Shattered: A Shade novella (3 page)

Christ,
he’s so thin. Surely he’s thinking the same of me. ‘Dad. It’s good to—’
My throat closes. ‘It’s good.’

We
let go, and I turn to Martin. He shifts closer, face pinched and arms crossed,
one freckled hand rubbing his jaw.

‘Mate
…’ is all he says before his eyes fill with tears. And then Mum sobs, then I
sob, then Dad, too. Suddenly we’re all crying in the airport, in a very
un-British moment.

No
one holds one another now. We just stand there, weeping, holding ourselves.

*
  
*
  
*
  
*

‘Shouldn’t
it seem smaller?’ I ask Martin as the two of us stand at the threshold to my bedroom.
‘Isn’t that how it works when you go back to a place you haven’t seen in a
year? You’re bigger, so the house or school or whatever seems to have shrunk?’

‘
Dunno
, mate.’ Martin gives me an easy grin, his natural
cheer having returned during the car ride home. ‘Perhaps you’re the one who’s
shrunk.’

That
should sting, but it doesn’t, coming from him. ‘Good point.’

I
enter my room, which is just as I left it four years ago. I’ve been back here
to our terrace house in
Maryhill
for a few days at a
time during that span, but never long enough to change the decor.

Glow-in-the-dark
stars cover my ceiling in meticulously constructed constellations. ‘Holy shit,
I forgot about that.’

Martin
laughs. ‘Some of them fell, and I didn’t know where they went, so
yer
ma said to leave them on
yer
desk.’ He points to a stack of cardboard stars, then chuckles again as he sets
my nearly empty rucksack upon the bed.

‘What’s
so funny?’

‘A
moment ago ye said “Holy shit”. Ye sound like a
fuckin
’
Yank.’ He says ‘
fuckin
’’ not with hostility but with
the ready fondness of a typical
Scot.

‘Do I
sound American in general?’

‘A
wee bit American, a wee bit English.’ He draws the blind to let in soft
daylight. ‘
Nae
bother – it’ll wear
aff
soon if I’ve anything tae
dae
wi
it.’

I
hope Martin does have something to do with it. I’ve missed him.

I
check the digital clock on the bedside table (8.16 a.m.) and subtract five
hours. Too early to chat with Aura. When I rang her from Heathrow it was
already 12.04 a.m. her time, so I doubt she’s awake.

I
strip off the wretched rugby shirt the Department of Metaphysical Purity gave
me as a parting gift, since all my belongings were confiscated upon my arrest.
‘Burn this, would you?’

Martin
catches the shirt when I toss it to him, then looks away, no doubt disturbed by
the starkness of my ribs and shoulder blades beneath my skin. I must look like
a skeleton.

‘Wonder
if anything in here fits.’ I switch on the lamp atop the chest of drawers, then
slide one open. ‘Hah, this is ancient.’ I turn back to Martin, displaying a
Franz Ferdinand tour T-shirt. ‘We were what, thirteen?’

‘Twelve,
I think.’ He starts to laugh, then stops, staring at my chest. ‘Is that—’
He points slowly, as if I’m a wild bird spooked by sudden moves. ‘You’ve a scar
from that day.’

That
day. One afternoon when I was thirteen, the lot of us – me, Martin,
Niall, Roland, Frankie, and Graham, along with Martin’s eight-year-old brother,
Finn, who always tagged along – were mucking about along the canal. Finn
slipped and fell in. The rest of the lads were too
pished
on that cheap
Buckfast
wine to do much but panic, so
I jumped into the grey water to pull him out.

Finn
had floated downstream under an iron bridge, unconscious. I held him up out of
the water as best I could, my own chest gouged by an exposed nail (hence the
scar). But the near-drowning took its toll on Finn’s brain, and he’s never been
the same since.

Neither
have I, to tell the truth. The incident gave my parents the excuse they’d been
looking for to leave Glasgow. For my father it meant the promotion he’d refused
for years, since it required him to work at the London headquarters of MI-X,
Britain’s more competent and benevolent version of the US DMP. For my mother it
meant living near her parents for the first time since marrying Dad.

And
for me, it meant boarding school, where I’d meet ‘a better sort of boy’ than my
lifelong mates.

‘It’s
not a bad scar. Only shows up under bright light.’ I turn off the lamp, then
pull the T-shirt over my head. Though the hem barely reaches the waistband of
my denims, the shirt still fits in the arms and chest. Martin’s right: I’ve
shrunk. ‘So how is wee Finn?’

Martin
looks down, rubs the toe of one pale-blue Converse against the instep of the
other. ‘He’s alive.’

Those
two words have never sounded so foreboding. I know better than anyone that mere
breath and pulse are insufficient. ‘Still at the psych unit in
Springburn
?’

‘
Naw
, he’s … worse. In June they moved him to a special
hospital in Yorkshire. So instead of a twenty-minute bus ride, it’s four hours
on the train.’ Martin runs a hand through his short waves of red hair. ‘They
say he might be released one day, if he’s no longer a danger to himself and
others.’

‘Is
that a big if or a small if?’

The
hope drops from his voice. ‘A wee if. A very wee if.’

After
the accident, Finn’s doctors had said that once his brain started changing from
a child’s to an adolescent’s, he’d either improve or decline. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s
not
yer
fault,’ he says quickly.

‘I know
it’s not.’ I rub the scar on my chest through the shirt, for a moment wishing
it were deeper, so I could feel it through the soft material. But it’s just a
thin silver sliver. ‘Does he ever wish I’d let him drown?’

Martin
gives me a surprised look. ‘He’s said as much, but he
doesnae
mean it.’ He turns for the open door. ‘’Mon, I can smell
yer
ma’s got breakfast ready.
Nae
doubt you’ve been
missing black pudding.’

I
follow him downstairs, listing out loud all the foods I missed while I was in
3A. But on the inside I’m thinking of Finn and his scrambled brain, stuck in an
institution, perhaps forever. And I know Martin’s wrong: when his brother says
he wishes I’d let him drown, he means it.

Chapter
Two

After
breakfast, fortified with tea and black pudding, I sit alone at my desk, the
window of an encrypted chat room open on my laptop. Across the Atlantic, Aura’s
waiting for my text so we can have our first private conversation in two
months.

I
want desperately to see her, but I know she’ll have questions. I’m already
exhausted from deflecting the ones my parents asked at breakfast after Martin
left:

‘Where
did you disappear to in the airport before our flight in June?’ Mum wanted to
know.

‘I
went to the loo, then got distracted by an aeronautics exhibit.’

‘That’s
what you told the FBI,’ Dad said, ‘but where did you
really
go?’

I
couldn’t say
I went to talk to a ghost
,
because as someone born just before the Shift, I shouldn’t see ghosts. In fact,
I only see them for a short while after I kiss Aura – whose birth may
have
caused
the Shift – during
which time she takes on my ability to repel ghosts. No one knows about our
power-swapping ability but us.

So I
simply repeated, ‘I went to the loo, then got distracted by an aeronautics
exhibit.’

My
parents sighed. Their next question was another I can never answer:

‘Zachary,
dear.’ Mum shifted the eggs on her plate with her fork. ‘I know it must be
difficult to talk about, but what did the DMP do to you in 3A? Did they hurt
you?’

‘Were
you beaten?’ Dad asked, barely containing his rage. ‘Were you starved?’

I
gave my parents the truth, knowing they’d hear it as a lie. ‘They did nothing.
They just … kept me.’

After
the DMP discovered my very presence was painful to ghosts – as evidenced
by the apparent shrieks of one who was put into an inescapable room with me
– they isolated me completely. If they ran further tests, I didn’t know
about them. I knew nothing but boredom and loneliness that found no relief but
madness.

Now,
I gather my nerve to send Aura the text. We start with instant message, where I
give her the link to our encrypted chat room. There’s an elaborate security
procedure she has to undertake, so I wait, staring at my desk clock, an old
brass-and-wood contraption that once belonged to my granddad. I watch closely
to ensure the second hand sweeps over the clock’s face in the correct
direction.

Four
minutes and thirty-six seconds later, Aura’s name appears in the chat window.
We flirt, reminisce, flirt some more. This is working. I’m forgetting 3A
already. I can do this.

And
then she writes:
Can you tell me what
happened while you were detained?

My
hands freeze, trembling, above the keyboard. That one word,
detained
,
has changed forever. It’s traded its casual meaning (‘Sorry I’m late.
I was detained.’) for one that meant the utter annihilation of the boy I once
was.

My
throat tightens, and I have to gulp air to keep breathing. The world’s going
all fuzzy around the edges. What’s happening to me?

My
computer beeps.
Zach, you there?

Am I?
Where is ‘there’? Is it only one place or two?

Desperate
for an answer, I look out the window. The late-morning sky is pale grey, almost
white, like the ceiling of my cell. But the clouds are moving, and the sun
behind them creates light and shadows. The sky is a grey that lives.

I am
here.

Yes
, I answer, resisting the urge to
add
Barely.
Though I still feel dizzy
,
that terrifying fuzzy-world feeling
has faded.

We can talk about it some other time.

I
type
NO! NEVER!
, but then delete it
and say
Yes
instead.

The important thing is that you’re okay
now.

With
that one sentence, she’s made the Atlantic Ocean seem light years across. With
that one sentence, everything becomes clear: Aura expects me to be okay.

I am not
okay, but I will be, and until then, I’ll fake it.

I
change the subject and have us switch to video chat, where I smile (which is
hard) and flatter her (which is easy, because she’s beautiful) and tell her I’d
forgotten how lovely Glasgow is, that I’ll soon be off to the pubs with my
friends. Like any regular guy.

Though
her deep-brown eyes are bleary from the early hour, they light up when I say
these things. She leans closer to the monitor, chin on her folded hands, the
way she used to listen to me
blether
about my latest
football match or complain about calculus homework.

My
voice grows more animated. Yes, this is the solution: keep to easy, casual
topics that have always connected us. Together, Aura and I will build a bridge
between Now and the Good Then of last year. A bridge so tall I can’t see 3A
from it.

Soon
Aura signals that we need to discuss secret things. The video chat’s not
encrypted – an issue I’ll remedy this week – so we switch back to
text.

I know why they let you go
, she writes.
It was the State
Dept
and whatever, but also MI-X.

I figured. But what took them so long?

They needed leverage against the DMP.

Like what?

Like the fact that the company that makes
BlackBox
hired private spies to bomb Flight 346.

I reread
her sentence five times, feeling as though I’ve fallen into one of those Tom
Clancy novels my dad loves. But I’m no Jack What’s-his-name, and this is
not
a novel.

I
pound out my reply.
What?!!! How do you
know this?

Her
answer takes an eternity.
Because I told
them.

Those
four words could be made of fire. They sear my eyes, burning straight through
to my brain and lighting up every panicky synapse. My fingers trip over the
keyboard:

How
idyu
kniw
Delete.

What
mawed
yoi
Delete