
The Slivers were trying to break through. Not for the first time, I cursed The
Owl. “Everybody close on the house!
They’re still on the move!” Courtney called over the party line. “Where’s that spike strip?” Haley
asked. “About twenty feet behind Ben before
he decided to go Shatner on us,” Greg answered. The spiderweb of glass expanded as the
Sliver continued to force its way through. The next voice was impossibly calm. “If
we can stop this vehicle, there’s every chance we can capture
multiple Slivers at once in addition to preventing Ms.
Craven’s abduction. Ben, do you think you can slow them down?” Mina Todd. She always asked for the impossible so
reasonably. The windshield broke open in front of
me, safety glass exploding outward as a long, muscular arm with a
seven-fingered, clawed hand burst through. It raked back and forth,
opening up a large gash in the glass that allowed me to see the three
Slivers inside. They were of slight frame with gray, hairless heads
and bulging black eyes, and they had begun sprouting extra limbs and
tentacles to better mangle me. “I’ll try,” I said, diving into
the jagged hole where the windshield used to be. Their brief, startled pause before
attacking was all I needed. I reached into my pocket and pulled out
one of the cheap stun guns Mina loved to make out of disposable
cameras and jammed it into the driver’s chest. The creature
shuddered violently, jerking the wheel to the side and stomping on
the gas reflexively. I forced the gearshift into neutral and
pulled on the parking brake. The SUV lurched to a violent stop in the
middle of the street. So far so good. Less good was the sound of snapping
wood that came from the passenger seat as its occupant’s body began
to shift. Its rib cage broke open into a giant, vertical mouth full
of jagged teeth and swirling tentacles. The tentacles lashed out at
me, wrapping around my arms and neck, and squeezed. The Sliver in the
backseat joined in, grabbing the leg I tried to anchor myself with
against the dashboard and forcing me closer to that terrible maw. The passenger door flew open. The
Sliver let out a howl of pain as Julie buried a large meat hook in
its back and began pulling it from the car. Courtney wrapped her
hands around Julie’s on the hook, throwing her track team muscles
into the effort and hardly wincing when the gelatinous Splinter blood
began to soil her neatly pressed blouse. The tentacles released me,
and soon enough the two girls wrestled the Sliver from the vehicle
and tased it. One down. The driver’s mutated arm reached
across my chest and pulled the door shut. It looked deep into my eyes
with those empty, black orbs. Its narrow mouth curled into the
faintest of smiles as it held me pinned to the seat with that
monstrous arm. Though its face was formless, its flesh waxy, I
couldn’t help but feel something familiar in that smile and those
soulless eyes. “Soon,” it whispered to me in its
chittering, popping voice. A new arm burst from its shoulder,
splitting into two insectoid hands that allowed it to shift gears and
disengage the parking break simultaneously. I watched helplessly as
Greg and Kevin finally caught up to us with the jury-rigged spike
strip we’d built for just this occasion, tossing it uselessly to
the ground just as the driver swerved out of the way.
I didn’t know if the Slivers were
still going to try for Ms. Craven or if they would content themselves
with taking me instead. Would they try to drag me to their Warehouse
(assuming the Slivers had a Warehouse) and replace me, or would they
kill me as soon as they found a nice, quiet place to pull over? They weren’t slowing down. If
anything, they seemed to be speeding up. They swerved down the
street, aiming for the side of an old duplex. Ms. Craven’s duplex. I took advantage of the driver’s
focus to pull one arm free, fasten a seatbelt around me, and brace
myself. The SUV slammed through the duplex’s
wall with a crushing impact that knocked the wind out of me and
whipped my neck forward. The unsecured driver flew through the jagged
remnants of the windshield and landed in what used to be Ms. Craven’s
living room. The passenger from the backseat climbed over me with
spindly spider’s legs, following the driver out the windshield. A woman screamed inside. Slowly, painfully, I undid my seatbelt
and crawled through the windshield, landing on the floor in a dazed
heap. Somehow I stumbled to my feet and
pulled the mini flamethrower from my back. It wasn’t much—just a
kitchen lighter duct-taped to one of those recalled aerosol fire
extinguishers that Mina had stocked up on, but it did the job.
Flicking the lighter on, I lifted it high. The driver had Ms. Craven wrapped in a
set of tentacles and interlocking claws, lifting her off the ground.
Ms. Craven looked at me fearfully, trying to cry out through the
tentacle lashed across her mouth. The flamethrower wouldn’t do much
good at this range, standing as much a chance of burning Ms. Craven.
I was going to have to wait for backup. “Let her go,” I said shakily. All
of my experiences with Slivers so far had proved that they loved to
talk. I only had to stall them long enough for Mina and the rest to
get here. The driver looked to the passenger,
exchanging a low series of pops and clicks. The passenger nodded,
calmly raising one of its three arms and pointing the hand at me,
flat. Just like the driver, a small, frightening smile crossed its
face. I lost all feeling beneath my waist, my
legs giving out beneath me. Then I could feel again—too well. It
felt like every nerve in my body had burst into flames. Violent waves
of nausea hit me, and my muscles no longer seemed to be my own.
Two realizations hit me at once. First: they had a Shard we hadn’t
documented yet.
Second: this Shard had remote control
of human bodies. There was shouting, and then Kevin and
Greg slid through the massive hole in the wall, brandishing their
flamethrowers and Tasers. Less than a second later, a sliding glass
door opened in the next room, and Mina and Haley ran in to join us. Only Aldo, Julie, and Courtney had yet
to catch up. The two Slivers looked at each other,
then at us. They could have taken me easily, maybe even two of us.
But five of us, well-armed as we were—that gave them a moment of
pause. The driver dropped Ms. Craven roughly to the floor. Both of
the Slivers raised their arms, and the driver looked at me, curling
its lips into that faint, unpleasant smile. “Soon,” it said again. Long spikes of bone erupted from each
of their chests and backs. They both began to laugh—a raspy,
choking sound—as the base of each spike began to pulsate. “DUCK!” Mina blurted, falling to
the floor. Everyone dropped, dozens of bony spikes
narrowly missing us as they erupted from the Slivers’ bodies,
lodging in the walls and shattering windows. By the time we regained our feet, the
Slivers were gone. “Is everybody all right?” Mina
asked. There were murmurs of assent. Ms.
Craven was on the floor, sobbing.
Finding out about Splinters is never
easy for people to deal with under the best of circumstances, much
less while being kidnapped by the extreme anti-human cult of
Splinters that we’d taken to calling “Slivers” last fall. Not that getting kidnapped by regular,
garden-variety Splinters was all that much better. I was confident that Ms. Craven would
come out of her shock soon—she’d always struck me as pretty
tough. Once this wore off, we’d be able to tell her the truth.
Maybe even make her a part of the team.
Assuming, of course, she was really
human. Haley examined my scratches and
scrapes. Content that I must have been okay, she smiled and threw her
arms around my neck, hugging me close. I don’t know what was more
uncomfortable, Haley’s weight against my aching ribs or the look of
annoyance on Mina’s face. “I’m fine,” I assured Haley,
pulling away, “though that Shard they have sure did a number on
me.” “One of the ones The Owl showed you?”
Haley asked. “No, this one’s new,” I said. “Dammit, I hate Shards,” Greg said,
shuddering. I didn’t blame him; the last time we’d gone up
against a Shard, it had made him feel a swarm of spiders crawling
beneath his skin. “Tell me about it,” I said.
“Hey, guys?” Aldo said over the
group line. “Did you secure the other Sliver?”
Mina asked.
“Yeah, we got her. No problems there.
What about yours?” Aldo asked. “They’ve retreated. They haven’t
doubled back your way?” Mina asked. “No, we’re clear,” Aldo said.
There was something held back in his voice I didn’t like. “What’s wrong, Aldo?” I asked. “Uh, I think you need to see this one
for yourselves.” “We’re on our way,” Mina said.
“Haley, Greg, keep an eye on Ms. Craven.” “I got some stuff that might calm her
down,” Greg said, patting a pocket on his old army jacket. “Don’t,” I said. Greg shrugged. “More for me then.” I followed Kevin and Mina out the front
door. By force of habit, I looked up and down the street, hoping by
some miracle that we hadn’t been spotted—or heard, for that
matter. It was early Sunday morning, so the streets were mostly
deserted. Typical abduction timing. The cops would be here
eventually—a vehicle crashed through the side of a house has a way
of summoning them sooner or later—but given the Prospero Police
Department’s closeness with the main Splinter Council, this would
all no doubt be hushed up pretty quickly. “You’re gonna have to spend some
quality time with Mina’s first-aid kit, brother,” Kevin observed. “I’ve looked worse,” I said. “You’ve looked better, too,” Mina
interjected coldly. “What’d I do?” I complained. “You nearly ruined the operation.
This didn’t go half as smoothly as our other interceptions,” Mina
shot back. I didn’t have a good defense for
that. Ever since she’d started receiving those messages from the
Owl, giving us the Slivers’ plans for abductions, we’d had a
pretty good (though not perfect) track record of intercepting and
stopping the Slivers before they could take their intended targets.
Over the previous month and a half, we had managed to save the
mayor’s son, Sheriff Diaz’s wife, and the head of the PTA from
being taken without their ever knowing anything was going on. Things
could have gone better this time, I knew that, but they also could
have gone a lot worse. “I didn’t have a choice. They know
what we’ve been doing, and they’re being more careful. I did what
I had to do,” I said. “You could’ve been killed.” “But I wasn’t!” Kevin squeezed his way between us and
put an arm around each of our shoulders. “Let us not forget, my friends, that
we did stop them from replacing Ms. Craven. It may have been
sloppy, and she may have been needlessly introduced to our world, but
we saved her. We did a good thing; the forces of evil are in check
for another day. We should be celebrating!” Kevin said, smiling
that easy smile he always used to defuse tense situations. Mina sighed. “Please try to avoid
unnecessary risks in the future.”
“Will do,” I said. “There, isn’t that better than
fighting like a couple o’ freshmen?” Kevin said. “So says the senior commencement
speaker,” I replied, punching him in the ribs softly. “Hey, I’m as surprised as you guys
are that I actually got the gig,” Kevin said, grinning. “Right… so how long have you had
that speech written?” I asked. “Seventh grade, give or take a
month.” Kevin laughed. “Come on, it’ll be my last chance to try
to change a few minds here before I move on to the real world.” “Freshmen don’t fight any
appreciably more or less than any other students,” Mina said as if
she’d missed half the conversation, looking a bit lost in thought. “Really? Maybe we should ask Aldo,”
Kevin joked. Tall tales about Aldo’s secret second
life, or third life in our case, had become something of a running
joke among the Network, given his habit of accumulating even more
scrapes and bruises than the rest of us in spite of spending most of
his time behind the scenes, digging for information or tinkering with
the equipment. Underground cage fighting and
undercover spy operations were common speculations. This conversation did lead to one topic
that had been eating at me lately: the passage of time. Of the eight
members of the Network, Kevin and Courtney were both seniors and were
going to be moving on from Prospero within the next six months. I
didn’t know how we were going to keep the fight going without them.
We would find a way to manage, Mina always had in the past, but it
would be rough without Courtney’s organizational skills and Kevin’s
ability to put things in perspective. Julie, Courtney, and Aldo had dragged
their captive Sliver to the privacy of Courtney’s backyard, a good
five blocks from Ms. Craven’s, and by the time we caught up with
them, they already had it tied up in copper wire and were threatening
to touch the wire to a car battery. As usual, Julie (her jet black
hair streaked with hot pink and red for Valentine’s Day coming up)
smiled at us perkily beneath her thick goth makeup. “Ya all right, Ben?” she asked,
eying the scratches on my face. “I’m fine.”
Aldo’s concerned expression was
unsettling. Ever since our fight with Robbie, Aldo had assumed a
bravura I’d never known he had in him. He was the first to cheer
any victory lately. If he wasn’t smiling…“What is it?” Mina asked, looking
down at the Sliver, which looked more human now despite the few extra
limbs it still possessed. Courtney held the end of the copper
wire above the car battery with a plastic pair of tongs. “Show them
again.” The Sliver hissed something in its
chittering language that must not have been kind. Courtney and Mina
exchanged a glance. Mina nodded. Courtney dropped the wire onto the
battery’s contact. The Sliver screamed too humanly as it
shuddered and arched what could best be approximated as its back, and
the wire sparked violently. When Courtney took the wire away, it
reluctantly took the face of its true, human form with a look of pure
spite. It was the face of Ms. Claudette
Velasquez, my calculus teacher. That she was a Splinter was not news;
we had known this for a few months. That she was working with the Slivers
was a surprise. The last time we had seen her, she had a seat
on the Splinter Council. “What are you waiting for? Kill me.
That’s what you want, isn’t it?” she challenged. “We’re not that stupid,” I said. Ms. Velasquez looked at the battery
with a mix of anger and fear. “Then what is your plan for me?” “You’re going to tell us everything
you know about the Slivers’ plans,” Mina said simply, taking the
tongs from Courtney and holding them a little closer to the battery.
“And when we’re convinced you’re not holding out, we’ll hand
you over to the Splinter Council.” Ms. Velasquez’s eyes went wide with
genuine fear. “And if you’re never convinced?” “We turn you over to them anyway,
only we don’t tell them how remorseful and cooperative you were.” Ms. Velasquez’s eyes scanned us,
probably trying to gauge whether or not Mina was telling the truth.
She must have believed her, because her body visibly slumped. “Fine. I will cooperate. Just don’t—” She let out an ear-splitting scream,
her eyes bulging—then fell still with mouth agape. We stared,
trying to figure out if it was a trick, when the flesh began to melt
from her bones in thick gray rivers. “What the… no, no…” Aldo
muttered, trying to scoop bits of dissolving Splinter into one of his
specially rigged containment boxes, watching with confusion as the
liquid continued to evaporate after the box was sealed. The entire Splinter corpse down to the
bones was deteriorating into nothingness as the raw Splinter matter
became incompatible with our world. “What the hell just happened?”
Courtney asked. “She was going to talk!” “Was she?” Mina asked doubtfully.
“Well she sure as hell wasn’t going
to die!” said Aldo, staring at the last vanishing remnants of the
body. “Splinters just don’t do that spontaneously.” “They might if they got one of those
in ’em, brother,” Kevin said as he pointed to what was left of
Ms. Velasquez’s deteriorating bones. What looked like a foot-long, white
caterpillar made of tumors and small air sacs disentwined itself from
around her spine. Slowly, it walked away from the dissolving remains
of my math teacher, shaking off bits of gray slime. Then it started to glow a faint,
pulsing white, lifting off the ground and beginning to float away
like a plastic bag in the breeze. Mina grabbed it with her tongs. “That a Splinter?” Kevin asked. “No, I don’t think so,” Mina
said. “Then what is it?” Aldo asked. The answer hit me before Mina could say
it out loud. “A game changer,” I said. “If
they’ve got themselves some sort of alien suicide pill hiding
inside them to keep them compliant, we might have to reconsider our
capture strategy.” Capturing a Sliver for information had
been one of our dreams ever since we started receiving information
from The Owl. Just when we thought we had the Slivers
figured out, they had to come up with something like this. I would’ve laughed if it weren’t so
damn depressing.
Stitches
The
Prospero Chronicles Book 4
by
Fiona J.R. Titchenell
This
is Prospero’s darkest hour. The few remaining humans trapped within
the quarantine zone are all but defenseless against the multiplying
forces of the Sliver Queen, Locusta. With Ben missing, Aldo among the
enemy ranks, and more steel plates than bones left in her body,
Mina’s passing the hours drowning in morphine and throwing heavy
objects at her guards.
Stripped
of her weapons, her gadgets, and the Network itself, she has just one
card left, hidden somewhere under her oft-sutured skin. It might be
powerful enough to complete her life’s work once and for all… or
to reach the one person who could make her life into more than a
means to an end. But playing it will cost everything she has, or
everything she believes in.
The
final chronicle of Prospero waits in these pages.
1. The Drip
Mina
It was Haley who told me. There was a competitive cooking show
playing on the TV in my med center room when she arrived. One of the
contestants was yelling about how the other team had ripped off his
method for perfectly searing parsnips, while the Occupation guards
out in the hallway patted her down for weapons. From the way she
stood there with her arms spread, half impatient and half dreading
the moment when she’d be allowed across the threshold to see me, I
knew enough to make me dread it too. The drugs wouldn’t let me feel the
full, visceral twisting of that dread, but no doubt it was occurring
anyway, somewhere in my distant-feeling innards. One of the guards raised an eyebrow at
the contents of Haley’s backpack but eventually returned it and
waved her inside. She extended my brutal stay of enlightenment by
treading the four feet to my bed as if they were a rickety balance
beam. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were
bloodshot, and her voice came out raw. “There’s been an attack.” I waited, and finally the blow came, in
an economical croaking of syllables. “Kevin’s dead, and Ben’s
missing.” My breath quickened, and I found that
her raw, blunt voice was more than I could match.
Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing. Responding with words was like trying
to slay a dragon with a toothpick. Kevin. Kevin Brundle. Kevin wouldn’t have gone looking for
trouble. Kevin never wanted to fight. Kevin was going to Berkeley and
then into politics to save the world the other way. Kevin’s
kindness was inexhaustible, enough to forgive me for killing his
brother and to save my life at least twice over. It couldn’t be
gone now. He couldn’t be gone. Kevin was always there, from the
very beginning, even when I was too preoccupied to thank him, which
was always. One little jab of the toothpick. “How?”
I didn’t want to hear the words, and
Haley didn’t want to say them, but somehow, inevitably, the ritual
of exchanging them demanded to be observed. “Officially, hit-and-run.” This
part came out in a sharp breath. “Unofficially, they beat him half
to death and then broke his neck.” Her breath retreated back in just as
sharply, and then started the cycle over again. “And when his parents challenged the
coroner’s report…” “Dead or replaced?” I asked. “Replaced, both of them. I mean, we
didn’t capsaicin-test them or anything when they suddenly changed
their minds two hours later, but—” “I’ll take your word.” “We found this next to him,” she
reached into her backpack and pulled out a Ziploc full of stiff,
bloodstained fabric, “but there was only one body.” I had to turn the plastic-sealed bundle
over twice in my hands before I recognized the shredded remains of
Ben’s ‘3 of a Kind’ baseball cap. Something had clawed straight
through it. I grabbed my phone from the bedside
table. “Don’t,” said Haley. I pushed Send anyway. Ben’s
number went straight to a voicemail message that wasn’t his. The
sing-song recorded voice of Robbie York cut clean through the drug
haze and squeezed my stomach up toward my throat. “You’ve reached Ben Pastor’s
phone. He belongs to the Queen now. What’cha gonna do about it, huh
Mina?” I hung up and threw the phone at the
end of my bed, where Haley stopped it from falling off the end. “We don’t know that it’s the
Shard who replaced Robbie last time,” Haley said without
conviction. “They could have given his body to a new Sliver, or
even made the real Robbie record the message, just to hurt you—” “It’s him,” I said. It was, without a doubt. The Shard who
had tried to make me kill myself last winter wielded Robbie’s vocal
cords with a smug venom all his own. Besides, now that the local
Splinter Council was defunct — and with them the agreement we’d
made to keep that Shard out of our dimension — his mind-altering
powers would make him one of the first weapons the Slivers would want
to put back on the table. “I was going to warn you,” said
Haley. “It was just—” “Too much,” I finished. Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing.
The nightmare Shard back in town. The Splinter Occupation threatening
us all with replacement if they even suspected we were continuing
Network activities. My body lying in this med center bed in
useless pieces that I couldn’t fit back together, a deadweight
reminder of my fight with Locusta, if I was generous enough to call
it a fight — the Sliver Queen had escaped without a scratch,
leaving me barely alive, and worse, without a clue to how I might do
anything but lose even more conclusively next time.
It was all the very definition of too
much. “I kissed him,” said Haley. I’d already charged the dragon the
moment I opened my mouth, and there was nothing to do now but keep
stabbing at the smallest, loosest scales I could wedge the verbal
toothpick under. This one looked as likely as any other. “You kissed Robbie?” I asked. Haley shook her head. “Kevin?” I guessed again, only half
hoping. “Were you back together with him when—” “Not Kevin,” she said. “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I pushed the morphine button. “At the going away party, I kissed
Ben, and I’m so sorry, not for the kiss, exactly, it was stupidly
innocent, but—”
“I don’t care,” I lied, lowering
my voice against the guards outside. “I just need to think. I need
to make a plan.” Never mind the fact that I’d spent
the last week trying to think and plan and getting nowhere. “I wanted it to be there,” she went
on. “The spark, the magic, I wanted so much for it to be there,
waiting to surprise us, but it just wasn’t.”
“Maybe you should talk to someone
else about this.” “It wasn’t there, and I think that
might be why Ben and Kevin went off on their own afterward,” she
persisted miserably. “I think it might be my fault they were alone
when they were attacked.” I shook my head. “Ben was only there
in the first place because I told him to go.” I felt like a dog snapping and yanking
at scraps of culpability, but here in this bed, waiting for my bones
to set around the new pins and plates, guilt was the only thing
strong enough to drown out the helplessness. I couldn’t let Haley
steal it all for herself. They might not have been ambushed if
she hadn’t kissed him. And they might not have been ambushed
if I’d kissed him instead. “How much blood?” I asked. “A lot, but not a certain death lot,”
Haley answered readily. “I looked it up.” “No trail?” “No.” That probably meant Ben had been taken
away in a vehicle or wrapped in Splinter matter, for what little help
that was.
“And it’s all Ben’s?” I asked. “We don’t exactly have a forensics
lab on our side here,” said Haley. “But Kevin wasn’t bleeding.” And their attackers wouldn’t have
bled real blood. “No sign of a Sliver-Ben walking
around?” I asked. “Not yet,” said Haley. “Is that…
good?” “It’s not anything,” I said. I wouldn’t have wished replication
upon anyone, but if we could be sure it had happened to Ben, we’d
at least know where he was. This hadn’t done much good for Aldo; we
hadn’t been able to find his replication pod in our last invasion
of the Sliver Warehouse. Now, with so few of us left, the Occupation
watching over everything, and this debilitating proof of what Locusta
could do to intruders, I didn’t know how we’d ever pull off
another attempt. But it was almost worse, not knowing.
Ben might be in mid-replication right
now, or he might have escaped and gone to hide in the woods until he
could find a safe moment to make contact. The Slivers might be
holding him for some other purpose more horrible than we could
imagine, or he might already be dead. I didn’t need to voice any of these
possibilities to know that Haley had already gone over them all
herself. Haley stepped closer, past the foot of
the bed. Her hurt was contagious, and maybe mine was too. I rolled
away onto my side to establish a crude quarantine. “Are you crying?” she asked. “No.” Her voice cracked. “May I join you?”
I scooted forward to the edge of the
bed, leaving room for her to curl up behind me.
The sunflower and carnation bouquet on
the table next to me was still as fresh and cheery as it had been
when Ben had brought it to me in the late morning, on his way to
Kevin’s party, when they had both been all right. For a moment, I
hoped to see it grow fangs or tentacles or the faces of dead people,
or some other surreal nightmare manifestation dripping with the
Shard-Robbie’s personal style. Having him tampering with my thoughts
again would be bad enough on its own, but I could almost have
welcomed it if it meant the rest of this day, this week, and this
news, might all just be part of another cruel illusion. The flowers, the room, and Haley’s
weight on the mattress next to me remained my mercilessly
unembellished reality. On TV, a frantic man with a neck tattoo
was grating a piece of ginger into a pan of simmering soy sauce. I pushed the morphine button again.
***
I should have said that Haley was the
first one who told me. Before the night was out, Mom called to
check on me. She refrained from saying “I told you so” about the
fact that, after three years, I’d finally finished destroying the
Brundle family. Then Julie texted, with a few hollow
words about how none of the fallen would want us to give up. Then Courtney sent me the new password
to the surveillance feeds she’d been able to salvage from before
the Occupation takeover. Sometime around ten at night, after
Haley had gone home, Patrick arrived and stood in the doorway for
eight minutes before asking if there was anything he could do for me,
and then for another three before retreating down the hall. The guards pretended not to notice him
keeping watch a few paces away from them for a further hour and a
half, his shoes squeaking slightly against the floor every time he
heard a curtain rustle or a machine beep. All the visits flickered by, like tides
coming in and out over a pier, while I lay there watching the
flowers. That night, I exceeded my drip’s
programmed dosage limit for the first time since all my surgeries, no
longer bothering to self-moderate for the sake of maintaining any
mental clarity. When I ran out of drugs, I took hits of guilt
instead, running a fine-toothed comb over every move I’d ever made
to bring us all to where we were. The tines always came away full, making
me wonder why I’d bothered fighting Haley for a few traces. My guilt drip turned out to be
unlimited, and yet my tolerance for it, already founded on a lifelong
habit for the stuff, spiked even more sharply than my tolerance for
the morphine. Soon, even my newfound cocktail of the two became an
inadequate masking agent for the absence of action.
So when the morning came, I sat up,
shoved the morphine button over the side of the bed, picked up the
vase in the less broken of my two arms, and threw it at a guard’s
head. It clunked against his skull,
then shattered wetly on the floor at his feet, spreading glass and
petals across the hallway. He turned to look at me as if I’d
tapped him on the shoulder. The slight cut I’d left on his scalp
reverted to its natural, gray, gooey Splinter state, then healed back
into human form. I vaguely remembered him strapping me to a stretcher
the day of the Sliver Warehouse raid. Darius, he’d called himself. “Something I can do for you, Mina?” His voice was as friendly now as it had
been that day, though his towering partner had both hands on her
rifle and was glaring at me with rage enough for the two of them. “Yeah,” I said. “You can tell me
what you’re doing to protect my friends.” The glaring woman snorted. Darius gave
me a look of sympathy that was equally useless. “Your organization ordered mine to
cease all anti-Splinter activities,” I said, “not just against
you and the local Splinter Council but against the Sliver faction
too. You said we’d be left alone. You said not to defend ourselves
against our common enemy. You said you had it covered, and a week
later they killed one of us and kidnapped another. I want to hear
what you’re doing about that.” “Mina,” said Darius, stepping
deftly around the broken vase and into the room, “that’s not
exactly what we—” “How about not blowing your head off
right now?” said his partner, raising her rifle. “How’s that
for what we’re doing to help?” “Don’t do me any favors.” I
picked up my phone, tapped Send again, and turned on the
speaker. “You’ve reached Ben Pastor’s
phone. He belongs to the Queen now. What’cha gonna do about it, huh
Mina?” I waited for the beep. “Hello, fake Robbie,” I said, not
lowering my voice in the slightest. “I don’t know if you’re
actually checking this mailbox, but if you are, I just wanted to
remind you which one of us was carted off kicking and screaming last
time you picked a fight with my head. If you want a rematch, I’m in
the Prospero Medical Center, room one-eighteen, bedbound and on a
significant quantity of opiates. You might have to take care of a
couple of armed guards first, but it’s not going to get much easier
than—” Darius’s partner strode over and
knocked the phone out of my hand with the barrel of her gun. “Margaret,” Darius tugged her back,
“she’s grieving. She’s harmless. It’s not like the
insurrectionists don’t already know where she is. It’s not worth
making a scene.” “Yeah, Margaret,” I said her
name but looked at Darius’s face instead. “I’m just a sick,
crazed human. What’s my word worth?” Without answering my question, Darius
picked up my phone where it had fallen, checked it for broken glass,
and set it gently on my pillow. “I could send replacement crews to
round up the rest of your cell right now,” Margaret threatened. “With your luck, they won’t even
show up in time to round up whatever Slivers are probably beating
them to it right now.” I didn’t know whom I was bluffing
harder or to what end. I’d had a lot of help the last time I
went up against the Shard-Robbie, and it had still been one of the
hardest, most painful fights of my life, right next to the one that
had put me here. I wasn’t sure if I honestly wanted him to try to
get at me past the guards, physically or telepathically, or if I just
wanted to needle the smugness out of his voice. I didn’t know if I wanted to make
Darius and Margaret argue amongst themselves or talk to me or shoot
me. All I knew was that waiting for a whole
plan to form wasn’t working, and standing still was death, for all
of us. That was clearer now than ever. I’d decided to deal with the dragon
of my situation in the same manner as the dragon of my grief — by
poking it with a sharp stick until something came loose. “This is ridiculous,” said
Margaret. “Our priority should be neutralizing her before they can
try for her again, not cleaning up after her tantrums.” “The team’ll be here any minute,”
said Darius. “We’ll get her moved and call it a night.” This was news to me. “Moved? Moved where?” “Someplace safer,” Darius turned
back to me, blocking Margaret behind him. “Why?” “Because as you’ve just pointed
out, there’s every possibility that the insurrectionists will try
for you here,” said Darius calmly. “Especially since they’ve
already made an extraction attempt on a caravan carrying your former
allies.” “A successful attempt?” I probed,
dropping my voice low enough to make Darius lean unconsciously closer
and put a caring hand on the railing of my bed. “You know I’m not authorized to
tell you—” I clamped my good hand over his, felt
his thoughts buzzing through his skin, and snatched at them with my
own. I’d only discovered that I could use
Splinters’ contact telepathy against them a few months ago, and I
hadn’t exactly practiced. My search of Darius’s mind was little
more than a few blind stabs before he jerked away with a gasp of
discomfort, but the answer to my question was there in the forefront,
easy to find. The Sliver-Aldo and the Old Man had
passed from Occupation to Sliver custody. “Thought so,” I said. “I understand that you’re
frustrated,” said Darius, standing more carefully out of reach.
“And how exhausting it must be to pretend you’re in control when
you’re not even sure if what you just learned is good news or not.” I pulled my hand back from where it
still rested on the railing. “Thought so,” Darius teased, then
gave me a nearly apologetic shrug, as if to say, Hey, you meshed
our heads first. It was true; I wasn’t sure whether
the Old Man and the Sliver-Aldo were better off with the Occupation
or the Slivers, or even whether I wanted them to be better off. The Occupation, the Slivers, the Old
Man, and the creature that had replaced my oldest friend — I hated
every one of them, too deeply to call the feeling by any other name. “I told you she was dangerous,”
said Margaret. “And I told you she’s just scared.” “Scared animals are the most
dangerous kind.” Footsteps approached along the hallway. “About damn time,” muttered
Margaret. But it wasn’t the backup team coming
to move me to some new undisclosed location. Nor was it a raiding
party of Slivers coming for my head. It was so much worse. With a tubful of cookies under her arm,
Cynthia Pastor stepped apprehensively around the broken vase and
looked from Margaret to Darius to me, sizing up the situation she’d
just interrupted. She looked even worse than I felt, her
eyes redder than Haley’s had been, and she had the rumpled, faded
look of someone who hadn’t seen a bed or a mirror since the day
before. “This is good,” Darius murmured to
Margaret while giving Cynthia a cursory pat-down. “Let them visit
until we’re ready to go, give everyone a chance to calm down, no
one does anything they’ll regret.” With a few more grumbles from Margaret,
both guards retreated to the hallway, leaving me alone with Ben’s
mother.
“Am I out of the loop again?”
Cynthia asked softly, nodding at where Margaret’s back would be on
the other side of the wall. “No.” I raised my voice to make
sure Margaret would hear me. “She’s just embarrassed that my team
gave the Slivers more to think about in one night than hers has all
week!” Cynthia took the seat by my bed. “I meant, you haven’t heard
anything….” She trailed off, leaving room for me to
crack open some secret cache of relief she hoped I’d been hoarding.
To tell her that Ben was fine, that he was in hiding, that this had
all been planned and staged as part of some greater master plan of
mine that required her to play the frantic mother with method
realism. “If you’ve talked to Haley, you
know as much as I do,” I broke it to her, with one hand on my
phone, finally taking stock of the surveillance feeds Courtney had
saved for me. I couldn’t look at Cynthia. I’d
just dragged myself out of a self-induced guilt stupor not ten
minutes ago, and her sunken, puffy gaze was like a syringe full of my
palliative of choice, offering to numb me back into uselessness. She pulled the lid off the tub of
cookies and held it out to me. “They’re burnt, sorry.” They were, pretty severely, but I took
one anyway, glad for the extra challenge the blackened bottoms added
to the act of eating them. I scraped off the edible top layer with
my teeth, hoping the process would nudge my mind into tighter order,
the way complicated foods sometimes did. Maybe it would clear a space
in the center for me to prioritize the feed backlog, and maybe even
figure out the correct way to respond to Cynthia’s presence. I separated the oatmeal from the
chocolate chips with my tongue, cataloguing the comforting flavors
and textures of refined sugar and whole grains, which always meant a
flow of mental energy would soon follow. I tried not to taste the
stiff starchiness of the three o’clock hour Cynthia had spent
beating the dough senseless with her egg whisk, drowning her own
helplessness in busywork. I made no comment on the bitter charcoal
aftertaste of the crucial minutes when she’d clutched the edge of
the sink to cry, her own mental dragon blocking her way to the oven
mitts. “How are you holding up?” she
asked. “I threw a vase at my guards today,”
I nodded at the glass-littered puddle. “So, better than yesterday.” This would have made Ben laugh. Cynthia
smiled grimly in my peripheral vision as I took stock of the feeds. There were three bugs in the school and
one in Town Hall that hadn’t been discovered by either the local
Splinters, the Splinter Occupation, or the Slivers yet. Odds were
slim that they’d recorded any plotting that would tell us where Ben
had been taken, especially since Courtney had probably already gone
over the likely time periods. But there was always the chance that
she’d missed something and my luck would surprise me. Cynthia waited for the eye contact I
couldn’t make, then spoke anyway. “Mina, honey…” For some reason, the term of endearment
made my eyes sting. “I want you to know I don’t blame
you for any of this. Present evidence to the contrary,” she added,
trying to laugh at the tub of burnt cookies and producing only a
spasmodic noise in her chest. Even knowing that this blow was coming,
I couldn’t be ready for it. I put down my phone, placed the
blackened base of my cookie in the empty emesis basin on my bedside
table, and crushed my head between my hands, trying to shield the
little rebuilding I’d done there from being shaken to pieces again. “Why…” I started babbling
uncontrollably. “Why wouldn’t you…” “Because I know you a little better
than you probably think,” Cynthia answered. “I know you’ve been
playing mommy to your friend Aldo for the better part of his life,
and I know he was lucky to have you. God knows no one else was making
the effort. I know you feel like you have to take care of the rest of
the world too, and I’m not going to tell the girl who helped save
my niece’s life that she’s not needed or capable, but listen to
me: you’re just one person. You’re seventeen years old. None of
that should ever have been your job in the first place. You’re
doing more than anyone has any right to expect, and the rest,
anything that slips through the cracks, is not your fault.
Understand?” I swallowed to clear my throat. Then,
out of options, I held out my good arm for her to hug me. She did, and I wished I could claim I
was doing it for her comfort, or even my own. The truth was that as
long as I could keep her hugging me, it meant I didn’t have to feel
her looking at me instead. “You might be right about taking care
of the world,” I told the wall behind her, and the few strands of
her hair that were fluttering in the draft of the air conditioner.
“Maybe even about Aldo.” I had to cough my voice clear again
after his name. “Maybe I couldn’t help not being old enough, or
strong enough, or smart enough to stop other people from doing things
to Aldo. But I did this to Ben.” Cynthia should have pushed me to arm’s
length. She only squeezed me tighter, and I squeezed back. I couldn’t allow myself to slide back
into the guilt wallow, where the weight of everything I’d done
wrong became an excuse to do nothing now, but I couldn’t take her
misguided absolution either. “I chose him for this,” I
explained. “I chose him, knowing what happens to people I choose.
The Slivers only targeted him to use against me. Right from the very
beginning, not just now. I could have backed off the first time they
threatened him. I could have kept them away from the two of you until
you left town last year like you were supposed to, but I kept
dragging him further and further in, until he killed that Splinter
who was posing as Haley and got you trapped here. I didn’t know
that would happen, not exactly, but I knew the dangers, and I knew
that once I’d proven the existence of Splinters to him, he’d have
to stay in touch.” I couldn’t tell how much of this Ben
had already told her, but there was no way she could know the next
part. I’d never even said it to myself. “I didn’t do it because it was
necessary to take care of the world. He’s brave, talented, an asset
to humanity, but that was never why.” Cynthia was very still now in my one
good arm, her embrace turning rigid. “I chose him because I was lonely.” There were footsteps in the hall, more
of them now, purposeful. “I had Aldo, and I should have been
grateful for that, but I wanted a partner my own age again, and Kevin
had turned me down. Kevin should have kept turning me down. I
got him too in the end. But first, I forced Ben into the Network
because I was lonely, and after everything I did to him, he
still did his best for me. He would have stayed here with me all day
yesterday, but I sent him to that party because even though
I’m the one who wanted him in my life in the first place, I
was too much of a coward to face what I might say to him if he
stayed.” Before Cynthia could find anything to
offer in reply, a dozen armed Splinters stormed into the room,
wheeling a med center gurney, with Margaret at the front. “Sorry,” Darius told Cynthia,
gently tugging her away from me while the others began the process of
shifting me onto the gurney for transport. “We’ll update the
family on her condition as soon as we’ve got her settled in the new
facility.” “New facility?” Cynthia repeated
through a thick wall of shock. “Wait…” “It is my fault your son is
missing,” I shouted to her as they wheeled me out the door and
beyond her reach. “But I’m going to bring him back!”
F.J.R.
TITCHENELL
is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction, including
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of). She
graduated from Cal State University Los Angeles with a B. A. in
English in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San
Gabriel, California, with her husband, coauthor, and amazing partner
in all things, Matt Carter, and their pet king snake, Mica.
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