Her face was narrower; sharper. She’d lost weight, but she didn’t look sick. No, far from it. As she titled her head and scrutinized him with alarming indifference, he saw the strong line of her throat, and the way her shirt clung to the muscles in her arms and shoulders. She was strong; had been training hard.
The boy he noticed as an afterthought: young, and curly-haired, scruffy-chinned. He didn’t look old enough to be here.
Captain Bedlam lifted her head from the files she was scanning and clocked him in the doorway. “Du Lac, good, I was just going to send for you. Meet your new teammates: Francis Gallo, and Rose Greer.”
“It’s Frankie,” the boy said, meekly. “Or Frank.”
Rose said nothing.
~*~
He found her in the mess, later.
He wasn’t trying to. He took his hot shower – all five allotted minutes of it – and dressed in clean clothes. Lay on his bunk a moment, staring at the low ceiling, until he realized that his stomach was growling, and that his jaw was clenched. That he was angry.
Tris happened by a moment later, in fatigues and a plain black t-shirt that highlighted the size of his biceps, hair wet from the shower and sticking up at wild angles. “You coming?”
“Yeah.”
When they walked into the mess, his gaze found her straight off; locked onto her. She sat at the end of an empty table beside the other new, young recruit, Gallo-I-go-by-Frankie. Gallo was speaking to her, but Rose paused, fork hovering in front of her mouth, gaze lifting up through her lashes and fastening to Lance’s. Like she’d felt him staring.
She stared back, blank-faced.
It wasn’t fair, he thought, as he followed Tris over to the meal line. They’d just buried one member of their team, one whose name he couldn’t remember; whose face was just a blur, a replaceable set of hands to hold a rifle. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, maybe someone’s father, and he’d been nothing to Lance; was nothing to the military. They threw themselves at this mad war every day, and for what? Could they win? Could they turn back the vicious, world-killing tide of heaven vs. hell?
Here was the girl he’d saved, come to throw her life away on a battle they couldn’t win. Because he’d suggested it. Because he’d been a part of the group who invaded her home, and killed her makeshift family, and it was all his fault, really. He wasn’t a hero. Wasn’t saving anyone.
“Lance.” He was aware of Tris calling after him, but didn’t respond. Set his tray of soy-based slop down across from Rose, and sat down hard, unable to keep the scowl from his face.
“S-sergeant du Lac, sir,” Gallo stuttered.
Rose broke off a piece of hard biscuit and dunked it in the gravy on her tray, all without taking her eyes from him. “Lance,” she greeted in a flat voice.
He felt a smirk touch his lips. “Insubordination on your first day, Greer?”
“No, sir.”
“Sir?” Gallo asked.
He ignored him. “You made it through training, then,” he said, nodding toward the jacket Rose had draped across the back of her chair – the one with the silver wings pinned to the collar.
She popped the bite of biscuit into her mouth, chewed and swallowed before answering. She didn’t even blink. “Top of my class.”
“I don’t doubt it. Why did you want to be a Walker? Because I told you that’s what I was?”
She broke off another corner of hard biscuit. “No.” That shouldn’t have disappointed him, but it did, somehow. He’d thought he’d lost the capacity for disappointment. “Because it’s the elite branch, and I don’t care about being common.”
“Rose is really good, sir,” Gallo said in an undertone.
“She is,” Lance agreed, still without taking his eyes from her. Her eyes were the loveliest shade of blue, and expertly shielded. “There’s no shame in being a soldier. Being infantry,” he said. “And out here, on the front lines – it isn’t like being in class. It’s dangerous.”
She brought a finger to her mouth and licked a spot of gravy off the tip with what seemed like purposeful slowness. “I’m aware of that.”
I’m sorry, he wanted to say. I’m sorry about Becket. I’m sorry you’re still so angry about it. But he knew he couldn’t say that, not in front of witnesses, not when she was this guarded.
But he had to say something. “Listen, about–”
“No.” One word, but he saw the flash of intense hurt, and intense anger in her eyes. A momentary spark of hate and fury and loss.
He hesitated, skin prickling beneath his clothes, wondering how one girl could hold so much threat.
The chair beside him scraped out, and the sound snapped the moment. Rose glanced, once, toward Tris, as he settled in beside Lance, and then dropped her gaze to her plate.
Lance chose not to label the dropping sensation in his gut as regret.
“The new kids,” Tris said, his voice flat, glancing between the two recruits. It was a hard gaze, though in a way different from Rose’s; it hinted at too many years seeing too much ugly shit. A disinterest. It wasn’t possible to impress Tristan Mayweather.
Rose didn’t lift her head; ate her food neatly, efficiently, without expression.
But Gallo dropped his plastic fork onto his tray and went comically goggle-eyed. “You’re.” He swallowed with a gulp. “You’re – you’re–”
Tris leaned into Lance’s shoulder. “Is he having a stroke?”
“Tristan Mayweather,” Gallo choked out, finally, expression one of unmasked awe. “I mean. Sir. Sir Mayweather.”
Tris stared at the kid a moment, then frowned and shook his head; stabbed his “meatloaf” with his fork. “It’s just Tris. No ‘sir.’”
Lance found himself biting back a mean smile. “Are you a fan of Sir Mayweather, Gallo?”
“Yes,” he said, right away, and then his cheeks turned pink. Hero worship shone like a beacon on his young face. “I mean. I’ve been studying the Knights for a long time. I always wanted to join up. And I always wanted to be Golden Company. I wanted…” He bit his lip, and trailed off, adoring, disbelieving gaze pinned on Tris – who stared down at his tray, lip curled faintly in disgust.
“Frank,” Rose said, quietly, without lifting her head. “Cool it.”
“Right.” He took a big breath and dug into his food.
Lance regarded his own meatloaf with a queasy feeling in his gut. They were just kids, and tomorrow he’d lead them out into the apocalypse. He wondered if either of them would come back alive.
For Rose’s part, he wasn’t sure she’d care.
~*~
The Knight Companies of the Rift Walkers had been created during the First Atmospheric Rift. Formed in crisis, and maintained ever since; the military had known all along that the conduits hadn’t gone. The Knights hadn’t been disbanded, but reassigned. Lance had started as Air Force, and then been recommended to the Walkers. He’d been embedded with Castor’s people, and his mission, at the end, had been a successful one: the conduit dead, Castor out of the picture.
But, technically, he hadn’t killed that conduit. The man called Daniel. And Arthur Becket had been killed in the process.
Rose had had her world shattered, in the process. And she stared at him now, in the small ready-room where they were all strapping on their gear and going over today’s op.
“This is an extraction,” Lance said. “The target location is here.” He pointed to the screen, the aerial view of an apartment building. Even from above, through drone footage, the disrepair of the city was visible. “The Rangers have a man inside who was able to radio out. Before the transmission was lost, he relayed that there’s something like two-hundred people trapped inside. The Army’s going to get them out in troop transport vehicles. We’re tasked with clearing a path for them. We have to find the conduit, and subdue him long enough to get the civilians to safety.”
He surveyed his team: Tris, Gavin, and the two new ones: Gallo and Rose. Gallo’s face was pale.
Rose snapped on her flame-retardant body armor with her jaw set, her gaze hooded. She looked ready – in spirit if not in form. She looked too small for her helmet, and boots. For the gun she slung across her back.
“Green Company is on standby if we need backup, but otherwise, it’s business as usual.” From the table beside him, he picked up the silver sphere of a wraith grenade and showed it to them; showed the clasp, and the release button, and the cross etched into the side. “We’ve only got one this time, and I’m carrying it. It’s a last resort.”
Gavin and Tris nodded, old hat at this.
Rose’s gaze fixed to it, though. “It’s live?”
“It is.”
“They only had empty shells in training,” Gallo said, voice hushed. “We practiced deploying them.”
“Yeah, well, the real thing isn’t something for you to practice on,” Lance said, more harshly than he’d intended. He pocketed the sphere, and he would have rather had a real grenade, or any sort of live ordnance, resting there in his tac vest, right over his heart. “The helo’s waiting. Let’s move out.”
~*~
For general travel, the Walkers relied on old, pre-Rift technology. Blackhawks, and ancient Hueys; Lance had been on more C1-30s than he cared to remember. Newer, more efficient technology was used rarely, and then, only if absolutely necessary. Too scarce and expensive to waste on something as simple as travel.
Today, this mission, was one of those absolutely necessary moments.
The Nighthawk Challenger 1-11 could hold up to ten passengers, excluding the gunner and pilots; its blades were near-silent; it had to be right on top of you before you registered its existence. It evaded radar, and its hide was a reengineered, conduit resistant kind of carbon fiber that could resist even the most extreme temperatures, its belly shielded and armored.
From headquarters, they flew up and over the low mountains, rotors cutting through the mist, the helo holding a steady elevation beneath Lopez and Chandler’s expert control. They rode with the doors rolled back, the chill, damp mountain air pouring all around them, buffeting their clothes and chafing their cheeks.
Lance gripped the overhead bar and watched Rose, stationed beside him, searching her face as the cloud cover broke, and the helo dropped down into the outskirts of what had once been Salt Lake City.
He could tell that she tried hard not to let her reaction show; but a tightening of her jaw, and a rippling of her throat as she swallowed betrayed emotion.
He’d flown this route a dozen times now, and it still tickled his belly unpleasantly. He couldn’t blame her.
In the months after the Second Rift, the city’s population had come down off the ski slopes; come in from the more remote suburbs, congregating in the heart of the city. Conduit fire had laid waste to buildings; the blackened, skeletal remains of shops and homes and restaurants edged an ever-shrinking heart of overcrowded, sunless, rain-drenched humanity, huddled in crumbling, mildewed homes and apartment buildings, and high-rises. Business no longer existed here. Not the above-board, legal kind.
Ought to abandon it altogether, Tris had said, on their last mission in.
Lance had protested – but it was a protest he found harder and harder to offer.
The clouds rode low and white-gray this morning, blotting out the sun, though it wasn’t raining. Yet. A storm system was moving in on radar, which meant they had maybe an hour before the weather made flying back over the mountains impossible.
As they drew closer to their destination, Lance spotted the troop transports, stationed a few streets over below, ready for their call.
The Wraith Grenade in his pocket felt heavy enough to pull him over the edge and out into the open air; a deadly free fall.
The building appeared, and Lopez circled it, bringing them lower. It wouldn’t land; they would rappel down to the roof, and enter the building that way.
He touched Rose’s shoulder, briefly, before he got into position. When she glanced toward him, he was shocked to register something like excitement in her expression.
The rotors droned overhead, and he leaned in close to say, “Just stay by me. It’ll be okay.”
For a second, he thought she would smile. But then she nodded and turned away, and it was time to disembark.
~*~
If asked, Lance would have said that nothing had the power to surprise him anymore.
The scene they found in the lobby of the building proved him wrong.
They’d hustled down through the building, doing sweeps of each floor. Frightened civilians peeked out of doors; some stared, some retreated right away, some begged for help when they spotted the flags and rank insignias stitched onto their tac vests.
Gavin brought up the rear, and waved them all back. “Lock yourselves in. We’ll send someone for you. Go back inside, please. Wait here.” Sometimes, some brave soul would try to take up a bat or a shotgun and come with them, but today, that blessedly didn’t happen.
Lance was aware of Rose just behind him, her silent steps, her quiet breathing. He could feel her, though: all her coiled excitement and readiness.
On the first floor, he heard sounds below. Muted shouts. Thumps and bangs.
Gallo had their thermal scanner out. “It’s really hot below,” he murmured.
Their conduit. And someone challenging him, apparently.
But when they got to the bottom of the staircase, they found two humming, heated, glowing figures squared off from one another in the open expanse of the lobby. The man, as expected: a scraggly ex-junkie sort with tangled beard and patched clothes.
The other was a woman. A girl. She looked maybe twelve, knobby and gangly, dressed in a flower-printed dress, her hair a sleek, pale bob that framed a childish face with big eyes. Big, glowing eyes, pulsing blue-white and crackling with inhuman power.
Lance raised his gun, and the two conduits lunged toward one another. They collided with a sound like a thunder clap, one that echoed off the walls and mailbox fronts. The girl raked her nails down the man’s face, drawing blood, and a furious growl. He shoved her hard in the sternum, and sent her skidding back across the floor. She collided with the elevator panel with a quiet grunt of pain.
“Why are they fighting?” Gavin hissed. They hadn’t been spotted yet, but Lance knew it was only a matter of time. “Aren’t they on the same side?”
“Shit if I know.”
Tris shrugged, and lined up his sights on the girl: the nearest, and the one with her back to them.
The man lunged for her – but the girl dodged; kicked him in the ribs and got hold of his beard; yanked his head back until he yelled.
“Have you ever seen them do this before?” Rose asked.
“No.”
The two conduits tangled together, slashing, and hissing. Each impact sent a shockwave through the floor beneath their boots.
“Use the grenade,” Gavin hissed. “Get both of them at once.”
A good idea. But Lance hesitated. He couldn’t have said why, and he knew that was dangerous. Hesitation was a death sentence in the field, and he had two brand new young Knights with him, and he–
The male conduit kicked the girl free, turned, and spotted them.
Lance trained his sights on the center of mass, caressed the trigger–
And Rose jumped into the fray.
Lance’s heart stopped.
“Jesus Christ,” Tris muttered.
“Holy shit – Lance!” That was Gavin.
“Rose!” Gallo made an abortive lunge forward, and Tris caught him by the back of his vest and dragged him back.
“Rose!” Lance barked. He sounded furious.
He was terrified.
It didn’t matter, because she ignored him. Rushed right at the conduit, a knife, of all things, bared.
And not just any knife, he realized with a fresh lurch, but a familiar one. The obsidian and ruby blade that had been the only thing remaining after Becket was sucked down into the open hell portal. The hell blade, t
he one Castor’s old conduit, Daniel, had possessed.
It was a big, unwieldy weapon, but she held it in a sure, steady grip, as she ducked the conduit’s reach, spun, and blocked his open-handed strike.
The conduit – like most people, like Lance, at first – was fooled by her size, by her sex. Wasn’t expecting her to come for blood. His face registered a moment’s startlement – and then Rose plunged the dagger into his heart.
It was exactly as it had been with Daniel. A blinding flash of light that he was helpless but to squint against. A pulse of a shockwave, a blast of power that went shooting out through the room, pressing them all back against the wall. As the glare faded, he saw Rose standing above the fallen conduit, the dagger in her hand.
When he could trust his vision enough, Lance charged forward. Rose didn’t shrink back from him when he gripped her arm. Rather, she turned her face up to him slowly, her expression wild with – with something. He refused to call it delight.
She pressed her lips together, and schooled her features, anyway, when she saw him.
“What the hell?” He was shouting, and he never shouted, but he didn’t care. “Are you stupid, or do you have a death wish? You could have gotten all of us killed!”
Murmuring behind him, Tris and Gavin grumbling to themselves, doubting her, probably doubting him.
She lifted her dagger. “Can your bullets kill a conduit?” she challenged.
“Lance,” Tris said, low and hard with warning.
He lifted his head, hand tightening on Rose’s arm, and saw the girl conduit crouching over against the mailbox fronts. She shivered, and stared at them with obvious, open fear – he’d never seen that emotion on a conduit. It had to be an act: a clever angel who’d learned to stall for time. To lure humans in close for the kill.
He dragged Rose into his chest – and she didn’t come willingly. Planted her feet and tugged – but, again, he outmatched her for brute strength. He got an arm around her, like he had that night months ago, and she finally stopped resisting.
Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory Book 2) Page 2