Machinations (17 page)

“You're giving me conjecture. I start pointing fingers and a lot of feelings are going to get hurt. Normally I wouldn't care, but we kind of need allies at this point.” I'm starting to understand the burden my mother was under all those years in office. Politics is a killer. Quite literally, in some instances. “I'm going to need some proof. I don't suppose you have any?”

“I know how to find some. All I need is access to the machine that attacked you.”

“You're kidding.”

Her face is stone, remarkably like her brother's. “No. That particular machine has a recording device in its optics for playback. The soldiers use it to review their techniques following training sessions. I'm guessing Forsyth already has the footage from the incident itself, but not before. If he did, he'd know I'm not guilty, and we wouldn't be talking right now.”

“You can get this extra footage?”

“No,” she says again, and I have the strong urge to reach over and smack her. “It's probably been deleted from the machine's memory, although that'd be my first effort, to try and retrieve it. If the programmer was smart, he's likely to have done everything remotely anyway, via McKinley's wireless network. It's possible I could trace the intrusion back to the system where it originated. He might have left me some bread crumbs to follow.”

I rub my temples, thinking through the jargon. I hate technology. It's too damn complicated.

Samuel understands better. “Like tracing an IP address?” he says.

She nods.

“I'm hearing a lot of ifs and mights in what you're saying,” I tell Zelda. “Can you trace him or not?”

“I can, and I can do it a hell of a lot faster than anyone else in this base.”

She's certainly changed her tune.
“I'll give you access—on the condition you're supervised during the process. Sound fair?”

Zelda nods. “Don't think this means I like you any more than before.”

“Right,” I agree dryly.

Samuel and I take our leave without further argument.

“See?” I tell him. “That wasn't so bad. Could have gone worse.” He shakes his head, not necessarily in disagreement. “Thanks for your help, though. I wasn't getting anywhere with her. That's one nasty chip she's got on her shoulder. But she seems to like you. Why is that?”

“I don't know. Maybe I'm just charming,” Samuel says with a halfhearted smile.

“
Charming,
” I say, forcing it a little. “Of course. How could I forget?”

He looks like he might say something else, but then doesn't, and I can't think of another witty thing to say on top of that last comment. An awkward silence ensues—one that makes me grimace the moment I turn away. I hoped everything would go back to normal between us, but this doesn't feel normal. It's like we're both staggering through a new script neither of us has had a chance to read.

Our celebration ends up being premature, too. Lefevre is waiting for us inside the observation room, but now he's joined by Camus, whose back is to us when we enter. His lean frame is silhouetted in a strangely ominous way by the light of the viewing window, and he's dressed warmly for room temperature in a heavy, gray trench coat. The crutch and cast are both gone, though that doesn't mean anything. It's just as likely he got impatient with the healing process as that he's actually healed. But there is something in his posture, an unnatural rigidness to the shoulders maybe, that gives away his state of mind.

Uh-oh.

“Get out,” Camus says, angling his head only slightly to deliver the demand. “Now.”

I start to leave with Samuel and Lefevre, taking the opportunity to escape, but Camus stops me with an exasperated, “Not you, Rhona.”

Samuel looks like he's prepared to stay behind, too—my partner in crime to the last—but I wave him off. I can handle Camus.

I think.

Immediately after the door shuts, Camus rounds on me.
“What were you thinking?”

The first words out of my mouth, stupidly, are, “I can explain,” as if I even need to. I don't need to justify my actions to him. I don't owe him anything. Not a damn thing—especially not when he's given me nothing in return. But even knowing this, my heart still wants to make peace.

So I try to explain. “I was trying to contribute to the investigation.”

“No.” He cuts me off with an imperious gesture. “Stop there. Please.” His frustration overwhelms him for a few seconds, and he places his hands on the table, as if to steady the madness of a world that continues to spin. “Why must you fight me at every turn?” he asks, looking back up at me.

“Fight
you
?” I say, incredulous. “Someone tried to kill me. I'm trying to figure out who and why. It has nothing to do with us. It has nothing to do with
you.
”

Camus is shaking his head, not listening. “How do you imagine I can protect you when you keep throwing yourself into the lion's den?”

Protect me?
No,
I think.
No, he does not get to play the hero card in this.
“Is that what you're doing, Camus? Protecting me? Because from where I'm standing, it feels like all you've been doing since I got here is knock me down.”

He moves around the table with surprising agility for someone barely recovered from a severe leg injury. Maybe he's so angry he can't feel it. I'd like to be able to reach that level of anger some time, to lose myself in a hot swamp of nothing. Right now, all my feelings are rushing headlong toward my stressed mental dams. I'm not indefatigable; I don't know how much longer I'll be able to stay strong before everything comes pouring out.

“I apologized for my behavior,” Camus tells me, minimizing the distance between us. “What do you have to say for yours?”

“How long were you watching?” I ask. “Because you should know we made progress. We got Zelda to talk. She's even offered to help us catch the person who did it. Don't you think that counts for something?”

“Yes, but considering all the things that could have gone wrong…”

“It was worth the risk.”

“Oh, it was worth the risk, was it?” Camus says, nodding enthusiastically, though clearly not in agreement. His jaw is clenched so tight I see the clear definition of bone beneath his skin. “Worth the risk,” he repeats to himself with a note of disbelief. “Is that all life is to you, Rhona? A game of chance? Throw the dice and hope for the best?”

In the privacy of the observation room, where there are no eyes or ears, no audience to play to, Camus doesn't need to call me Rhona. It makes me wonder why he does.

“Of course not,” I tell him more gently, keeping my tone under control. He looks feverish, out of control, even—frightened. As if he's made himself physically sick with worry.
Worry for me?
“Camus, are you okay?”

“No,” he answers candidly. “Not when you continue to do things like this. It's reckless.”

Watching his knee-jerk reaction, the pieces of the puzzle come together. I don't know why I didn't see it sooner. “You're not angry with me,” I say.

“Haven't you been listening to a word I've been saying?”

“Okay, you're annoyed with me, but the person you're really mad at is
her.
”

His gaze snaps away from me, ashamed. We both know who I mean, although it's a little weird to refer to myself as a different person. Only for the sake of civility do I make the distinction.

“Whose idea was it to form the rescue mission, Camus?”

He swallows before speaking, but even then his voice is so quiet, raw and hoarse with feeling, I can barely hear him. “Rhona's,” he confesses, almost sounding relieved that at least it wasn't his plan. “I argued against it from the start, but she insisted. She refused to leave anyone stranded. So typical.”

“She threw the dice,” I say.

“She gambled with her life,” he corrects me, before continuing in a broken voice “And I couldn't protect her from the consequences. That's my failing.”

Not for the first time, I see Camus as a complicated mesh of anger and grief, just as volatile as Zelda, and equally desperate to make sense of the senseless. The difference is Camus reins himself in, leashed by an Englishman's control, impatient with his own feelings. While Zelda had Lefevre as a confidant, and probably anyone else who would hear her complaints, Camus has suffered in silence. Repressing—no,
killing
—his heart. I can't imagine what it's like to live in that kind of daily misery. Always pretending to be okay when you are so clearly not.

“I'm sorry, Camus,” I say, because someone should say it.

He frowns. “It wasn't—”

My fault?
I see the completion of the thought reflected back at me from his expression.
Yes, it was. It can't not be my fault, if it was Rhona's. Say it, Camus. Yell it. Scream it at the top of your lungs. Rage. Anything. Hate me so you can love me again.

But of course he does none of those things. That would be too easy. Or too hard.

Instead, he tries to compose himself, remain outside the reach of human comfort, by moving to stand in front of the window again. His reflection is as faint as a ghost, his unhappiness transparent. “ ‘We have seen the best of our time,' ” he says, and it takes me a moment to understand it's a quote. “ ‘Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.' William Shakespeare.” In response to my blank look, he says, “Famous sixteenth-century playwright.”

It seems I lost certain chunks of my high school or college years—English class must have been one of those periods that either never got transferred, or lacked enough emotional content for me to hang on to. Then again, maybe Camus is referencing an obscure play I was never familiar with—that would be like him. The hipster. “Well, he got the Machinations part right,” I say, thinking of
the
Machinations, even though I'm sure Shakespeare had no idea of the terrible things to come under that name. “But I don't know. I think our lives can still be more than just a collection of bad events. Life should be more than just survival.”

Camus is silent, wrapped up in old guilt.

I approach him cautiously, like I would a wounded animal. “You don't have to go through this alone.” I try slipping my hand into his. He recoils from my touch, but not instantly, and in that single moment when our palms are mated, I get a sense of shared longing. He's good at hiding it, better than most, but it's still there. That need for companionship, for a friend, for trust and love and all the things intrinsic to the human condition. All the things he's denied himself for the past six months.

“And you can't keep punishing yourself, Camus. You can't keep driving everyone else away.”

His eyes search my face with the desperation of a drowning man looking for a lifeline.

“Like who?”

I mentally list the people who were Camus's friends, only to realize most of them actually belong to me. “You can always make friends. And…” I take a breath. “You still have me. You know, if worse comes to worst.”

The last bit is a joke. I wish he would smile again.

He snorts. “I'd be more inclined to believe that if you didn't seem so dead-set on getting yourself killed.”

“Sheesh. You bleed to death one time, and no one ever lets you forget it.”

Camus shakes his head.

“Too soon?”

“Is everything a joke to you?” he asks me.

“If it's a choice between laughing or crying, then yeah.” I shrug. “Why not laugh? I'm an ugly crier.”

It's not my intention, but he looks chastised by my remark. It's like he's only just realizing how hard he's been on me. About freaking time.

“I didn't mean to upset you.” I give him a sideways look that says,
Yeah right.
He exhales—part sigh, part laugh. “I guess that's not entirely true, is it? I'm just tired and…concerned.”

“Yeah, I get that. But I'm okay, Camus. Nothing happened—”

“This time. What do you expect will happen when your luck runs out?” It's a rhetorical question he expects me to know the answer to, because we've already lived through that scenario.
What do I expect will happen when my luck runs out? I don't know, Camus. The reset button didn't work quite right the last time.
Nothing is how I expected it would be.

“The base is my responsibility, but so are you,” he continues with more care in his tone. “I won't require you to ask permission for every little thing, and I'll try not to behave like your keeper. But I do ask that you extend me the courtesy of keeping me informed. Particularly when you're intent on endangering yourself.”

“Okay. Fair enough,” I agree.

Satisfied with my answer, he takes his leave, but I stop him on the way out. “Hey, Camus?”

He stops, turning only his head. His profile is all sharp angles. I'm sure I'm supposed to say something profound now, something that will alter our relationship and radically redefine our possible future.

I say, “Cheer up.”

There's a glimmer of a smile, promising, but it's gone too quickly, and soon he is, too.

Samuel replaces him less than a minute later, giving a playful rap on the door frame as he peeks in. “Is it safe?” he inquires.

I shrug, half-sitting against the table. “For now.”

He joins me, our shoulders coming together supportively, but I don't look at him, out of fear of driving the wedge of weirdness between us any deeper. “Everything all right?” he asks, more seriously.

“No,” I answer honestly. “But we're getting there. And what about us?”

“Us?” he squeaks.

Now I turn to face him. “Are we going to be all right?”