Tears ran down her cheeks, which were red from the cold. “They’ll know you’re here. They’ll find you. You have to leave me.”
“It is not for you to decide what I must or must not do, little human,” he replied gently. “This journey is ours to make, together. I cannot proceed without you, and I gave you my word to keep you safe. The price paid is more than worth it, knowing that you are here now, that you are safe and in my arms.”
Zoey sniffled and threw her arms around him, holding him close. “I thought they shot you.”
“My connection to my nyros has recovered. They’ll have to do far better than that, if they mean to kill me.” He turned his head and glanced down the hill, toward the human dwellings in the distance. “Come. We need to obtain a new vehicle.”
“Oh, no,” Zoey cried quietly, drawing her head back. “My purse, my clothes, everything! Everything is gone. Now they know who I am, that I’m with you. Even if we get another car, how are we supposed to keep it running? I have no money!”
Her face suddenly fell, and her cheeks drained of color. “My photo album. My photo album is in that truck, and that’s all I have of my father. That’s all I had left from him, and now it’s gone, too. I lost him again. He’s gone.”
Eyes glistening with another wave of tears, she pulled away from Rendash. She turned and stumbled in the direction from which they’d come. The snow was too deep; Zoey fell forward, catching herself on her hands, and clawed at the snow to drag herself forward. “I have to get it. I have to get him. Ren, please, it’s all I have of him!”
His heart ached as he stepped to her. He bent down, slipping his arms around her middle to pull her out of the snow. She strained against his hold, moving her legs in a futile attempt to continue forward.
“Be still, kun’ia,” he whispered.
“I need to go back,” she rasped. Her struggles ceased abruptly, and she sagged in his arms. Her body shook with heart-wrenching sobs. “I need to go back…”
Rendash turned her to face him, supporting her with his hands, and kneeled to put himself at eye level with her. The whites of her eyes were pink from crying, moisture coated her blotchy cheeks, and the skin beneath her eyelids was puffy; she was still beautiful to him, more so now, seeing the depths of her caring.
“Your father is with you forever,” he said, touching the tip of a finger to her temple, “here. And because you shared him with me, he is here, as well.” He touched his own temple. “We will carry him, together.”
She nodded, sniffled, and closed her eyes, forcing out the last of her tears. “What are we going to do, Ren? No money, no car, the cops after us, you’re going to be all over the internet. What do we do?”
He stood up and dipped his head to place a soft kiss atop Zoey’s hair. “Do not worry, kun’ia. We will solve all those problems, one at a time.”
“Okay.” Zoey sniffled again, and her trembling lips shifted into a small smile. “That sounds like something my dad would say. One day at a time.”
“Let us honor him by pressing on. We’ll see to the vehicle first.”
Based on her coloring — where her skin wasn’t an irritated red, it was paler than ever, taking on a faint blue undertone — and her shivering, she was suffering from the cold. Trudging through the snow wasn’t likely to help with that. With his nyros functional, Ren’s body adjusted its temperature to counteract the conditions, but the chill in the air was still uncomfortable to him despite his adaptations.
He picked her up and carried her down the hill, only setting her on her feet when they reached the road below — which, like the other roads in town, had been cleared of snow. All was quiet save for the gentle wind rustling the boughs of the nearby trees.
Zoey leaned against his side, wrapped in his long coat, as they walked. He swung his gaze between the many vehicles parked in front of the dwellings along the road.
The distant wail of enforcer vehicles carried faintly over the treetops. How long would it be before Stantz’s soldiers arrived in their helicopters?
“How are we going to get a car?” Zoey asked.
“We must focus on finding a suitable vehicle first,” he replied, “and then we’ll figure out how to take it.”
“That one, the SUV.” Zoey pointed at a large vehicle with black windows. “It’s got tinted windows, so we won’t have to worry about people seeing you from outside, and the interior should be big enough for you to have some leg space.”
The SUV vaguely reminded Ren of the truck they’d left behind; it had a similar, somewhat blocky front end and was of comparable length. However, this vehicle had four doors rather than two, and its back end was closed in. Its exterior was black, and reflective silver metal gleamed on its wheels.
They approached the SUV cautiously. The windows in the dwelling behind it were covered and there were no lights on, and a quick check of the area revealed no nearby humans.
Ren shifted his primary attention to the vehicle, though he continued to watch their surroundings with his side-eyes.
He opened his nyros, allowing it to enter an automatic scanner mode for only the second time since he’d crashed on Earth. He didn’t understand how it worked — the technology was so intricate and advanced that it was beyond his comprehension — only that it did work. Here, in a more densely populated area, his nyros detected countless signals being broadcast, many of them easily accessible with limited security. Some came from devices inside the dwellings, some were transmitted in the air from far-away sources, and some came from the vehicles.
Like the black SUV.
His nyros interfaced with the vehicle through its over-air signal, breaking through its simple security system and delving directly into its core controls. His nyros had already encountered human language and coding, thanks to what he’d done at the cabin, and the process was even faster now.
Ren’s interaction with it occurred on an instinctual level. The characters flitting through his mind’s eye were unfamiliar to him, but his nyros knew them, and it granted him an intuitive understanding of the systems. He instructed it to deactivate the security and tracking and block any further interfacing with over-air signals.
He touched the handle, engaging a direct, physical connection with the internal computer, and the locks disengaged with a popping sound. He pulled it open for Zoey and stepped aside to allow her entry.
She climbed in, and Ren’s gaze locked on her backside; it was absolutely not the right time or place, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity. His cock didn’t care whether it was appropriate. He barely withheld a groan. She deposited that luscious ass in the seat and adjusted its position. With her body in profile, he took a moment to follow the curve of her legs. He frowned when he noticed how wet her pants were; that couldn’t be helping her stay warm.
“Are you…going to get in?” she asked, staring at him.
“Yes.” He tore his gaze away from her legs, closed her door, and walked around the vehicle. With a final glance at the surrounding area, he tugged open the passenger door, slid the seat back as far as it could go, and pulled himself in.
Zoey rubbed her hands together before lifting them to blow into her cupped palms. “So…now what?”
Ren took her hands between two of his and gradually increased the temperature of his skin. He placed another hand on the SUV’s control panel, which was currently dark.
A connection crackled through his fingertips like a spark, producing a faint, fleeting tingling in his fingertips. He held it for only a fraction of a second; just long enough to start the vehicle’s engine. The instruments came to life, lighting up across the console, and cold air blew through the vents.
“How are you doing all this?” Zoey asked, wide eyes flicking between Ren and the console.
“It is my nyros,” he said. “My understanding of how it works is little better than yours. I know how to wield it as a tool…the same way you know how to operate one of these vehicles, but not how to fix it.”
“So, you
did the same to the car as you did to the security system at the cabin?”
“Yes. And, like the system at the cabin, I disabled its ability to communicate with any external systems.”
“Good idea. I think most of these new cars — especially higher-end ones like this — can be tracked by GPS, or whatever.”
“How do your hands feel, Zoey?”
She looked down, and a small smile appeared on her lips. “Better. Thank you.”
He released her hands, telling himself that it was necessary — she needed them free to drive, and they had to move. To ease the sudden feeling of emptiness, he dropped a hand to her thigh, raising the temperature of his palm further to warm the cold flesh beneath her wet legging.
She covered his hand with one of hers briefly, brushing her fingertips over his scales, before taking hold of the wheel.
“I…I think we’ll need to backtrack. That cop probably realized we were going to get on I-70 before he pulled us over, and they saw us run in this direction.”
Rendash nodded, smiling pridefully. “And the last thing they would expect is for us to move directly toward their search.”
“Right. We’re supposed to be running away.” She inhaled deeply, moved the stick on the wheel column, and backed the vehicle out onto the road. “You wouldn’t happen to be able to access any kind of maps with this thing, can you?”
Ren was silent for a moment as he interfaced with the vehicle’s internal systems. “No. Not without enabling functions that would allow us to be tracked.”
“Okay. Well, we have almost a full tank of gas, so we have room for a couple wrong turns.” Shifting the wheel-stick again, she drove the vehicle forward, her gaze restlessly scanning the area. Her muscles were tight beneath his hand, and she kept adjusting her grip on the wheel as though her fingers were stiff. She was frightened, and he couldn’t blame her.
She guided the vehicle slowly down narrow roads lined by large dwellings and tall trees on both sides. The snow piled along the edges of the road was black and gray rather than the pristine white he’d grown used to over the last several days.
Gradually, the air blowing from the vents warmed.
“Maybe it’d be better if you go invisible,” she said after a little while. Up ahead, the road descended into a place where the buildings were positioned closer together and the roads were wider. Numerous vehicles were moving through the area.
He obeyed without question. Though they were both being hunted, the enforcers were likely more interested in locating Rendash. Having a completely different vehicle with darkened windows would help, but she stood the best chance if she appeared to be alone.
The cloaking field was easy to maintain now, completely unlike it had been when he first encountered her. He’d considered it before, but he couldn’t stop the thought from reemerging — so much had changed since that night.
He turned his head to watch her. She kept her face surprisingly neutral, but he could see in her eyes that she was still shaken up. He gave her thigh a gentle squeeze. Zoey offered a soft, brief smile in reply.
Rendash had told himself — had told her — that he’d stayed to ensure her safety.
Selflessness.
That was one of the core tenets of the aekhora, and he’d neglected it so thoroughly that he should have been ashamed of himself. There was little selflessness in him protecting Zoey — she deserved comfort, security, and happiness, that could not be denied, but he was not doing it simply because it was right.
He was doing it because his want for her, his need for her, had grown to become a driving force in his mind. If he truly wanted her safe beyond all else, he would have left her behind days ago. Before he’d destroyed her life. Before he’d taken away her future on this planet.
It wasn’t so much that he wanted her safe as that he wanted her safe with him.
After some aimless wandering, Zoey found the road she called the Interstate and directed their SUV onto it. The insistent call of his ship, clear but still distant, screamed that he was going the wrong way. Even knowing that they were deliberately backtracking, it was a struggle to prevent himself from correcting her course.
With the weather having cleared, there were far more cars on the road than he’d seen so far, and he was glad that she’d told him to cloak himself. They saw several enforcer vehicles driving on the sideroads just off the interstate as the town passed around them, but no such vehicles crossed their path.
“Okay,” she said as they approached a fork in the road, “I think this is our exit coming up. One-seventy-one. I’ve never been great with maps, but I think I remember this cutting south…and then bringing us somewhere east where we can get back onto seventy?” She sighed heavily and shook her head. “How the hell did people do this before GPS?”
“What is GPS?” Ren asked.
“I think it stands for Global Positioning System, or something like that. It uses satellites to pinpoint your location, and then translates that onto a map. You basically tell it where you want to go, and it figures out the best route for you to take based on where you are.”
She took the right fork, following it around a sharp loop and onto a narrower road, which only had one lane going in each direction. A river flowed to their left, and the road seemed to more-or-less follow its course as it wound through the hills and mountains.
Before long, Zoey leaned forward, her gaze flicking upward. The sky in the distance had an ugly gray cast to it, as though there’d be more bad weather soon, but that wasn’t what she was focused on.
“That’s not a coincidence, right?” she asked.
Ren’s gaze followed hers. Far-off — but approaching rapidly — were three black, familiar shapes.
Helicopters.
It seemed as though he and Zoey both held their breath as the helicopters passed overhead, the chopping whir of their blades audible even with the windows closed and the rush of wind that enveloped their vehicle. Rendash shifted to look in the side mirror and watch the aircraft speeding toward Vail.
Zoey released a shaky breath. “I think we’re safe. For now.”
Ren stared at the darkening sky reflected in the mirror. When the helicopters didn’t reappear, he nodded and squeezed her thigh again. “Yes. We’re safe.”
Chapter Eighteen
“I’m working on containing—”
“Damnit, Charlie, I might as well have a red-assed baboon running that operation at this point,” the director shouted. Stantz gritted his teeth and moved the phone away from his ear. “Your fucking dog is all over the web, and it’s only been a few hours! Explain to me how the fuck you’re going to contain that? You shit the bed, Charlie.”
“Because of this, sir, we’ve discovered entirely new applications for—”
“I got Homeland Security and the Pentagon ringing my damned phone right off the hook, Charlie. You think they’re going to just shrug and leave us to it if I tell them we might be able to make them magical force fields in twenty years if they’d just please leave us alone?”
Pressing his lips together, Stantz squeezed his phone. The edges bit painfully into his fingers.
“One more chance, Charlie. You know I don’t like to retire assets, but when an asset becomes a liability… Fix this.”
The call ended with a double beep that felt far too final.
Stantz growled and threw the phone against the wall; the plaster, to his annoyance, took all the damage. He made himself pick the phone up and return it to the case on his belt before he stormed out of the hotel room.
The command trailer was at the rear of the parking lot, which was slick from the snowfall that had begun shortly after the incident in town. Stantz walked to the trailer, welcoming the cold blast of wind through his button-down shirt; it was a good distraction from his sour gut and boiling blood.
He found Fairborough inside the trailer. The man was sickly pale and had dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. Stantz frowned; Fairborough oversaw a
team within Stantz’s unit. It would befit him to present a more respectable countenance as an example to his men.
“Nothing,” Fairborough said, dragging a handkerchief over his glistening forehead. “Alpha Team found a trail over the hills, but it went dead at a residential road.”
“I need your people to get this video corrected, Fairborough. We need a clean version. Something to make the real thing look like it was tampered with.”
“We can do it, but it’s going to take a few days.”
“We don’t have that kind of time.”
“Sir, it’s very detailed work, and—”
“I need it done, Fairborough, and I need it done now. The director’s breathing down the back of my neck, ready to throw everything I’ve worked for away because of this. Because he’s too stupid to see the endgame. We need that video discredited, and we need those two found.”
“They have to be somewhere in town. They have no vehicle, and her money, identification, and clothing were left behind. They couldn’t have made it far.”
Stantz shook his head and faced one of the monitor-lined walls. An overwhelming amount of information flitted across the screens — camera feeds, transcriptions of text and phone conversations, personal files, satellite feeds. None of it adequate enough to hunt down a green, seven-foot-tall alien and a waitress from California by way of Iowa.
“He can. Have the choppers expand their search eastward.”
“We already have roadblocks in place that way, and with this weather—”
Stantz silenced Fairborough with a hard look. Fairborough held his; gaze for several seconds before looking down.
“It is imperative that we locate my specimen,” Stantz said in a low voice. “We must be willing to risk everything for it. That specimen is the key to the future of our species. I don’t care if the weather is dangerous, I don’t care if everyone is tired. Give the message to the pilots and keep those ground crews moving.”
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