by Kevin George
Love shook his head but stopped when they heard a knock at the door. Afraid their conversation had been overheard, Love scurried to the foot of Emma’s bed, spreading his wings wide to shield her as the door slowly opened. Expecting Ms. Van Horn or a group of Board members, Love was surprised to see a single human guard standing there, and a woman at that. Still, Love knew Walda Lamb was Head of Security and not to be trifled with, though he was surprised to see such concern etched across her flustered face.
“We need your help,” she said, forcing out the words as she struggled to catch her breath. “Intruders are coming. . . you have to stop them.”
“I’m not a warrior,” Love said. “You have your guards for that.”
Emma leapt off the bed and hurried around Love. Walda Lamb bowed at the sight of her.
“Descendant,” she said with the utmost reverence before turning back to Love, hope replacing panic in her eyes. “Does that mean her blood. . . that He is almost ready to—”
“Are they survivors from the City Below?” Emma asked.
As quickly as Walda’s expression had changed, the wrinkles returned to her brow. She shook her head.
“They’re not coming from that direction,” the head of security told Love. “And they’re not on the ground. They’re up among the clouds and are coming to destroy everyone, the Descendant included.”
Emma and Love turned to each other, their eyes locking. Love shook his head a single time, hoping to prevent Emma from mentioning those that he’d saved.
“How can you know that?” Love said, inching toward the open door.
“They’re flying. . . but not the way you do. They look nothing like you or anyone else on the Board.”
“You’ve. . . seen them?” Love asked.
“Well, no, but they must be dangerous. You’ve heard stories about humans from the past, humans The Mountain was designed to keep out,” Walda said. “Maybe they survived long enough to finally locate us.”
“Or maybe they’re more innocent than you think,” Love said.
“Either way, the Board wants you to go out and stop them before they discover the entrance to the upper level,” Walda said. “I have guards stationed up there with weapons at the ready, ready to fire on anyone that arrives, but—”
“No,” Love snapped, stomping forward. “You mustn’t.”
Walda took a step back and raised an eyebrow of suspicion.
“It’s just. . . I’m sure whoever’s flying out there wouldn’t want to come inside,” Love said.
Walda shook her head. “They’ve already been spotted flying laps around The Mountain. Sensors indicate they attempted to break into the drones’ hangar. No, they’re still out there and they’re coming for us.”
“Go,” Emma said, taking him gently by the arm. “See who’s out there. Send them away or do whatever you need to so there’s no unwanted trouble.”
“But my promise,” Love whispered to her.
“I’ll be okay,” she said.
Love turned to Walda, nodding with a grimace. “I’ll do as you ask, but Emma must remain in her room. There are to be no blood withdrawals without me here.”
Walda sighed. “I have nothing to do with that.”
Love stopped in front of the head security guard, unfurling his wings until they nearly surrounded her. Walda nodded furiously.
“Okay, okay, she’ll be left alone,” Walda stammered. “We have to hurry.”
Walda rushed down the hallway and Love began to follow, stopping just long enough to glance back at Emma standing in the doorway.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Love said.
Emma forced a smile before Love turned and rushed down the hallway, hurrying to keep up with Walda. Love barely paid attention to a pair of guards heading in the opposite direction.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Carli squinted, trying to see farther into the distance through the darkness of her visor and the blizzard swirling around her. Moments earlier, she thought she’d glimpsed a dot of glowing light on the horizon—no, several dots, she told herself—but had quickly lost sight of it as the snows fell heavier. Carli looked up toward Wyatt, who continued to ascend along the side of The Mountain, noticing nothing behind—
A flash above caused Carli to bank hard to the left. She narrowly avoided a rocky protrusion, yet another reason to focus on what was in front of them. After flying several passes around the lower part of The Mountain, Wyatt proceeded higher and higher, where visibility worsened by the minute. Gusting winds nearly blew Carli against a rocky cliff face, so she flew a wider berth, making it nearly impossible to spot any sort of entrance. She barely kept sight of Wyatt. Her heart sank when she thought she saw wind throw him against an outcropping. Danger be damned, she banked closer to The Mountain, desperately searching for Wyatt’s body plunging toward the ground. When she spotted him stopped, standing atop the rocky outcropping, she cursed his foolishness but still steered herself closer and landed beside him.
Cutting power to her jetpack, she slipped and nearly lost her footing on the icy outcropping. Wyatt’s hand clamped onto her forearm and pulled her closer to the cliff face. Carli’s pulse exploded. The only thing stopping her from screaming to leave was the thin air making it a struggle to breathe deeply. Wyatt stared up, shuffling along the outcropping, not looking where he stepped, oblivious to the immediate danger they both faced.
“There has to be another way in,” he called out over the shrill wind.
“Not up here there’s not!” Carli yelled, her patience gone.
Wyatt either didn’t hear, didn’t agree or didn’t care. Before Carli’s anger grew into frustration, heavy winds caused them both to stumble toward the edge. Carli prepared to push her jetpack’s power button when the wind suddenly eased. Inches from the edge, Wyatt glanced back at her and smiled. That smile disappeared the moment a loud cracking echoed from above. Wyatt and Carli looked up in time to see chunks of snow and ice falling toward them.
“Fly!” Wyatt yelled.
Carli grasped for her power button but missed, her fingers shaky from a mixture of cold, fear and rushing adrenaline. It didn’t help her concentration when frozen, falling chunks began to crash around her, exploding near her feet. Resisting the urge to look up—for fear of what might hit her—Carli concentrated on the button and finally mashed it, propelling herself skyward. But she no sooner cleared the ledge of the outcropping than frozen debris smashed into her, jostling her off to the side and causing her to lose the grip on her jetpack.
Every bone rattled in her body when she felt something even worse in the pit of her stomach: the sinking sensation of freefall. Snow and ice rained around her, knocking into her as she flailed to find the grip on her jetpack’s controls. When she finally grabbed the power button and pushed it, nothing happened.
I’m dead, she thought clear as day, the world plunging around her. A strange sense of calm overtook her body, and everything seemed to slow down. Carli pressed the power button over and over to no avail. She was close to hitting several sections of rock jutting out from The Mountain but narrowly avoided them. She smiled within her helmet and couldn’t ignore the irony. I must be lucky.
Above her, she saw Wyatt speeding toward her but knew he’d never reach her in time. Carli finally closed her eyes, not wanting to see the world rushing up at her, not wanting to know when she was about to hit the ground. Her thumb instinctively pushed the power button over and over, long past the time she thought she might save herself. But when the jetpack vibrated against her back and she heard the whirring of its engine, she twisted her body into flight position and held down the power button, stealing a glance at the approaching ground in the process.
Please work. . . please work. . .
The engines fired and shot her forward, the sudden g-forces yanking at every part of her body, jerking her freefall to a stop. Before she could sigh in relief, the engine sputtered again, plunging her back toward the ground. Press after press of the pow
er button eventually led to several more bursts, slowing her descent but not nearly enough to let her land safely. Though panicked, Carli had enough clarity to know that only a well-timed power surge near ground level could save her. And as the rock-strewn ground rushed up at her and her jetpack no longer seemed responsive, she closed her eyes again to await the—
A hand clamped onto her ankle and pulled her up so fiercely that Carli couldn’t stop from crying out in pain. She opened her eyes to the ground less than twenty feet away, still coming toward her but not so rapidly. She looked up and saw Wyatt struggling to hold on, their combined weight dragging them toward the ground, neither able to avoid hitting the snow in a frenzied heap. Carli lay still for several seconds, her body jarred and pained, unable to do anything but breathe.
Wyatt ripped off his helmet and crawled beside her, his grimace a mix of pain and concern.
“Are you okay?”
Carli sat up and took off her own helmet, smiling despite how her body felt. She leaned in and planted a kiss on his cheek. Both of their faces turned red. Carli climbed to her feet and removed her jetpack, thrusting it into his arms.
“It stopped working,” she said.
Wyatt snickered. “Yeah, I figured that.”
Wyatt inspected the pack and muttered about power failure likely being caused by a clogged air intake system created by falling debris. Wyatt cleared it out, explaining that the jetpack should work well enough until they could find a quiet, warmer place for him to open it up and take a closer look.
“But just in case, here, you take mine,” he said, shrugging off his own pack.
Carli accepted it but didn’t give it much thought as she stared into the distance, certain she saw the same glow on the horizon that she’d spotted earlier. Lifting her helmet’s visor, she saw the glow actually appeared to be an orange hue.
“You think it’s part of the same group we flew over?” she asked Wyatt after pointing it out.
Wyatt stared at the orange glow for a few seconds and then scanned the rest of the surrounding landscape, as well as the section of Mountain looming just behind them. He shook his head and returned to cleaning snow out of the jetpack.
“I didn’t see any strange lights from the other group,” Wyatt said. “Plus, we passed them on the other side of The Mountain.”
Carli glanced at the snowy landscape, gaining her bearings and realizing Wyatt was right.
“But the pass to this side of The Mountain wasn’t far away,” she said.
“Not far by air, that’s true,” Wyatt said. “But on foot? No, there’s no way it can be the same group. Maybe it’s the same kind of group, another security group patrolling The Mountain’s perimeter.”
“In that case, hurry up and clear the pack so we can fly out of here,” Carli said.
Wyatt looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure we shouldn’t stay and try to communicate with them? To find out where they enter The Mountain?”
“Yeah, sure, because that first open door seemed very receptive to our arrival,” Carli said, her words oozing condescension. “For all we know, The Mountain sent a patrol to find and kill us.”
Wyatt frowned and blew the rest of the snow from the jetpack’s open intake valve. Carli waited for him to strap the pack to his back—as she did with the jetpack he’d given her—but Wyatt turned the other way and scanned the area near the base of the Mountain. Moments later, his eyes locked on a section of large rocks not far away.
“There,” he said. “That’s where we hide.”
Before Carli could object, Wyatt hurried toward them, explaining that their best—and only—option was to hide behind the rocks, watch where the patrol traveled and follow them to another potential Mountain entrance. Carli argued that spying on the approaching patrol could be done just as easily from the sky, but Wyatt insisted on staying at ground level, that they would be prepared to liftoff at the first sign of danger. With a sigh, Carli agreed, dragging her feet through the snow behind as she walked, trying to cover her footprints as best as she could.
They squeezed between several large boulders, their bodies brushing together. Despite the cold, Carli felt her face burning and was glad to still be wearing the helmet. She spotted several colorful, fluffy objects stuck between two of the boulders. She reached out to touch them, removing her gloves to feel how soft they were. Carli had seen images of them while studying aboard the HASS, the name of the objects immediately popping into her mind.
“Feathers,” she said, holding them up for Wyatt to see.
He barely gave them a glance and nod before turning toward an area of huge rocks at the base of a sheer cliff face a few hundred feet away. Carli craned her neck to see what he was looking at and noticed a splash of color at the bottom of the cliff, a splash of color that broke the monotonous whites of the world and grays of The Mountain rocks. When Carli lifted her visor for a better look, the feathers fluttered out of her hands, completely forgotten as a knot formed in her throat. She was forced to swallow hard before asking the question on both of their minds.
“Blood?”
Wyatt nodded. “Faded, but that’s what it looks like.”
“The snow around those rocks. Does it look. . . uneven to you?” Carli asked. “Like maybe something’s buried underneath?”
Wyatt shrugged and stepped out from between the rocks, ignoring Carli as she shook her head. Glancing toward the orange glow and seeing it still far off, Wyatt headed toward the blood-stained rocks. With a sigh, Carli followed, a sense of dread filling her with heavy, unwanted warmth. She stayed several feet back, even as she noticed the snowy ground turning a slightly pinkish hue. The snow crunched beneath their feet like usual, but Carli noticed a different sort of crunching as Wyatt stomped closer to the rocks. Carli stopped and stared at the ground, a wave of revulsion crashing through her. Something awful had happened here. She reached for her jetpack’s power button, wanting nothing more than to fly far away. The only thing that stopped her from leaving was Wyatt, who’d never abandon her.
“Stop!” she screamed as he kneeled in the snow and started to dig.
For once, Wyatt did as she told him, stopping before he made it through a few scoops of pinkish snow. He was about to ask her what the problem was but saw her staring straight up the sheer cliff face. From their vantage point, the top of The Mountain was shrouded in clouds. Wyatt saw nothing that looked different from any other part of The Mountain, but when he looked back at Carli, he saw her still staring, as though she could see something he couldn’t.
“Up there,” she said.
Her voice had changed. Gone was the fear and panic, replaced by a steely calmness that suddenly worried Wyatt more than anything else they’d seen at The Mountain.
“What’s up there?” he asked.
“Some sort of way inside.”
He didn’t know how or why she thought what she did, but Wyatt had no doubt she was right. Still, he didn’t know why he felt such a lack of excitement now that their biggest problem was solved.
“Do we go up there?” he asked. “Or stay here and wait to see if the patrol reaches us?”
“Our place has always been among the clouds. I don’t see why that should change now.”
Wyatt flashed her a hopeful, albeit forced smile before lowering his visor and pushing his power button. The jetpack engaged and shot him skyward. Carli remained on the ground for several seconds, watching Wyatt to make sure the pack remained functional, before she took off after him. She soared straight up, speeding along the massive cliff face, fighting her way through swirling winds and falling snow, wondering if she was crazy for mentioning checking the top of The Mountain. As certain as she’d been at ground level was how uncertain she felt the higher they flew. But it wasn’t long before Wyatt pointed wildly toward a section of Mountain just through the clouds, a section where Carli saw a large hole and a ledge connected to it.
A ledge where people have jumped from, she thought. Dread gripped her insides at the id
ea of something even worse happening near that ledge. Either way, Wyatt headed straight toward it, only seconds from reaching it when a human form suddenly appeared in the opening and plunged over the side. Carli gasped inside her helmet and followed Wyatt as he banked slightly to one side, both of them with the same idea of catching whoever had fallen. But they no sooner turned when they saw this mystery person suddenly sprout a pair of massive wings and speed straight in their direction. . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Every cell in Emma’s body begged for sleep. Her arms and legs felt like boulders and she couldn’t keep her eyelids open. The bed on which she lay was perhaps more comfortable than any she’d ever felt. She felt as if she were melting into the blankets. Once she fell asleep, she probably wouldn’t wake for a day or two. But a hundred different thoughts pulled at her mind, each one stopping her from being able to drift off into unconsciousness.
The past. . . the City Below. . . denying Bronwen and Alistair Upton a chance to escape the rushing lava aboard the hovercraft. . . wondering if the little girl and baby aboard that craft made it to safety. . . wondering if her own people from The Third and others from The Fifth had escaped a fiery death. . . thinking of countless people from One and The Second that she witnessed being inundated by liquid fire. . . her parents and where they might’ve ended up. . . her husband, the prince, who’d let her be taken by the Sky Person while he’d gone after Paige. . .
A decision that ultimately saved my life, that may have saved the only life from the entire city, Emma thought, a few tears squeezing out of her closed eyelids. All so Love could bring me here. . .
Emma told herself to leave the past in the past, a task easier considered than done. To help ease her mind, she focused on Love and her worry for him. She sat up and opened her eyes, the room suddenly cold and empty without his presence. If for some reason he never came back—if for some reason the intruders were as dangerous as the guards and Board assumed—Emma wondered if she could go on without him. His offer to take her to the sanctuary with those he’d rescued now seemed like the obvious choice to have made. If something bad happened, she didn’t know if she could ever forgive herself for turning down his offer.