The Color of Rain (39 page)

Melee
locks behind me. The inner door of the airlock is open, and a single shadow stretches through from the catwalk.

I am here.

And
this
is happening.

F
or once, Johnny isn't as sharp as his shadow. His hair is uncombed and scruff lines each side of his jaw.

“
Hello, Rain
.”

But his voice is still black.

I step onto the catwalk, gripping the rail. “Looks like you've hit a rough patch, Johnny.”

“Someone blew a hole in my ship. That someone is going to be hung by her own hair.”

I take another step out of the airlock. I have to keep his focus on me and make sure that he forgets about Ben. “I'm surprised,” I say in my best playful voice. “No crew? Passengers? I thought for sure you'd want an audience for this.”

The docking bay is abandoned. On the left, the catwalk, which led to where
Melee
hung, is broken and dangling over the unknown depth of the ship's guts. Beyond it, the scraps of metal used to patch the hole make warping, uneasy sounds. Death howls.

His knuckles are strained on the guardrail, but his other hand is deep in his pocket, no doubt gripping that stone-handled knife
or maybe the silver lighter.

I take another step toward him, and a disappointed look crosses his face. He cocks his head to look behind me. “Where's your Mec toy? I'll start with him.”

“Dead. Didn't make it through the crash. Why do think you couldn't reach him?” It's a gamble, but I know that Johnny must have tried to attack Ben through the shocking mechanism on his com—and failed to find the signal.

His eyebrows bend. “I don't believe you. You're too calm about it.”

“You know, Johnny, I'm starting to think that you never knew me. Didn't I only use him to release the Touched on Entra? And did I just use him to blast a hole through your ship or do I love him?”

I love him.

The thought hits me like a bullet, and I can barely breathe. I love Ben, and he loves me. How in the world did that happen?

I clear my throat. “You decide.”

He narrows his eyes. “You don't love him. You've been with me, but then I don't think you love me either. You've been using everyone.”

“Bingo,” I tease. “It's almost all gone my way. I'm that good.”

“Not with your crazy brother. I saw him out there, floating into oblivion. You didn't mean for that to happen during your not-so-brilliant getaway.”

“I said ‘almost.'” My voice falls. I really have lost my brother, but I can't quite feel it. It's like the emotion is paused inside me, waiting until I can wrap my head around it.

He smiles slickly. “I knew you'd give me a challenge even in the end. You took away everything that I could hurt you with. You
are
that good.”

“Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.”

He almost looks moved—and I wonder if Johnny ever loved me beyond his lust, but someone runs down the catwalk, breaking our staring contest. A boyish crew member wearing a flight suit three sizes too big carries a large welding torch over his shoulder. His beating steps slow when he sees me. “Captain, you still want me to break open the ship?”

“Maybe later,” he says. “What I wanted came to me.”

“So you want me to stay?” the crew member asks in a squeaky voice. “Or leave?” Johnny doesn't answer, and the boy is clueless enough not to get the picture. “Captain? What should I do?” Johnny is close to snapping again, and this boy is too close to him. But he doesn't move. “Captain?”

Johnny shoves the boy, using the weight of the welding torch to send him over the edge of the waist-high railing. He screams and falls. Horrible sounds echo up as his body breaks against the gears so far beneath us, sounds which rattle inside me and make me sway with vertigo.

My body throbs to the tune of a screaming siren, but I move closer to Johnny—within arm's reach. “Is that what you're going to do with me? How boring.” I slide up so that I'm perched on the guardrail. One light shove and I'll go down just like the crew member did. “You used to have more creativity, Johnny. How
limp
you've become.”

He grabs for my neck, and I don't try to stop him. He leans
me out over the drop, nothing keeping me up but his fingers around my throat. His eyes are fierce, his teeth bared, but I don't scream or fight back, and it takes the fire from him.

“Maybe you're right.” He brings me back to the catwalk. “I can do better, and I wouldn't mind an audience. You made a mockery of me in front of my crew by somehow evading that alarm and destroying part of my ship.” He flattens the creases out of his dress shirt. “But know this, there's no way you're getting out of this one with your heart still beating.”

Johnny hauls me from one end of the crew deck to the other. He yanks me off my feet, ripping out hanks of my hair, but I've slipped deep into that voided place of submission. I would even fight the moans and cries coming from me if I didn't know how much he loves the music of my pain.

He wants the drama, the faithful cracking open of the crew doors as we pass. Their whispers and expressions feed his enthusiasm like liquor, and by the time he's dropped me by the elevator on the other side of the ship, blood runs down my forehead and the back of my neck.

Strings of red hair spot the hallway in my wake.

Johnny grins sickly. “That
was
fun. Where shall we go next? Passenger level? You still have friends there from your days as a blue tag, if I remember correctly.” The elevator doors open, and I let him kick me inside.

Friends? He means my regulars, the men that I slept with. Lovely.

When we reach the floor, he jerks me to my feet and marches me across the common room. The place is empty for once, and Johnny drags me to the Rainbow Bar.

The bar is not empty. In fact, the damage to the ship and alarms and whatever else has happened while I was aboard
Melee
seem to have given Lionel his thickest crowd of drinkers yet. Still, they part for Johnny, clearing his two favorite seats by the counter. I can feel the eyes of a hundred drunken and terrified passengers like prodding fingers.

I lock eyes with a girl wearing a blue-rimmed bracelet, catching the pity in her expression before she turns back to the drink in her hand. Johnny tosses me into the chair and settles himself upon his as though it were a throne. Lionel approaches, and I read his masked surprise in the way he takes twice as long as usual to pour our drinks.

He sets the red syrupy liquid before me, but Johnny pushes it back. “Something stronger. Something strong enough to burn blue.” He smiles and digs through his pocket, dropping the knife and lighter on the counter.

Lionel reaches deep into his cabinets, bringing out a dusty bottle of something as clear as water. He pours a small amount, and Johnny pounds the countertop until he doubles it.

“Lay your hand flat, Rain,” he says silkily as though he's asking me to take my shirt off.

I do it. Palm down.

He flips the knife open and stabs my hand straight through.

I scream, almost knocked out from the streaking pain.

The Rainbow Bar falls silent, every eye glued to the knife
spearing my hand to the bar. Lionel's are the worst—peeled open like he's watching a gory fight to the death. He tries to mouth something to me, but I look away. I don't want him hurt because of this. He showed me a little kindness when I needed it. I stare instead at my hand, blood welling around the blade.

Johnny tastes the clear drink, and then spits a little across my hand. I seethe as the liquor hits my wound and sears up the nerves in my arm.

“Captain,” I hear a familiar voice behind me, but I can't turn.

Johnny faces the speaker.

“I know this girl. If she's a problem, I'll take her off your hands. I'll buy her from you.”

“You going to pay for the hole that she punched through my ship, too?” Johnny smacks his lips. The liquor he's downed must be strong as I can already see a haze in his eyes. “What's your name again?”

“Tobern. I boarded at Earth City. We played cards together on Entra.” He forces a bad laugh. “You won.”

Tobern
. I still can't turn, but I know his thin body. He wasn't as bad as some of the others—and yet he paid for me all the same.

“Well, Tobern, here's a notion: Captain always wins.” Johnny yanks the knife out of my hand, and I don't have a chance to screech before I hear the
oof
behind me.

And the thump on the floor.

Several people gasp, and a woman in the corner chants some kind of prayer.

Johnny finishes his liquor; his face twists as he swallows the burning stuff. He hauls me off my stool by the elbow. “I think
we've made our point. Don't you, Rain?”

I trip on Tobern's arm. He's lying on his side across the floor. Blood seeps from a wound in his chest, and his eyes are a blank brown. Maybe he didn't deserve a medal for bravery or morality, but he didn't deserve this.

“Clean up the mess, Lionel.” Johnny pounds the counter and leads me out. I glance through the crowd that has shrunk back to the edges of the room. No one dares move, not that I blame them. And as I turn one last time, I see a familiar line of razor-straight hair peeking from the storage room door. Gen, one of the girls I saved from Leland.

So she's still alive. I breathe the smallest sigh of relief. At least I did something right.

Johnny's happily drunk by the time we make it to the command room. He drops me to the floor and collapses in his captain's chair. I look out the massive window. The strings of the Void veil the stars, and I wrap my injured hand in the bottom folds of Ben's shirt.

Are the K-Force even coming? Or am I prolonging my misery for nothing?

At some point, Johnny is going to get bored and kill me. At some point, Ben is going to wake in
Melee
, and Johnny will find him in there.

And kill him.

“I don't know what I'm going to do with you.” Johnny sighs. “I'd like to hang you, but that just seems so quick. Any suggestions?”

I brush a trickle of blood from my scalp and open my mouth, but the screech of the alarm beats my words. It silences itself in record time, and a blue, blinking warning light replaces it.

Blue
.

Johnny gets to his feet so fast that he stumbles. “What the—”

The command deck fills with crew members flying to posts around the room. “What's going on?” Johnny barks.

“A ship, Captain. A large ship is incoming.”

The Mecs!

“It's
Stride
,” someone yells.

A shock rattles through me. Not
Stride
!

Johnny collapses into his chair. “I knew my brother would come back with his tail between his legs. Father would kill him for abandoning us here with a hole in our guts.”

I almost choke. We sent a call for help, and the wrong side answered . . . and if
Stride
is here, does that mean that he bested the K-Force? Could he have killed
Holmes
?