by Wren Weston
Rapid. Efficient. Accurate.
Head shot.
Sutton’s chuckles when Lila’s time was a tenth of a second too slow to best hers.
Head shot.
Jenkins spinning his wheelchair and popping a wheelie, chanting that neither of them would ever best him.
Head shot. A row of little paper targets.
Head shot. The wetness creeping into her eyes, making it harder to focus.
Head shot. Moans and groans and screaming and writhing on the floor.
Head shot.
Head shot.
Multiple times in the same body if the merc didn’t go down.
Click. Click. Click.
A switch of guns.
Pulling the trigger until ear-splitting bursts turned into clicks once again.
Lila looked at her guns, empty of bullets. She looked around the room, empty now of anything more to shoot. She felt as though she’d knocked back a few shots of whiskey, and she embraced the warmth that loosened her muscles.
It was like walking on a cloud.
It was like breathing a cloud.
She was a cloud. Transparent. Weightless. Floating through space and time. Raining.
Her legs did not touch the floor.
Tristan leaned over his brother, tying a gray bandana over his leg. Blood trickled down the length of it, wetting his black trousers. Dixon didn’t seem to mind. He panted a bit, grinning like a man happy to be alive after a storm churned through the city, leaving nothing but his home, perfect and untouched in its wake.
“It’s okay. The bullet didn’t hit an artery,” Tristan said to her unanswered question.
Unanswered because Lila hadn’t thought to ask.
Fry ran toward the cages, opening their squeaking doors to check on the children inside. “Oracle’s light, the gods were watching,” he called out, cradling the head of one of the girls. “There were a few close calls, but none of them got hit.”
“Thank the gods. Get them out,” Tristan ordered as he pulled hard on Dixon’s knot.
Fry did as he was bid, laying the children out carefully, their heads resting on pillows, their shoulders covered by the blankets that had once lined their cages.
“I never knew you could shoot like that,” Tristan said to Lila, finally turning away from his brother. “No wonder you’ve never taken me up on hand-to-hand training.”
His half-smile dissolved the second he spied her face. Jumping up, he tugged her toward the front of the room and sat her in a chair. “Hey, talk to me.” He caressed her cheeks with raw, swollen hands.
“Did I get shot?”
“No. You’re just…crying.”
Maria stared at the pair, wide-eyed, clutching the gun she’d stolen. She seemed not to know what to do with it or herself.
Tristan gently took the weapon from her grasp and placed it on the table.
“I knew he was full of shit before he even opened his mouth,” Maria said, glancing at Oskar, who still hadn’t looked up from his drooling stupor. “I don’t want to go to Germany. My father has that look in his eyes, the one he used to get when Oskar and I were little and the chairwoman called for him.”
The teen kicked the merc leader in the head. “He put my brother in a dog’s cage.”
Tristan pulled her away from the corpse, and she panned her head at the carnage.
So did Lila. Not because she wanted to but because she couldn’t help herself. Blood and bodies and brains spilled over the cement floor. Shaking death throes. Scraping boots and twitching hands. All of it mixed amid the snoring of those who’d been taken out by tranqs and the moans of those who’d been beaten into unconsciousness and hadn’t yet been tranqed.
Tristan picked up a tranq gun, clenched in a dead Italian’s hand, and fixed those who might wake. They finally slumbered with closed eyes while the dead stared back.
Regrets played in her mind. Regrets that were not her own. The regrets of nearly a dozen people, for her hand had dealt death to most in the room. She’d never erase the sight and smell of so much blood. Not the sounds of the fallen. Not the moans of the injured.
The oracle had been right after all. Tristan had dragged her into the mire to drown. She was a killer now. These were her victims.
And she didn’t feel a damn thing.
Lila focused on Maria. She heard her own voice speak from far away, sounding strange even to her own ears. “Where’d you learn to shoot?”
Maria fiddled with the scarf wound around her neck. “One of the blackcoats used to let me play on the range at night when no one else was around.”
“That’s against protocol.”
“He wasn’t thinking with his protocol. I’ve been perfect so many times. I didn’t do well here, not even close. It’s not the same, is it?”
Lila shook her head, and the cloud of numbness carried her thoughts away.
“The assholes deserved it. They were Italian mercs. This was war. We wouldn’t be standing here right now if either of you hadn’t done what you did.”
Tristan pulled his palm from his pocket. “Toxic, tell me you got that.”
“Is everyone okay?” Toxic asked, her voice echoing in the large room.
“Yes, did you get it?”
“I hit record as soon as you dialed.”
“Do you see now why we left you behind? Where are the others?”
“I told them to hang back until the idiot stopped talking. Then all I heard were gunshots.”
Tristan clenched his teeth. “Toxic, next time we have sixty people ready to rush in and save us, you let them do that, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll tell the other teams to meet up at your location.”
“Good. Have them meet us in the field behind the warehouse. Tell Gwen to start up the fireworks. We don’t need anyone to get suspicious and take a closer look.”
“Already done.”
“Good. Then I need you to make a new AAS flyer. Print up as many as you can.”
“Wait, what?” Toxic asked. “I don’t even know what was on the first one.”
“That’s why it has to be you. Don’t dig up the file for the old one. It can’t look or sound the same. It needs to read like someone copying Peter. Print it on the new paper we bought, and wear gloves. No prints. Tell Shirley to fetch the nitro from the hotel. She has another job.”
“No,” Lila said quietly.
“What?” Tristan dropped his palm to his thigh. He knelt beside her chair, wiping her cheek with his thumb. “We can get it easily. Bullstow’s been too busy to look for it.”
“No, you’re not going to blow something else up.” In her mind, Lila saw bodies exploding. Not just those of the dead, but the bodies of the tranqed.
“This is war. What else can we do? We’ll print off every blueprint we can find of the oracle’s compound, then blow this warehouse to ashes. We could even fake Maria and Oskar’s deaths, make everyone believe that they were killed in the blast. Shaw will get the idea of what they were planning, all the kids will be safe, and none of them—”
Lila shook her head. “I’ll not let you be that person. We’re already drowning. If you do this, we’ll never touch the bottom.”
“Drowning?” Tristan squeezed one of her hands and fumbled with his palm. “Toxic, delay my previous order. Just have everyone meet in the field, you got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
He disconnected and slid his palm into his pocket, then flipped on the jammer in her pocket. “They saw you, Lila. They did this to themselves. I’ll not let them reveal your identity under the serum. I need to protect you. I need to protect—”
“There are more important things. You kill these men now, and no one knows anything. We need to know what the empire is planning, Tristan, not just what they told us while I was stalling. We need real inform
ation. We need the truth serum.”
“You want me to drop them off at Bullstow’s front gate? That’s not happening.”
“No. I want to call the oracle.”
His eyes widened.
“The woman could put a bullet in all of us, confess to Chief Shaw, and still go home for dinner. We partner with her on this one. This is the oracles’ fight, anyway. More theirs than ours, that’s for sure. They should get a say, and it’s more than my father will give them.”
He fixed his gaze upon the sleeping children. “Okay. Fine. We’ll see what she wants to do, but I’m not agreeing to anything. Not yet.”
Lila took out her palm, still numb, her brain barely chugging along. She didn’t need much of it, though, for her call was short. Lila had barely said hello before the oracle interrupted her.
“Are they okay?”
“Yes.”
The oracle breathed a sigh of relief. “I just need the address.”
Lila gave it.
In the front of the room, Maria knelt beside her drugged brother. She’d snatched up Oskar’s hand and brushed her lips upon the back of it.
Oskar dozed on, lost and oblivious to the world.
Tristan might have been as well. He stood beside Frank’s and Dice’s bodies, cursing the tranq darts lodged in their cheeks and noses. They’d been closer to the mercs than the rest, and had suffered for it.
Fry knelt beside them, checking their pulses, then pulled out the darts and flicked them onto the floor. “Frank’s going to be pissed when he wakes up. This is the third time he’s been tranqed in two weeks. I just hope the sensors didn’t malfunction. He got dosed pretty hard.”
“You think he’ll quit?”
“I think he’ll be glad he wasn’t shot. If he’s not, I’ll remind him of what could have happened. It would have been a lot worse if they hadn’t gone for the tranqs.”
“And if they hadn’t wasted so many darts on our coats rather than our skin.” Tristan crouched before Frank and checked his pulse. Satisfied with what he found, he put his friend’s arm gently back on the floor.
“So much for overcomplicated plans, eh,” Fry said as both men stood up. “How about next time, we just bring along a princess who knows how to capitalize on a distraction.”
“Did I mess things up?” Maria asked.
“Quite the contrary. You did much better than me and Dice. We were too busy gawking at the chief.”
Lila’s stomach should have twisted in knots at Fry’s words, but it didn’t.
Hood had been revealed.
How quickly would word spread among Tristan’s people?
How quickly would word spread to Chief Shaw and her father?
“I didn’t see you steal the gun,” Tristan said.
“Of course you didn’t,” Maria said. “I learned how to be ignored a long time ago. Sometimes I borrow things when no one’s looking. He was so busy yapping that he didn’t even feel me take it.”
“It seems you developed quite the skillset as a Wilson slave.”
Dixon scooted back to the wall, using it as a crutch to pull himself up. His gaze fixed on one of the mercs and the bloody puddle underneath him.
One of the many that Lila had killed.
She looked away.
“Let’s go,” Tristan said. “We need to get the others away from here. There are far too many eyes for the number of secrets in this room.”
Fry retrieved Lila’s hood from the floor and tugged it over her head. “We’ll keep your secret,” he promised, squeezing her her shoulder, the same one that had hurt so much all day.
This time, Lila didn’t feel a thing.
Chapter 30
It turned out that the closest teams who might have helped them in the warehouse had encountered problems of their own. Italian patrols had slipped behind several groups, guns drawn, ready to kill. Luckily, the reinforcements had spotted the Italians before the mercs could creep behind their friends. Palms buzzing with advanced warning, they’d all done some creeping of their own, and the mercs had all been darted before they even had a chance to fire.
Superior numbers had saved them.
In the end, three dozen foreign soldiers had entered New Bristol.
Tristan had been more than a little disturbed by the number. Lila should have been disturbed as well.
But Lila was a cloud.
Whoever she had thought herself to be was not who she had become. She had become the oracle’s worst fear. A vision cutting through the her peace. A horrible, grating migraine. A path she’d tried to divert. A darkness. A storm cloud.
The mire.
This was what drowning felt like.
She sat on the tailgate of Tristan’s truck, parked near the warehouse, her feet swinging back and forth. She’d slid her tranq back into her holster, but the guns she’d killed with lay in easy reach. The crickets chirped in the early evening, and the sun had not yet set. Her hood hid her face while she followed the moon’s progress. It floated above the horizon on an assigned course, a path that had been planned by the gods.
Had hers been planned so neatly?
Had this been the plan? Had she done it right, or had it gone horribly wrong?
Had she held the gun, or had it been the gods?
She hadn’t cared much about the gods before, not even when she dreamed of the oracle the week before, but now it all seemed important. If the oracles were the gods’ emissaries, and they’d used her and Tristan’s people to save the children—
Lila retreated into her coat. Her thoughts were too heavy, and she liked floating better.
She liked it very much.
Fry and Tristan carried Dixon out of the warehouse and into a waiting car. They’d buckled Shirley’s knife and holster around his waist. Blood still oozed down his trousers, staining the gray fabric. He’d given Lila more than a few concerned glances as he passed, but there wasn’t time for a chat. His grin had dissolved, as had the adrenaline, and his jaw had clenched tightly against the pain.
Tristan was too worried to let him dawdle.
The driver had peeled away, set on getting Dixon to Doc’s room at the shop.
Tristan’s people had brought the snoring bodies from the fields, friends and enemies alike, for a few friendly fire incidents had occurred during the mercs’ attack. Their scarves trailed in the field, flashes of color popping amid the thigh-high weeds. They loaded up their friends in two loud trucks, chosen because their rumbling engines would cover the snores. Fry and Tristan added Frank and Dice, then slapped the sides of the trucks.
The vehicles pulled away.
Tristan sent all but ten of his people back to their homes and jobs in New Bristol. Those who remained looked as though they’d spent time on a battlefield. They brought out the sleeping young and set them to doze in the back seats of a few cars, with warm blankets tucked over their shoulders. They brought out Oskar next and put him in the back of a truck so that Maria had plenty of space to sit beside him. Her suspicious eyes followed everyone’s movements.
The group then began a search of the surrounding area, finding nothing of interest but the Italians’ vehicles. The four delivery trucks looked new, and none of them had been stolen.
The oracle arrived soon after, her small gray electric car bouncing up and down on the broken road behind the building, flanked by two large trucks. Her door closed in the quiet, and she emerged. She had exchanged her purple robe and slippers for a long gray coat, draping sweater, jeans, and boots.
Workborn clothes.
Six figures disembarked from the other vehicles, all orbiting the oracle as though she were the sun, all wearing workborn clothes as well. They scanned the warehouse as though it were a battlefield.
Lila had never seen a purplecoat before.
Perhaps she saw them now, as anonymous as their
mistress.
Tristan led them to the cars that held the children. The oracle peeked in on them, touching their faces. Once she was satisfied, Tristan led her into the warehouse.
Lila didn’t follow. She didn’t want to see the people she’d killed.
It felt like hours before the oracle returned, followed only by Tristan. Their faces were far more determined than their footsteps, which shuffled upon the concrete.
The truck dipped as they both sat upon the cold tailgate beside Lila.
“You found the girls,” the oracle said, as two purplecoats emerged from the warehouse, keys jingling at their fingertips. “Tristan told me what happened, though I’d already seen most of it in my visions.”
Lila licked her lips. “So I didn’t stop anything, then.”
“You stopped enough. I saw much worse. Believe it or not, this is one of the better outcomes.”
Tristan raised a brow. “I feel as though I’m missing something.”
“You are, but it’s none of your concern. Nor is this mess. It belongs to the oracles. You were right to get me involved, chief. You are not your father’s daughter.”
Lila didn’t know what to say to that. Judging from the blood on the warehouse floor, she was far from being his copy.
Car doors slammed in the distance. Two engines sputtered to life.
“I’m going to finish it. I’m going to take the mercs back to my compound, the dead and the sleeping alike. Their computers as well. I don’t trust your father or his lackeys to investigate this on our behalf.”
Lila wondered if the oracle referred to her or Chief Shaw. “You should tell him about this. You need to be protected. He only did what he did to keep you safe.”
“We don’t need him to keep us safe. Everyone forgets that not so very long ago the oracles were battle queens. We made the decisions for our tribes, not the matrons, not the senate, and certainly not the prime minister or the Allied Council. We answered to the gods, and only to the gods. We saw the paths that triggered our visions, and we saw the same paths. Some we wanted to trigger, others we did not, but we could adjust and adjust quickly when the time called for it. The senate is blind, and so is your father. Perhaps it really is time for the oracles to take charge once again.”