by P. T. Hylton
It was an effort for Sarah to keep the smile off her face. Fleming was already rebuilding Steven’s confidence.
“The answer to your question is no,” Fleming said. “I didn’t light that fire, nor did anyone acting on my orders. It might have been an accident. It might have been the act of an insane lone wolf. Or it may have been the Council trying to frame us. I don’t know, and in the end, it doesn’t matter. Because I’ll tell you something else, Steven. I’m glad it happened.”
Steven’s eyes widened.
“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. But this fire is going to force the Council's hand, and it will make people pick a side. The Council showed their true colors when they went against the will of the people, and now they’ll continue down the path they started. It doesn’t matter if I set the fire. The Council will pin it on me and use it as an excuse to discredit us. Then we’ll find out who’s really dedicated to this cause.”
“You think they’ll really come after you for this?” Steven asked.
“I know they will. Sometime in the next few days, they’ll announce I’m suspected of the crime and then they’ll come after me. If they find us, and they will, I need strong leaders like you and Sarah to step up in my place.” He paused and regarded Steven as if considering something. “Can I trust you, Steven?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Good. What I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave this room. We know that the fire damaged our nuclear reactor’s control unit.”
Steven didn’t reply, but from the look on his face, Sarah knew this information wasn’t news to him.
Fleming continued. “The reason we’re telling you this is because we have to speed up our timeline. Decisions will need to be made quickly now. If they can fix the ship, fine, but I think there’s a good chance they will not be able to do so. Having sat on the Council, I firmly believe they will never land New Haven, no matter the consequences. That’s when we’ll have to make some tough decisions.”
“What kind of decisions?” Steven asked.
“You said when you came in here that you don’t want to take part in violence, and I applaud your sense of morals. But I hope you can see now that things have changed. Protesting may not be enough. We may have to take the Council by force. I know that sounds extreme, but it’s for the survival of our species.”
Before Steven could reply, there was a knock at the door.
Fleming’s gaze shot to the monitor, and he visibly relaxed when he saw who it was. He pressed a button and the door beeped. “Don’t worry. It’s a friend.”
The door opened and Firefly walked in.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I had a meeting with the team and I didn’t want to make anyone suspicious.”
Chapter 20
Alex had trouble sleeping that night. Every time she drifted off, she had another dream of New Haven crashing to the Earth in a fiery blaze, the last of humanity extinguished in a collision of earth and fire. She gave up at oh five hundred and decided to go for a run.
The streets were nearly empty at this hour, and she ran in the center of them, enjoying the luxury of having so much space. The sun shone bright and hot through the glass dome above as it always did regardless of the hour. Sometimes on these runs, Alex would consider what it would be like to run at night. True night, like they had on the surface, with darkness and stars. Part of her thought it would be frightening to be surrounded by a black void of nothingness above and around her, but another part thought it would be exhilarating. It would feel like she could fall right off the Earth and drift into the darkness at any moment.
This morning, she didn’t think about those things. Her thoughts were on vampires.
On her last mission, she’d known it was possible they might encounter some vampires; on this mission, she knew they would. They’d be entering the depths of a nuclear facility with plenty of dark spaces. A haven for vampires. From her experience last time, she knew she could handle it. Still, there were no guarantees. Even with all her training, her top-notch equipment, and her team watching her back, all it would take was a single slip-up, and she’d be a beverage for the undead hordes.
They’d be well protected on this mission. In addition to their usual gear, CB had informed them last night that the Council had approved them to bring the Daylights. Alex had laughed out loud at that. After everything she’d gone through to try to smuggle them aboard, now they were coming along legally. What a difference a few days and the threat of the destruction of humanity could bring. They’d also be wearing the jetpacks.
When she got back to her quarters, she found Simmons waiting at the door. He was dressed in sweatpants and a tee shirt, and he nodded at her as she approached. “Hey. Mind if I come in for a minute?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Alex reached past him and unlocked her door. Other than a few group conversations with the whole team, she hadn’t talked to him since the Daylights incident. She knew he wasn’t happy with her, but she hadn’t taken the time to gauge his anger. As usual, she’d been wrapped up in her own stuff.
Was he here to break up with her? Could you even break up with someone if you were just occasionally hooking up? And if he was here to break up, why would he do it now, right before the mission? The only explanation she could come up with was that he was so angry he needed to get it off his chest so it didn’t distract him down on the surface.
He followed her into her room and shut the door. She sat down on the bed, leaving enough room for him next to her, but he chose the chair across the room.
“So what’s up?” she asked.
“I wanted to talk. Before the mission.”
Yeah. Just as she’d thought. Better to nip this in the bud. “Listen, I know you’re pissed, and I know you don’t understand why I did it. If you want me to explain, I’ll try, but I’m not sure I have the energy for it now. I’ve spent the last few days apologizing, and right now I need to stay focused. But if you need to get something off your chest, I understand that too. Go for it.”
Simmons nodded. “Thanks. I do have something to get off my chest. It’s about the day you took the Daylights.”
Great. She knew it. She took a deep breath and vowed to let him vent. She owed him that. If she could rein her emotions in and avoid an argument, this would be over soon, and they’d both feel better. Well, he would.
“When I found out what happened that morning, that you’d smuggled the Daylights aboard the ship, I was pissed.”
“I know you were.”
“Let me finish. I was pissed at CB for letting the whole team find out like that. He could have taken you aside and talked to you in private.”
Well, that wasn’t what she’d expected to hear.
“Then I got even angrier when he hauled you off to see the Council. I sat in my quarters, stewing. I came dangerously close to heading to the Hub to see if there was anything I could do. I swear, if they’d thrown you in a cell, I would have grabbed Firefly and headed over to see if we could blast you out.”
Through sheer force of will, she kept her mouth shut. She’d promised herself she’d let him have his say before responding.
“It wasn’t until later when I heard Drew and Owl talking that I realized I wasn’t angry with you for betraying the team. It never even crossed my mind. I was too worried about you. I guess what I’m saying is, this whole thing made me realize how much I care about you. These late-night booty calls are great, and I don’t want that to go away, but I want something meaningful even more. I’m willing to risk it. You’re worth it.”
Alex had never seen Simmons look so vulnerable. She waited a moment, forming her words carefully in her mind before she spoke. “Thank you. That means a lot, especially right now.”
He smiled weakly. “You’re welcome. But thank you wasn’t exactly the response I was hoping for.”
“I know. Honestly, I’m so messed up in the head right now that thank you is all I can give.” She held up a hand before he
could respond. “I want to talk about this, I really do, but it has to wait until after the mission. Is that cool?”
He nodded, his smile a little more confident now. “I’m just glad you didn’t kick me out for talking about my feelings.”
“It was kinda girly. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to take a shower before I head down to the hangar.”
She stood up and peeled off her tee shirt.
Simmons watched as a bead of sweat dripped down her neck, onto her chest, and disappeared into the depths of her athletic bra. His eyes lingered there for a long moment.
She stepped toward him and took him by the hand. “Care to join me?”
He did not object.
***
An hour and a half later, the majority of the team was geared up and gathered in the hangar outside the away ship.
Things felt different this morning to Alex. The familiar excitement and nervousness hung in the air the same way it did before every mission. The political tension was gone now, replaced by the gravity of the job at hand. For the first time in days, they felt like a team again.
Owl shifted her weight nervously from foot to foot. As both the pilot of the away ship and the driver of the rover, a lot of the responsibility for this mission would fall to her. She’d have to navigate the versatile but still large rover into the dark depths of the facility. While others would be able to duck around corners and slip into doorways when the fighting came, she’d be stuck behind the wheel.
Alex put a hand on her shoulder. “You ready to do this, girl?”
Owl put on a brave smile. “You know it. Can I count on you to keep the vamps off me while I’m driving?”
Alex smiled. “I won’t let them get you. That would look really bad on my record.”
“Right, ‘cause it’s so spotless now.”
“You know me. Always toeing the line.”
Firefly came up to the ship and nodded a curt greeting. Unlike the rest of the team, he wore a dour expression, and he moved sluggishly.
“Rough night, Firefly,” Drew said. “What was her name?”
“And can Drew have her apartment number?” Simmons threw in.
“Ugh, no thank you. Firefly and me have different taste in women. I like mine alive.”
Firefly ignored the ribbing and brushed past them, setting down his bag of explosives near the door of the ship.
CB soon joined them. His fatigues always looked crisper than the rest of the teams’ for some reason, and today was no exception. He always looked like he’d come directly from ironing them. His cap was pulled low over his eyes, and he crossed the hangar at a brisk military clip. A stack of papers was secured snugly under his arm.
He stopped in front of the group and waited for them to come to attention. “All right, I’ve just received my final orders from the general. We’re a go for the mission.”
He looked down the line, giving them each a quick visual inspection.
“Before we head out there, I want to let you all know something. I’m proud of you.”
That caught Alex by surprise. CB expected his team to perform well, and he wasn’t one to throw around praise, earned or not. First Simmons had shared his emotions, and now CB was doing the same? There must have been something in the air.
“I know I don’t tell you that much.”
“Ever,” Drew said, and the team laughed.
“But you deserve to hear it now and again. You’re one hell of a team. You proved that in Buenos Aires, and you proved it again by hanging together the last few days.”
Alex suddenly realized what he meant by that. None of them had ratted her out to the general. God, she hadn’t even realized or thought to thank them.
“You all know that this mission is going to be different. We’ll be in a vast facility filled with dark, tight places. There will be vampires, and we will have to kill them. There’s no doubt about that. Even once we locate the reactor control panel we’re looking for, there are no guarantees what condition it will be in and how long it will take to remove it.
“I need everyone to keep a close eye on the time. Get paranoid. There’s no such thing as checking it too much. We’ll be working on a shortened day to begin with, and the facility won’t have a lot of windows. It would be easy to lose track of time. That ain’t happening to this team.
“I also need you to be disciplined. No one goes rogue this time.” He glanced at Alex, but, thankfully, only for a moment. “You don’t hear the order come from my lips, you don’t do it. Got it?”
A chorus of, “Yes, sir!” rang out.
“Good. I don’t need to tell you any more about the challenge we’ll face. No doubt it’s been running through your minds all night. But I will tell you one more thing. This mission is the reason this team exists. I’ve been running to the surface for going on twenty-seven years now, and nothing I’ve done comes close to the importance of what we’re doing here.”
He cocked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the city behind him. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but if we don’t succeed, they die. We Resettle, we die, Daylights or no. And we can’t stay up here without the parts. We talk a lot about the Remnants up here. About how brave and brilliant they were, and how they saved humanity. We have the same chance; you have the same chance, today. I’m not saying they’ll be learning your names in history class, ‘cause that’s not how we do it in the GMT. That’s not why we do it. But you damn well better believe that if we succeed they’ll be talking about the events of today.”
He paused and turned his gaze to the sky. “And if we fail? There won’t be any more history classes. There won’t be any more history.”
CB let the weight of his statement hang over the team for a moment. Then he said, “All right, time to board. We’re going to Texas.”
Chapter 21
Fleming was already there by the time Sarah arrived in the Resettlement headquarters that morning. Try as she might, she was never able to beat him there. It was as if the man didn’t sleep. No one else had arrived yet, which was a good thing. She might not be as dedicated as the Councilman, but she was his most dedicated supporter.
She approached his desk at the front of his room where he was once again poring over the speech they’d written together the previous night.
He looked up as she approached, his eyes alive with excitement. “Whenever I write something I’m happy with, I always go to bed afraid that it won’t seem as good in the morning.”
Well, at least that confirmed he actually slept.
He slammed his hand down on the papers in front of him. “These are even better than I thought! We did well, Sarah. Very well. This is going to move the needle. It will help them understand something big has to be done, and we can’t wait much longer to do it.”
Sarah leaned over and scanned the paper. “I’m still not sure about that opening. You don’t think it’s too bold?”
“If now’s not the time to be bold, when is?”
She couldn’t disagree.
The first ten supporters arrived not long after Sarah. Most were the faithful from Sparrow’s Ridge, which made Sarah a little anxious. Not that she didn’t appreciate every one of them, but she hoped some of Fleming’s supporters in more powerful positions would show up too. People like Steven. Firefly was on a mission today, so of course he wouldn’t be in attendance. And Alex. If she was still staying strong. Sarah hadn’t seen her in days, so she wasn’t sure if she was still supporting Resettlement or if getting caught had scared her back to the straight and narrow. Firefly said she hadn’t spoken a word against Resettlement to him, which was a good sign.
Sarah glanced up from the speech text and saw Fleming staring at the door with wide eyes. She followed his gaze and what she saw made her gasp.
General Isaiah Craig stood in the middle of the hall, two dozen police officers at his back.
“You’re a difficult man to find, Fleming,” the general said.
***
General Craig had d
iscovered Fleming’s location in the usual way—someone had talked.
A badge named Franklin hauled in a young man for smuggling government supplies in one of the less savory sections of Sparrow’s Ridge. Thinking he might be part of a larger operation, Franklin had sat him down in an interrogation room to find out what he knew. The interrogation turned up some unexpected information. Franklin had passed the info up the chain until it got to Captain Keller, who had immediately called General Craig.
Craig could have let Keller and his men handle this bust, but something about this, about the way Fleming and his followers had most likely put the entire ship at risk by starting the fire in Engineering, felt personal. The general would have wanted to be there even if Councilman Stearns hadn’t asked him to take care of it personally.
When they’d arrived, they’d been surprised to find no guard outside the door. Quite the contrary—the doors had been propped open. Apparently, there was a meeting starting soon.
Then they’d stepped inside and found only a dozen people. He’d exchanged glances with Keller. Maybe this movement wasn’t as big as Stearns had made it sound.
On the plus side, the way Fleming went pale when he spotted them was entirely satisfying.
“You’re a hard man to find, Fleming,” the general said.
Fleming quickly regained his composure. He stood up and clapped his hands together. “General Craig! Welcome. Have you come to join the Resettlement movement?”
“I’m afraid not. We need to ask you some questions about a fire.”
Fleming nodded sagely, as if he’d expected nothing less. “Of course. In that case, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. I don’t have any information on the matter. Still, if you have questions, ask away.”
General Craig felt himself bristle at this man’s hubris. To Craig, this man had the smug air of a guilty man who believed he would not be caught. “Not here. I need you to accompany us back the Hub. We’ll talk at badge headquarters.”
Some of the others in the room started to stand, but Fleming waved them back into their seats. Craig was suddenly glad he’d brought so many badges.