He waited another lung-burning fifteen seconds to be sure, then shimmied out and toward the river. When he broke the surface, Michael and Rachel were already near the end of the short, walled-off inlet, looking back uncertainly.
The sweetness of his first breaths was soured by Rachel’s impatient wave.
Why the hell had he even been so keen on waiting for the two of them?
“This is why we work alone,” he mumbled as he swam quietly over to them, ignoring the fact that Al wasn’t there to hear him.
“You get lost down there?” she whispered as he drew up to them.
“Just making sure I didn’t lose my new business partner,” he said, looking pointedly at Michael. “Also, I forgot: Phase Four.”
With that, he pushed past them to join the flow of the river.
They floated downstream like deadwood under the moonlight. With the extra weight of her soaked leather jacket and staff, Rachel had it the worst attempting to keep afloat. Between their soaked clothes, wet boots, and general, bone-deep weariness, they swam with all the grace of drunken hippopotamuses.
Behind them, the Red Fortress was alive with activity as men scoured the base and cars hit the road to look for them. He waited until they’d floated nearly half of a mile and rounded an appreciable bend before he decided their chances of being spotted were low enough.
He signaled an end to their tactical float, and they extracted themselves at the edge of what had once been a park but was now a small field of mostly bramble and wild grass. No one was quick to do anything but lie in the thick foliage and catch a few merciful gulps of warm summer air.
“Mikey,” he finally said, extending a closed fist toward the younger man lying beside him.
Michael’s shadow shifted, his head turning from Jarek’s face to his fist and back.
Jarek plopped his head back down to the tangle of weeds and wild grass with a wide smile. “Operation complete.”
9
What Rachel wanted more than anything was a hot shower, a good meal, and a couple of years’ worth of sleep.
What she got instead was a long night of slinking from shadow to shadow under Jarek’s paranoid, arguably insane direction. And her sopping-wet jacket didn’t help either.
“It’s been like a goddamn hour,” she whispered softly to Jarek as they peered around the corner of an abandoned home, checking the next stretch of road. “If we haven’t seen them yet, you really think they’re out here?”
Instead of answering, he held up a single finger. She was on the verge of reaching out to snap said finger when someone gave a low whistle from a truck she hadn’t noticed.
Four men, all well armed, came shuffling out of the nearby houses to pile into the truck.
He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Oh, they’re out here, Goldilocks.”
After that, she didn’t argue so much.
After her years living in Unity, Newark at nighttime was a spooky sight, a dark, empty husk of a city that told mostly of lives dead and gone. They scarcely spoke as they trekked through dusty lots and past a gamut of old homes and other buildings that ranged from run-down to scorched wreckages. Under Jarek’s lead, they stuck mostly to the shadows, being especially careful to avoid the streetlights that intermittently lined the crumbling pavement of the old streets.
In another hour of walking (or, more accurately, sneaking), she saw a grand total of eight people outside their homes. Jarek guided them into the shadows or behind the cover of fences or old cars while each of those eight people passed. The caution seemed a tad ridiculous, but Jarek just said something about how people talk, and neither of them saw fit to press the issue. Better safe than sorry.
As sparse as the pedestrians were, there weren’t many signs of occupied homes, either. The few small gardens they stumbled upon were inevitably hidden from street view, and none of those houses had lights on inside. Her father had once mentioned something about how people in the cities tended to rise and fall with the sun these days because lit homes ran the risk of drawing the attention of passing marauders.
She gazed at the dim shapes of ruined buildings as they went and tried to imagine how the place had looked before the Catastrophe, when there had been flowers in the gardens and children playing in their augmented realities. Back before the raknoth had culled the world population from nine billion to one with the push of a few buttons.
The story had spread across what remained of the world with as many variations as there were tellers. She’d heard stories about how the creatures ate people whole and others about how they only drank the blood of humans. That one might actually be true, considering the way the Red King had ripped into his own man earlier.
Some claimed the raknoth had come from space and had been hiding away on Earth for thousands of years, while others insisted they’d been sent by God himself as a reckoning for humanity. No one actually knew how or why the raknoth had nuked the world into oblivion, only that they had done it.
She hadn’t even fully believed the raknoth were real until tonight. She shuddered, part from the chill of her wet jacket and part from the memory of the fury in those blazing red eyes and the raw power of the alien mind that had sought to invade hers. The thing had been an absolute monster—one of the very monsters her brother had signed up to wage war against.
She could see why Michael wanted to stop the raknoth. He’d only been five when the bombs had fallen, but he’d grown up utterly surrounded by constant reminders of the hurt the creatures had inflicted on the world. She’d suffered plenty of hurt herself, but most of that had come before the Catastrophe. Once John Carver had taken her in, she’d been too preoccupied making sure she didn’t lose another home and another family to think about running off to join some foolhardy crusade.
As fun as tonight had been, somehow she wasn’t too upset at the thought of getting Michael the hell out of Newark and taking the next five or so years to calm her amped-out nerves. She might have to find them another car, as getting close enough to the Red Fortress to recover the one she’d been using didn’t seem like the wisest idea right now. She’d probably be able to find an abandoned solar car somewhere. God knew the Catastrophe and the long winter that had followed had left plenty of them lying around, and a lot of them still functioned, especially once the debris had begun to clear from the atmosphere.
For now, though, lying low, licking their wounds, and getting an hour or two of sleep all sounded like good enough places to start. While she didn’t trust Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Handsome ahead, he seemed to be their best bet for avoiding the Reds while they did that.
When they reached the dusty span of an old park, Jarek announced they were almost there. They skirted around the mostly barren clearing of the park, cut north for one last, spooky block, and arrived in front of a plain gray metal door.
Jarek walked in as if he owned the place. She traded a hesitant look with Michael and followed him in, keeping her staff ready.
The space inside was small and unremarkable, a palette of beige tones from floor to ceiling that somehow managed to be both soothing and depressing. The only thing that stood out was the large bulletin board on the wall, overflowing with pinned papers ranging from handwritten notes to honest-to-god wanted posters that looked as if they’d come straight from the rootin’-tootin’ Wild West.
She tensed as a door sprang open at the back of the room.
“Honey, I’m home!” Jarek called.
The man who stepped into the room was a dead ringer for Albert Einstein’s evil twin gone mad scientist (and starting to bald).
“And I see you’ve brought guests.” The man’s eyes scanned her and Michael briefly before fixating on her staff.
“Long story.” Jarek cocked his head. “Okay, maybe not so long. Mostly, lots of asses pulled out of lots of fires—some nicer than others.”
“The asses or the fires?” the older man asked, still studying her staff.
Jarek gave a bark of laughter. “Pryce, you old rascal, you!”<
br />
She cleared her throat.
“Ah, right,” Jarek said. “Guys, this is Jay Pryce, tinkerer extraordinaire. Pryce, this is Michael and Rachel.”
“Utterly intrigued, I am sure,” Pryce said, stepping forward to offer his hand.
“Uh, thanks?” She slowly reached out to take his hand.
Pryce didn’t really shake her hand so much as hold it up for closer inspection. His curious eyes flicked back and forth between her hand and her staff. This guy’s wheels were definitely turning. Did he know about arcanists too?
Jarek rolled his eyes. “You’ll have to excuse Pryce. He thinks he’s a scientist or something.”
“Sorry.” Pryce released her hand with a guilty grin. “It’s nice to meet you.” He offered his hand to Michael. “Both of you. I’ve heard your name mentioned more than a few times, Mr. Carver.”
Michael took his hand, and they exchanged a more conventional handshake.
Pryce looked back to Jarek. “So, the Red nation is combing the city for you.”
“You already heard about it?” Jarek said.
“No . . .” Pryce stroked his chin. His eyes flicked over her and Michael once more. “But I don’t see how they couldn’t be, considering that you were clearly there and now you’re here. So. You come to grab your things, or is there some other wonderful reason you decided to pay me a visit with an angry army on your back?”
Jarek grinned and offered Pryce his submachine gun. “Don’t pretend like you don’t love it. Where else could you find this kind of excitement?”
Pryce snatched the weapon from Jarek and studied it dubiously. “Oh, the glory.”
She couldn’t quite place a finger on what the relationship was between these two. It was almost like father-son but without the responsibility or obligation. Whatever Pryce might be to Jarek, she just hoped he had food and maybe a soft place to lie down for a few hours.
Jarek seemed to be stalling. “Well, I guess if you’ll bring my comm, I can just call the ship in and we can, you know, be on our way, or . . .”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” Pryce pulled a comm and an earpiece from one of the many pockets of his tool-laden shop apron and handed them to Jarek. “Any luck finding our girl, by the way?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Jarek slipped on the comm and popped in the earpiece, then clapped Michael on one shoulder. “I held up my end of the deal.”
Rachel’s stomach fell. “What deal?” She looked at Michael. “What did you promise him?”
Michael shifted. “I think I know how to find—”
“Think?” Jarek said.
Michael pursed his lips. “I know how to find something that belongs to him.”
She stared and waited for more. None came. “Aaand what the hell is this ‘something’ that you’re willing to sign up with this . . . person over?”
Jarek touched a hand to his chest as if mortally offended. She wasn’t amused. If Michael was indebted to this asshole, that could make their return to Unity more difficult.
“Jarek lost his exosuit,” Michael said. “Hux and I found it when we, uh, knocked over a shipment from the Reds to the Overlord.” A shadow crossed his face. “Hux stashed what we found in his safe place before . . . before they found him.”
Her apprehension bled away at the grief on his face. She’d never met Michael’s mentor, but she knew he’d looked up to Huxley with fierce respect, and they’d been friends as well.
“Sorry, man,” Jarek said. “You two were pretty close, I take it.”
She was almost surprised to see what looked like genuine sympathy on Jarek’s face. Maybe he wasn’t utterly heartless.
Michael nodded, then gave a little shrug. “Nothing to do now but make sure it wasn’t for nothing.”
Jarek clapped a hand on Michael’s other shoulder. “Hallelujah, man. Let’s get cracking on finding this safe place, then.”
“I suppose you could all stand to sit down and breathe for a minute or two,” Pryce said. “I can’t help but notice you could all benefit from medical treatment.”
That brought the pulsing ache of her bullet-grazed shoulder back to the forefront. It wasn’t bad, but it could certainly use cleaning and dressing.
“A drink might not hurt either,” Jarek said.
“A medical professional might feel otherwise,” Pryce said.
“Guess it’s good you’re just a crazy old geezer, then.”
She looked away to stifle a smile as the two shared a fit of amused chuffing. Grown-ass man-children though they might be, even after the night they’d had, there was something mildly charismatic about Jarek and Pryce.
“Well, c’mon back then.” Pryce turned to stroll to the back of the room.
Jarek hesitated. “You’re sure? We do have some serious heat on us.”
“Sure, sure. Where else am I gonna find this kind of excitement?”
Jarek gestured for her and Michael to go first, mumbling something about crazy old bastards.
Michael followed Pryce, and she and Jarek fell in behind. When they reached the door, each paused to see who would go first. Then they both did, shouldering into one another with almost perfect synchrony.
She scowled at him. He stepped back and offered the right of way with a dramatic bow.
“Sexist,” she grumbled.
He winked at her.
She rolled her eyes and stepped through the door into a workspace that was much larger than the front room and chock-full of all kinds of stuff. That was the best word for it: stuff.
An astounding variety of tools decorated the wall over a large, L-shaped work bench. Across the room, several metal shelves hosted an eclectic assortment of items including electronics, garden fertilizers, blocks and bars of different metals, and various other raw materials. Behind the shelves, another long bench housed a grab bag of lab equipment: scales, glassware, a microscope, and a few other machines she wasn’t sure about.
Pryce strolled past two large tables in the center of the room that were heavily laden with more stuff to a dark, tightly winding spiral staircase in the far corner. “Upstairs?”
“Perfect,” Jarek said behind her. “As long as there’s—wait, what?”
She turned. He was touching his earpiece, his brow deeply furrowed.
“Patch it through,” he said.
His eyes darted back and forth, focused somewhere far away as if he were reading text that wasn’t there. After a moment, he seemed to remember the rest of them.
“Local broadcast,” he explained.
He reached down to touch his comm. A crackling voice filled the shop.
“—as gone on long enough.”
Despite the crackle in the line, she recognized the voice. She’d only heard him speak four words that night, but they’d stuck with her, right in the place where all of her darkest nightmare material hung around.
The Red King.
“You have twenty-four hours to return the nest,” he continued, “at which point we will grant you amnesty and allow you to leave the city. Refuse this offer, and you will be opening the world to horrors like it has never known before. You have no idea the power you meddle with. Twenty-four hours. Do not make us find you.”
With that, the line went silent. The silence lingered as they traded looks and tried to puzzle out what exactly they’d just heard.
“Say, Mikey,” Jarek finally said. “I’m thinking now might be a swell time for you to tell us what the hell it is you stole from the Reds.”
10
“Here’s the thing,” Michael began.
Jarek braced himself. Here it was. Good news never started with “here’s the thing.” What if Michael couldn’t really get him to Fela? What if he’d busted his ass and brought the entire Red army down on his own head for nothing?
He let out a breath, leaned back into the soft armchair, and found a practiced semblance of relaxation as Michael continued.
“We’re not really sure what we found.”
“The nest, apparently,” Al said in his ear.
“The nest, apparently,” Pryce unknowingly echoed from the small kitchen space that adjoined his cozy but perfectly adequate living quarters, where they’d decided to hold council once he’d seen to their wounds.
Jarek stifled a smile. It was good to have Al back, even if he and Pryce were redundant at times. Being without Al for any amount of time always felt wrong after all these years, as if he’d left a physical part of himself behind.
He took a long sip of whiskey. The liquid fire passed down his throat, leaving behind tingles that spoke of spices and cherries. He watched Michael over on the couch next to Rachel, waiting for him to get to the point.
“Honestly,” Michael said, “it was kind of dumb luck that we stumbled onto the thing at all.”
Jarek sipped the delicious whiskey again and rolled a hand in a let’s hurry it up motion.
“So what exactly did you find?” Pryce said. “Other than Fela, that is.”
“There were some munitions and other supplies,” Michael said, “but the main thing—the thing I assume the King was calling the nest—was a, well, some kind of device. It looked kind of like a giant metal egg standing on its base, almost as tall as me. At first I thought it was just a weird statue or something. It didn’t have controls or anything like that.”
“But?” Pryce said.
“But when I touched it, I felt something. There was this low buzz, like the thing was on or using power or something. But there was something else too. It was like”—he frowned, scratching at his dark bush of hair—“like the thing was trying to communicate. Like it was partially conscious or something. I don’t know. I just know that it felt powerful and that the Overlord wanted the thing in his possession. Badly.”
Rachel frowned at Michael. “Do you think it was trying to reach you telepathically? The way I used to try?”
Michael considered. “I guess it kind of reminded me of that. But my glyphs would’ve stopped that kind of thing cold, right?”
Jarek ran a hand through the back of his hair and tapped his foot on the ground, resisting the urge to tell him to hurry the hell up and tell him what any of this had to do with Fela.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 8