by Kyla Stone
“We are,” Willow said. “And now we need your help again. We have to get to the Settlement.”
Raven tilted her head, studying them. “What for?”
“We need their help.”
“The Settlement doesn’t give help. They’ll take you in. But they don’t leave. They don’t fight.”
“They can’t just hide from the world,” Willow muttered. “Don’t they know what’s happening?”
“Why didn’t you stay at the compound?” Raven asked, ignoring her. “It’s safer there.”
“No, it’s not,” Willow said. “The Patriots can’t be trusted. They’re violent and treacherous. Every single one of them would stab their own mother in the back if it helped their precious cause. Besides, they joined forces with the Headhunters.”
Raven stiffened. “Headhunters?”
“The thugs who attacked us at Sweet Creek Farm—”
“I remember who they are.” Raven scowled. “Cerberus. Does he still wear that white wolf pelt?”
Cerberus was the vicious leader of the Headhunters, the gang of violent bikers who’d survived the apocalypse by trading in-demand supplies—including humans. The Headhunters had taken Elise Black captive. They’d killed Nadira. “Yeah. Why?”
Raven didn’t answer. Her expression closed like a fist, her eyes going hard. She activated her hoverboard and dropped it to the ground. It hovered six inches above the mingled dead leaves and melting snow. “I’ll help you. I’ll take you to the Settlement. But I can’t promise anything. They’re not my people.”
Willow nodded, more relieved than she wanted to admit. “That’s all we can ask. Thank you.”
Willow glanced at Shadow. The wolf stalked through the clearing and stood protectively at Raven’s side. He stared at them with his penetrating amber eyes, his ears pricked forward, looking for all the world like he understood everything they were saying. Willow resisted the instinct to take a step back.
“Let’s go,” Raven said.
Finn scratched the back of his neck with his good hand. “You mean right now? In the middle of the night?”
Raven pointed at their campfire, smoke still swirling up through the trees. “You made yourself a target for humans. A bigger target for predators, with a fresh kill they can smell for miles.”
“Now sounds great,” Finn said swiftly.
Finn and Willow hurriedly packed the tent and their supplies, Willow doing most of the work since Finn was one-handed, his wounded right arm still numb and bound in a sling. She tugged on her boots and refastened them, hissing at the pain in her side. It seemed to be fading a bit, and at least she could move. She was lucky that bruised ribs and a vicious headache were the worst of her injuries.
“Ready for a midnight adventure?” she whispered in Benjie’s ear. He nodded sleepily, rubbing at his eyes. She tugged Benjie’s knit cap over his ears and zipped up his jacket. Her fingers grazed the slashes in the fabric. She repressed another shudder and shoved away the horrible images of what might have been. Together, she and Finn had managed to keep Benjie safe. They could do it again.
When they were ready, Raven set off. She slowed her board to keep just ahead of them. She hovered easily over the twisting roots, fallen branches, and thorny, snow-covered underbrush that Willow, Finn, and Benjie were forced to trudge through on foot.
Benjie twisted around to look behind them at the campsite barely visible through the trees. “Aren’t you gonna call Shadow?”
“He’ll come when he comes,” Raven said.
Several minutes later, the wolf bounded through the woods, veering in to race past Raven and nip at her heels before taking off ahead of them, a shadow among shadows, as silent as his namesake.
An owl hooted from somewhere above them. A wolf howled in the distance. Ten yards ahead of them, Shadow’s ears pricked, his tail lifting. He answered with a howl of his own, lifting his muzzle toward the sky.
“He’s howling at the moon,” Benjie said sleepily.
“A myth,” Raven said. “Projecting their call upward allows the sound to carry farther. Another wolf can hear him over six miles away.”
“Wow,” Benjie said, impressed.
Shadow paused at the edge of a copse of birch trees, glancing back over his shoulder at Raven. He gave an eager, high-pitched whine before plunging into the darkness.
Time passed with aching slowness. The seconds, minutes and hours blurred into the next aching step, the next steaming breath, the burning in her exhausted thighs, the scrape of branches and thorns, the watery darkness sifting all around them. The occasional snap or crunch of something moving deep in the woods pierced her with needles of fear.
Beside her, Raven’s gaze roamed constantly, always scanning her surroundings, taking everything in. Every so often, she stilled the hoverboard to touch a bent twig, or hopped off to squat and brush aside a pile of dead leaves and clumped snow, squinting at the markings of tiny—and not-so-tiny—tracks. She could read the signs of the forest—who or what had traveled there previously. In the dim moonlight, her face was tight with concentration, with focus.
“What is it?” Willow asked.
“A big cat.” Raven brushed off her knees and stepped back on her hoverboard, slightly favoring her left leg. “Leopard. Probably a mod. But best not to take chances.” She turned twenty degrees southeast and kept going.
Willow checked to make sure Finn and Benjie were keeping close. Finn was carrying Benjie on his broad back, hunched forward slightly with Benjie’s arms wrapped around his neck, his good arm around Benjie’s leg. They were busy entertaining each other with silly jokes.
“Why did the cookie go to the doctor?” Benjie asked.
“Because he broke his arm?” Finn guessed.
“No! Because he was feeling crummy. Get it? Crumb-y?”
Finn chuckled. “That’s a good one, Sir Benjie.”
He gave Willow a crooked smile, though lines of fatigue appeared around his mouth and between his brows. Her chest constricted even as butterflies fluttered in her stomach. He was exhausted. They would need to rest soon.
“Not yet,” Raven said, as if reading her mind.
Willow puffed out a breath, watched the white, steaming whorls in the cold air. “Can I ask you a question?” She took Raven’s silence as consent. “You said the Settlement people weren’t your people. I thought your mom lived there.”
“She did.”
“But not you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Raven was silent for a long time; so long, Willow thought she wouldn’t answer. Conversing with Raven was like pulling teeth. Worse than Silas, almost.
Suddenly, Raven halted. She squatted and examined something on the ground. Shadow slunk out of the darkness and pressed in beside her, sniffing the dirt, ears pricked and tail raised.
“Coyote scat,” she said, rising. “Nothing to worry about.”
Willow strained her ears to listen for danger, but it was hopeless over the crunch and snap of their own lumbering movements. She tripped over a tree root hidden beneath the snow and cursed.
“I lived with my dad at our private zoo, Haven Wildlife Refuge,” Raven said finally. “He hardly ever left—he preferred animals over people. He was a war vet. Saw enough that made him believe in being alone. He could survive off the land, taught me what I know. My mom, she wanted…other things. She didn’t like the government, what was happening. The Settlement people did their own thing, kind of off-the-grid, so she decided to live there. I visited her once, but it wasn’t for me.” She fell silent again.
Finn huffed beside Willow, breathing heavily, too focused on hiking through the steep woods to say much. Benjie clung to Finn’s neck, his eyelids fluttering.
She patted Benjie’s back and exchanged another look with Finn. Her heart ached with her love for them. She would kill anyone or anything that tried to hurt them.
She turned back to Raven. “And when the virus came?”
“We didn�
�t know at first.” Raven angled her hoverboard around the trunk of a massive oak tree. “The visitors stopped coming. The keepers got sick. Dad finally switched on the old holoscreen. Then we knew how bad it was. He wanted us to stay put, thought we could ride it out. He didn’t know he was already infected.
“My mother messaged, said she was coming. But she never did. Afterward, I went to the Settlement to look for her. They said she left to find me. Something must have happened to her along the way...”
Raven’s voice trailed off, choked by grief. Willow didn’t know what to say. So she listened, the only thing she could do.
Raven cleared her throat. “Anyway, before my dad died, I went into town to get medicine. The Headhunters saw me. They followed me back to the refuge.” She paused for a long moment. “The Headhunters aren’t good people.”
Willow glanced at her. There was a note of repressed grief and rage in Raven’s carefully controlled voice. Willow couldn’t make out her features in the thick shadows.
No wonder Raven had reacted so strongly when Willow mentioned the Headhunters. Willow had thought it was because of what went down at Sweet Creek Farm, but she was wrong.
“There was a boy with them,” Raven said hesitantly. “Damien. He’s a redhead with piercings. Our age. Did you see him at the compound?”
Willow shook her head, though Raven couldn’t see her in the dark. “The Headhunters are all older.”
“I see,” Raven said, a complicated mix of emotions edging her voice, relief mingled with disappointment.
Willow waited for Raven to say more, but she didn’t. She couldn’t even tell if this boy was someone Raven wanted to see or wanted to kill, or both.
There was so much story hidden within Raven’s clipped sentences, so much Willow still wanted to know about her. But she didn’t ask any more questions. Raven was skittish, and she had just spoken more words at one time than she ever had before.
Willow didn’t want to push her. She knew how hard it was to speak some things aloud.
Maybe tomorrow. If tomorrow would ever come.
4
Gabriel
Twenty-one-year-old Gabriel Ramos Rivera stood three feet from the cliff edge, his hand shielding his eyes as he gazed over the rugged, hilly wilderness to the small speck of the Sanctuary in the distance.
Even in the bitter cold, with thick clouds rolling low over the horizon, it was a spectacular vista—gray-blue mountains looming in the distance, the winter valley below streaked with winding rivers that gleamed like silver. The crisp blue sky stretched out, endless and unbroken.
But they weren’t here for the view.
“This is the closest we can get,” Cleo said beside him. She was dressed all in black, a tight jacket zipped to her chin, her automatic rifle slung over her shoulder, several gun and knife holsters at her hips and thighs. The daughter of the New Patriots commander, Cleo Reaver was always prepared for battle.
Gabriel flicked his field glasses over his eyes and switched from infrared to zoom mode. Five miles below and to their northwest, the Sanctuary clicked into focus. “You sure the Phantom will take down those cannons?”
“I’m sure.”
Cleo pulled up a set of roughly-drawn schematics on her holopad and compared them to their real-time view of the Sanctuary. “Once we’re inside the walls, you’ll take this route here through sectors three and five to reach the plasma wall. Your best bet is to set up here, between these two buildings. You’ll have a clear shot of all eight cannons.”
They spent the next hour working out potential kinks in the mission. Of course, it could all go to hell the second they got inside. Probably, it would. A plan was always fluid. You had to be quick on your feet to survive.
Cleo fell silent for a moment as she pulled a cigar and a lighter out of her pocket, lit the cigar, and puffed out a white circle of smoke. She was Indian, with rich, velvet-brown skin. The sides of her skull were shaved, the top a thick knot of purple braids that tumbled down her back. She tossed her head, fully revealing the burn scar that blossomed below her left eye and stretched across her cheek and jawline to the side of her neck.
Rather than hide her scar, Cleo wore it like a badge of honor. She was tough and fierce and dangerous, capable of cruelty—as an undercover Pyro, she’d beaten and burned Willow with one of her cigars—but Gabriel found himself liking her despite himself.
She rocked back on her heels and glanced at Gabriel out of the corner of her eye. She raised her chin, her jaw jutting imperiously. “You’re a fine-looking guy, Rivera.”
He gawked at her, too startled to speak.
She shrugged. “What? I’m just surprised the Black girl isn’t as into you as you’re into her.”
“That’s a long story,” he said, still trying to gain his bearings. Cleo jumped from rage to calm, and from hate to friendship and back again, in a fraction of a second. She was hard to keep up with. He considered lying, but decided against it. “I betrayed her. I nearly got her killed. It’s a mark of her own character that she doesn’t loathe me. I deserve it.”
She eyed him, her gaze wandering over his face, his broad shoulders and toned chest. “If I went for guys, you and I could be good together.”
He sensed the truth of it, whether he liked it or not. He and Cleo were more alike than different. They were both warriors, brave and fearless in battle, determined and iron-willed, both willing to die for a cause.
But where she was still consumed by her hatred, he was learning to let go. Where she would raze anything in her path, he was no longer willing to kill innocents, no matter how noble the reason.
“I thought you liked Celeste,” he said to change to subject.
Cleo ducked her chin, letting her purple braids fall across her face. His hunch was correct, then. Was she actually embarrassed?
“There’s no time for love in the apocalypse,” she muttered.
“There’s always time for love.” He shook his head ruefully. He sounded just like Micah. “But if?”
Cleo’s scar was smooth and shiny in the dappled shadows. It distorted the right side of her mouth, twisting it downward slightly, so she looked like she was scowling even when she wasn’t. Or maybe she was. It was hard to tell with her. “If is a big word,” she said finally. “But I told you she didn’t betray us, didn’t I?”
A pang of guilt struck him behind his ribs. He’d underestimated Celeste. Again. She hadn’t deserved his suspicion. “You did. Celeste is no fighter—” For a moment, he imagined her gripping a gun, still wearing her white stiletto boots, checking her nails before aiming. But that image was wrong—at least, not completely correct. He remembered the ferocious determination in her face when she’d dropped on top of him at the pizza place deep in the ruins of Atlanta. She’d been bloody and disheveled, but very much alive—and more than ready to slit his throat.
He smiled. “Actually, she is. She’s come a long way. She’s a survivor.” He looked at her askance. “But you know Celeste is an elite, right? She was on the Grand Voyager. Her mother was the CEO of a huge big-pharma corporation.”
Her nostrils flared. “That’s—she’s different.”
“How so?”
Cleo looked away toward the tree line, gnawing her bottom lip, clearly flustered. “She’s not like the other elites, okay? She doesn’t look at me like I’m scum on the bottom of her shoe.”
“Neither does Amelia. Or her mother. Or Finn. Silas just hates everyone, but he’s not prejudiced about it.”
“What’s your point?”
“It hasn’t been an easy-to-digest realization,” Gabriel said slowly, choosing his words with care. “The elites are simply people. Some are malicious. Some are selfish. Ignorant, maybe purposefully so. And there are those who are brave and loyal and kind. Just like everyone else. It isn’t right to destroy them all. We need to take down the corrupt power structure, but we don’t have to kill everyone.”
“I do,” Cleo growled. “Billions of people are dead because of them
. New Patriots. My friends. My mother, if I can’t stop the virus. I have to do this. I will.”
“And if Celeste was inside the Sanctuary?”
Her jaw worked silently for a moment, her eyes hard as shards of flint. She took several puffs of her cigar. “I am a soldier. I was born to follow orders.”
“Your mother’s orders.” When she didn’t respond, he continued, “The same woman who turned her own children into soldiers.”
“We chose this life.”
His eyebrows shot up, incredulous. “When you were ten?”
“You’re wrong.” Her lips pressed into a thin line. “We always had a choice. Yes, she trained us. She showed us there was another way, that we could fight back. But make no mistake. She loves us, too. She is our mother, and we are her children.” Absently, she rubbed the scars laddering her left wrist. “If she told me to die for her, my only questions would be where and how. You understand?”
“I understand better than you think.”
He did. He’d felt that way for his mentor, Simeon Pagnini, the man who’d taken Gabriel under his wing after his parents had died—his mother from a treatable cancer her corrupt insurance wouldn’t cover, his father from despair and hopelessness, wasting away on Silk. Simeon had introduced him to the New Patriots, had channeled young Gabriel’s bitterness and rage into something useful—a thirst for vengeance.
Simeon had taught him tech and hacking, shooting and combat skills, hand-to-hand fighting techniques. He’d been the father Gabriel had never had. Gabriel had given him everything—his devotion, his trust, his life. In return, Simeon had used him, manipulated him, betrayed him.
Gabriel shivered, pretending it was from the cold. Simeon’s stunned, devastated gaze still haunted his nightmares. His own finger on the trigger as Simeon’s body crumpled like his bones had turned to liquid. “Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’re right.”
Cleo glanced at him, her eyes dark and unfathomable. Her expression was closed. She blew out a last puff of smoke and hurled the cigar over the edge of the cliff. Gabriel lost sight of it as it plummeted down into miles and miles of bristling pine trees and thick underbrush.