Oliver Invictus (Annals of Altair Book 3)

by Kate Stradling

  “I’d hardly call him little. He’s as tall as you are, and probably a lot more useful. Oliver, pull it together and wake up, would you?”

  Again he pried his eyes open. This time he managed to scowl at the pair watching over him. They were almost at eye level.

  “You got me shot,” he said flatly.

  Not-Emily had the grace to blush. “Sorry.”

  “You put me in a cargo hold,” he said then, because that was his second most pressing complaint. They’d tossed him out of the way like a piece of luggage.

  “It was the only open spot. We had thirty people sandwiched in here. Can you get down?”

  His arms and legs felt like they were made of lead. At least the zip-tie had disappeared.

  “Can I?” he asked sarcastically. As close as he was to the ceiling, the only egress he could imagine involved shimmying over and dropping like a rock to the floor five feet below.

  “Come on,” said their guard, Hancock. He hooked capable hands under Oliver’s armpit and wrenched him sideways.

  Oliver’s preservation instincts kicked into full gear. He flailed, and gravity played its part to pull him down. Not-Emily skirted out of the way as Hancock caught him under his other arm and steadied him on his feet.

  Oliver, for the barest instant, was sure his knees would collapse out from under him. The tranquilizer’s aftereffects still coursed through him, his legs like jelly and his head spinning.

  “Whoa, there,” said Not-Emily, grabbing him on his right side. “Come on. Let’s get you into some proper shelter. Hopefully it’s warm, but I make no guarantees.”

  “It’s homey.” Hancock grinned from Oliver’s other side. “You’ll like it, pretty lady.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” she said. Together they helped Oliver exit the transport into the stark morning sunlight. The snow on the ground quickly seeped through his socks to his feet, further rousing his sluggish senses.

  “Where are we?” he asked. Snow-laden pine trees surrounded them. The ice-blasted face of a rocky red hill jutted up directly ahead. Not-Emily pressed her lips in a thin line, a dark scowl between her brows. Hancock ignored the question.

  There was an opening in the rock, covered over by a wide-spaced bar grate about ten steps in. Hancock directed them to a cut in the wall next to the grating, where a solid metal door stood half-hidden by an outcropping of stone. He tapped a rhythm on this. It clicked from within. A sentry motioned them past and shut it again.

  “They’re taking most of the kids into the main shaft,” the sentry said.

  “These two go to a holding area first,” Hancock replied. The man waved them on.

  The passageway was only a narrow bypass around the metal grate. It curved back into the main cavern. Oliver twisted around for a last glimpse of the snowy world beyond.

  “It’s for the bats,” said Hancock. It took a moment for Oliver to realize that he was talking about the grate.

  “Nice,” Not-Emily muttered from his other side. “Rabies would be just the thing to round out this miserable trip.”

  Hancock laughed. “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. They keep the mosquito population down in the summertime, and they keep the government-types away. The bat grates mark this as an environmentally protected area, sacrosanct and off-limits for human meddling.”

  “Is this an abandoned mine shaft?” Oliver asked suspiciously.

  “The null hits it on the nose. This way, you two.” He led them beyond sight of the outside world and deposited them into a small chamber that had been carved off the main channel. Nothing more than a metal table and chairs awaited them there, with one bald light bulb extending from exposed wiring overhead. “I’ll tell the Commander that you’re here.”

  “Can we get a blanket or something?” Not-Emily asked, rubbing her upper arms to ward off the chill. “It’s freezing in here.”

  “I’ll see if we have an extra in our supplies. You can always share mine.” He winked at her and shut the door. The lock clicked in place from the other side.

  “Delightful,” said Not-Emily to the space where he had stood. “Why do men always think those idiotic remarks are attractive?”

  Oliver had already sat down on one of the metal chairs, still too lethargic to stand for long. He might as well have sat on a block of ice. His breath puffed into the air, a sigh on his lips.

  “You’re going to freeze,” Not-Emily said, though she did nothing to alleviate his chill.

  She was probably right, but he wasn’t about to complain. Against all odds, he was out and away from Prom-F. Seeds of hope sprouted within him anew. “Who are these people?” he asked.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say they’re part of the Overmountain Brotherhood. It’s a group of would-be revolutionaries. They live in backwoods areas—holes in the ground, mountain cabins, and the like—and run through military training like they’re going to stage a coup. The government has them classified as a terrorist group. After last night it’s no wonder. We’ve gotta get out of here.”

  Oliver’s brows shot up. “Why? What happened?”

  “Prom-F is a crater in the ground, that’s what happened. They pulled all the kids out and bombed the place.”

  A knot twisted in his stomach. “Just the kids?”

  “Just the kids,” Not-Emily repeated. Her lips pursed together, white with pressure.

  He thought of the fleet of administrators, handlers, security guards, and custodians—hundreds of adults who had worked to keep Prom-F running like a good little government cog. A vague sense of nausea blossomed within him. He had said he wanted mayhem. Fate had granted his wish and delivered the sickening guilt that came as consequence.

  Not-Emily continued. “They disabled all of our ID chips and crammed everyone into their transports, and then split up once they left Prom-F. It was probably three or four Brotherhood cells working together. Whoever orchestrated it had a lot of influence. Or whoever they were looking for was really important.”

  “Kennedy Ross,” said Oliver.

  “What?”

  “That’s the projector’s name. Kennedy Ross. She’s an eighth grader. She’s been at Prom-F for four years, since she was ten. She was a late acquisition. When they tried to ship me off to Prom-E, she used her projection to have the administrators email out a call for help. These must be the people she was contacting.”

  Not-Emily stared at him like he’d broken out a pagan idol and started sacrificing chickens to it.

  Oliver bristled. “There’s no point in me keeping her a secret now, is there? And speaking of secrets, who are you, and what happened to the real Emily Brent?”

  Her brows arched. “Officially, she’ll be listed among the dead now. Their records will show her next to her cell phone when the blast went off.”

  As long as the real Emily wasn’t dead, he didn’t care. “Unofficially?”

  “Unofficially, I don’t know what happened to her. I’ve never met her.”

  “But you knew things about Prometheus and about me,” he said. In her scant time by his side, she had bluffed her way magnificently, but there were certain details—such as the handlers’ reports—that she couldn’t have known off the top of her head.

  Not-Emily mulled over what to say. “I’ve seen recordings of her, de-briefings. She talked about her life, her habits, her childhood and education, her time at Prometheus. And she talked about you.”

  His heart tightened in his chest. “What did she say?”

  “That you were her biggest regret.”

  She might as well have punched him in the kidney. His surprise stripped the air from his lungs, stuttered his thoughts to a halt, and bleached the color from the room around him.

  He was her biggest regret?

  Not-Emily dipped her head to catch his gaze. “She said it tore her up to think of you, of how she had had to abandon you to Prometheus. She said that if she had recognized the truth sooner, she could have pushed you into safety instead of guiding you back to
an organization that would only use and eventually destroy you.”

  Some color returned. “She said that?” he asked, his voice hollow. Maybe the impostor was trying to soften the blow by cushioning her previous statement.

  “She did. I have it memorized. I had to watch that part of the recording over and over. It was the only section where she cried.”

  His gaze tugged up from the table to meet her candid stare.

  “I had to memorize her,” Not-Emily said. “The way she talked, the way she laughed, the way she reacted under pressure. It was part of taking on her life.”

  “How long have you been pretending to be her?”

  “Only since the start of the school year, about six months. She transferred jobs from California to Wisconsin, except I was the one who showed up in the new place at the new job. I was supposed to last a lot longer than this, you know. Her ties to Prometheus were cut. They never call handlers back into their ranks after their term ends.”

  A prayer of thanks whispered through his mind. If the real Emily had come instead of this impostor, she would have stayed in her room last night. She would have been left behind. She would have—

  He shook the possibility out of his mind. “So what’s your real name?”

  The woman’s brows arched.

  “I call you Not-Emily in my head,” said Oliver. “What’s your real name?”

  A smothered laugh twitched against the corners of her mouth. “It’s Jenifer. With only one ‘n,’ not two.”

  She didn’t look like a Jenifer. Not-Emily suited her more.

  “And you’re part of Altair, Jenifer? Or is it a different group that Emily joined?”

  “I’m part of Altair,” she said. “Born and raised. In fact, my father’s a Smith.”

  Oliver scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re Jenifer Smith?”

  “No. In Altair, Smith is a title, not a surname. A Smith is a master-orchestrator, someone who takes raw materials and renders them into something better, more useful. It’s the title used to designate the leader of an Altair cell.”

  “And how is this Overmountain Brotherhood related to Altair?”

  “They share resources—asset databases, mostly, but other information as well. They serve different purposes, though. Altair is for keeping secrets safe. The Brotherhood… They’re for fighting tyranny, so they say, but how they define that differs from cell to cell. There are other affiliate groups in the network that have their own goals. We’re all pieces of one giant framework. United we stand, divided we fall.”

  From beyond the door of their holding area, muffled voices echoed through the shaft.

  “When they come in here, let me do the talking,” Jenifer said. Quickly she took a seat in one of the cold metal chairs across from him.

  The lock on the door flipped open.

  “Blankets for the lady and the null,” said Hancock, generously distributing one of these to each of his captives. Jenifer unfolded hers and swept it around her shoulders.

  Oliver accepted his more reluctantly. It was a quilt, worn at the seams and frayed at the edges, and a little musty to the smell. He scowled. “Are you sure this didn’t come from the smallpox ward?”

  Hancock pointed an index finger at him as though firing a gun. “That was an urban legend, young government stooge. And if it really happened, it was the government who did it. The commander will be with you shortly.”

  “I’m here now.” A broad-shouldered figure filled the doorway. “Hancock, stand guard outside.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jenifer sent Oliver a warning glance as Hancock shut and locked the door again. The newcomer, the commander, was gray-haired and weathered, with hard lines etched around his mouth. In many ways he reminded Oliver of General Stone, particularly as he glared down at the two of them.

  “So, Miss Asset, care to tell me how someone who’s supposed to be in Milwaukee ended up in Western Montana?”

  “Through no fault of my own,” she said. She gave a brief synopsis of how the GCA had showed up on her doorstep Tuesday night and escorted her to the airport, to a private plane that carried her out to Great Falls.

  “Why you?” asked the commander.

  “Because five years ago, before I joined up, I was this kid’s handler. He wasn’t cooperating with them this week, and they thought I could coerce him into obedience.”

  Oliver suppressed the shock that flashed through him, careful not to show more than an initial widening of his eyes. She was pretending to be Emily Brent still.

  “Is that true, kid?” the commander asked.

  Oliver jerked in his chair, taken off guard at the direct address. “Yes.”

  The man eyed him suspiciously. “And why were you not cooperating?”

  “Why should I have?” Oliver retorted.

  The hard mouth cracked into a smile. The commander ruffled Oliver’s hair. “I’ll have them send you up something to eat.”

  He rapped a staccato rhythm on the door. As the lock slid open, Jenifer half-started from her chair.

  “Wait. You’re leaving us here?”

  “For your own safety,” said the commander. “We don’t see a lot of women in these parts. Null-projectors are best kept under lock and key as well.”

  He slipped out the door. Hancock’s grinning face flashed across the opening before the door shut again and the lock clicked back into place.

  Jenifer kicked the table in frustration. “We have got to get out of here!”

  Oliver wondered at what point she had assumed responsibility for him, to the extent that she would include him in her thoughts of escape.

  Chapter 9

  The Smith that Bloweth the Coals

  Friday, February 22, 9:14 PM MST

  Someone in the main shaft was yelling. Oliver sat up from his position curled against the far wall, apprehension in his throat. If the government had tracked the cell of revolutionaries to this shaft, he was headed straight back to Prometheus, to the E Campus this time. The Brotherhood might have seen itself as a force to be reckoned with, but their supplies and resources were rudimentary in comparison with the military. The snowstorm alone had granted their midnight mission its success.

  Jenifer stood beside the table, observing the door, listening, alert. Her hands closed around a chair back. If someone were to come through with guns ablaze, it was her only weapon.

  A second voice answered the first. They volleyed back and forth in a quick exchange. Then, the lock slid open with a screech. Oliver scrambled to his feet, blanket close around him. Jenifer’s grip tightened on her chair.

  A man barged into the room, a dust of snow on his heavy wool coat.

  “You’re the asset? Come with me, now.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Call me Smith,” he said, much to Oliver’s surprise. He had assumed a Smith would be older, middle-aged, but this man looked like he was mid-thirties at the most.

  Smith had already turned to leave, but Jenifer protested. “What about Oliver?”

  The man stopped short, frowning at the teenager in the corner. “I can’t hide him. His face is plastered all over the news.”

  “What?” The word burst from Oliver’s lips before he thought to stop it. “Why?”

  “NPNN is blaming you for the Prom-F school bombing,” Smith said. “Come on, asset. We have to go, now.”

  She caught his coat sleeve. “But he had nothing to do with it.”

  Smith jerked his arm away. “Of course he had nothing to do with it. They need a scapegoat, and that’s the narrative they’ve chosen to spin. With his face showing every hour on the hour, we can’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

  “You can’t leave him here,” she said, her voice low. Her attention flicked to the mine shaft beyond, where Hancock or some other guard was doubtless listening to their every word.

  “Do you know how many checkpoints I have to pass between here and home?” Smith asked. “It’s going to be hard enough with you
along for the ride. I can’t risk smuggling a wanted fugitive.”

  “You can’t leave him here,” she said again. “He’s a null-projector.”

  They stood in rigid opposition to one another. She was jeopardizing her way out on Oliver’s behalf. If she pushed too hard, she would get left as well.

  “It’s all right,” Oliver mumbled. Both adults shifted cagey gazes to him. He said to Jenifer, “Go ahead. Get yourself to safety. It makes sense for them to look for me specifically: all nulls end up at Prom-E. Did Cedric make it out alive last night?”

  “Cedric?” she repeated.

  “The other null-projector. They had us stashed together in a handler’s dorm room. When the power went out, I left him there to go exploring. Did he make it out?”

  But she had been with Oliver in the transport. She couldn’t possibly know whether the Brotherhood forces had swept through the handlers’ dorms in search of any errant students.

  “If he escaped, they’re going to search for him too,” said Oliver slowly, “and he’ll want to be found. He’s still got his blinders on where Prometheus is concerned. General Stone will want to find him and me both.”

  Smith turned to the guard in the hall. “Did you hear that? One of your cells might have another null in its ranks.”

  “They’ll take care of it,” said the guard negligently.

  Something in his manner of speech twisted Oliver’s gut. How would they “take care of it”? Whatever Cedric’s fate—if he was even still alive—Oliver would probably share it.

  Smith must have heard something he didn’t like in that answer as well. “I’m taking this null with me,” he told the guard.

  “Have at it,” the man said. “It’s your funeral.”

  “Come on, kid.” Smith swept out the door without checking that he was followed.

  Jenifer grabbed her blanket from the floor and looped it over one arm. She latched onto Oliver’s right side through his wrap and guided him from the holding area. The shaft beyond the room was black. The guard switched off the feeble bulb behind them, plunging them into further darkness. Together they stumbled around the bend to see night beyond the bat grate. Smith’s silhouette strode purposefully to the narrow bypass.