Flame: A Sky Chasers Novel

  “I liked what you said at services about getting the Empyrean kids together,” she told him. “The Pastor arranged a school for the little ones to attend every day, did you know?”

  “I guess that’s something.” Now that Waverly was missing, all else seemed small and petty. “Mather has the power. All I can do is ask for things.”

  “You did more than that,” Felicity said. “You said it in front of the whole congregation. Mather needed to do something, or it would seem strange.”

  Kieran glanced at the surveillance camera trained down on them from the ceiling. “Shouldn’t you be careful of what you say?”

  Felicity shrugged. “I didn’t say anything bad.”

  Kieran studied her. She smiled at him, crinkling the bridge of her nose in the most adorable way.

  The elevator doors opened onto the busy corridor. Kieran sidled out of the elevator and, with Felicity right behind, went to Mather’s office. Two guards stood outside the door. The big one with the dove insignia on his shoulder eyed Kieran with suspicion. “The Pastor is busy.”

  “I only need a moment of her time,” Kieran said steadily, though the man made him feel pinned and vulnerable.

  “Please?” Felicity said softly from behind Kieran. The man glared at her so coldly Kieran felt the need to step between them.

  “It’s important,” Kieran said to him, trying to make his voice forceful.

  “Is that Kieran?” Mather called from inside her office. The door opened, and Mather smiled. “Felicity, too! Come in.”

  “Waverly is missing,” Felicity blurted, refusing the chair Mather pointed to. She stood over the woman’s desk, dancing nervously on her feet. Kieran resisted the urge to put a hand on her shoulder to calm her.

  “Yes, we know,” Mather said, composing herself as she settled into her chair. “Waverly evaded her guard yesterday afternoon and ran away under her own power.”

  “Is Jacob Pauley still on the loose?” Kieran asked.

  She nodded once. “He is.”

  “Did you know he has already tried once to kill Waverly?”

  Mather rested her elbows on her desk, knitting her fingers together. “No.”

  “He attacked her on the Empyrean, which is what led to his capture.”

  “I hear your concern, Kieran,” Mather said coolly. “But I think it’s more likely that Waverly is in hiding.”

  “There’s no way Waverly would leave her mother,” Felicity said, her voice soft but strong. “She’s very protective of her.”

  “There’s no telling what she might do,” Mather snapped.

  “I’m telling you,” Felicity said, taking a step forward, “Waverly didn’t run away. Not without her mom.”

  Kieran looked at Felicity’s profile, the way she stared at Mather, though he could hear that her breathing was quick and frightened. Waverly always described Felicity as spineless, he thought, but it took courage to contradict Mather.

  “You and I see Waverly very differently,” Mather said with a kind smile.

  “Please listen to me, Pastor,” Kieran pleaded. “Jacob Pauley will hurt Waverly if he finds her before you do.”

  Mather blinked, once, twice, and understanding flooded Kieran.

  That was exactly what Mather was hoping for. She didn’t want to find Waverly. Mather wanted Pauley to kill her.

  “I’ll make an announcement, Kieran, that Waverly has evaded her guard.” She spoke slowly, like a schoolteacher soothing a child. “Would that help?”

  A shudder went through Kieran. “But an announcement would only inform Pauley that Waverly is alone.”

  “What would you have me do?” Mather said, her eye twitching with annoyance.

  “Look for her,” Kieran said. “Send out your guards. Comb the ship! You can’t let that lunatic get her!”

  “You’d like me to serve justice by finding Waverly?” Mather narrowed her eyes. “But you won’t testify in my trial to defend the truth?”

  Kieran’s throat went dry. In the corner of his eye he saw Felicity’s mouth drop open. She looked at Kieran, her eyes wide and frightened.

  All along, he thought, she’s been waiting to spring her trap to get what she wanted from me.

  The room was quiet. With the tip of her ring finger, Mather straightened her blotter, a row of pencils, papers sitting on the corner of her desk, then she lifted her eyes to Kieran and waited.

  “I’ll testify,” he finally said in a whisper, “at your trial. I’ll tell the truth if you find her.”

  “Thanks for this talk.” Mather stood up and held a hand out to the door.

  They were being dismissed.

  As they walked past Mather’s guards in the hallway, Felicity looked sidelong at Kieran, but neither of them spoke. Felicity nodded her head toward the central stairwell, and the two started down the cold metal stairs.

  “She isn’t going to do anything for Waverly,” Felicity finally said, her voice shaking with anger.

  “I know,” Kieran said grimly. “I’m going to Dr. Carver.”

  “The church elder?” Felicity asked, confused.

  “He’s the one using Waverly against Mather,” Kieran whispered. “He might help. But I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”

  “I’ll have Avery send a text through the com system to the elders chamber. He has access.” Felicity lightly stepped down onto another landing and opened the door for Kieran. He felt awkward walking through ahead of her.

  “I’m here,” Felicity said, pointing to a door to her right. Unlike the deadly still corridor outside his own apartment, he could hear the sounds of people living behind these doors—the laughter of a man and woman, the clink of silverware on stoneware plates, the strumming of an instrument. It sounded like home, and not home.

  “Do you live with…,” Kieran began, but he stopped, hating how the question sounded.

  “With Avery? Not yet.” Felicity smiled, biting the tip of her tongue between her front teeth—an odd quirk of nervousness that made her painfully endearing. “Living together without being married isn’t really allowed here.”

  “Oh,” Kieran said with an embarrassed nod.

  “Waverly’s smart,” Felicity said, reaching toward Kieran’s hand with her own, just enough to tap him on the wrist. “She’s a survivor.”

  “Yeah,” Kieran said, but his stomach tightened. Please just let her be hiding in the rain forest. Or the orchards. Please let her come home. The thought of that man finding her and what he might do to her made Kieran tremble. He didn’t want Waverly anymore, but he would always care for her, and he’d do anything to help her.

  NIGHT

  Seth woke gradually, confused by his surroundings until he understood he was still in his hiding place in the back of the lab. Some kind of loud noise he couldn’t identify at first—the intercom—had woken him. He moved to rub his eyes, forgetting about his hand, and was paralyzed by a pain so severe he curled into a fetal position and endured shooting needles emanating from his finger and up into his forearm. His hand was worse, much worse.

  The next thing he became aware of was a creeping chill moving over his spine and into his aching limbs. It felt like more than cold. It felt like fever.

  So this was it. He had an infection.

  He peeked through the gap in the shower curtain to find the lab lights were turned off. The scientist must have left. He shoved the bag of graffiti supplies out of the stall along with his new stencil, turned on the shower, and drank from it, then pulled the shower curtain aside.

  Arrogant, Waverly had called him. If he’d gotten on that shuttle with her, he’d have received medical attention and his hand might be healed by now. Instead he hid out for a few useless weeks until his wound got so bad he was going to have to turn himself in anyway. Because that’s what it had come to. If he didn’t want to lose his fingers, or his whole hand, for that matter, it was time to turn himself in.

  Everything Waverly said to him in that awful fight, every single vicious word, had
been the truth. It wasn’t the whole truth, though. He’d had one noble motive for this ridiculous escapade: to deserve her, even if he couldn’t have her. He still wanted that.

  “So, Ardvale,” he asked himself through his teeth, “what are you going to do with your last night of freedom?”

  Seth picked up his sack, which held only a few tubs of paint, a wide paintbrush, and the metal patina solution that Amanda had given him. He examined the stencil he’d made. It wasn’t perfect. The curve of her nose was slightly off, and so was the shape of her left eye, but it was unmistakably Waverly.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” he whispered.

  He limped to the door of the lab and peeked into the corridor. There was no one around. The clock on the desk by the door read 1:07 A.M. There probably wouldn’t be too many people moving about, but there’d still be a night crew in Central Command, and someone would be watching the surveillance video.

  He’d have to move fast.

  He found a lab coat in one of the lockers at the back of the room and a white cap that looked like something a surgeon would wear, probably to keep the scientists from contaminating samples with shedding hair. It would likely take a few minutes for anyone observing surveillance to recognize him. A few minutes would be all he needed.

  He left the lab and took the stairs up two at a time, ignoring the way each impact jarred his poor hand. Once he reached the habitation level, he bolted through the doorway and held his stencil against the wall with the forearm of his hurt hand, careful to protect his splinted fingers. He soaked the paintbrush in the tub of metal patina and, with a few strokes, smeared a thin coat over the stencil. The whole process had taken less than two seconds. The patina solution was a charcoal gray color, and he could smell it already working on the metal it touched, corroding it, changing its color, leaving behind an image of Waverly that mirrored the posters of her hanging everywhere.

  Only under Seth’s version was a single word: TRUTH.

  As he worked his way down the hallway, he ripped the awful posters down. He didn’t pause in a single hallway for more than a minute or two before he moved on to the next. Within five minutes he’d coated an entire level, and he hadn’t run into a single person. He sprinted to the stairwell and went down to the next level. He ran out of the metal corrosive after his third hallway and moved on to royal blue paint. By the third habitation level, all he had left was red. This made the most striking image of her: Waverly in the color of blood, the color of prophets, Waverly the truth teller.

  He’d covered all three habitation levels with her image by the time he ran out of supplies. Hopefully the New Horizon crew would believe the graffiti had been done by one of their own so that those who doubted Anne Mather might feel brave enough to come out of hiding. It was small, but it was all he could do.

  He sent the empty paint tubs and the stencil down an incinerator chute and ran back to the stairwell. He estimated his project had taken no more than thirty minutes, but he was certain they’d be on his trail by now. He took off at a run, pushing his body as fast as it could go. His feet felt as though they were attached to hundred-pound weights. His heart felt weak. His lungs felt clogged. His face was throbbing in time with his pulse. I’m breaking down.

  All he wanted was to get to the rain forest level. He wanted to smell that soil again, breathe in that fresh oxygen, bury his face in fern fronds, just one last time before they took him.

  They were waiting for him on the next landing: five guards, armed with guns and Tasers and iron fists. Seth stopped on the landing above them, hands above his head. “I’m unarmed.”

  They rushed at him en masse, and a hand shot out, slamming him in the ribs. Seth buckled. Hands pulled on his clothes, his hair. He covered his hurt fingers with his good arm. “I give up! I give up!”

  They didn’t stop. He felt kicks on his legs, rough hands pulling on his clothes, a harsh grip on the back of his neck that paralyzed him with pain.

  “I give up!” Seth cried again. His voice reminded him of the thousand times he’d defended himself to his father. The thousand times he’d insisted he hadn’t lied when he had. “You don’t have to do that!” he said as hard fingers on the back of his neck forced him to his knees.

  “Try anything and we’ll finish you here.” The speaker’s lips were close to his ear, the breath moist and sickening.

  “I won’t!” Seth said. He raised his hands over his head and screamed when someone behind him took hold of his twisted fingers. “It’s broken! It’s broken!” he pleaded.

  “Owie,” someone behind him mocked, but they let go of his hand and jerked him to his feet. Then he had to endure having his wrists bound behind his back. He was face-to-face with the big guy, the mean one. He held a nightstick, which he shook in Seth’s face as he growled, “Just try and get away.”

  “Say please,” Seth managed to whisper before he was pushed forward, up the stairs. Two men walked ahead of him, another two on either side, and the mean guy behind. All of them were quiet. All of them looked to be twice as strong as he was. None of them was Don.

  “I need a doctor,” Seth said to the one on his left. “My hand’s hurt. I think it’s infected.”

  The guy behind him jabbed him in the ribs with a nightstick.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Shut up,” the guy behind him said with a blow to the spine that was even harder. After that Seth didn’t try to talk to them.

  When they emerged from the stairwell Seth recognized the corridor outside Central Command. It was disorienting to be walking openly in the public areas of the ship. The corridor was crowded with freshly showered morning crew members reporting for duty as the tired night crew waved good-bye and headed home. A woman, petite though soft around the middle, stared at him as she passed by on her way to Central Command. He wanted to cry out to her, ask for help, because she looked like a nice woman who would feed him some soup.

  In that moment, he missed his mother. He missed her so much it was like a frozen block of ice inside his chest, one that could never be worn away or lightened, not even by Waverly Marshall. As the guards pushed him into the Captain’s office, he understood finally what his life had been about: revenge for his mother’s death. To be a hero. To save her. To undo it somehow. To bring her back.

  Was this clarity or delirium? His fever ate through his thoughts. When had it gotten so bad?

  “No wonder I’m so fucked-up,” he said under his breath as the tall office chair at the desk swiveled around and he was face-to-face with a matronly, plump old woman who could only be Anne Mather, the antimother.

  “You’ve led us on quite a chase,” she said.

  “I hope you had as much fun as I did,” Seth said breathlessly, becoming aware that his throat was sore. The guard pushed him toward a chair and forced him down.

  “You’re unwell,” Mather said appraisingly.

  “At least I’m not old.”

  Her gaze lingered at his hairline. “What have you been up to, young man?”

  “You know. Stealing pies off windowsills. Your basic Huckleberry Finn–type stuff.”

  “You like Twain?”

  “Never met him.”

  “You’re coy,” she said without a hint of humor.

  “Yeah. I like him,” Seth said. Huckleberry Finn had been one of the few books in English class that hadn’t felt like a waste of time. He’d had an affinity with Huck, who had a mean dad, too. After that he’d read everything Twain ever wrote. “Probably the best writer to come out of the United States of America.”

  “I’ve always been partial to Hemingway.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You’d like him. He’s very”—her eyes narrowed with the word—“male.”

  “So what are you going to do to me?”

  “Who are you working with?”

  “I’m alone.”

  “Jacob Pauley?”

  “That lunatic?”

  “Have you seen him?”


  “Not since he left me to die on the Empyrean.”

  “What about Waverly Marshall?”

  “Haven’t seen her since she rescued me.”

  Her eyebrows tweaked upward. “You’re Mason Ardvale’s son.”

  Seth stiffened at this. “So?”

  “Your father was a bully.”

  This enraged Seth beyond reason. He didn’t know why, since he agreed with her. Still, he was so angry all he could do was stare at her forehead, willing it to split.

  She smiled. “I trained with Mason on the space station before the mission launch. He had a reputation among the women on board.”

  Seth tried to think of something witty to say, something to make her think she hadn’t drilled to his core, but he was too tired. He stared at the blotter on her desk—it was pristine, perfectly aligned with the row of pencils that lay to one side, lined up with the intercom to Mather’s right.

  “Wow,” he remarked distantly, “you’re really anal.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Retentive,” Seth said. “I read Freud, too.”

  “Young man, do you appreciate your situation here?”

  Seth sighed. All he wanted was to sleep. He felt used up, aged. “I tried to be a hero. I failed. Can I see a doctor?”

  “We’re not finished. Why have you been hiding?”

  “I thought I’d be able to help Waverly.”

  “Help her do what?”

  “Nothing.” Seth looked out the porthole. He hadn’t seen the stars in such a long time. “Just help her.”

  “What is your relationship to her?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Why don’t you ask her?” He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. A gray film had grown over his vision like a layer of mold.

  “Because I don’t know where she is,” Mather said.

  “She ran away?” Seth blinked his sticky eyelids.

  Mather studied him carefully. He stared back at her, letting her see his surprise and his gladness. Waverly got away. Good for her, once again proving she didn’t need Seth Ardvale. Or anyone, for that matter.