I don’t realize how quiet it’s become until I pause to take a breath.
The marines are still spread out through the trees, but most of their flamethrowers are switched off and they’re all looking this way. The featureless black fire masks they have on make it impossible to tell who is watching me and who is watching Shelby.
“There has to be a better way,” I shout, fighting for volume in the smoke-clogged air. “No. There is a better way. I know there is. Just give me some time to find it. Please.”
“They burned us out!” Shelby bellows, jumping up to stand on the seat of the bulldozer jeep. “Now we burn them out. What could be better than that!” She throws her arms wide to indicate the smoke and flames. “This is justice. Plain and simple. So GET BACK TO WORK.”
My stomach drops as I hear flamethrowers roar back to life around me. But then I hear voices. Shouts. Sharp. Angry. Pleading. The squad members are arguing among themselves.
“Sarge?” one of the marines calls. Her fire hood is still in place, but I recognize the voice. It’s Greta Horgan. She used to babysit for us, sometimes, when we were little and she was a teenager. There’s hope in her voice. She’s looking for a reason not to do this.
“No! Not ‘Sarge?’” Shelby whimpers the word in a mocking tone as she jumps down from the jeep and puts herself between Greta and Sarge. “There are no questions here. You have your orders. You follow ’em.” She pivots, including the others in her glare. “You don’t look at him. You. Look. At. Me.”
But Greta doesn’t look at Shelby. She doesn’t take her eyes off Sarge.
“Goddamn it! This is mutiny!” Shelby shouts, turning on me. “You. This is your mutiny. You’re gonna pay for it, too. I’m gonna line you up against a wall and—”
I catch a spark of light just at the edge of my vision. Without thinking, I reach forward and yank Shelby to the ground as a throwing shard punches through the air where she was standing.
Before either of us can react, there’s a stiff whooshing sound and a Sorrow war hammer slams into Greta’s head, spraying fiberglass and blood in all directions as it crushes through her helmet and her skull.
The Sorrow are fighting back.
Sarge hits the deck, screaming orders I can’t hear through the smoke, which is suddenly sparkling with crystal shards and muzzle flashes. Takers are leaping through the trees overhead, dodging bullets at unbelievable speeds as they rain death down on us.
Shelby shoves me away and rolls to her feet, bolting through the trees. I crawl into the roots of the dying tree and press myself into the sticky, wilting mass as the battle rages around me.
Flames. Bullets. Shards. The horrifying crunch of war hammers sinking into flesh.
It’s hard to tell the difference between the oil-slick black of human fire gear and the shadowy folds of Taker robes. Even if I could pick out who was who, I’m not sure which direction to move. Who to trust.
Whose side am I on?
Out of nowhere, Jay’s voice is in my ear.
“Crawl to the next tree when I say go!”
My first, insane impulse is to throw my arms around him, but there’s no time for panic hugging. I twist and see Leela racing through the trees up ahead. Beth and Chris are crouched behind Jay.
“You followed the Takers up?” I guess.
“Seemed like a better idea at the time,” Jay says, his eyes scanning the turmoil that surrounds us, looking for an opening. “Go!”
I scuttle forward, staying low and close behind Jay as he darts from tree to tree. I don’t know where he’s leading us. It’s hard to imagine right now that there’s anything left of the universe that isn’t fire and smoke and death.
Rich yellow light gleams through the smoke to my right. Tarn. He strides through the trees with his light-amplifying cloak swirling around him like sunlight burning through fog.
I veer toward him. Maybe, together, we can put a stop to this.
Then I see the dark smear on the end of his staff.
Blood.
Human blood.
I stop, watching him as he disappears again into the morass.
I thought I knew what despair was. I didn’t. Now I do.
“Friend!” Beth’s voice rings out behind me, sharp with fear. “I’m a friend!”
I spin to see a Taker yank my sister to her feet and swing a hooked, black-bladed knife at her belly. Beth goes limp, throwing her weight backward to avoid the flashing blade. Then Jay is there. He tackles the Taker, grabbing their knife hand and twisting it at an angle that would have broken a human arm. But the Taker’s arm just keeps bending, their lower joint folding back along the middle segment of their arm to plunge the knife into Jay’s hip.
The blade skitters off the hard carbon of Jay’s braces and sticks into the softer bands that strap them to his legs. The Taker yanks, but the knife is stuck fast. Jay takes advantage of the Taker’s surprise to shift his weight and swing his other leg around, driving it into the Taker’s torso.
The Sorrow warrior slumps.
Jay spins and bolts after Beth, who has already joined Chris and me in the shelter of two enormous trees growing from the same trunk.
“Go! Go! Go!” he shouts, waving us forward. He clearly has a plan. I don’t ask what it is, I just run.
Seconds later, the silver and blue of three Prairie-printed flyers loom out of the smoke. The rotors of the first are already spinning. Leela pokes her head through the open rear doors as we approach. “Hurry!” she shouts. “We have to get out of here.”
“We can’t just leave!” I cry.
“You have to.” Sarge’s smoke-harsh voice hurries ahead of him as he limps toward us through the trees. Bloody and panting. “You kids get out of here. Go tell the commander what’s happening. She needs to know.” He meets my eyes hard. “The commander, you hear me, Ensign?”
Mom. Not Grandpa.
“I hear you.”
“We all need to leave,” Beth says. “Immediately.” She points ahead of us through the trees.
“I wish, B,” Sarge says, as I stare past Beth’s pointing finger. Did I just see—
Yeah. I did. Movement. Like someone is carrying a huge mirror through the trees.
“Raptors!” I shout as a human scream punches through the air, followed by the higher, purer shriek of a phytoraptor.
Sarge swears as answering screams of pain and terror and raptor outrage ping-pong around us through the trees.
“Divekar, you go north. Lim, you go south. Get as many people as will follow you back here.” As Jay and Leela race off, Sarge turns to me. “Watson, keep this bird ready to fly.” He pulls out his sidearm and hands it to Beth. “Cover us as well as you can, okay?”
“Sarge!” I protest, but he’s already gone, disappeared into the soup of violence and smoke.
“We aren’t combat trained,” Chris says. I can hear my frustration echoed in his sensible words. “We’d just be a liability.”
“Still,” I say.
“Focus!” Beth says, raising Sarge’s pistol and firing at an unnatural rustle in the branches overhead. A camouflaged raptor shrieks in response, leaping away as Watkins and Munda stagger through the smoke toward us, carrying Horowitz between them. She’s hurt. Bad. Chris and I run to help them get her up the ramp.
More marines follow, staggering into the flyers. Another flyer’s rotors chop to life. Then the third. Thank goodness. I’d hate to be the only hope these people have of getting out of here alive.
Then I hear a familiar voice, shouting curses through the trees.
I run to the bottom of the ramp and peer through the smoke. Shelby is dragging Sergeant Preakness toward the flyer, firing wildly behind her as they lurch along.
Preakness is mostly unconscious and almost twice Shelby’s size. She’ll never make it to the flyer with him. Not alone.
A wiry raptor with huge flapping membranes fanned out around their body charges at Shelby. She shoots them. They don’t stop coming. She shoots again and again, bu
t the raptor is almost on top of her when they finally collapse, their suddenly dead weight sending her sprawling on top of Preakness’s limp form.
I can’t just stand here and watch.
I throw myself down the ramp and race to Shelby and Preakness. I shove the dead raptor off them and hook one of Preakness’s arms over my shoulders. Together, we can almost run with him, despite the blood streaming from Shelby’s knee. She doesn’t say a word to me as we haul her sergeant’s limp form through the trees.
Chris is waiting at the bottom of the ramp. He helps us get Preakness inside, where Leela is now in the pilot’s seat and Beth is helping Jay tie a pressure bandage on Sarge’s shoulder. Below it, his arm looks badly mangled.
I help Shelby lower Preakness into a seat in the back row, triggering his harness to tether in.
“Do we have everyone?” I ask.
“Close,” Chris says. “One of the other flyers is already gone.”
“Take off,” Shelby snarls. Then she grabs the back of my harness and hurls me into a chair beside Preakness.
“Harness, restrain wearer!” she hisses. “Authorization Alpha Zeta 221.”
My tether slithers out around me, binding my arms and legs to the seat.
“What the hell—”
“I told you you’d pay,” Shelby growls, rubbing her hands over the huge smear of blood Preakness has left all down her side.
“Run!” I shout to my friends. “Get off! Now!”
“Nah,” Shelby snarls. “Sit. Stay for the court-martial.” She leans in close and wipes her bloodstained hands down my cheeks. “This is yours. And you’ll pay for every drop. You hear me?”
The flyer’s engines are whining. The chair I’m bound to is pivoted backward. I can’t see who’s flying. It can’t be Leela. She wouldn’t follow Shelby’s orders. Not now. I just hope my friends made it off.
“Sir?”
My heart sinks at the sound of Jay’s voice.
“Jay!” I shout. “No! Run!”
Shelby bursts out laughing.
“Harness,” she snarls, turning to face Jay. “Restrain wearer. Authorization—”
Jay interrupts by punching her in the face.
Shelby stumbles backward, tripping over Sarge’s outstretched boot. He lurches forward out of his chair, pinning Shelby to the deck.
“Go!” he shouts.
Jay lunges at me, brandishing the knife he took from the Taker who attacked Beth. The hooked black blade shears through my harness as if the nanoteflon cord were a blade of grass.
“Hurry!” I shout, fighting the clinging vines of the tether. I can feel the rotors biting into the air. We’re taking off even though the rear doors are still open and the ramp is only half folded.
I throw myself forward as the last bond snaps, pulling Jay with me toward the quickly closing doors.
“Stop them!” Shelby cries, shoving Sarge away. But she’s too late. Jay wraps his arms around me and we leap into open air.
Terror steals the scream from my throat as we plummet. Then Jay’s tether hurtles out behind us to bond with the rising flyer. It snaps taut, breaking our fall, but we’re still few meters from the ground. And rising.
“Hold on!” Jay shouts. Then he swings the black blade again.
The tether snaps.
We hit the ground hard, my weight driving the air from Jay’s lungs in a vicious whoosh that leaves him gasping.
I scramble to my feet and reach down to help him up.
Somewhere in the trees ahead, Leela screams, “Joanna!”
The gunshots crack out even as the word blasts through the air.
I throw myself forward again, putting my body between Jay and the bullet. It’s all I have time to do. But the fleshy thud that follows doesn’t come with a rush of pain or a sudden loss of consciousness.
The shot didn’t hit me.
I roll over and look up to see Shelby retreating into the rising flyer, gun in hand. She just tried to kill me.
Tarn is standing between us. Gleaming yellow blood is spreading across his translucent robes.
“Joanna,” he whispers.
Then he folds in on himself and collapses at my feet.
Nineteen
The thudding of my own pulse fills my ears as I scramble to Tarn’s side and press my hands against his wound to stanch the blood.
“Why did you do that?” I gasp.
“I don’t know,” he rasps. His voice is strange. Thin. Blood bubbles through the gaping hole in his chest with every word. “I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .” He trails off into another sticky gasp.
“Tarn!”
Suddenly Jay’s hands are on my shoulders, pulling me away from Tarn.
“Jo. Come on. Step back.”
I look up and find myself blinded by a blurry rainbow of neon light. I blink furiously. Again. The blinding glow sharpens, resolving itself into a ring of Givers in biolight-amplifying robes standing around us.
Of course. They need to try to heal him. I have to get out of the way.
I stumble to my feet and allow Jay to pull me out of the glowing circle. I’m relieved to see that Beth, Chris, and Leela are tightly bunched beside the ring of healers. A second circle of black-robed Sorrow fans out around us. Putting themselves between us and the phytoraptors who have clustered around the protective circle, perching in the trees and on the ground.
“Why aren’t the phytoraptors attacking?” Leela mutters under her breath.
“They haven’t made an aggressive move since the flyers left,” Beth says.
“Shhh!” Chris hisses. The Givers are starting to sing.
It begins as a sensation, not a sound. A buzz, like touching a low-voltage electrical circuit. It brushes over my skin with staticky fingers.
The Givers raise their arms in a single shared gesture, the voluminous folds of their robes unfurling to make a continuous circle of light around Tarn. The song swells with the motion, exploding into a huge sound so deep, it seems impossible that it could be coming from a group of living beings. The moaning chant booms, so powerful that I can almost see it thrumming through the air. A pillar of pure sound stretching through the forest’s soaring canopy.
Then a second layer of sound soars over their impossibly dense tonal chant. A gentle keening.
What is that? It sounds almost more human than Sorrow, but it definitely isn’t.
The weirdly beautiful hum fills my mind with memories. Physical sensations more than pictures. Teddy’s sandy hands, reaching down to pull me from cold waves the first time he and Miguel took me surfing. Mom’s hand against the small of my back as I climbed up the hot dunes of Death Valley when I was nine. Tarn’s hand, wrapped around his knife in Ord’s back.
“It’s the raptors,” Leela breathes, almost silently.
I look around and realize that the predators are sitting on their haunches, their fanged mouths open in almost comically identical oblongs.
They’re singing.
The contrast between the delicate song and the burly, terrifying beings is so strange and beautiful that I don’t know what to feel. Is “elated” the thing that happens when you’re so terrified, it’s kind of breathtakingly amazing?
“Did the Sorrow know this would happen?” Jay whispers.
“I don’t think so,” Chris says. “Look at the Takers. They’re as surprised as we are.”
I think he’s right. The Sorrow soldiers are still on high alert, looking around at the raptors and at each other like they can’t figure out what to do next.
Finally, they start to lower their weapons, slinging guns and hammers across their backs and sheathing knives. The phytoraptors ignore them completely and keep singing, their attention utterly focused on the glowing Givers as their healing crescendos build. The Sorrow and raptor songs twine together into a strange harmony that feels like a living thing wandering through the air. Then it evaporates, notes and breath drifting apart like morning mist in sunlight.
Silence fills in the space
it leaves behind.
No one moves. Sorrow. Raptor. Human. Even the flames have died out. It’s like the whole forest is holding its breath. Then the cocoon of shimmering fabric opens, robes whirling back around the Givers’ bodies as they kneel in a single motion.
Tarn stands.
His blood-spattered robe hangs open, but he’s glowing like a beacon all on his own.
Our eyes meet.
He rumbles something in Sorrow that blows through the clearing like cold ocean spray flying off the wake of a speeding boat. His Takers and Givers echo it.
The raptors listen. Still intent. Fascinated.
Movement darts through my peripheral vision. Before any of us can react, Bob drops out of the trees and lands in front of Tarn, inside the circle of Givers. My relief to see him alive is quickly followed by a flash of anxiety, as he rears up on his hind legs.
The Takers yank their weapons out again, but Tarn booms a single word, bright as a bugle blast, and they sheathe them once more.
Bob growls. Then he looks past Tarn to me and raises his hands to sign.
Tell.
I sign back with shaking hands, I will.
He turns back to Tarn and begins to sign. My heart breaks as he draws the words from the air with his gnarled hands. I speak them anyway: “We will protect your trees. No. Humans. Here.”
With that, Bob springs straight up, into the canopy.
A rustle of motion sizzles through the trees and the raptors all disappear, melting back into the green.
Twenty
We’re back in the cabin Ord’s Takers brought us to after the Wagon crashed, what feels like several different universes ago. Dr. Brown built this cabin in the massive caverns around the Solace while she was living with the Sorrow. The sparsely furnished space looks the same, except for the fine layer of glittering dust that’s gathered on the cot, storage locker, and portable recycler/3D printer in her absence.
Leela is sitting on the storage locker, her back tense with pain. Her leg got clawed pretty badly while she was helping Sarge sound the retreat. But this time it’s Beth painting her with dermaglue instead of Miguel. I’m sitting on the floor next to the camp bed and Jay is stretched out on it. His braces are charging and he’s got three pain patches on his bruised back.
The Survivor Page 17