While Rusev got ready, Holly and Viola walked to the extension to catch up with Robert and Bo. Both were awake and keen to hear everything about the overnight trip to the Karrier. Holly told Robert as much as she understood while Viola gloated to Bo about her “real meals” from the dining machine and he asked countless questions about what it was like inside the rover.
“Are we going to be there when Rusev tries to make contact?” Robert asked.
Holly hadn’t really thought about this. Despite now once again trusting Rusev beyond any doubt, she certainly wanted to be there and didn’t feel that it would have been fair to exclude anyone else without good reason. “If you want to be,” she replied.
“Ace!” Bo exclaimed. “Can I drive the rover?”
Holly laughed. “No way.”
“Please?”
“Obviously not,” Robert interjected, as surprised as Holly to see how disappointed Bo looked by her answer and how serious his request seemed to be.
“You can sit next to me in the front and hold the wheel when I say so,” Holly added, regretting the harshness of her first response. “How’s that?”
The boy’s face lifted immediately. “That’ll do.”
Holly told them both to get ready and to expect a long day; she didn’t plan on ferrying people to and from the bunker, so she made this very clear.
Since only four people could fit in the rover at one time, Holly briefly returned to the lander to explain that she was going to drive the Harringtons to the bunker first and then return for Rusev. Yury wanted to stay in the lander, but two trips would have been necessary even without Robert and Bo given that Holly didn’t want Dante to be inside the bunker when contact was made. It made perfect sense in her mind to bring the Harringtons to the bunker, bring a fully restrained Dante back to the lander to be watched by Yury, and then return to the bunker with Rusev to get down to business.
Rusev agreed and was in fact glad of the chance to talk to Yury for a little longer; the trip to the bunker — already quick on foot — would take very little time in the rover, but for Rusev even a ten-minute break was highly welcome. She removed her wristband and handed it to Holly, asking her to pass it on to Robert given that she didn’t need it for now.
The drive did indeed pass very quickly, though Bo savoured every second. His childlike wonder over every little detail of the rover wasn’t exactly infectious, but it did make everyone smile. Holly tried to enjoy the drive as much as he did, knowing that her return trip with Dante a few minutes later would be a lot less fun.
Holly pulled up at the edge of the patch of thorny plants and carefully lifted the tall and all-important radio from the rover.
“That’s it?” Robert asked. “It looks like the inside of something. Is Rusev sure it’ll hook up?”
“She seemed pretty sure,” Viola said, taking the words from Holly’s lips.
Robert shrugged, taking their word for it.
Bo took great delight in once again typing in the code. He remembered it without prompt: 2 8 2 8 0 2.
Grav was in their faces with an aggressive stance as soon as the door swung open, but he relaxed as soon as he saw them.
“Who did you think we were going to be?” Bo asked.
“Probably you,” Grav shrugged. “But probably is not always enough.”
Holly proceeded to place the radio on the floor next to the control console, neglecting Grav’s offer of assistance not because the radio was easy to manoeuvre but because any hand-over would carry a needless risk of dropping and destroying their last hope of survival.
“Is Rusev following on foot?” Grav asked.
“No, I’m going to get her now,” Holly said.
With everyone quietly looking at the console and imagining how the day might go, a booming voice suddenly filled the bunker:
“Nobody move.”
Holly turned around immediately, towards the open annex where the rovers were stored and Dante had been confined.
And there she saw him:
Standing free beside the rover.
Grinning like a maniac.
Pointing a pistol right between her eyes.
sixty-three
“Stay back!” Dante ordered.
Holly’s eyes flicked sideways to Grav. A flicker in her mind had raised the notion that he might have been in on it, but the look on his face just as quickly put the idea to bed.
Grav instinctively pulled Viola behind his body to protect her. Robert had already done the same with Bo. Holly stood alone in the middle of the group, no more than five metres from Dante.
“Put the gun down,” she said, trying to sound calm and authoritative. “No one has to get hurt here, Dante. We can talk this out.”
Dante shook his head and gritted his teeth, breathing loudly and irregularly through his nose.
Holly noticed Grav inching away from her, taking Viola with him. She glanced and saw that he seemed to be moving towards the light switch. She lifted her eyebrows as subtly as she could, telling him to go for it.
“Fucking freeze!” Dante yelled, shifting his aim to Grav.
Grav took half a step forward. “Do it, you piece of shit,” he challenged, knowing that Dante couldn’t possibly readjust his untrained aim before Holly took him down as she inevitably would. “You will be on the ground before I am.”
Holly moved further away from Grav. On her other side, Robert and Bo did the same. Their line was now almost semi-circular, with Holly in the centre and Bo and Viola peeking out at the edges.
“I’m warning you,” Dante said. “Both of you. All of you!”
Grav took another step, forward and inward.
This movement had an unintended side-effect which Dante seized upon immediately: he himself took a diagonal step forward and shifted his sights squarely onto the newly exposed Viola. “This is it,” he said, his hands beginning to shake, which Holly took as a worrying sign that he really did mean it. “If the next move you all make isn’t straight backwards, I swear to God I’ll do it the second anyone moves a muscle.”
Holly knew now that she couldn’t afford to risk any reverse psychology or any attempts to get inside Dante’s head. From Grav’s careful half-step backwards, she knew he was thinking the same thing.
“I can’t go any further back,” Robert said.
Dante instinctively turned towards him then callously shifted his focus to Bo.
Holly considered the distances, working out whether she could make it to tackle Dante — who had as much experience discharging firearms as he did riding unicorns — before he could decisively react. She took a deep breath, preparing to go for it.
But before she took a single step, the decision was taken from her. Not by Grav, as she might have expected, but by Robert.
In a rapid double motion, Robert pushed Bo to the ground and charged towards Dante.
He made it halfway before the shot rang out and he collapsed to the floor, clutching his chest.
Dante looked as stunned as anyone. Holly saw the look in his eyes, a horrified kind of regret, for the split-second it took until Grav arrived and tackled him.
Holly grabbed Viola, stopping her from running to her fallen father by pulling her against her own body. Bo was left alone on the floor, gazing open-mouthed at Robert as though his senses were suspended.
Robert’s wristband, having been worn for mere minutes, reported a sudden and potentially devastating blip in his vital signs. On every other wristband in the room, his dot flashed orange. Those wristbands all emitted shrill alarms, but no one could hear them over the two other sounds which dominated the air in a battle for aural supremacy: Dante’s screams and Grav’s punches.
Before long, only the punches remained.
Even when Grav slid the pistol to safety with his left hand, his right didn’t stop.
Satisfied that Dante was no longer capable of posing any kind of danger, Holly let go of Viola and rushed towards Robert. She rolled him onto his back and was instantly disheartened
by the pool of blood that had already collected.
Bo rose to his feet as Grav continued to pummel Dante, whose supine body had long ago stopped resisting.
“Grav, enough!” Holly firmly shouted. “Help us out over here!”
He kept going.
Though it didn’t get through to Grav, Holly’s shout did rouse Viola from her understandable daze. “Enough!” the girl screamed, her voice dwarfing Holly’s and everything else since the near-deafening gunshot.
Grav turned around in response to Viola’s call. Sickening dots of Dante’s blood were splattered across his face. As if pulled from a trance, he looked back at Dante’s lifeless body and wiped most of the blood from his own brow before dashing over to Robert.
Bo already stood over Robert, rhythmically rocking. It was hard to watch, but Holly put a hand on his back to try to offer some kind of comfort.
Viola was now on her knees at Robert’s side, begging Grav to tell her what she could do to help.
Grav pulled Robert’s shirt collar down to take a look at the wound. Holly noticed his shoulders slouch when he saw it, but he retained focus and asked her to hand him the medical box from the large storage unit.
“Dad!” Viola called as Holly fetched the box. “Dad! Can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
sixty-four
Robert was breathing — they knew that much, at least — but Grav remained visibly concerned by the level of blood loss.
After handing Grav the emergency medical box, Holly knelt beside them and saw the bullet wound just below Robert’s collarbone. It was bad, but she knew very well that it could have been so much worse.
As Grav worked to slow the bleeding, Holly couldn’t help but notice how horribly bloodied his right fist was.
“Is he going to be okay?” Viola asked. “Tell me he’s going to make it.”
Grav finished covering the wound. “He is going to be okay,” he said, almost convincingly. “But we have to get him back to the lander. He is going to need to rest and this first-aid kit is worthless.”
“Do you mean you want to take him in the rover?” Holly asked.
“Yes, this one,” Grav replied, pointing to the parked rover on the other side of Dante’s still motionless body. He walked over and dragged Dante out of the way, taking a few seconds to check for a pulse while he was there. He then opened the rover’s door and returned to Robert’s side. “Okay, help me get him into the back seat.”
Holly did as Grav suggested, and both were hugely relieved to see Robert wince and hear him groan under his breath as they carefully placed him inside the rover.
Viola now had her arm around Bo; of the two, she had evidently been far more convinced by Grav’s insistence that Robert would be okay. “Grav says he’s going to make it,” she said, explicitly making this point as she tried to soothe Bo, “so he’s going to make it.”
Bo didn’t react.
With Robert safely in the back seat, Holly insisted that she would drive him and the children back to the lander, with Bo and Viola sharing the front seat beside her. “You can take the other rover,” she said to Grav. “The one that’s outside. You’ll be able to carry Dante up the stairs, right? We obviously can’t leave him unattended.”
Grav hesitated then nodded very slowly, saying the word “right” several times. He turned to Viola and Bo. “You two should go outside and wait for Holly to drive the rover to the edge of the patch. We don’t know how much weight the elevator can take,” he said.
Viola followed the instruction without questioning it, taking Bo with her.
Holly knew that Grav had made up this fake concern on the spot — the elevator had already proven capable of lifting two fully loaded rovers, much less one — and she had a bad feeling she knew why.
“Are you really sure he’s going to be okay?” she asked, hoping she was wrong and that Grav wasn’t waiting to deliver bad news when the children weren’t present to hear it.
“Robert is going to be fine,” Grav said. He then covered his bloodied right hand with his left as though subconsciously hiding it. He looked straight at Holly, evidently forcing himself to meet her eyes, and spoke again: “But Dante is dead.”
sixty-five
“You killed him?”
Grav said nothing. He didn’t apologise and say that he hadn’t meant it; he didn’t deflect and say that Dante had brought it on himself; he didn’t try to reduce the impact of his actions by saying that Dante wouldn’t have been allowed to board the rescue Karrier anyway. All he said was nothing.
Holly tried to compose herself. “You’re going to clean this up on your own, but right now we need to deal with Robert. Press the button to lift the platform when I get in the rover, then close the roof and drive back in the other one. Quickly.”
“I am sorry,” Grav said. “But where the hell did he get a gun?”
“There was one in each rover,” Holly said. “We just found that out on our way to the Karrier. But if we’re going to start asking questions, how the hell did he get loose?”
Grav looked at the ground as he shook his head, clearly disgusted with his own carelessness. “I had to untie him from the bed in the extension to bring him here, but his hands were still bound. His hands were still bound in the rover we came here in and they were still bound in the second rover where I put him, but I did not tie him to anything inside. I did not see any way for him to free his hands or open the door, but he obviously—”
“Just press the damn button,” Holly interrupted.
Grav did so. The platform lifted, frustratingly slowly, and Holly proceeded to drive the rover over the patch of thorny plants to the safety of its edge where Viola and Bo were waiting. They got in, sharing the same seat.
Holly drove as quickly as the rover would allow. Robert shifted in the back seat, beginning to make noises that sounded more like “oww” than the earlier pained and animalistic groans. Viola and Bo turned to see him, and he reacted to Viola’s “Can you hear me?” with a nerve-settlingly affirmative mumble.
“Stay still and relax,” Holly told him. “Everyone is okay and we’re going to make sure that you are, too.”
No one asked whether Dante was included in Holly’s “everyone”; given the difficulty she would have had in answering tactfully without flat-out lying, she was extremely glad of this.
Robert’s eyes were open by the time the rover reached the lander, but Holly soon realised that she wouldn’t be able to get him up the ladder without Grav to assist. She sent Viola and Bo into the lander ahead of her and fortunately didn’t have to wait too long for Grav. He arrived without Dante. When Holly asked where the body was, “gone” was the only answer she got.
“Dante’s dead?” Robert asked, still inside the rover and still in great pain.
Grav was visibly pleased to hear Robert talking, whatever the words, and crouched down to see him. “Forget about Dante; he made his bed. What we are going to do is get you inside, okay? I am going to carry you on my back and you are going to lock your right arm around my neck. Can you do that? Holly will be right behind us.”
“I don’t know,” Robert replied. He inhaled sharply, feeling a sudden twinge. “Is the bullet still there?”
Grav helped him out of the rover. “Do not worry about any of that. The worst is over.”
Understandably, Rusev was waiting at the top of the ladder. Holly and Grav didn’t know how much the children would have told her but imagined that they would have been too concerned about Robert to mention anything about Dante’s condition. This, however, didn’t stop Rusev from asking the obvious question:
“Where’s Dante?”
At this point, while Grav helped Robert onto one of the lander’s beds, Holly made a unilateral decision to reveal the truth in front of everyone in the plainest possible terms. “Dead,” she announced. “Grav tackled him to the ground and he hit his head. He’s dead.”
In one grammatical sense, this euphemistic description was entirely true:
Grav did tackle Dante to the ground, and then he — Grav — did hit Dante’s head… over and over and over again. The syntax of Holly’s answer may have implied that Dante hit his head on the floor or another surface, but the end result was the same. She didn’t yet consider the likelihood that the condition of Grav’s right fist — which was now more bruised than bloody — would raise further questions. For now, all that mattered was Robert; no distractions could be allowed to get in the way.
“And the radio?” Rusev asked. “He didn’t damage that, did he?”
In one way, Holly admired Rusev’s instant focus on the radio. In another, she found the easiness of her shift slightly troubling. She shook her head. “It’s fine, sitting there waiting for us.”
Rusev’s body relaxed, the tension vanishing. “Okay. We should get going, then.”
This level of emotional detachment was too much for Holly. “I think we can wait until Robert is a bit more stable,” she said, quite firmly.
Rusev seemed to consider her words. “Time is quite decidedly against us, Holly.”
“Go then. I’ll be there soon. We’ve got both rovers, anyway.”
“Okay,” Rusev said. She picked up the two flasks that would see her through the day, praised Bo and Viola for being so brave, and set off.
Viola insisted upon watching as Grav extracted the bullet from Robert’s wound. Grav had already injected a potent and fast-acting analgesic which stopped Robert from squirming.
Bo insisted upon no such thing and chose instead to sit with Holly and Yury on the other side of the lander. He remained unusually but understandably quiet.
“Are you excited about the radio?” Yury asked him, speaking in a very gentle voice. Holly expected this from Yury, who was gentle to almost everyone; there was no surprise in seeing him act in such a manner, as there had been when Grav playfully ruffled the boy’s hair the night before.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Bo replied.
This did take Holly by surprise. Worry over his father’s condition was one thing, but Bo had previously been the most consistently upbeat member of the group when it came to evaluating their survival prospects.
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