Beyond Surrender (Beyond #9)

by Kit Rocha

She'd hate it—being in the middle of nowhere, cut off from her friends and family and the bustling activity of the O'Kane compound. But maybe that was the whole point. This sounded like her idea of escape, and Ryder couldn't bring himself to argue. "Okay."

  "How many rooms were you going to build?"

  The question startled him, though he couldn't quite put his finger on why. "I don't know. As many as I need, I guess."

  "A kitchen. A bathroom, I hope." She traced her fingers lightly over the back of his hand, building his cabin with words that seemed to pick up speed. "A bedroom and a living room, one with a fireplace. And chairs close enough that you can curl up next to it when it's cold. Some kind of barn or something, too, to keep your tools in. And animals. Hawk's sisters keep chickens, but those things scare the shit out of me."

  "I don't know anything about farm animals," he admitted.

  "Were you going to hunt instead?"

  Unease prickled up his spine. "Sure. Hunt, fish, that kind of thing."

  "Oh." After a moment she squirmed onto her back to stare up at him. "It's okay, you know. If that's not what you want. Me, in the cabin with you."

  "No, that's not it." Her words painted the picture so clearly, so readily, that he felt ashamed to confess that it was the first time he'd ever tried to really imagine that cabin. "We have to get there first, and that's…"

  "We're going to get there." She cupped his cheek, eyes feverishly intent. "We have to get there. You're coming back to me after this."

  The unease exploded, and Ryder bit back the easy reassurance that rose to his lips. He'd spent so much of his life lying, and he never wanted to do it again. Especially with her. "It's not that simple—"

  "It is," she interrupted. "You're coming back to me, and we're going to live in a cabin in the woods and probably starve to death because I don't know if either of us can cook, but I won't care because I'll be there with you."

  It was a reckless promise, one none of them could make right now, and Flash was proof. "Nessa, don't."

  The silence lasted for five of her breaths before she simply...deflated, like a balloon with the air rushing out. She sank over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. "I know," she said finally. "I'm sorry. It's stupid anyway. I'd be a mess in your cabin. I'd drive you crazy within a week, and you'd throw me out to sleep in the barn. It was just...a dream."

  He was a complete bastard. "Nessa, you can ask me for anything else—anything. But don't ask me to say that I know I'll survive this, because I can't do that."

  "I know," she said again, swiftly, like she could silence his explanations if she agreed hard enough. "Forget it. I'm just—I'm fucked up right now." She rolled upright to sit on the edge of the bed, her back to him. Her damp hair stuck to her shoulders, barely obscuring a rising bruise. "Don't listen to anything I'm saying."

  He touched her back, just below the perimeter of that angry bruise. "I'll try," he offered quietly. "That's all I can do."

  She nodded shakily. It took forever for her to sink back to the bed, and it wasn't the same. She was quiet and stiff against him, her eyes tightly shut and her lips pressed together.

  He'd never seen her closed off before.

  Anything he said now would be consolation in the worst sense of the word, careful half-truths with none of the certainty she craved. So he held his tongue, wrapping an arm around her in an effort to bridge the distance between them.

  It didn't work.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The end was starting to feel a lot like the beginning.

  The O'Kanes had started in a warehouse like this. The years since had brought enough luxury to soften the starkness of their surroundings, but this was where they'd come from. Hard cement floors, unadorned steel beams, people perched on wooden crates and stacks of pallets, passing around too many bottles of liquor and not enough bags of food from the market.

  At thirteen, it had felt like an adventure. Tonight, Nessa could only see how far they'd fallen.

  Dallas's voice rose and fell a few feet away, a cadence so familiar it was hypnotic. Nessa kept trying to focus on his words, but her brain could only hold two or three words in a row before their meaning slipped away. Too bad, because she had no doubt he was being properly inspiring. Dallas always rallied when things felt bleakest, and she couldn't tell if it was faith and belief, or if he was just too fucking contrary to stay down when someone kicked him.

  Nessa had always thought she had that personality quirk in spades, but one kick had laid her out on the floor, reeling.

  On the opposite side of the room, Hana fussed quietly. Nessa shouldn't have been able to hear her over the murmur of voices, but she felt hyperaware of the kid's voice now. The guilt would come either way, so Nessa leaned into it and glanced over to where Amira sat between Noelle and Trix.

  Shock still dulled her reddened eyes. She moved on instinct, soothing Hana with a gentle hand between her daughter's shoulder blades. Noelle wrapped her arm around Amira's back and murmured something, but Amira didn't even blink in response.

  Nessa's throat burned. Grief overcame guilt, and she looked away, her eyes stinging. The marks around Amira's throat lingered behind her eyelids like an after-image—a permanent reminder of what Amira had had...and what she'd lost. Nessa wanted to crawl across the warehouse floor and beg forgiveness, but the urge was purely selfish. Amira deserved time and space to grieve.

  They all did. And none of them would get it.

  Forcing her eyes open again, Nessa sought out Ryder's familiar profile. He was seated next to Finn, close to Lex and Dallas and Mad. His expression was serious and his gaze alert—he had no trouble focusing on Dallas's words. This was the moment he'd been trained for, the culmination of his life's mission. The reason he had all those super-spy skills and perfect muscles and all that endless patience.

  This was Ryder's war, and he'd die to see it through, if he had to. She didn't think he wanted to die, but she didn't think the notion scared him, either. He didn't share her need to fight back against terror by building a fantasy where death was impossible. To him, it was another fact in a long list of facts. Eden was corrupt. Water was wet. He might die. To promise otherwise would be to lie.

  And Ryder didn't lie the way she did.

  Oh, she never meant them to be lies. In the moment, she meant every goddamn thing she said. Lying there, cradled against him, her mind had been alive with the potential of that cabin in the woods. She could see the grain of the wooden floors. The rocking chair in the corner. The colorful quilts on the huge, hand-carved bed, and all the pillows he tolerated because he knew she loved them. She'd seen the table where they would have their coffee and the little garden plot where they'd grow vegetables and the chickens she made him deal with because they would always scare the shit out of her.

  For thirty seconds, she had wanted to live in that cabin more than she'd ever wanted anything in her life. Because that was how Nessa had always fallen in love with things. Swiftly, irrationally, recklessly…

  And temporarily.

  She loved Ryder. She was addicted to him, obsessed with him, desperate to spend every waking second drowning in him—and she didn't know if it was real. Was it the kind that would outlast the giddy rush of a new infatuation, or would her need for him fade when the shiny wore off?

  She didn't know if he was the liquor or the knitting.

  And God, she hated herself for not knowing. She hated that she might never find out. Most of all, she hated that their last moments together had been awkward and lonely, because they hadn't had enough time to learn how to reach across the gulf between his caution and her enthusiasm. They hadn't had enough time to figure out if it was even possible.

  Time. She'd wasted so fucking much of it, and now that every hour was precious, that every minute mattered—she was running out.

  "Fuck it." Zan's harsh, angry words cut through her reverie. "I say we drive right through the fucking gate." A few gathered voices rose in murmurs of assent, so he went on. "We hav
e reinforced trucks big enough to do it, so let's do it."

  Lex shook her head. "It's not enough to breach the gate into the city. It's a ready-made bottleneck. They'll cut us down the second we march—or drive—through. We need access."

  Jasper studied the map spread across a stack of pallets. "We could position trucks and forces at every city gate and hit them from all sides at once. But it would take time."

  "No more time," Dallas said, his tone brooking no argument. "We're going in at dawn, one way or another. And we're driving a path straight to the City Center and taking the Council down."

  "Smith Peterson." Markovic had been leaning against the far wall behind Dallas, but he stepped away from it as he spoke, bracing his weight on the carved wooden cane in his hand instead. "He's the one you're after. The Council follows the strongest leader, like a snake trailing after its own head. Cut off that head, and you kill the Council."

  "I'll start with Peterson," Dallas agreed. "But if you can't make them fall in line behind you after that, I'll keep cutting off heads until we're knee-deep in them."

  Markovic inclined his head. "Fair enough."

  Lex worried her lower lip with her teeth. "We have to get in there first."

  "I think I can help with that." Bren walked up with a huge duffel bag slung over his beefy shoulder. He swung it up onto the pallets, where it landed with a heavy thud right on top of the maps. He tugged open the heavy zipper, revealing dozens of black-wrapped bricks.

  Jasper's eyebrows rose. "Is that—?"

  "Enough C-4 to blow a hole in the world." Bren ran one hand through his hair. "I've been collecting it ever since that shit with Trent went down in Three. Some from Five, some from Eight. Figured we might need it one day."

  For several tense moments, everyone simply stared at the duffel. Something inside Nessa wrenched, as if the import of all the words and all the planning had crystallized into reality. War had been a vague concept, even after they started fighting it. After had been a nebulous time, some future she could see past but couldn't bring into focus.

  They weren't talking about fighting petty little battles anymore. They were talking about bringing down the wall that defined life for everyone on both sides of it.

  Tomorrow.

  Dallas touched the side of the bag. "How big a stretch can you bring down with this?"

  Bren grabbed a marker from Ace and shoved the bag aside until he revealed the area of the map that covered Sector Four. "We blow the south gate and the central gate." He marked them on the map, then added several more Xs along the curving edge of the border between Four and the city. "Breach a few more places along the wall, and they won't be able to cover all of them."

  Nodding, Dallas glanced up at Mad. "ETA on your cousin?"

  "The Riders and most of the Temple guards should be here in a couple hours." Mad jabbed his finger down on the entry point that left the clearest shot toward the City Center. "The guards can hold whatever ground we take. They're solid fighters, but mostly trained in defense. The Riders? They're your best bet of cutting a path to the Council."

  "All right." Dallas reached out, and Ace handed him a second marker. "So the Riders—"

  "Dallas!"

  Nessa turned toward the sound of Noah's voice. People melted out of his path as he jogged across the warehouse, and for the first time in weeks he didn't look like someone had run him over with a delivery truck. His hair was as wild as ever, standing up in red spikes that seemed to defy gravity at this point, but his eyes flashed with excitement.

  "You've got to see what just came over the vid network." He dropped a tablet on top of the map and reached into his pocket for a slim projector. Turning toward the distant wall, he waved his arms, ushering people out of the way. "Fuck, it's on every network, in every sector, on every device. It's probably streaming on people's watches and desks and shower walls and refrigerators."

  Both of Dallas's eyebrows shot up. "The propaganda?"

  "Worse." Noah set the projector down and swiped his fingers over the tablet. "Or better, if you're us."

  At the final flick of his fingers, the bare cement wall lit up with bright white light. A figure appeared on it, blown up to three times the size of a normal person. Nessa had never paid much attention to the news broadcasts out of Eden, but shocked recognition rippled through the crowd. Hawk first, and Jeni. Jared and Lili. Markovic and Dallas and Lex and even Ryder.

  Noelle was the one who named him. "Smith Peterson," she said, her voice raw, and it clicked into place.

  Smith Peterson. The man who'd arrested and tortured Markovic, kidnapped Hawk and Jeni, and murdered Noelle's father.

  Such a pleasant, average-looking man. He was almost handsome, smooth in all the ways Nessa had always liked in spite of herself, with a fancy suit and an elegance that seemed to come with paying for people to do all the hard shit in life.

  He didn't look like a monster. Not until he opened his mouth.

  "Get video of all of it," he commanded someone sitting at a workstation. "Make it bloodier, if you have to. Convince them the sectors are coming to rape their wives and eat their babies. And double—no, triple the enlistment bonuses."

  "Triple, sir?"

  "We need three thousand bodies minimum to wear them down before we send in the real soldiers. Promise whatever you have to so we don't need to conscript. Most of them won't survive to complain about what we actually give them."

  The screen went black for a moment, then faded into Markovic's face. The video Nessa had recorded played through, but someone had tweaked it slightly. The colors of the garden were more vibrant. Markovic's words echoed deep and strong. Beside Peterson's oily contempt, Markovic sounded like the voice of salvation, calling out from someplace beautiful.

  Noah cut the sound as Markovic finished, but another, different image of Peterson had flickered onto the wall already. "There are almost a dozen of them," he told Dallas, waving at the video. "It's alternating on a loop between Markovic and leaked clips of Peterson saying some pretty crazy fucking shit."

  "There," Markovic said heavily. "Penny came through. Now you can hold off on your invasion, give it time to—"

  "Tomorrow," Dallas interrupted. "At dawn. This is as much for them as it is for us, Markovic. You think Peterson's gonna go any easier on his own people if they get in his way?"

  "Of course not," he snapped, his eyes blazing. "Are you really so arrogant that you think he reserves his cruelty for you? Everything he's willing to do to the sectors, he's willing to visit first on every goddamn person locked inside those walls."

  "I know. That's why we're putting him down. Now."

  Markovic slammed his hand down on a crate beside him, the sound thundering through the warehouse. "Why, then? I had to relive the worst weeks of my life, then put someone I care about in mortal danger, and for what? Tell me why any of this matters."

  Dallas braced both hands on the pallets and leaned forward, eyes intense. "It matters because tomorrow, we won't have to kill as many people who don't have it coming just to get to Peterson. It matters because instead of fighting against us, all the people you've been trying to protect all these years might stand up and fight with us."

  "Might," Markovic echoed. "And you can't wait long enough to know for certain because the great Dallas O'Kane has to get his vengeance, his pound of flesh—"

  Ryder had been silent and still during the whole exchange, but he flowed out of his chair to stand between the two men. "You want yours, too," he noted bluntly. "You're a lot of things, Markovic, but you're not a hypocrite. Don't fault O'Kane for being human."

  Lex toyed with the strap of the duffel bag. "It's not about vengeance." Her voice carried through the warehouse, low but loud, like she needed them all to hear her words. "If it was, we'd find our own drones, load them with this shit, and fly them straight into the city."

  She turned to face the crowd, her gaze tracking over each of their faces. "We've been holding off on invading the city because we didn't want innocent p
eople to die. But now Peterson is sending them out here to die. It sounds fucked up, but the only way we can protect them now is to get in there. We can't fight this from a distance, not anymore."

  Over the years, Nessa had gotten to known Lex well. Better than most, because in the beginning it had been just the two of them in a world that was all about men. She'd seen Lex's strength of will, her steely stubbornness, and the ice-cold streak of pragmatism that surfaced when someone Lex loved was in danger.

  Lex cared about people. All people. It was there, underscoring everything she did, but the only one who ever got to see her naked sincerity was Dallas. The rest of them had to settle for glimpses, the moments when her guard slipped and Alexa shined through. Tiny sparks of hope in the night.

  Right now, she was glowing with it. She was radiant. She believed, and the force of that belief tugged at the places inside Nessa that were built on a foundation of O'Kane pride.

  "We never wanted this fight," Lex went on. "Never asked for it. The only thing we ever asked for was to be left alone, in peace, to live our lives on our terms, the way we fucking want. But the things that have happened in those Council offices—" Her voice broke. "It has to stop. Not just for our sakes, but for all those people in there. They don't deserve this. No one does."

  "No one," Noelle said loudly, her words drowned out by Ace shouting, "Fuck, yeah!" Then it was a jumble of sound, voices rising in agreement, in defiance, in cheers.

  Nessa met Ryder's eyes. He stared back at her for an endless heartbeat, then the corner of his mouth ticked up in a smile.

  Her heart lurched. The butterflies—those beautiful, terrifying butterflies—danced. If she lost him tomorrow…

  "Okay, Bren." Dallas thumped his hand on the map to silence the room. "What do you need to set this up?"

  "Anyone with demolitions experience to help with the charges. Cruz?"

  Cruz nodded. "I'm in."

  "So am I." Ryder shrugged. "No sweat, right?"

  Of course Ryder knew how to blow shit up. His endless childhood training wouldn't have neglected something so vital. Funny, how many emotions churned through her as Bren nodded to accept his assistance. Pride at his skill. Anger at the people who'd taught him so many ways to kill and so little else. Worry at the risk he was about to take.