Stitches

3. Patch It Up

3. Patch It Up

Mina

The “someplace safer” Darius had promised turned out to be a curtained-off section of a concrete room that had definitely been repurposed from a previously abandoned building.

I’d been too heavily sedated on the ride over to plot the turns reliably in my head, but conscious enough to know by the length of the ride that we were still in Prospero, or very close to it, probably somewhere in the outer edge that was mostly farms and gold rush ruins now.

My phone had conveniently gone missing during the relocation, but otherwise my circumstances weren’t much changed.

New ceiling to stare at through my slightly eye-straining spare glasses. Same Occupation guards and gradually healing complex injuries taking their turns at threatening to kill me but never getting around to it.

I spent the first two hours reciting the lyrics of Patience under my breath, to keep my focus sharp enough to inventory every divisible component of the new room’s furniture and machinery, the respective probable number of seconds it would take me to detach each one, and the relative potential usefulness of each as an implement of either escape or defense.

Not long into the third hour, there came the clang of a reinforced steel door being blown off its hinges. My less than promising math brought my good hand down to unscrew the guardrail on the right side of my bed.

Someplace safer indeed.

The two guards, both currently strangers to me, raised their rifles and fired down the hallway in the direction of the sound.

Something squelched down the hall in spite of them. The wooden cracks and sticky, peeling squeaks of a transforming Splinter echoed closer, until its flesh-colored tendrils lashed around both guards, breaking the imitation bones that held their guns and burrowing through their skulls with surgical precision.

I doubted the guards would die, but I’d seen Splinters overpower each other’s minds like this before, and I knew they wouldn’t be capable of doing any more guarding in time for it to matter.

The mass of tentacles and organic-looking spears oozed its way into the room, just as the ineffectually light aluminum railing came free in my hand.

I raised it over my head.

Then I recognized the human clothes still tangled up in the Splinter parts. The Spin̈al Tap t-shirt.

A pair of humanoid eyes blinked open out of the mush and confirmed its identity.

“Dad?”

The rest of his face emerged in answer.

The Splinter of my father found my IV line and yanked it out with one tentacle.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking you to rescue Ben,” said Dad. “Is that acceptable to you?”

“You’re… what, going rogue?”

“Rub it in later.”

He placed a tentacle on one of my immobilized feet, and my first thought was that the slight jostling hurt far more than it should have. The pain spread upward in a rapid wave, the sum total of a million nudges and a hundred bad days of aches, itches, and swelling. I squirmed with only the most primitive of objectives: find comfort, find the morphine button, find any position but this one.

“I know. Sorry.” Dad held my foot firmly in place.

“Wh…?” Speaking cost effort that I needed to stay conscious.

The wave reached my head, reigniting the first, staggering shock of my concussion, and then doubled back down my arms and my other leg, popping every joint and kicking every bruise in its wake.

When the aches finally began to fade, every instinct told me to be still, to avoid disturbing any new region of myself, but I risked craning my neck toward Dad. He was busy sharpening the ends of two fleshy tendrils and hooking them under the edge of my leg cast.

“Wait…”

He pulled, and the plaster broke.

“I’m supposed to have nine more weeks of—”

He repeated the process on the other leg.

“Come on, get up.” He took my left hand, ignoring the wrist cast and finger splints that remained there, and tugged. In the aftermath of whatever had just run through me, the pressure was strangely painless.

Tentatively, I dropped the railing and swung my legs over the side of the bed where it had been, testing my weight on them and finding them as sturdy as they’d ever been.

I took in a sharp breath, noticing the absence of protest in my ribs. I checked the crook of my elbow where the IV had been and found no blood, no mark at all.

“What did you do to me?”

“To you?” Dad repeated, breaking the cast off my wrist and letting me untape the splints myself. “Really, sweetheart? To you?”

He began to shrink and revert to human form, one fold of Splinter matter spitting out a bundle of black fabric as it transformed.

A change of clothes from my own dresser.

I stepped unsteadily into the worn black jeans, traded my hospital gown for a matching long-sleeved shirt, tied the shoelaces in a quick, messy knot, and followed Dad at a jog around the twitching, temporarily melted guards. He led the way down the hall to the breached front door, across the untended, industrial-looking lawn, to where his car was parked hastily across the driveway.

When I saw who was keeping watch next to it, I skidded to a stop, my throat filling with bile and my hastily re-learned skill of standing upright almost failing me.

“What’s that thing doing here?”

The Sliver of Aldo, the creature who was sapping my friend’s life with every passing moment, looked at its shoes and pretended not to hear me.

Mostly for the excuse not to look at it either, I scanned the street, half expecting to find the Old Man waiting there too, if Darius’s information was so out of date.

“Mina,” Dad sighed, “sometimes I think you’re trying to be cruel. He went to a great deal of trouble to escape from the Slivers and find you.”

“It stole Aldo’s body!”

“Did he, now?”

“I’m not getting in a car with it.”

“Then stay here.” Dad took the wheel and tossed his toolbox conspicuously onto the front seat, leaving only the back available, which the Sliver took one end of. “If we survive picking up Ben, we’ll let you know how it went.”

Kicking the asphalt with the ball of my newly functioning right foot, I hurried after them. Once I’d slammed the back passenger door behind me, I folded myself as close to it, and as far from the Sliver, as possible.

Dad tore away from the curb, and I searched the patchwork fields of crops outside the window for landmarks.

The wooded cliffs framing the fields on either side of the road told me I’d been right; we were still in Prospero’s shallow valley. If I’d also been right about the general direction of the ride from the med center, and if I wasn’t misplacing too much time in assuming that the sun should be in the northwest by now, then we were pointed east, away from town.

“Do you know where they’re keeping him?” I asked Dad.

“More or less.”

“Is that where we’re heading?”

“Via a stop or two.”

“Why a stop or two?”

“Ben is a priority.” If Dad meant for this to sound reassuring, he fell short. “But I’m sure you’ve noticed we’re juggling a few different crises here.”

The sunbaked asphalt blurred past below us, the distance back home becoming increasingly daunting, even with my feet now restored to working order. If we were truly headed toward wherever Ben was being held, then I would gladly have put the pedal to the floor, but without more information, I was already feeling carsick, my internal compass conspiring with my inner ear to demand a map check.

It wouldn’t take long for the guards at the undisclosed holding facility to put themselves back together, however, and my being retaken by the Occupation would serve no one. I needed this chance, this car.

The fact that the Splinter of my father was the least worrisome thing I had to share that car with did not settle my stomach. It seemed alarmingly possible that one of our “stops” might involve dropping me off at Dad’s own idea of “someplace safer.” He might even have tasked Sliver-Aldo with keeping me there, while he continued on to whatever his real next stop was.

True, he had said he was taking me to rescue Ben, and he was usually more prone to omissions and doublespeak than outright lies, but he wasn’t usually prone to helping me undermine the will of Splinter leadership, either.

I confined my gaze to the road, to keep my queasiness to a minimum.

“If our priorities turn out to be different, breaking me out today won’t make me any more cooperative,” I warned Dad plainly.

“I would never have assumed otherwise,” he sighed.

I couldn’t tell if his tone implied that I ought to show more gratitude, or if that was just the echo of past arguments ringing in my ears.

“You visited me in the med center every day,” I said.

“Between trying to secure your safe, legal release,” Dad noted.

“Every day.”

“How odious of me.”

“And you never told me you were a healing Shard.”

“I’m not.”

“Really?” I flexed my perfectly functioning left hand. “I suppose you’re not an interdimensional alien who stole the body of Sam Todd either?”

“Mina, I realize I haven’t always been entirely honest with you—”

“‘Not entirely honest’?”

“And I agree that you’re old enough for a frank conversation about the family history, but the next phase of this maneuver is rather time sensitive.”

With some miles between us and the Occupation holding facility, Dad pulled off the conspicuous main highway and through a winding dirt track that barely qualified as a road. At the edge of a tomato field, he pulled over and opened his door.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I promised to give your mother a call once I’d collected you,” he answered. “Maybe ‘that thing’ can fill you in on a few details in the meantime.”

He walked farther down the dirt road than was necessary to make a phone call in privacy. I buried my face in the front seat’s headrest, trying to seal out the awareness of the imposter in the seat next to me. It was impossible.

“Go on,” I said. “Tell me what I have to know to save Ben. Just don’t talk to me like you’re Aldo.”

“I am Aldo.”

We’d been over this before.

“No, you’re not.”

“Am too.”

It rested its hand, palm up, on the seat between us, offering again the telepathic contact it had tried to initiate in the Sliver Warehouse.

“There are flamethrowers under your seat. If I’m lying,” its voice trembled, “kill me.”

Surrounded by killer Shards and gaping replication pods, the last thing I’d wanted in that Warehouse fight was any Splinter’s thoughts invading mine, let alone the thoughts of the Sliver feeding off of Aldo. But now that I was alone with it and its ridiculous claims, I didn’t mind the chance to tear them apart at the source.

As I had with Darius, I grabbed the Sliver-Aldo’s wrist and dug in with both my fingers and my mind.

The rough edges of my thoughts drilled through a soft outer layer of fear, anticipation, and half-remembered song fragments. I dialed up the force, digging for the incriminating moment not too long ago when this thing must have poured out of a replication pod imprisoning the real Aldo.

The Sliver-Aldo made no attempt to probe my mind in return, or to shield its own, responding only with a slight gasp when my search cut through the superficial layer of transient thought and struck home.

My rage shattered against a hard, crystalline reality inside him, leaving me reeling without its white-hot sense of purpose.

The moment I’d meant to throw in the Sliver’s face wasn’t there, and in the utter clarity of his memories, there was nowhere for that moment to be hiding.

In its place was my friend.

I was born like this, Aldo narrated for me, finding and clasping both my hands as the images of his life sharpened into focus.

I saw his parents flashing in and out of his sight over the years, both of them Shards from the very beginning, both of them shrouded in thickening nightmare, as Aldo had grown and come to understand what they were and what they expected of him.

That’s how Shards are made, by breeding two Splinters together in human form, he explained.

The flashes slowed, holding one memory in view. Through Aldo’s teary, ten-year-old eyes, I watched his father hold a shard of a broken plate to his arm and slice it through the skin with all the cold brutality I’d long imagined from him but never seen, never wanted to see.

My fury redirected with a sickening lurch as the blood welled up and ran down into the crook of Aldo’s elbow.

There never was a human Aldo Kessler. I’ve never stolen a human life, but if they have their way, I will.

“Go on, be a big boy and patch yourself up,” his mother prompted, arms folded, making it clear he’d get no help from her body-controlling power, which could mend any injury as surely and instantly as it could make them worse.

I knew this because he knew this.

“No use crying about it, you’ll have to learn these things sooner or later.”

Ten-year-old Aldo also knew that she might relent before school in the morning, especially if either of them marked his face by then, but for tonight, he was on his own.

He screwed up his eyes, and in spite of the darkness, I could feel the scene around him. The eyes of his parents. The terrified thrumming of his heart. The twitching muscle in his ear. The sting of his arm, and his desperate determination to keep that sting alive, to prevent the recent stirrings of Splinter fluidity from liquefying his skin back into an unbroken layer.

“Are you even trying?” his father asked in a voice that demanded prompt honesty with an intangible but irresistible pull.

“Yes, I swear!” said Aldo, a child grandmaster of half-truths, while trying with all his might to do the opposite of the task he’d been set.

The porcelain edge broke the skin again. Aldo clenched his teeth, and my own twelve-year-old face flashed across the mind’s eye of the memory, distorted and brimming with talismanic power. This face was both more beautiful and more forbidding than anything I’d ever seen in the mirror.

Once they decide I’m strong enough — Splinter enough — to survive it, they’ll force me to merge with Home and reconstitute me in a new human body, said the Aldo of today. It’s supposed to enhance my powers exponentially… at the cost of losing my mind.

The images skipped and shifted again.

I saw countless other scenes flash by, the night of the broken plate repeated with a hundred different painful variations. I saw Mr. Kessler double the size and density of his fist before breaking three of Aldo’s ribs some weeks before his fifteenth birthday, while demanding to know what tricks she was using to stunt the manifestation of his destiny for so long.

What tricks I was using.

In between, there were more images of myself.

From Aldo’s angle, I saw myself protect him from Patrick with an air of cool confidence I hadn’t possessed a trace of at the time.

Through the ache of skeletal repairs in progress, I felt myself hold him on his parents’ front lawn while Ben argued with his father on the porch in hushed, harsh tones.

I watched myself sleep, fitful and exhausted after Shard-Robbie’s assault. I stroked my own hair with Aldo’s fingers, experienced his temptation to touch my dreams, to steal a glimpse of my ravaged mind and try to repair some fraction of the damage. I shared his helpless understanding that to do so would be an intrusion and a betrayal.

I saw myself burn and zap Splinter after Splinter, a sight both thrilling and terrifying, before finally turning my flamethrower on Aldo himself, first in his waking nightmare at the hands of the Shard-Robbie, and then on the day of the humanity test, when that nightmare had finally come true.

Exactly the way the Slivers — via Billy — had planned.

I couldn’t comment, couldn’t apologize. I was floundering too deep in the flood of images and feelings to separate out a response of my own. Even one-sided as it was, this unobstructed closeness was overwhelming, nearly smothering. And yet I was afraid that if I reinserted the slightest distance between myself and the Aldo I’d thought I lost, he might slip away again.

Finally, I watched his parents’ recapture of him, his mother stripping him of the parasite he’d been clinging to as an escape of last resort.

I heard her shouting after him, as he broke open the Old Man’s cage and made his run from the Sliver compound. “She won’t take you back! She’ll never understand you! You have nowhere to go but home!”

Locusta’s been trying to produce second generation super-Shards for centuries, Aldo told me. My parents want to be the ones to give her one. I’m the first experiment that’s lived this long. They won’t let me go without a fight.

I squeezed Aldo’s hands with all the reassurance I could muster. With effort, I managed to find my own mental voice under the outpouring of his.

Then a fight is what they’ll get.

There was a rush of gratitude and relief, overtaking Aldo’s consciousness and permeating mine.

I became abruptly aware of the continuing existence of our bodies when Aldo brought his lips to mine.

His thoughts both accelerated and softened, leaving his nightmares behind and replacing them with five years of thoughts and hopes that all culminated here.

There were images of us, both remembered and fabricated and every gradation between, interspersed with observations.

How the two of us were so alike, two unwilling products of the Splinter war, trying to make up for the crimes and mistakes of our parents. How if there was one consolation for the circumstances that had brought us into the world, it was that those same circumstances made it possible for us to share the weight this completely, this easily, with each other.

These thoughts played deferentially in the background of the immediate moment present, Aldo kissing me, and me kissing him back, and both of us feeling both these things in an endlessly reflective loop, like the illusionary corridor of a mirror maze.

For my part, I couldn’t claim to be thinking anything half so comprehensive or coherent, even in the background.

Going from avenging Aldo to kissing him, from slashing my way out of my own head to getting lost in his instead — it was like coming home, only to find everything there upended.

The false infinity of this moment was comforting and terrifying and inescapably finite.

Without meaning to, I thought of Ben, his face appearing too clearly and centrally for Aldo to miss it no matter how he averted his telepathic gaze.

He pulled back from my mouth, leaving our foreheads touching. A wave of disappointment crashed over his joy, not displacing it but mixing with it in a turbulent pressure front that threatened to burst my chest open.

I know, he said, still through the skin. I knew that. I just wanted you to see me.

He sat back in his seat and folded his hands in his lap, breaking the connection, leaving my solitary consciousness feeling, for the first time, small.

“I…” I started. “I’m so glad you’re… you.”

“Yeah,” said Aldo. “Me too. Your, uh, your stuff really is under the seat.”

Glad for a neutral task, I reached under, my fingers finding not just a single flamethrower but a familiar thickness of canvas.

I pulled out my bag, the one Ben had given me, the one that held my weapons, my wallet, my backup phones, and every other inanimate thing I never liked to be without.

I’d thought I’d lost it somewhere between the Warehouse and the flight to Sacramento.

I held it to my chest.

“Thank you.”

“Thank your Dad,” said Aldo. “He’s been keeping it safe since the town meeting.”

He started to lean over the driver’s seat, looked back at me, and then shyly extended his arm instead, reaching his hand to the steering wheel with a Splintery c***k.

He gave the horn a light tap, which just so happened to coincide with the end of my parents’ phone call.

Dad slid back into the driver’s seat and looked over at the two of us, sitting at opposite ends of the backseat, now only suffering from a touch of post-kiss awkwardness instead of the pre-fight-to-the-death variety.

“All better, then?”

Aldo smiled back at him weakly.

I might have done the same.

“Good,” said Dad. “Because neither of you is going to like what comes next.”