Stitches

1. The Drip-2

“How about not blowing your head off right now?” said his partner, raising her rifle. “How’s that for what we’re doing to help?”

“Don’t do me any favors.” I picked up my phone, tapped Send again, and turned on the speaker.

“You’ve reached Ben Pastor’s phone. He belongs to the Queen now. What’cha gonna do about it, huh Mina?”

I waited for the beep.

“Hello, fake Robbie,” I said, not lowering my voice in the slightest. “I don’t know if you’re actually checking this mailbox, but if you are, I just wanted to remind you which one of us was carted off kicking and screaming last time you picked a fight with my head. If you want a rematch, I’m in the Prospero Medical Center, room one-eighteen, bedbound and on a significant quantity of opiates. You might have to take care of a couple of armed guards first, but it’s not going to get much easier than—”

Darius’s partner strode over and knocked the phone out of my hand with the barrel of her g*n.

“Margaret,” Darius tugged her back, “she’s grieving. She’s harmless. It’s not like the insurrectionists don’t already know where she is. It’s not worth making a scene.”

“Yeah, Margaret,” I said her name but looked at Darius’s face instead. “I’m just a sick, crazed human. What’s my word worth?”

Without answering my question, Darius picked up my phone where it had fallen, checked it for broken glass, and set it gently on my pillow.

“I could send replacement crews to round up the rest of your cell right now,” Margaret threatened.

“With your luck, they won’t even show up in time to round up whatever Slivers are probably beating them to it right now.”

I didn’t know whom I was bluffing harder or to what end.

I’d had a lot of help the last time I went up against the Shard-Robbie, and it had still been one of the hardest, most painful fights of my life, right next to the one that had put me here. I wasn’t sure if I honestly wanted him to try to get at me past the guards, physically or telepathically, or if I just wanted to needle the smugness out of his voice.

I didn’t know if I wanted to make Darius and Margaret argue amongst themselves or talk to me or shoot me.

All I knew was that waiting for a whole plan to form wasn’t working, and standing still was death, for all of us. That was clearer now than ever.

I’d decided to deal with the dragon of my situation in the same manner as the dragon of my grief — by poking it with a sharp stick until something came loose.

“This is ridiculous,” said Margaret. “Our priority should be neutralizing her before they can try for her again, not cleaning up after her tantrums.”

“The team’ll be here any minute,” said Darius. “We’ll get her moved and call it a night.”

This was news to me.

“Moved? Moved where?”

“Someplace safer,” Darius turned back to me, blocking Margaret behind him.

“Why?”

“Because as you’ve just pointed out, there’s every possibility that the insurrectionists will try for you here,” said Darius calmly. “Especially since they’ve already made an extraction attempt on a caravan carrying your former allies.”

“A successful attempt?” I probed, dropping my voice low enough to make Darius lean unconsciously closer and put a caring hand on the railing of my bed.

“You know I’m not authorized to tell you—”

I clamped my good hand over his, felt his thoughts buzzing through his skin, and snatched at them with my own.

I’d only discovered that I could use Splinters’ contact telepathy against them a few months ago, and I hadn’t exactly practiced. My search of Darius’s mind was little more than a few blind stabs before he jerked away with a gasp of discomfort, but the answer to my question was there in the forefront, easy to find.

The Sliver-Aldo and the Old Man had passed from Occupation to Sliver custody.

“Thought so,” I said.

“I understand that you’re frustrated,” said Darius, standing more carefully out of reach. “And how exhausting it must be to pretend you’re in control when you’re not even sure if what you just learned is good news or not.”

I pulled my hand back from where it still rested on the railing.

“Thought so,” Darius teased, then gave me a nearly apologetic shrug, as if to say, Hey, you meshed our heads first.

It was true; I wasn’t sure whether the Old Man and the Sliver-Aldo were better off with the Occupation or the Slivers, or even whether I wanted them to be better off.

The Occupation, the Slivers, the Old Man, and the creature that had replaced my oldest friend — I hated every one of them, too deeply to call the feeling by any other name.

“I told you she was dangerous,” said Margaret.

“And I told you she’s just scared.”

“Scared animals are the most dangerous kind.”

Footsteps approached along the hallway.

“About damn time,” muttered Margaret.

But it wasn’t the backup team coming to move me to some new undisclosed location. Nor was it a raiding party of Slivers coming for my head.

It was so much worse.

With a tubful of cookies under her arm, Cynthia Pastor stepped apprehensively around the broken vase and looked from Margaret to Darius to me, sizing up the situation she’d just interrupted.

She looked even worse than I felt, her eyes redder than Haley’s had been, and she had the rumpled, faded look of someone who hadn’t seen a bed or a mirror since the day before.

“This is good,” Darius murmured to Margaret while giving Cynthia a cursory pat-down. “Let them visit until we’re ready to go, give everyone a chance to calm down, no one does anything they’ll regret.”

With a few more grumbles from Margaret, both guards retreated to the hallway, leaving me alone with Ben’s mother.

“Am I out of the loop again?” Cynthia asked softly, nodding at where Margaret’s back would be on the other side of the wall.

“No.” I raised my voice to make sure Margaret would hear me. “She’s just embarrassed that my team gave the Slivers more to think about in one night than hers has all week!”

Cynthia took the seat by my bed.

“I meant, you haven’t heard anything….”

She trailed off, leaving room for me to c***k open some secret cache of relief she hoped I’d been hoarding. To tell her that Ben was fine, that he was in hiding, that this had all been planned and staged as part of some greater master plan of mine that required her to play the frantic mother with method realism.

“If you’ve talked to Haley, you know as much as I do,” I broke it to her, with one hand on my phone, finally taking stock of the surveillance feeds Courtney had saved for me.

I couldn’t look at Cynthia. I’d just dragged myself out of a self-induced guilt stupor not ten minutes ago, and her sunken, puffy gaze was like a syringe full of my palliative of choice, offering to numb me back into uselessness.

She pulled the lid off the tub of cookies and held it out to me.

“They’re burnt, sorry.”

They were, pretty severely, but I took one anyway, glad for the extra challenge the blackened bottoms added to the act of eating them.

I scraped off the edible top layer with my teeth, hoping the process would nudge my mind into tighter order, the way complicated foods sometimes did. Maybe it would clear a space in the center for me to prioritize the feed backlog, and maybe even figure out the correct way to respond to Cynthia’s presence.

I separated the oatmeal from the chocolate chips with my tongue, cataloguing the comforting flavors and textures of refined sugar and whole grains, which always meant a flow of mental energy would soon follow. I tried not to taste the stiff starchiness of the three o’clock hour Cynthia had spent beating the dough senseless with her egg whisk, drowning her own helplessness in busywork. I made no comment on the bitter charcoal aftertaste of the crucial minutes when she’d clutched the edge of the sink to cry, her own mental dragon blocking her way to the oven mitts.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

“I threw a vase at my guards today,” I nodded at the glass-littered puddle. “So, better than yesterday.”

This would have made Ben laugh. Cynthia smiled grimly in my peripheral vision as I took stock of the feeds.

There were three bugs in the school and one in Town Hall that hadn’t been discovered by either the local Splinters, the Splinter Occupation, or the Slivers yet. Odds were slim that they’d recorded any plotting that would tell us where Ben had been taken, especially since Courtney had probably already gone over the likely time periods. But there was always the chance that she’d missed something and my luck would surprise me.

Cynthia waited for the eye contact I couldn’t make, then spoke anyway.

“Mina, honey…”

For some reason, the term of endearment made my eyes sting.

“I want you to know I don’t blame you for any of this. Present evidence to the contrary,” she added, trying to laugh at the tub of burnt cookies and producing only a spasmodic noise in her chest.

Even knowing that this blow was coming, I couldn’t be ready for it.

I put down my phone, placed the blackened base of my cookie in the empty emesis basin on my bedside table, and crushed my head between my hands, trying to shield the little rebuilding I’d done there from being shaken to pieces again.

“Why…” I started babbling uncontrollably. “Why wouldn’t you…”

“Because I know you a little better than you probably think,” Cynthia answered. “I know you’ve been playing mommy to your friend Aldo for the better part of his life, and I know he was lucky to have you. God knows no one else was making the effort. I know you feel like you have to take care of the rest of the world too, and I’m not going to tell the girl who helped save my niece’s life that she’s not needed or capable, but listen to me: you’re just one person. You’re seventeen years old. None of that should ever have been your job in the first place. You’re doing more than anyone has any right to expect, and the rest, anything that slips through the cracks, is not your fault. Understand?”

I swallowed to clear my throat. Then, out of options, I held out my good arm for her to hug me.

She did, and I wished I could claim I was doing it for her comfort, or even my own. The truth was that as long as I could keep her hugging me, it meant I didn’t have to feel her looking at me instead.

“You might be right about taking care of the world,” I told the wall behind her, and the few strands of her hair that were fluttering in the draft of the air conditioner. “Maybe even about Aldo.” I had to cough my voice clear again after his name. “Maybe I couldn’t help not being old enough, or strong enough, or smart enough to stop other people from doing things to Aldo. But I did this to Ben.”

Cynthia should have pushed me to arm’s length. She only squeezed me tighter, and I squeezed back.

I couldn’t allow myself to slide back into the guilt wallow, where the weight of everything I’d done wrong became an excuse to do nothing now, but I couldn’t take her misguided absolution either.

“I chose him for this,” I explained. “I chose him, knowing what happens to people I choose. The Slivers only targeted him to use against me. Right from the very beginning, not just now. I could have backed off the first time they threatened him. I could have kept them away from the two of you until you left town last year like you were supposed to, but I kept dragging him further and further in, until he killed that Splinter who was posing as Haley and got you trapped here. I didn’t know that would happen, not exactly, but I knew the dangers, and I knew that once I’d proven the existence of Splinters to him, he’d have to stay in touch.”

I couldn’t tell how much of this Ben had already told her, but there was no way she could know the next part. I’d never even said it to myself.

“I didn’t do it because it was necessary to take care of the world. He’s brave, talented, an asset to humanity, but that was never why.”

Cynthia was very still now in my one good arm, her embrace turning rigid.

“I chose him because I was lonely.”

There were footsteps in the hall, more of them now, purposeful.

“I had Aldo, and I should have been grateful for that, but I wanted a partner my own age again, and Kevin had turned me down. Kevin should have kept turning me down. I got him too in the end. But first, I forced Ben into the Network because I was lonely, and after everything I did to him, he still did his best for me. He would have stayed here with me all day yesterday, but I sent him to that party because even though I’m the one who wanted him in my life in the first place, I was too much of a coward to face what I might say to him if he stayed.”