This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(14)
Sean huffs softly, shaking his head at me for taking the trouble. This is the guy who has a collection of photos tacked up on the stone wall next to his hammock, women from brightly lit worlds laughing and smiling and pouting for the camera. Wives or girlfriends or lovers, I suppose. Pictures he takes off the bodies of the soldiers and pins up as morbid trophies. This is what the fight does to people. To someone like Sean, who devotes his time to teaching our children, but can’t bring himself to see the soldiers as human.
There are a number of caverns at the bottom of our network of tunnels that we don’t use anymore. Too damp for living space, and there are far fewer Fianna now than there were during my sister’s time. Sean binds the trodaire while I keep watch at the door, scanning the empty passageway, waiting for someone to round the corner and discover us. He’s tying her down, looping the rope tightly through a post drilled into the stone that was once used to stabilize shelving. At one time this had been a storeroom for weaponry. “You really think there’s any chance this works out at all?” he asks, finishing off a knot and stepping back to inspect his work.
I can hear the doubt in his voice, and the long, exhausting night I’ve had crowds in on me all at once. I need a moment’s respite. I need Sean, of all people, on my side. “Lecture me later,” I say, as pain pulses through my leg again. “I need a little first aid before I can take any more.”
Sean’s initial alarm fades when I unwrap my makeshift bandage to reveal the miniature stab wound in my leg. Leaning close to inspect it, he frowns and asks, “What is that?”
I lean against the wall, taking the pressure off my leg. “A cocktail garnish,” I mutter.
Sean’s head jerks up so he can look at me—my expression prompts a burst of laughter as he realizes who’s responsible for the plastic sword in my thigh. The bands of tension around my chest ease a fraction. Sean leaves me there as he goes off in search of a pair of pliers; no sense risking anyone else discovering Lee Chase nearly bested me with a cocktail sword. By the time he comes back, Sean’s still grinning.
“You’ve had worse luck with girls,” he points out, widening the rip in my pants leg so he can get at the plastic with the pliers. “Remember that time you tried to sweet-talk Mhairi and she laughed at you?”
I wince as he loses his grip on the remnants of the cocktail sword. “I was thirteen, shut up.”
“Or Aoife? Or Alejandra?”
“What are you talking about? Alejandra and I—”
“Poor girl felt sorry for you.” He huffs, pulling the thing free and holding it up for us both to take a look at it. It’s annoyingly small, the hot pink still visible beneath the darker red of my blood. He starts laughing again and grabs at the wall beside him for support. “No wonder you were able to capture her, if this is all she had to work with.”
“Just bandage it up, Sean, before I start listing your romantic failures. We’ll be here all day.”
By the time he’s done, his smile has faded. The laughter couldn’t last forever, but it was enough of a rest to let me breathe a little easier. Sean’s my pressure valve, my best friend as well as my cousin, but he’s as fierce a fighter as we’ve got. We lean against the rocky wall for a little, side by side, eyes on the unconscious soldier tied up near the far side of the cave.
“What the hell, man?” Sean breaks the silence, his voice quiet. “What were you even doing on their base?”
I hesitate. If I tell Sean about the facility I saw, he’ll insist we send scouts, and how can I tell him there’s nothing there anymore? “I got itchy, I was scouting. Things are getting tense, and I wanted to know what’s in the wind.”
He groans, tipping his head back to let it smack gently against the stone wall. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I know you know what happens if you of all people get caught. McBride’s just waiting for the chance to move while you’re off following a hunch. He nearly did tonight, without you there to speak against it. Where does the trodaire come into this?”
“She spotted me. I spotted an opportunity.”
“To bring her to our home? To risk discovery?”
“She has information we need, and think what we could trade her for.” I grit my teeth. “You think I should’ve killed her?”
“Yes,” he replies, exasperated. “Yes, I think you should have killed her.”
“And set them panicking about an assassination on their own base?” I can hear the snap in my voice and I swallow it down, carefully even out my tone. The idea comes so easily to Sean, one of the best, gentlest guys I know. Maybe it seems natural to him because it is natural. Maybe I’m as mad as McBride thinks I am, trying to settle a decade-old conflict with words.
Or maybe Sean’s good nature, the sweetness in him that’s been there since we were children, is fading. Maybe it’s one more casualty of this war.
The image of the secret compound is right there when I close my eyes—a wire fence, a small collection of prefab buildings built into the gentle slope of the island. I want to tell him I saw it. I want to tell him I went back and it was gone. But it’ll only convince him I’m losing my mind. He’s my greatest ally—my closest friend. I can’t afford to alienate him.
Sean sighs, eyeing the trodaire again. “What are we going to do about your girlfriend?”