Page 78 of Honey Cut
twenty-nine
TRISTAN
For a minute,there is just the river—a dog barking—the honk of a truck on the road up ahead. I clear my throat.
“Cara,” I say gently. Regretfully. “I am the reason. I would do anything to make things different, but I can’t. I pulled the trigger. I shot him. And I couldn’t stop the bleeding after I did.”
“You’re not listening.” She sounds tired, so tired, and I realize that it’s got to be very, very late where she is. “How he died and why he died are two different things. And I know why he died. Why he was going to hurt that Carpathian politician.”
I’m off the river walk now, back on the streets, but I feel like I’m seeing nothing, perceiving nothing. Just Cara’s voice thousands of miles away. “They said he was taking money from Carpathian rebels. They’d wired money into his account the day before he died.”
“I think it did have something to do with the rebels, in the end,” she says. “But not—not like how the military made it seem. Because we talked the day before he died, and he told me…” She trails off.
I don’t say anything. I sense that the conversation is in a fragile place, and I don’t want her to hang up on me again. If there’s any way I can help…I owe her that much, at least.
“Sorry, it still sounds fucknuts to me.” She gives a shaky laugh. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve imagined it all.”
“You can tell me,” I say, trying to sound reassuring and not like I’m worried about her. “I promise I won’t judge anything you say.”
She blows out a breath, a long one—the exhale of cigarette smoke. “He kept calling me and calling me the week he died. He’s always been persistent, you know that, and he usually hated whatever boyfriend I had or whatever situation I was in…rightfully so, probably. I’ve dated some real winners.” Another pause, and I hear the puff of her dragging on her cigarette. “So I ignored his calls at first. But he wouldn’t stop. All hours of the day—he was on Carpathian time—and finally I caved and answered, ready for a fight.”
“Did you fight?” I ask. I know there’s a particular pain to having the last words between you and a loved one be vicious ones. It’s nearly as bad as knowing you put a bullet in their neck.
“No,” Cara replies. “That’s the thing. He wasn’t calling me to fight at all. He was begging with me, pleading for me to make sure Mom and Chloe were okay. And then he said he wanted us to hide. That he’d been taking money from someone to do…just small things at first. Things he didn’t see the harm in. Information about the villages you were patrolling, any rebel activity. Not stuff that would actually compromise the unit’s safety.”
A slow tide of disbelief is rising in me. Sims wouldn’t do that. Hewouldn’t.
All this time I’d been so certain that the official narrative had to be a lie because Sims was the last person on earth to ever take a bribe.
“It was for Mom,” Cara says on another exhale of smoke. “And Chloe. And me, even though I was never in one spot long enough for him to send money. But Mom was struggling to pay on the house, and Chloe was expecting her first baby and could barely afford car seats and all that stuff on her teacher’s salary. He had a savior complex about us—when Dad left, Aaron decided that he was the man of the house, even though he was only a kid when it happened. It changed something in him, I think. It became the only reason for anything he did.”
“But he was so proud of being a soldier.” I shouldn’t be pushing back, I should only be listening, but I can’t make sense of this. “It was his entire identity.”
“I think he tried to justify it at first. It wasn’t really disloyalty. It wasn’t really treason. Just information that anyone could go find out for themselves if they really wanted to. But then…it got dicier. They wanted to know information about the unit. They wanted him to make sure certain buildings were left alone during patrols or raids. He tried to back out then, and they threatened to expose him. You know what would have happened if they had—a court martial, Leavenworth. That scared him.”
Sims hadn’t been a coward. Not in combat, at least. But I can easily see a threat like that having a lot of power over him. No one wants their name to be synonymous with treason, no one wants to end up in prison for decades upon decades. No one wants for that to be the reason they have their own Wikipedia page.
But especially Sims. He would rather have died.
“So he did things he wasn’t proud of,” says Cara. “He made sure certain things weren’t found on patrols. He made sure he was working checkpoints at certain times so he could wave through the trucks he was told to wave through. If any of the rebels he was shielding asked if they could trust him, he was supposed to tell him that he was with Ys.”
“Ys,” I repeat. That name again. It had come up during a security meeting at Lyonesse, connected with Drobny.
“Y-S,” Cara spells for me. “It’s French, I guess. The name, I mean, not…well, not whatever Ys is.”
“So Ys was the group bribing him?”Arms deals. That was what they’d said at the security meeting.Weapons shipments to rebels.
Oh God.Aaron, what did you get yourself into?
“Yes. And he tells me all this, and then he tells me that they want him to do something bad. Something awful. And he can’t make himself do it, except they told him that if he didn’t, they’d…find…us.” Cara’s voice is a little shaky again. “They’d kill us. Me and Chloe and Mom.”
It’s my turn for a long exhale. I can see our borrowed penthouse now, tall and stately and everything that’s the opposite of muddy forests and desperate soldiers.
“He was stuck,” Cara says finally. “He didn’t think there was anything he could do. If he turned himself in, confessed everything, Ys would have us killed. If he didn’t turn himself in but still didn’t do what they wanted, Ys would have us killed. But if he did what they wanted, he might be arrested, he might go to prison forever, but there was a chance we’d be safe. And that was all he could see. That chance.”
I stop in front of the penthouse, my mind firing with memories. Memories that had turned into official statements and therapy sessions and mandated journaling exercise entries and nightmares.
When Sims had died, when I’d dropped down next to him and tried to stop the hot, arterial gush of blood with my bare hands, he’d spoken to me. Two words.
