I pull Jubilee closer in the water, inspecting her face. There’s still more shock than sense there; bracing myself, trying not to recoil, I cup a hand under Jubilee’s chin to turn her face toward me. I keep my other arm wrapped tightly around her, afraid she’ll sink beneath the water if I let go. Her eyes open when I squeeze her.
“Jubilee, are you listening to me?”
She doesn’t answer, her eyes darting around in the darkness, panic making her tremble in my arms.
“Soldier!” I bark, keeping my voice as quiet but tense as I can.
Her eyes widen, and I watch as the soldier takes over, her chin lifting a little.
“This rock here is hollow inside. I can pull you, but when we go under you have to hold your breath. Understand?”
She nods again, lifting one hand to rest it against the rock for balance and leaving a red smear behind it. The water hasn’t been enough to wash the blood away.
I suck in a lungful of air, my throat threatening to close or catch in a coughing fit again. The water closes over my head, and I keep hold of Jubilee’s wrist as I guide her in with me. The water carries the distant shouts of my people directly to my ears until we surface, choking, inside my tiny shelter. There’s only a small space that’s water; the rest is the natural rock and the ledge Orla built for me when I was Fergal’s age.
I push Jubilee’s arms against the rock until she instinctively grabs at it, leaving me free to reach up and fumble in the dark. The netting with emergency supplies is still there, and my heart slows a little in relief. I grab the tiny cylinder of the flashlight dangling from it and turn it on; the beam bounces around the two of us as I help her scramble up onto the little ledge and then crawl up after her. We huddle there in a space meant for a child, her breath coming in sobs.
I grit my teeth hard. I have to think of a plan, but my misery keeps tugging me back toward Sean. I need to be there for him as he grieves. I want to tell him I’m sorry I didn’t get there in time, that I couldn’t save Fergal. Instead, I cower here as Jubilee’s tension starts to ease a fraction, and I angle the flashlight to see part of her face. Her lips are parted, eyes staring, water dripping unheeded from her nose and her chin. I have to get her moving. I have to put enough life back into her to get us both out of here. Swallowing my grief and my revulsion, I lift my hand to brush her wet hair back from her face.
She jerks away from my touch. “Please, Flynn, don’t.” She looks half her age, except for the bloodstains on her face. If any of my heart was left untouched, it would break right now—that this is the time she chooses to finally use my name. When I can barely stand to look at her.
The soldier I’ve come to know never would have done this, and yet her hands are smearing my family’s blood on the stone. “Don’t check out,” I tell her. “You have to stay with me. I can’t drag you to safety or they’ll find us both.”
“You should have let him have me.” Her voice is empty and aching.
“It wasn’t you.” I have to force the words out. “It was the Fury.” It wasn’t her. My own thoughts repeat it, over and over, unwilling to face what I’ve seen. Wanting it to somehow reduce my pain.
“I don’t remember anything.” Her voice breaks, and as she curls in on herself she’s still shaking, but this is different. It’s not the trembling that came with the dilated eyes or the jerky movements. This is shock, and my arms move haltingly to wrap around her and keep her from sliding back into the water. Suddenly I’m not holding Captain Lee Chase, but a terrified girl who wants to press her way into the stone around us and stay there forever. “I killed your people. You should—you should kill me yourself, why aren’t you?”
“Because it wasn’t you.” I’m repeating the words in her ear, desperately trying to make it true for both of us.
“You can’t know that!” Her whisper is fierce. “Stop it, Flynn, you can’t—just stop it.” Her fingers wind into my shirt, at first to push me away, but her resistance crumbles, and she lets me pull her in close until she’s clinging to me, shoulders shaking as she weeps against my chest.
Hot tears track down my cheeks too, and my throat closes as I swallow hard, fighting for composure. I wish that for one moment I could forget what’s happened and hold her and let the contact between us heal us both. But I can’t. Even her scent has changed; her hair smells like gunmetal.
My heart wants me to wrap my arms around her. My heart wants her to suffer for what she’s done.
Her shivering worsens, and as if in answer, my body starts to shake as well. I reach up and feel around in the netting until my fingers close over a warming pouch; I activate the seal, then press it between our bodies to slowly heat up.
Now and then the murmur of a distant voice carries through the water and stone to our ears. It’s not until there’s been silence for some time that Jubilee speaks.
“What do we do now?” It’s barely a whisper.
I want to have an answer. My heart slams against my ribs, tempting me to panic, to give in to grief and fear and exhaustion. Now that I’m still, my abused lungs ache. “I don’t know.”
“The LaRoux Industries chip,” she says, eyes staring in the dark. “When I picked it up on that island, it was the same feeling—the same taste in my mouth—”
The same unseeing, dilated pupils I saw in the cavern. I squeeze her before she can start shaking again, trying to keep fear from joining my grief in overwhelming me. I cannot think, now, about the possibility that a corporation is responsible for the madness plaguing my home.
“I have to get to the base,” Jubilee says with a sudden, hollow urgency, as though reciting steps in a manual. “I have to report…. I have to tell them.”
My head jerks up. “Jubilee, you can’t. They ship soldiers off Avon when—” When they turn into murderers. My lips refuse to make the words real.
She blinks at me, haunted. “It’s protocol. It’s all I know.”
“Listen to me.” I grab at her shoulder, gripping it tight, until her eyes focus once more on mine. “You’re all I have now. You’re the only one who can help me stop whatever’s happening to my home. I can’t be on the base, looking for answers, but you can.”
“I can’t—oh, God.” Her eyes glaze, and I know she’s not seeing me anymore. She sees blood, and bodies, and the barrel of a gun pointed between her eyes. “I can’t.”