This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(77)
It’s about an hour later when the door swings open, and I look up to find Jubilee there with Merendsen. She looks ragged in a way she hasn’t since the massacre, and my hands fall still on the glass I’m polishing. Merendsen barely glances my way before heading for a table full of trodairí, but Jubilee freezes for the tiniest instant when she sees me. There’s relief there—the raggedness was for me—and then it’s gone, replaced by anger. She starts to head for the bar, but Molly casually steps in between us and she stops, looking up at him. He shakes his head a fraction—not now—and after a long, burning moment of hesitation, she nods. She turns her back on me and slides in to sit beside Tarver Merendsen.
The trodairí vie to buy him drinks, and he plays them like he was born doing it. Despite the heavy dread in the air since the Fianna attacked and hostilities resumed, Merendsen eases them back into the world and has them laughing at his stories. Mostly at his own expense, though a couple are about a younger Jubilee. He spends a good twenty minutes on the time she hit her head hard enough that all she could taste for weeks was dead rat, making the table erupt into easy laughter. He’s good at this. You’d never know he was in her quarters an hour before, whispering the darkest of secrets.
Jubilee is different, though. Her laughter comes a second after theirs, never quite reaching her eyes. She lets Merendsen take over, take the lead, relieving her of any need for a response. She nurses her drink longer than they do. Her eyes fade in and out of focus, gaze growing distant, though it never shifts to seek me. How long is she going to leave me here, polishing glasses in a room full of people who want to kill me? Damn it.
But I can see the way her muscles are still coiled with that graceful readiness that’s hers alone, her body still tense. She’s reeling like I am, so shaken she can’t react. I want to go to her. I want to…I have no idea what I want to do.
As the night wears on, the other soldiers drift away until the only ones left at the table are Jubilee and her old captain. A few late drinkers line up along the bar, and Molly tallies the till as I clear up. Jubilee’s tracing a design into the spilled beer on their table, knotwork. It’s Irish. I wonder if she knows.
I can’t slow down my head. Regret and relief crowd my thoughts, which won’t stop turning, won’t stop reaching for Jubilee. Then I look up, and she’s standing a few yards away, speaking to Molly. I drop the glass I’m polishing, and it shatters on the floor. Molly frowns at me and tilts his head at the door that leads out the back. I go.
Jubilee slips through the door not long after me. My heart jumps as I recognize her silhouette in the half darkness, and I make myself stay where I am, leaning against a stack of crates. My head’s swimming with tiredness, and just having her in the room hitches my pulse up a notch, though I don’t know if it’s wanting or anger or something else completely. My heart is so tangled I can’t think.
“Molly says you can stay here in the back room.” She sounds tired, at least as tired as I am. “If anyone asks, you’ll say you’re his cousin.”
Posing as the cousin of a three-hundred-pound Chinese man would be beyond even Sofia’s talents. “I don’t—”
“Molly’s an orphan, like me. He was adopted. Off-world, families who aren’t blood-related happen all the time. You’re just not used to it here.”
Lapsing into silence, she leans against the stack of beer crates opposite me and folds her arms across her ribs, tight and uncertain. She just stares at me, for so long I feel I might shout to break the quiet, until finally she blurts, “Are you trying to get yourself arrested out there, breaking glasses and drawing attention?”
Frustration takes the lead among my competing emotions, and I come to my feet. “You’re the one who left me working behind the bar for hours, under the same damn camera that’s broadcasting my face to the whole—”
“Because you stormed out! If you’d stayed, I would’ve been able to plan our next move, someplace to hide you while I figure this out.”
“Hide me? While you figure it out?” The frustration coursing through me is real, but right behind it, the knowledge that she wasn’t the killer. I could touch her now and not hate myself. But she’s still a trodaire—I can’t let myself think this way.
I search for words that will push her away, put some distance between us so I can’t reach for her. “So you think I’m going to hide somewhere safe and trust you to fix this while I’m sidelined? You and your old captain have it under control?”
“Sidelined?” she snaps, incredulous, though there’s relief in her gaze too. Her eyes rake over me, unable to look away. Neither of us can talk about how everything is different now that Jubilee’s innocent. Anger is easier. “Damn it, Flynn, I’m betraying everything I’m sworn to, hiding you here. I’m a traitor now. I’m the bad guy.”
“You’re doing it for the right reasons,” I offer, but I know for Jubilee, the words ring hollow.
“I know,” she replies tightly. “I know that. And I’d do it again. I just—I never thought I could ever in a thousand years be here, in this spot.” She turns away, twisting the heel of her hand against her eyes for a moment. “I told you my parents died in the uprising on Verona. But I didn’t tell you that it wasn’t even rebels who killed them. The men who killed them were sympathizers. Supporting the rebels. People like me.”