by Kate MacLeod
Scout had put on the breathing mask, then a pair of thick safety glasses, and was tugging on a pair of extremely thick gloves that went up past her elbows.
“Get down to the dogs,” she said to Tucker, her voice muffled by the mask.
“What are you thinking, Scout?” he asked suspiciously.
“If Daisy is right and this is booby-trapped, only one of us should be standing here. Get down to the dogs,” Scout said more firmly.
“This is crazy,” Tucker said.
“It’s all we have to try,” Scout said.
“Then let me do it,” Tucker said. “You get to the dogs, and I’ll do . . . whatever it is you think you’re doing.”
“I’m already wearing everything,” Scout said. Then a low hum filled the cave around them, growing in intensity until the rocks around them were vibrating, making the metal supports of the platform under them sing.
“There’s no more time!” Scout said as a bluish glow began to spread across the surface of the gunmetal.
Tucker reached out a hand to touch it, then retracted it with a yelp of pain when it zapped him with a flash of light. Scout smelled the faint scent of burned flesh.
“Run!” Scout yelled, then picked up the largest of the hammers scattered over the platform.
Tucker backed up, ran out of platform, and stumbled back down the first few steps of the staircase, but he didn’t leave.
“Do it now!” he shouted at her as the hum built to an intensity that made both of Scout’s ears ache. The ache was fast becoming acute pain. It felt like her eardrums were going to burst from the pressure in the air around her.
Scout gave a yell that vibrated oddly through the breathing mask, making her sound like a desperate robot.
Then she reached inside the panel with her gloved hands, grabbing and tearing at anything she could reach. She knew she wasn’t getting anything crucial, just miscellaneous cables and wires that probably had redundancies built into the system. The blue energy that danced over the gun glowed intensely around her hands, and her gloves started to smoke.
But the moment she had the main board clear, she stepped back, hefting the hammer. She didn’t know what function this tool normally served, with its handle longer than her forearm and its massive head. But it served nicely for her current purpose.
She swung as hard as she could, pivoting through her hips and bringing all of the muscles of her legs into propelling the swing.
It hit the motherboard with a very satisfying smash. Then Scout’s entire world was one intense blast of light like she was inside the heart of a star.
22
It felt like an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second, but eventually, Scout worked out that she hadn’t just died.
But she might be about to.
Something caught hold of her, and she lurched forward, half running, half nearly falling down the staircase. The blue energy was still crackling up and down the gun barrel, occasionally snapping out and trying to strike her.
The air smelled of burned hair. She hoped it wasn’t hers.
She felt a rawness in her throat and realized she was screaming. She could feel her screams vibrating inside her chest, but she couldn’t hear a thing. She almost wished her eardrums would burst, just to relieve the pain and the pressure.
The hum was more of a whine now, the blue energy dancing up and down the gun barrel snapping and exploding like fireworks all over the inside of the mountain.
Scout finally reached the train car and threw herself inside, grabbing both of her panicked dogs near and hugging them close beneath her with everything she had.
Then, nothing.
The pressure eased off her ears. She was pretty sure the dull humming whine she was hearing now was damage to her eardrums and not an actual thing making a sound in the cave, but she couldn’t be sure.
She tried to sit up and look at her dogs, poor things with more sensitive ears than hers, when she realized something was lying on top of her and she couldn’t get up.
“Get off,” Scout said, too loudly but still barely audible in her own ears. She shifted her shoulders and Tucker fell off to lie on his back beside the dogs.
“Sorry,” he said. She more read his lips than heard him. “Did we do it?”
Scout straightened up, gave the dogs each a pat, then hopped back out of the train car to look up the length of the barrel.
Nothing looked different. The pinpoint of light was only a faint red now, but that would just mean that the last of the sun was disappearing from the sky.
“It must have worked,” Scout said. “We’re not dead.”
“Unless Joelle only said that to get us moving,” Tucker said.
“Or unless she was wrong,” Scout said. “No one ever fired this gun before.”
“Are you okay?” he asked with deep concern. Scout thought it an odd question, then looked down at the smoking remains of the gloves barely clinging to her arms. She peeled them off carefully, afraid she was in shock and that the first glimpse of charred skin would bring a rush of pain.
But her skin was unmarked.
“I guess so,” Scout said, pulling off the glasses and then the mask. “Got lucky.”
Tucker grabbed her wrists and turned her hands over to examine both sides, then pushed back her sleeves. Scout didn’t especially like him touching her, but at the moment she didn’t feel like pushing him away. They had just survived a thing together, and he was only making sure she was okay. She could allow that much.
“We should get back,” Tucker said and climbed back up into the train car. “This is the first place they’re going to go when they realize there’s a problem.”
“Can we get back to the platform before they reach it?” Scout asked. “Otherwise they’ll just see us rushing back and know it was us.”
“If we’re lucky,” Tucker said, already touching the controls to start the elevator taking them down into the train tunnel once more. He looked over at her own hands gripping the edge of the console in anticipation of the lurch that would start their movement down the tracks. “Maybe we spent all our luck.”
“We stopped the gun,” Scout said. “That was the important thing.”
“Your plans just ended here?” he asked. She could tell he was trying to sound like he was teasing her, but the humor just wasn’t there. He was as numb as she was.
“We haven’t averted the war yet,” Scout said. “But if we get caught and . . . taken out of action, the others can finish the job.”
“You’ve made a lot of friends since you left here,” he said.
“I have,” Scout said with surprise. “I hadn’t really thought about that. I never had friends before. It’s a nice feeling to have.”
She expected Tucker to say something self-pitying about his own life trapped on Amatheon, his own lack of friends, but he said nothing, just got their train car rolling back towards the compound.
They rode in silence through the darkness, Scout sitting on the floor with Shadow in her lap and Gert pressed close up against her side. She was just noticing the blacks around the train car becoming very dark grays when Tucker said, “Welcoming party.”
Scout hugged her dogs, then stood up to stand next to Tucker as the train car rolled up to the platform.
There was a veritable crowd waiting for them. Malcolm stood in the middle of it, flanked by a man and a woman dressed like smugglers in clothes of practical cut but flamboyant colors.
Mitch and Kira, Scout guessed. Mitch’s dark hair was shaved close to his pale head, and he was wearing some sort of jewelry that cupped his ear. Kira had her brown hair pulled back in a long braid that reached midway down her thighs.
The train car stopped at the edge of the platform and Scout braced herself, expecting to be ripped out of the vehicle by dozens of hands, but the rebels just waited for her and Tucker to step out.
Tucker tried to grasp her hand, but she pulled it out of his reach, instead unfastening the dogs
’ leashes from where she had tied them.
But she did step out the same time as Tucker did. She could show that much solidarity.
“What did you do to my gun, boy?” Malcolm asked, his voice low but thick with anger.
“I’m not sure what happened,” Tucker said truthfully. “There was a bright light and all this noise, and I thought we were going to die. And then it was all over. Someone messed up a step in assembly, maybe?”
“Not likely,” Kira said, fixing her eyes on Scout. Scout pulled her dogs closer. Gert was giving that subsonic growl she did when she thought someone was threatening Scout. Normally that made her feel protected, to know that her dog had her back, but they were woefully outnumbered here.
“She did something,” Mitch said. “We told you she’d show up, didn’t we?”
Malcolm seemed to notice Scout standing there for the first time. He squinted at her as if not sure if he remembered her if he had met her in life or in a dream. His frown deepened.
“Scout Shannon,” Kira told him, giving Scout a narrow-eyed look. “She’s been making trouble for you and for the Months ever since the governor’s daughter failed to meet you to make the exchange.”
“And Shi Jian,” Scout added. “Don’t forget her. I’ve been making all the trouble I can for her too.”
“Don’t know her,” Malcolm said with certainty. “You, I do.”
“What did you do, Scout?” Kira asked. “What component did you remove?”
“I told you,” Mitch grumbled. “The only way to disable the gun was to disable the firing daemon in the software. And she’s not smart enough to do it.”
“Of course she’s not smart enough to do that,” Kira snapped, and Scout’s cheeks heated. It was true she had no idea what they were talking about, but she wasn’t dumb.
“The firing daemon was in the firmware installed on the fourth hub,” Mitch said. “She must have taken it. She might have it even now in one of her pockets.”
“Search her,” Malcolm said, stepping back to let four of the rebels come forward—two to hold her arms and two to frisk her, apparently.
Gert’s low growl ratcheted up several decibels, and her haunches were pulled all the way up into a fearsome ridge down her back. Shadow snarled, lips curled to show his teeth, tiny but sharp.
“Um,” one of the rebels said. None of them were eager to be the first to try touching Scout.
“I’ll search her if you like,” Tucker said.
“I don’t think so, traitor,” Malcolm said. He punched that last word hard, as if he knew it carried strong images of bullets in the back of brains and bodies tumbled to the bottom of a ravine.
“Someone has to search her,” Kira said.
“Shoot the dogs,” Malcolm said.
“No!” Scout said, hurrying to pass the leashes off to Tucker.
Tucker took them from her, but his eyes were wide and showed far too much white. She sometimes thought his dog fear was a put-on. This wasn’t one of those times.
“They know you’re an ally,” Scout whispered to him. “They’ll look out for you. Just don’t let them go.”
Tucker nodded mutely, and Scout turned, stepping far enough away from the dogs that they couldn’t reach the rebels who held her arms or the ones that checked all of her pockets and then gave her body an excessively thorough pat down.
“Check him,” Malcolm said, and Scout took her dogs back so the same four rebels could give Tucker the same treatment.
“It would have been nice if it had been as easy as pulling something out,” Tucker said. “We could’ve done it and been out of there before the electrical storm started. I think it even singed Scout’s hair in the front.”
Scout ducked her head to hide the front of her hair behind the brim of her hat.
“She must have damaged something,” Mitch said. “If we can figure out what, we can get replacement parts from the Months. We’ll have to wait until the next convergence—”
He stopped when Malcolm raised a hand, then closed it into a fist he pressed close to his own forehead. Like the entire world was trying his patience.
Scout couldn’t help noticing the way that hand shook. How much were they giving him to keep him under their control? Was there a limit?
Was he reaching it?
“Scout, what did you take?” Kira demanded. “You should know we found your little spy on the Months’ ship. She’s in our power now. Her well-being hinges on your own actions. Tell me true: what did you remove?”
Scout ducked her head again and squeezed her eyes tightly shut until the urge to cry passed. She couldn’t think of Sparrow now, not yet.
“I didn’t take anything,” Scout said, blinking one last time, then tipping her head back to look Malcolm directly in the eye. “I didn’t have to. I just found the largest hammer your crew left lying around, and I smashed every component to atoms. You need replacement parts from the Months? You’re going to need to send them a very long list.”
Kira swore under her breath, and Mitch threw his hands up in the air.
Malcolm opened his eyes and stared at her for a long minute. Scout forced herself not to look away from those too-wide pupils darting back and forth in random oscillations, in dark irises that looked like they were caught in red webs of burst vessels.
The fist pressed to his forehead opened, but Scout didn’t get truly scared until she saw that open hand stop shaking as he drew it back to strike her.
Shadow barked in alarm, and Gert put herself between Scout and Malcolm. She strained at the leash Scout held close to her collar, but Scout wouldn’t let her jump on Malcolm. She’d rather take the hit than let Gert bite him. That would surely be the end of Gert.
Then Malcolm shouted a curse at the galaxy at large and turned his back on her. Scout released a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and Tucker stepped up to stand closer beside her. He gave her an imploring look, but she had no clue what it was he was silently asking her to do.
Or not to do.
“Malcolm,” Scout said in her most reasonable voice, putting a calming hand on Gert’s head. It took a lot of ear strokes to settle her, but it was made easier when Tucker dropped to a knee to calm Shadow’s incessant barking. “It isn’t over.”
“No, it is not,” Malcolm said with a growl.
“I’m not talking about war. Forget about war,” Scout said, shooting a look over at Kira. But the woman didn’t seem inclined to try to interrupt, so Scout went on. “The rebellion was started to achieve certain goals. Freedom, fairness, safety. I don’t know if you had an actual mission statement, but I’m sure you knew in your heart what you were trying to do. And it wasn’t revenge for your wife.”
“That’s all in the past,” Malcolm said, but his voice was softening.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Scout said. “We’ve reached a point where you can come to the negotiating table and actually be heard. You’ve given up years of your life for this, years you could’ve spent keeping your head down and caring for your kids. What good will that sacrifice be if you walk away in a huff now?”
“I don’t remember,” Malcolm said. “I don’t remember.”
“I have connections,” Scout said. “I know the governor. I know Bo Tajaki, the man who will almost certainly be awarded custodianship of our world when the court reads out its verdict. And, as much as they love being my enemy, I also know the Months.”
“Why are you listening to a teenager?” Kira hissed at Malcolm. Malcolm turned back around to look at Scout.
“I’m not listening,” he said. “Not yet.”
“You seem like you’re listening,” Kira said, shooting a glare at Mitch that Scout was certain was an accusation of underdosing the rebel leader.
“I’m not listening,” Malcolm said again, “yet. The art of negotiation is not so simple as you think, girl.”
Scout swallowed hard. “You said yet.”
Malcolm sighed as if she were pulling confessions from him. “The governo
r, this Tajaki fellow—they will seem to agree to anything if they think it means they can get a kid like you out of danger. But the moment it comes time to follow through, they’ll have a million reasons why they didn’t promise what you think they said they promised. But they’ll want to be heroic, for you.”
“But not the Months,” Scout guessed.
Malcolm licked his lips and gave her a frightening smile. “Indeed, not the Months. If you can contact them and get them to agree to anything at all . . . well, then we’ll just see where you stand.”
Scout pretended to think it over; then she gave what she sincerely hoped was a confident nod.
She ignored the wide-eyed look Tucker was giving her. She was not crazy.
23
The rebels formed a phalanx around Scout to walk her back to the communications room. But it was a pretty loose phalanx, as the dogs were still growling nervously and none of the rebels wanted to get too close.
Joelle was seated at the same console when they entered the room, but she got up at once to stand with her hand on the back of her chair. She swallowed nervously, and Scout sensed that Joelle was working as hard as she was not to look at the closet door that stood innocuously closed at the end of the room.
Ken and Bente were there as well, but they didn’t look up from whatever they were working on, both grouped together in Ken’s workstation.
“Joelle,” Malcolm said, and his daughter snapped to more rigid attention. “Put a call through to the Months. Scout intends to have words with them.”
“Yes, sir,” Joelle said and slid back into her seat.
Malcolm turned back to the crowd that had followed him into the room. “You all can disperse. I’ll let you know your orders when I have them.”
There was a rumbling of acknowledgments, some more enthusiastic than others.
“Me too?” Tucker asked, hovering in the doorway.
“Why would I need you here?” Malcolm muttered, turning away from him.