The Color of Rain (37 page)

I close my eyes, listening to the last clanks, but a realization crashes over me: I don't want to die. Not now. Not with Ben still on this ship and the Touched waiting helplessly on
Stride
. I'm not finished!

But I've waited too long. The airlock is about to fly open. . . .

I turn back to the door, and I would never have rolled it open in time, except that it is already opening. I leap out, and the door bangs shut. I have just enough time to spin and see the outer doors rip open, flinging my brother's frozen prison into the Void.

Ben stands in the spot where he slammed the door behind me. “Rain . . . I'm—”

Crew members yell, cutting him off. They're coming at us down the catwalk.

His hand finds mine and we run to
Melee
. He shuts the door and locks it, and I don't know if it's been five seconds or five years but I'm on the ground. Everything has gone wobbly, like my whole existence is made out of the ghostly strings of the wormhole, and I'm only now seeing them.

Walker is gone!

A thought occurs slow and strong. There are no real colors after all, just ash against a very black universe.

“Walker is gone!”

“What in hell happened?” Ben leans over me, but his face and the ship behind him begin to shake violently along with my vision. “Rain, what's wrong with you? Are you—you're having a seizure!” Clanking and bashing echoes through the hull, and Ben shakes me. “They're going to cut their way into the ship to get at us, Rain. I need you to get up. We need to figure out what we're going to do.”

“Exit strategy,” I say. “Nothing left to lose.”

“Are you sure?”

The banging on the hull stops and Johnny's voice calls out. “I know you're in there with your love toy, Rain. Enjoy your last moments because I'm going to crack this ship in half, slit his throat, and drown you in his blood.”

“Nothing to lose,” Ben agrees.

He jumps into his captain's chair, and his fingers fly over the command panel. Within seconds, the whole vessel vibrates with the sound of whirling engines. I picture the crew members jumping away from the ship, realizing that we're about to blast ourselves against the wall. Maybe Johnny fleeing for his miserable life.

I struggle to my feet and hold the back of Ben's chair. Maybe we're about to die. The least I can do is go out standing.

Ben grips the controls but doesn't move them. “I don't think I can—” He never gets to finish because I grab his hands, throwing the steering forward. The engines strain on the chain net for just a moment before we're slingshot into the side of
Imreas
. . . .

And my body explodes backward.

“Get up, Rain!” Ben yells. “Get up! You have to see this!”

I'm nailed to the floor, but somehow, I manage to lift my head. Ben stands before the cracked front window of
Melee
, and beyond, three ship-shaped fish swim before the wink of distant stars. “Those're big fish.”

“What in hell are you talking about?” Ben jabs a finger toward the corner of the windshield where the smallest fish floats on its side with a hole through its guts. “That's
Imreas
! We took out the whole lower docking level. She's a sitting duck!”

“Poor duckfish.”

Ben points to the two even bigger ship-shaped fish on the other side. “And THAT is
Holmes
—my uncle's ship—right there behind
Stride
. We're saved! They'll come pick us up before they track Leland, and Johnny isn't going anywhere anytime soon.”

He swings out of his chair and picks me up, squeezing me in his arms. “We've got some leaks, but we've got at least a few hours. I've already messaged
Holmes
. They should pick us up and . . . Rain”—his voice falls—“you're burning up.”

“S'those damned fish,” I slur. “Bitme.”

Ben turns me by the shoulders. “What happened to you?”

“Should they be leaving?” I point out the windshield at the large fish that looks like
Stride
. Its engines have swollen to a brilliant blue, and it blasts away. Within seconds, the one behind it does the same.

“
They left us!
” Ben's voice digs into my skull like a nail. “
My uncle left us!
”

“Stupid fish.” I pat his shoulder, my body collapsing inch by inch. “Poor us.” My eyes close against me.

“Poor Walker.”

T
he Void was a dream.

But when I broke into it, I found a nightmare, and then another nightmare within the first. And then another . . .

I burn from the inside, my veins aflame, and I'm only aware of Ben's occasional yell. His mouth lowers over mine again and again, giving me breath that I do not want.

At some point, my eyes open, and I'm beneath a cascade in a white world. Water streams over me—water that hits me cool, then steams from my skin. Ben's hair drips onto my nose as he speaks meaningless words that can't beat the rush of the downpour. He looks so scared, and I want to calm him, but I slip into the dark instead.

I crack into another layer of the nightmare and find my little brother waiting. He squats on an endless black canvas, his elbows propped on his knees and his green eyes blaring.
So after all that, you still lost me
, he says.

No!
I tell him, but I don't have lips to make words. Or eyes.

I'm completely without a body.

And that's because I gave it away a long, long time ago.

A constant wheeze—the sound of air leaving. It reminds me of Walker's breaths at the bottom of the pool, which were so nearly his last.

Maybe these are mine.

I open my eyes, and the noise grows louder. It's coming through the hull—the leak of our air sliding through the cracks of
Melee
. I push myself up; my head feels like it's been cracked in pieces and then glued hastily back together. Ben is asleep beside me. His cheek rests on his folded forearms on the edge of the bunk, his body curled on the floor.

I get up without disturbing him and take shaky steps until I drop in the captain's chair. Outside the cracked windshield, the Void dances, showing off its gossamer strings, and in the near distance, the profile of
Imreas
issues some kind of gas through its punctured docking bay.

We did that, I sort of remember. I rub my aching head.

We broke through. And that fish that bit me threw my body into some kind of tailspin fever. There's a new bandage on my arm along with one at my elbow. So Ben must have given me some of his special Mec blood. Is that what saved me?

I pull at the foreign bulkiness of my clothes. I'm wearing one of Ben's shirts and a pair of his pants. So he redressed me . . . but he didn't strip me of the silver bracelet. My wrist glows scarlet even though we have drifted far away from its source.

How could everything go so wrong? The Touched left in the hands of that Leland . . . Johnny trying to rape me—and then kill
me? And the K-Force leaving us here to die . . . and Walker.

What have I done?

I gasp so loud that Ben wakes with a start. “I lost him, Ben! After everything, I lost him!”

He rubs his eyes with the back of one hand. “Welcome to the land of the living, Rain.” He gets to his feet, shuffling as though each boot is filled with concrete. He leans against the control panel. “What do you remember?”

“My brother!”

“Out the airlock, just like you were about to be. I still can't believe I got to you in time. I was in the engine room when I heard Johnny's orders over the speakers.” He shakes his head. “I've never been so scared. But I knew where I could find you. I knew you'd be with him.”

I begin to cry, turning away from him so that I don't have to face his slow, hopeless sort of tone. Outside the window, the image of
Imreas
gets a little closer. But before it—only a stone's throw away—something else. Something like a rectangular box.

“Ben! It's Walker! Look! It's Walker!” I jump up. “Can we get to him?”

Ben doesn't say anything.

“You've got to have like a space suit in here. You can just send me out there and I'll try to grab him. It'll work!”

He looks away. “All the storage compartments are leaking. We're lucky we have air. For now. We can't open any doors. It'd be over in a heartbeat. Crumpled like a hollow shell.”

I turn back to Walker. He's so close, but then, he's never been so unreachable. I always thought of that pod as his prison, but the
truth is that it has been his casket since the moment the lid closed.

He's become a fading face. A memory like the rest of my family. My breath is stinging fast as my longing for him eclipses the way I miss my father, only to swell bigger than my body, than the Void. Than the entire known universe.

It's too much and it's all at once, and then—it's gone.

I stop crying, feeling very, very cold. Something clicks in my brain, and I can't spare one thought for my little brother. Not one. Not now. “Okay,” I say stiffly. Move forward. Keep going, I tell myself.
I've got to keep going
.

“Rain, it's a shock, I know, but we tried. He knows how hard you tried.”

I don't hear him; I finger my bracelet. Time to get this damned thing off. I pat my pants down, looking for the glass plate with Johnny's print, but only find Ben's deep pockets. “Where are my clothes?”

He squints at me for a long moment before pointing to the shower. I cross to the tiny bathroom, finding my clothes jumbled in a wet heap at the bottom of the shower. Clumpy bits of paper are stuck to my shirt, and it takes me a minute to realize that they're the remains of Lo's picture. So I couldn't even save that much.

I sort through my things until I find the glass plate, but it's cracked in half.

“No!”

“What?” Ben calls from where he's collapsed on the bunk.

I return to his side, looking down at him. “What happened when I got onboard? How did this break?”

He shuffles up on one elbow. “Let's see. It could have broken while you were running amok under the alarm on
Imreas
. Or when you had a
seizure
on the floor. Or when you slammed against the back wall when we broke through the side of a starship. Or—”

“Okay already.”

His voice rises over mine. “Or how about when I had to hold you in the shower to keep that fever from cooking your brain?”

I blink, trying to remember the last part. “You took me in the shower?”

“And gave you CPR and restarted your heart twice and gave you about a gallon of my blood.” He waves his arm at me where the crease in his elbow is now bandaged. “I've never met anyone so determined to die.” He falls back on the bunk, and I sit next to him.

“Thank you.” I touch his arm, wanting him to reach for me, but he doesn't.

“Yeah.”

“I don't remember much after I dosed Johnny with Limpicilin.”

He laughs hollowly. “Of course you did! Wow. Why else would he have gone so psychotic? Speaking of which”—he says as he pulls the dose rod from his pocket—“you
never
get one of these again. Do you have any idea how much adrenaline you shot into yourself?”