A Fortunate Accident – Chapter 29

We reach the camp without further incident, something I’m grateful for. My ribs are killing me, and I’m sure my feet are covered in blisters. I feel like shit on a stick, and I probably look it too. This is definitely starting to feel like punishment for the crappy person I am, and my spirits sink lower and lower with every step I take.

I limp through the gate, and the amount of activity on the other side gives me pause. People run from one building to the next, and only half the usual buildings have been erected. The large armored vehicles sit inside the fence, open and awaiting passengers.

Something tells me we’re not sticking around for long.

“I’m going to escort Skylar to the infirmary,” Saif says, taking my arm as the limp starts to slow me down. “You two figure out where we’re going to sleep tonight.”

“It’s your night tonight,” Kalvin reminds him, shouldering our bags.

“Huh? Oh.” Saif looks at me. “Okay, well, we’ll see about that.”

I squeeze his arm. “You can sleep in the same bed with me. I’d like the company.”

I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts about everything that happened today. I’d like someone to be there for the eventual nightmares.

Saif doesn’t respond. He smiles and ushers me forward.

The infirmary is blessedly quiet despite the activity in the main camp. Dr. Emily is both glad I’m alive and annoyed that I’m so injured. She takes me to the bathroom in the back, and I strip down for her so she can assess my injuries before I shower.

“Just don’t do anything with my clothes. There’s a plant in the jacket pocket I want to save.” I turn on the water and wait for it to get hot.

“Are you sure?” she asks, holding the clothes away from her. “Maybe we should burn them.”

“Don’t you dare,” I say, no malice in my voice. “Not until after I go through the pockets, please.”

Showering is so painful I cry the entire way through it. Lifting my arms to wash my hair causes my ribs to smart, and the hot water coursing over my fresh blisters is like having needles stabbed into my feet.

My mood is low through the entire process. I escaped death at the hands of the military, and I found the weird space probe and my plant in the wilds of Rio. But I didn’t do anything valuable for the mission. In fact, I made it harder to get to camp sooner. We were late getting to Luca because of dealing with Dominic, and I’m sure that caused issues, too. I’ve been called worthless before, and now I actually feel it, deep in my bones. Ever since I came aboard on this operation, things have spiraled out of control.

Same for the Amagi.

Same for Saif’s and Kalvin’s lives.

I am nothing but trouble.

Once I’m clean, I’m given random fresh clothes and a shot of nanos that Emily programs to heal my broken ribs. Both of them. I was right; I broke two. She deals with the blisters on my feet, sprays them with painkillers and antibiotics, and bandages them up. She delivers my boots clean with new socks. My dirty clothes are stuffed into a bag and handed to me.

I grab my datapad and glance at the universal clock. Shit. It’s my birthday. I’m now twenty-nine years old. Fuck. How did that happen? Twenty-nine years old, no real network, no business, nothing to show for all of my life’s work except for a Class Three pilots license.

I really am worthless.

I exit from the infirmary tent and run right into Saif.

“Oh, hi,” I say, aiming my eyes at the ground. “Were you waiting for me?”

“Of course.” Saif’s returning smile is kind. “I got some sandwiches and a room for us for the night. Let’s go relax and try to get some sleep.” He pulls me close to him with his arm over my shoulder.

“We don’t have to.” How can I get out of this? If I stick around, I’m just going to be the cancer that grows and eats everything good in this relationship. Tears sit in the back of my eyes and beg to be shed. My throat burns as I hold them back.

“We will. Come on,” he urges me, directing me to our room.

I eat the sandwich in silence, assuring Saif I’m just tired.

I am tired. Tired of everything.

Now I know what Vivian went through when she was fighting to win back her farm. This really sucks. It’s a constant stream of stressful, horrible things with no rest. That doubt flower in the back of my head has bloomed, and it’s having little baby flowers.

There’s no end in sight to this madness.

I want to give up.

I can’t get into bed fast enough. My body is like lead, and my chest is hollow and cold.

I let Saif kiss me good night, then I roll over and close my eyes.

Sleep comes swiftly.

“Oh, come on, Skylar. You’re going to sleep with me to get what you want,” Eamon said to me. “It’s what you’re best at.” He was going to rip off my clothes if I didn’t do it myself. He liked to play with dominance in bed, and I was never sure if he would hurt me or not. I took my clothes off myself to try to take control.

I had no control.

Dominic gestures to Eamon on the bed. “Don’t you see? Everyone already knows you’re trash. You could have been better. You could have made better choices. You chose this. It’s your fault.” He leans into me. “You’re nothing. Nothing.”

I inhale sharply and sit up in bed.

“No.”

Dominic is right. I’m wrong, and he’s right. I press my fingers to my lips as cold shivers run down my back. Why didn’t I listen to him? He’s always told me how worthless I am, that I can never do anything right, that I’m a sham of a daughter, that I will never be anybody special. And shit, yes. I did sleep with Eamon to get what I wanted, a ship’s AI I couldn’t afford. I’ve slept with countless men for favors or just because I was bored or angry.

Oh fuck, there is something fundamentally wrong with me.

I look around the dark room, and my eyes fall on the bedside clock. Four-thirteen in the morning.

“You do nothing but cause pain and suffering to your mom and all the dads. You should be ashamed of yourself,” Dominic had said to me when I was sixteen.

Tears fill my eyes, and I cover my face with my hands.

He was right. He was one-hundred percent right about me. The reversal of fortune is a betrayal I should have seen coming. I should have seen what Dominic saw, an unfaithful and unreliable daughter who preferred her own happiness over her family’s wants and needs.

Sobs bubble up from my belly.

“Sky… Skylar.” Saif sits up next to me, and his warm hand rests on my mid-back. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“I’m a horrible person,” I say, my tone matter-of-fact. I bark out another sob. “My mom and Dominic have always known it. I should have seen it years ago, but I was too vain, too full of myself to care about what they needed. And here I am, defying them, turning my back on them. I could end this madness if I just stop fighting and hand everything over to them.”

I’m a horrible, terrible, evil person. I think I’ve always known and just never wanted to accept it. But the events of the last few days have worn me down, taken away all my self-control and self-esteem. These past few days have shown me what I was incapable of seeing before.

“No,” Saif stresses, rubbing my back in smooth circles. “No. That’s not true. You are not a horrible person.”

I nod my head and let the tears fly off my nose. “I am. I need to give up. I need to stop all of this. Stop this job. Stop this fighting. Let you go. You don’t need to be saddled with someone like me. It’s over. It’s done.”

I throw my legs over the side of the bed, and Saif scrambles in panic. He grabs his wristlet and makes a few gestures as I get up and pace, thinking of what to do next.

“It’s a good idea to end this now before your sister gets pulled into my problems, too. I’ll pack up my bags, and I’ll get out of here as soon as the sun’s up.” I walk back and forth, back and forth. “India is going to quit this, anyway. I’ve got my plant. I’ll figure out what it does. I’ll end this.”

I inhale and look at the room. There’s an hour until sunrise. I can pack up and be ready to go once the sky lightens. It’s not like I unpacked much, just enough to find some pajamas and my toothpaste.

Saif jumps into his pants and pulls them up with swift precision. He approaches me with his hands out.

“Skylar, you’re tired. I think you were having some kind of nightmare. Why don’t you come back to bed?”

“No.” I cross the room to the bathroom. “It’s time I ended this hellish life of mine. I don’t need to drag you and Kalvin down with me. Or India or your sister,” I repeat. Did he not hear me the first time? “I’m nothing but a burden. Didn’t you hear Dominic? I’m just a liar, and I conned you into believing everything. You’re better off without me.”

My head whips around at the sound of the doors opening to my suite. The inner door opens, and Kalvin comes through, his hair a mess. Takemo stands behind him, his back against the outer door.

“I’m here,” Kalvin says, dropping his shoes in the vestibule.

Saif turns to me. “You don’t mean that. Don’t say that about yourself. I don’t care how tired you are. You do not tell lies about yourself.”

“Why not?” I lash out, snapping my arm out into the air. “No one is ever going to believe me. They will all believe him, believe my mother. I can already see the doubt on everyone’s faces. Hell, I doubt my own memories of the whole situation.”

Tears pour down my face, and I turn to hide them from the guys.

“No one will believe me because I already have this awful reputation that I gave to myself of the flying, fuck-em-and-leave-em, drinking whore who can’t settle down. Why would anyone believe someone like me?” I smear the tears from my face. “Why do you believe me, huh? Why? I never told you, back then, about what happened to me. I never said a word because Dominic told me I wouldn’t be believed, and he was right then, and he’s right now.” I laugh through my tears. “Fucking bastard. He knew what he was doing right from the beginning, and I fucking played right into it.”

I storm into the bathroom, and grabbing everything I left out from the counter, I shove it all in my bag.

Saif stands in my way when I return to the room.

“I didn’t need to hear from your lips what happened to you. I saw it with my own eyes,” he says, sighing. “You were so skinny, yet you ate like you had never eaten before at every meal. And then you were obsessed with the self-defense courses and anything having to do with survival in the wilderness. I could see the desire to run away written on your face every time we ended up at far-school together.”

He hangs his head for a brief moment.

“When you left far-school, the time we were thirteen, Dominic came to get you. You couldn’t make eye contact with him. You were smaller like you were trying to draw into yourself. I saw him grab you and practically wrestle you onto the train, even though you didn’t struggle. You were like a limp doll, and he just tossed you around.” He pokes himself in the chest. “I hate myself for not having spoken up for you then. I should have.”

I stand still with my bag in my hand. No one has ever told me they saw the way I was back then. So many people either didn’t notice or turned a blind eye to it, and it wasn’t like I saw many individuals in the flesh, anyway.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Sky.” Saif reaches out and takes the bag from my hands.

Kalvin’s been silent, but he now steps forward. “Don’t doubt your own memories. That’s what Dominic and your mother want. They want to drive you crazy until you can’t tell red from blue. Then really, no one will believe you if you can’t believe in yourself. It’s a tactic. Don’t let them win.”

“They’ve already won,” I say, turning my bleary eyes on him. “They took my future, sold off my business to him.” I wave at Takemo, still standing in the doorway. His face is like stone.

“We’re going to build a new future,” Kalvin says. “Right? We already talked about this.”

“That was before.”

“Before what?” Saif asks.

“Before we got Dominic arrested. It’ll be all over the news. There’ll be no hiding from it. It’s better to end this now before you both get dragged into it, too. Publicly. I remember what happened to Vivian. I can’t let that happen to you. Me? I already know what they say about me. But you can move on and have a great life with someone else without being sullied by this.”

Saif and Kalvin look at each other. Kalvin nods.

“The arrest changes nothing. We’re in this for the long haul.” Saif approaches me with his hands out. I let him touch me, touch my face, push my hair behind my ears, lay his hand on my shoulder. He knows I don’t like to be held, and I don’t even know what a hug would do to me at this point.

“You should go back to bed. Sleep. Those nanobots are still healing your ribs.” Kalvin walks to the bed and lifts the covers, pulling them back and tucking them in.

I turn in time to see Takemo cross the room from the door in long strides. He opens his arms and pulls me into a hug that makes me squeak with shock. He’s careful to squeeze only my upper body across my shoulders, and only just long enough for the hug to register before he pulls away.

Saif and Kalvin stand frozen, too stunned to move.

“She needs hugs,” he says, pointing to me. My cheeks burn. “I know she doesn’t want to be held, but for fuck’s sake, she needs them. Don’t leave her without them.”

I draw in a ragged breath as he strides from the room, slips on his shoes, and exits.

We all stand still for a long moment.

Kalvin huffs. “So he hates you, huh?”

He turns around and lifts his eyebrows.

That was so unexpected that I struggle to pull in a breath. “Maybe not?”

Okay, yeah, I’m ready to go back to bed.