Interval: Rachel
Rachel changed her mind about Granville after they finally got there. Not because it wasn't a good place for her mother, who couldn't seem to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time before retreating back into her own head. And not because it wasn't the fortress they'd heard about from the radios and from the caravans who'd passed them on their way there.
She changed her mind because once she decided to leave and find the place they'd lost Piper along the road and bring her back, even if it only meant bringing back her body, not a single person in the entire, stupid city was willing to help her.
Granville was big and loud with machines and people, more than Rachel had ever seen in her entire life, much less all at the same time. The engines roared from sundown to sunup, and the air was filled with a buzz of electrical activity that felt like mosquitoes darting around her ears. They said she'd get used to it, but she hadn't yet.
The only halfway decent thing about Granville was the kids her age. They came from everywhere, and there were plenty to choose from. Some of them were born and raised Granvillers, some arrived just after Pyramid was gone for good. Others, like Rachel, trickled in slowly, though those were getting less and less common.
Toby was the one who helped her fix Piper's damaged music player and showed her how to replace the battery so it would run for more than a few hours at a time. The kids traded music for cigarettes or alcohol or bits of tech, or for favors to be redeemed later. Rachel didn't have much to trade with yet, and the only thing she seemed consistently good at was pissing off Granville's security patrols, so she relied on Toby to fork over something on her behalf.
She spent every day with an earbud buried in each ear, armed with the mix of music that was Piper's and her own squarely between herself and everything else. She might have been able to live there, maybe finally gotten used to it, if it hadn't been for the grave markers.
They had them pre-cut, bits of marble and rock made unnaturally uniform and set carefully in the ground a ways from the main city, where Granville buried their dead. It wouldn't have bothered her—they had to put bodies somewhere, after all—if they hadn't made one for Piper, too.
There was nothing in the grave. Just a pretty, off-white block of stone over an undisturbed patch of ground. Her mother had knelt there for a while, whispering things to her lost daughter, but even she must have seen the pointlessness of that because she stopped after a week. Rachel never went, because Piper wasn't there. Piper was dead, or wandering, lost and scared and hungry, along the road miles back, and putting a pretty hunk of stone in the dirt wouldn't fix any of that.
After a week of dreaming of Piper walking on bloodied feet, terrified and alone, Rachel tried to get back out on the road. She had her bag packed with what she could scavenge from home or steal outright. She had Piper's tech charged to full, fit to burst with whatever music Toby had for her, and made it as far as the main gate before it even occurred to her that they might not let her go.
And they didn't. They were gentle at first, insisting that she was too young or some other crap. They didn't seem impressed when she told them she'd been as good as alone before, and knew how to avoid mechs and slavers better than anyone. They didn't even budge when she asked if she'd be able to leave if she found someone to escort her, not that she knew if she could.
In the end, they told her to get lost, and she had to be dragged, her heels biting into the dirt like backhoes, one hand gesturing rudely back at the guards and narrowly missing Toby's left eye as he doggedly pulled her to safety.
She tried dozens of times after that, but got no closer to the outside than she had that day at the front gate.
So she took matters into her own hands. She tested every inch of the metal shells around the perimeter of the city, looking for places she might still be skinny and shapeless enough to fit through. She asked the other kids, though most of them stared at her in bewilderment. Granville was way better than wasteland, they said, and her sister was as good as dead and probably half-digested in wild dogs. She had Ian in a headlock after that one, and had almost relocated one of his ears before the others pulled her off him.
Toby helped, as much as he had guts for. But more often, she was left to her own devices, and she used the freedom to climb the paint-stained metal towers that corkscrewed over the city, and tried to make nice with the younger guards from the watchtowers and prod them for possible exploitation. She made a circuit around the city every day, prowling for a way out, a gap they'd forgotten to tighten.
Piper, or Piper's body, was out there somewhere, far from the grave they made up for her.
Every morning, Rachel pushed the earbuds in tight to get closer to the century-old noise of guitars and raging, aching lyrics, and began a fresh hunt for the city's weaknesses.
Eleven: Heartbeat
Graham was a sunken, bare-bones version of himself, less little boy and more ghost already. Trip sat with him, because she had wanted to, and to give Marla the chance to see to her idiot grandson.
Neil had two broken fingers, both eyes blackened, and a split lip. And that was just what they could see from a distance. He refused to let them touch him and didn't have a word to say in his defense. He had curled up on the bed in equal parts righteous indignation and pain, and ignored them completely until they finally retreated.
The fight was all the town was talking about. Thankfully, Jason was everywhere, soothing hurt feelings where he could, visiting the dream-house and spending hours there with the enslaved, with Rose, having private talks he didn't share with Trip in any detail. He tended to the wounds Trip couldn't, wounds she hadn't known were there.
She had told Jason everything about Liberty. About the damaged turbine, and the sensors screaming nonsense after being reset, and the hydraulics breaking. She told him about the dream-house and, rather sheepishly, how she found it. She told him again about trying to get help for Graham, and Ben's eventual desperation. She told him about the dog they found, out at Rider, and Neil's research into it.
She told him a bit about Monkey, just enough so he'd understand that Monkey was innocent and could be trusted implicitly, but it rang hollow even to her, and she had no idea how well she made that point. It felt dishonest, anyway, after their argument outside the city gates. She hadn't sent a dragonfly to apologize, and wasn't sure what she'd have to say for herself if she did. All she wanted was space, and time.
Now, in the cool quiet of Ben's house, Trip smoothed back a bit of Graham's hair, sweat-soaked and limp against his forehead, and wondered how much left there could possibly be for the fever to burn away.
"Hey, little guy," she said. "Graham, sweetie. Sweetheart."
Ben's son, half-dead already, was just a limp thing in the bed now. He took in air and it left him scorched, and the entire house smelled like a sickroom.
Trip took Graham's small, damp hand in hers. "You want to hear a story?"
Graham couldn't possibly object, but he liked stories, so she took a moment to decide where to start.
Trip could divide her life in two. The split wasn't when Pyramid attacked her village, like she expected. Her life before that day was foreign now, a kind of waking dream that she was sad to realize didn't always feel real anymore. It was a safe, private thing that slid behind misted glass the day she found her father in the war room.
The divide was before Pyramid, and after.
"When Pyramid died," she started, and winced as Graham choked briefly on nothing and settled again.
She pressed his hand to her cheek. "When he died, there were a lot of people all around him. They'd been living there, plugged into that system like they were part of it. I barely saw them. I only saw him."
The people were in pits, after all, on either side of the raised walkway to the old man. He sat high over them, wires splayed like wings. Trip saw him and didn't even think to look down.
"He did it all," she said. "He...came after us, for as long as we could remember. My whole life, Pyramid's sent mechs on raids for slaves. We never knew why. They were just programmed that way."
Graham had been here in the village when Pyramid attacked. He ran with Ben, with the others, back into the sudden safety of the wilderness, while her father stayed.
"And after..."
And after, when she killed the old man, Monkey had reared back, like he'd stepped on a live current. The rest must have done it, too, but she didn't see them. She saw her father, abandoned in the war room, and imagined him dying, over and over.
And the voices rose out of the pits, scattered among the slaves, and the sound of it hit her like a wall of water.
Monkey had held her then, pressed her against him until she could only smell the warmth on his skin, and not the oil and coolants that came pouring out of the pitiful man-machine. Monkey wrapped her up against the noise of the enslaved, lowing like cattle or screaming, some just screaming.
Graham snored faintly, and Trip wiped her damp cheeks with a palm. "After we killed him, we had all these people to look after. I thought—you know, we couldn't leave them. What would they do? So we took the slaver bands off of everyone. But..."
Some of them didn't want to take the bands off. Trip attributed it to shock, some sort of reflexive, post-traumatic need. But she'd talked them down and gently disabled the bands and eased them over raw skin. It had taken hours, getting to all of them, even with Monkey's help.
She set Graham's arm back at his side and smoothed down the covers. He was numb to it, even as she straightened his nightshirt at his collar and sleeves, like she was tucking him in for the night.
"Do you think..." she said, but she was asking herself, because Graham wasn't really with her, and he wouldn't have the answer even if he were.
"Do you think they hated me for it?"
It was the question she wanted to ask Monkey, but Monkey might not answer her now, if he ever planned to.
She sat up straight, swiftly enough to startle Graham, even fevered, into mumbling softly.
Monkey might leave. She had never been quite sure how far she could push him, and maybe asking for his name one more time had been enough. Maybe that coldness had been it, the silent way he slammed a door on her, and it couldn't be repaired.
After a minute, Trip stood. "Sorry, that wasn't a very good story, was it? Let me go find Marla, okay?"
She put a hand on Graham's forehead, trying not to let the heat of it scare her all over again, and started to gather her things.
"Don't worry," she said. "Concentrate on getting better, okay? I'm going to take care of everything."
But even Graham, locked in a fever-dream, could probably hear the lie in that.
Monkey expected his thoughts to be in some kind of order after trudging across the wasteland all over again, his feet and back aching like there was no padding left in them. Instead, he was just as wordlessly, aimlessly furious as he'd been when he had to turn and leave Liberty without actually reaching it. The anger was mostly for himself, but Trip hadn't done much to help, and he reserved a small part for her, too.
He kept forgetting how much younger she was, like it would stop being true at some point. There were an easy number of years between them, and even after all she'd seen, Trip still had that newly-made feel to her, which meant bright eyes and open hands, and simple answers for everything. Monkey outgrew it years ago, or maybe he'd never had it. He couldn't remember.
His water canister had been in the bag of bike parts, and Monkey's tongue was wad of spiked cotton by the time he reached the canyon. Monkey drank nearly half a gallon of water as soon as he got home, until his throat was a different kind of sore and his head started to swim.
He only let himself rest for a few minutes before starting up again, feeling like an old engine that splutters and complains but never quite dies. He washed his hands, careful to pick any remaining dirt from his fingernails and wondering if callouses could reach bone, and went out to the shed to take care of the boy.
There weren't many options, so he dug a pit as deep as he could in the rock-filled dirt on the south side of the canyon ridge. He hoped it was enough to keep wild things at bay, and to keep the wind from opening the grave to the sky after a week. It took him hours, and sweat poured off his back like rainfall.
Monkey picked up the boy, still wrapped in the sheet. He was stiff and rubbery all at once, in that space between recent death and the time when he'd go limp again, and Monkey just wanted to get him in the ground.
He lowered him as gently as he could and grabbed the handle of the shovel. He bit the point of it into the earth to start tipping it back into the grave, and stopped.
The sheet had come loose along the way, just enough for the boy's hand to flop free and lie in the open dirt like a dead bird, the fingers white and craned upward.
Monkey was suddenly glad that it was just him after all, and Trip was miles away where she didn't have to see this.
He swallowed hard and turned his head away as that first shovelful of dirt hit the boy's chest.
When the grave was full, Monkey plunged the shovel into the earth and stood back, sure he was supposed to do something, but couldn't for the life of him decide what. He had no sermons or goodbyes, or even the kid's name. But silence seemed wrong, too. He scowled at the new grave for a long minute before anything came to mind.
"Better luck up there, kid," Monkey said. "I'm sure you can see your mom from there, so look for her."
He rubbed the back of his neck with a rough hand, and had to wipe it on his pants when it came away damp with sweat.
"So, I don't know how to do this right, but I think they'll sort it out up there, okay? You...well, you let me know if they don't."
For some crazy reason, he added, "And I'll find the bastard who did this to you."
Because it wasn't raiders, and the boy didn't get separated from a caravan. There was a reason he was dumped at Monkey's front door with a needle stab in his arm and mere hours from death. Why it was suddenly Monkey's problem to make it right was beyond him, but it was a good excuse to get moving. Things here had started to take on that sour, unwelcome feeling Monkey usually recognized far before this point, and he had waited too long to move on.
He slung the shovel over his shoulder and turned away, because he couldn't think of anything else to do, and headed to his shack to start thinking about what to take and what he could leave behind.
There were more people than usual in the streets on Trip's way back across town, talking in high animation and gesturing. Over and over, she felt their eyes slip to her and back off again. She didn't start the fight, and she only almost helped stop it, and neither counted for very much.
They said Neil's name, or other, less kind things, with considerable venom, and didn't bother to quiet as she passed. Their outrage was palpable, an oily texture in the air that Trip breathed as she walked. She could feel the trouble with the enslaved bubbling to the surface, like an underground river wearing away at the ground beneath them.
Trip saw a few people in the market pantomiming their reaction to the feedback, their hands over their ears. She realized that they were marveling at Jason's heroics. Jason's solution had been swift and smart, if a little inelegant, and it warranted retelling.
She heard his name in the streets, more than once. Jason did this, Jason said that, as if they'd forgotten he'd only just arrived, and crawling in the dirt at that. She was oddly proud of him, having accomplished so much so quickly, but she made a point of remembering Ben on purpose to keep him close by.
When she got to the clinic, Jason and Geoff were standing outside, their heads bent over something Geoff was holding. It looked like a piece of Monkey's bike, as best Trip could tell.
"So, yeah, I had to rebuild the exhaust pipe here..." Geoff turned the thing in his hands.
Jason murmured appreciatively. "That's actually really good. Where did you learn to do this?"
Geoff tried to look confident and humble, but the smile tugged too hard at his mouth, and he had to duck his head. "Just...repair books Ben had. It's not that big a deal."
"Repairing something is more creative than people think," Jason said. "You have to see a problem a dozen different ways to figure out how to fix it."
"Yeah, that's what I keep trying to explain to Wren."
They looked up, a little late, when Trip approached.
"Hey," Geoff said, and went back to fiddling with the bike part.
Jason left him to it and came up to Trip. "Hello. How's...um..."
"Graham?" Trip asked. Jason just couldn't seem to hold that name in his head. "No worse, but no better. I'm sending Marla back to him, if she's ready."
"Are you going in to see him, then?"
Trip hadn't seen Neil since they first carried him in, and he dismissed them like they'd been the disappointment that day. "Yeah, I think so."
"You mind if I go with you?"
Trip shrugged. "Sure. Why didn't you go in before?"
"He doesn't seem especially fond of the enslaved," he said, and prodded his scars with a finger. "I was waiting for you."
Trip was ashamed of Neil, like he was her charge. "Let's go in together, then. Geoff—"
But Geoff was already headed back to the garage entrance, his mind on the workings of the bike.
"He got that bag of parts that your friend dropped off," Jason said. "It's been hard to drag him out."
Trip couldn't think about Monkey now. There was too much to even try, so she nodded at Jason and pushed Monkey clean out of her thoughts for the time being.
The clinic was near-still and silent, save for the brief interruption of Geoff opening the garage door on the other side of the building and disappearing into the work area. Marla sat at Neil's bedside, slightly different than she'd been at Graham's, her back bent ever so slightly forward. It was no longer a nurse's vigil, but something dearer, more personal, and Trip had to remember that Neil was her only family, or at least the only family Trip knew about.
Marla turned to them as they entered, and Trip swore all over again that this place made people older, just by sitting in it for too long. Marla was in no condition to care for Neil's cuts and bruises, much less Graham's illness. "Oh, Marla," she said softly. "You should go home."
Marla waved her off, but the motion was languid.
"No, please," Trip said. "You look terrible."
Marla smiled at her. "I'm quite able to care for—"
"Go away, Gran," Neil said, his back still to them. "I'm fine."
"You're badly hurt," she said.
"Yeah, well, what good will you be if you drop dead?"
"Neil!" Trip scolded, but Marla didn't seem bothered.
Marla stood unsteadily, and Jason eased her away from the visitor's chair. "Home with you, I think."
Neil flopped over and gave Jason a scrutinizing look. "Who are you?"
"He saved you yesterday, dear," Marla said, and let Jason support her arm. "He distracted them with that noise trick."
"The feedback was you?" Neil asked, and Jason's nod was a short jerk of his head.
"There were a dozen people on you, you know that?" Trip asked. "Jason had to climb the broadcast pole and loop in an auditory feed. If he hadn't, you'd be dead."
"I was fine," Neil grumbled.
Jason snorted on unkind laughter.
Neil's pride was even more easily wounded than the rest of him. He gave Jason a venomous look, shifted his weight to the edge of the bed, and tried to stand up.
Trip saw it go wrong as soon as he got his feet on the ground. She just barely caught him when his legs buckled in too many places. He collapsed back on the infirmary bed.
"Fuck, Trip, I don't need your help," Neil said, but his eyes were too bright.
"Clearly you do."
"He won't take any painkillers," Marla said, for their benefit.
Neil glared at her. "Painkillers are drugs. I'm not a stupid—"
Trip tightened her grip on his shoulder in warning. "Don't you dare. Don't you even say it."
"Where are you from?" Jason asked, suddenly harsh. "Granville? Where?"
"What do you care?" Neil sneered.
Jason pushed his hair away from his scars, and even Marla reeled at the brutality of them. "This is why. I want to know where they're still teaching people that scars mean—"
Neil cut him off. "Great. Another vegetable. That's what this town needs. Fuck, where are you all coming from? Is there a factory of you or something?"
"Something like that," Jason said, his eyes hard.
"Neil," Marla said. "Stop."
Neil pushed Trip's hand away. "And I bet you've been to that drug den, huh?" he asked. "Like the rest of them? Soaking all your brains until you aren't even human anymore."
When Jason didn't immediately reply, Neil snorted and looked at Marla. "The drugs don't fix anything," he said, like it was a long-standing argument. "They're going to ruin everything while we fucking watch."
"Language," she murmured, but that was her only response.
"The drugs help them dream," Jason said. "But you wouldn't understand that." His voice was low and furious, like distant thunder. "You don't know what you're talking about, so shut your goddamn mouth."
Marla cleared her throat. "He just visited them, Neil, that's all."
Neil waved a hand in dismissal. "He thinks it's okay for them to be vegetables for the rest of their lives. It's a disease, and it's going to destroy this town."
"You don't know that," she said gently.
"It's not like we haven't seen it before!" he barked at her, and her mouth tightened.
Jason worked so hard to bring himself back under control that Trip saw a muscle twitch in his jaw.
"You can't always assume how things will turn out," Marla said, but Neil wouldn't look at her any more.
Trip sighed, pushing out air until her lungs ached. "It's not that bad, Neil."
He wouldn't answer her, either, and steadfastly ignored them all until Jason offered Marla his arm. "I think that's enough for everyone. Can I escort you home?"
She shook her head. "I'm headed to see Graham."
"Any chance I can dissuade you?"
Marla smiled, papery and exhausted. "No, young man. I don't believe so."
"Then I'll make sure you get there," Jason said.
"Thank you," Marla said, and looped her arm through his. "I'd like that."
"Oh, fuck you," Neil hissed at Jason, who didn't so much as glance at him.
Jason led Marla outside, and had the grace not to give Neil the look he deserved before the door closed behind them.
Trip had clutched a handful of Neil's shirt in her hand again, and it was only when Jason was gone that either of them realized it. She released him hastily, and he brushed at the fabric as if she'd left marks there.
"Why are you such an asshole?" she demanded. "Do you practice when we aren't looking?"
But Neil was staring at the door, after Jason and his grandmother, mouthing something silently to himself and puzzling over it. He abruptly sat straight up, poleaxed by something Trip couldn't see. She waited cautiously, in case he made a mad dash for the door, but he only watched it with darkened eyes, one of them red-caked from a broken blood vessel. He tipped backward, like a ship nosing into lower water, and his skin went even whiter than usual.
Trip was getting tired of catching people all the time, but at least it was teaching her what to look for. Neil's eyes twitched upward, and his back buckled, and Trip tried to help him make a softer landing.
He didn't pass out, but he did sink in on himself, all the rage and fight going out of him in one breath.
"Okay now?" Trip asked. "You okay?"
He turned to her slowly. He looked as bad as the worst of the drugged enslaved, his features at a half-tilt on his face. "Trip," he said, and she was shocked to hear his voice that tired so suddenly. "Who is he?"
"I don't know. I mean, his name's Jason. He arrived the day after Ben left, remember?"
Neil stared at her. "But where's he from?"
"Webster, I think? Somewhere. Why?"
He didn't answer.
"Just forget it. You did enough damage, okay? Everyone's going to hate you now."
Neil gestured to the corner. "You think?"
There had only been one window left to shatter, but it must have been too tempting to ignore. The brick they'd thrown lay pointless and abandoned against the tiled floor in a hailstorm of glass. Trip hissed. "When was that?"
"This morning," Neil said dully.
"Any idea who?"
"I forgot my x-ray goggles back at the lab."
"Quit being so...you," Trip said. "Please. I'm trying to help you, you know that? I don't know why I'm even trying."
Neil looked at her through slitted eyes. "No, you aren't."
"I am trying," Trip said, but she knew she didn't quite get what he meant, and she was too exhausted to ask.
It was strange sitting with Neil and not doing anything, but she didn't want to leave him after seeing what they'd already done. So she listened to the hum of Ben's machinery, in Ben's clinic, and the distant noises of Geoff tinkering in the garage. She realized she couldn't say for sure how long Ben had been gone, or how much longer it might be for him to come back. And she needed him here, maybe more than she could remember needing anything.
Other than Monkey.
"I was with Graham this morning," she said at last. "I don't think he's going to make it."
She wasn't sure what expression passed over Neil's face. "Yeah," he said quietly.
"'Yeah'?" she repeated. "That's it?"
"I already told Ben I couldn't help."
She moved to touch him, but Neil jerked his shoulder away, and it cost him another wave of agony.
"Please," she said. "Graham's going to die. Don't you even care?"
"It doesn't have anything to do with me!" Neil said sharply. "I don't know anything about it, and I can't help."
Trip backed away. "You would have made a shitty doctor, you know that?"
"Fuck," Neil said, not even at her anymore. "Fuck this whole town. You can all go to hell."
Trip felt the rage well up in her like a storm, like something raw and welcome. "Same to you," she snarled. "We didn't have to take you in, you know. You showed up at the gates like the enslaved do, and we took you in. You eat our food and sleep in our beds and Marla earns her keep and is lovely and wonderful and I don't know what the hell you're good for."
Neil's gazed darted to her. "It was a mistake for everyone, then."
Trip had never kicked anyone out of town before, and she didn't want to start now, but he wasn't making it easy. "Maybe," she said instead.
Neil sat up again and started to peel the bloodstained hospital fabric from his skin. The bruises were hand-sized and swollen over his back, and midnight blue-black in the worst places. He was skinny, even skinnier than Trip had thought, and she realized that he was showing her this on purpose.
"You earned those," she said. "You know that."
He turned to her, and his chest was even worse. The broken ribs jutted forward, not enough to break skin but worryingly close to it. His right collarbone was angled where it shouldn't be, and blood swam just under the skin.
"Jesus," Trip said.
"Get out," Neil told her. "You think you're helping? You're not. Solve your own problems."
"Like what?" Trip asked, but she couldn't stop seeing the ripple in his breathing, like bones and muscle still rearranging. "I'm doing everything I can."
He gave her a long, narrow glare. "Just get out."
Trip did, but she saw the bruising on his skin long after she left, long after she blinked up at the sun-bleached sky, like dark spots burned in her vision.
She couldn't find Jason for a while, but she stumbled across all the places he'd been. Everywhere she went, she met people who had seen him that day, though not recently. Trip spent an hour looking, because she wanted to ask something she hadn't yet, that had been the first question in her mind since they cleaned the dirt from his skin, and she hadn't been brave enough until now.
She stopped by the dream-house, which was quickly becoming more of a gathering point. Awake now, the enslaved huddled in clusters and talked, maybe about the dreams they had before the drugs ran out, maybe not. They gazed at Trip with misgiving until she explained she was looking for Jason, and then their faces lit like switches being flipped, all at once. They hadn't seen him, of course, but they'd like to, if she found him.
She made her way to the watchtower. They told her Jason had come and gone, but he mentioned he was going to sit with Graham to give Marla the break she'd refused for so long.
And so Trip went back to Ben's, and found Jason reading at Graham's beside, apparently unaware that he'd been hiding from her.
He glanced up as she came in, and pressed a finger to his lips, as if she stood a chance of disturbing Graham.
"What's up?" he asked, after she pulled a stool up alongside him.
"When did you get your scars?" she asked, without preamble. "Why are they different?"
Jason smiled ruefully, a little slow. "I was wondering when you'd ask. Everyone else has."
"I wasn't sure if you'd answer."
He walked his fingers along the marks the band had made, clear across his forehead to his temples. "It was a long time ago."
"Yeah," Trip said. "You didn't come from Pyramid, did you? Were you on a slaver ship when the system went offline?"
"No, thank goodness," Jason said. "I think some of those crashed. Lost guidance data right in the middle of it, and fell straight down. A lot of the slaves died that way."
Trip tightened her hands on the stool until her bones hummed. "I didn't know that."
"No, I don't think you would have expected it," Jason said neutrally.
He sighed and massaged his scars with his fingertips. "Anyway, these are older. Years ago. I was probably your age."
"You escaped?" Trip asked, and was surprised she never considered it. "Most people die if they try."
Jason's hand dropped into his lap. "Well, no. We didn't escape, exactly. We were on a ship, though."
Trip remembered the ship that had taken her, and the dozens of pods that lined its halls. "What did Pyramid need enslaved for on a ship? Don't the mechs run it?"
"Mostly, yes. It's almost totally automated. Altitude, destination, speed...pretty much everything. But it's not perfect, and landing and taking off usually needed more guidance than that. In the end, everything needed more flexibility than automation."
Trip nodded, fully understanding that.
Jason flexed his fingers. "That day, something went wrong in the ship's programming. The entire system went down, and the ship switched to manual control. We had to land it. We...very nearly didn't."
"You couldn't have used the escape pods?"
Jason shook his head. "Mechs wouldn't let us. We had to save the ship. They were all old, you know, and there weren't as many as there used to be. Orders were to land and repair it."
"And if you didn't..." Trip said, and Jason nodded.
"We managed it, somehow, but it was a rough landing." He paused and shrugged. "The mechs had us all outside to look at the ship, to see what was damaged, which is when we noticed."
Trip barely waited a full second. "Noticed what?"
"The ship and mechs used the same programming," he said slowly. "They communicate. Whatever took the ship offline spread to the mechs. It took a while, but they all powered off. As well as..." He tapped his scars. "Well, it enough to stop the control. The bands themselves didn't open. We had to force them off."
"That's why your marks are so bad."
He must have been remembering that, because he scowled. "Maybe it's why we couldn't dream after that. Maybe we did it wrong. And a lot of them...the people on the ship, couldn't survive with it cut off like that. The ones that didn't die in the landing...they didn't make it without the bands. The ship had two, three dozen people when we took off, but by the end..." His mouth twisted.
Just like Heather, and countless others back at Pyramid. Trip reached out to touch his hand, but stopped halfway. "At least you were free," Trip said.
Jason shrugged, and she felt foolish.
"So what then?" Trip asked. "Where did you go? Where's the ship now? How many of you survived?"
"At the end, it was just us," he said. "And she..."
Trip blinked, startled, but waited for him to continue.
"Just us," he said again. "She said we had to leave them. We walked away from the ship, and left it there."
No sand to leave footprints in, but the same idea, after everything.
They listened to Graham's wet, uneven breathing for a few minutes. Trip fretted at the edge of her chair with her fingertips.
"Where is she now?" she asked. "The woman who escaped with you?"
Jason didn't acknowledge the question at first, and instead went statue-still, his eyes frozen, and Trip knew she only imagined seeing the scars writhing on his skin.
"She's gone now," he said softly, and suddenly left Trip sitting alone, the door drifting shut behind him.
After a few moments, long enough to smooth Graham's hair behind his ear, Trip stood and followed.
Geoff caught them as they were coming out. He was breathless and just shy of breaking into a sweat. Wren was at his heels, in no better shape.
"Mark's holding an emergency meeting," he said, and gulped in air.
Trip's gut wrenched. Of all the days for Mark to finally surface, it had to be now. "He can't– Who does he think he is?"
"Everyone's already there," Geoff said. "We were sent to find you."
"Okay," Trip said, but Wren made some panicked noise, barely a word at all. "What, Wren?"
"Mark found what he needed," Geoff said angrily. "It's over."
"Over? What's that supposed to mean?" she asked, but he shook his head.
"Monkey..." Wren said quietly, and went still again.
Geoff had forgiven her, or at least enough to let her take hold of his arm. "He's already telling everyone about it. He got a dragonfly today..." Geoff trailed off and gave Trip a helpless look.
Trip scrambled to find something reassuring. "Look, I already plotted out the abductions. They weren't anywhere near the canyon. Mark can't have much of an argument."
Wren shook her head, and Geoff scoffed quietly.
"They're not going to care about that when they see this," Geoff said.
"What did Mark find?" Trip asked, and the lump in her throat was solid rock.
Wren spoke up, thready and trembling. "Monkey and a boy. The boy died."
"What?" Trip asked, because it was all she could ask. "What?"
She turned to Geoff. "What?"
"I don't know," he said, and thrust his hands into his pockets. "You tell me."
All Trip remembered of it later was that it had all happened too fast for her to get the words out properly, and she cursed herself endlessly for it.
They let everyone into the meeting who showed so much as a passing interest, and the war room was packed tight. There were too many of them for the small space, but no one seemed to mind being jostled. Everyone had heard that something, they didn't know what yet, was happening, and they didn't want to miss it.
Mark was at the head of the table, with Rose at his side, and the excitement in their faces blossomed as Trip walked in.
"There you are!" Mark said, absurdly grand. "Finally. Let's do this already."
Trip's heart sank. She only recognized a few of them, out of the corners of her eyes. Without Ben or Nash, or Neil or Marla or any of them, it was a room of strangers. She had Geoff and Wren, who'd been admitted as an oversight, and Jason, who stood at her side but was more fascinated than concerned.
"We got him," Rose announced, to Trip and to the room. "We got the proof we need to show that he's been taking the children."
"Who?" someone asked, breaking her cadence, and she glared him into silence.
Mark stood taller than Trip had ever seen him, in spite of the dark circles under his eyes and the clear signs that he'd been pursuing this with a madman's intent since the last meeting. He held the datachip aloft, as if they could see the evidence on it in his hand, and smiled in a way that could freeze the waterfall.
"I've been sending out dragonflies," he said clearly, broadcasting it to the crowd. "As often as I could. They were supposed to record the activity along the road, where the children were taken, and bring photos back to me of any life that way."
Trip dug her fingers into her arm at first, but Jason took her hand in his, and she squeezed that instead.
"And," Rose said, "we sent some to the canyon."
Mark plugged the datachip into the console with a flourish, like it was the greatest moment of his life, and the vidscreen flickered. When it solidified, Mark smiled, his teeth predatory. "A few days ago, this is what it recorded."
"Shit," Geoff said, and the room erupted into shocked murmuring.
It was Monkey, the shape of him slightly fuzzed at the edges, but still undeniably him, and he had a limp child in his arms.
Trip felt the floor go unstable under her feet, and Jason was suddenly holding half her weight.
Whether the boy was already dead was debatable, but it didn't seem to matter. The room chattered loudly, some of them horrified, some gleeful with the scandal of it.
Trip knew, with a pain in her chest that was like having the wind knocked from her, that it was her fault for not letting Monkey tell her this when he tried. He might have had a chance to explain, but there was no hope for it now.
"There's more," Rose said, nastily, and Trip didn't doubt it.
The other photos were exactly what she feared. Monkey carried the boy inside, and Mark explained that there was a delay of a few hours before he emerged again, this time with a white sheet wrapped around what had to be the boy's body and conveyed him to the shed.
"The dragonfly's battery ran out after that," Mark said. "But I think it's enough."
"It's more than enough," Rose said, and snarled at any possible defiance. "We're voting now."
"Voting on what?"
Rose and Mark glared at the other end of the table, and Trip was shocked to find that it was Geoff, at her side, who had spoken. "That doesn't prove he killed him, or that he kidnapped him. What are we voting on?"
"You're not voting anyway," Mark said. "And even if you were, you should be thinking about how to keep your sister safe, so shut it."
"Yeah, well, what if they're fake?" Geoff demanded. "It could all be made up. You hate Monkey."
"They look real enough," Jason said quietly.
Geoff glared at him. "Yeah, what do you—" he started, but fell back as Wren yanked his arm hard enough to unbalance him.
Rose stood, and it was a regal, liquid motion that drew attention to her. "We have enough evidence to send to Granville. We'll be doing that no matter the vote, because they'll have the resources to pursue it."
Trip couldn't speak. She tried, but the entire language up and left her, and her mouth felt sandy.
Rose smiled. "So, we'll be taking a vote on how we, as a community, want to respond to this threat."
Mark cleared his throat. "We propose an exile, obviously. Monkey won't be permitted within a hundred yards of Liberty's perimeter."
"Or what?" Jason asked softly, but they all heard him. "What if he does come?"
Mark looked at him with faint surprise. "We'll shoot him, of course."
Trip found her voice then. "Mark! This is crazy!"
The snarl faded from his face for just a moment, just enough for Trip to see that he really thought he was doing the best thing for them. And for her too, probably.
Rose cleared her throat and held her hand aloft. "Those in favor of exiling this man—Monkey—from Liberty, pending investigation from Granville for abduction and murder?"
Nearly every hand in the room went up, until there was a sea of them, and Trip was drowning on air. It was all so democratic. It wasn't something she could hack, or reprogram to suit her. There was new, damning evidence she didn't have time to combat, and a room of people primed to believe it. Nothing she knew how to do would work here.
Trip heard Geoff distantly. "Maybe we can prove they're fake. Just give me five minutes with them..."
Everyone ignored him.
"Those against?" Rose asked, quiet and dangerous.
Geoff's hand shot up. So did Wren's. Trip raised her hand, and Jason slowly followed her lead.
Rose looked at Jason in dismayed surprise for a moment. She made a show of counting, but it was purely for the entertainment of it.
"That's twenty-two for exile," Rose said, and ticked them off with animalistic fury. "And four against."
"That's it, then," Mark said. "If Monkey comes anywhere near Liberty, he'll be shot on sight. Motion passed."
The room burst into applause, of all things, and Trip stumbled back. It had happened, nice and neat and officially approved.
"You're wrong," she said, under the noise. "You'll see."
Mark was the only one who heard her say it, and he narrowed his eyes.
Trip spun, and couldn't find the door for a second. Jason caught her elbow and maneuvered her through it, and she slipped outside.
Her first instinct was to run, but she wanted to be seen calm, and more collected than she had any intention of being. There were people gathered outside, curious about the racket in the war room, but Trip ignored them and pushed through.
She went to the clinic first. She had some initial thoughts on how to turn the datachip against Mark, but she needed another brain, and she needed it immediately. Neil was her best chance. He might not care whether Monkey was shot, still far from Liberty's gates and dead before he knew why, but he'd love picking apart the video, and heaping scorn on the person who stitched it together, if it was fake. More likely, they'd have to prove that the timestamp didn't match the abductions, or scour the video for other evidence that the scene had to be interpreted another way. There had to be.
Trip's plans came to a momentary halt when she found the clinic empty. The bed had been remade, and Neil was long gone. He shouldn't have been, with injuries like that, and Trip was surprised.
She wheeled at the door and headed toward his lab.
If anyone dared to meet her eyes, she didn't know, because she would only look straight ahead, as if nothing could sway her interest. She stared at the space in front of her nose, thinking about crossing all those miles with Monkey, so close she could always sense him, slaver band or not.
She knew how he twitched in his sleep, just slightly, like a dog sighting an animal it wanted to chase but was never able to reach in the dream. She knew how he hated to let her see him in pain, though he always would be at the end of a day's travel, and how he gave her more than enough room when she needed it, and knew when to come close again.
She moved through the city in a clean line that she could have done blind. No one asked where she was headed, and none of the gates gave her trouble. The world opened a path for her, straight to the lab – or it had simply run out of obstacles to give her for a while.
Trip was surprised to find the the door to the lab open. She thought he'd have locked it down like a fortress after the fight, with iron bars and tripwires and posted dragonflies. Instead, the door swung open as soon as she put a hand to it, practically on oiled hinges.
The lights were on downstairs, but she didn't hear him moving around, and didn't smell any of the usual chemicals. She fumbled her way down the stairs on wobbly legs, and made sure to take a deep breath before leaving the bottom step.
The first thing she noticed was that the door to the rabbit room was open, but Neil was nowhere in sight. She paused at the bottom of the stairs, uncertain, and waited for him to materialize.
"Neil?" she asked, finally. "Where are you?"
She heard a constant, patternless thumping noise, and realized it was the rabbits' small feet thundering in their metal cages. Trip swallowed and moved forward into the lab, surprised that she'd made it this far without being noticed, and almost slipped in a puddle when she rounded the lab table.
Trip didn't scream, somehow. She scrambled back, hands and feet and knees everywhere, just to get away.
Neil was lying face-down on the floor, the back of his head bloody and cracked open to the air.
Trip had slipped on the fresh blood that pooled around his head and spread out like a living thing across the concrete. One of her hands landed in something wet and pulpy, but the hand stopped being part of her at that moment, and she left it glued to the floor.
"Neil?" she asked, around a numb tongue.
There wasn't even a stirring in his chest where his breath ought to be, and Trip knew that she wouldn't see it again, no matter how long she waited.
"Trip?" someone called, far away.
She barely heard it. She lifted her first hand to see blood, and her brain stumbled on the brightness of it and stalled completely.
"Trip? You down here?" Geoff's disembodied voice floated down, and a hysterical giggle welled up in her throat.
Geoff pounded down the stairs. "Jason said you might be here. I've got some ideas. Mark can't just—"
He skidded to a stop when he realized she was sitting on the floor, one hand in the air in front of her face, like she was counting fingers. "Trip? What happened?"
She lifted the other hand. That one had landed in something gray that squished between her fingers, and she lurched to her feet when she saw it. She pressed her hand, palm out, in Geoff's direction, and pointed at Neil's body with the other.
Then she threw up.