“He’ll be okay now,” Byron reassured her, placing a warm hand on her shoulder. “He’s in good hands.”
Then Rowan rounded the corner of the hangar, running up to her. “You’re safe!” He pulled her into an embrace. “I feel terrible about how we left things.” He pulled away and met her eyes. “I’m so sorry for what I said. Of course you had to go after him. I only meant…”
“I know what you meant,” she told him. And she did. The needs of the many did outweigh the needs of the few, and she wouldn’t have asked anyone to risk their own lives to help her save him.
She was just thinking of how grateful she was for Gordon and Byron when Rowan leaned in closer and kissed her. She was taken aback slightly, but was hit by his familiar scent, remembered the prickling of the fresh stubble on his face.
The kiss was over as quickly as it began, leaving her unsure how to react. She noticed Byron was no longer there. She saw him making his way toward Rivet’s building. He looked over his shoulder, giving her a resigned smile and a wave. She turned back to Rowan. He had saved her life in New Atlantic, been the first person to express affection for her, the first to awaken these strange new sensations.
But what had Byron said to her in Basin City? “You’ve fought by my side. My pulse races at the sight of you.” He had been the one to risk everything to help her, and more than once. He’d infiltrated Delta City with her to find the piece of blast deflection craft. Fought to save her from the Repurposers. Saved her from the night stalkers in Basin City at the jeopardy of his own life. And just now he’d risked everything to help her save Willoughby.
It was Byron.
It had to be Byron. Her heart thudded at the thought of him. Her eyes were alight at the sight of him.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Rowan, and turned away. She had to clear her thoughts. All of this was so new, so confusing. All of these people had been around others for their whole lives. They knew how to act, knew what was normal and what wasn’t. How you went about things. But H124 had no such luxury. She could only trust her heart, which lay with the one for whom it beat.
Behind her, Gordon was preoccupied with his post-flight check on the helicopter, so she made her way into the complex through one of the cool, shadowed tunnels, her footsteps echoing off the walls. Everyone was busy elsewhere in the compound, and the place felt strangely deserted.
She sensed someone approaching in the shadows. Byron. He stopped in front of her. She halted, watching him. He spoke no words, but his eyes sparked at the sight of her. She felt a magnetic pull, a flame erupting in her core. She’d never felt such a powerful attraction to someone. A primal sensation swept over her, every nerve in her body suddenly alert and full of desire.
She was rooted to the spot, grappling with what she felt. She didn’t know what was right, what was expected.
What was she to Rowan? What was he to her? She’d met him first. He’d been the first person to ever kiss her. With him, it felt different, more companionship than fire.
But this pull to Byron felt insurmountable. His eyes flashed in the darkness, and their flames were so close they touched.
Then something in her broke free. She leaned toward him. He grabbed her, and they crashed into the corridor wall. His hands roamed over her body, caressing her in ways she’d never felt before.
Their tongues met, and together they rocked back and forth, hips grinding. Then he pulled back and met her eyes, and her lips burned in longing.
She tore off his green canvas jacket, casting it to the floor. Her hands roamed over his muscled chest, his flat stomach, reveling in the feel of his body. He pulled her down the corridor, into his sleeping chamber. He threw her down on the bed, stripping off her shirt, and within her she felt a surging tide.
She growled, kissing him deeply. He kissed her back, lowering his weight upon her, hips moving rhythmically against hers. She felt dizzy, dreamy.
“I want you,” he breathed into her ear. “I’ve wanted you for so long.”
“I want you, Byron,” she whispered back, lips tingling. Her whole being was alive, rippling with currents. She grabbed his back and shoulders.
“Halo,” he breathed into her neck. “Halo.”
“Byron,” she whispered.
They came together, ablaze and abandoned.
* * * *
Later, feeling strangely rejuvenated, H124 went to her quarters. She freshened up, then walked to the mess hall to eat. Dirk was sitting by himself. She debated joining him. He stared out of the window, eyes hollow, jaw slack. She selected a meal of salad and nuts, then decided to sit by him. He stirred as she stood over the seat.
“Can I join you?”
He blinked, the rims around his eyes red and raw. “Of course.”
She ate the first few bites in silence, not sure what to say. “How are you holding up?” she finally asked, lamely.
He leaned back in his chair. “Barely. Glad you got to Willoughby, though.”
“Me, too.” She ate a few more bites. “Are you thinking about Astoria? You can talk to me.” She felt bad for even saying it. Even though she didn’t see how she could have prevented Astoria’s death, she still felt like she didn’t have the right to talk about it to Dirk.
“I don’t even know what I’d say,” he told her. “I still can’t quite believe it. I always thought if she died that I’d feel…lost somehow. I don’t know…empty, like half of me had been torn away. But I don’t…it’s like she’s still here inside of me, like I’m carrying her around here.” He brought a fist to his chest. He talked more about their childhood and happier times. H124 was amazed by his stories of a cheerful, carefree Astoria. She couldn’t even imagine that.
After dinner, she stopped by the medical office. Willoughby was out of the medpod, sitting on the edge of a bed, consuming an MRE. Though parts of his face were still a bit swollen, his crushed cheekbones had been repaired, as had the gash in his side. Other than his unkempt hair and Rover clothing, he looked like his regular self.
He smiled as she entered. “Perfect timing. I’m going stir crazy. Let’s go for a walk.”
“Sure you’re up for it?”
Willoughby stood up, talking around the last bite of the MRE. “Absolutely.” They walked into the hall in silence, Willoughby wincing only slightly. “What’s the next step?” he asked.
“We go to a genebank to the south. Make sure it’s intact.”
“I want to come,” he said. “Tired of feeling useless.”
“You’re hardly useless.”
As they continued down the hall, Onyx stopped them. “You’re not going to believe this, H.”
“What is it?” H124 asked.
“We just got this feed coming out of Delta City.” Onyx brought up her display, the images floating in the shadowed corridor. It showed Olivia standing aboard the intact PPC luxury ship, before the Death Riders had attacked and the fragment had fallen.
Olivia’s face resolved into a mien H124 had never seen—caring, compassionate, and one hundred percent fake. “I’m out here risking my life to show you good people of Delta City why you can’t listen to the anarchists that threaten to tear our fine city apart. This asteroid they keep warning you about will fall nowhere near Delta City, yet I’m jeopardizing my very existence today to show you the truth. Our specialized science teams have pored over the data and found that the asteroid will land far out here, in the vast ocean. It’s harmless.”
H124 stared up at Onyx. “‘Our specialized science teams?’”
Onyx rolled her eyes. “I know. Complete bullshit.”
The footage cut to the sky, panning up to show the incoming asteroid, searingly bright, a trail of fire and smoke streaking off as parts of it broke up in the atmosphere. It was so massive that it appeared to be falling in slow motion, drawing inexorably downward. The camera followed it down to the surface of the se
a, cutting away just before it hit.
“It’s about to touch down,” Olivia informed the audience, though this section of footage had obviously been shot long before the impact, and most certainly before the arrival of the Death Riders. It cut back to the sea, and with a clever addition of some visual effects, showed a bright light vanishing beyond the horizon. The footage now jumped to an over-the-railing shot of the waves, revealing the sea as it rolled in, lapping gently against the ship’s hull. “It’s hit now,” Olivia lied, “and you can see how little damage it caused.” From the look of it, this footage had been shot before they’d even reached the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “I repeat, there is nothing to fear. Go back to your regularly scheduled programming, and enjoy the new series of treats we’ve cooked up just for you!”
Onyx made a disgusted sound, and switched off the display. “And Delta City’s back to normal. They stuck up a bunch of new simulated reality shows as inane as ever. Rowan says some people are still fleeing, but it’s down to a trickle now. Even the execs have been fooled by her, and they too are staying behind.”
“And where is she?” H124 asked. “Did she survive?”
“We don’t know.”
Uneasy, she and Willoughby left Onyx. They returned outside, walking for a bit, then joined Raven and the others to prepare for the upcoming trip to the next genebank. They packed warm snowsuits and snow goggles, and checked over their weapons and maglevs. Then she turned in for the night.
* * * *
H124 awoke to Raven prodding her arm. “Onyx found the leak. How Olivia’s been listening in. And she has news. Come meet us in Rivet’s lab.”
As Raven left the room, H124 rolled over, still groggy, and forced herself to get up. She dressed quickly, cleaned her teeth, then headed over to meet the others. When she entered Rivet’s lab, she found Raven and Onyx gathered around a worktable with Rowan and Byron. When she locked eyes with the latter, she couldn’t fight the smile that worked its way to her lips. He returned it with an intense gaze. Willoughby stood off to one side, leaning against the wall, while Dirk slumped on a work stool, exhausted.
“I found the leak,” Onyx told them all. “It was a line of code. When Astoria allowed Olivia access, the code got deeply embedded. I went through the access program line by line, eliminating everything, and still didn’t spot it until last night. All our info has been channeling to Olivia’s direct line, not to the PPC in general.
“But I’ve fixed it. Reversed it, actually, piggybacking off it. She’ll think she’s still listening in, but now we only feed her what we want her to hear. And as she’s listening, we’re hacked into her system, able to overhear her now.” Onyx looked around the room. “Now we’re the ones listening, and she’s none the wiser.”
H124 couldn’t help but notice Onyx’s use of the present tense. “So did she make it to that little airship before the fragment hit?”
“I’m not sure about that yet. But I did find this on her personal feed.” Onyx brought up the display and clicked on a video.
Olivia’s smug face came into view. She smoothed down her immaculately tailored scarlet suit and smiled her cheerless sneer. “After seeing images of New Atlantic’s destruction, some of you are convinced that the same thing is going to happen to Delta City. I’m here to show you that this is an absolute fabrication. I’ve come out to this location,” she went on, the wind whipping her normally perfect hair in wild tangents, “to film the last piece of the asteroid falling thousands of miles away from Delta City.”
It was an alternate take of the video now streaming in Delta City. The footage continued through random, unedited cuts. Now Olivia was nowhere in sight. Instead, the scene showed the ship in ruins after the battle with the Death Riders. Battered soldiers lay on the deck, and a few straggling PPC executives stared up in horror. The camera panned up to the sky, where a cluster of downward-thrusting clouds were so brilliantly lit that H124 had to squint. This was no visual effect. The fragment wasn’t even near impact when a violent airburst hit the camera. She saw the whole ship tilt, the windows shattering, people screaming for their lives. One exec slid down the deck, suit on fire. The camera fell and skittered across the deck. She caught the briefest glimpse of the Death Riders and PPC execs grabbing the railings and crying out, their garments erupting in flame.
The image grew brighter and brighter, and a series of explosions blew out the camera’s microphone as the fragment broke up. On the camera’s sideways image, she witnessed the PPC execs and Death Riders scrambling to get through the doors as a secondary explosion rocked the deck. The ship tilted unnaturally and the camera slid, plunging off the side of the boat and splashing into the sea. The camera’s descent stopped suddenly as it became suspended on a raft of plastic. Tilted on its side, the lens depicted a scene of watery chaos. The ship capsized, the PPC execs and troopers doing all they could to cling to the railings as it sank in the mire of garbage.
The camera shook violently, and was abruptly launched into the sky, along with chunks of seawater and reams of garbage. Something struck the lens, and the camera went black.
“Why would she go out there? Why not fake the whole thing?”
Willoughby regarded her. “She probably thought if she could get footage of it hitting, it would be a milestone for ratings. She probably didn’t realize how devastating the impact would be in the water.”
“Obviously it backfired on her,” Raven said.
“So she really thought she could convince people that the asteroid fell in a different place?” H124 asked.
“She was probably hoping people would stay in Delta City,” Willoughby added. “She’d get the A14 and launch the blast deflection craft, and she could keep her little domain intact and maintain her rule.”
H124 shuttled the footage back to the beginning and watched it again. “I wonder if there were any survivors.”
“Let’s hope not,” Byron said.
Onyx lowered the display. “Seems like a huge risk to take. I would have just fudged some visual effects.”
Willoughby touched his temple as the truth dawned on him. “Wait…she didn’t just want to convince the citizens it was fake. She wanted her fellow execs to believe it. They wouldn’t be fooled by special effects. But Olivia knew the impact wouldn’t be harmless. By bringing them out there to film it, telling them it would be harmless, she sealed their fate. That must be why she had the personal airship. She had her own escape plan, but probably told them they were far enough from danger. Then she’d be able to get out of there scot-free, and all the competing execs would die.” He shook his head. “Insidious.”
H124 couldn’t believe she and this woman shared the same blood.
Rowan leaned on the table. “I’m going back to Delta City and the surrounding Badlander camps. We’ve located an ancient bomb shelter to the east that can hold far more people than we thought possible.” He brought up his PRD display, revealing the shelter’s interior. “It’s called Greenbrier. It was meant to shelter politicians, heads of state. For a while they turned it into a museum. Then they put it to use again, expanding it even more. It’s got everything.” The images showed kitchens, movie theaters, bowling alleys, recreation rooms, sleeping facilities, fancy dining rooms. “I’m going to try to move as many people there as I can. Chadwick and I are also going to restart the pirate broadcasts. He’s built another mobile transmitter.” H124 remembered the Silver Beast, the transmitter that moved like a living creature, able to cut into feeds inside Delta City and disrupt broadcasts. Its creator, Chadwick, had helped them infiltrate Delta City.
Raven consulted his PRD. “We’ve got six and a half days until impact, and one more genebank to visit. It’s the farthest one yet, in Antarctica.” He brought up a map, rotating the globe so they could see the underside of the earth. “Here. The southernmost continent.”
The mere sight of the exotic location stirred her. And now she saw why
they needed snowsuits.
“We don’t know what condition we’re going to find it in, so we’re bringing supplies in case we need to repair damage. It’ll be our last stop before we all seek final shelter. Then comes the impact.”
H124 looked to Rowan. “Will we be joining you in Greenbrier?”
He nodded. “I hope so.”
The meeting soon dissolved, and H124 helped load the Argo with supplies in preparation for departure. She was carrying some long-range rifles out of the armory when Onyx called to her from down the hall.
She turned. Onyx hurried to catch up. “I just intercepted this series of transmissions.” She pulled up a list of communiqués on her PRD. They were all from Olivia, all sent recently.
H124 met Onyx’s gaze. “She survived.”
“It gets worse.” She played a few of the video feeds. The first were a series Olivia had prepared for fellow Delta City PPC execs, informing them that the asteroid fragment that fell in the Pacific Ocean had been the one predicted to hit Delta City, so all was fine now. At first H124 thought her grandmother might still be clinging to the plan to somehow get the A14 and divert the asteroid. But as she read Olivia’s next coded communiqué, she realized it was far more devious than that.
In it, Olivia informed Melbourne City that she was heading there to take over its programming. Once Delta City was destroyed, Melbourne City would be the new seat of PPC power, and with all the Delta City execs dead, Olivia would rule the roost.
“She’s planning a coup,” H124 groaned. “She’s convinced all those people to stay there so that they’ll be killed and she can take over as head.”
“She’ll be the reigning PPC exec on the planet,” Onyx agreed.
“So she’s not planning to retrieve the A14 anymore.”
“It doesn’t look that way.”
H124 was stunned. She wondered if the continued pirate broadcasts would eventually overpower Olivia’s machinations in time to get the rest of the people out of Delta City.
“Thank you for letting me know.”
Shattered Skies Page 19
