Before Beasts, There Was Light--Book 9

I Don't Care

Of course he regretted it. But he rebelled against that care. Screw it all. Screw the world. Let it nuke itself. Let them nuke themselves. Take him along with them, he didn't care, he didn't want to care, he was just so damn sick and tired of it ALL.

And thus he found himself in the last place any of them would want to be: back in the frozen hold at the bottom of the ship.

It did surprise him that Tala had somehow managed to make the hold as cold as it was outside without the sea breeze to nip away your heat. But Kai had felt so much painful cold over the last however long that he just blinked and stood there, wrapping his arms around him and pressing his wings in tight underneath his big coat.

Ray had gotten that for him. Stolen it, even. And the Chinese boy had always prided himself on being honest and good. It must have hurt him to steal it, even as he thought how perfect it would be to cover both Kai and his wings—for him. Not Ayah, who could have used it too. But for the fire that would have suffered most from the cold.

With clenched teeth, he shoved the thought aside.

But then, looking at the ice cocoon which held the last Blitzkrieg boy, he found his metal cage caving in once more.

Tala had lost all his teammates to all this. He had nothing left. He didn't even care if what Kai had told him was real or not. He just didn't want to be alone, and now here he was. Frozen at the bottom of the ship. Alone.

With a guttural groan, Kai dug his hands into his hair.

"I don't CARE!" he roared as loud as he could, even tasting sparks on his tongue.

The ice swallowed it whole. No echo responded, as it would have with metal.

The suck in of breath after the roar hurt. Too cold. His eyes burned, so he clenched the rebellious bastards shut.

"I CAN'T care!" he amended. "Damnit, if this doesn't kill me, fucking caring will! Why didn't it kill you?" Kai flung an accusing finger at the lump of ice.

But, no, Tala had been top of their class in survival. He freaking went to the frozen tundra to hide out and did so smashingly. Had a cozy little cabin he probably built himself and everything. Freak.

Trembling, eyes still burning, Kai spat a mouthful of sparks onto the floor and stomped his way over to the station where the stereo had been. Might as well make himself useful if he was going to be a stupid, brooding wreck, he figured. Couldn't use the damn radio up in the cabin, oh no. Tracking and crap. But what tracking could there be on a gym class stereo? Time to check up on the world he'd been so blissfully ignoring.

"There's a good idea," muttered Kai as he kicked at the frozen door handle. "Tune in to the apocalypse. Care even more. Freaking, stupid, helpless little girl I am," he accented each word with another kick, finally giving the door a gout of frustrated flame. The ice vaporized, leaving scorch marks on the white painted aluminum, but he got in easy enough after that and slammed the door behind him. At least the office hadn't been covered in ice as well. Not that it helped with the temperature any.

He contemplated setting fire to the wooden desk and filing cabinets inside. But all he needed now was to set the fire alarms loose all over the ship and make everyone run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Real cool guy there, Kai. Punching out your teammate then starting a fire. A real traditional rebel.

So he turned on the space heater (which worked just fine and without a whine), blew some steam on his hands, and set about to getting some news tunes.

Since FM was the short waves, he went straight to AM. Blurbs of Russian went through, interspaced with other languages that were too fuzzy to make out. He heard a thin stream of American that sounded like NPR (even out on the Arctic Ocean. Figures). Finally, he heard a blurb of only mildly staticky Russian that sounded promising. Turning it up, he curled up in front of the heater, nuzzled into his coat, and listened.

"Do me a favor and don't wake up for a bit," he muttered towards the frozen windows.

Right. Because Tala had magic hearing feelers through the ice.

He didn't know how long he huddled there, resisting the urge to go out and start burning down things just because he could, listening to random advertisements and stock numbers. During that time, he figured the world couldn't be all that bad if commerce was still going on, alive and well. Because who would be the heartless loser to play advertisements while there were millions of people burning and dying?

That thought almost made him laugh. Hadn't life taught him better? Of course people would be still doing that, no matter the tragedy about them. They were people.

Sure enough, after what had to have been an hour of freezing his butt off (the wires in the heater had turned red hot, at least), a news broadcast broke in. A thin, dry sounding man listed off more numbers to the 'Japanese Tokyo Catastrophe' as well as several other cities in western Russia, eastern America, the Middle East, and surprisingly a few tropical islands thought deserted around the cape of Africa. Bombings, the man mentioned now and then, because after what had happened to the capital of Japan, the rest of the world didn't have the stomach for another nuclear catastrophe—or that's what everyone hoped.

As the man went into rumors and reports of hearsay and speculation as to who could be the next nuclear offender, and their next target, Kai slapped off the radio. His heart thudded loud and painful in his chest, as though angry with him. But what could he have done?

Tyson's town is a long way from Tokyo, he told himself. And it was. Nearly on different ends of the country. But that didn't stop the accusations floating through his head. It didn't matter how he rebuffed them—Hillary and Gramps and Kenny would have just gotten caught up in the mess, maybe even died, anyone else wouldn't have believed him, etc—it still made his hands shake. He had been on that island with Cain. He had been a part of that. He had had the chance to go to LA, to say something. Destroy someone. Kill. Protect.

He dug his hands into his hair again and started up the mantra.

"I don't care." He didn't. He really didn't. This was illogical. He had already said he wasn't stupid enough to think he could save the world. "I can't care." They were just strangers. Millions upon millions of strangers. When had he ever cared for strangers? He wasn't programmed that way. He had killed strangers himself.

But the mantra wasn't a new thing for him. In fact, it was a very, very old thing from just after the days of Russian summer grass and the soft, gray-haired mother. When the child Tala stood in his dorm doorway with that silent, open-mouthed scream and Kai had thought his face like the howl of a weird classic painting he had once saw. When the chains hit, when punishment was dealt, when he lost under the teachers that would not accept failure, when he set the knife-thin black blade through the vents and across a man's throat for the first time, when he stared at Tyson across the frozen lake, when he breathed and watched a man burn and blacken before falling over the other side of the ship...

The fingertips on his scalp bruised. Hairs popped as they came loose. His head had become clamped between his knees.

"I don't care. I can't care. I don't care. I don't."

And for once, he had a little privacy for his cave in.