“Now you’re the one trusting an Apostle?” Carlee’s face was full of disbelief and painful irony. “You were the one saying we shouldn’t go, but we did. You stormed off into the woods; you didn’t watch it like I did. Leeches came to it during the night, scanned its temurim, and then flew away. Several times. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what any of it means. But I know there is more going on than we know. I don’t trust it. And I don’t trust its promises.”
“I don’t trust Darwin. I’d be a fool to. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We don’t have to worship it or travel with it—heck, we don’t even have to like it—but without its help, the best we can hope for is to live scared the rest of our lives, giving guns to farmers.”
Carlee stepped in close to Stefani, pushing her face only a few inches away from Stefani’s.
“You might think we’ve been wasting our time, but we have made a difference to thousands of people, and now we have a plan to help thousands more.”
“Carl, you have to see—”
“And do you know what I heard from Darwin? Exactly what I heard from Bobby! Even some of the words were the same. It was almost as if he were back, in a giant robot body, preaching to us about freeing humanity and killing Apostles! Ready to die all over again!”
They locked eyes for a minute, both breathing deeply.
“You can’t make any difference if you’re dead,” Carlee whispered before turning away.
“You weren’t the only one who loved him,” Stefani said. The words caught Carlee’s feet like a pair of force-field shackles. “You lost a husband, but I lost an older brother. I lost the last of my family in that fight! But I don’t look back at it as worthless. Just because we didn’t win doesn’t mean it wasn’t a battle that shouldn’t have been fought! My brother died trying to create a better world, and that’s something I’m not ashamed of. That’s something I am proud of.”
“Being proud of him won’t bring him back. It won’t bring any of them back. Instead, there are three of us now. Three of us, Stefani! If we had listened to Jane, none of that would have happened. I’m not going to honor his death by following in his footsteps. He forced you to keep me from fighting with him then, and I’m sure he’d force you to keep me from fighting the Apostles now.”
“We didn’t have an Apostle on our side then,” Stefani said. “We had a hundred vagrants, most of whom were little more than priests with some prayers. This isn’t anything like that. The war is the same, but this is a battle we can win!”
“Our war is over,” Carlee said. “It’s been over for a long time.”
“Tell that to Petra.”
“If the Apostles want to fight, then so be it. All we can do is try to limit the human casualties. Getting involved in their fighting will only make things worse for us. I’m sure of it.”
Stefani shook her head and looked at the ground. The exchange had been heated and personal, and it had taken a toll on both of them. Jeff stood by, stopping himself from joining the conversation every time he felt like jumping in.
“We have a better future,” Carlee said before Stefani could find the right rebuttal. “We have a path where we can make things better for the next generation. What does it matter if the Apostles stop killing us if we keep killing one another? We can do so much without getting involved with Darwin. Jeff’s plan is a good one.”
“What do you think, Jeff?” Stefani asked. They both looked at him, and he felt caught between them. But luckily, his answer was a simple one. He had settled on it a while ago.
“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “I want to kill all the Apostles, but I don’t trust Darwin, and I don’t know as much about . . . what’s been tried before as you two do.”
Stefani sighed and looked at him as if he had betrayed her. But it was the truth, and he wasn’t ready to take sides.
“I promised Bobby that I would keep you safe,” Stefani said, defeated. “And I will continue to do that until my dying day, but this is a mistake, Carl.”
“I can protect myself. There is nothing I can or will do to stop you if you want to try,” Carlee said. “But I can’t. I can’t, and I won’t.”
With that, Carlee entered the small room toward the front of the transport and shut the door behind her. Stefani stood in place for a moment before she wearily started to remove her flight armor. Jeff didn’t know what to say, so he just watched her until she was finished. She then looked up at him, and they made eye contact.
“I didn’t know Bobby was your brother.” It was the only thing that came to mind.
“Didn’t think about it, did you?” Stefani said. She pushed past him, heading for the controls of the fortress.
“Did I do something to upset you?” Jeff asked. “Because I didn’t mean to. I just . . . I don’t know what to do with Darwin. I just said what I thought.”
“Of course you did.” Stefani looked over the indicators, making sure there weren’t any Apostles or leeches nearby.
“What did you want me to do?” The tension within the fortress had reached him now as well.
“How come you never asked me why I came back for you in Dallas?” Stefani swiveled around in the chair from facing the controls and stared directly at him.
“I . . .” The question caught him off guard. “I don’t know.”
“There it is again. You don’t know. You don’t know. But you asked Carlee about why she saved you. She told me about that. She told me you worried about me when I was missing, and I believed her. Foolish me.”
A tear ran down Stefani’s cheek, and Jeff watched it roll in slow motion. By the time it fell from her cheek and hit the grated floor, he realized how blind he had been. A thousand moments raced through his mind, now replaying with a different context. When she had told him not to fall in love, she had been warning herself as well. When she had attacked Darwin so that he and Carlee could escape, it wasn’t only for her sister-in-law. When she had flown back to save his life during the biggest battle in a decade, it had meant more. More than he had ever realized.
“I didn’t—”
“Know,” Stefani said. “You didn’t know. Let’s talk about this later.” She smiled at him hopefully; she was more vulnerable now than he had ever seen her. She had always been such a warrior that seeing her as anything else had been difficult.
“Are you sure?”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up now.” Stefani looked past him, out the transparent, shielded walls of the fortress.
“Why?” Jeff followed her gaze and saw that they were passing by the rubble of what had once been the Kansas City courthouse. It was a feature of the ruined city he knew well.
“Because I promised to help you find your revenge.”
39 ROSS
JEFF RELAXED HIS SCATTER GUN and stared at his former home, where he had spent the last seven years in Fifth Springs living with Dane. It had been a memory filled walk from where Jeff and Stefani had left the fortress a mile away under the pretenses of recruiting. It was hard to remember the good times because it was hard to think about anything but betrayal. But they had happened.
He kicked some charred wooden boards by his feet and looked around the rest of the area. The people of Fifth Springs had inhabited the other homes in the subdivision, but only the one at the end of the street still stood. Oddly, the deserted landscape of his former home didn’t make him feel much. Even the moldering human remains that he occasionally passed did little to affect him. The people of Fifth Springs had joined the long list of humans who had died with no one to bury them. Compared with many, they had lived successful lives.
But he wanted to feel more. He wanted to cry for his dead neighbors and for the murdered children. He wanted to curse Horus and fire his weapon into the air. But he had already wept for them, and their deaths felt like a lifetime ago.
“My hood shows there is a body under there,” Stefani said.
Jeff looked over at her, unsure of how to react.
“You sho
uld take a look,” Stefani said. She wore a pair of sunglasses over her eyes, with her hood up over her head. The combination of sniper rifle and body armor made her look as intimidating on the outside as the day he had first met her. But she was different now; her strength was more alluring, and her confidence gave him confidence.
“All right,” Jeff said. He fumbled with the mental controls of his hood for a moment before he found the right setting. His vision changed, and everything went dark except for certain details. Sure enough, there was a pair of human skeletons buried underneath the wreckage. One of them looked to have died mostly intact; the other resembled how he had looked after the attack.
“Some more bodies,” Jeff said. “There are lots of them around.”
“Jeff . . .”
He switched his vision back to reality and readjusted back to the sunlight as he looked over to Stefani.
“What?”
“I promised to help you find your revenge,” Stefani said. “And here it is.”
“What? No. That isn’t Dane. It can’t be.”
“You told me there were leeches from Horus’s wings flying around everywhere, slicing people up and making a mess of things. Horus followed after them. Dane wasn’t a vagrant like you. You have to see that it’s extremely unlikely that he made it out alive.”
“He could have made it . . .”
“Jeff, your friend is already dead. If anything, pushing him out of the way of that laser saved your life and ended his. Horus thought you too weak to even bother with, but Dane was still whole.”
“He’s still out there.”
“I know you want him to be, but—”
“He is, Stefani. I know it,” Jeff said. She was suggesting something he was not ready to accept, no matter how much he wanted to.
“Do you, Jeff? Did you get a glimpse of another time line? Or are you telling yourself that so that you have something to hang on to? We’ll find your mayor and be done with it.”
“I saw glimpses when it happened. People made it out alive. Horus didn’t even care enough to do a thorough job; it was just taking a little pleasure detour on its way to kill Petra. If others made it, then Dane did. He’s out there.”
“Where?”
“Old Unity, maybe . . .”
“And if we don’t find him there?” Stefani asked. “Are we going to have to get tissue samples of everyone who died here before you admit that Dane is dead?”
“No.” Jeff thought about it for a moment, weighing whether he would be able to keep to the commitment he was about to make. “If he’s not there, we’ll just focus on the mayor. Carlee will get suspicious if we stay in this area forever looking for Dane.”
“And you can live with that?”
“With a little help,” Jeff winked at her, and Stefani blushed. Seeing her show even a hint of embarrassment made him want to laugh, but he didn’t. He didn’t know what to think of the whole thing, but luckily, he had plenty of other things to think about that were less confusing.
“Then to Old Unity we’ll go,” Stefani said. “But now you’re making me hope Dane isn’t there.”
Now he did laugh. Flirting was just so unnatural to him that he didn’t know what else to do.
“First, we should go check out that house,” Stefani said. “There are some folks inside who may be interested in joining our movement.”
“There were people in there this whole time?” Jeff asked. After almost giving up on Dane, he was filled with renewed hope. Dane dying by Horus’s hand was suitable, but after the way his best friend had left him on the ground to die, he wanted to return the favor. He had turned Jeff into a generous fool, giving his life for someone who, in the end, had cared so little for him.
“Five of them—armed, from what I can see. Just inside the bottom floor. I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet.”
They picked their way through the shattered and cluttered street that Jeff had walked down thousands of times. His heart beat faster the closer he got to the final house in the area. The glass in the windows was shattered, and he could hear voices chatting lazily on the inside about who had eaten what. Stefani positioned herself in front of the door. Jeff tapped her on the shoulder and furiously shook his head. He wanted to go in first.
“Don’t start with that chivalry crap.”
“I have the better gun for this,” Jeff said. “You cover me.”
She looked to her long barrel and shrugged before moving to the side of the door. Jeff took a deep breath and kicked the door in with his metal leg.
“Don’t move!” Jeff shouted. But the men sitting around the room didn’t follow orders. They jumped for their weapons, and Jeff hit the closest man with the back of his gun and kicked another in the chest, sending him flying into the wall. Stefani locked her gun on another one of them while the remaining two managed to get their weapons up.
None of them were Dane.
“Put your guns down, or we’ll waste you,” one of the boys with a sawed-off shotgun said. The short, dark-skinned man’s voice cracked as he spoke, and the gun trembled in his hands. Jeff was worried he was going to shoot them by accident.
“Calm down, kid,” Jeff said. The boy couldn’t be more than fifteen, but that didn’t mean much. Most warlord armies were made of young boys, either taken as slaves or volunteered from local communities.
“Be smart,” Stefani said. “None of you needs to die today.”
“Shut up!” the man next to the boy said. He was older and fatter, an unpleasant-looking man who had the air of wanting to fight. Jeff knew the type well, but he didn’t recognize any of them.
“You guys aren’t from around here,” Jeff said.
“You two done messed up,” the older man said. Jeff heard the click of a safety and then saw that the man he had punched now pointed a rusty handgun at him. “There are more of us.”
“Not if I kill this one,” Stefani said. The man she held at gunpoint started to pee himself and whimpered a prayer that Jeff didn’t understand.
“You don’t count too good, do ya sweetheart?” the older man said. “There would still be more of us.”
“By the time his head exploded, I would have killed the rest of you.”
The leader of the group forced a laugh, but sweat dripped down his face. He eyed Jeff’s uniform and superior weapon, then swallowed deeply.
“We are starting up a pact between us, you know, forming a new group,” the older man said. “We could use the help. We’ll be going after a few targets nearby, and you can have your shares if you—”
He didn’t finish. Stefani hit the man in front of her and spun around in front of their leader just as his gun went off. Except she wasn’t in the line of fire. The blast shot past her, missing her widely. She kicked the man violently between the legs, and he sank to his knees. She stooped with him as the others watched in horror.
“I’m sorry. We don’t like wannabe warlords very much,” Stefani said. The man groaned and held his gun up to Stefani’s forehead. She didn’t move as he pulled the trigger. The energy pistol exploded backward into the man’s face, ripping through his bone, leaving a mess behind him.
The other armed men in the room dropped their weapons.
“All of you want to be warlords?” Stefani asked.
“No! Not at all,” the boy said. “That was Josh’s idea. He was forcing the rest of us to go along. I only ran into him the other day. You have to believe me!”
“What about the rest of them?” Stefani asked, gesturing to the other three men in the room who were doing their best to hold their hands in the air.
“Aaron is cool,” he nodded to the man who was bleeding from where Jeff had hit him with the back of his gun. “The other two were Josh’s men.”
“You little—”
“Shut up,” Stefani said. She spoke softly, but the other men immediately obliged. “What is your name?”
“Ross,” the boy said. His voice cracked again with nerves, and his eyes kept dodging betwee
n Stefani and Jeff.
“Well, Ross,” Stefani said. “We’re vagrants. We’re looking for people to join our cause. If you and Aaron are interested, you can come with us. Or you can stay here with them. But they’re not going to be happy you didn’t endorse them.”
“Vagrants?” Ross’s voice cracked again as he took a step back.
“Don’t worry, kid,” Jeff said. “It’s not what you think. And you can learn to do stuff like her.”
“I . . .” Ross didn’t know what to say, which was understandable. Jeff had taken some convincing himself.
“I’m going to stay,” Aaron said.
“Bad decision, but it’s your choice,” Stefani said. “Ross?”
“I . . .”
“You won’t regret it,” Jeff said. Ross looked him in the eyes and nodded.
“OK. I’m in.” The boy looked dizzy, but he nodded his head profusely.
“All right—let’s hit the road,” Stefani said. She gestured for Ross to leave the house. Stefani swung her gun around, and despite the limited space, she quickly shot every remaining gun in the room. Every blast made the men jump as the energy burned a hole several feet into the ground.
“We’ll be around. If I see you again, I’ll put you down,” Stefani said.
Jeff followed her outside, where Ross was standing nervously.
“This way, kid.” He pointed in the direction where their fortress was parked a mile or so away. Ross nodded and followed a few steps after Stefani and Jeff.
“You’re not going to be the new guy on the team anymore, Handsome,” Stefani said. “Can you handle it?”
40 OLD UNITY
“I DON’T TRUST YOU,” SUSAN Welter said. The mayor of Old Unity had come out to meet them as requested. It was a bigger community than Townend, but it wasn’t nearly as fortified. Susan circled them on her horse.
Jeff continued to search the trees and broken houses that lined the community, using his hood to enhance his vision. Dozens of soldiers were lying in wait for them in case things got violent, and a surprising number of them were women, but so far, he hadn’t found Dane.
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