Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

The man nodded. “It’s Cole, right? You’re the kid I spoke to over the D-band?” Mortimor glanced at Cole’s new hand. “I’d offer to shake your hand, but let’s wait until you get used to using it.”

Cole pushed himself back on the cot, sitting up even more as he tried to clear his head. “You’re Molly’s— you’re her father,” he said.

Mortimor frowned. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but we’ve got some problems, and I need answers. Let’s start with who you are and how you got here. Then I’d like to hear how you know Molly and where she is. Also, I need to know where that Drenardian band is you were thinking through the other day. I know it’s a lot to dump on you, but we don’t have a lot of time, if we have any.”

Cole swiped his hair off his forehead and tried to swallow, but his mouth felt dry, his tongue swollen. “Can I get some water?” he asked.

“Penny!” Mortimor snapped his fingers. “Some water,” he said, after she turned.

She rushed off, and Mortimor turned back to Cole. “Is Molly okay? How do you know her? And why were you wearing one of my flightsuits?”

“We found the ship,” Cole said.

“Parsona?”

Cole nodded.

“How—?” Mortimor stared at the wall beyond Cole. “What about the man aboard the ship?”

Cole shook his head. “No one was aboard. But we did… we found what was in the ship. The hidden thing.”

Mortimor narrowed his eyes, and Cole suddenly felt trapped in one of those situations where two people both know a secret, but don’t know how to tell the other person they know without giving the secret away in case they don’t.

“Where did you find it?” Mortimor asked, obviously feeling caught in the same snare.

Cole chose his words carefully: “In the chart data.”

Mortimor nodded, but something else seemed to flash behind his eyes. Relief?

“Did you serve with Molly? You seem a bit young.”

“We were cadets together. At the Academy.” Cole looked up as the girl reentered the room. More of her hair had come loose as she hurried to the cot. She held a glass of water in her bare hands, her gloves pulled off. Cole felt a wave of guilty excitement from seeing her. He noted her freckles and the way her cheeks were flushed from the rapid walk. He barely managing to nod his thanks as he reached for the glass—

“Ah… left hand,” Mortimor said, pointing.

Cole obeyed. He smiled at the girl, who turned away quickly, hurrying back to Stanley. Cole took a long swig from the glass, dribbling some down his chin. He went to wipe it off his mouth with his right hand, but Mortimor grabbed his wrist.

“Careful,” he said. “People tend to hurt themselves at first, even with the temporary limiters.” He reached down and used part of Cole’s sheet to dabble at the moisture on his chin. The way he did it—like a doctor tending to a patient—suddenly made Cole feel like a useless invalid.

“You’ll need some therapy,” Mortimor said. “Some training. First, though, back to Molly…”

“Yeah.” Cole took another sip of water and swallowed. “We were flight partners in the Academy. I was sent with her to get the ship. Everything went to hell from the beginning—”

“Byrne?” Mortimor asked.

“What? No, that came after. Hell, I just found out about him. You do know he’s here, right?”

Mortimor nodded.

“Okay, no, our problems started on Palan, some pirates there—”

“Palan? What in the galaxy were you doing on Palan?”

“That’s—that’s where the ship was. I don’t know what—”

“No, that’s fine.” Mortimor shook his head. He looked back to the Stanley, who was peering over his patient at their conversation. “So, I imagine Parsona told you what needed doing. Where did things go wrong? On Dakura? Lok? Is Molly okay?”

“Go wrong?”

Cole looked for some place to set the glass, then gave up. “Things went wrong everywhere.” He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “We barely got out of Palan alive, we committed genocide on our way back to Earth, the Navy framed me and we had to kill Lucin—”

“What?” Mortimor pushed away from Cole’s cot, a wary eye on his right arm. “Two guards!” he shouted to Stanley. Several of the nearby forms stirred from the outburst.

Cole held up both hands. “No, that—it wasn’t like that. He was about to shoot Molly, I swear. He’s the guy who set us up, who had us go get your ship.”

Mortimor squinted at Cole. Two aliens ran into the room dressed in Navy black, reaching for weapons at their sides. Mortimor held up his hand, keeping them at bay.

“How did you end up here?”

“I don’t know. Molly and I split up on our way to Lok. I made a jump. I was in a Firehawk with a friend —”

Cole stopped, whatever words he had queued up next shattered in a spasm of anguish. He thought of Riggs, dead by his own hands.

It had been real. That part had been very, very real.

He leaned forward, rested his face into both palms, and began to cry. There was no escaping into his skull this time—no shrinking down and getting away from it. There was nobody to hurt, to take it out on. There was just the shame and the depression, the guilt and the torment, wrapping their tentacles around him, squeezing the air out of his chest.

“Leave us,” he heard Mortimor say.

Cole tried to remember where he was, to get a grip on himself, but the scramble for sanity just made him fall even faster. He sobbed into his hands, the tears dripping through his fingers.

“My friend—” he croaked, his voice high and embarrassing.

Mortimor came to him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “Take your time,” he said.

“My friend’s legs,” Cole sobbed.

“Shhhh. I know. It’s okay, son.”

Cole shook his head and swallowed. He licked the salt from his lips. “It’s not okay,” he mumbled. “Nothing’s okay. Molly—” He pushed his hands up through his hair, clenching fistfuls until the roots tingled with pain.

“Where is she?” Mortimor whispered.

The question hung in the air between them, between two strangers. They knew almost nothing of each other, but they both orbited that same drifting unknown, that haunting absence in both their lives. For Cole, the question opened some internal hatch holding back all his atmosphere, and the vacuum sucked at it. His body quaked with grief as a moan unlike any he’d ever uttered welled up and out.

Mortimor wrapped his arms around Cole and pulled his head to his shoulder. Cole latched on and cried even harder, a thousand horrible things dragging their claws across his insides as they were yanked through that newly opened hatch. He cried and fought it, trying to keep them in. Shame and guilt, they tore through him, far more powerful than the embarrassment of breaking down in front of a stranger.

••••

Mortimor waited. Despite his sense of urgency, he let the lad have it out. He could very well imagine the things the boy had been through. While the young man’s frame shuddered with agony, he looked around the room protectively. He looked to the others in their cots, to their heads lifting from pillows, their faces full of empathy and regret. Mortimor clenched his jaw and didn’t say a word—he just let the boy have his cry.

It was all he could do to not join in.

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