No way could he lean far enough through the window to get a bite of the kid. Not unless Billy twisted just right to move Poke out of the way.
Or pulled Poke out.
No ideas, Billy thought. Don’t give the wanker ideas.
The kid sniffed the air. Was he a bloodhound, as well? He’d disguised it well, if he was.
He shook his head as if he knew exactly the contents of Billy’s conversation with Terry. “You answer Mr. Barston’s questions. Then we’ll talk about snacks.” He pushed up his sleeve and waved his bare arm.
Terry licked his lips.
“You don’t have to do that,” Billy said. No more killing. No more taking. He’d promised the princess.
This is Medical Isolation Bay Two. We are cycling up the containment bottle.
Copy that, Medical.
The kid held his chin high. “I understood the job when I took it.”
Commence bottle stability check countdown on my mark.
Copy that, Medical.
Terry pulled out of Billy once again. He reached toward the window like a ballet dancer, his arm extended and his fingers gracefully pointed. He spun as best he could around their shared pin.
His finger just touched the window.
It cracked like a mouth opening. The glass that had been under his finger spread before him like the Red Sea parting.
Mark. The synchronization tone sounded from Billy’s Intrepid friends.
You heard the good doctor! Let’s get our push and slide ducks in a row, people.
That’s why we’re out here, Intrepid.
Why we are out here.
The kid, he didn’t seem afraid as he watched the crack appear. He didn’t even seem surprised. “Emperor Trajan chose Mr. Barston for a reason, Maker of Burners,” he said. “The Draki Prime chose him for a reason.”
Reason? More like chance. But with Fates, there was no chance. Occasionally, you got a little destiny. But mostly fate chased you down and beat the living hell out of you with a baseball bat.
None of which Billy had ever asked for, yet he was out here.
Out here, in a copter, heading toward his final death. Out here, a living bomb with another, deadlier, bomb pinned to his gut. Out here, in the darkness of winter, doing his best to replace a higher-functioning detonator because he owed her his soul.
Because he was going to die. No way around that. But she didn’t have to.
She wasn’t the Ambusti Prime. She wasn’t his Fate. She was the Prime Fate of a good man and a good beast, not the beasts trying to destroy the world.
And the good needed to inherit the Earth, this time. The truly good. The people who would help the survivors rebuild a world worth living in.
His lot in life might have started as chance. It might have started as fate. He didn’t know. Billy, like his Progenitor, was randomness personified.
But this one time, this one moment, he’d hold control. He’d add order.
The kid gripped the specs. “Your vessel is more of a man than you have ever been or ever will be.”
Copy that, Sentinel One.
Terry growled, but Poke held. Billy held, not because he thought himself the man the kid claimed he was, but because he had no other choice. His fate knocked at the containment unit’s door and his fate was to be the Burner Progenitor’s unwanted vessel.
“Tell me why the specs are important,” Billy said to Terry. “Tell me why you want Rysa so badly.” Because he was going to figure this out. And he was going to carry this burden to its bitter and broken end.
Terry froze, as did his chaos. “The universe isn’t strictly cyclical. You need to learn your lessons.”
“Then teach me,” Billy said.
“Our Burner Progenitor remembered, too. He remembered a world where the Incursion made two runs at the Earth. Where they took the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres.”
In Terry’s version of fate, the Incursion circled the Earth twice? “He’s saying that if we don’t stop the Incursion, it will make a run at the Southern Hemisphere when it’s done with the Northern.”
The kid nodded.
“In the reports, the Ambusti Prime went into the chamber with his Burner Progenitor.”
Billy had been correct; Rysa was the firing mechanism.
“The Incursion didn’t close. She didn’t help. They dropped ships for another full day. Our Emperor changed things. We still lost most of the Earth.”
The kid opened his mouth to ask a question, but Billy held up his hand.
“The Ambusti Prime was in camp when I arrived. We became Progenitors from a version where the Prime survived. An earlier version of me became a Progenitor in a time when she didn’t.”
Terry pointed through the hole in the glass. His voice lowered. “She always steps away to save herself. She lives and the world dies because she can’t do her job correctly. We could send in my snack to operate as the detonator and it would have just as much of an effect on the world’s outcome.”
Was this about revenge? Did he want Rysa because he felt his perceived uselessness of her needed punishment?
Terry knew nothing.
“What’s on the specs, Terry,” Billy said.
The laugh that rolled from Terry carried every ounce of Burner resentment every single Burner had ever held. It popped and fizzed with the lifelessness that held them in their semi-dead state. It burned and it scarred and Billy understood it with every fiber of his being.
It still felt evil.
“Targeting-Daten,” Terry said.
“Targeting data?” Billy looked up at the kid. “He says it’s carrying targeting data.” To Terry: “How do you know it’s targeting data?”
Terry snorted. “It smells like what sent us here in the first place. It’s all roll, pitch, yaw, push, and slide.” He sniffed again. “No cadence, though.”
This is Commander William Bower in Medical Isolation Bay Two. Those of us down here want to say thank you to our Sentinels.
The other woman with Rysa, the Shifter, she’d been with a kid named Bower. What was the Intrepid? What was Billy hearing?
Terry smacked his lips. “A little extra spicing isn’t going to change how useless the Ambusti Prime is! It’s supposed to help her figure out where to aim. Too many angles have changed. The date is off. The Incursion’s velocity is different this time around. Even if she did figure out how to use the information on those specs, she’s useless. The data will just make her tastier.”
The man named Commander Bower continued: Thank you for believing in this. Thank you for coming all the way out here.
Billy backed against the chair. He stared at the kid through the hole Terry opened in the glass. “Listen carefully, kid. You take those specs and you go up to the cockpit, got it? And you close the door.”
The kid nodded and turned away to swipe his jacket off the seat next to him.
“And kid?”
He looked up at Billy.
Billy would not speak of the Intrepid people, or about someone fixing what was happening well enough that a Momma Bear and her Sentinel cubs could, someday, test medical systems all the way out here.
Because that kind of what-will-be tech wasn’t built by a world that suffered two passes of an invading force. That kind of testing only happened after the good people of the Earth survived.
Billy sat himself and Terry down in their chair. He wedged Poke in well, for good measure. And he looked up at the kid one last time. “We don’t pass go. We go directly to Rysa Torres Drake.” He pointed at the specs. “We need her to tell us how to use those damned things.”
Because his Rysa wouldn’t choke. His Rysa would win this game.
And give them a world in which to wake tomorrow.
Chapter Forty-Five
Wyoming…
Ladon signaled Officer Seaver, and they pulled the bus off the interstate at the first exit. Their small caravan drove south for a few minutes until Ladon found a small metal shed-barn with a wide, flat area f
or parking. Rysa had seen several buildings like this one in southern Minnesota and along the back roads in Wyoming. She had no idea what the farmers used them for; she’d never asked, either.
This one would serve as temporary parking for a bus full of dragons and their two-man normal escort.
Daisy walked down the back steps first. She moved slowly again—her activation must have started overtaking Rysa’s healing.
Being active prior to her mother dropping the First thing on her should have made the whole activation simpler. But then again, very little of what happened with Fates and Shifters fit into any obvious logic, and Rysa had no sense of how much longer—and with what intensity—Daisy’s activation would take.
There was a logic to the system, though. Patterns to activations. Patterns to the manifestations of abilities, as well. There were probably genetic proclivities to what seer a Fate ended up with. And Burners were probably not nearly as chaotic as the world liked to think.
For once in Rysa’s life, she’d like it all to be obvious so she wouldn’t have to deal with chaos.
Rysa pulled her mom’s pink hat onto her head and stepped off into the freezing, predawn gloom.
The band of red pulsed once and shifted completely into a vivid, screaming neon orange. Then it shrunk away again, under the eastern horizon.
Ladon pulled her close. He didn’t speak or offer reassurances, he just held her tight against his chest.
They were about to be murdered by colors in the sky. Murdered by dragons who were not her dragons. Murdered by desperation and science.
Daisy wrapped her arms around herself and walked toward the front of the bus. She’d found a bright blue Praesagio knit hat, and her cheeks had taken on a pink glow that, if they didn’t know better, would have looked nice.
“I still can’t get through to Dad,” she said.
No international calls were going through, though they still had some local communications. The invaders had taken out some of the satellites but not all; they seemed to be firing on the ones they noticed on the way down and apparently had not, as of yet, fully realized how humans talked to each other.
At least that was the speculation in the emergency broadcasts Rysa had picked up.
Rysa had already talked to her mom and dad, and to Derek. She’d cried. She wasn’t ashamed.
It would be nice if Daisy could talk to her father before they jumped into the fire.
Officer Seaver’s cousin—the flirty big guy from the rest stop—parked his truck next to Seaver’s cruiser. He waved once, and grinned sheepishly before ducking into the cruiser’s passenger seat. For a moment, they seemed to yell at each other, then the light of Seaver’s laptop erupted through the interior.
Both men stared, Seaver at his equipment and his cousin out his window.
The dragons twisted out the back door of the bus. Anna followed, then Andreas, who held his phone to his ear. They stepped out into the snow and the whistling chill.
Neither dragon bothered with invisibility. Sister-Dragon climbed on top of the bus, while Rysa’s Dragon made his way to the roof of the small shed.
“Okay,” Andreas said into his phone, then to the group: “We need to stay here for the time being.”
Daisy pointed at the horizon. “Did you see the ring? The Incursion has to be over the Atlantic.” She stomped her foot. “We need to get to the base. I need to be there when Billy arrives.”
Andreas pointed over his shoulder, away from the ring, and to the west. “He’s coming to us.”
“What? Why?” Praesagio had Billy and the Burner Progenitor in a containment unit and on a helicopter. They, too, were bound for the base.
Andreas tucked his phone into his pocket. “Billy demanded that—shit.”
The world flickered over to orange. For a split second, Rysa thought one of the dragons had passed by, but this orange glared unnatural and dangerous. Andreas pointed over her head.
She looked toward the horizon.
The Incursion moved. Skipped, really, like a pebble on a pond.
A full two-thirds of the concentric death circles were visible in the sky. They contracted again, and flipped back to red, yellow, blue.
The Incursion’s lack-of-center shimmered above the Earth. More precisely, its center was not in the middle of the rings, but in them, through them, on the other side of itself.
Three specks dropped out of the non-center—specks that were large enough that she could see them unaided from Wyoming—each shimmering in the Earth’s yellow sun, up there, above the horizon. Then they, too, vanished into the black of the night.
New York, Rysa thought. They just rained destruction onto New York.
She’d never been to New York City. Never walked through Times Square or gone to a Broadway show. Never eaten a New York pizza, or taken the subway.
Not in New York City. Not in Beijing. Not in Tokyo or Seoul. Not in Paris or Berlin, or Amsterdam, either.
Now she never would.
Washington, D.C. is next, her dark Fate said. Then Philadelphia. Then they work their way down the coast.
Rysa had a reoccurring nightmare when she was a child. She’d lay down her fourteen-year-old head and close her fourteen-year-old eyes, and dream about buildings dropping from the sky. Not skyscrapers or apartment complexes or shopping malls, but cubic factories made of steel and soot and smoke. Their faces slid and locked like a toy, and she could never tell what side was top and what was bottom, only that each massive cube was coming to destroy her life.
The fourteen-year-old dream Rysa would stand on the deck of her mother’s north suburban home and look out over the city. Houses sprawled in front of her, as did parks and schools. The twin downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul rose above the trees, and beyond them, the southern suburbs.
She stood on that dream deck looking out over the dream city, always on a beautiful, early summer day. Always under a bright, warm, correct sun.
As the first sooty cube spiraled down from the blue sky above, its iron bones bright in the summer sunlight, teenaged Rysa watched from the supposed safety of her home. She watched this chugging, factory-like, huge thing—so huge that she clearly made out its pipes and rivets even though it descended onto the suburbs thirty-five miles south. She understood the death that it represented.
The dream never came with dread. It never ignited terror in her belly. Her throat never tightened and she never stopped breathing.
Every reoccurrence, every single stone-cold replay buried the dread and terror and suffocation. She watched the end of the world descend onto her life, and all her brain—all her body—could process was, Well, that’s it, isn’t it?
We’re done.
And just like that, the world ends on a trivial note.
All the things that had never mattered finally added up into the one True Triviality. All her what-ifs vanished. All her might-bes winked out. Every possibility collapsed into a reality that just up and decided it wasn’t going to be anymore.
She had no name for the emotion the dream left her with. She didn’t when she was fourteen, and she didn’t now. At the time, her mother had told her teenaged self that she felt ripped from her life in San Diego, sad about her father’s absence, and terrified, like most fourteen-year-olds, of high school.
But now she wondered if the dream, like so many other small moments in her childhood, had pointed to something incredibly large.
In the eastern sky, the Incursion, the impossibility, the thing not built of pipes and horrors and soot, contracted again into a tight, blindingly-bright party balloon.
It looked like a fucking balloon that a sad clown of death would give to a fourteen-year-old child.
“Fuck you,” she whispered. She didn’t want to die.
She didn’t want the world to die. She’d spent the last ten hours avoiding the death of the planet but there it was now, the sad balloon of partying evil hanging in the pre-dawn sky over America.
She would not allow that unnamed emotion of
eternal darkness to take over her soul.
The certainty of hollowness. The sudden, complete cut-off of what-might-be. The end of the what-was-is-will-be for her and her husband and her dragon. For her family and for her friends. For every human on Earth and, strangely, probably for a good number of dragons, too.
Because this, that damned dream-like balloon in the sky, could not have come from the dragons she knew.
“Why is Billy coming to us?” she asked.
“They have… data.” Andreas couldn’t tear his gaze from the Incursion any more than the rest of them could. “That’s what his handler said. Daniel ripped off his optimizers and demanded that Billy take them to…”
He stopped talking just long enough for Rysa to realize that this was the issue they were all hiding from her and Ladon. That the Burner Progenitor and the Whispering One had told everyone but Rysa her part in this.
Andreas frowned, but he said it anyway. “Billy’s been saying words like ‘vessel,’ and that no matter how his Progenitor whines about it, he is going to be playing that part and no one else.”
Vessel, her dark Fate repeated. Sounds familiar.
Daisy cringed.
“Most certainly not his princess,” Andreas added.
Ladon and Dragon growled.
I am the Ambusti Prime, her dark Fate whispered. I am the Prime Fate of the Burners.
No, Rysa was the Draki Prime. Her fate was tied to the dragons.
Which dragons, young one? Her dark Fate snickered.
Rysa looked up at the Incursion. In the center of the primary colors in the sky was a whole different sky.
A different place. A different world. Someplace too red with a too cold and much too large sun, and—
The snow-swept black field beyond the shed winked over to the seething rock of a vision. What should have been corn stalks became writhing shades. What should have been the wide expanse of Earth’s sky became storms and lightning.
Rysa, chained to the clouds. A monster coiled and uncoiled around her. A grand monster, a great one, a god. He would save his people. He would prepare for their coming. He would keep them safe.
The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7) Page 33