Mostly, Arden attempted to reason through why her mother was broken. Sometimes she grew angry with her for it. She hated her mom for giving up, for not having the strength of character to face each day and fight back. Then she became ashamed of those harsh feelings. Creating a circle of frustration from which she couldn’t escape. Because of that, she tried never to let these thoughts bubble up anymore, though they did, and to accept that people weren’t as driven as she was.
Her mom held a tea tray, with chipped and mismatched teacups. She set it on the tiny table in front of the sofa. Then she stood up, wringing her hands. “We’re out of chamomile. I didn’t know what to do.” Her gaze darted around the room, never settling on anything. She didn’t seem to notice that Arden had come home.
The boys didn’t pay any attention to her either.
Uri stopped his pacing. His hand came up to his nose. With a crack, he snapped it back into place. Then resumed walking. The tissue around his nose appeared puffy. When the swelling went down, it wouldn’t heal well. Not that it mattered. Uri had broken it several times before, so it hadn’t been straight for years.
Colin continued to stare at the floor. Arden wished he’d look up so that she could figure out what was going on.
Her mother nervously went about pouring, her hand shaking as she tipped the spout, spilling more liquid outside the cup than inside. Her erratic behavior appeared more flighty than usual, indicating the onset of a breakdown.
“Um, I didn’t know what to do. I heated the water. And I . . .” She blinked twice.
It was then Arden realized there was no tea at all. Just hot water, the liquid clear where it pooled in running puddles on the table. Her mother continued to pour despite the mess she made.
Arden jumped forward to stop her mother from emptying the teapot’s entire contents onto the table. She placed her hands over her mother’s, easing her back. “It’s okay, Mom. I got it.”
In the back of the house, her dad started hacking, a rough cough followed by a wet sound Arden knew was blood. She didn’t need to see it to know what was happening. The same thing played out each night, only growing worse with time.
Her mother reacted to her father’s cough with a small jump. She twiddled around, glancing to the back room, before turning again to Arden. Confusion clouded her eyes.
“I’ll figure something out,” she promised her mother. Not knowing herself if she meant the tea, or her father, or the situation between the two boys. “Why don’t you take care of Dad?”
“Right.” Her mom nodded absently. “I’ll just . . .” She looked to the back room from where more hacking coughs emanated. “I’ll see what your dad needs.”
Her dad had suffered in the mines. He’d worked for years digging belowground, toiling as a mine rat. All he had to show for it was the mine cough. Then he’d started to display the more horrific symptoms of Violet Death, which had only morphed into an addiction to Shine that he’d developed in order to ease his suffering. He was now little more than bedridden. The symptoms were exacerbated by lack of vitamin D. He was too sick to visit the sunbeds. And the government had labeled him beyond help. Which meant that they’d no longer authorize the sale of VitD to him.
Her mother wasn’t much better. The stress of caring for her husband along with her own use of Shine left her in a perpetual fog. Neither one asked where she and Niall acquired the drugs they brought home. Arden doubted either parent knew they were affiliated with a gang. They were completely unaware of her illegal enterprises. If they were asked, they’d say Arden participated in all the after-school activities.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
She didn’t feel guilt over this deception. It was easiest if her parents didn’t get involved. If she were caught or her parents were grilled for information, the less they knew the better. It might even keep them alive for the little time they had left.
It also allowed the Lasair to hold meetings in their house. Her parents never asked about them. Like now, with two highly agitated men in her living room, no one questioned the oddness of this.
“What happened?” she asked.
Colin looked up, his eyes bloodshot. He opened his mouth, shut it, and then shook his head. Looking down again.
“They took Mariah,” Uri shouted, hitting another hole in the wall.
“Stop,” Colin said, sounding defeated. “Breaking your hand is not going to save her.”
Arden knew she wouldn’t get answers from Uri. He was too far gone in his crazy headspace. Instead, she concentrated on Colin. Arden sat next to him, getting him to look straight at her. “Start from the beginning.”
Colin licked his lips. “We were on the far side of the club, opposite from the bolt-hole.”
Arden nodded, not saying aloud that she’d made it to the bolt-hole with Dade, so she already knew that hadn’t been their path of escape.
“Our best option was to blend with the crowd. We were almost out, but they . . .” He scrunched his brow, shaking his head. “They were expecting us. They knew who we were. They had intel on us, or our masks, or something.”
That wasn’t good. It meant that every member of Lasair had to change his persona and be more vigilant. That they’d even been marked showed a clear lack of security on their part.
“The govies let the others run by and focused on us. We fought.” Colin shrugged. “I’m not sure what happened. Uri and I were in the middle of kicking some ass when I was distracted by a scream. I looked up and—”
Uri cut in, yelling, “They took Mariah.”
The blood made sense now.
Arden’s dad coughed in the background, breaking the tension of the moment. It was a reminder that they all needed to hold it together.
Colin cleared his throat. “Uri went after her. But there were too many of them. It was suicide.” He shook his head. “I grabbed Uri, held him back, and we were able to fight our way out.”
“I could have gotten to her,” Uri said, turning his rage on Colin and leaning down aggressively. For a moment, Arden thought he’d lose it and take a swing at Colin.
Colin didn’t help the situation. He stood, getting right up in Uri’s face, and raised his voice. “No, you couldn’t. We can’t rescue two of you.”
“Keep it down,” Arden hissed. She didn’t need to deal with two testosterone-challenged jerks coming to blows in her living room. Let alone drawing the attention of her mother. It would take more of Arden’s energy to get her mother refocused and out of the way again.
This was her fault. If she had been with them, perhaps she could have helped Mariah. Yes, Mariah had been trained to fight as they all had, but sometimes backup helped. Yet instead of fighting with her family, she had been with Dade.
Worse, she’d taken him into Undercity.
Her head needed to get in this game pretty quick before they lost anyone else. Her self-flagellation helped clear her indecision and harden her resolve, if not her heart.
“Where’s my brother?” Arden asked, her worry clear.
Colin shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Arden pulled out her datapad and sent a quick ping. The reply came almost immediately.