Chapter 6
‘Plan B isn’t working too well,’ Hayden complained in a loud whisper to Tim.
Bane suppressed a smile at his friend’s poor attempt at subtlety.
‘Has it ever?’ Kate grumbled, forcing her bleary eyes to focus on her watch. ‘Anyone ready to share a taxi yet? Mr Botox isn’t going to crack tonight, guys. I give up.’
‘Botox. It takes all the expressions off your face,’ Kate replied with inebriated innocence. ‘Your face doesn’t look drunk. In fact, it never shows any emotion.’
Hayden squinted at him, studying his face. ‘Ish being drunk an emotion?’
‘Of course,’ Tim replied. ‘A gently swaying motion.’
It must have looked like some kind of a magic trick to them, Bane thought as he finished off another beer. Which it was. When he’d been caught giving the waitress a generous tip, Tim had accused him of having made some sort of arrangement with her, and from then on had insisted on collecting the drinks himself. Of course, that hadn’t made any difference. According to his friends’ slurred complaints, all they knew was that they were all struggling to see straight while he looked like he could thread needles while riding a unicycle. Bane had assumed they would have learnt by now.
‘If you want to know something, you could just ask. You don’t need to use me as an excuse to all get drunk,’ he said.
Tim sat up a little straighter. With a slight lean. ‘You mean if we ask you a question, you’ll answer it?’
But Tim wasn’t sober enough to be deterred. ‘We just want to know what it is that has you bound so tightly to your past. You have your whole life ahead of you, mate. Whatever it is, it’s time to move on. Maybe if you talk—’
‘Bound?’ he interrupted, unable to hide the despair that rose up in his throat. ‘I’m not bound to anything, Tim. I’ve been cut free. There’s no more gravity, nothing at all for me to hold on to. I’m free to drift aimlessly among the bloody stars forever.’
Hayden turned to Kate and frowned. ‘I’m confused. Are we the stars?’
Tim waved his finger at him, concentrating hard as if he wanted to make some important point. ‘Mate. ADFA will only hold you for a few years, and then you’ll be free again. Free to leave Brisbane and fly all around the globe on missions, and—’
‘Do you have any idea how painful it is to live without gravity? How hard it is to get anything done? How impossible it is to get close to anybody? How devastating it is to be cut off from everything that matters in the world?’ The realisation that he was saying too much only made him feel angrier. He had never come close to hitting his school counsellor when she’d tried to get him to open up, but the pitying look in Tim’s eyes was making his fingers twitch. With a deep calming breath, he made himself unclench his fists under the table. ‘Kate, could you please call a taxi for us as well?’ he requested as politely as he could. ‘If Tim’s starting to tear up then that’s my cue to take him home.’
Bane paid and dismissed the driver, planning to walk home later. His apartment was a couple of suburbs away from Tim’s, but he needed some air.
‘For the Troops and With the Troops,’ Tim declared to the sky. ‘Isn’t that the Military Police motto? You should join them, Bane, and I don’t mean as a Reserve. You live like that naturally. Loyal to your squad, I mean. Protective.’
‘Yeah, well the troops aren’t generally throwing up to the point where they can’t make it to their own front door without help,’ Bane replied, dragging his best friend’s lanky frame up the steps.
Tim chuckled too loudly as he fished around in his pocket for his keys and made a valiant yet doomed effort to let them both in. ‘Yeah. It takes a real mate to be willing to take you home when you can’t stop spewing. Maybe I can return the favour someday.’
The keys clattered as they hit Tim’s shoe and it took a fair amount of skill for Bane to retrieve them without releasing his grip on Tim’s swaying shoulder. He unlocked the door, dropped the keys onto the coffee table and his friend onto the couch.
Tim’s face looked clammy as he picked up one of the cushions and clutched it like a teddy bear. ‘Why didn’t you drink tonight?’ he asked. ‘You got something on tomorrow or is it a Christian thing?’
‘I did drink. It takes a bit more to knock me over than a few beers. Besides, last time I got drunk I ended up like you. I didn’t like it,’ Bane explained as he put the kettle on. In fact he had thrown up once and his addled brain had gotten so excited he’d found himself on the phone trying to book a ticket home on the next plane. When he’d realised the truth, he’d become so depressed he had shut himself away for nearly two whole days. He couldn’t allow himself to live like that.
After making them each a coffee, Bane sat down to wait and see if his squad mate would recover enough to be able to put himself to bed. Apparently Tim’s natural sense of caution was still out of action, which wasn’t a great sign.
‘What’s with the girly bracelet anyway, Bane?’ Tim slurred when he caught him fiddling with it again. ‘Did some girl back home give it to you? We all want to know.’ He gestured grandly around the room as if the whole squad was there.
Bane sighed. He needed to talk to someone. He felt less reluctant than usual, which probably meant that Tim was drunk enough that he wouldn’t remember the conversation in the morning. He smiled at the way the compulsions against speaking seemed to adjust to each situation.
‘Yeah. Some girl. We went to school together,’ he admitted, closing his eyes and remembering the way her feet used to bounce around whenever she raised her hand in class.
‘Oh. High school sweethearts. I love those stories. Did you make out behind the library at lunchtimes?’
‘No. I set her locker on fire and slashed her bag with a knife. I can’t believe how much time I wasted fighting it,’ he replied. Tim looked confused, and with a start Bane realised he had just hit his fist against the coffee table. It had been so long since he’d spoken about her that he’d forgotten how quickly his emotions could take over. He laid his hands carefully in his lap before continuing. ‘We didn’t really talk to each other until after graduation. All those years at school together, but because of my stupidity I only really had a few short weeks with her.’
She died in agony, right in front of him.
‘She left me,’ he said instead, his voice catching.
Tim hugged his red velvet cushion close to his face, big brown eyes wide with inebriated sympathy.
‘I tried to stop her, Tim, but that girl …’ He snorted under his breath. ‘She could argue with the moon itself. What hope did I ever have?’
Making a sincere effort to sit up, Tim’s expression was dismayed, and queasy. Even in the state he was in he was still clearly trying to pick up on every nuance. Usually that was something Bane appreciated in his friend.
‘She didn’t, you know, die … did she?’
A massive silvery sword, spinning and emitting so much energy that fresh flames burst from it with every revolution. The memory had not dimmed in the slightest. Bane’s eyes were filled once again with an image of Lainie pushing herself into the sharp knife at her throat in a futile attempt to pull Sarah Ashbree away from the Event Horizon. Her blood sprayed out like a million precious jewels, each one a spark of agonising appeal. She sank to the floor of the cave with blood gushing from her neck, while Noah pinned him down to prevent him from being killed by the revolving sword that guarded the way to Eden. She had died right in front of him, while he lay so close …
It took him a little while to compose himself enough to answer. ‘She’s not dead. She’s still out there somewhere.’
‘Is that why you won’t commit to the army? Do you think she might come back?’
Squeezing his eyes closed, Bane tried to shut the memories out. Lainie was living in Paradise. What right did he have to wish for anything else if he really loved her? ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘She won’t be returning.’ Picking up his phone and keys, he poured his barely touched coffee down the sink. ‘I’ll have a look at the ADFA application tomorrow. Thanks for the talk, Tim. You’re a good friend.’
Tim looked more confused than ever. His mouth opened but he couldn’t seem to put any words together, which suited Bane just fine because there was no point talking anymore. There was nothing else to say.
As he stepped out into the humid night air, Bane looked up at the dusky red moon. It reminded him of old blood, and he remembered that there was supposed to be a lunar eclipse that night. Had it been and gone, or was it still to come? He decided that he didn’t really care enough to check, and kept walking—a man without purpose, powering through the back streets of suburban Brisbane.
Lainie wasn’t coming back, and there was nothing he could do to try to move on that he hadn’t tried already. And yet he had to keep pressing forward, because if he let himself stop he would be sucked straight back to that town, and there was no future for him there.
Full-time army. Would that be enough of a challenge to keep him from falling apart? Hopefully. Would it be enough for him to leave his past behind? Never. He simply couldn’t let her go.