I STAND VERY still in my office, my face shadowed by the sweep of my bangs, scanning the map covered in pins and flags. I’m chic and stylish in my tailored pantsuit but still feel too modern and plain. I wear no corset; my core is strong. But Saber knew the truth—what I most needed was a stronger mind.
I pause in the glow of the setting sun streaming through my window and look at the most recent blue mark on the map. We’ve just confirmed whispers of a slaving ring in Sweden. Sweden! Who could have believed that would be the right place?
Just one more thing to do. I take three steps forward and place a red square over a small spot in China. I shiver—from excitement, from horror—and stand staring at the mark. A slaving ring, smudged. Slaves rescued. Slavers…dealt with. A few seconds later—though I thought I was alone—warm arms snake around me, and I close my eyes in appreciation.
“You’re home.”
“I’m always home when you’re with me.”
I turn for a long kiss, running my fingers through Saber’s hair. “Where did you go?”
“Pickup. Got another collar from the medical examiner.”
I straighten, eyes wide. “Did you? Where is it?”
He lifts a box from my desk and holds it out to me. I don’t ever let him touch the retrieved collars, just in case. Everything I know about the slaveminders tells me that touching wrecked collars shouldn’t have any effect on him, but I learned long ago that I’m not very good at thinking like a street criminal.
I take the box and open the top. The collar is in surprisingly good condition. They often aren’t, due to the very nature of…blowing up. The capacitor that destroys the brain usually warps the device, but this one is barely singed. I’m glad to have a new one, and sad at the same time. These only fall into the medical examiner’s hands when someone in slavery dies.
I lift the device and its trailing wires from its container, holding it up to the light. “It’s the third one this year,” I say soberly.
“Things are getting pretty desperate. Jobs disappearing left and right. People turn on each other.”
“I heard on GNN that the suicide load has doubled in the last twelve months.”
“Dark times,” Saber says.
“Damn bots,” I whisper. “I feel responsible.”
“You’re not,” Saber says firmly. “You can’t save everyone. We’re doing what we can in our own little corner of the world.”
I nod but don’t tell him I agree. Because I don’t. Two years ago I had so much power in my hands; I wish I’d found something better to do with it. But if there’s one thing I’ve had to come to terms with, it’s that you can’t defeat evil by being evil. It’s been a long, hard lesson.
I’m itching to take the defunct collar back to the lab, but considering how little I’ve accomplished since embarking on this project, a few minutes won’t change anything. Two years and I’ve done hardly more than identify all of the parts. I sigh. “I’ve made so little headway. Sometimes it feels impossible.”
Saber kisses my forehead. “You’re the one who taught me to believe in the impossible.” A shadow passes over his eyes, a sadness I rarely see these days. And when I do, it’s almost always on someone else’s behalf. He has a mission now.
With the money I made from Glitter, a little philanthropy from Aaron and Spencer, and a lot of work, Saber and I started up a slave refuge—which Saber mostly runs. I’m…tech support.
We started with one child we found on the streets of Los Angeles when we were still midbuild. I’d never seen Saber quite so angry as that night when we stumbled upon her—and the man who was beating her bloody. Saber pulled the man off as I checked her wounds, but when Saber saw the slave mark freshly tattooed on her forearm, her assailant only lived long enough to point us toward her owner.
It was a race against the girl’s unknowable countdown to locate the slaver’s den, where we found three slaveminders—including the girl’s—and two more slaves. I didn’t ask how Saber got their pass codes, but he certainly didn’t buy them. These days, I’m the one who doesn’t ask questions.
Saber has been like a machine ever since, working tirelessly at finding slaves, rescuing them, and bringing them back to the small but cozy compound of our shelter. Sometimes we find their families. Sometimes we don’t.
Sometimes they don’t want to go back to their families. Regardless, there’s always a home here for a former slave.
And if those who run the rings—who install the collars and locate buyers of human chattel—occasionally meet less-than-clean endings at the hands of Saber’s employees, well, I’m in no position to judge. I broke the law—as well as my own standards—for myself. Saber is a vigilante for the oppressed. And I love him for that.
It’s amazing to see him. The hollowed-out shell that two minutes in Reginald’s presence could reduce him to is gone forever. Now he’s alive with purpose and passion. I’m not sure even he understood at the time how much of his will he was forced to give up to Reginald.
Ah, Reginald. Pulling that trigger may be the only choice I never second-guess.
At present our site is home to eighteen residents. I know the exact number because I keep all their little slaveminders on a shelf in my office, countdowns synchronized so no one has to be reminded of their continued bondage more than once every fourteen days. And even then, they all come in together—supporting one another.
Saber comes with them. I hate that. I hate it even more than I hated Reginald. But our residents find comfort in the fact that they’re not alone.
The official and very strict policy is that every resident here owns him- or herself. I’m merely the steward of their scanners. Our refugees can’t touch their little boxes, but I can, and each one bears their name and picture. A smiling picture. Once I get to know them, I decorate the boxes with their favorite things and colors. My wards can’t escape the tether of their collars—not yet. But I can remind them that I always—always—see them as individual, free human beings.
And I remind them, every fourteen days, that I’m working hard to find a way to make them free in truth.
Saber clears his throat, and I know he must have something to say that I won’t like hearing. I roll my eyes over to him. “Tell me.”
“Sonoma Inc. officially unveiled their new antidepressant today.”
I freeze and have to consciously unclench my fingers from around the box, lest I damage the best collar I’ve gotten my hands on thus far. “So that’s what he made from the Glitter.”
“The media is heralding it as a timely breakthrough, with so many people losing their jobs and falling into depression.”
“Imagine that. The Wyndhams finding a way to capitalize on a crisis they created. I’m shocked.” Once I would have said that with the vile burn of bitterness on my tongue. Now it simply fills me with pity. I don’t run on anger anymore.
Saber is silent, so I know there’s more.
“Out with it,” I say, smiling sadly.
“You know me too well.” He sighs. “Lady Mei was in the newscast. She’s been made a countess in her own right and is running public relations for the pharmaceutical arm.”
Oddly, I smile at his news. “I see Justin’s hand there. I imagine she’s thrilled. Is it awful to say I’m happy for her?” Worried too, but after helping me she can have no illusions as to what she’s getting into. We wanted very different lives, in the end, and I owe her better than to judge.
“No, it’s not. She always loved her life at the palace.” Saber twines his arms around my waist. “You did too. Admit it.”
“I will. I miss it. Not everything that went with it, but I miss the elegance. The beautiful clothes. The food,” I add after a pause. “But I don’t regret leaving. This is more than I deserve.”
“Dani—”
“By rights I should be behind bars, and you know
it.”
He’s silent, which means he doesn’t have a good argument.
I take a deep breath. “If I can beat these collars, it’ll be a start. If I can really help people for a change, instead of hurting them, maybe I can put Molli behind me. Put away the terrible person I became.”
“You never became anyone else,” Saber says, soothingly. I don’t argue, because then I’d have to reveal all the things he doesn’t know. Betraying him with Justin, the fact that Reginald was unarmed and helpless when I shot him, my immediate satisfaction when I realized that the death of a billion innocents could be used to blackmail my ex-husband. That’s who I was, who I let myself become. Saber has always thought me better than I am.
But I want to be the person he sees when he looks at me. And I’m taking small steps in that direction. I’m making progress. It’s something.
Saber goes to call our boarders in for dinner, and I take the package into my lab. I have two tables covered with defunct slaveminders, laid out in carefully sorted and labeled pieces. Saber’s raids bring back not only rescued slaves, but also pieces of tech.
His work is rescuing the slaves. Mine is freeing them.
With the help of my employees at a little tech firm I run in San Francisco, I’ve been developing swarms of server-controlled nanobots, infinitesimal versions of the appliances that once dressed me and cleaned my rooms. With them I hope to unlock the secrets of the slaveminders and—especially—the collars. But I can’t stop myself from tinkering with the pieces we have now, particularly with a new addition to the collection.
Two hours pass unheeded as I work on the tiny pieces of the new chip. I only notice the time at all because that’s when Saber brings me a plate of food.
“I thought you were just going to have a quick peek,” he says, nudging me teasingly with his hip.
“Saber, look,” I say, not taking my eyes off what I’ve done. Not entirely sure I can replicate it.
Saber crouches beside me and peers at the collar and slaveminder sitting on the table. The black box is half destroyed, acid-etched where the tamper seal blew, but the core still functions.
“Okay,” I say. “Keep your eye on the collar.”
I tap out a sequence of numbers on the keyboard I patched into the slaveminder, press Enter, and hold my breath.
The collar lights up, glowing blue for almost a whole second before going dark.
“Wow!” Saber says. Then more quietly, “What just happened?”
My heart races with excitement. “I synced the collar with this slaveminder. They communicated with each other, just for an instant.”
“And that’s…good?”
I can’t stop a smile from curling my lips. “Progress,” I say. “It’s progress.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was hard. Hard. It’s funny how the books we love the most are the ones that are the toughest to write; and I love this book like whoa. And I wrote it the way I wanted to. So, for better or for worse, thank you to my publishing team, who let me stretch a lot of boundaries. My editor, Caroline Abbey; my agent, Mandy Hubbard; my publicist, Josh Redlich; and the myriad wonderful people at Random House Children’s Books who had their expert fingers in the production of Shatter: thank you for dealing with me.
No one besides myself worked as hard on this book as my husband, Kenny, who read it almost as many times as I did. And no one had to survive my mental absence quite so starkly as my children: Aud, Bren, Gid, and Gwen. How they all live with me, I do not know. What I do know is that I couldn’t live without them.
During the writing of this book, I found myself very much drawing away from the world and into myself. Thank you to the friends who reminded me that there is a world outside of my head. Melissa Marr and Sandy Black, thank you for making sure I got out of my house once in a while. And thanks to Lauren de Stefano, for reminding me that it’s okay to stay home too. Also, cheese.
The Glendale Public Library in Arizona was generous enough to make me its writer in residence while I was editing this book, and that’s basically the reason I made my deadlines. In particular, thank you to Kearsten LaBrozzi and Ray Ceo, who watched over me…but mostly made sure I was left alone when I needed to work.
Special thanks to Emily Ruth Morris, who did a final, very fast beta read for me and didn’t spare my feelings when it came to making my characters stronger.
While revising this manuscript, I literally spent over 200 hours watching the BBC’s And Then There Were None on my Kindle, right beside my laptop as I worked. I’m quite sure I have every line memorized. (“I just open my mouth, and it comes out.”) The characters of Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne—brilliantly portrayed by Aidan Turner and Maeve Dermody—had precisely the feel I was going for with Justin and Danica, and I found their performances so very inspiring. I watched ATTWN so many times while editing that the characters started to feel like friends, especially those two. So much so that when I realized I needed middle names for Dani and Justin, the characters were christened after these two, in homage. So thank you, Aidan. Thank you, Maeve. Even though chances are neither of you will ever read this paragraph. You are both absolutely sparkling, and even now—long after the book is finished—when my writing on my other projects feels dull, I still find myself pressing Play.
APRILYNNE PIKE
is the critically acclaimed, internationally and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wings series. She has been spinning stories since she was a child with a hyperactive imagination. She received a BA in Creative Writing from Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. She lives in Arizona with her family. Visit her online at aprilynnepike.com and follow her on Twitter at @AprilynnePike.
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Aprilynne Pike, Shatter
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