Slivers

2. A Small Personal Complication

2. A Small Personal Complication

Mina

“So, the Ms. Craven thing… Real? Staged? Other?” Ben asked, dealing our first round of Texas Hold’em of the evening.

“There’s an ‘other’ option now?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

We were sitting on the floor of my basement bedroom, two surveillance feeds playing simultaneously in the background in case something noteworthy came up. Homework was spread out around us. Ben would probably actually finish some of it between rounds.

I might consider it.

Examining the cards in my hand, I placed my opening bet with all the false confidence Ben had taught me. That confidence didn’t carry over to the subject of conversation.

“I don’t know either,” I said.

Ms. Craven fell into the same infuriatingly unverifiable category as most of the rest of the town: not to be trusted, in case she was a plant by the Slivers or even the Splinters, but not to be abandoned to them either, in case she wasn’t. I was past pretending, at least to Ben, that I knew a perfect way to handle that.

The suicide parasite sat placidly in the containment box in the corner of the room, watching us. We were no closer to knowing exactly what it was or where it had come from. It certainly wasn’t like any Splinter fragment I’d ever experimented on, or any earthly life form Ben or I had read about. We didn’t even know if all Slivers had them in case of capture, or if they were used to force loyalty on unwilling converts.

Either way, it would make both questioning Slivers and rescuing their human hostages considerably more difficult.

Above us, my parents’ raised voices might as well have been a third surveillance feed.

“My people could disband the Council of Prospero over this! They’ve already threatened to send in some outside help if we cannot keep order,” Dad said.

“Maybe you do need help! Maybe it should be disbanded!” Mom threw back.

“Don’t joke about that!” Dad hissed. “You have no idea how bad things could be!”

“So stop them from getting that way! That’s your job, isn’t it? It’s not as if I helped these… these Slivers get the better of you!”

It was still strange, hearing Mom use Network terminology.

The Network, the Splinter Council, and the human Town Council had managed to maintain a nonaggression pact for over a month so far, each group turning its attention to rooting out the Slivers. Mom, Dad, and I had begun trading our respective groups’ information when necessary. The matter of Ms. Velasquez’s betrayal, for example.

Dad wasn’t taking that one well.

The Network even had special authorization to use deadly force against Slivers without voiding the treaty if it was absolutely essential, though such circumstances had not yet arisen. Dad had spent an excess of time impressing on me how very certain we had to be that the entity in question was in fact a Sliver.

The vibration of one of my phones announced incoming email, so I reached to click over to my inbox.

From Ben’s angle, he saw the sender’s name before I did and put down his cards.

THE OWL.

“Go on,” Ben said with only the slightest hint of grim humor. “Maybe he knows.”

“Or she,” I reminded him.

“Or it,” Ben completed our little routine.

It had been about a month and a half since our new informant had sought us out, and we still knew nothing about him (or her, or it) except that codename, an email address that even Aldo hadn’t been able to trace, and the fact that every tip we had received so far had been dead accurate.

I opened the message and downloaded the brief video clip that was attached.

The screen displayed the dimly lit interior of a house like dozens of others in Prospero. The footage had obviously been taken surreptitiously, and with none too steady a hand. There was one bright light in the background. It took a few seconds to make sense of the flurry of movement under it, two indistinct figures pinning a third.

“Shut it, or we’ll put you right back in!”

I couldn’t identify the threatening voice from the garbled audio, but when the figure on the floor shifted into view, I knew the face.

Cayden Halvorson sent a brilliant crackle of electricity across his own skin, knocking the other two figures back, and scuttled a few feet away on creaking, inverted elbows.

A Shard, definitely. An electric one, I noted with distinct personal discomfort.

“I’m not a kid!” the Shard snapped in Cayden’s voice, but not quite Cayden’s voice. The vocal cords were the same, but the forceful, arrogant tone made his voice almost unrecognizable. “I don’t need to be handled!”

The two figures advanced on him in evident disagreement, intoning indecipherable threats, before the clip came to an abrupt stop.

The message accompanying the clip consisted of one word:

Coincidence?

“They’ve taken Cayden,” Ben summarized flatly, probably trying to decide how to feel about that. I was used to the numbness that came from watching acquaintances I wasn’t even sure were human in the first place suddenly stop being so.

“He fits the pattern,” I said.

The Owl had tipped us off to three replacements after the fact in the past two weeks, sometimes with an apology for not having known in time for a rescue, all of them Shards. Three Shards, not counting the body-manipulator Ben had discovered in our last rescue. An ominous ratio, considering the fact that, until now, I’d encountered only one Shard in my eight years of work, and it had very nearly killed the entire Network. With the Splinters and Slivers fighting each other instead of just us, they were bringing out more powerful weapons.

All three of the new replacements were also from the extreme social margins of Prospero High.

It wasn’t uncommon for Splinters to select young outcasts for replacement. Though Slivers sometimes aimed higher, Splinters in general seemed to favor long lives with minimal pressure, expectations, and scrutiny. But so many people taken so quickly from such a small, specific pool had to mean something, at the very least that some Splinter or Sliver had found them a convenient target.

Ben didn’t need me to voice the question of who.

“You think Ms. Craven might already be one of them?” he suggested. “Picking out the latest targets? She had access. All the more reason for them to want to throw us off her trail.”

“Maybe,” I agreed.

All three Shard victims had been regulars in her sanctuary lunchroom at school. She would have been in the ideal position to gain their trust and lure them off alone. But then again….

“But they’re not throwing us off her trail, are they?” I pointed out. “They’re making us theorize about her right now. If it’s her, they’d have been better off drawing as little attention to her as possible. They already staged a k********g with the Splinter-Haley. They know we know that trick. They know we’re not stupid enough to fall for it again that easily.”

Or maybe they didn’t. And maybe we were. Maybe—

Ben snapped his fingers. “Mr. Montresor!” he said. “If it’s not Ms. Craven, if she was attacked to draw attention away from someone else, it’s got to be him.”

The school counselor would make an ideal Sliver recruiter: maximum information with minimum attention. He was probably the only person who could wield even more influence over the problem students than Ms. Craven, and even if he couldn’t, he spent plenty of time alone with each one, whether they wanted him to or not.

“That seems probable,” I agreed.

“Still listening to his bug?” Ben asked.

I hadn’t been prioritizing it as highly since we’d solved the identity of the Shard who’d been impersonating Robbie York.

“Some, but we should check.”

Ben nodded and reached to turn off the less critical feed at the same moment I did. I knew the instant our fingers collided that I was going to jerk away too quickly to be polite, the way I’d snapped at him after having to watch him nearly crushed between that SUV and Ms. Craven’s wall.

That was another problem, one that had me almost as concerned as the suicide parasites.

At some point during the past seven months, in spite of my best efforts, I had developed unintended feelings for Ben.

I’d kept them out of my conscious mind for as long as I could manage, but I knew the symptoms too well to avoid recognizing them eventually, especially after Shard-Robbie had finished picking through my brain and smearing every secret he could find across the walls of the school auditorium.

There was no question about it. My attachment to Ben was not only partnership, or friendship, or simple physical attraction, or some combination of the three; it was something much stronger and more all-consuming, something bordering on romantic monogamy.

Unfortunately, the simplest solution to that problem wasn’t feasible to implement. I couldn’t cut Ben out of my life. We’d made promises to each other after the last, disastrous time I’d tried, and I wouldn’t break my part of them over a few little stomachaches. Not to mention what an end to our friendship would do to the Network and therefore to humanity’s chances.

All I could do was prevent it from progressing further, block out all I could of the feeling, as I would any other unhelpful bit of fear or queasiness, until it ceased to exist.

Acting on the feelings was, of course, out of the question. I’d already killed one boyfriend—one boy the Splinters had taken because of how I felt, one boy whose duplicate I’d then lost my temper with—because of those same feelings.

I might not be able to avoid repeating all the peripheral aches and pains of that scenario the way I’d planned to, but I would not risk repeating it in its entirety.

Besides, there was more wrong with the idea of me pursuing Ben than the risk to myself or to his physical safety. He’d made it clear on multiple occasions how important normality was to him. He seemed content, for now, to help me incorporate normality into my life the way we’d promised, showing me a movie here, organizing a game night there, and I was grateful. There were even elements of his behavior, the odd nervous gesture or flush of color, that indicated he might possibly feel something other than friendship for me. Some easily diagnosed psychological side effect of shared traumatic experiences, no doubt. But we both knew “normal” was not a word that would ever accurately describe me.

Not like Haley.

I had little doubt Ben and Haley would soon notice their perfectness for each other, and once they did, rendering my feelings even more pointless than they already were, I was sure those feelings would also become easier to manage.

Upstairs, the front door opened.

“It’s me,” Aldo announced himself from halfway down the stairs in a brief moment between my parents’ outbursts. His voice was finally at the tail end of breaking and had gotten incongruously low over the past few months, but I could still tell from the unsteadyness of those two words why he was here.

Aldo’s visits were always for one of three reasons. Because our work needed him here, because I needed him here, or because he needed to be somewhere that wasn’t his house.

Before I could think of a way to warn him, he appeared in the doorway and froze at the sight of Ben. Barely a second’s disappointment, awkwardness, and indecision slipped through before he closed the door behind him and leaned against it only slightly more casually than he would have if I’d been alone.

Whatever Ben and I shared about work and our own lives, Aldo’s third reason for visiting was private.

Luckily, although neither Aldo nor I could be called experts on the subtleties of lying, we were both well practiced at pretending the third reason didn’t exist, with or without an audience.

Less luckily, Ben excelled at subtlety and picking up on it.

“Are you okay?” he asked in that sharpened way that seemed to mean something closer to I know you aren’t.

He didn’t know what I knew about Aldo—seven years’ worth of knowledge about his family, his habits, his unique quirks and tics—but he knew that something was off, instantly and without question.

“Yeah, why?” Aldo answered over the slam of a door in the living room upstairs.

Ben raised an eyebrow.

I was about to change topics by explaining our recruiter theory, but Ben spoke first.

“You’re shaking,” he said. “What happened?”

“What happened is that it’s freezing outside, and we don’t all live right across the street.” Aldo rolled his eyes and wrapped his awkwardly long arms around himself to demonstrate. His long-awaited growth spurt was off to a dramatic start. He was still a head shorter than Ben, rail thin, as pale as an antique porcelain figurine and about as sturdy-looking, but he’d already surpassed my scant five feet by several inches.

Ben continued to look suspicious.

“I think I’ve had a bad influence on you.” I directed a grin at Ben that made him stop examining Aldo’s body language. “If this isn’t paranoia, I don’t know what is. It’s Aldo. He’s on our side, remember?”

I’d been working hard on my jokes, learning to tell them better and more often. It was a skill I’d never put much effort into developing before, but Ben valued it, and after everything he’d been through because of me, any time I could make him smile, also because of me, was a particular victory. Using that skill to misdirect him caused an unpleasant twisting sensation in my stomach. But in this case, it had to be done.

“I know,” Ben said more lightly. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“I’m fine. Really,” Aldo insisted.

“Good,” I said. “That takes care of that.”

“Mina—”

“I know my friend,” I said.

My next words I selected carefully, in order to maintain as much as possible the streak of honesty I’d painstakingly built with Ben.

“I know how he looks when there’s news about the Splinters, and I know how he looks when he’s… having a bad day. This is the latter.”

“Thank you!” Aldo said in exasperated relief.

Ben only let it drop when I resorted to that awful phrase that must somehow mean something less futile to him than to me.

“Trust me?”