“Wait,” she repeated.
“By Earth…” one said as they entered the room. “What is this?” He raised his hand to his ear. “Coms are down.”
My three partners sprang up and fired. By the time I joined them, the two officers’ innards were splattered all over the wall. The few shots they’d gotten off had sped harmlessly into the wrong side of the desk.
“All right, let’s go!” Rin ordered. “It’s all on us now. Less than five minutes.”
She and the others sprinted down the unblocked corridor. I stopped for a moment to choose between a fallen pulse-pistol and a rifle. I didn’t have any experience shooting firearms, so I settled on the pistol, figuring I’d be more useful with something small. Then I quickly caught up.
The corridor led to a fanning passage with sealed doors running along one side at a tight interval. Each was labeled, and the numbers of those we passed were all preceded by an “A.”
“Row C is two floors up,” Rin said.
A curved staircase ran along the back wall in the center of the lengthy passage. She sent Gareth up first, and he crouched at the top, his footsteps light as a feather. Feet scuttled past row B’s railing, and he swept them with his arm. As a Ringer, he probably wasn’t strong enough to knock an Earther over straight on, but the officer was caught unawares and tripped. Gareth shoved his rifle against the man’s neck and fired, letting the man’s flesh muffle the shot. Three years on a gas harvester in the heart of Saturn, and now I knew what they’d been practicing the whole time.
Gareth waved us up, and we followed. They may as well have been towing me on a leash, I was so flabbergasted by what was happening. We reached the top of the stairs, and Gareth shot another officer down the row. Footsteps loudly descended the stairs from the next level up. Hayes fired his rifle between the risers, and when two bodies tumbled down, Rin finished the job with two clean shots through their foreheads.
We rushed up the next flight of stairs, when gunfire erupted from behind us. An officer had emerged from one of the row B cells at our backs. I almost tripped face-first in my attempt to duck. A bullet caught Gareth in the meat of his thigh, and he groaned in the only way his tongueless mouth could allow.
Rin leaped over the side of the stairs and rushed the cell, firing to drive him back to cover. She stopped just outside and tossed a stray gun across the opening to draw his fire. She then poked around the corner, and I knew that the screams emanating from within the cell could mean only one thing.
“Can you walk?” Hayes asked, wrapping his arm around Gareth’s back to help him stand. He grunted in response. When Rin caught up, we continued to row C, blood dripping from Gareth’s leg in our trail.
“Wait,” I said. “They’ll be able to follow us later.” My uniform was well-made, so I pulled it loose and shot through the fabric with my pistol. It was technically the first time I’d ever fired a gun. The rip allowed me to tear off my sleeve completely, and I wound it around Gareth’s leg. He grimaced in pain as I pulled it tight, but didn’t fight me.
“Ready,” I said.
Hayes went to help him walk again, but Gareth shrugged him off and raised his rifle. “Let’s go,” he signed.
“I opened every cell in row C,” Rin said as we reached the top of the stairs. “No time to check who was where, so find the ones you came here for, Kale, and then we leave. We don’t have the supplies for any more.”
“If they’re open, then where is everyone?” I asked.
The cells extended in both directions from where we stood, each of the thick steel doors raised. I’d expected to see my friends strolling through the halls, confused, wondering why they were free. I didn’t. No officers were left on the top level either.
Gareth and Hayes stayed by the stairs to keep guard while I stowed my pistol in my belt and hurried ahead with Rin. I checked every cell we passed. They were clean metal boxes, four meters by four meters at the most with ceilings barely tall enough for a Ringer to stand at full height. The far wall was almost entirely transparent, with a view of Saturn’s rings that would’ve been beautiful if I couldn’t see the thick, circular frame wrapping the glass, denoting them as airlocks.
The first three cells were empty. In the fourth, I found a Ringer curled up in the far corner, facing out into the void. He shook uncontrollably. I edged into the room slowly, my pistol hand dropping to my hip.
“Hurry, Kale,” Rin said, waiting by the entrance.
I got close enough to reach out and touch the man, and then he turned to face me. Even through a thick coating of bloodstains, I recognized his face right away. Desmond’s eyes, usually brimming with fervor, regarded me, but it was as if I weren’t there. Like he could see right through me. For a moment, he stared blankly, then he cowered backward as far as he could go.
“Don’t… Don’t touch me!” he moaned. “No more. P…p…please.” He extended a trembling hand, his fingers twisted and gnarled as if they’d each been broken in a different direction. Half were missing their fingernails, and as he spoke, I could see that most of his teeth had been knocked out.
“Desmond,” I whispered. “Desmond, it’s me.” I went to grab his arm, but he recoiled and held his shaking hand against his chest. “It’s Kale.”
Hearing my name seemed to awaken something in him. His gaze focused as much as possible, and when I reached for him again, he poked my arm as if to make sure I wasn’t a hallucination or some cruel trick being played on him by his captors.
“Kale?” he muttered weakly.
I’d considered him a pest for a long time, but he’d always been ready to pick a worthy fight or spit out some witty comeback. Now he could barely speak. I choked back tears. I couldn’t even imagine what Pervenio had done to break him so thoroughly and in so little time. It hadn’t been even three days since the last time I’d seen him.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “I’m here to get you out.”
His eyes widened. “I can’t! They’ll—”
“You’ll be fine, I promise. They can’t touch you anymore.” I leaned in and extended an arm beneath his shoulders. He didn’t fight it, but as I tried to lift him, I realized how little help he could offer me in return. One of his legs was bent awkwardly at the knee. We made it two steps before it gave out and his body folded. He would’ve collapsed to the floor if Rin hadn’t lunged forward to help me.
“By Trass,” she whispered. “I hope the others aren’t this bad.”
“Hold him,” I said.
I ran to the next cell and found it empty. I kept going. By the end of that row, my heart pounded against my rib cage. The last compartment was as vacant as the others. I left it and sprinted back toward Rin and Desmond.
“Anyone?” Hayes hollered.
I ignored him. Every cell I passed in that direction was vacant as well. Empty. All empty and sparkling, as if they’d just been washed. My chest felt like it was going to explode. There was only one woman aboard the Piccolo, and I didn’t see her anywhere. I returned to Desmond without taking even a moment to catch my breath.
“Cora!” I seized him by the shoulders and shouted, “Where is she?”
He winced as if he thought I was going to strike him. Then he raised his hand and pointed with a crooked finger to the cell next to his: C-031. It too was hollow. I raced in and checked the flat, metallic walls for ways out. A vent, something. But the cells shared walls, and there were hardly even seams in the surfaces.
Rin and Desmond stood by the exit watching me. “Where is she?” I yelled.
“The director… made us watch,” Desmond said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. His hand lifted again, and he pointed a crooked finger at the transparent outer seal of the airlock behind me. “He said… he said we’d receive the same fate our people granted his if we didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.”
“What did he want to know?” I forced through quaking lips. “What are you talking about?”
“The Piccolo,” Desmond said. “Something about a
hidden Q-Zone. They didn’t stop. They started sending us out one at a time. I was next, but… but then they all left for some reason.”
“You’re lying!” I tackled him out of Rin’s arms. My fingers squeezed his throat. “You’re lying!” I cocked my arm back to punch him, but just before I did, I stopped. His hands covered his face as he shrank away from me, as terrified as a child left alone in the bottommost level of the Lowers.
“I didn’t know anything,” he whimpered. “I didn’t know anything…”
I fell off him and crawled back toward the empty cell C-031. A piece of frozen rock drifted by the airlock window, but there were no bodies lost in the blackness. Nothing. No proof that anyone had been ejected to die. I scanned the cell one last time and noticed a lens built into the small area of wall above the entrance.
“Rin,” I said, my throat dry as sandpaper. “Did your sister know?”
Rin shook her head. “Only that they were here. I told you, she had to deactivate all surveillance feeds to get us in and those feeds are all local. From the hall, the cells looked empty. We didn’t prep for this, Kale, we’re improvising. She—”
“Is she still connected?”
Rin sat upright and withdrew her hand-terminal. “Yes, but not for long.”
“Can she pull up the last day of recordings from this cell?”
“Probably, Kale, but we don’t have time. They’ve found her bug and are fighting her. We have to go.”
“Ask her.”
“Kale…”
“Ask her!” I boomed.
She reluctantly obeyed. She entered communications with Rylah, and I gazed out of the C-031 airlock. Lights from distant ships danced across the blackness. Ice-rock glistened against the swirling rouge atmosphere of Saturn. Rin extended her hand-terminal in front of my face for me to take.
“Here,” she said gravely. “We don’t have long.”
I took it without a word. Frozen on the screen was a silent feed facing the inside of the cell. Cora sat silently in the corner, staring expressionlessly at the wall, her clothes and face clean. I swiped my hand across the screen to fast-forward through the time. Once, security officers came to take her away. She was gone for hours until she limped back in, her face as bloodied as it was when I’d left her, her right arm broken, snapped at the elbow like a twig. Twice more the security officers came for her, and each time when she returned to her cell, her limp was more pronounced and her body more densely covered in red.
She cried for a few hours after the third time she returned. Until the entrance opened again and in strolled Director Sodervall himself, the time stamp indicating this happened only a little more than an hour ago. I’d never seen him below his shoulders. He wore formal black-and-red fatigues and was unexpectedly short, even for an Earther.
Cora regarded him, and for the first time, I could see the blue of her eyes before she scrambled across the floor. The director leaned in front of her and said something. He didn’t grin afterward. Or shout. He merely sighed, as if he was tired of the sight of her, before strolling out of the room.
She watched him go, the dread in her expression matching Desmond’s when I found him. I didn’t need to see what followed to know the truth, but I watched nonetheless. I had to. The cell’s inner seal closed. She gazed up at the lens—right into my eyes—and then the outer seal popped open. Her body was sucked through, gone in less than a second. Like ashes in the winds of Titan.
TWENTY-THREE
The hand-terminal slipped through my fingers as the recording stopped. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t swallow. I was petrified, like one of Earth’s forests frozen over for centuries after the Meteorite struck.
Rin’s hand fell upon my shoulder. Not forcefully, but with the concern of family. “We have to go, Kale,” she whispered. “She’s gone.”
“I…” I couldn’t find words.
Rin crouched by my side and picked up the hand-terminal. “Now you know what we mean to them.”
I turned to my aunt. Gone was her hardened glare. Her eyes were glazed over, a tear running down the ripples and craters of her disfigured half.
“She…” I swallowed. “She didn’t even know anything,” I managed to say.
Rin propped me to my feet. I didn’t have the energy to fight her as she led me out of the cell. I wanted to sit at the airlock and search for Cora amongst the stars, but I knew I wouldn’t find her or anybody else.
Back in the hall, Desmond cringed against the railing of the stairs. My assault had caused him to revert to a complete state of terror. Nearby, Hayes supported Gareth, his normally carefree expression rife with anger. Twenty Ringer members of the Piccolo’s crew had been detained, and only one of them remained, beaten and broken to within a fraction of his life. He would’ve been spaced as well if not for what happened on Titan.
“Kale, we have to go,” Rin said. “Rylah’s been blocked, and reinforcements are incoming.”
I couldn’t move. I stared at the long row of open cells, imagining the screams that had echoed from within them at the hands of the director before each Ringer was rendered silent despite knowing nothing. But they weren’t all gone. I helped Desmond to his feet. His whole body shivered.
“Kale, focus,” Rin said.
“They’ll pay for this,” Hayes bristled. Gareth signed his agreement, though his scowl was more than enough to indicate his feelings.
“They will,” Rin agreed, “but we have to get to the tunnel. Our time is up.”
I wound my arm around Desmond’s back and walked wordlessly with him toward the stairs. He was heavy, and having only one working leg meant he couldn’t help me much. Fury drove me. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen afterward, but I was going to get Desmond out just to show the director what failure felt like. Even if it killed me.
We followed the others down the stairs. I stopped as my view of cell C-031 was about to be cut off. Through the airlock viewport, as the station rotated, I saw the silhouette of Saturn’s largest moon eclipsing the sun—Titan. Orange blades of light encircled it like a crown of fire.
“Kale!” Rin shouted with urgency.
I snapped too and allowed the cell to fall out of sight. Down the stairs we went. Rin took the front since she wasn’t carrying anybody. Her rifle was ready. Desmond and I brought up the rear behind Hayes and Gareth. My shoulder burned with soreness and my arm felt like it was going to fall off. A few times, Desmond stumbled, but I didn’t let him fall. I wouldn’t let him fall.
When we were halfway down the exit corridor, the emergency alarms started wailing. Rylah’s interference in the station’s systems had finally been purged. By the time we crossed the lobby, every door into the detention block was reopened. A device that had the potential to wipe a million Ringer identities off the grid had been expended to save only Desmond’s life. My first decision as the leader Rin hoped I could be.
Officers flooded the lobby behind us, their footsteps clattering like a herd of ancient cattle. We retrieved our supply bag at the platform and jumped to the service ladder rising through the vertical passage just before any of them might have seen us. The tram-car we’d arrived in was gone, leaving only rock, metal lines, and darkness, enough to shroud us.
Desmond could barely wrap his broken fingers around the bars, so I stayed below him, keeping him steady. We climbed, the force of the station’s centripetal gravity lessening with every rung. We reached a service landing about forty meters up, where we finally had a chance to rest.
It was a tight fit against a power conduit, but we all shoved in, stifling our heavy breaths by pulling our sanitary masks as tight as possible. Desmond didn’t have one on, so I covered his mouth with my sleeve. Getting sick was the last thing he needed to worry about. His gaze dithered as if he was ready to pass out.
“Legs in,” Rin whispered. “Tram’s coming.”
The rocky walls around us rumbled, and I heard a loud humming sound like a shuttle taking off. A beam of light pierced the darkness from above
, gathering fast. There was just barely enough room for the tram to zip by. My sweaty face was blasted by a wave of warm air.
“Let’s go,” Rin said once it passed.
“For Trass’s sake, give them some time,” Hayes protested.
“There is none now.”
The tram stopped. Then a basso voice filled the depths of the shaft, one I’d heard many times before. It belonged to Director Sodervall.
“What in the name of Earth happened here!” he barked. “Spread out. I want the entire block searched. Find these Ringers and put them down!”
Hearing him ignited all the ire festering in my gut. I pictured him leaving Cora’s cell without a care in the world before she was taken by the vacuum.
The rest of the group listened to Rin. They prepared themselves to climb deeper up the shaft, where gravity would become imperceptible. Even Desmond stood groggily, expecting me to be behind bracing him. I didn’t move. I stared down at the platform where Sodervall had arrived. My hands balled into fists so tight that my nails dug into my palms. I wasn’t sure if it was my limbs shaking or Desmond’s as he lay beside me, but I felt like I was going to explode.
“Kale, what are you doing?” Rin whispered from above.
“Aren’t you tired of hiding?” I answered.
“Kale?”
I released Desmond, pushed off the wall, and dropped through the shaft. I braced myself between the metal of the car and the rock of the walls with my hands and feet. It was no different from a ventilation shaft, and negotiating those was my specialty. My light weight made me noiseless, and once I was low enough, I swung myself around the cylindrical tram-car and threaded through one of its open viewports.
Stacks of horizontal seats rushed by me, my body snaking through the narrow spaces between each level. I grabbed hold of the second-lowest one with my left hand and launched myself through the vehicle entrance, landing directly behind Director Sodervall. Before any of his men could react, my pulse-pistol was out of my belt and aimed at the back of his head.
Titan's Son: (Children of Titan Book 2) Page 25