Article 5 (Article 5 #1)(81)

He shook his head.

“I was there.” His voice cracked. I felt the wall support my weight.

“You … were there? What are you talking about? We have to go.” This time my voice had no volume. No conviction.

Somehow we were both on the floor. He grabbed me, pulling me hard against him. I was too shocked to struggle.

“I thought if I told you, you wouldn’t come with me. Or that you’d run away. I know it was wrong, Ember, I’m so sorry. I needed to get you safe first. I was going to tell you once we got there.”

He wasn’t deceiving me. His tortured face spoke the truth.

My mother was dead.

I became aware of a screaming pain at two points. The front of my head and the center of my gut. Icy knives of reality stabbed into those places. Stabbed at me until I bled. Until my body was turned inside out.

I could hear her. I could hear her voice. Ember. She called my name. How could she be dead when I heard her so clearly?

“I’m so sorry,” he repeated over and over. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I just wanted you safe. I’m so sorry.”

He was too close to me. Crowding me. I pushed him away.

“Get back,” I groaned.

“What do I do?” he asked me desperately. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What happened to my mother?” I asked him.

He hesitated. He wasn’t going to say.

“Tell me!” I insisted. “Why is everyone hiding everything from me? Tell me!”

“Ember, she died. That’s all you need to know.”

“Don’t be a coward!”

“Okay. All right.”

He kneeled in front of me, his arms now crossed over his midsection. His shoulders were shaking. A line of sweat poured down his temple.

“Fighting didn’t turn me, so my command needed something else. Tucker showed them letters. Ones I had written back to you. I thought they’d been mailed but … he’d been hoarding them. They learned who you were. That I didn’t end it with you like I was supposed to. They told me I had to buy in or … Jesus. Or you’d be hurt. So I cut a deal. No more fights. No more you. And they’d promote me to show the others that the system always wins. I did whatever they said. I thought it would work, that they’d leave you alone, but it didn’t matter.

“It was the final test. Your extraction. They used you to break me.

“We took your mom to a base in Lexington, with all the other Article 5s in the state. She was put in a detention cell. My unit leader, Bateman—he was pissed off by what happened at your house. That I didn’t follow orders and stay in the car. He said I was out of line. I was a failure as a soldier. He reported me to command.”

He stopped there and leaned over his knees like he might vomit.

“Finish,” I demanded. I could barely hear him over the screaming in my brain.

“They brought me in front of the board for discipline. My CO was there. He told me that it was time to put my training into effect. That I could still make captain someday. He told me I could redeem myself by … by executing the detainees, starting with your mother. I told him no. I’m just a driver. I just transport. I told him to kick me out. Give me a dishonorable discharge.”

Chase punched his thigh again. I wept softly.

“He told me to follow orders. That if I didn’t do what he said, someone else would. That they’d pull you from school and do the same. I didn’t know what to do. The next thing I knew, Tucker was escorting me to her detention cell, and I had a gun in my hand.”

I wanted to scream at Chase to stop. But I had to hear. I had to know. The tears ran from his eyes freely now.

“Your mom. God. She had been crying. Her shirt was all wet. She saw me and she smiled, and she ran over to me and grabbed my jacket in her hands and said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Chase.’ And I was there to kill her.

“I held the gun up, and she backed into a chair and sat there, watching me. Just watching me. I thought for a second I was going to do it. That I had to. But nothing happened. My CO was behind us. He told me to pull the damn trigger or I’d watch them murder you. Your mom heard him. She grabbed the gun in my hand, and she leaned in close and told me to find you, wherever you were, and take care of you. ‘My baby,’ she called you. She told me not to be scared. She told me not to be scared.

“And then he shot her. And … she died. A foot away from me. I don’t even know what happened afterward. I ended up in a holding cell for a week.”

Silence. Long, suffocating silence.

I felt my brain twisting, trying to understand, even as it was trying to erase the last thirty minutes.

“Maybe if you would have talked to your officer. Maybe if you had tried to tell him that she didn’t deserve this.…” My voice sounded small.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“You don’t know that! You didn’t even try! You could have talked to them and … and … you could have never come home.… In training you could have not been so … you! You could have told us to run!”

I felt as crazy as I sounded.

“I know.” He had no conclusion to this statement.

A frozen hammer against my skull. I knew the truth, even if I didn’t want to.