Oliver Invictus (Annals of Altair Book 3)

by Kate Stradling

  Had the real Emily seen it? Her parents must be devastated. She was their only child, and if she had gone underground with Altair—not literally underground, he hoped, recalling the destitute mine shafts that the Brotherhood used, but figuratively—she would not be able to correct them.

  Which meant that Emily Brent was officially dead. So was Oliver’s hope of ever seeing her again, but that was more because of his new fraternization with General Stone. That man wasn’t letting the null-projector out of his power any time in the foreseeable future.

  Oliver had, perhaps, an hour’s quiet reflection before the rioting started again. He hadn’t expected daytime movement from the Rosses, but General Stone chose not to chase the destruction this time.

  He had also called for Cedric to be brought to Prom-B as a back-up null. Principal Lee was almost beside himself with gratitude. Oliver suspected that the second null was more for Stone’s peace of mind than for anyone else, though. The general was careful not to put himself under any projector’s influence.

  Cedric’s plane would land shortly before noon. Oliver hoped it meant some rest for him, that Cedric might spell him for a few hours.

  In the meantime, he listened in a daze as the administrators divvied their students up between Prom-A, -C, and -D. General Stone spent most of the morning on his cell phone, either giving orders or receiving reports. The map on the wall added two more incidents, complete with notecards describing their details. The first load of students, fifty or sixty in all, left for the airport just after ten o’clock, bound for Principal Genevieve Jones and Prom-A.

  The Prom-C and Prom-D transfers would leave later in the afternoon, if all went well. But of course, it didn’t.

  At ten twenty-three, an explosion rocked one side of the Prom-B dormitory. The thunderous boom reverberated through the building. The fire alarm triggered an instant later, complete with sprinkler system.

  “Everybody out. Stay orderly,” General Stone commanded.

  In the hallway beyond their makeshift base, students shrieked as they ran for the exit. Oliver fell in step beside the general, fully awake now thanks to a new surge of adrenaline.

  He half expected another explosion, but it never came. Smoke poured from one of the rooms on the south side of the dorm. Stone, on his cell, was ordering drones to circle the area and take out the attackers. He motioned a line of students to exit ahead of him and Oliver. Emergency sirens sounded in the distance.

  Prom-B, located in an affluent district, had many hiding places in its surrounding buildings. As Oliver stepped through the outer doors to the courtyard, two paces behind General Stone, his eyes traveled in a sweeping gaze around the area. The attacker could have hidden inside any one of those buildings, concealed from general view, with an escape path marked out ahead of time.

  A drone glided across the school’s airspace, scanning the surrounding neighborhoods. The emergency sirens drew closer.

  Prom-B’s emergency plan said, in case of fire, for everyone to gather in the game fields on the back half of the property. Administrators and handlers were already herding students in that direction, toward the center of a frozen swath of ground.

  “Not out in the open!” General Stone shouted, incensed. “Get those students back here! Keep to covered areas only!” Several assistants darted past him to usher the crowd back toward the gymnasium.

  Next to Oliver, a boy—third or fourth grade, by the looks of him, slipped on the ice. Oliver paused to help him up, only for General Stone to yank him by the collar.

  “You do not leave my side, null,” the general breathed in his face.

  The fallen boy, meanwhile, scrambled from the ground and dashed across the open courtyard, to the new gathering place in the gym.

  Oliver fell in step beside General Stone as they followed.

  He didn’t hear anything. No crack, or whoosh. One instant, he was perfectly fine, and the next a searing pain bolted through his chest, just below his collarbone, with enough force to rock him back onto ice-encrusted earth.

  He hit the ground hard, his mind a jumble as he turned curious eyes to his right shoulder.

  Crimson spread across his sweater.

  He’d been shot. And not by a tranquilizer dart this time.

  The pain was more than he could bear, as though molten lava had exploded from beneath his skin. Around him, students screamed and scattered. General Stone was snapping orders in his face, orders for him to stay awake, to stay alert. Oliver barely registered any of this. Instead, his head dropped back against the earth, his gaze fixed upon the sky above him, the clouds that drifted peacefully across the azure expanse, the sun that burned in mocking glory behind their dove-gray folds.

  He should be screaming. It was hard enough remembering to breathe. The pain doubled as several hands hoisted him up and bolted for the gymnasium.

  “You don’t get to die, Null,” General Stone said through grimacing lips, as though he had power over life and death.

  They settled Oliver within the entryway, on the hard wooden floor just to the side of the basketball court with a hundred or more students looking on aghast. Someone pressed a coat to his shoulder to staunch the blood that erratically pumped from him. Pain engulfed him. His life drained away with every passing second.

  Much to his astonishment, he wanted nothing more than to live.

  The desire burned, a quiet fire he had thought long extinguished. What did it matter if he died? He was bound for Prom-E, with no future to speak of, no hope of a normal life, of freedom to live as he chose. What did it matter?

  But it did.

  Paramedics swarmed, the first responders who had arrived to tend to the explosion in the dormitory.

  “Keep him alive, and keep him awake,” General Stone ordered. “I don’t care what kind of drugs you have to give him. Keep him awake.”

  They cut his clothes from around his chest, injected him with some unknown solution, plugged his shoulder up with sponges, and bound his wound almost in unison, from his perspective.

  One of them stayed in his face through it all. “Focus on me. Look at me. You’re gonna make it. Just focus.”

  In an instant, Oliver was hefted from the floor to a gurney. An ambulance waited at the doors of the gym, its back open to receive him. General Stone climbed inside, along with his driver, Doyle, and the attendant EMTs.

  “Keep your eyes open. Look at me, look at my face!”

  Despite all efforts to the contrary, Oliver lost consciousness before they cleared the gates of Prom-B.

  Chapter 20

  Twilight Haze

  Wednesday, February 27, 7:23 AM PST, Seattle

  A voice droned, its words indistinguishable. Lethargy ate at Oliver’s senses as he surfaced from a calm nothingness. Was the voice speaking a foreign language? It was muffled, but every so often he thought he understood its patterns.

  A series of beeps and whirs punctuated the vocal hum. Somehow he recognized them as belonging to a hospital, but no one had taken him to a hospital before. The worst he’d ever had happen was an unexpected dose of tranquilizer, and a GCA office had served as his recovery ward.

  His mind cast back to that time, what seemed ages ago. Emily had been there. She wouldn’t be here.

  Reluctantly he opened his eyes.

  The room was dark, except for a television. It broadcasted the feed of a memorial service—the Prom-F memorial service, to be precise.

  Oliver closed his eyes again. His whole body weighed against the mattress as though it were made of lead instead of flesh. The mattress met with equal force, tipped at an angle to elevate his upper half. He ventured another look at his surroundings.

  No one was in the room with him. In that odd, quiet moment, he succumbed to the abandonment that had haunted him all his life. He was discarded and alone. He might as well have died.

  Perhaps he had.

  Flashes of the chaos at Prom-B, of the searing pain and the screams around him, skittered across his memory. As an experiment,
he tried to wiggle his fingers. They responded only in the vaguest sense, the slightest of movements with minimal recognition from his brain that they were even still attached.

  A nurse crossed through the door to check the bag of fluids pinned to one of his arms. She stopped short when she saw his open eyes.

  “Tell Dr. Bridger that the patient in 3042 is awake,” she said into a device at her collar. Then, she continued with her duties.

  Oliver attempted to work his mouth, but his tongue felt enormous, as though it had swelled and was encased in moleskin. He tried to swallow and failed. The nurse changed the bag of fluid and left again.

  The televised memorial droned on, and on, and on. Oliver’s eyelids drooped.

  They jerked open again when a man entered the room.

  “Ollie, I’m Dr. Bridger.”

  Ollie? Really? No one had ever called him that in the whole of his life.

  The doctor directed a small flashlight into first Oliver’s right eye and then the left. “You probably feel like a train hit you,” he said as he made his examination. “That’s the anesthetic. You’ve had two surgeries since you arrived yesterday. You’re a lucky kid, you know?” He put down the light and picked up Oliver’s right hand. “Can you feel that? Blink twice for yes.”

  Oliver obeyed, focusing his gaze on the man.

  Dr. Bridger continued talking as he checked reflexes. “You’ve got a broken clavicle and a hole in your scapula where the bullet punched through, with some radial fracturing on the back side. The good news is it missed your lungs and your shoulder socket both. We had to operate to remove some bone fragments and to stabilize your subclavian artery, but most of the damage is soft tissue. Everything looks really good.”

  A hole in his shoulder blade was “really good”? Oliver worked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, hoping that he might slough off enough moleskin to talk, but to no avail.

  Dr. Bridger drummed his fingers along Oliver’s ankles and the bottoms of his feet. “Can you feel that? Good. We’re keeping you on a pretty strong dose of painkillers for the next two or three days, until we’re sure that everything has stabilized. You’ll be groggy. It’s best if you sleep as much as possible.”

  That blissful order he could follow. Cedric must have arrived from Prom-E, that General Stone was allowing him this much of a reprieve.

  After checking Oliver’s vitals on a monitor next to the bed, Dr. Bridger jotted a couple of notes into his tablet and left again. On the television screen, names and pictures of the Prom-F dead flashed one after another. Oliver’s last handler, Garrett, was among them.

  Handlers weren’t as miserable as he’d always thought, and they certainly weren’t worthy of such a death. As he drifted back toward unconsciousness, regret stabbed him in the heart.

  He should have reported Kennedy Ross. The Brotherhood would have attacked regardless, but who knew how strong their projectors were. Levels 4 and 5 were so rare that it was safe to guess that Kennedy had been the only one of that caliber that night.

  The ragtag assault would have had far fewer casualties if she and Oliver had already been well on their way to Prom-E.

  That was his mistake.

  “Sorry, Garrett.” He tried to speak the words, but they emerged as an incoherent mumble into his covers as dreamless sleep claimed him again.

  Chapter 21

  Killer Instinct

  Thursday, February 28, Seattle

  The hospital only allowed him clear foods for the first day he was awake—water, juice, gelatin, broth—to see how his system would respond in the aftermath of his surgeries. The strange feeling around his tongue receded, and liquid seemed to help. He could wiggle his fingers and toes freely, too, which offered relief of a different kind.

  A brace pinned his right arm to his side, keeping him from any movements that might disturb the site of his injury. His left arm, though, was free. He could feed himself, insufficient fare though it was. His appetite was non-existent, thoughts of food crowded out by raw memories of a bullet ripping through him. A hospital-assigned counselor wanted him to talk those memories out, but Oliver kept his mouth shut.

  He deserved this pain. It was his to own and internalize.

  Nurses and orderlies came and went throughout the day, changing IV fluids, dressing his wound, checking vitals. A guard stationed at the door inspected their credentials before letting anyone pass.

  General Stone never so much as appeared. The man would have regular phone updates when he wanted them. Besides, with a small crater on his back for an exit wound, Oliver was useless for anything other than sitting up in bed.

  For the most part he watched the news, but not of his own volition. One of the orderlies had left the control on the bedside table to his right, too far away for him to reach with his good hand. Veronica’s reel of stories transitioned away from the bombing of Prom-F to other events around the globe. The false tale of Kennedy’s kidnapping only aired once over the course of the day, much to his confusion.

  Had they caught her? Had they killed her? He was so far out of the loop that he didn’t know what to think.

  Did he hope she was dead?

  Evening brought a different set of nurses and orderlies. Dr. Bridger checked in before dinner, briefly, to verify that Oliver was still progressing. He disclosed no new information, though.

  Everyone assigned to work with him called him Ollie. In fact, the nickname was written on a whiteboard next to his vital signs.

  Was that their way of disassociating him from the murderous Oliver Dunn? Sure, the picture on the news was half a year old, but he didn’t look that different from the sallow, sour-faced teen who had been peddled to the country as a cold-blooded killer.

  Maybe he had dreamed everything prior to this hospital stay. Maybe there was no Prometheus. Maybe there was no such thing as a projector, or a null-projector. Maybe he was just some kid who had been in a coma for years and was now coming out of it.

  If only.

  He slept off and on that night, awakening every time someone entered his room to check his vitals or change his IV fluids. Close to dawn, he heard the door creak. He dragged his eyes open to view a new orderly bearing a cart full of pills.

  “Time for your painkiller, Oliver,” the man said.

  Not “Ollie.”

  Oliver squinted through the dimness. The orderly was clean-shaven, his hair trimmed and neat. He thought he had never seen this man before, but he knew the voice, from somewhere. His mind in a fog, he tried to place where he had heard it.

  The orderly didn’t remove any pills or fluids from the cart. Instead, he approached the bedside. His hands, clean and long-fingered, extended toward Oliver’s neck. The movement caused his collar to shift, revealing the white edge of a bandage wrapped around his left shoulder.

  The same shoulder that Oliver had put a bullet through mere days ago.

  In panic, the teenager yelped and flung out his free arm. Searing pain shot up from the ports in the crook of his elbow as he pulled against every cord and tube he came into contact with, seeking for something he could strike against the man. His right arm, tied uselessly to his side, flailed against its restraint while his shoulder burned in agony.

  Abel Ross was already upon him, fingers wrapped around Oliver’s throat.

  He leaned in close and murmured, “Relax, kid. The bullet was only payback. I promised you I’d strangle you with my bare hands.” His grip tightened.

  Oliver couldn’t breathe. The pressure on his throat crushed his windpipe. Still he thrashed as stars danced before his eyes and blackness seeped around the edges of his vision.

  A streak of light cut through the shadows in the room as the door flew open with a bang against the wall.

  Abel whirled, the pressure of his hands at Oliver’s throat lifting enough for the teenager to gasp some much-needed air.

  The newcomer flung himself onto the renegade with a shout. Abel shoved him away and bolted for the open door. He disappeared beyond its fra
me. Oliver’s rescuer, meanwhile, had pushed the panic button on his hospital bed.

  “There’s an intruder on the third floor,” he said into the intercom. “The patient in room 3042 has been attacked. Send help in here, quickly.”

  He paused long enough to hold open one of Oliver’s eyelids. “You okay, kid?”

  Oliver recognized his face. “Smith,” he croaked, hardly able to believe his eyes.

  “It’s Dr. Moncrieff,” the man replied, tapping a name badge on his lapel. “I’m here visiting one of my patients. Lucky for you I overheard the commotion. Your guard is down the hall buying himself a can of soda.”

  Was he mistaken? But no amount of blinking could change his perception of the man. It was Smith, from Altair, from the cell in Idaho. It made no sense for him to be in a Seattle hospital, and yet here he was, every blunt, irritated, reliable inch of him.

  And there had been little commotion from the hallway for him to respond to. Abel Ross had been well on his way to killing Oliver and would have succeeded if not for his intervention.

  Nurses swarmed into the room. Smith gave them an account of what he had seen, repeated a description of the attacker, and slipped out the door as people tended to Oliver’s injuries. He did not return.

  The staff meanwhile fluttered around Oliver. He had aggravated the wound in his chest during his struggle. Someone cut off the bloody bandages. The torn flesh oozed. Oliver looked away as they tended to it, his breath rattling in his bruised throat.

  Hadn’t someone said that Abel Ross was the best shot of his Brotherhood cell? But Abel was more than that. He was so deranged that killing from afar wasn’t enough. In exacting his revenge, he had come to a hospital, had acquired credentials and bypassed security to finish off Oliver with his bare hands.

  And there was no way he had come this far by himself. Kennedy was somewhere in the hospital with him.

  Where would they run? Had security found them? Arrested them? But if they took Kennedy into custody, she would skip right back out again the minute she was beyond Oliver’s null-projection, and she would take her father with her.