The Color of Rain (41 page)

“I'm sorry about dosing you.”

“What you did probably saved both of our lives. Probably.” He glances at me. “But that doesn't mean I liked it.” He detaches the last wire from my arm.

“What about Walker?”

“We were able to recover his pod from the Void before it floated too far away. I'll take you to him.” For such wonderful news, his voice is all wrong. A heavy feeling settles in my chest.

“What is it? What happened?”

“He's no worse than he was.” Ben's tone reveals that he is no better either. “I wanted to have more progress by the time you woke up. You've been in a coma for weeks.”

“Weeks?” I rub my arms, finding a new white scar on the back of my hand to match the burn scars left on my wrist and the crescent scar from the fish bite. I touch my stomach through the thin gown, my fingers catching on the welts from where I was stabbed. I remember the smell of metal and grease as Samson picked me up off the catwalk. “What about Samson? Will they lock him up?”

“They did arrest him at first, but since he's been helping with
Imreas
's security codes, they've granted him a pardon until we reach the Edge. The courts won't go easy on him though. He helped Johnny for too long.”

I slide off the bed and stand on rubbery legs.

“Walker is on a different level.” Ben places a folded green uniform on the bed. “Do you need help changing? I'll close my eyes. Or I can get a woman to help you.”

“No need.” I reach for the shirt, but already my breath is tight and fast as though I've been running. “Maybe you
can
help. But you don't have to close your eyes. It's not like you haven't seen me naked before.”

“That doesn't make it okay.” His eyes are already closed, and he bunches the shirt around the neck hole to slip it over my head. “Besides, you'd be surprised how capable I am without my sight from all those runs through the Pass.”

I slip the gown off my shoulders, looking at the way he holds out the shirt with his eyes sealed. I wait for him to peek or make a move, but he doesn't budge.

“Is this respect?” I joke to hide my sudden awkwardness.

“It is,” he says without humor. “Like you deserve.” I step toward the shirt, and he loops it over my head. My arms are stiff and slow, and he guides them through the sleeves.

“I think I got the rest,” I say as I step into the pants, and Ben turns his back while I finish dressing. When I've fastened everything and braided my hair back, I lean around him and find that his eyes are still closed even though he's facing the wall.

A yearning swells in my throat, and I slip my arms around his waist, pressing my face to the hollow between his shoulder blades.
His shirt is so warm, and I've never realized how sweetly he smells. He holds my arms against his stomach, and I can feel the indented spot on his wrist where years of wearing a com wore the skin down to his bones.

“We'll get better, Rain,” Ben says. “Every day, we'll get a little bit better.”

We walk down a hallway as white as the room I woke in. In fact, everything is made from an opaque glassy substance, and doorways seem to yawn open when they're touched or commanded.

“This ship is so strange.” I run my hand down the smooth surface. “What is this stuff called?”

“Memory glass. Although don't let the word ‘glass' fool you. It's damn near impossible to break,” Ben says. “Almost everything on the Edge is made out of it.”

“It's beautiful.” I touch the smooth hardness, remembering the surviving panes of the greenhouse. Could I imagine a whole world made out of something so precious? Unbreakable? “How do they make it so strong?”

“They smash it a few million times. Right down to the atoms until it's so pure that its molecules line up like a puzzle.”

“You smash it to make it stronger?” He nods, and I love it. “I've never imagined anything like that. But how do you know where you're going? There are no signs or directions and every hallway looks the same.”

“There are signs within the glasswork . . . and ads and pictures. It's a jumbled mess, if you ask me.” He taps his temple.
“You need the hardware to see it.”

We turn down a hallway, passing more Mecs than I ever imagined, but instead of staring at them, they openly stare at me. “Maybe they think you're the one who eats brains,” Ben teases.

“One thing certainly hasn't changed. Your jokes are still pretty bad.”

He takes my hand. “They're not used to seeing non-Mecs on their ship, but they're friendly.”

A Mec approaches from the opposite way, resembling an older, trim-bearded Ben. His mouth is stern but his eyes have a kind glint to them. “Rain, it's good to see you up and walking. I'm Keven.”

“My uncle,” Ben adds. “He's been looking in on you.”

Keven holds out his hand. “We owe you. Never would have brought down that son of a bitch without you, or so Ben tells it.”

I release Ben's hand and shake Keven's. I find that I don't know what to say. The last thing I want to do is bring up the subject of Johnny or my status on
Imreas
, but before I can say anything, the whole ship wavers beneath my legs, and I have to grip Ben's arm to stay on my feet. My heart hammers like we're under attack. “What was that?”

“We've reached the end of the Void,” Keven says. “That's what it feels like to slow down.”

“We're there?” I ask. “Really?”

“Had to happen sometime.” Keven claps Ben on the shoulder. “Well, I better make sure we don't crash into anything in Edge space. Keep her comfortable, Benson.” He continues down the hallway, and I turn to Ben.

“Benson?”

“Yeah.” His cheeks pink. “You can pretend you didn't hear that.”

“Sure thing . . . Benson.” I swallow a small laugh, and he knocks his elbow into mine. “He's not as harsh as you made him out to be.”

Ben watches his uncle turn out of sight. “He feels guilty about almost leaving us to die. He didn't even know we were alive in
Melee
until we sent that second transmission. And he's changed. Something happened while I was gone, and I haven't sorted through it yet. He says that he thought he lost me for a while.”

I remember the weeks on
Imreas
when I was Johnny's Scarlet Siren . . . the weeks I spent wondering if Johnny had actually let Ben live after our stunt on Entra, too terrified to ask. I take Ben's hand, but his fingers adjust and readjust around mine. All the while, I feel the ship moving underfoot.

Slowing.

“I have to warn you about Walker, Rain. I wasn't lying when I said that we could help him. I promise I wasn't . . . but . . .”

Ben touches the wall and a doorway slides open in the middle of the glass.

The room is more complicated than the one I woke in. Chirping machines crowd most of the free space and a control screen full of scrolling information covers one wall, but the most complicated thing is my brother lying on a bed beneath a host of wires.

His chest moves up and down.

Breathing.

I
step toward him, but the closer I am to Walker, the worse he looks. There's something very wrong in the slack lines of his face. Something more vacant than the widest eyes of the Touched.

“We unfroze him and got his circulatory system working. He needed a new heart, but that wasn't the hard part.” Despite his incredible words, Ben sounds depressed. He takes most of the wires off of my brother's scalp, and I reach out for Walker without touching him.

“It didn't work,” I murmur. My brother's been scrubbed clean, and his cheeks have a hint of pink in them, but he's not behind them. “He's gone.”

Ben taps a few things on the control panel. “He's brain dead. We've tried everything, but there was so much damage and that disease kept stripping his neural net even when he was frozen.” His eyes are rimmed with an exhausted red. “But we haven't given up.”

The machines
tick
and
chirp
, and I close my eyes. “You can't remake his brain.”

“Not his memories, but maybe if . . .” Ben keeps talking, but
no matter what he says, I can't hear him anymore.

I sit on the foot of my brother's bed and look away. “I need some time. Please.”

Ben leaves, and I curl up beside Walker's small body. He lies beneath a screen of wires while a clear tube pumps air through his neck and into his chest in a steady rhythm. Every piece of him is smaller than I remember: his nose, his chin, his bony chest.

Tears swell until I can't see him. “Why did you have to be so ready?” I touch his cheek. “Why was it so easy for you to leave?”

He answers with silence, and I close my eyes and press my face to the robotic up-and-down motion of his chest. I don't want to remember our last moment together, but like so many leaden memories, it sinks through my consciousness.

Walker on the diving board . . . “
Remember when Dad used to call me Night Bird?
”

I begin to shudder so hard that his body shakes with me. I squeeze my eyes, and my mind falls into a much older memory of being so young, kneeling by our apartment window. Behind me, Jeremy reads to himself, mouthing words. By the kitchen table, my mother cuddles Walker's wiggly baby body. He makes the worst sort of chirping noises, and I can't concentrate on my lesson.

My dad chuckles. “Night Bird. That's what we'll call the little squawker.” He pinches my chin and points to the fog on the window glass. “Now, what's your letter?”

I draw an
R
into the condensation, and then add a
W
. “And that's
our
letter,” I tell him.

My tears soak into the gown over Walker's chest. I know what
I have to do, but my fingers are slow to disconnect my last link to the family who made me so damn special. Still, the wires fall away one by one until he is only joined to this life through the tube at his throat.

I ache not only for Walker but also for the sense of home that lives within him—and within the memory of Jeremy, my mom and dad. I wasn't ready to lose them, but then, maybe no one ever feels ready. Maybe grief is like running the Void. You never notice that you're in it until you're coming to the end.

“Go on then, Night Bird.” I detach the tube from his neck.

The last of his air slides from his lips like a tiny sigh, and I hold my brother's body, and I weep.

It's still night when I bring the sheet over Walker's head and kiss his lips through the soft material. I cried myself dry, but relief comes like a slow tide, coating my drained courage.

I twist my red bracelet, noticing for the first time that I've developed blisters beneath the metal, and some of those blisters have already hardened into calluses. “Can't run between the raindrops,” I say, remembering my dad's, and ultimately Walker's, warning for me. My brother's hand slips out from beneath the sheet, and I squeeze it.

He's already growing cool.

I leave the room without having anywhere to go. Where now? What do I have left? I don't even know my way around this weird, all-white ship, but my eyes catch on a piece of paper stuck to the wall. In Ben's bold letters, it reads: