ARC: Cracked (31 page)

“Why, thank you, Meda,” I answer myself since no one else is going to. “It’s been lovely. And yourself?”

“That’s fine with me, Jo,” Chi says. “The last thing I plan on being is your friend.” He grabs for her hand but she snatches it out of range, then gives him a shove. He grabs her wrists.

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she says in desperation. “I don’t want to see you ever again. Just leave me alone!” Her voice is high-pitched and frantic.

“Not gonna happen,” he says easily. “Ever.”

She jerks her wrists and he lets go. She opens her mouth, but closes it again. Her eyes are shiny. She looks to me (finally), but apparently doesn’t know what to say there either. So she runs, or rather hobbles, as fast as her still-healing injuries will let her. Chi turns to me. “Hey, Meda.”

“Looks like you’re losing the war.”

“Nah.”

“Chi – I hate to break it to you, but she’s been getting meaner and more upset – not less.”

“That’s because I’m getting to her. I’d be way more worried if she was calm. She’s in retreat.”

I am skeptical. “You sure?”

He smiles. “Yup.” He’s a madman, but, really, he’s in love with Jo – it comes with the territory. “In any case, they want you in the admin trailer. We were gonna walk you there, but…”

Jo ran off in a fit.

“I’d still go, but, well…” He waves to where Jo went.

“She’s in retreat,” I supply.

“Exactly. I need to press my advantage.”

“Got it,” I say. Chi smiles in gratitude. “Good luck,” I add. Rebecca apparently heard the conversation and is already standing, ready to escort me. We troop across the trailer park and listen for an announcement of Chi’s death. None comes by the time I reach the admin trailer. The guard leaves me at the door.

Inside is a room with a bunch of tables and chairs. The trailer was used for meetings and as overflow space for people trying to organize the building of the new settlement. Right now it’s empty but for a middle-aged man with sandy stick-up hair and a shell-shocked expression, leaning against a table.

Luke Bergeron. He’s older, but I recognize him easily from the photos.

“Andromeda Porter,” he murmurs. He straightens and wipes his hands on his dirty jeans.

“Melange,” I correct him. “Meda Melange.” My mother’s name might have been Porter, but she gave me Melange. I’m not going to turn down any of her gifts.

“Right,” he says, obviously unsure what to do with me.

I examine the man my mother considered marrying. Like most Templars I’ve met, he looks decidedly disreputable. Tall and lean with long hair, a full beard and a leather jacket with the Mountain Park insignia. If anything, he’s even more disreputable than the average – the other Crusaders at least look as if they’ve thought about trimming their facial hair; he looks as if he’s never even heard of the concept.

Noticing my regard, or maybe just because he wants to break the awkward silence, he explains, tugging his beard. “I’m undercover as a homeless person. To watch Exo.”

“Oh.” Scintillating. He has all the secrets of my past, and yet we talk about his hair. But he’s a stranger. A strange stranger, and I don’t know how to ask him about my mom. He gives me the same study.

“You look like her, you know?”

“No, I don’t.” My mom was girl-next-door sunshine. I am all darkness.

“Yes, you do. Not the hair color.” His blue eyes crinkle in the corner. “And not in style, for sure. But your expressions – especially the one right now that tells me I’m full of it. That was your mom’s favorite.”

And just like that the dam is broken.

I don’t know where to start. “Tell me everything.”

“Your mom and I were best friends. Inseparable. She was…” Words fail him. I understand. “In any case, we were supposed to get married. Did you know that?”

I nod.

“Well, she was out on an assignment, during her apprenticeship, and they got her. Took her captive. I tried to rescue her – I swear I did.” There’s a hint of desperation in his eyes, like he needs me to believe him. I don’t point out that if he’d succeeded, I wouldn’t exist. “I would have marched into Hell itself for her, but the Crusaders wouldn’t let me. They drugged me to keep me from doing anything stupid.” He shook his head. “While I was in the hospital, her candle lit up. I was told she was dead. But I didn’t believe it. I always thought that if she was, I’d know.” He leans back against the table. I lean next to him.

“How did her candle light up?”

“You can renounce the Inheritance, after you’ve accepted it, and choose not to be a Crusader any more. You lose your special abilities and go back to being normal.” He steeples his fingers and looks down at them. “Usually the candles of those people don’t get a shrine. It doesn’t really ever happen, and never by someone like your mom. She loved being a Crusader, it was her calling.”

“If she loved it so much, why did she give it up?”

His soft blue eyes are on me. “She loved something more.”

Me. He doesn’t need to say it.

“She was afraid of what would happen to you. Afraid the Templars wouldn’t listen, afraid they would make her give you up, or…” He shrugs. “We’re not perfect, and you’re possibly the biggest threat we’ve ever faced. Who knows what you’re capable of?” He looks at me curiously. I don’t really know what I’m capable of so it’s not like I can answer.

He continues. “I found her, eventually. I tracked her down.”

“How?”

“I knew her,” is all he says. “She ran away from me.” There is more in those words than I can describe. “But afterward, she made contact. We’ve talked over the last fifteen years. Mostly about you, Meda.”

“Me?” My mom had a friend – a boyfriend? Someone she talked to, about me?

“You were her favorite subject. And she did it to protect you. She streamed me all her videos just in case anything ever happened to her. Or in case the Templars ever found the two of you. She wanted to have evidence of your character, of all the efforts she made to raise you to be good. Both her successes and her failures.”

The science experiments were to protect me. Protect the world too, in case I turned out to be a monster, sure, but can you really fault a person for that? My eyes sting. They seem to be doing that a lot recently.

“Meda, I was watching the day…” his voice breaks.

I can’t speak but I don’t know what I would say, anyway.

He swipes his hand over his eyes. “In any case, I have something for you.” He pulls a laptop out of a battered messenger bag. He turns and sets it on the table and opens it. He slides a chair for me to sit down in, then he starts a video. He doesn’t sit, but stands next to me, his arms crossed.

On the screen appears my mother, in the basement room. I tense.

“Luke,” she says and smiles. It’s my smile. There’s nothing businesslike about her in this video. “I want you to know I love you. I’ve always loved you.” Luke turns his back to me, whether to give me privacy or him, I don’t know. “What I’ve done to you hasn’t been fair, and I’m sorry.”

Her eyes are leveled at the camera. “This is even less fair.”

She takes a deep breath before she continues. “I might be doing something dangerous today.” Then she hurries forward. “I don’t think it will be, I wouldn’t do it if I thought it was. But just in case…” She takes another deep breath and stares straight into the camera. She has the look of a doctor about to deliver a terminal diagnosis – full of regret, but unable to change anything. “I want you to watch.”

I hear a movement from Luke, but I don’t take my eyes off the screen.

“I’m going to break Meda out of eating souls.” She takes a deep breath and her eyes move back and forth as she thinks. “It’s some sort of built-in addiction, and an addiction can be broken. She was too young to try before, but now she’s fifteen. She’s learning responsibility and willpower.”

I remember Chi saying demons kill to get high. Mom didn’t know it’s the life that demons eat, not the soul. She didn’t realize that the demons were constantly receiving life from Hell– “plugged in”, as Daddy had said. She must have thought a demon’s resurrection was a one-time thing, not a constant stream of “life”. And how would she know? As Chi pointed out, they don’t know much about halflings, other than the ones that play for Hell’s team, and those’d be plugged in, too.

My mom spreads her hands on the table in front of her. “This will break her of her addiction once and for all. If there’s any way for her not to hurt me, she won’t. She’s so human, so loving, you’ve seen it, Luke.” She sets her jaw. “The demon side of her – she can overcome it. I don’t want her to live her life carrying around this burden. Not if we can break the hold it has on her.”

But we couldn’t, or rather,
I
couldn’t. I touch my fingers to her face.

She continues, her eyes are bright with hope. “And Luke, if I can break her of it, if I can
prove
it, she’ll be safe from the Templars. Forever. And…” Her voice trembles. “And, maybe we can come home.”

Home. Home to the Templars, to Luke. She waited the whole length of my existence to be able to go home, to escape her self-imposed isolation. The one she adopted for me.

“I’m not telling you this in person and I haven’t called you in weeks, because I knew you’d figure out what I’m up to.” She smiles slightly. “You probably have anyway and have been going crazy the last few weeks. I haven’t checked my voicemail because I don’t want you to try to talk me out of it.

“I know what I am doing. She loves me, Luke. She does. She’d never hurt me. But… if she does–” she looks dead at the camera and I see the tears shine in her eyes. “–find her, find my baby and tell her I love her and I’m sorry.”

My baby, not my experiment.

She lets out a breath, and her face takes on a softness I’ve never seen. “I love you, Luke, and I’m sorry. I wish things could have been different for us, but I don’t regret anything. I can’t. You’ve always been my best friend, my confidant, and we will meet again. Luke, I–”

He reaches out and closes the laptop with a click, shutting it off, but he doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then, thickly, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep the rest just for me.”

I nod.

I know I shouldn’t ask, but I can’t help it. This man is the biggest secret my mom kept – and that’s saying something. “Why did you two never…?” I let it trail off, but he knows what I’m asking.

“She wouldn’t let me. It would have meant leaving the Crusaders. She said she couldn’t stay without giving you up, but she wouldn’t make me leave.” He snorts. “Make.” He repeats and shakes his head, then looks at me. “She was real stubborn.” He looks at the ceiling. “Anyway, the mission was more important to her than anything. Except you.”

Even him. I don’t say it. He knows it far better than I do.

“Anyway, I’ll see her again.” He looks at his hands. “One day.”

After that we just talk. We leave the little room and stroll outside, both needing to escape the heavy air of the trailer. He tells me what she was like growing up, and I tell him what it was like to have her as a mom. We compare our versions of the same stories and they make us laugh.

He paints the picture of a side of my mom that I didn’t always see but suspected was there. In his stories, she was happy and carefree, and quite mischievous. Apparently she was an ace prankster, and the tricks she played were legend – though only Luke ever knew she was responsible.

It’s hard to think of my mom like that. Young, carefree and happy, and knowing the difference was me. She was only nineteen when I was born.

“It wasn’t you, Meda–” Luke cuts into my thoughts. “–that changed her. If anyone’s to blame, it’s your father and the rest of the demons who took her from–” He stops and changes what he was going to say to simply, “–who took her. But even if they hadn’t, Meda, she still wouldn’t be that girl. Life has a way of happening to all of us, and we all grow up.” A small smile appears. “I don’t know any forty-year-olds sneaking out to prank their friends, no matter how easy their life is.”

I let out a breath and change the topic. “Sometimes…” I don’t want to say it, but he’s the only one who might understand. “Sometimes, I forget what she looks like. I can’t picture her. I’m losing my memories, and I just want to hold on to all of them, like a book, to read over and over again. I loved her, and yet sometimes I can’t even picture her smile.”

He looks thoughtful, not horrified, by my confession. “It’s natural to forget, for the memories to fade. Your mom wouldn’t want you to spend your life living in the past.” A smile twists his mouth. “I’ve tried to remember everything. I remember all the important things, our first ‘I love you’, our first kiss.” He grins, eyes twinkling. “
Definitely
our first kiss.”

Then he takes a deep breath, his eyes on the ground in front of us as we walk. “But I also remember other things, things that weren’t important at the time.

“I couldn’t tell you what day it was, but we had been swimming like we’d done a thousand times, and we were lying on the grass to dry. Just a normal day, but I can close my eyes and see the exact pattern the shadows of the leaves made on her skin.”

He looks at me now. “Anyway, I want you to be careful, Meda. Careful you don’t wake up one day, an old fool with nothing but the sun-dappled memory of a dead girl to keep you company. Your mom wouldn’t want you to live like that. Remember people you have lost, but let them go. Let the memories fade.”

It’s obvious he hasn’t let her go. “Wouldn’t she want you to do the same?”

He smiles the caught smile of someone doing something they shouldn’t. “Yes, but part of the fun of loving your mom was arguing with her.”

“But I’m supposed to do as she says?”

“You’re her daughter.”

I pause, digesting that. “So… are you ever going to let her go?”

He looks up at the sky, and I don’t think he’s talking to me when he says, “No.”

“But you just said she would have wanted you to move on.”

He smiles. “Finally, a disagreement with her where I’ll actually get my way.” Then the smile fades, and he says softly, “But for you, Meda… I don’t want that for you and neither would she. Remember the good times, honor her memory, but let her go.”