Josin L McQuein - Arclight

Jove’s mouth just outran his brain.

He could have antagonized me all night, and no one but Anne-Marie would have said a word, but he should have left Tobin’s father out of it. Jove slams sideways, hit full force by someone a lot bigger.

“Get off me,” Jove yells. Tobin pins him to the floor, sitting on his legs. “I didn’t mean it. Get off!”

I assume the broken nose means his apology isn’t accepted.

One punch comes, then another, until they blur so fast the impact sounds like perverse applause. Jove gets out one good scream before his mouth floods with blood, sending flecks of crimson to pepper the front of Tobin’s face and clothes.

“Stop it!” Anne-Marie cries, but her feet are still stuck to the ground. Dante and Silver hurry the babies away from the fight.

This is something else the drills never prepared us for. We’ve never been locked in long enough for friends to become enemies.

“Toby, don’t!” Anne-Marie tries again, but he doesn’t hear her.

I don’t think Tobin even sees Jove anymore. He’s hitting his own agony, exorcising his own mourning.

He’s crying.

“Tobin, stop.”

I grab his arm on a backswing and go along for the ride when he pushes forward.

“Tobin!” I splay both of my hands on his shoulders as I duck my head into the space between his arms so we’re face-to-face. “He said he didn’t mean it,” I say, knowing Jove meant every hateful word. “Enough, he gets the point.”

Because of me, Jove lost his mother the same way Tobin lost his father, and he’s just as much an orphan. He doesn’t need a beating to understand that hurt.

So many here only have one parent; they’re not forgotten so much as never mentioned. Anne-Marie won’t discuss her father even when I ask. She says it’s not the sort of thing people talk about, but she can’t tell me why. If I had a family, I wouldn’t keep quiet about it.

Jove moans, unable to get away. Tobin’s still on his legs; I’m bent over his head, keeping myself in the line of fire.

“Get out of my way, Marina,” Tobin snarls, fist frozen at midswing.

“Look at him, Tobin. You’ll kill him. You cannot murder someone in the Safe Room, okay?”

It’s weird what arguments your brain comes up with at the worst possible moments.

“Move, or I’ll move you.” Tobin shifts his position for better leverage.

Desperation and lack of ideas make me stupid. I grab Tobin’s face with both hands, close my eyes, and kiss him on the mouth.

Anne-Marie says guys don’t think straight if you kiss them out of the blue; I guess she knows what she’s talking about. Tobin drops his fist. His body goes rigid; he even stops breathing. When I open my eyes, his are wide and bewildered.

That’s a good word for the whole room, because there’s nothing but silence until the babies start to sniffle and someone drags Jove out from under us.

In total, the kiss buys about ten seconds before Tobin snaps back to reality and pushes me away; we sit there for another five on our knees. He stands, wipes his mouth, and goes back to his corner without even glancing in Jove’s direction.

But he looks at me.

His eyes are clear and focused, without anger now, only loss and confusion. He collapses in on himself, so we’re back where we started. Me on my side, Tobin on his, both isolated in a crowd. This isn’t Purgatory. It’s Hell.

It’s too hot in here, too close.

Anne-Marie sits with Jove’s unconscious body, trying to clean him off as best she can with her bare hands and shirttail. I unbutton my jacket and bunch it up under his head to help him breathe while she strokes his hand.

“Someone’s going to have to set his nose,” she says. “I don’t know how.”

“Doctor Wolff will fix it,” I answer. Besides the nose, Jove’s lost a couple of teeth. The rest of his face is swollen; he winces when I touch his side.

“But what if they lose Doctor Wolff?”

“They won’t.”

“I think I should get help,” she says. “Don’t you think I should get help? Someone needs to know what happened—or is happening—or could happen. I don’t think Toby meant it. Oh . . . how did this happen?”

She ends up gasping. Anne-Marie always seems to forget that she needs air.

“And how do you plan on getting out of here? The door’s locked.”

It’s the wrong question to ask.

She starts in on the horror of being locked in a small space—which she never thought was small until now—straying from one extreme to the other until she comes to the conclusion that we’re all going to run out of oxygen and collapse.

She’s abandoned her gloves, and the only two of her fingernails that managed to survive the run brush over Jove’s swollen eyes. She pats his hair down over his forehead, but all that does is leave it tacky against the drying blood.

“I should have made him stop,” she says. “Jove’s really not this bad . . . at least he didn’t used to be, but he lost his dad three years ago, and now his mom . . . I didn’t know he’d gotten so—I’m sorry.”

“It’s the Fade’s fault, not yours,” I say quietly, but her attention’s still on Jove.

“He’s bleeding on the floor.”

Untold years have left the cement surface cracked, and each spidered line acts as a thin channel for Jove’s blood to travel. Anne-Marie shakes her shoe to clear what’s pooled by her toe.

“I never thought he’d do something like this—Toby, I mean. He only ever hits walls, and I thought he’d stop that when the last one wrecked his knuckles.” She worries the edge of her sleeve with her teeth, leaving it with tiny holes along the cuff. “I should have stepped between them, not you. But I—”

“Anne-Marie, stop!” I cup my hand over her mouth. “Help me get Jove’s jacket off. He’s too big for me to maneuver on my own.”

Keeping her busy is the only way to stop her from talking, or at least change the subject.

“Are you sure?” she asks nervously. “We could make him worse. Marina, I don’t want to kill anybody. Please don’t make me.” Her hands are ice-cold and sweating over mine, trying to keep me from working his buttons.

“I want to make sure the blood’s only coming from his face. Otherwise, we need to stop it.”

“Yeah . . . okay. That makes sense.” Anne-Marie bites her cheeks to cut off whatever automatic protest she wants to make. I’d laugh at the effect if we were anywhere else.

“I can do this,” she chants as we roll Jove to one side and free his arm from his jacket. “I can— I can— I can’t — I can’t do this.”

Anne-Marie rocks back on her heels as soon as we lay him back down. It’s not fair that Jove caused the problem, Tobin did the damage, and we’re the ones with blood on our hands.

“Is he all right?” she asks, chewing on her sleeve again.

“We got lucky. Jove doesn’t know how to do laundry.”

It’s a black shirt day, but Jove’s wearing his khaki one. If he was hurt, the whole thing would be caked as red as his face. How can a person bleed so much from just his face?

“We should keep him still until Doctor Wolff can take him in the morning.”

Anne-Marie nods, shrugging her jacket off to drape over Jove’s body.

“We need to wash him off, and he needs water. See how much the dispenser will let you have.”

Anne-Marie hugs her arms around herself, grumbling about the lack of plumbing as she picks her way over to a tall black box in the corner. She holds her bracelet out to the sensor on the front, prompting a single canister to roll into her hand. No matter how many times she shakes her bracelet, that’s all the box gives her, and kicking it doesn’t change its mind.