Reese took off running, slipping through the trees, much as twenty years ago she’d darted through the close-set houses in Colony 6. She looked fierce and determined.
“Can’t reach.” Eagle was struggling to make his hand obey him.
“I’ll get it.” Jaxon felt Eagle’s neck for his skin tag and pressed. “You feel it?”
Eagle nodded. The masking wouldn’t prevent drones from detecting their heat signatures or tracking the T-link emissions, but at least their identities would remain hidden, perhaps giving them time to destroy the drones and get away.
Eagle coughed. “Feels like I fell off the roof of that building.”
“You’re lucky you had on a vest or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Believe it or not, I’m almost wishing we weren’t.”
Jaxon didn’t answer but started forward, staggering under Eagle’s weight without Reese’s help.
“Sorry about Dani,” Eagle panted. “I should have done something. I just didn’t think she’d need help. You’ve seen how she is in practice. None of us can touch her.”
Jaxon thought about his surprise at Dani not rushing the enforcer and how she’d lost her gun. She’d been injured, but with her ability, she’d have to be hurt a lot more for her endurance to diminish.
He gave a bitter chuckle. “It was her plan all along.”
“What?” Eagle’s pained face twisted in his direction.
“To get captured. I bet she thinks they’ll take her to her brother.”
“No,” Eagle said. But in the next breath, he added, “Yeah, that’s her. And it explains why her T-link isn’t working. She must have disabled it. We have to get to her before they make her talk, or Brogan and the entire underground is at risk.”
Jaxon knew, but he held back a comment, pushing both himself and Eagle harder. Tree branches tugged at his clothes and smacked him in the face. The smell of earth and crushed leaves was drowned by the stench of his own sweat and fear. Every sound made him look behind them, fearing to see Special Forces or one of the tracking drones.
Eagle was stumbling more often now, and his face was closer to green than white. “Let’s take a few minutes,” Jaxon said, coming to a stop. He propped Eagle against a tree. “You want to sit?”
“No, I might not get back up.” Eagle started coughing. He doubled over, clinging to the tree, spitting up blood. Cursing under his breath, Jaxon put his arm around Eagle’s waist and was about to pull him onward when the world around him stuttered.
Jaxon sees smooth male hands touching the nyckelira case on a desk. The wood looks real, instead of the customary hard plastic molds, and is decorated with elaborate carvings.
The hands flip the case open, revealing an empty interior. Strong, rough fingers, different from the smooth ones of before, reach out and stroke the black velvet lining.
A sharp slap on the face brought Jaxon back to himself. He opened his eyes to see that he was on the ground with Eagle on top of him. “Sorry,” Eagle groaned. “I tried to pull you out of it, but I fell. Look, I think someone’s coming.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Five minutes maybe.”
Three more minutes than he’d planned to stop, extra minutes they didn’t have.
“What’s going on?” Reese said in his ear.
“Nothing,” Jaxon heaved himself to his feet and pulled Eagle up after him.
“Right.” Reese paused disbelievingly before saying, “I have a shuttle. Sending my location to you now. Heading in your direction. When you see a tall purple building, look for me in the alley there. That’s as far as I’ll be able to come.”
Jaxon could see the building now, though it looked more gray than purple. “Almost there,” he said.
“Actually, that’s a good two kilometers away,” Eagle informed him. “That’s ten minutes on a good day.” He could mentally diagram it down to the centimeter, so Jaxon didn’t protest.
“I’ll leave the shuttle and meet you,” Reese said.
Jaxon thought a moment. “Okay, but turn off your T-link now. Even if Dani disabled hers, Special Forces might figure out how to use it to pinpoint our location. Then they wouldn’t need to wait for drones to pick up our heat signatures or T-link emissions.”
Eagle, still clinging to Jaxon, said, “He’s right. I’m sending a delete code to erase any information and shut down the connection to Nova. I also just sent Reese the coordinates where to meet us. Even without a link to the feed, the compass on her T-link will get her there.”
“You just sent . . .?” Jaxon stopped talking, remembering that while Eagle’s special glasses supported hand motion control, they didn’t require them. A few flicks of his sightless eyes were every bit as effective. CORE iTeevs supported a few similar eye commands, but most people never used them.
“Reese, you hear that?” Jaxon asked.
“Yep. Doing it now.”
Jaxon’s lungs were burning from lack of air by the time he spied Reese ahead in the thinning trees. Without a word, she put his assault rifle back into the nyckelira case, grabbed Eagle’s arm, and started pulling them both back the way she’d come.
“Hurry,” she said. “They sent an alert to all public shuttles for everyone to be on the lookout for three people. We may have a problem, unless one of you knows how to prevent it reporting back.”
Eagle coughed once, spitting up more blood. “Our IDs are masked, so as long as I can disable the weight sensor,” Eagle said, “it won’t be able to estimate how many we are.”
“Actually, I’m not masked, or I couldn’t use the shuttle,” Reese told him. “I’m using a second CivID. But go ahead and do it anyway. Better to burn another ID than to have it realize I picked up two more people.”
“They’ll expect something like that,” Jaxon said as they cleared the trees. “We won’t have much time.”
Reese smiled grimly. “We won’t need it. Once we get to the shuttle it’s only six minutes to the safehouse. I’ll stop and let you two out there and go on a bit to throw them off. The shuttle won’t be able to record any of our faces, so they’ll have nothing.”
They reached the shuttle, looking conspicuous in the alley near the purple building. She helped Eagle inside, who began pulling open panels. Seconds ticked into minutes. “There,” he said finally. “It won’t be able to report normal weight until it connects the sensor to the feed again.”
“How are you preventing it from connecting?” Jaxon asked.
“I pulled out the wire.”
Jaxon barked a laugh. “I guess that’s as good a way as any. It’ll report an error and go in for repairs. It might even make our trail harder to track.”
Eagle made a face. “Well, I also pulled the speech and audio wires. I wasn’t sure which was which.”
“Finally some good news,” Reese muttered. “I hate it talking to me.”
“We don’t want it recording anyway,” Jaxon added.
Eagle scooted to the next seat and Jaxon climbed in the back, while Reese took Eagle’s vacated seat. On the manual shuttle controls, she punched in an address near their destination, choosing the highest speed possible.
They’d been driving only two minutes on the main street when a large silver enforcer shuttle passed them at high speed. Like their own smaller shuttle, the windows were one-way glass and the inside hidden from view, but Jaxon could imagine a full squadron of enforcers with assault weapons inside. He gripped his gun long after they passed, half-expecting them to turn around and give chase.
Eagle was coughing again and spitting blood. “He might be bleeding internally,” Reese said.
Jaxon nodded. “We have to hurry.”
Chapter 7
LYSSA AWOKE AS Ty stroke her cheek and leaned in to kiss her. She sighed with pleasure until she realized where she was. She jerked upright and scrambled for her iTeev.
“Don’t worry,” he said with a laugh. “It’s still early. You don’t have to be to work at five, remem
ber?”
“I’m getting my niece off to school, though.” Niece, not daughter. It came off her tongue easily enough, but the word tasted bitter. She breathed a sigh of relief when her folded iTeev screen showed there was still plenty of time to get home before Tamsin needed to be up for school, which started at nine. Lyssa hadn’t meant to pass out here last night, but one glass of chotks had turned to another, and being with Ty was so uncomplicated compared to the rest of her life.
Except for the fact that he was going to die. There was that.
He sat next to her on the bed and nuzzled her cheek with his lips. He was fully dressed, ready to go in to division, and she had to leave soon herself, but she gave into the need to kiss him. His compact form fit hers perfectly, and she never felt afraid of him. He was warm and strong, and his freshly washed smell was tinted by some kind of cologne that reminded her of a teacher she’d had once in school. She’d had a serious crush on him too.
Grief crept up from somewhere inside her, and she clung to Ty more tightly than she should have. She stared at the wall and the beautiful painting he had of Freedom Fountain and the Plaza outside the CORE management building that housed the city manager and other government workers.
He pulled away slightly to look at her face. “What is it?”
Her eyes caressed each curve. His face was kind, and there was an underlying strength that made her wish she could confide in him. “Nothing,” she said.
His mouth turned slightly downward. Not what he wanted to hear, apparently. “Look,” he said. “I know you want to take this slowly, but I’ve been thinking that maybe in a month or so, you’d like to move in. If things are still going well, of course, as I hope they will be. You probably don’t have a lot of space there with your sister and her family.”
His words pierced her heart like radiation from a desolation zone. She could never leave Tamsin, and she could never explain why. Because doing so would risk Tamsin, and she couldn’t trust her daughter’s life to him. He had no relationship with her and would have no reason to develop a deep enough one to permit disclosure.
What was she thinking, getting involved with him? Or with anyone? There would be too many questions. Since the moment she’d decided to go against the laws of the CORE and keep Tamsin, she’d given up so many other choices.
And she’d do it again.
She pushed away from Ty, faking nonchalance, though he’d likely glimpsed her terror. “Maybe. Let’s wait for a few more months and see.” He’d probably be dead by then.
Lyssa had questioned Jaxon regarding the timeline of his visions, and while most of them came true within a few weeks, others hadn’t happened for months. One vision of Reese coming to Amarillo City he’d had a year in advance. But whatever the length, time wouldn’t stop. They were already nearing the two-month mark for the vision of Ty.
“Lyssa.” Disappointment spilled from the single word, but she pretended not to notice, knowing he wouldn’t push her.
She hopped out of his bed. “I’d better get going or Lyra will be late. If you wait a few minutes, I’ll drop you at the station.”
“It’s okay,” he said stepping toward the door. “I have a few errands to do on the way.”
She blew him a kiss and hurried into his bathroom for a quick sonic cleansing that would make her presentable for Tamsin, even in her dirty clothes from yesterday.
The worry set in almost immediately. What sort of errands did Ty have? Would one of them be the reason someone would break his neck?
Cutting her cleansing by less than half, she ran from the room and gathered her clothes, pulling them on as she hopped to the door. This was the other part of seeing Ty. Worry that never ended. Worry that something she did or didn’t do would cause Jaxon’s vision to come true.
The blue shuttle was waiting for her, either having sat outside all night or returning this morning at the time she’d requested yesterday. She didn’t know or care which. She could see Ty striding down the street. She wished the public shuttles allowed manual control like the police ones, but she was stuck having to tell the shuttle to move down the road slowly.
She expected Ty to head from his apartment to the sky train, which was only a ten-minute ride to the main station near their division. Instead, he crossed the street and headed the other way, hurrying slightly now. She told the car to follow as she had on numerous occasions when they met at the bar. More than once, she’d seen him give credits to a few street punks that somehow managed to continue avoiding enforcer sweeps. She’d begun to wonder if that was wise. Conceivably, they could be the reason for his impending demise, though Ty’s connection with her was far more likely as a cause, at least while she remained a target for those who suspected her Colony 6 origins.
More shuttles were filling the streets now, as people began their day. While most used the sky train, some spent their shuttle allotment on errands or to reach destinations not along the sky train routes. Some worked for members of the CORE Elite or their relatives.
Lyssa checked the time and continued her surveillance. Though she carried a gun, she didn’t have a lot of confidence that she’d be any help to Ty should someone dangerous come looking for him.
On he walked, turning down random roads until finally he stopped and swiveled around, folding his arms over his chest, and staring at her shuttle as it approached. He wouldn’t be able to see inside it, or know it was her, but he might suspect. Especially if he’d noticed the shuttle awaiting her outside. Whatever he’d been planning, it looked like he wasn’t going anywhere until the shuttle was gone.
“Go home,” she told the shuttle wearily, not wanting to face him now. She wanted—no, needed—to see her daughter. Ty could get himself killed for all she cared.
The ache in her chest renewed, but she inclined the seat and ignored it.
“Destination home,” the shuttle said cheerfully, as if happy to be fulfilling its purpose. “Time to destination is fifteen minutes.”
When she arrived at the ninth-floor apartment she shared with Lyra and Kansas, Lyra was alone in the kitchen. Her delicate face was almost lost in the mass of long black hair, the hair she could never cut unless Lyssa did too.
“Good, you’re here,” Lyra said. “I was about to get her up, but if I don’t have to take her, we can let her sleep a few more minutes.”
Lyssa heard the accusation in her twin’s voice, even if it didn’t exist. “Of course I’m here.” Like I am every day that I’m off work.
Lyra nodded. “It’ll be nice for you to have this extra time together. She missed you last night.”
“I missed her too.” It was like an ache similar to the grief she felt for Ty, only more intensified.
Lyra stepped toward her. “You really shouldn’t see him,” she whispered. “It’ll be that much harder when it happens.”
“I tried to stay away.” What she wouldn’t add was that at least she could have a part of Ty and that was more than she’d ever have with Kansas.
Lyra nodded. “I’m sorry.” She hugged Lyssa, and for a moment they clung together as they had in the Coop when their father had died at the factory, and when they’d awoken in the night listening to their mother’s hacking coughs. She’d lasted only until they’d leveled out of school and left the Coop, and only since Tamsin’s birth did Lyssa understand how she’d held on even that long.
“Thank you for being here.” Lyssa knew she said it too often, and it normally irritated Lyra, but today she only smiled.
“I told Kansas about Dani,” she said. “Well, not her name or that she’s working at division, but just that she was one of those we grew up with. I told him she normally lives in Newcali.”
“And?” Lyssa’s swallow sounded too loud in the room.
Lyra sighed and released Lyssa. “He reminded me that even visiting the fringers would put us all at risk. Or further risk, rather.” Because Kansas also understood that their Colony 6 connection somehow put them at risk, thus the extra shuttle service, but he didn
’t know how they’d almost been killed six weeks ago.
Lyra frowned and continued. “Still, I think I’ll ask Dani to take me there, to see what it’s like. To make sure it’s not worse . . .”
Worse than here, she meant. Because there were no birth orders in Newcali, and if Lyra and Kansas moved there, Lyra could have her dream.
“We’ll figure this out,” Lyssa said.
“What if we can’t?” Lyra stared at her, anxiety furrowing her brow. “What if this is just the way the world is always going to be? What if they’re right that there isn’t enough land to sustain more people? What if they’re telling the truth?”
Anger grew inside Lyssa. “They lied about killing our friends. The colonies are also a lie. You heard what Reese told us about her visit to Colony 6. They’re paying bonuses so women there will have more children. Instead of giving women like you babies, they’re creating more workers to take the place of those they killed after they went crazy from the experiments. You know there’s room for more settlements in the empty zones. And maybe we’ll end up having to leave the CORE, but we need to see if we can fix it first. For Tamsin. For all the other kids. For your child when you have him.”
Lyra’s face hardened, as if the thought was too much. She swept her bag from the kitchen table. “I’m heading to work a little early so I can stop at that bakery Kansas likes.”
“Good idea. I’ll be there soon.”
Lyssa watched her sister leave before checking on Tamsin. The child was fast asleep, lying on her side with her blanket off, her knees tucked and her arms spread out as if she were reaching for something. “I love you, baby,” Lyssa whispered, stifling an urge to wake her with kisses.
Lyssa went to her own room next door for some clothes and then to the bathroom for a proper cleansing. By the time she returned to wake Tamsin, the girl was already stretching, her mouth open in a huge yawn.
“Mommy!” Tamsin said, reaching for her.
Lyssa went to the bed and sat, scooping her baby into her arms. She smelled of soap and a hint of peppermint. Her body felt warm and slightly humid. “Hi, sweetie.”
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