If the other man had intended to attack, this would have been the moment. But he hesitated. And now, as she leaped off the bed, she saw a familiar expression on his face.
A human expression. Fear.
Before she could reach him, he’d turned and fled. Out of reach of her blade and her rage.
Leaving the door open behind him, which allowed Mariama to hear for the first time the shouts and screams echoing outside.
* * *
PULLING ON A T-shirt and cotton pants, she went out the door and ran through the earliest gray light of dawn to the edge of the plaza. There she stood still, half-hidden behind a bush, and witnessed the ruin of the colony she’d always considered her own responsibility.
Smoke billowed across the plaza, mixing with the rising morning mist and the twisting skeins of thieves. Figures ran here and there, some recognizable—people she knew, had known for the only part of her life that still seemed real—and others strangers.
Human strangers, some of them, and some not. Some being ridden by thieves, and others that Mariama saw—with a long-buried jolt of recognition—were last-stage hosts. Dozens overall, inexorable, unstoppable as they swarmed the plaza, entered the cabins, captured the Fugians who did not react as quickly as Mariama had.
Some of their captives were naked, the rest clad only in nightclothes. None seemed to be armed or in any condition to fight, and already some were cowering on the ground, awaiting imprisonment or death.
Some, but not all. As she watched, Nick Albright came around a corner and into the plaza. He was carrying a handgun, a semiautomatic .9mm SIG that Mariama had often seen him practicing with on the target range.
But even before he appeared, some of the last-stage hosts were moving in his direction. So, regardless of his gun’s ability to spray its bullets around, he only managed to get off three shots—all at close range, none of which would have required target practice—before he was overwhelmed.
He gave a single hoarse shout as he went down under the onslaught.
Mariama felt a great anger rise up in her, a red anger that filled her skull. She wanted nothing more than to rush into the crowd of invaders, to take them all on, to spill as much of their blood as she could before she died.
But she knew she had to restrain herself. It would be a useless gesture to die for the other Fugians, as Nick had.
Maybe, by holding back now, she could save some of them.
Beginning with one.
She turned away from the carnage and began to run.
* * *
TWO ATTACKERS WERE dragging Sheila, still in her nightgown, from her isolated cabin. Two . . . humans, Mariama thought. Too alert and fast-moving to be last-stage hosts, and she could see no riders.
Two humans attacking her oldest, closest friend.
For just a few seconds more. Then they were merely two humans thrashing on the ground, blood spewing from their slashed throats.
Humans were easy.
* * *
SHEILA WAS STARING at the dying—dead—men. Mariama grabbed her by the arm and yanked her away.
For a moment Sheila, eyes and mouth both wide with terror, fought to escape Mariama’s grasp. Then she seemed to come back to awareness, at least enough to stop struggling and draw in a big, ragged breath.
“Sheila,” Mariama said, “move.”
Finally, Sheila came with her, and they headed away from the plaza and the cabins, away from the shouts and screams, which were already dwindling. The battle for Refugia—if it could even be called that—was coming to an end, half an hour after it had begun.
“Move where?” Sheila managed to say.
But Mariama, leading her forward, was silent. Either her instincts—or maybe they were just hopes—would prove correct, or they wouldn’t. The two of them would live a little longer, or they’d die now.
In either case, there was no need for her to explain.
TWENTY-SIX
THE BOY STOOD atop his aerie in the pouring rain. The storm had come from the north, heralded by billowing dark clouds barely above ground level, that swept over the green lands and obscured the dark hulks of the ruined buildings marking the borders of his territory.
A cold rain, a harbinger of the changing seasons. A warning he had never ignored . . . until now.
He shivered. This was the kind of cold rain that got deep under his skin, the kind that blossomed into a thick weight in his chest that made it difficult for him to breathe. That filled his head with a quantity of green goo—semiliquid—that never seemed to run out no matter how much of it he expelled.
He thought of it as the green sickness. He’d come down with it a few times over the years, and it left him feeling so weak and shaky that it was hard to hunt, and it would sometimes last for days, even weeks, forcing him to rely on his stores.
It came most often in this season, especially when he was cold and wet. So normally he waited out rains like this one in one of his shelters.
But not this time. Not when he had more important things to think about, to accomplish.
And standing here in the cold rain wasn’t the only thing he was doing differently. He’d also been neglecting many of his responsibilities, like gathering firewood, hunting, collecting fruits and nuts, smoking meat for winter stores.
And eating.
He’d always known that food came first. That his chances of surviving—the day, the month, the winter, each year—depended first and foremost on making sure he had plenty to eat. It was a simple, obvious conclusion.
And, equally obvious, it was most important to stockpile food before winter fell, those long months when meat was scarce and crops nearly nonexistent. From the bees hastening from one late-season flower to the next with an urgency they never showed in midsummer, to the squirrels fattening themselves up as they built their winter nests high in the strongest oaks and maples, to the lions, the mother dragging one injured, struggling deer or raccoon after another back to the den for her cubs.
As part of that world, he’d always understood all this. But even so, now he spent hours every day, in every weather, at his game instead. His game. His work. His labor.
His training.
Training he’d neglected for far too long because he’d always believed he was already powerful enough. Until she’d shown herself to him, and he’d seen how truly vulnerable she was. That while he’d been measuring his life in years, hers might have only weeks, days, remaining.
That understanding, that series of revelations, had made his world flip on its head. All this time, he’d been learning the wrong lessons. He’d focused on the honeybees gathering nectar and pollen, the flocks of sparrows somehow feeling storms coming days in advance and feasting on seeds, the mother lion with her bloody prey, and missed the point.
He’d failed to see that the sole point of the bees’ hectic foraging was to keep the queen and larvae alive. That the sparrows spent days, weeks, showing their babies how to find food, and that the mother lion, in bringing back an injured deer, had been training the cubs to hunt for themselves.
Training her cubs. The boy supposed that someone, his own mother, must have taught him to hunt as well. Trained him. Helped him stay alive until he could manage for himself.
Because he couldn’t remember any of that, or her, he’d missed the point.
Training was all that mattered. And he was not yet powerful enough.
No: That wasn’t true. He had the power.
It was something else he was lacking.
* * *
ONCE THE RAIN ended, the fog, chased by the wind, sometimes obscured the world from him—and him from the world—as it passed by.
But he didn’t care what he saw and what he didn’t, not here, not in his world. He was elsewhere, where he didn’t need to use his eyes.
For hours he stood there, until the fog blew away and
the sun broke through, drying his clothes—the mist rising from him like it did from the pond below—and warming his bones.
But he barely noticed. He was still far away, learning.
Learning how to reach out in new ways.
Preparing for the first time to take care of someone else.
His body might be wasting away, but the most important part of him—the only part he cared about—wasn’t. That part was gaining strength.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THERE WAS COMPLETE silence.
No, this wasn’t true. Jason could hear the cawing of crows fighting over something down by the old wharves. The whistle of the wind as it swept through the stone structures around them. Even the whispery sound of the dead thieves’ insubstantial bodies tumbling along the stone plaza, driven by the gusty breeze.
No. Not dead.
Even as he glanced down, he saw one of the wasps’ legs twitch. The tip of another’s stinger, close to where the girl lay at his feet, much too close, gleamed white as it poked from a thief’s abdomen.
Fighting off a sudden surge of panic, he bent over and hoisted her off the ground. She was so light, so insubstantial, all long skinny limbs and matted hair brushing against his face as he lifted her.
She was not dead, either. Still semiconscious, but aware enough to link her arms around his neck and help him hold her as—expecting any instant the attack to resume—he looked around.
The frozen tableau was just beginning to shift again. The last-stage hosts had fallen to the ground, just as their masters had, but they, too, were still alive, making feeble, disorganized motions with their hands and feet.
Watching them, bile rising in his throat, Jason wished for a moment to be free of his burden. With his machete, he could free the camp of these monsters in just a minute or two.
The ridden slaves, five or six of them in view, though deprived of their riders, hadn’t been affected so strongly. But stunned as well by whatever the girl had done, they were moving away, their normally expressionless faces showing something remarkable. Something that Jason never thought he’d see in one. Shock. Even pain.
And the human slaves—
The human slaves were running, saving themselves, like humans almost always did. Heading for the fort’s catacombs. For where Chloe was, if she was still alive, and the breeding chambers, and her father, too.
Again, Jason was desperate to be free of the girl who clung to him. To fight his way into the catacombs or to die trying.
Instead, he turned to look at the leader. She was staring at the girl, but then she transferred the full intensity of her gaze to him. “What did you do?” she asked in a voice like wire.
He shook his head and answered her question with his own. “The others,” he said, and coughed. How long had it been since he’d talked out loud? Freely?
“From your ship,” he went on. “Are they coming for you?”
She gave her head a fractional shake.
“Good.” His gaze flickered over the awakening thieves. Soon enough, the ridden slaves, too, would be back under their control, and the hosts. The attack would resume, and this little pause would have had no meaning.
“Now go,” he said.
In his arms, the girl gave a little moan. The sudden tension in her body showed that she was closer to consciousness.
“And take her with you,” he said.
The male sibling stepped forward to take the girl from him. But the woman stopped him with a glance.
“That man,” she asked Jason. “Is he dead?”
Jason’s eyes sought out the torn-apart form of the stocky one who’d been killed at the onset of the battle.
The woman grimaced. “No. The other. The one they took.”
Jason hesitated for a moment. He could read her thoughts. They were all prepared to die, these brave, foolhardy visitors, in the attempt to rescue the captive. Malcolm.
They would die, and Jason would, too, for no purpose at all. He wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of taking more of the slaves with him before he did.
“I imagine he’s dead by now.”
For a moment her ferocious gaze clouded with what he thought was grief. But then her chin lifted. “We have to be sure,” she said.
“No, listen.” He gestured at the tableau around them. At his feet, some of the thieves were back up on their legs. They moved with unfocused motions, like ones that had been beheaded, but they were coming back, and quickly.
“Either way, he’s beyond your reach,” he said. “Stay alive. Go. Now, or it won’t matter.”
The female sibling said, “Shapiro, look around. If we’re going to move out, let’s do it.”
But the leader, Shapiro, was still staring at Jason. “How many of you are there?”
Of us. “Too many for you,” he said. “And I’m the only one who won’t try to kill you.”
Shifting his grip on the girl, he looked down and saw she was awake and watching them with wide eyes. “Can you walk?” he asked her.
She nodded, then stretched her legs toward the ground. When he let go, she staggered a little on her feet. Placing her undamaged hand on his arm, she kept her balance.
“Take her with you,” he said again to the woman. “Please.”
Shapiro nodded, letting her gaze rest on the strange girl’s face. But for one more moment she hesitated. “And you?”
Jason looked over his shoulder at the slaves gathering for a new attack. Waiting only for the hive mind to recover before they attacked again. Already, some were beginning to approach.
“Me?” he said, looking down at the thieves on the ground nearby. They still weren’t flying, but had regained enough mobility to move away, to seek a safe distance from the strangers’ vaccine. Only his proximity was keeping him alive for now.
He’d expected them to run, to leave him behind, but now in an instant he saw another possible future . . . and the strategy that might make it happen. That could give him the chance to rescue Chloe.
“I’ll be dead thirty seconds after you walk down the stairs,” he said to Shapiro.
Without hesitating, she said, “Then you’re coming with us.”
He shook his head. “No. I’ll stay.”
Her gaze flicked over the mass of thieves covering the yellow-brown walls and stairs. A few of the wasps were already rising into the air—short, hesitant flights, but not for much longer. Two of the last-stage hosts were back on their knees.
“And die the minute we leave?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then feel free to kill yourself,” she said. She turned away from him and headed down the stairs, stepping past the body of her dead shipmate without a glance.
“But do it on your own time,” she called back. “And not until you’ve answered every last one of my questions.”
Jason had been counting on that.
He had no idea how much of the interchange the girl had taken in. But now she looked at him through those strange sea-glass eyes, took his hand in her undamaged one, and, with a tug that was much stronger than he’d expected, led him down the stairs. Staying close to him every step of the way, protecting him with her own force field, the siblings walking close behind.
Jason allowed himself to be led away from the fort, from Chloe.
Were she still alive, he knew she would want desperately for him to escape, to be free. As he would for her, she would willingly sacrifice her life for his.
But that wasn’t Jason’s plan at all. If this chapter of his story ended in death, as the last one did, this time he would not be only a witness.
And if one of them, and only one, would live, it wouldn’t be him. Not this time.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Refugia
“HOW MANY DO you think?” Mariama asked. “I’m guessing . . . three. Four if I’m lucky.”
Her eye to the rifle’s telescopic sight, she was on her knees at the front of the hide, watching the activity in the plaza perhaps two hundred meters away. The hide, which she’d built years ago deep in the crook of a kapok branch and maintained ever since, and which gave a clear view over Refugia’s southern wall.
Though Mariama hadn’t built it for the view, but in case something very much like this happened someday.
“If everything breaks right, maybe five,” she said. Then she paused, thinking. “I won’t even have to worry too much about my aim. Not in this world.”
Sheila, sitting behind her and in the corner of the platform, as far from the railing and the view as she could get, said, “Mariama?”
Mariama ignored her. “Just make them bleed and they’ll die sooner or later. Sooner.” She paused again. “Rather do it clean, though. Clean kills.”
“Mariama.” Sheila’s tone was sharper. “Tell me what on earth you’re talking about.”
Finally, Mariama turned her head and returned her friend’s gaze, Sheila’s expression igniting a different kind of disbelief in her.
From what she could see, Sheila seemed to have spent the past twenty years actively forgetting every lesson the Fall had taught her. Even now, even in the face of all this evidence of human—and thief—nature, she seemed determined to hold on to at least some of her naïveté.
Mariama didn’t have time for it. She had never possessed any illusions about the earth and its inhabitants, and she wasn’t about to start now.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Mariama didn’t bother to hide the edge to her tone. She gestured at the plaza below, where figures were moving around in the morning mist. “How many of them I can kill before they make it to cover.”
Sheila, silent, looked away. Of course she’d known. For some reason, she’d just wanted to hear the words spoken out loud. Maybe she’d thought forcing Mariama to say them out loud would change her mind.
Slavemakers Page 20