Unbound

What JJ couldn’t understand was what she needed with the aura anyway. By the time the twelve-hour window was almost up, and he still hadn’t found Solange and the aura she was hiding beneath, he knew he’d never know the answer to that question. He returned to the penthouse, determined that the boy who’d trusted him so completely wouldn’t die alone.

Yet he did die.

JJ entered the bedroom where Ricky lay, instantly shocked at how tiny he looked. Curled into the fetal position, hands tucked prayerfully beneath his chin, his head was bent low as if braced for a blow. He was so small…

Every person has a right to the small things.

His father’s words burst through his mind like the monsoon that had raged on the night all this had begun. Surely it was only his own guilt rearing, but it seemed the completion of the thought coincided exactly with the boy’s final mortal moment. The slight quiver that overtook the small body was as unnatural as if it were made of rousing snakes, and JJ shuddered, swearing he could hear a rattler’s shake.

The little happinesses.

The quiver strengthened into a quake, and the cells comprising Ricky’s skin began separating, looking pixilated at first, some sinking while others slipped and scattered across the ridges and angles of the young body before dropping to the cotton bedding. JJ’s gut twisted, and his hard exhalation scattered those loosened cells into a fine coating of dust.

Those are the ones that make life most worth living.

The boy settled more firmly, burrowing into his final resting place as his sandy insides softened, and he even looked peaceful before his small smile, and his lips, too, fell away. JJ refused to avert his eyes as the freckles dropped, the eyelashes fell. He saw the spiky hair flatten, dissolve, and leave behind a powdery skull. JJ’s unblinking stare was obscured only when he began to cry, and he eventually realized between convulsing, open-eyed sobs that his wet sorrow was melding with the boy-shaped dune. He could literally build a castle with his tears. It made him cry harder.

It’s what we’re fighting for, came his father’s last, late reminder.

When, and how, had JJ forgotten to fight?

The shell of Ricky’s body was now totally depleted, drained as if dehydrated, lacking life force instead of water. From somewhere in the suite a clock chimed off the last of the twelve-hour mark, and JJ reached out to touch a small hand, to say good-bye. In one moment there was a child. In the next, dust mounded the bedding, a handful finely ground as beach sand in JJ’s fist.

An innocent. A child. Dead because of him.

And JJ did bow his head now, unable to form thought or words, but sending up a prayer of emotion into the Universe, hoping someone, something, somewhere understood the regret squeezing his chest, the sorrow burning in his gut, and the hopelessness that made him want to lie down, too, and embrace a dusty death.

Weeping openly, not even trying to hide the scent of his shame and sorrow and misery, JJ didn’t turn at the soft sound behind him. Unguarded emotions were easy for his kind to pick up. Kneeling bedside, he bowed his head and welcomed blessed death. But the enemy he’d drawn back to him had something else in mind.

JJ turned his tear-streaked face, and found Warren’s unsurprised gaze locked hard on his. Tonya Dane’s prediction—the one Warren hadn’t wanted to believe and had been trying to prevent—had finally come true. His troop leader put it together quickly, eyes slipping mournfully to the mound of dust on the bed, as he inhaled to take in both the boy and Solange on JJ’s skin.

“You should kill me,” JJ said flatly, still kneeling.

“Yes.” Warren’s reply was, if possible, even flatter. “At the very least, exile.”

“No.” JJ’s mind stumbled over the unacceptable thought. “I don’t want to live. I don’t want—”

“I don’t care what you want.” Warren remained still, so enraged he was all but quivering. “From now on, you want what I want.”

“And that is?” JJ said it casually, but inside he was braced against the idea of living. He glanced at the plate-glass window, but a dive from the penthouse balcony wouldn’t be enough to kill him. Warren, clearly intuiting his thoughts, moved between him and the window.

“I take responsibility for this,” he surprised JJ by saying. “I made a mistake. I allowed you too much autonomy and granted you a position with too much power. I favored you because of your childhood, your parents, their deaths. When you wanted the position of weapons master I allowed that—”

Now something did spark inside JJ. “Because I’m the best.”

Warren nearly snapped back, but closed his eyes instead, his head and shoulders drooping. “But I should have had someone apprenticing with you. I just never thought you would…I should have thought.”