Stitches

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 d**g 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 kidn*pped 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—”