“I bet.” Holt eyed the bucket greedily. It was more ammo than he’d seen in a long time. “Getting tougher to find working guns, most people don’t take care of them right.”
“Or they switched to refurbished Assembly guns,” Russ said.
It was true. He had shot one or two of the plasma cannon some of the more industrious kids had managed to strip off fallen Assembly walkers. They were powerful, but you lost a lot of accuracy. He’d stick with his guns until they fell apart, thank you very much.
Holt handed over the domino case … and the kids descended on it like happy little vultures. Holt dug through the ammo bucket, looking for calibers he could use.
Behind him, Mira was still trading for artifacts. With the ammo bucket holding his attention, Holt didn’t notice Zoey move away from the group and start walking toward the one lone, sealed tent.…
26. BE FREE
SHE HAD CHOSEN HER MOMENT TO WALK OFF, waited until they were all absorbed in the trading.
Zoey didn’t know what attracted her to the tent. Like everything that had to do with the “feelings,” Zoey was simply pulled toward it. There was a certainty in her mind that there was something there for her, and ignoring it wasn’t an option.
Sometimes Zoey felt like a boat in a current, being carried this way and that. She let herself be pulled and pushed, and sometimes it was scary. But she had a sense it was important to let it take her where it wanted. So she did.
Zoey reached the tent. It was zippered shut. The flashlight was still on inside, wavering back and forth. Zoey heard breathing and what she was sure was someone gently crying. She reached for the zipper near the ground and pulled it straight up, opening the tent.
Inside were two kids, both older than the others outside, approaching their twenties.
One was a girl. She was kneeling over the other figure, a boy. Her eyes were red with tears. When Zoey opened the tent, the girl’s hand was resting on the boy’s chest like she was feeling his breath.
The boy was on his back on the floor, unmoving, as if he were sick. But he wasn’t sick, Zoey knew. She noted that his hands and feet were bound, tied with rope. And most tellingly … his eyes were solid black. They stared sightlessly upward, never blinking.
The Tone had taken him.
“Who are you?” the girl asked Zoey, her voice shaking with surprise. “You shouldn’t be here.”
The boy was blank to Zoey: she couldn’t read or sense anything from him. It was the Tone, she somehow knew. Once it took someone, they were inaccessible to her.
But, the girl …
Zoey felt the girl’s emotions wash over her, a rich mix of pain and sadness and anger and … fear. Of being found, Zoey sensed. She’d been hiding. Keeping the boy out of sight from Holt and Mira and herself. Obviously feeling they wouldn’t understand. Her name was Elizabeth, Zoey sensed.
Elizabeth read the thoughts in Zoey’s eyes. “It’s … You don’t understand,” she stammered, eyes welling with tears again. “I just want to go with him. He’s my best friend. I just want to wait until it takes me, too—then we can go together. So … we tied him. That’s all…”
Zoey saw her eyes now, the Tone spreading through them like masses of black veins. She wouldn’t have long to wait.
“Please,” Elizabeth said. “Please don’t tell your friends. Please don’t—”
“Elizabeth,” Zoey said quietly. The older girl stopped talking, staring at Zoey. “I understand. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
Zoey stepped into the tent and knelt down at the boy’s side. Not because Zoey wanted to, but because she was compelled to. There was something here for her, she just had no idea what. Elizabeth didn’t try and stop her.
Zoey’s heart beat heavy in her chest, thumping in her ears. Her hands shook. Pressure built in her head, behind her eyes. Her vision blurred. Time seemed to slow. There was something here for her. What am I supposed to do?
Surrender, the answer came.
Zoey closed her eyes, let the current take her where it would.
The world receded. She felt her hands rise, one resting on the boy’s chest, one covering Elizabeth’s hands. But she wasn’t sure it was really her moving them. From far off, as the world started to go white, and everything dissolved away, she could barely hear Elizabeth’s voice say, “I’m scared.…”
And then it happened.
Be free. The words filled Zoey’s mind … and everything went white.
* * *
THE SUN WAS SETTING on the other side of the river, and Holt was still sorting through the ammo bucket. The kids had brought him the nonperishables (mostly jerky), the sunblock, and the water purifier. He was digging out the last of the 12-gauge shotgun shells from the bucket when a scream ripped the air.
His head snapped up at the sound, eyes coming to rest on the closed tent he’d seen earlier.
Only it wasn’t closed anymore. It was open. And every kid on the Delirium was running toward it.
Then he noticed something genuinely alarming. Zoey was nowhere to be seen.
Instinctively, he looked up at Mira at the other end of the deck, trading for artifacts. She gave him a questioning glance.
Holt cursed under his breath. He’d totally forgotten about Zoey in his excitement over the ammo. He was on his feet instantly, moving for the tent. Had the little girl done something? What could she do? She was eight years old at most.
Holt made it to the tent in a few strides. There was a commotion inside, the kids of the Delirium packed around the entrance. More were on their way, he saw, from the other boats of the trading post. An older girl pushed out of the tent excitedly, and while she was definitely upset, she wasn’t angry or frightened. To Holt she seemed … ecstatic.
Among everyone, he saw Stephanie, the Trade Master, shoving to the head of the surging crowd.
“There was a flash and then it was gone!” the girl yelled at Stephanie and the others. “I watched it dissolve from his eyes! Look at my eyes!” She pointed at them, and there were gasps from the kids surrounding the tent.
“That can’t be,” Stephanie said, not bothering to hide her astonishment. “It just can’t.”
“It is!” the older girl insisted. “Look at Jim! Look at him!”
“What’s going on?” Holt asked. He could feel Mira moving for him at the other end of the boat, but she was still far away.
The others spun around, staring at Holt. It was Stephanie who spoke up. “Jim was one of ours, the Tone took him three days ago,” she began. “Elizabeth convinced us to hold him until it took her, too, so they could go to the Presidium together. They were hiding in the tent—we didn’t want anyone to see.”
Holt understood. Some people got real tense around the Succumbed, not seeing much of a difference between them and the Assembly. They were under alien control, after all.
“So, you’re keeping him here,” Holt replied. He tried to peer past the kids into the tent, but they were crammed too tightly around it. “It’s not smart, but it’s none of my business. Where’s Zoey?”
“That’s just it,” Stephanie said. “Elizabeth claims your friend Zoey … cured her and Jim of the Tone.”
It took a moment for that statement to fully and completely connect in Holt’s mind. Then the weight of it hit him: Cured … the Tone?
“That’s not possible,” he managed to say. But something told Holt that it was more than possible. And that if it was, Zoey would be the one who could do it.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Stephanie replied. She nodded to Elizabeth. “But here we are. Elizabeth’s eyes were almost solid black yesterday.” Stephanie turned back to the tent, “Move out of the way,” she ordered. “Let us inside. Move!”
The crowd parted for her, allowing a view inside the tent, and Stephanie gasped.
Zoey sat at the far end. When Holt managed to see inside, her eyes were already on him. But that wasn’t what had stunned Stephanie and the others. It was the older boy, who was now sitting up
on his sleeping bag, his head in his hands.
“Jim!” Stephanie exclaimed. The boy looked up at her, groggily. Looked up at her with his perfectly clear eyes. Holt was stunned at the sight. The world stopped as the reality hit him.
It was just as the girl had said. The Tone’s effect was gone. Somehow … Zoey had reversed it.
“How’d you do it?” Stephanie asked, her gaze moving from Jim to Zoey.
“I don’t know,” was all Zoey said.
The kids stared at her. They were speechless. But only for a second. Then they started clamoring for Zoey’s attention, begging her to do the same for them. To cure them.
They pushed forward almost as one, like a mad, desperate wave.
They weren’t children anymore; they were something less. Something scary. They sensed survival, right in that tent, and they wanted it for themselves.
For the first time since they had met—a time that had seen Zoey crash-land in a spacecraft, on the run from various Assembly factions, and barely avoiding plasma cannon fire and death—Holt saw terror in the little girl’s eyes.
“Holt!” Zoey cried as the others grabbed and pulled at her.
He lunged forward, grabbed Zoey, and hoisted her up with one fluid motion onto his shoulders. The little girl held on, arms wrapped around his neck as Holt forced his way out of the tent and moved quickly for the riverbank.
The kids followed after him desperately, dozens of them, from all different crews and origins. “Wait! Wait!” they shouted.
“She can save us!”
“We’ll trade anything!”
“Just have her help us!”
“Please!”
They tried to stop Holt, to pull him down, to yank Zoey from his back.
“Get off!” Holt yelled. It didn’t matter. They kept coming, incensed now. How was he going to get out of this? He looked around, saw Mira was already headed for the nearest exit. It was the smart thing to do; she could meet up with them back on dry land. Assuming they made it—the crowd was growing bigger and bigger, and soon everyone in the trading post would be trying to bring them down. What was he going to—?
From the near distance came an awful sound.
A powerful, distorted bellowing, like eerie, electronic whale song, but much more menacing. It was incredibly loud, echoing across the river valley, back and forth. Seconds later, another bellowing answered it, from a different direction.
Everyone stopped, even Holt, Zoey still on his back. They all looked around blindly. But there was nothing to see in the fading light or in the trees flanking the river.
Holt had heard those sounds before. He imagined many of these survivors had. And he knew what they meant: big, scary trouble.
“They’re here,” Zoey whispered into his ear.
The sounds came again … moaning on the other side of the river. The trees along the bank shook as something massive pushed through them, toppling them as if they were twigs, with huge footfalls and the violent splitting of wood.
Trees tumbled over into the river as two red Spider walkers walked powerfully into view on top of them. And the blood of everyone on the trading post went to ice.
Spiders were the larger of the Assembly’s two main walkers (though the green and orange tripods they had encountered in the Drowning Plains suggested there might be other types). Spiders were thirty feet tall and wider than a city street. Agile, fast, powerful, and carrying enough firepower to decimate anything that challenged them. They got their name from the eight large, mechanized legs that held their huge fuselages far above the ground. The combination granted them superior mobility and made them the most feared sight on the planet.
And here were two.…
The traders and boat crews stared in stunned silence, and Holt knew that look well. He’d had it just a few days ago. These kids had never seen red Assembly before.
“What. In. Hell…,” Stephanie, the Trade Master, whispered in awe next to him. Her eyes, like everyone else’s, were glued in place on the red Spiders.
When the huge walkers saw the trading post, they sounded their awful moans again, one time each … and opened fire.
Their plasma cannons whirred to life, screaming as they flung a thick cloud of yellow bolts toward the trading post. The plasma fire burned the air all around them, slamming into everything, spraying sparks and flame and debris.
A boat at the far end of the post exploded in a shower of fire, and Holt saw the kids on its deck thrown like rag dolls into the sky by the blast.
Screams ripped the air, and the crowd that had surrounded Holt before broke apart in panic, running every direction at once.
“Get to your boats!” Stephanie yelled as more plasma fire shredded the air around them. “Dissolve the post, man your defenses!”
Holt looked for Max, saw him a dozen feet away. He whistled two short notes, and Max barked, lunging forward through the crowd, heading back the way they had come.
Holt quickly ran after him.
Behind them, the Spider walkers bellowed as they fired, stepped into the river, and moved toward the conglomeration of boats, their footfalls rocking the ground like thunder. More concussions shook the water.
Holt pushed through the seething crowd as fast as he could. In its own way, it was even harder than before. It was chaos, with kids running everywhere, slamming into him from different directions all at once. It would have been hard enough to balance without Zoey holding on tightly to his neck.
Ahead of him, blending in and out of the crowd, he saw Mira, only a few people ahead. She was having the same problems he was.
“Mira!” he shouted, trying to yell over the plasma fire, explosions, and screams. She heard him and spun, wide eyed, finding him with her gaze.
And then the boat next to him detonated hard, spraying metallic debris and fire in a wicked arc all around him. It blew him to the deck of the barge he was trying to cross.
Holt grabbed Zoey, held her head down as more plasma fire burned past, sizzling as it slapped into three traders above them, blowing them into the water.
Holt peered over the edge of the barge. The Spider walkers were about to reach the trading post, and he could see panels sliding down on either side of their bodies, watched as missile batteries glistening with silver warheads protruded out. Apparently, these reds meant business.
“I’m a lot of trouble, aren’t I?” Zoey asked under him.
Holt looked down at her. “Kid, trouble ain’t the word.”
27. WIND SHEAR
THE RED WALKERS WERE ALMOST on top of the trading post, their huge cannon firing as they advanced. Another boat exploded, launching upward into the air as its fuel ignited.
Mira ran through the panicked crowd, leaping from boat to boat, trying to get to where she’d last seen Holt and Zoey before the blast. Behind her, she caught a glimpse of a gray blue blur. Max had found her and was following.
Half the traders and boat crews rushed to separate the trading post into its different vessels. The other half was readying their defenses. Some boats had guns, others prepped water cannons repurposed from firefighting ships, and a few even had primitive cannons that fired large, welded-together pieces of scrap metal. Most of it, Mira knew, wouldn’t do much of anything against the massive red assault walkers. The traders were used to fighting Mantises or warding off Vultures, not engaging in open combat with Spiders.
Mira leapt onto the barge where she’d last seen Holt and Zoey … and barely avoided landing on them where they’d taken cover on a spool of thick rope. A few seconds later, so did Max, barking wildly.
With alarm, Mira ducked down and looked to where Zoey rested underneath Holt.
“Is she okay?” she asked with concern.
“We’re fine,” he said pointedly. She gave him an annoyed look.
Another explosion, more plasma bolts burning through the air. At the other end of the trading post, the boats had begun to detach from one another. The entire structure started to list as the current caug
ht it.
“I think I brought them,” Zoey said. Holt and Mira looked at her, heard the shakiness in her voice. “I think they found me when I … did what I did.” She looked up at them both with genuine fear.
“Well. Okay,” Holt said, peering over the edge of the barge. They watched one of the boats fire a cannonful of rusted scrap metal at the nearest walker. The projectile bounced off the red Spider’s armor without making a dent. “I’d say that’s an important realization, wouldn’t you? Kind of a ‘note to self’ type thing. Right?”
“Right.” Zoey nodded.
Another blast, a plume of fire shot into the sky. More bellowing from the walkers.
“We’ll figure it out later,” Mira said, taking Zoey’s hand. “Right now, we need to make ourselves scarce.”
Holt got to his feet and surveyed what was left of the trading post.
More and more boats were detaching, gunning their engines, and retreating downstream as fast as they could. Good for them, not so good for Mira and Holt. The remainder of the post was starting to spin, no longer connected to the riverbanks, and the current was carrying it away. If they didn’t get off quick, they’d have to swim for it.
A rapid-fire hissing as one of the walkers launched a volley of missiles. They whizzed through the air, homing in on two of the retreating boats, and slammed home. More concussions as the vessels ignited, careened out of control, and crashed into each other.
They didn’t waste any more time.
Mira pulled Zoey after them, and they all leapt from boat to boat as fast as they could, trying to make it to dry land. But they had a long way to go. More plasma fire ripped the air; trader kids ran everywhere in a panic, hurriedly undoing the ropes and clasps that kept their individual boats tethered to one another.
But it was too late.
The huge walkers reached what remained of the trading post at the same time. One of them raised its front two legs, emitted a deafening, angry sound that rent the air and stabbed downward. The powerful legs impaled straight through the old tugboat like it was made of paper. A pillar of flame shot upward; the hull of the metal ship split in half, spraying metal and bolts everywhere. Mira watched its crew leap off it as it burned, barely making it into the river before a secondary explosion consumed what was left of the ship.
Midnight City: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) Page 18