by K. M. Ruiz
“Promise?”
“Always.”
They were strapped into their assigned seats so tightly it hurt to breathe. Sharra held Lillian’s hand in her own as hard as she could and didn’t let go.
Erik, she thought. I’ll see you soon.
Sharra would remember leaving Earth in flashes, not whole memories. How the space shuttle’s engines roared in her ears and shook her bones. How the g-forces flattened her body against the curve of her seat. The way her breath was forced out of her lungs as the pressure got worse down the two-kilometer-long, curved launch ramp before they were flung into the sky. The sharp pop of her ears over and over as the space shuttle gained altitude, struggling to break orbit on a one-way trip to a new life. The way she never let go of her daughter’s hand.
Left behind on the ground, Gideon watched the space shuttle until he couldn’t see even the spark of it anymore. Beside him in the viewing room, Hu watched Gideon with a frown on his face. “You should have been on that shuttle.”
Gideon pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead. “I don’t need you questioning my actions.”
“I shouldn’t be doing this, Gideon. Nathan wanted you on the Ark.”
“Nathan needs to learn I’m the only one he’s got to rely on. He can’t do that with me in space.”
Hu let out a heavy sigh. “Then let’s find a private room to wait. It’ll give me time to sort out your mind.”
Gideon turned away from the window and the view stretched out beyond it, no longer interested in what it had to offer.
PART SIX
SALVATION
SESSION DATE: 2128.04.09
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 308
“You broke it,” Aisling says as she tugs on the short sleeve of her yellow dress. A wire is caught in the fabric and she frees it with careful fingers. She kicks her feet where they dangle in the air.
“We didn’t break anything,” the doctor replies, not looking up from the datapads on the table.
“Tell that to the people of Río Gallegos.”
The doctor’s head snaps up, face turned toward the two-way mirror near the door. She makes a gesture with one hand, one she has made before.
“Too late,” Aisling sighs. “You’re always too late. Bombs away.”
The doctor slams her hand against the table, shaking it. “We wouldn’t still be in this situation if you helped us!”
“If I could help you, I would, but you would still be in this situation.” The girl slides a little in her chair, her small head tilting back. She stares at the ceiling, with its bright lights, and doesn’t blink. “Please don’t be mad. I’m trying to fix this.”
“How? How are you trying? You’re not giving us the information we need.”
“I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t understand.”
[THIRTY]
SEPTEMBER 2379
TORONTO, CANADA
The Strykers Syndicate was pared down to a skeleton crew over the course of hours. Every Stryker was ordered into the field to deal with the escalating riots, including those who were still recovering from wounds incurred in Buffalo or elsewhere. To stay behind meant dereliction of duty and the promise of instant termination. That was the order of the World Court, and Ciari heeded the warning. Their absence meant Lucas’s small group had far fewer people to run into and risk tipping off the government.
They gathered in a debriefing room, standing around a large conference table that had the small carrying cases stacked neatly across it. Everyone’s attention was on the vidscreen embedded in the wall.
“This isn’t going to trip an alarm, is it?” Jael asked.
“I know government code and I learned a few new tricks while on the run,” Jason said, never taking his eyes off the vidscreen. “They won’t know we’re hooked up where we’re not supposed to be.”
“Will it last?”
“Longer than the measures you’ve got running in Ciari’s office to hide your activities.”
The vidscreen showed a view none of them had ever before seen. A hazy, ethereal blue glow seemed to smudge the center, dividing black from a curve of gray-blue. The cloud formations were gray and thin over a murky blue ocean. The darkening shape of a continent moving into night seen from space was unfamiliar. The old satellite they were using didn’t have the best focus capabilities after decades of floating through space without upgrades. Still, Lucas knew what was happening when he saw it.
“There,” Lucas said, leaning forward, eyes on the grainy picture.
A tiny, brightly glowing dot was lifting off the planet, rising into space. It grew larger, the satellite bringing the shape into focus. It was a space shuttle, the first of many, and no one could look away as it left Earth behind and disappeared offscreen. More space shuttles followed the first.
“That’s the start of it,” Lucas said. “We’ll only have so much time left now. A few days at the most.”
“With the amount of people they need to move, I’d think it would be longer,” Keiko said.
“The launch site was built to house space shuttles, not people. It’s a bottleneck in terms of movement. It’s why the government wanted to do this over the course of weeks, not in the middle of a panic. They can’t hope to ship thousands and thousands of people into space, then put them all into cryo on the colony ship quickly. Cryo is complicated and there are only so many doctors on board the Ark who can oversee the process.”
“Which means a lot of people won’t make it,” Ciari said, staring at the vidscreen.
“If a registered human misses their shuttle to Paris, then there’s no chance for them.”
“And the ones in space?” Threnody said.
Lucas shrugged. “I’ve seen the schematics of the Ark. It’s mostly storage space, bays and bays of cold boxes for cryo sleep and storage units for supplies. Easier to pack bodies in as cargo than as passengers. You use up less space if you don’t have to factor in living quarters for anyone but the crew.”
“Will that ship make it to Mars in one piece?”
“It’s survived over two hundred and fifty years cold-docked in space. It’ll survive a few more.”
Ciari stared across the table at him. “You don’t want it to.”
“I thought we could let them go, let them fly to some uncertain future.” Lucas ran a hand through his hair, nails scratching against his scalp. “We’d have Earth, which is all I ever wanted, but they would return.”
“Are there Warhounds on the space shuttles launching right now?” Quinton wanted to know.
“There will be Warhounds on every single one until Nathan has transferred them all.”
It went unsaid that when the Ark returned from a failed colonization on another world, it would arrive bearing humans and psions beholden to Nathan, who would fight for his rightful place in society. The world didn’t need another war.
“What now?” Kerr said. “You want to stop the launch? How do we do that and save the Strykers as well?”
“Distributing the virus has priority. We’re going to need everyone free to help fight, because we won’t be enough on our own, even merged,” Lucas said.
“Can you be sure they won’t run away?” Samantha said, not looking at her brother. She hadn’t looked him in the eye since letting Gideon go free. “If I was a Stryker and no longer had a neurotracker in my head, I’d go to ground in an instant.”
“When I give an order, Strykers obey,” Ciari said. “You weren’t trained how we were. Don’t believe all of us will abandon our posts. Freedom won’t mean anything if we don’t have a place to stay and live.”
“Speaking of living,” Keiko said. “The government only has half the supplies from the seed bank in the Arctic. I helped Nathan organize the transfer of everything left. If that’s what they were using to replenish the SkyFarms over the years, we’re going to need the rest of it. Where did you ta
ke it, Lucas?”
Lucas smiled at the question. “I see someone found my little message in the wall.”
“Your damn message got a Stryker killed. Where’s the rest of the seed bank?”
“Safe. You don’t need to know where.”
Keiko opened her mouth to argue, but Ciari interrupted her with “That’s all we need to know, Keiko. Leave it be.”
Threnody spared a glance at Jael before saying, “If we want the Strykers to believe what we tell them about the virus, they’ll need to hear the reason from an officer.”
“That’s why Keiko will be with Jason and Quinton to administer the virus,” Lucas said. He cut off Quinton’s protest with a look and a warning touch against the pyrokinetic’s mental shields. “I’m sending Threnody and Kerr on a different mission that requires their powers. Aidan will monitor Keiko’s progress, and when she returns, I’ll teach her the basics of merging.”
“What about them?” Aidan said, pointing at Lucas’s sisters.
The permanent smile on Kristen’s face was half covered by one hand, which she used to prop up her chin. She was seated next to Samantha, tapping her fingers against the edge of the table. “We’re going to the City of Lights.”
“Where is that?” Jason said. “I’ve been to almost every city that’s left in this world. I’ve never heard of that one.”
“Paris,” Samantha answered in a clipped voice. “We’re getting Lucas a sitrep on security at the launch site. No one will question us Sercas being there if humans discover our presence.”
“Is that safe with the amount of Warhounds that will be around? Not to mention the toxicity of the surrounding area.”
“The radiation won’t be as high as it was in the past, but it’s still intolerable, especially if you’re human.” Samantha shrugged. “We need to know what’s happening in Paris now that we no longer have people providing us inside information.”
“It’s been so long, you’d think the radiation would fade,” Jael said. “But it doesn’t. It just gets in your cells and lingers.”
“Sounds like everything’s been decided,” Quinton said, turning his back on the room and the space shuttles on the vidscreen that were still launching. “Come get me when it’s time to go into the field.”
He left, ignoring Threnody when she called out his name. Sighing in frustration, she shoved away from the conference table, calling over her shoulder to the room at large, “I’ll be back.”
Jason’s careful, meticulous hack of the security system that spanned the Strykers Syndicate had been limited. Quinton couldn’t go far. Threnody found him in a room that held rows of empty research terminals, the people who would have manned them currently reassigned. Quinton didn’t immediately look up at her arrival.
“Hey,” Threnody said, putting her back against the door.
“You could have argued,” he said after a moment, letting his hands rest on the edge of a terminal as he glared at her. “You could have done something other than accept everything that comes out of Lucas’s mouth.”
“Where would that have gotten us? This is the only course of action. If it means we have to work apart, then we work apart.”
“You don’t know if this is the only way.”
“Yes,” Threnody said quietly. “I do.”
She had faith in a child that no one alive had ever met, that no one ever would except through saved encrypted files. Maybe Threnody didn’t trust Lucas, but she trusted in his goal, and Quinton couldn’t doubt that, because it meant he’d be doubting her. Quinton shook his head and tried to smile, but it came out wrong, crooked. She saw it for what he meant it to be.
“Damn it,” he whispered. “Why can’t I ever argue with you?”
Threnody shrugged. “Maybe you should have. I’m the reason why we got sent to the Slums in the first place, remember? Maybe if you reminded me to toe the line growing up, fulfill our contracts without arguing, and do as we were ordered, we wouldn’t be here.”
“It wasn’t my place to tell you how to do your job, Thren. It was my place to follow where you led.”
Threnody pushed away from the door and went to his side. She adjusted the flak jacket he wore, settling it more evenly on his broad shoulders. Threnody let her hands rest there, thumbs pressed against the bare skin of his neck. She could feel the electric pulse that ran through his body, a thing she knew just as intimately as she knew her own.
“I’m glad,” Threnody said, “that they gave you to me as my partner, Quin. I don’t regret that, and I don’t regret everything that brought us here to do this. I just hope you won’t either.”
Quinton splayed one hand against the back of her head, fingers digging through her loose hair. He leaned down to press his forehead to hers, staring into her eyes. Conviction filled Threnody’s voice, the same conviction that had gotten them through countless hellish missions over the years. It was a belief that they could survive anything, that they could survive this, and Quinton wondered what he would do without her by his side, shoring him up.
“I don’t regret you,” he said.
She offered up a tired smile, some of the tension leaving her body. They were family, no matter how hard the government tried to beat that belief out of them. A few years shy of thirty, the two of them, and they had survived so much. Psions had long memories, and forgetting anything that happened in their lives was damn near impossible. The neural pathways linking the intricate relationships of memories meant a lifetime could be recalled with crystal clarity. In that lifetime, they would always have each other.
“Come on,” she said, pulling away, eyes clear of everything except determination. “Let’s get back to the others.”
When they returned to the conference room, they found only Lucas and Kerr waiting for them. The vidscreen was running the satellite feed, but nothing of interest was happening. It seemed the launch was at a lull. Lucas focused his attention on Quinton once the other man stepped inside.
“I don’t like disobedience,” Lucas said.
“You’re going to get a lot of it when you free the Strykers,” Quinton said. “If you’re hoping to grind us under your heel when this is over, you’re not going to like what happens.”
Lucas nodded at the door, ignoring the threat. “Go find Jason. He’s with Keiko figuring out the best route for teleportation over the continents.”
Quinton knew a dismissal when he heard one. He still hesitated, wondering if he could get away with remaining in the room. Threnody shook her head. “Go, Quinton. It’ll be all right.”
“Watch your back,” Quinton said as he left. The door slid shut behind him.
Threnody eyed Lucas. “What now?”
“Everyone has their orders but you two,” Lucas said. “I’ll explain what needs to be done after we leave tomorrow.”
“Why?” Kerr said.
“We need to pick up Novak. You need a hacker and Ciari can’t spare one from the Stryker ranks.”
“And you can’t spare Jason,” Threnody said. “When we get Novak tomorrow morning, where are you teleporting us? What do you want us to do?”
Lucas smiled, the expression an echo of Nathan’s ruthlessness, Nathan’s cruelty. “You’re going to steal a bomb.”
[THIRTY-ONE]
SEPTEMBER 2379
PARIS, FRANCE
The streets of London echoed with the voices of rioters demanding entry to the restricted area around the city towers. Bodies were strewn in the street near where military defense holed up, but people still struggled forward over the fallen. Segregation based on the cleanliness of a person’s DNA had been the norm for centuries, rarely challenged, and always rigidly enforced. Now the government was applying segregation to an extent never before seen in society, and the people who had slipped through the cracks all their lives were refusing to be forgotten.
Unregistered humans weren’t the only ones joining the growing worldwide fray. The military, with its scores of quads sent out to police what was left of the world, wer
e made up of a mix of people. Some soldiers came from families that had barely made it into the Registry when the Fifth Generation Act was enacted. Other soldiers called the streets home. City towers refused to have unclean DNA in their midst, and the soldiers who patrolled those areas refused to work in the streets. The military had become as divided as the rest of society. It wasn’t any great shock when it began to break apart and soldiers took opposite sides in the fight.
People held their ground in the streets of surviving cities, waves of protesters hitting against the anchor foundations of sealed city towers. In London, it was no different, and in the early light of morning, its streets were crowded.
Lucas’s group teleported out of Toronto when it was full dark, arriving in London when the sun was starting to rise over the distant horizon. The air had a faint bite of cold to it, an early warning of the oncoming change of seasons. Dawn filtered through an overcast sky filled with smoke and pollution as their feet hit the roof of a tenement with a hard smack. Lucas was executing this part of the plan through shortened teleports, needing to conserve his strength for the oncoming fights ahead. The brief rest everyone had managed before scattering across the world was only that—brief.
A scan of the tenement proved it was almost empty, the majority of its inhabitants drawn to the riots. Lucas looked out over the city as he sent his mind skimming through the mental grid, tagging the population. People on the streets of London were closer to the foundations of the city towers near the Thames than any other territory. He wondered how long the registered humans would last before security was overwhelmed.
“I really hope they don’t burn the city to the ground,” Threnody said as she surveyed the area from behind her helmet. “There’s less toxicity around here and there’s no room in any of the other cities for this population. The bunkers couldn’t handle the overflow.”