Rachel Caine: Ghost Town

Shane pointed to her and raised his eyebrows to make it a question. She made an okay sign. He gave her a thumbs-up on his own behalf.

A sudden burst of light overhead caught her by surprise, and she looked up to see a trapdoor fly open as light poured down. A lithe figure in a white suit dropped, landing lightly on her high-heeled feet, and looked around at the damage. If Amelie spoke, Claire couldn’t hear it; she moved over to stand beside Oliver, who was bending over Myrnin and holding him down.

Myrnin didn’t seem as if he needed to be held down. He was shivering, pale, and hollow eyed, and when he met Claire’s eyes, he looked quickly away.

She saw tears.

Michael and Eve were standing together, wrapped in each other’s arms, looking like they didn’t intend to ever let go. Claire reached down and took Shane’s hand, pulling him upright. She felt a cautious kind of joy, a dawning realization that they might actually be okay, after all.

Until Shane turned his head and looked down the tunnel, and Claire remembered. Worse, she saw him remember. His lips parted, and she saw him yell, Dad! , and he ran down the tunnel toward the machine room.

Claire ran after him, heart pounding.

The machine was destroyed. Really, truly scrapped. It was hard to believe just how ripped apart it was, actually; she supposed that there’d been some kind of chain reaction inside of it, because it looked like it had just crushed in on itself at some points. There were pieces everywhere, bent and scattered. Nothing moved. There was a thick, choking haze of dust hanging in the air.

Shane headed straight for the wreckage. Claire tried to stop him, but he shook her off, face white and blank. Dad? She heard a dim echo of the shout this time, and heard the dread in Shane’s voice.

She grabbed Shane’s arm, and he looked down at her. She had no idea what to say, but she knew her expression would communicate how sorry she was.

Shane pulled free and ran over to the machine’s wreckage—and stopped. Just . . . stopped, staring down.

Claire didn’t know what to do. She felt awful and scared and sick, and she knew she should go to him, but something told her not to. Something told her to wait.

Amelie touched her shoulder, frowning, and Claire jumped in tense surprise. Amelie looked from her to Shane’s motionless figure, and Claire saw knowledge dawn in Amelie’s face. She went to Shane and put her arm around his shoulders, then turned him around, and Claire knew that he’d seen something behind that tangle of metal. Something awful. There was a burned-out, dead look in his eyes again, and it felt like her heart turned to ash in sympathy for him.

Claire rushed over and into his arms, and after a few seconds, he hugged her. Then he put his head on her shoulder, and even if she couldn’t hear him, she felt the way his body shook, and the dampness of his tears against her skin.

Claire combed her fingers through his hair and did the only thing she could do.

She held on.

The only thing that approached the sadness Claire felt for Shane was the sympathy she felt for Myrnin.

Maybe it was all wrong; after all, it was his fault. All of it. But in destroying the machine, Frank Collins had reset things back to the way they should be—including Myrnin’s sanity.

Sane, he understood what he’d done, and Claire could hardly stand to look at him, to see that awful, stunned, horrified expression in his eyes. He hadn’t said a word, not a word. When Amelie tried to speak to him, he averted his eyes and sat, motionless and quiet, head down.

Oliver, as usual, had no sympathy at all. “West is dead,” he said flatly. “Or worse, perhaps. Collins sacrificed himself to put it right. Let him brood, if he wants to brood.”

Myrnin raised his head then, slowly, and fixed his dark, tragic eyes on Oliver. He said nothing, but there was something very nasty in the way they looked at each other.

“Well?” Oliver demanded. Myrnin looked away. “All because you couldn’t lose your precious Ada without going mad. Promise me, Amelie, that you’ll crucify me with silver before you allow me to fall in love.”

“I hardly think there’s any chance of that,” Amelie said. “I doubt you have the capacity.” She sounded remote and cold, but there was something almost painful in it, too. “There is some positive news, I suppose. Most people seem to have recovered their memories. Whatever damage has been done seems to be temporary.”

“Positive news,” Oliver repeated. “Except that our boundaries are down, and all our defenses. You know that can’t continue. The machine—”

“Isn’t working,” Claire said, and got up from the chair where she sat next to Shane. “It isn’t working. It isn’t going to be working, not for months, if it ever does again. Get over it, Oliver.” She was angry, she realized. Shaking. And she knew that it was because of Shane’s dad. “Could you maybe take a minute or something? Just feel something?”

Amelie and Oliver both looked at her with identically surprised expressions. “Feel what?” Oliver asked. “Grief? For Frank Collins? Are you sure your memory is entirely restored?”

Claire gritted her teeth and resisted the urge to flip him off. She shouldn’t have. Eve silently did it for her, from where she stood near the portal, slapping dust and debris off of her Goth black. Her boots were still untied. “Hey, Oliver?” she called. “Didn’t see you biting the bullet back there and taking one for the team. You were out of there faster than me.”

That put Oliver’s mood dangerously toward the dark, but Eve clearly didn’t care. She was distressed, too. And angry.

Myrnin finally spoke. “I knew,” he said, very softly. “I knew that I wasn’t . . . myself. I let myself believe that what I was doing was safe, but it wasn’t. Maybe even then my mind was . . . going.” He looked up, and there was a faraway, miserable look on his face. “If I’d believed Claire in the first place, we could have stopped this. It didn’t have to happen this way. But I wanted . . . I suppose that deep inside, I wanted things to be . . .” He took a deep breath. “I wanted her back. I wanted the past. I wanted to feel . . . less constrained by the rules. And that’s what the machine picked up from me. That’s what it tried to do.”

“Well,” Oliver said. “You got your wish.”

Amelie shook her head. “This gets us nowhere,” she said. “Frank Collins did us a great service, regardless of his history. I will honor that.”

Shane looked up. “How?” His voice was hollow and empty. “A plaque?”

“How would you prefer he be honored?” Amelie asked. “If it’s within my power, I’ll grant it to you.”

Shane didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. It was, Claire thought, like he’d already figured out what he was going to say. “Let Kyle out of the cage in Founder’s Square,” he said. “Put him on probation. But don’t kill him.”

Silence fell, long and heavy, and for a few dreadful seconds Claire thought that Amelie was angry. But she was just . . . pensive. She finally said, “All right.”

Oliver made a frustrated, furious noise in the back of his throat, picked up a glass beaker that had somehow survived all the destruction, and smashed it to smithereens against the far wall. “Enough!” he barked. “Will you continue to bend to every breather who—”

Amelie grabbed him by the arm, pulled him to face her, and said, “Stop.” Her tone was chilly, and quiet, and deadly serious. “We will stop tearing at each other, Oliver. It does neither of us good. It solves nothing. It breeds mistrust and paranoia and ill feelings, and we are not so numerous in this town that we can afford our ambitions. I told you we will rule as equals, but mark me: unless we change, unless we learn how to risk our safety and compromise, the humans will rise up. They will destroy us. I don’t grant this because the boy is innocent. I grant it because mercy is more to our cause than justice.”