The beginnings of anger licked at the base of Jarek’s stupefied mind.
“Hey, hold up a second.” The bulldog stood up and moved toward Michael.
Michael spun around counterclockwise and shoved the guy into the wall. The bulldog’s eyes went wide, but Michael was already pulling the stun gun from the guy’s belt and turning it against him.
The bulldog made a couple of jerking grunts and slid limply down the wall. Once his bulk was resting on the concrete floor, Michael pulled the comm from his wrist and turned back to the door’s access panel.
“What the fuck is going on?”
An odd combination of brewing anger and hopeful excitement swirled in his chest as Michael swiped the comm over the panel and tapped in a string of numbers.
By way of reply, Michael pressed the Enter key and stepped aside. The panel’s LED flashed green, and the door unlocked with a series of heavy clicks.
Jarek stepped numbly to the door and peered through.
Fela. Finally.
He crossed the room in a stupor and put a hand on the flimsy cage that contained her—a Faraday cage, he took it. That probably explained why Al (ship Al, that is) hadn’t been able to get a fix on her all this time—that and the fact that her power pack had been removed. He spotted it on the nearby table beside the scattered assortment of explosives, heavy weapons, and other rare gadgets they kept in the vault.
The dark gray exosuit was deactivated, collapsed down into compact form in the cage, just waiting for someone to come power her up. Waiting for him.
And she’d been here this entire time.
He turned slowly to face Michael. He’d risked his ass to free Michael from the Fortress. He’d nearly lost his life twice more running around the country on Michael’s damn quest.
And his suit had been here within easy reach throughout all of it.
“You lied to me.”
Somehow, those four words seemed to express every violent thought that was coursing through his mind.
Michael certainly cringed enough to think that was so. “Hux and I found it a few weeks ago. And once you showed up at the Fortress, I thought if I could just get you to . . . It doesn’t matter. I was wrong. And now they’re talking about keeping it until they can get past Al and put one of their own—our own—people in the driver’s seat. I’m sorry, Jar—”
Scarlet lightning crackled through his brain. The next thing he knew, the knuckles of his right hand were pulsing with pain, and Michael was lying in an incoherent heap on the floor.
He clamped his right hand over his mouth, clenching his jaw and squeezing until the pain grew strong enough to pierce the numb haze that clogged his mind. His eyes were moist with unspilled tears. The anger came flowing back in, calmer and more controlled, but hot and bitter nonetheless.
“Sir,” Al said quietly in his ear, “is it . . .”
“It’s her, Al. We’ve got our girl back.”
“Oh, dear.”
Al should’ve been excited. Just like Jarek should’ve been. But he was too angry to be excited.
He’d been stupid. Worse, he’d been naive. He’d broken the goddamn golden rule: don’t trust anyone but Al and Pryce. That was it. If they were a living human and their name wasn’t Jay Pryce, you didn’t trust them. Because if you did, bad things happened. Every. Damn. Time.
Simple enough.
You sure as hell didn’t let yourself think that maybe, just maybe, these Resistance a-holes weren’t so bad just because you were chumming it up with a few people close to them.
“Dammit!” He kicked at the Faraday cage.
He grabbed at the cage and gave a few yanks. Maybe it wasn’t so flimsy after all. It was, however, bottomless and not fixed to the ground, probably because it had been meant to shield Fela from outside signals, not to keep her locked up. That was what the vault door had been for.
He could tip the cage, but it’d be noisy if he wasn’t careful.
Fuck it. Let them try to stop him.
He bent down, grabbed the mesh, and heaved upward. The cage was heavier than it looked, but he cast it over with a wordless cry. It hit the floor in a jostling crash, freeing Fela’s collapsed form.
He grabbed the power pack from the table and crouched behind the suit to pry out the manual release lever and open the housing. He slid the power pack home, closed the small hatch, and began stripping off his weapons and clothes.
“Sir!” Al cried from Fela’s external speakers as she rebooted from hibernation.
Relief sped his fingers over the last fastenings of his clothes. “Hey, buddy.”
“I’ll begin synchronizing my data with Fela’s storage momentarily,” said the Al that was still aboard the ship’s computer.
He stepped into the collapsed suit’s open boots and quivered as Fela responded to his presence. She began folding up around him, wrapping him in her armored embrace. The sensation of the smooth, flesh-like polymer membrane closing in on his skin was like coming home after far too long on the road—familiar, comfortable, and, above all, safe.
Michael shifted on the floor, mumbled something incoherent, and then lay still again.
He buckled on his gun belt and sword. “You had your shot, Mikey.”
Thanks to Fela’s auditory sensors, he heard the Resistance agent step into the antechamber outside well before the man’s startled intake of breath.
“What the hell’s going on here?” the agent whispered outside.
“Sir,” Al said, through the earpiece in his helmet this time, “what the hell is going on here?”
With a deliberate thought, he slid the helmet faceplate closed and brought the display to life. The feed from his comm timer ticked away in the lower left corner.
“Oh, you know, Al.” He grabbed the hefty sword he used with Fela from the nearby rack and clipped the sheath to the connectors Pryce had installed on Fela’s back. “Burning bridges. Saving Pryce.” He clenched his fists, relishing the power at his fingertips. “Just another day at the office.”
The one bright side to this betrayal was that he had plenty of time left on the Red King’s one-hour deadline.
In the corner of the room, an orange alarm light flashed to life, accompanied by a quiet but irritating rhythmic buzzing tone.
Plenty of time. Sure.
22
Rachel was urgently explaining Pryce’s predicament to Alaric outside the council room’s double doors when the orange strobes and the annoying, buzzing alarm began. At the end of the hallway, a few men trotted through the common room, sidearms drawn. Further off, someone was shouting something.
She had a bad feeling whatever was going on had something to do with Jarek and Michael’s mysterious disappearance.
Before she could say anything to Alaric, one of the double doors pushed open. The slightly paunchy but solid-looking man Alaric had identified as Commander John Nelken emerged. Nelken had a hard face and an ex-military air about him. He’d clearly been as pleased as a cat on bath day when she’d interrupted their meeting to speak with Alaric.
For a second, Nelken looked confused himself. Then a gunshot from the direction she’d seen those men running snapped all three of them into action. Alaric’s revolver appeared in his hand, and Nelken turned to call something to his fellow commanders back in the chamber.
She set off for the common room at a jog. As she entered, shouts echoed from the hall to her left. Three more Resistance men with shotguns came storming out of a room further down the hall and barreled off in the direction of the sounds.
Before they reached the end of the hall, a man-shaped form blurred around the corner, moving far too fast to control its turn. Instead, the thing leaped up and reoriented in midair so that its feet touched down on the wall. Its legs continued pumping without missing a beat. It skittered along the wall a few steps before launching itself at the foremost of the men running toward it.
Her startled brain began fitting the pieces together. The dark gray thing she could only assume w
as Fela dropped three men effortlessly, almost gently, into crumpled heaps in the space of two seconds. Fela (and presumably Jarek inside) continued down the hall without a noticeable pause.
Then he saw her.
At first, she wasn’t sure he’d stop at all. The thing dug in its heels and skidded to halt near the next hallway, leaving small gouges in the concrete floor.
“Jarek?”
The dark gray surfaces of the suit looked like something out of an anatomy book. Instead of the bulky, angular armor she’d been expecting, Fela was smooth and round, resembling a well-muscled man several inches taller and wider than Jarek.
In some spots, the dark gray material was bundled into fibers like those of a skinned muscle. In others, particularly at the shoulders and along the torso and thighs, a smoother, lighter-gray material emerged like armor plating.
She recognized the smaller of the two swords crisscrossed over the back of the exosuit and the gun belt strapped above its hips. That was definitely Jarek in there, which meant several things, not the least of which was that either the Resistance had been lying to Michael about Fela’s whereabouts, or Michael had been lying to her and Jarek this entire time.
The thought made her feel hollow inside. She fixed her eyes on the dark slit across Fela’s face plate and waited.
A voice growled out. “Did you know?”
The voice was unmistakably Jarek’s, though it was a shade deeper and minutely garbled through the speakers.
“No. I had no idea, Jarek.”
He seemed to consider that. Then he gave a slight nod and turned back for the exit.
“Wait!”
His armored form slowed.
More shouts were coming now from multiple directions. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted to say. “What happened to needing—”
A gunshot barked to her right, painfully loud in the enclosed space. She whipped around. Alaric was yanking the shooter’s gun hand down and away from Jarek, but other men and women were spilling into the common room now, most of them armed. And now that the first shot had been fired, the others didn’t hesitate.
Jarek sprinted down the exit hallway, moving far faster than she’d ever seen a human move. She thought she saw multiple shots ping off Fela’s back and into the surrounding walls, but he didn’t seem to pay them any mind.
He disappeared around the corner at the far end of the hall, and several Resistance men and women ran to follow.
Two men to her right were alternately eyeing her and looking in the direction Jarek had disappeared. One of them stepped toward her. “You’re gonna have to come w—”
“Touch me,” she said, “and I’ll put you through that wall.”
His eyes widened and his nostrils flared, but he and his partner both took a step back, hands in plain sight.
She spun on her heels and tromped down the hall Jarek had come from.
If Fela had been here all along—if Michael had known all along—then she could maybe understand why Jarek was pissed enough to blow out of here like that. But if he’d taken it out on Michael . . . And if Michael had deliberately lied to her . . .
For now, she just needed to make sure Michael was okay.
She picked up her pace, following the trail of sullen and groaning Resistance fighters Jarek had strewn in his wake. When she found Michael in the hallway a minute later, she breathed a sigh of relief.
He appeared unharmed aside from the swollen, reddening patch of dark skin at the outer edge of his left eye. He was alternatively blinking his eyes as if to clear his vision, but he quickly stopped when he spotted her.
She didn’t need to ask. His expression told her everything.
“You knew all along.”
He nodded. “I thought I could get him to join us if I showed him the good we could do. The plan was always to give Fela back. At least I thought it was. The council had other ideas.”
“You lied to me,” she whispered.
Because that’s what it boiled down to: whatever the reasons, Michael had lied. And he’d lied to her.
“No,” he croaked. “No, Rache, I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to . . .”
She could see he was only beginning to fully register what he’d done.
“I’m sorry, Rache.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond, so she gave a curt nod. “I’m going to help him get Pryce back.”
She could feel his unspoken protest behind her, but she didn’t pause to give him time to voice his opinions.
Michael, her naive, do-gooder little Spongehead, had lied to her. It didn’t sound right even in her head. She didn’t need the fingers of one hand to count off the number of people she really trusted in this world, and Michael was at the top of that list. Or he had been, at least.
Maybe it didn’t change much, really. He was still her brother. She would still put her life on the line for him right this moment without a second thought.
But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell.
After her family had been taken from her, when John Carver had found her and given her a home, she’d been a broken, frightened thing. John might have found her, but Michael had saved her. To an outsider, it would have appeared that she’d been the one taking care of him. In truth, she knew it had been the other way around.
Michael had helped restore her to something resembling a whole person. And even after he’d grown up big and strong, he’d always remained her precious Spongehead, the one person she could truly trust, the linchpin that held it all together. But now that linchpin felt eroded, corrupted.
She needed to focus on something she could control right now, something she could fix. Something like making sure Pryce didn’t become another casualty of this mess.
Jarek had also been lied to. She got that. But it didn’t make her any less pissed that he’d attacked her brother, given the finger to teamwork, and run off by himself.
She took a roundabout way back toward the council room to avoid the growing crowd. Alaric was there among several others, including Nelken and the two commanders she’d interrupted earlier.
Alaric, Nelken, and one of the other commanders, a short, strong-looking black woman, were the only ones who didn’t look as if they thought the sky might be falling.
Alaric spotted her and stepped to meet her at the mouth of the hallway, but Nelken broke away and planted himself between them. “Ms. Cross—”
She let some of her anger free, and a sudden wind swept through the tight hallway, ruffling hair and clothes, among other things—Nelken’s resolve, for instance. The commander took a small step back, hands raised in peace.
“I have a friend to track down and at least one ass to kick,” Rachel said quietly, “so if you’d kindly get the fuck out of my way . . .”
Nelken glanced at Alaric, who shrugged, a small smile creeping onto his face.
“Delightful,” Nelken said. “Now if you don’t mind stowing the attitude for one minute, maybe we can talk about our next move. Alaric’s already filled me in about Pryce. I assume that’s where Slater’s headed?”
She stared dumbly as she tried to decide if she’d been out of line or if Nelken’s response should make her even more pissed.
“I need to get over there,” she finally said. “He can’t take them all on and protect Pryce at the same time. I need a ship.”
Alaric nodded his agreement.
Nelken scratched at his square jaw, thinking. “This might be the time to move on Hux’s safe, while the Reds are busy.” He glanced at her. “I can’t spare our only working ship, but I can give you a vehicle and a small team.”
“You’re gonna help him? You’re not mad?”
“Of course I am,” he said, his pale eyes hardening. “We can’t let Slater’s actions drop. But now isn’t the time to squabble. We have an opening. We should take it.”
Fair enough.
A ship would’ve been considerably faster, and she wasn’t crazy about the idea of unknown Resistance fighters watching her back
. But any vehicle was better than nothing, and having a couple of gun hands along might not be the worst thing in the world.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s do it then.”
“I’ll go with her,” came Michael’s voice from behind.
“Me too,” Lea called. She was hovering close to Michael as if she were afraid he might keel over.
Nelken’s expression hardened as he focused on Michael. “You are going to have a long chat with me when this is done about how Slater miraculously stumbled upon that exo.”
Michael didn’t argue or defend himself. He just gave a small nod, his eyes grave. As betrayed as she felt right now, she had to give it to him: he wasn’t shirking the responsibility for any of his actions.
Nelken stared at Michael until he appeared satisfied. “Very well, then.” He looked at Alaric. “You’re ready to move?”
Alaric fumbled a pouch out of his jacket pocket. “Reckon I better be.” He shoved a little wad of green leaves into his mouth and began chewing.
Nelken nodded. “Good. The teams should all be loaded up soon.”
Alaric frowned. “Still not convinced it wouldn’t be better to stick with one truck.”
“It’s a small enough force.” Nelken didn’t sound absolutely convinced himself. “Better to have backup and options if you’re spotted.”
Rachel leaned forward, interjecting herself. “We’d better get moving if we want to get to Pryce’s in time to matter.”
“Right,” Nelken said. He looked at the three of them as if he’d just had a thought. “Perhaps you should take the skipper.”
“It’s only seated for two,” Lea said.
“We’re small,” Rachel said. “We’ll figure it out. Let’s go.”
“Guess we’ll see you back here, then,” Michael said to Alaric and Nelken.
That was assuming all of their plans went off without a hitch. Still, she didn’t mind the little bit of optimism.
“You’re sure you don’t wanna stick with Alaric?” she said quietly to Michael as they hurried down the next hallway. “You’ve been pretty hell-bent on finding that nest thing.”
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 19