Chapter Forty-Four

 

Minda turned the choco-fiasco into a memorial concert for Mertex and for Verex Kowlk. They’ve been going for hours.

I am hiding out in the Green Room, waiting for Mamá to bring me clean clothes. Fizzax got called away after one drink to question everyone about what happened to Mertex, and I slipped away while he was getting his orders. If he finds me in here, I’m going to claim accident – Mertex accidentally stabbed himself with the syringe when the car went into the ditch, Tyson’s foot slipped off the brake when we followed him here, those wires just never got attached right to that statue. In my version, Murry’s a hero. As long as Tyson doesn’t contradict me.

I’m still shaking with shock and heartbreak and need, so when I text Stephen what Mertex said about where Kayla is, it takes me a couple of tries to get it right. I’m not up to talking, so I’m relieved when he texts back. Heading over to the other island as soon as I find my shoes.

I’m too broken right now to even be curious what Stephen’s doing that he lost them.

There’s another text I didn’t even notice come in. It’s from Rex. Are you OK? You didn’t say what you wanted.

I want Brill back. I have trouble breathing every time I think about what is happening to mi vida right now. If he’s still talking to Frank, he must be so scared. When his heart stops beating – if it hasn’t already – will I somehow know?

I took off the dented body armor when I examined the bruising on my chest. Now, I take the paladzian pendant out of my bag. The crystal glitters, beautiful, perfect.

The door opens while I’m putting the pendant on, tucking it under my shirt, close to my shattered heart. Brill may not even be dead yet, but it doesn’t matter. Unlike Minda, I won’t be there to hold him when it happens. Unlike Chestla, there’s no way for me to demand mi vida not die on me.

Frank probably won’t even give us his body back, so there can be a proper funeral.

Minda sees what I’m doing and gasps. She wraps me in a hug. “Oh, sweetie.”

It feels good, like the compression is holding my world together. When she lets me go, I feel lost. I’m still covered in dried glow syrup, and it feels like I’m a string of stars, let loose in the galaxy to float away. I’m losing my friends, one by one. And Kaliel is next. The time they set for his trial is less than an hour away.

Mamá comes up behind Minda, carrying a dress for me. “What’s wrong, mija?”

I glare at her. “If you wind up with Frank, I will never speak to you again. Nunca.”

Mi mamá looks like I slapped her.

I turn to Minda. “At least you got to say goodbye.”

Minda hugs me again. She doesn’t ask what happened to mi vida. “Tell Kaliel goodbye as soon as we get there. Plus anything else important you have to say. This kind of trial – with the victim’s families there – it’s not likely to go well. And you know our justice is swift.”

I take the dress from Mamá, who is looking more and more puzzled.

I tell Minda, “Kayla’s the one who needs to tell him goodbye. Can’t they delay this until we find her?”

“I wish it was that easy.” Minda rubs at her leg. I wonder whether it’s the real one or the join for the prosthetic. “I’ve arranged for a transport to bring as many of us as possible to support Kaliel. It leaves in nineteen time segment partitions.”

I still can’t wrap my head around the way Zantites tell time.

Mamá looks confident for the first time since she walked into the room. “She means roughly fifteen minutes, mija.”

I gesture down at my syrup-covered, gently-glowing clothes. “Then I’d better hurry.”

I clean up the best I can, and am just sliding on a fresh coat of lipstick when Minda knocks on the door. “You ready?”

I follow her out to the transport, where Mamá, Valeria and most of the crew are piling in. I wind up sitting next to Tyson. I still don’t feel like talking. I try to make that clear by staring out the window. He lets me, for a good long while.

They’re holding the trial in an open-air coliseum. Which means that at least Kaliel will get one last look at the sky. Ay, no! No, I’ve got to stop thinking like that. Tyson may be planning a miracle.

I look over at him. He’s got the sleeve of his jacket pulled up, examining a damaged scale. The skin underneath is a soft pinkish gray. “Are dragons on Evevron like dragons on Earth? Or are tey more like me? Tis body is sturdy. Are tey harder than me to kill?”

This trial must have him thinking about his own mortality, the way the pendant heavy on my neck has me thinking about mine. I manage a sad little laugh. “Dragons on Earth aren’t real.”

“Which is a shame, right? Some of te tings tey’ve done with tem in te holos is impressive.” I’d never have pegged Tyson as a guy who watches Earth movies. Pero, this is the first time I’ve ever sat and just talked to him. He shakes his cabeza. “But I mean te extinct ones.”

“Dinosaurs?” I think about it for a few minutes. “They’re more like dinosaurs. Spucks are smart, as animals go, pero, they’re not people. And they certainly don’t have your sense of justice.”

Tyson’s tongue flicks out between his lips. “Your compliment makes me bounce sparkle premier night champagne.”

I glance out the window again. We’re getting close now. People are lining the streets. Yet when I look closer, I blink in surprise. Many are holding up MIAG signs. Less than half of these people are Zantite. There are visitors here from dozens of different worlds, wearing shirts that say things like, Team BeeBee AND KayKay, and, Save the hero, save the girl! There are some holding up pictures of me – heavy on the theme of dragonslaying – and even a group of a dozen Scarzilan girls wearing hoodies with stylized images of Brill’s face emblazoned across the back. The whole thing’s done in black and white – except for the eyes, which are a different color on each hoodie.

When I see the one where Brill’s eyes are lavender – mischievous and laughing – I look down at my hands, which are trying to dig holes in the top of my thighs. I have to force myself to keep breathing.

I still can’t accept he’s gone. When a Krom’s unconscious, the eyes go clear, like a marble with a network of orange veins behind it. I can’t dwell on what his eyes must look like now, not if I’m going to be in any condition to speak for Kaliel.

I try to focus on the scene outside the window. What Tawny’s artist has done for Kaliel is nothing short of amazing. It’s taking six people to hold up his most elaborate piece, a moving mural of various versions of Kaliel fighting space pirates. People around it are holding up signs that say, Live to fight another day! in about a dozen different languages.

That hurts too. Right now, my love is either dead or dying.

And yet. It’s the opposite of the signs at the spaceport when I was leaving Earth. I wonder, after watching Tawny’s spinwash of my exploits, if those people who were there that day all still feel the same way – if they’d rather be watching me die today instead of Kaliel. If they still think I sold out my planet’s future. If that lady’s still angry enough to want to throw poo at me.

And if any of that even matters, when there are also this many people – some of them Earthlings – who came all this way to show their support.

When we get off the transport, Minda takes my hand and pulls me through the crowd, to where Kaliel and Tawny are standing flanked by Zantite guards.

“Here.” Tawny hands me a Mercy is a Gift tee with an olive branch – with one of the tree-dwelling booger-picker creatures perched on it – underneath. It’s a hideous green color that matches my nails.

It’s the last thing I’d have expected for her to approve for my wardrobe. I pull it on over my dress.

“Bo.”

I turn back to her. “Que?”

She takes both my hands in hers, but it feels different than the fake-friend gesture she’s made before. “Just so you know, I wasn’t the one that gritcast feed back to HGB headquarters of those particular pirates walking into Brill’s ship. I meant to keep my promise to you.”

Is that a manipulation? Is she angling to keep my cooperation, now that her leverage is gone? Or was it an apology?

Pulling my hands out of hers, trying to keep tears from running down my face, I turn to Kaliel, and he throws his arms around me, wrapping me in a crushing hug. His face close to my ear, he says, “Thank you so much for coming. I didn’t want to die alone.”

Kayla’s not here, his family didn’t come, and no lo sé how many actual amigos he has left, since they mostly abandoned him during his first trial. Which just leaves me. I hug him back as hard as I can, and there’s comfort there, between two people who’ve lost everything. And I can kind of understand what Brill said about there being a measure of comfort in him going with Frank instead of a stranger.

I can’t lose Kaliel too, so I try to hold onto him forever. Pero, he releases me.

I tell him, “I thought you had a plan.”

“Well, yeah, but then Verex Kowlk’s entire fan club showed up and went and sat in the victim’s section, and I don’t think Tyson was expecting that.” He casts a distressed look out into the coliseum, at a crowded section of seats marked out from the rest in black marble. Someone is trying to lead Minda over to sit in it. She refuses, points to a place farther down in the regular seats where Mamá’s sitting. With Frank.

Which means it’s done. “Oye!”

My love is dead. I shatter inside.

“Hey, where’s Brill?” Kaliel asks.

That’s what I want to know. I make eye contact with Frank, and he looks steadily back. Anger starts to break through the numb wall of grief. What did you do with mi vida’s body, you kek? Where do I need to go to grieve? I had thought Brill was dead once before, and it nearly broke me. I need to see him, cold and ruined, to find closure.

Tawny’d as much as said Brill’s execution had been green-lighted because they suspected Brill knew the megacorp had hired the crew of the Onyx Shadow to frame one of its own pilots.

Pero, is that what they told Frank?

I don’t care if he is a weapon. If Frank approved of the “collateral damage” murder of a whole transport full of abuelitas, and chose to eliminate the guy who’d found out about it, he is even colder and crueler than I’d believed.

Tawny has to know Brill’s already dead. She has to know it’s tearing me apart inside. She says, “They’re starting. You need to find somewhere to sit, so I can call you to speak later.”

“Can I sit with Kaliel, por favor?”

Tawny nods and for a second there’s actual sympathy in her eyes.

I move around her, and follow Kaliel out to his rows of seats.

I recognize some of Verex Kowlk’s fan club members, filling the victim’s section. Half of them are in Minda’s club too. Many smile when Kaliel steps into view, and my stomach turns at the sight of all those white teeth, ready to tear mi amigo to nothing. He doesn’t matter to them, not really. They’re just angry the object of their obsession got taken away.

I do feel a pang of sympathy for a female Zantite, sitting apart from the other victims, weeping into an oversized handkerchief. Pero, she doesn’t even look at Kaliel. I doubt whether Kaliel keeps breathing matters to her either.

Tawny’s perched on the end of the long bench seat, then Kaliel, then me. Tyson comes to sit beside us. He scratches his ankle with the toe of the other boot.

“Brill’s really not coming?” Kaliel asks.

“He wanted to be here.” I glare over at Frank again, pero I can’t hold onto the anger in the face of the heartshattered heat biting at the back of my eyes. “I can promise you that.”

After the long introductions and formal language about complaints, Police Chief Dghax, one of the four Zantites sitting in judgement of this case, asks Tawny to state her objections to the summary guilty verdict, which is to stand unless proven otherwise.

Tawny moves into the center of the colosseum, and asks Doc Sonda to join her. Turns out Sonda’s a pediatric brain surgeon, and thus an expert. Sonda does so, turning the space around her into a giant holo of a brain. It’s so like what we saw on Evevron I get a strong wave of déjà vu. Sonda was one of Mertex’s friends, and her giant jaw keeps quivering as she explains the abnormalities in what we’re looking at. So much loss, in this one space. So much pain.

I don’t know whether anyone told her what’s really going on, pero she refers to the mindworm’s remains as an “inoperable growth” woven into parts of Kaliel’s brain, with a larger mass down towards the base of his skull. The mindworm looks huge and dark in the hologram.

Kaliel makes a tiny unhappy noise. When I look over at him, he whispers, “All of that is still in my head?”

“Relax,” Tyson whispers over me. “It will dissolve away, given time.”

Dghax asks, “Is this going to prove fatal?”

Sonda points at her diagram. “Whatever treatment he received on Evevron stopped the growth rate flat, and has relieved the pressure on the brain. The scan shows pockets in the tissue where something that was pressing into this lobe seems to have liquified. Kaliel claims the treatment he received was proprietary, so he cannot reveal the few details he knows.”

Dghax says, “So if he were to be spared, he would be able to live a normal life?”

That raises angry murmurs from the crowd, pero Sonda nods.

After that, the psychologist comes out and says that Kaliel is contrite, and that he now seems rational, calm and unlikely to repeat his actions. The psychologist looks at Kaliel and shakes his head in wonder. “He doesn’t deny that he did it. But the way he described what happened, it was like his perceptions had been re-wired, and the overwhelming feeling was that he was afraid of Minda and convinced that destroying her was the only way he could survive.”

The psychologist reads specific details from Kaliel’s account.

It sounds like Kaliel was describing what the mindworm was feeling, as filtered through his own brain. Brill was right. Psychologically, it is a child. And where we’ve seen it as aggressive, it’s scared. Several times, Kaliel’s report mentions homesickness, abandonment.

The psychologist continues, “Impaired perception is an untraditional defense, but we are talking about alien physiology, and this entire trial is being held because of a treaty that found we had unjustly executed twelve physicians whose only crime was not understanding our physiology.”

The unhappy grumbling turns into a chatterclash, pero at the same time, the judges look like they are actually listening. I look over at Tyson, who looks a little smug.

Then Tawny calls me to testify about Kaliel’s character.

I’m not sure how long I can stand out here before I break down. I try to keep it as succinct as possible, speaking around the lump of emotion that keeps trying to stopper my throat. “Kaliel has saved my life more than once, and I’ve seen him put the welfare of others before his own. He could have run from this trial. It’s a big galaxy. You probably never would have found him. But he was more worried about the damage he’d done between your people and mine. He showed up here willing to die to heal the breach. I beg you to let him live, pero if you don’t, you should at least save his heart. Because that took courage.”

That sends shock waves through the audience, and I’m afraid it was the wrong thing to say. My chest feels frío, my fingers like ice. Zantites take their customs seriously, and if they think I want them to honor a coward, even in death, it could sway them the wrong way.

Pero, look at him.

Kaliel’s barely older than me, his body still in perfect condition, his eyes clear and unafraid. He’s a lot more heroic than me. And he’s about to be ruined. My hand goes to the mourning pendant around my neck, under the tee-shirt. “He’s a good friend, and I seem to be running a shortage of those these days.”

I turn to go back to my seat.

“Wait,” Dghax says. When I stop, he asks, “What’s that you keep playing with around your neck?”

Heat flames into my face. To these Zantites, it’s a forest fire of emotion. I pull the pendant out. Dghax’s eyes go wide, along with one of the other judges. The other two probably have no more idea what a paladzian pendant is than I did when Brill gave it to me. My throat thick with emotion, I manage, “Like I said, they’re in short supply.”

Before Dghax can ask what happened, I slip back into my seat and tuck the pendant back under my shirt.

“Very persuasive,” Tyson says softly.

“I meant every word.” It comes out forcefully, although Tyson hadn’t implied otherwise.

Kaliel points at the pendant, starts to ask what it is, pero Tawny tells him it’s time for him to go up there to speak for himself.

“But your grief has you even more impassioned. You miss Mertex.” Tyson flicks his tongue. “So if Kaliel lives, you won’t be so alone.”

I bring a hand to the bridge of my nose. He said Mertex because he doesn’t think I’m ready to talk about Brill, pero I am. “That’s what this Mindhugger can’t seem to understand. That you can’t just replace one friend with another. I’m going to miss Mertex, because he was cómico and had a good heart, pero not like I’m going to miss Brill. Dios mio, I wasn’t kidding when I called Brill my life.”

Tyson scratches at the back of his blade-like cabeza. “Wat happened to Brill?”

Could he really not know?

Tyson’s a Galactacop. There’s a delicate balance here between my need for justicia, and my need for discretion, and no lo sé what powderkegs get blown open if he confronts Frank. “There was an accident. I’ll explain later.”

I turn my attention back to Kaliel. Dghax just asked him what he has to say in his own defense.

“Thank you for the chance to apologize thoroughly for the pain I’ve caused.” Kaliel turns, finds Minda in the audience. “Especially to you. You have showed kindness to my friends, and promoted understanding between our planets.” Minda’s work has actually been in an effort to keep her planet from invading ours, but there’s no way Kaliel’s going to say the i-word. “I have no way to repair the damage I’ve done to all your good work.” He turns to the victims’ section. “I don’t know any of you the way I know Minda, but I regret what I’ve taken from you.” Kaliel holds up his hands. “There’s blood here and I know it. Even though I didn’t mean it, that changes nothing. I don’t deserve my life. But I beg you. My girlfriend is missing, and she’s never hurt anybody. Delay this sentence and let me live long enough to find her. I want my last act to be something that brings good.”

Beside me, Tyson hisses. He didn’t coach Kaliel to say that. Tawny’s just standing out there, looking bewildered. The judges ask her if she has anyone else who wishes to speak.

When she concedes the colosseum floor, the victims’ representative moves to help the weeping girl descend from the stands.

And as much as they seemed to be considering the logic of Kaliel’s arguments, looking at the judges’ sympathetic eyes now, Kaliel’s doomed.

I can already feel the fuzzy detachment where time stretches out, like I’m about to be in a car wreck. I want to flitdash down the street, past my new fans, and hide somewhere while Kaliel dies. But he asked me to be here. And I couldn’t be there for Brill.

I’ve got the shakes. It’s not so much the IH as having my emotions wrung out over and over. I’m not sure I can handle this. Pero, I won’t abandon Kaliel.

The girl blinks her whale eyes. “I’m Willa. I am – was – married to Yex, one of the cameramen killed in the bombing.”

“Does your heart long for justice?” one of the judges asks.

Sí. They’re going to eat Kaliel in about three minutes. My guts are churning with nausea.

Willa grabs a fresh handkerchief from her pocket. “Yex was a curious man. He always wanted to understand the story behind the story, so I’ve been trying to understand why he died. I’ve been following Bo’s exploits, and after seeing what she’s gone through to save her friend, I really do believe mercy is a gift she deserves. I want to give Kaliel back to her. As long as he then stays far away from here.”

Just about everyone in the audience turns to stare at me. And I realize I’m crying, heavy feo tears that have to be looking horrible on camera. I stand up. The only words I can manage to get out are a breathy, almost inaudible, “Thank you.”

“Wait a minute.” The president of Verex Kowlk’s fan club is on his feet. “You don’t get to decide that.”

Someone else shouts, “Mercy is a gift!”

And then I can’t make out anything distinct, because they’re all shouting. The people on the streets outside hear it, and they take up the chant. Mercy is a gift. Kaliel’s staring at Willa, wide-eyed, like maybe he hallucinated what he thought she’d said.

I can’t believe they’ve latched onto Tawny’s saying either. Media spin and emotional manipulation can do wonders. For once, just maybe, it’s something good.