The Stolen Sky (Split City Book 2)

by Heather Hansen

  At the door, Roan slipped by her and went inside first. Then Mina and Saben. Dade was the last one into the room. He was surprised to find the girl they were looking for still inside. He’d thought that if she’d escaped into the hall as the others had done, they might lose her.

  The girl lay on her thin mattress with her back toward the door. She was curled forward, her body hunched. The cotton gown she wore dipped low on her back, showing each knot of her spine.

  Unlike the matted nests of the others, her golden hair had been braided to keep it away from the sides of her skull. The hair three inches above her ears had been shaved, and a line was cut into her head. He could see the cut had been restitched with black med thread. It wasn’t a neat job, the knots clumpy and uneven.

  Mina leaned over the girl, touching the pulse at her neck.

  “Is she alive?” Dade asked.

  Roan snorted. “Wouldn’t that be ironic if she wasn’t?”

  Dade growled at him, about to tell him he was an asshole, when Mina said, “Barely.”

  Mina turned the girl gently onto her back.

  She moved her hands to the girl’s head, turned her face, and used her thumbs to open the girl’s eyes and check her pupils. “They’ve drugged her with something.”

  “It’s probably for whatever they did to her head,” Roan said. “It looks pretty brutal.”

  Dade stepped forward to get a better look. There was dried blood on the mattress beneath her head, indicating there was a similar wound on the other side. He swallowed back the sourness creeping up his throat.

  The girl appeared broken. Her sallow skin did nothing to hide the bruising. There were yellow stains around her nose, the corners of her lips, and her neck. He wondered if the bruises were caused by some kind of medical device.

  She didn’t move when Mina shook her. Or when Mina slid back the gown to check the rest of her body. Her arms were covered in open, oozing bedsores. Clearly she’d been here for a while. Then there was the deeper bruising around her torso. One or two places looked like a boot print.

  Dade swallowed, trying not to be sick. He turned away.

  “What have they done to you, Kallow?” Mina whispered. Her voice was sad, full of a deep emotion that Dade had never heard from Mina.

  He wondered who the girl was, especially since Crispin wanted her and Mina knew her. She’d clearly been treated worse than the others. What had earned her that cruelty? And why had they kept her alive?

  “I need the suit,” Mina said.

  Saben stepped forward and pulled it from his pack.

  “Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Saben and Roan, you watch the halls. Dade, I need your help.”

  She put undergarments on the girl before Dade walked over.

  Mina’s gaze had never slipped from Kallow since they’d entered the room. The way she was caring for her spoke of a previous friendship.

  She ran her hand over Kallow’s cheek, then said to Dade, “Hold up her legs for me.”

  He did as he was told, holding her weight as Mina worked the suit onto the girl. It wasn’t skintight as it should be. The girl was too frail for that. And yet, it was an effort to get her dressed.

  Something bothered Dade, set him on edge in a way he couldn’t explain. It was like an echo, something he should remember and yet did not. The feeling got stronger the longer he stared at Kallow.

  He felt as if he should know this girl. She seemed familiar. Or maybe she just had that sort of face, because try as he might, he could not place her.

  It frustrated him enough to ask, “Who is she?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  But it did. He knew it did. “Tell me.”

  Mina sighed. “She should look familiar.”

  The words didn’t register as they should have. It was like Mina spoke into the tunnel of his memory. Yet the connection still wasn’t there.

  Running her fingers over the girl’s cheek, Mina turned Kallow’s head. This side looked even worse than the other. What made his breath stutter, though, was the sun-star tattooed on the skin behind her ear. Clearly visible on Kallow’s shaved head. The cut and the sutures had bisected the middle of the sun.

  It would scar that way, a broken sun-star. The shape mangled. If it didn’t follow the trajectory of the cut on the other side, he would have presumed that whoever did it had desecrated the tattoo on purpose.

  If he’d known her, it had been years ago, perhaps when he was a child. How could any of the Solizen be missing? Did the Solizen know that one of their own was kept here? Had they sanctioned this? Dade felt a kinship with her even if he didn’t know her. It made him want to protect Kallow even more.

  “Who?” he pressed, knowing that Mina knew. That she was purposely not telling him.

  “Your sister.”

  The words didn’t even register. He was already shaking his head. The denial came hot and fast. He felt his hands begin to shake. “Impossible. She died when I was ten.”

  “Obviously not.”

  Dade swallowed. He couldn’t deal with this revelation. It didn’t make sense. One day she’d disappeared out of his life, and he’d been told . . . Well, he’d been told endless lies. “What does Crispin want with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Mina said. She carefully tucked the girl’s hair back into the hood before she pulled it over the back of her head. Then gently smoothed the strands in.

  The words rang hollow to Dade. Yet he couldn’t help but think she knew exactly what would happen once they handed Kallow over.

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “It’s not my business.”

  Dade swallowed back his rising anger, knowing that now that he had found his sister, he couldn’t let her go. “Is Crispin going to hurt her?”

  Mina looked up at that. “No, I promise.”

  “If he does, I’ll rescue her a second time.”

  Her gaze seemed sincere as she spoke. “I promise, Dade. She won’t suffer in Crispin’s hands. He’ll take care of her.”

  Over the comm, Venz broke in. “The govies just pulled up. They’re surrounding the building.”

  “We need to go,” Mina said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Alarms screamed. Their piercing sounds breached the air, making Arden’s head throb. Lights in the corridors and rooms flashed blue, strobing the walls with continuous blinks of color. The vid-projectors along the console went blank, their foggy images dissipating into the air.

  And then nothing.

  It was quiet. The alarms shut off, but the whirling lights remained on: blue-white-blue-white.

  The machines lining the console didn’t restart as Venz had said they would. He’d assured them that once the other team loaded the worm, it would force the system to reload and they’d have access to the station. Yet everything remained off.

  They waited and . . . nothing.

  She fought her rising panic. None of them had the skills to figure out how to crack into the system. Everything was centralized. If the worm didn’t work, if the other team hadn’t loaded it in time, then—well, she wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  It would be horrible to come all this way and not get what they sought, a waste of their lives. But she had no compunction against killing them instead of surrendering. She’d already done that to get in. If they caught her, she’d be dead anyway or locked up here and tortured. Might as well take out a few before she died.

  Arden was just deciding how best to make her last stand when the console kicked on. Then the visiprojectors hummed to life. The vapor appeared, forming into images. A long display flashed across the projection, a series of numbers that continued to scroll and grow and change over the seconds. All stuff she didn’t understand. And then the screen flicked twice, and the system opened and looked normal. In the center of the screen, the CRC logo twirled.

  “Oh, thank the moons,” Arden hissed out.

  The worm had worked. The release of tension made her feel a little sick, like being
chucked out of a building without light wings.

  Arden stepped up to the console, and her fingers flew on the light board. She opened all the doors within the center capsule. They didn’t know which room the formula would be kept in, and there was no time to be precise about it. Once that was done, she turned back to the others.

  They each had their assigned duties. Annem was supposed to do all the system stuff. There were a lot of files to be located and data to be collected. They might be here for the VitD recipe, but that didn’t mean Mina wasn’t going to make the most of their time and access there. Venz had gone over all the details with Annem. They’d worked through as many scenarios as Venz could think of.

  The other three—Arden, Niall, and Coco—were supposed to find the recipe.

  But now it appeared that wasn’t going to happen. Annem was pale, her body curled on the floor. She hadn’t woken up.

  Coco sat beside her. She’d removed the top corner of Annem’s suit so she could get better access to her shoulder. Her hands worked over Annem’s wound, using a second tube of quick-seal to stabilize her shoulder as much as possible, then wrapping gauze around the wound.

  Time was their enemy. Niall was already at the door to the hub, gazing at Arden balefully. If they didn’t have Annem to break into the system, then that part of the plan would get scrapped. It wasn’t the focus of this mission anyway. Mina would have to deal with it.

  “Coco,” Arden said, “we need to go.”

  Coco finished redressing Annem but didn’t look up. The bandage under the suit made Annem’s shoulder bulky. “I was there when Venz taught Annem the system. What if I break into it, instead? I can get the files. It’s the only choice we have.”

  It wasn’t, not really. They could decide not to retrieve information from the mainframe. It was only a data-mining expedition anyway, to see if there was anything they could use in the future. Mina would complain about the lost opportunity, but then Arden had also overheard Mina tell Coco not to let Niall out of her sight. She had sounded very explicit with her warning.

  “You need to go with them, I’ll be fine.” Annem’s voice was no more than a whisper. Her eyes closed. It surprised Arden that she’d woken. Arden had thought for sure the pain would knock Annem out for a good long while.

  “I’m not leaving you,” Coco said, her words mostly a sob. She shook her head repeatedly in disbelief and frustration. “They can figure it out. When the doors open again, you and I have to make it out of the CRC. So I’m going to stay here and work this system and make sure you stay alive.”

  She was trusting the most important part of the mission to Niall and Arden. Coco gave Arden a look of warning, her eyes narrowing as she then looked at Niall. “Don’t screw up.”

  Niall and Arden unloaded their equipment, leaving behind their blast-phasers and packs, only taking their sidearms and knives with them. They needed to move swiftly and the extra weight would slow them down.

  The halls were lined with rooms, and all the doors were open. Bodies were slumped in most of them. They walked with their phasers at the ready, checking each room in case the sleeping gas didn’t vent correctly.

  Arden had a general idea of what they were looking for, a cabinet of sorts perhaps. Somewhere the govies would label and store physical specimens. She moved into each room, clearing it fast. If it didn’t look like it contained what she wanted, they moved on.

  The VitD formula could be kept anywhere. It could be any size for that matter. Mina hadn’t been specific, despite Arden’s pushing her for answers. Though she did tell Arden not to worry, that she’d know it when she saw it. Whatever that meant.

  Irritation clawed at Arden. She worked her way down the hall with no clear direction. They could look for days without success. She’d know it when she saw it—whatever. Only knowing scattered pieces of a plan irritated her to the core. Arden didn’t understand why everything had to be so damned secretive.

  She liked to collect secrets too. Yet she’d never sent people on a mission blind. Hadn’t thought Mina would either. Arden couldn’t stop the curl of betrayal from forming inside her soul.

  The center ring of the CRC was a lot larger and more intricate than she’d been led to believe. They’d made it through one hall and started on another. Arden poked her head into a couple of rooms. They looked like offices or lab facilities, nowhere to hide something important.

  She’d suspected that the job would be hard, but she was losing faith that they’d find the recipe. Then bad scenarios started playing through her mind, and she noted everything that could go wrong. Annem was already hurt. Maybe the recipe wasn’t here either. Perhaps this whole plan was a ruse for something else. She wouldn’t put that past Mina. And if that turned out to be the case, she was going to make Mina pay.

  Arden paused to sweep another room. When she stepped back into the hall, she saw Niall turning a corner far ahead.

  At first he had pretended to check the rooms on the other side of the hall from her. That had morphed into only lazy glances as he’d passed them by. She’d thought it meant that he was as frustrated as she was with the search. Now he walked as if he’d honed in on something and knew exactly where to go.

  She ran after him.

  Niall ignored every open door. His head was dipped forward, and his stride had picked up. At the next turn, he stopped. Closed his eyes as if he were thinking about something. His head bobbed up and down in tune with whatever information was in his head. And then he made a left turn, followed shortly by another right.

  Arden kept pace with him. She wanted to ask him all sorts of questions, the first of which was, “How do you know what you’re looking for?” Instead, she kept her mouth shut and watched. Arden didn’t want to remind him she was there. She couldn’t risk him ditching her and taking the recipe for himself.

  Niall was another person with deep, untold secrets.

  Damn him.

  The question of why she wanted to repair their relationship taunted her. Just because he was family didn’t mean he deserved her loyalty and trust. He’d done nothing to earn it. Had disrespected it at every turn. And yet here he was again, clearly manipulating all of them.

  There was a pleased sort of grin on his face, a smirk that she hadn’t seen in years. He wanted to be here.

  She walked directly behind him when he finally entered a room. And then she stopped in her tracks.

  This room was some kind of vault. The walls were shiny with metal. Drawers in all shapes and sizes were cut into the walls. Some were large rectangles, some were thin, and others were small squares. All packed together so that they touched seam to seam, stacking from floor to ceiling. The light in the room reflected off the surfaces, making the room shine with blinding silver.

  Arden squinted.

  Just like Mina had predicted, she’d know it when she saw it. If any room held the secrets, it was here, embedded in the city’s core. Now to figure out which box they needed. That would be a mess. There wasn’t a label or numbering system on the drawers.

  They didn’t have time to check and open every box. She wondered what was in all the other drawers. What vast secrets were the govies hiding?

  Two hunched figures were on the floor. Both unconscious from the gas. They were older and dressed in the scrubs all the scientists wore. The male closer to her had hit his head. There was a bit of blood smeared on the rack beside him at about hip height as if he’d smacked it as he fell. Arden saw only the legs and shoes of the other.

  Niall was quiet beside her. His arms crossed over his chest as he stared at the wall. His gaze tracked the boxes. It looked as if he counted, starting at the top left and then down a specific row. He reached out his hand. It hovered over a drawer, then lowered to the one below it. He caressed the metal.

  His grin was in full force now. Then he looked back at the two scientists.

  Arden watched him with narrowed eyes. “Something you’re not telling me?”

  But of course he didn’t answer.


  Niall walked over to the closest scientist, the one with the head wound, then dragged him over to the wall. He stepped closer to the drawer. It was thin, and long, about a foot and a half in width. The metal was shiny under his fingers, yet it didn’t take on his prints. He traced the edge with one hand before reaching down to lift the scientist’s palm. The box was low enough that Niall only had to prop up the scientist’s back so that his palm could reach the metal.

  When the scientist’s palm connected, the drawer slid silently open on hidden tracks.

  Arden stepped to Niall’s side to peer into the drawer along with him. The interior was lined with soft black material. Spheres rested atop it in several rows, each in its own divot. Every sphere had been etched with a different symbol. The spheres were small, pocketable. They were no bigger than the palm of her hand.

  Niall ran his finger over the etched symbols, obviously looking for one in particular.

  Bastard. He’d known exactly what they were looking for this whole time. All her assumptions that he’d planned this were now coming painfully true. Would she ever learn to shield herself against him?

  He pulled out one of the spheres, holding it between his fingers. Twisting it in front of him as he examined it. His eyes squinted, but she saw in them his excitement, his burning triumph.

  Arden reached out and snatched the sphere from his hand. She wanted a closer look at it, but more than that, she didn’t trust him with it.

  Niall looked up at her in surprise. Almost as if he’d forgotten she was there. Then his expression morphed into anger. He reached out to take the sphere back, but Arden stepped away.

  She kept her hand curled in toward her chest until she was out of grabbing distance. The sphere was lighter than she’d imagined, almost weightless. She hadn’t had a clear idea what they’d be looking for, but this mirrored bit of nothing wouldn’t have been what she’d envisioned.

  Arden twisted it as Niall had, wondering how to open it. The two symbols on its surface were concave. There was also a bit of a dip along the surface, bisecting the two symbols as if the sphere could separate in half. She pushed her glove-covered fingernail against one of the inset symbols, but nothing happened. Arden reached down to her calf for her knife, intending to dig the blade into the etching.