Flame (32 page)

But now she’d
seen
it: an unarmed woman gunned down. It didn’t matter that the victim had been Anne Mather, the architect of all Waverly’s loss, her pain, her transformation into a dark-hearted creature. The act itself had been the ugliest thing Waverly had ever seen, and she was glad now she hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger.

“Tom,” Mather moaned.

“Thomas,” one of the guards said into his walkie-talkie. “You better get here now. Hurry.”

They were almost to the stage, close enough that Waverly could see the sheath of blood spreading under Mather as she lay on her back, looking up at the lights with those cool gray eyes, swallowing down the blood that pooled inside her mouth.

“Wave…,” Mather whispered. She moaned and closed her eyes.

“Hush,” Waverly said. She knelt down and took Anne Mather’s hand.

“I wanted…,” Mather said softly. She seemed to have no control over her own breath and had to time her words with each tortured exhale. “To say … I’m sorry.”

Waverly looked at her own hands cupped around Mather’s deathly cold fingers. Her sworn enemy, the woman she’d planned to ruin with her lies, whose death she’d fervently wished for—why was she holding her hand?

“I’ve done so…”—Mather panted between words, grimacing in pain—“… many things.” She took in breath sharply, then coughed, great racking hacks that sent foamy blood spurting out of a hole in her chest.

“I brought this,” Mather whispered, “on my … myself.”

Waverly could only look at her. She had no words.

The heavy metal doors behind Waverly opened, and the guard named Thomas stood in the doorway, his face slack with shock.

“No,” he whispered and staggered onto the stage. He fell to his knees next to Waverly, then bent over Mather and smoothed the hair off her forehead. “Annie,” he said with a whimper. “I should’ve stayed! I should’ve known!”

She smiled at him. “No, honey. Don’t.”

The big, frightening guard bent down and kissed Mather tenderly, her forehead, her eyebrow, the corner of her bloodied mouth. “Stay,” he pleaded.

The Pastor opened her mouth to speak, but she coughed again, and suddenly she was heaving, folding in half as a medical team thrust Waverly out of the way and bent over her, fitting a mask over her face, stanching her wounds with mounds of gauze. Thomas refused to let go of her hand and watched her face with minute attention as the medical team traded arcane terminology, describing what was happening to Anne Mather’s body. Waverly didn’t need to understand their words to know she was dying in the most horrible way.

The color faded from Mather’s cheeks, her lips turned blue, her eyes rolled up in her head. Waverly lowered her gaze when Thomas, the Pastor’s most vicious protector, wept over her, kissing her forehead, massaging her hand, rocking on his knees.

Waverly turned away. They all did, to let Thomas have a few last moments alone with her.

Besides, the woman was no longer there and there was nothing more to look at.

THE GIFT

In the infirmary, a medical team fitted a mask over Seth’s face, and he breathed in the pure oxygen. Soon his head cleared, and his feeling of panic subsided. Nan, the nurse who had saved his life, was in the bed next to him. He couldn’t believe she was still alive.

She had turned toward him, looking sleepy, her skin pale, her lips cracked and whitish. Clear tubes snaked out of her nostrils. She raised her eyebrows as her lips formed the words: “How are you feeling?”

He couldn’t speak with the mask over his face; he could only roll his eyes. She nodded in understanding, and he felt a little less lonely. Someone else was suffering, someone who cared about what happened to him.

He motioned for the doctor, the older woman with a knot of gray hair at the nape of her neck. He could barely whisper, “How is she?”

The doctor turned toward the nurse and asked, “May I tell him your condition?”

The nurse nodded once.

“His knife hit her between the scapula and the spine. The blade nicked a lung, but most of the damage is orthopedic.” The doctor looked at Seth fondly, and he looked back at her high cheekbones and intelligent expression, thinking she must have been pretty when she was young. “Don’t you want to know
your
condition?”

“I’m dying,” he croaked.

“I hope not,” the doctor said, her tone deadly serious. “You came close. But the oxygen is helping your body stabilize. We’ve got you back on your meds, and we’re watching you.”

“Waverly?”

The doctor shook her head. “We’ll try to find her, okay?”

He nodded and fell asleep immediately.

When he opened his eyes, the lights were back on. Nan looked very tired, and her chest was wrapped with layers of white gauze, but when he turned toward her she brightened up. “You look better,” she said softly.

He smiled.

A tall, thin man brought him a tray with some cut fruit and a bowl of broth. He managed to drink the broth through a straw, and it felt good as it filled his stomach with warmth. The fruit was pink and soft and sweet. He couldn’t identify it, but he enjoyed warming it on his tongue before he swallowed it, piece by piece. At the end of the meal, he was exhausted.

“Waverly?” he asked the thin man.

“Let me make a call.” The man walked out of Seth’s line of sight, but Seth could hear his side of the conversation. “I’ve got a very sick young man here asking for Waverly Marshall … She’s sixteen years old, how much of a threat could she be … Patients do better when they have family around … She’s the closest thing he has…”

Seth closed his eyes again, and when he opened them, he was looking at Waverly. Tears slid over her smooth cheeks, and the corners of her lips pricked upward into a smile. He felt instantly better.

“Hi,” she whispered, and he felt her fingers moving through his hair, rearranging, working at knots, smoothing it back from his forehead. Her touch relaxed muscles he hadn’t known were tight, helped his blood move through his veins, soothed the nerve impulses that told him he was still in pain, still sick, still in danger.

“You’re going to be okay,” she whispered.

He knew she was lying, that they’d told her the truth. He knew it by the hint of terror in her eyes that she tried to cover with her smile. He loved her for that, how brave she was being, and how brave she was trying to help him be.

“Where you been?” he asked.

“They had a lot of questions,” she said evasively.

“You in trouble?”

“All I could do was tell them the truth,” she said. “So far they can’t find a problem with my story.”

Seth felt a presence on the other side of his bed and turned to find Don standing over him. “I tried to get back to you in the lab. I could tell you were sick.” Don rubbed a chunky hand over his face, looking as though he hadn’t slept in days and hadn’t shaved in a lot longer than that. “I couldn’t risk leading them to you.”

“It’s okay,” Seth said. He was already feeling tired from all the talking. But there was something he needed to tell Waverly before he fell asleep, because he was afraid he might not wake up. He badly wanted to touch her face, stroke her hair, but he was too weak to lift his arm. “Listen,” he said to her.

Don got up to let them be alone, and he was grateful for that.

“I don’t want you to be alone,” he told her.

Her face crumpled. “I’ll have you.”

“Maybe not,” he got out before he had to fight for air. Waverly seemed to have lost the ability to smile. She stroked his hair at a frantic pace. When he could speak again, he said, “I want you to have a family.”

She shook her head in a desperate kind of denial and looked away from him.

“The kids they made from you,” he said. She wouldn’t look at him, but he knew she was listening. “I saw one. She’s … she’s so cute.”

Now Waverly did look at him. He saw a hardness in her that he knew would probably never subside completely, but she was with him, listening.

“Kieran is a good guy,” he said. “He loves you.”

Her large brown eyes searched his face as though trying to divine some motive. “He wants someone else now,” she said.

“He’ll protect you.”

“Seth…”

“This place is dangerous.” She tried to put her fingers over his lips, but he spoke anyway. “If you’re married and pregnant, they…” He stopped to catch his breath, then forced out the words, “They’d let you live. For the baby.”

“Without you?” she whimpered. “I can’t—” She lay her head down on his mattress, but she kept hold of his hand, massaging his fingers, kneading them, kissing them.

When he had the strength, he squeezed her hand. “I need to know you’ll be okay.”

Her features hardened. “Then live.”

REUNION

Kieran’s shuttle touched down on the Empyrean in a dark, empty shuttle bay. He’d expected Arthur to meet him, but there was no one. Kieran walked down the shuttle ramp, confused, holding his sore middle. He’d expected relief now that he’d expelled the explosives, but the detonator had lodged inside him, somewhere deep, and it felt like a hunk of broken glass.

He pushed the pain out of his mind and looked around. The bay was completely dark except for the light of a single OneMan hanging near the air-lock doors.

“Kieran.” It sounded like Arthur’s voice, very soft and distant, coming from the OneMan. Kieran approached, hunched over, gripping his stomach with one hand. “Are you there?”

Kieran leaned into the helmet to speak into the headset. “I’m here.”

“Go to the port-side stairwell and walk down.”

“Okay.” Kieran limped across the bay between the rows of shuttles. He made it to the stairwell and started down the cold metal steps, leaning heavily on the railing. The ship was cold, very cold, but the air was good. He could smell the pollen from the rain forest as he descended the stairs—a huge relief. The ship’s lungs were still intact.

He heard footsteps below, then saw a long shadow creeping up the wall of the stairwell. From around a bend, Arthur appeared. His face broke into an immense smile, and he ran up the rest of the stairs and hugged Kieran tightly. Kieran winced, and Arthur pulled away. “You okay?”

“Not sure how to answer that,” Kieran said.

“I heard you say Jacob Pauley made you swallow explosives,” Arthur said.

“How did you pick up that transmission?”

Arthur grinned. “We’re always listening.”

“I threw up the explosives. Now I just have the detonator in me.”

“So you’re safe?”

“I won’t explode, anyway.”

The two boys took the stairs down three more flights, only enough time to give each other a broad outline of what had been happening. As Arthur opened the door to the habitation level, he smiled. “I’ve got some pretty interesting news, but first…” Arthur paused, seeming almost frightened to ask, “Have you seen my dad?”

Kieran touched his friend’s shoulder. “I saw your dad in the brig when I first got there.”

Arthur closed his eyes and smiled.

A cramp seized Kieran, and he doubled over.

Arthur grabbed him by the arm to hold him up. “I thought you said you threw up the explosives.”

“Not the detonator, though.” Kieran groaned. “It’s stuck in me.”

“Maybe we can get it out. Let’s ask Tobin.”

Kieran leaned on the wall of the corridor. “Tobin is alive?”

“Yes,” Arthur said and cocked his head. “They think we’re dead?”

“They
told
me you were.”

“I was afraid of that.”

Kieran winced with another spasm of pain and pulled on Arthur’s arm.

“Come on,” Arthur said, “let’s find Tobin.”

Kieran followed his friend out of the stairwell and down the cold corridor, bracing himself against the wall. Arthur knocked and entered an apartment without waiting for a response. Kieran followed him into a living room that had been converted into a makeshift hospital. There were four beds, each one pushed against a wall, each occupied by one of the sick adults. Victoria Hand was the only one conscious, and she smiled weakly at Kieran and lifted a couple of fingers.

“Tobin!” Arthur called and went down the hallway toward the bedrooms.

“Quiet,” Tobin said irritably. He was sitting on the side of a bed, looking spent, but when he saw Kieran behind Arthur, he bolted to his feet. “Kieran!”

Kieran rushed at his old friend and put his arms around him. “I thought you were all dead.”

In the bed where Tobin had been sitting was Philip Grieg, the heroic little boy who had saved Waverly and Seth from Jacob Pauley. When Kieran last saw him, his face had been horribly swollen and bruised. Now his features were back to normal, and there was even a healthy pink in his cheeks. “How is he?” Kieran asked as he sat down on Philip’s mattress.

The little boy opened his eyes, a faint smile on his lips. “Hi.”

Kieran laughed with joy. “He’s okay?”

“He has three words,” Tobin said with pride. “‘Hi,’ ‘bye,’ and ‘uck,’ when we bring him his emergency rations.”

“So he’s getting better?”

“He started talking a few days ago.” Tobin gave a tentative nod. “I think he’s blind in one eye, and he can’t use his left hand, but he can hold a cup of water, and he’s starting to be able to sit up. Victoria thinks he might be able to walk again someday, but not for a while.”

Kieran bent over the little boy and kissed him on the cheek. Philip smiled and said “Hi” again.

“Is that Kieran?” someone by the door asked, and Kieran turned to see Austen Hand standing in the doorway holding a stack of empty ration containers. He dropped them on the floor, rushed at Kieran, and gave him a bear hug. “I thought that was your voice.”

“Yeah,” Kieran said, grimacing at the way the boy jostled him.

“What’s wrong?” Tobin asked.

“He’s got a detonator in his stomach,” Arthur answered.

“What?” Tobin and Austen yelled simultaneously.

By the time the situation was fully explained, Tobin had Kieran lying on the floor at the foot of Philip’s bed. He gave Kieran a pain reliever and stood over him while he drank three entire grav bags of water.

“They said to force fluids, right? We’re forcing fluids.”