《Smile》

¤

The Titav HQ is unremarkable, which is the point. I would never have ambled down the street outside and thought for a second this wasn't the third in a row of V-cafes. While the outside retains the shabby facade - cracked brick, grimy windows, and the pale pink neon sign of others of its kind - it's insides have been converted, much as they can be, to make a sustainable place to lay low.

All the sofas and lounge chairs that at one time must have been staggered through the front staging area, where guests would plop down and wait to be serviced, have been moved to the backroom, which has been gutted of anything unnecessary, though the Titav maintain the liquor locker, entering and exiting it with arm fulls of stoppered beige bottles. 

A washbasin sticks out of the wall on my right, a few cots beside it. A shower curtain depicting yellow rubber ducks in rain slickers hangs between the cots to offer a semblance of privacy. Quint lays on the cot nearest the sink, while Marava obsesses over him. The sleeve of his right shirt has been ripped at the shoulder and he's got gauze wrapped around his bicep to his elbow. He tries to sit, but Marava keeps shoving a palm into his chest and slamming him down. The way she fusses over him, it's like watching a mother hen with the most mischievous of her chicks.

A few Titavs dare to approach the pair, as Marava's clucking - all in a fast-paced garbled Spanish - has managed to scare them all away. When Marava stands, to re-dampen a rag in the faucet, Quint flashes me a pleading look.

I shake my head. "No can do," I mouth.

Marava didn't know the Titav and she'd given the few who had come bearing fresh bandages and bottled water, a tongue lashing that left them reeling. Mars knew and hated me. I'm afraid that if I breathed in that direction, she'd be wrenching my head off my neck with her claws. "You're on your own," I add.

Quint's face falls, his brows knit together. Marava plops down beside him and lets the rag sit across his forehead. He smiles at her, and takes her hand in his, peppering it with tiny kisses. Keran swings back around on her swivel stool to face me, a strip of gauze stretched between her hands. I shake my head and she frowns.

"Della told me to bandage you up."

I laugh. "You'll hurt me on purpose."

Her hands squeeze the gauze. "I'll shove this gauze where the sun don't shine if you-" she advances on me, grabs my wrist, pulls me toward her. I almost slip off the chair.

"Let me see." She turns my hand over, inspecting the purple flesh of the knuckles. She prods one with her fingertip. I yelp and resist the urge to smack Lieutenant Strong Hands away.

Quint and I lock eyes, and he gives me that same helpless, 'you're own your own' look I'd given him seconds earlier. I understood. He had his own pain master driving him insane.

Keran frowns as she begins to wrap my hand. "I think it's sprained," she moves the gauze expertly around my knuckles and palm. Not too tight to hurt, or too loose to fall off. "Bruised to hell, but the bones seem intact."

She glowers, while reaching for a pair of scissors on her lap. "If you take care of it, should heal in about three to six weeks." She snips the excess gauze and grabs a roll of medical tape.

"Three to six weeks?"

Once the tape's secured the new bandages, she lets my hand go. I look at it and blink. It'd take that long? Keran points at my ankle, then at the space she's cleared off on her thigh.

"If I had the supplies for a splint, it might take less time to heal. But knowing you," I heft my foot up and place it on the designated spot, "You'll end up making it worse. Three to six weeks is an optimistic estimate."

She frowns as she turns my ankle gently from side-to-side. The subtle movements cause explosions of pain to ripple through me. I dig the nails of my good hand into the thin mattress. "Looks like its a hairline fracture."

Deft fingers begin unraveling the remains of the splint done at Izzer's forge. Her nose crinkles as the soiled, smelly bandages come off in tatters. She plunks the spent bandages into a bowl near her feet. My ankle's barely recognizable. There's a lump about the size of a baseball resting on the inside, and a smattering of black dots encompassing the entire area. "Can you wiggle your toes?"

I manage something akin to a wiggle which is enough to pacify Keran's curiosity.

"That's good," she traces a finger around the lump, the pressure not enough to cause any agitation. Sandy blond hair falls in front of her face, as she continues to inspect my ankle.

"You're good at this," I say.

She snaps to attention, slipping that perpetual scowl back on her face to save appearance. She leans over, plucks a towel and a piece of cardboard off the floor, and slides it under my leg. "I'm being serious, you know. You seem to really know your stuff." She harrumphs as she folds up the flaps of the cardboard to form snugly around my ankle. "You even tended to Snitch, albeit with appalling bedside manner."

"Snitch was a coward."

She continues her work, tending to my ankle, measuring lengths of medical tap and securing them around the splint at evenly spaced intervals. Already it feels as though the pressure has lessened and the throbbing has gone down.

"I used to bandage up Della's injuries," Keran says, quietly.

I snort. "You mean the great and mighty Titav Commander can be injured?" Keran smacks my ankle and it smarts.

"Sorry," I say.

She places my foot back on the ground, with a little more gusto and a lot less concern than she'd been doing earlier. "Do you still look after Della's wounds?"

Keran's shoulders tense and the muscles in her jaw go stiff. I brace for another impact of her hand on my ankle, but she doesn't make to move. She just sits there, staring at her lap. Absent of her gun, and that soldier bravado, I want to ask her how old she is, but I refrain.

A personal question like that, spewed from my mouth will have her fist connecting with my cheek. I'd already racked up a list of injuries that would take months to heal. I wasn't about to add another.

"She takes care of herself now." Keran plucks the leftover gauze off the floor and balls it in her hands. "I don't even know when she's hurt these days." Her knuckles go white as she squeezes them.

"Keran-"

She jumps to her feet, slamming the gauze to the floor. Her eyes seem on the verge of tears. Her bottom lip trembles. "I didn't even know there was a spy. A spy!" She kicks over the bowl. Old bandages tumble across the floor. "How useless can I be?"

"You're scary," I say and at that, Keran whips around, her mouth twisted into a vicious snarl. I take a breath and continue down a trajectory that could leave me with a pair of scissors jammed in my eyeball. "When has a useless person ever been terrifying?" Her eyes narrow,  it she doesn't make any sudden movements that spell disaster. "Only people who are dangerous or who have the potential to be dangerous are scary. And right now, you're every bit as terrifying as Della."

Keran runs her eyes over me as if trying to see the angle I'm working. She checks her supplies, her scissors, gauze, making sure that everything's exactly where she put it last. Then, she snorts, and the tension fades from her posture.

"I'm not one of your little group. I don't need a pep talk."

"It wasn't a pep talk." I straighten in the chair. "I only said the truth."

Keran's eyebrow arcs. "Aren't you supposed to be a compulsive liar?"

"'Lie only when necessary.'"

The words sound foreign as they slip from my mouth. It's like I've conjured them from a different lifetime.

"Sounds like Councilman stuff." Keran puts her arms across her chest and juts her chin.

"It is," I say. "I got a 93% on the test. All short answer questions which reduced Tujo to tears. I wrote mine in haiku. Got sent to the Reflection Room for it. We'd been given an opportunity to be made resplendent before Him and there I was squandering it away. That'd been my first time," I swallow, the sensation of utter darkness needling the back of my neck. "In the Reflection Room."

Keran's brow furrows. "What're you blabbing about now, one-zero?"

"Nothing." I shrug. "Nothing that matters."

A Titav, one I've never seen before bursts through the plastic, double doors. They swing on their hinges as she enters, her hair of sea of contained flame shaved close to her scalp.

"Ellie," Keran says, turning away from me. The spry, red-haired girl gives Keran that odd chest salute.

"Lieutenant." Keran's cheeks flush as she returns the girl's gesture.

The girl's whole demeanor is one of sharpened edges, her shoulders back, neck stretched and tense. Her face doesn't show any signs of youth but rather showcases years worth of hardship, etched in each wrinkle that cuts across her ruddy skin. "The Commander's ready. Bring the remaining Liars to the inner chamber."

Keran nods. Ellie gives her one last rigid salute, clicks the heels of her boots together, turns and vacates the room as quickly as she had come. The door hinges don't even have time to stop squeaking before she disappears beyond them.

Keran rubs her hands together, then makes for the shelf above the sink. She grabs up her gun and tucks it back in its holster. "You heard her," she says.

Marava helps Quint to his feet, despite the protest flickering across his face. He swallows back the words he wants to say and allows Marava to dote over him, though I can't imagine it being a lasting arrangement. I use the chair's armrest to help secure me in an upright position. The splint's taken a great deal of weight off my injury and while my movements are as rigid as the hands of a rusted clock, I manage to hobble my way over to Keran.

"Why do we need to be there? Isn't this internal Titav business?"

Keran appears to mull my words over. She and I were sharing similar wavelengths, weren't we? She'd been wondering about our inclusion too. Keran's fingers close around my upper arm and she coaxes me through the double doors.

"You're part of the Collective now," she says, helping me navigate past couch cushions, discarded food rations, and crumpled clothes. "This involves you as much as it involves any of us."

Her jaw tenses as we reach the bottom of a staircase. I look up the mountain of steep steps. The muscles in my ankle cry out.

Keran takes a step, turns, and waits for me. "Take them one at a time, and you'll manage."

I nod and do as she instructs. "Thanks," I say. She grunts. "No really. Thank you."

Each stair creaks under me as I hobble from one to the next, Keran's hand supporting me under my armpit.

"You won't be thanking me once you see what Della has planned." Keran's face sours. A shiver of ice treks over my spine. At the top of the stairs, we walk a length of the carpeted hallway until we arrive at a nondescript, wooden door flanked by armed Titav men. Mid-twenties with withered faces, all tan and sunken in, as if their insides had been sucked out through a straw. They grunt at Keran instead of giving her the salute her rank should earn her. I'd thought insubordination of any kind, would land you on the receiving end of Keran's foot or gun, but she's too preoccupied with the door to make these guards her bitch. 

Her hand settles on the knob. She inhales. "You're about to see how far we'll go to obtain justice." Her lips pull into a hard line.

"You're just going to kill someone. What's one more corpse added to the pile?"

Keran shakes her head, peels back the door. "You're clueless, Ten."