“No,” Tray said, shaking his head. “No, daddy. I lied. I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry.”
“Tell me what you planned to do in Kemah,” his father scolded.
“I was going to find someone named Daniel Matthews,” Tray confessed. “I thought he could tell me something about Mom.”
Steven’s scowl deepened and Tray shrank back against his pillow. The doctor had seen Steven smack Tray before, and there was no reason for Tray to assume his father would withhold punishment just because Tray’s fingers had been mauled. Tray wasn’t allowed to ask questions about his mother or her side of the family.
“That, he probably could,” Steven allowed. “The man nearly broke up our marriage more than once.”
“He did?” Tray asked. He hadn’t been able to find much. They’d been studying Quin genealogies at school, and the school’s computer had linked him to the other man.
“After your mother died, Daniel tried to take you away from me,” Steven said carefully, his cheek twitching. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he was one of your kidnappers. He knows exactly how much you’re worth.”
Tray’s jaw quivered. “Then he’s dead. You killed him.”
“No. He wasn’t with the ones I saved you from,” Steven said, his fingers gently tracing the bruises the kidnappers had left on Tray’s jaw. “Dammit, Tray. Why? Why would you do this to me? There is a reason I keep you from your mother’s old acquaintances. She left you a lot of wealth, but she did not acquire it honestly. She has many enemies. That is why I changed your name. You must put as much distance between yourself and her as possible!”
“Yes, sir,” Tray acknowledged. Then he felt a sharp pain up his arm and retracted from the doctor.
Steven tenderly kissed the top of Tray’s head, and Tray swore he felt his father’s tears.
“I’d punish you for disobedience, but I think hanging from a meat hook for three days was punishment enough,” Steven laughed.
“Thank you, sir,” was all Tray could think to say.
A gentle piano rift accompanied Tray’s rise to consciousness, and he shuddered when he felt a hand on his cheek. “Danny?” he murmured, turning his face up, his heart sinking when he saw Amanda. “Oh.”
Her lip was busted, her body radiating sweat and dust, and she held a mug under his nose. “Here,” she said.
“Smells good,” Tray said, inhaling the aroma, then coughing at the dust that came with it. His neck hurt, but he wasn’t in traction, so he figured it was safe to move. He didn’t hear the engine turning.
“It smells like food, but it isn’t. It’s just chowder,” Amanda said. She said that about anything in the soup, stew, or chowder categories, and the only reason Tray found it funny was because she believed it. “Saskia thought you’d want it when you woke up.”
“Thanks,” Tray said, taking the mug of purple-hued chowder and setting it by his pillow. “I might lay here for a few more minutes.”
Amanda frowned again then climbed onto the second bed, hugging one knee, rocking to the rhythm of the piano. It was an instrumental cover of a song that he and Amanda sang often. “The more I try to remember what happened, the hazier it all gets. But it’s my fault we’re here, and I’m sorry,” she said. Her brow furrowed as she scrutinized her fingernails, but her apology was sincere.
“Can’t get off the ground kicking yourself. Let’s patch up and get out of here.” Tray rolled out of the bed, taking a moment for the spots to clear from his vision. Amanda guided his head back to the pillow, keeping a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Was that hunger or pain?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tray whimpered, his muscles rippling from frustration.
“My arm hurts, too,” she said. “I fought with Danny. He choked me.”
Tray gave her a look, not sure how to take her confession. He’d seen Danny get rough with her, but he’d also seen her slash at Danny with a knife.
“We’ve been patching over an hour,” she said, checking her Virp. “Or two. I’m losing time. I keep having episodes. I don’t mean to be like this,” she whispered, scratching at her arm.
“I know, sweetheart. Danny knows, too,” Tray assured, lifting his head to take a sip of chowder. It tasted as good as it smelled. “We’ll get you help in Quin. I know a lot of good doctors; they’ll come right to the house.”
“Is it a big house?” she asked, lying on the other bed.
“One of the bigger ones in Clover,” Tray smiled, recalling his family estate. Clover was the northern dome of the five major structures comprising Quin. “It’s on a nice hill and you can see over the whole city. We might not go there.”
“Why not?”
“Hero, for one,” Tray remarked, then caught himself. The more he thought about Danny’s rivalry with his father, the less he wanted Danny to know about his son. “Danny doesn’t like it there. He seems to have a lot of bad memories about the place. In five years, I’ve never gotten him to come home. But it’s a safe place. Well-protected. Bad people can’t get in.”
“You mean the Guard?” she asked.
“I mean anyone.” Tray rubbed his sore neck. “I was kidnapped once when I went to Kemah to look for Danny. After my dad brought me home, I didn’t leave the house for months. It was the only place I felt safe. So it’s really confusing for me that Danny doesn’t feel safe there.”
He lifted the mug, letting more of the thick chowder slide onto his tongue and silence the rambling. It was a horrible memory and the fear it stirred was as fresh as the day he was taken. His fingers ached just thinking about it. The music changed, the new song including vocals and a flute. Tray focused on the melody, letting the calm, happy memories bury the painful ones. He was halfway through his chowder and half asleep when he felt Saskia’s hand on his arm. He recognized her earthy scent and the chill of her fingers.
“Did Sky have any doctor friends in the city?” Tray asked.
“Haven’t found anyone yet,” Saskia said, probing the knot on the back of Tray’s head.
“I’ll go with you,” Tray grunted, lifting onto his elbows. “What’s the point of traveling the world if I stay in the infirmary the whole time?”
Saskia smirked, but linked his arm, keeping him upright as he tottered down the hall. Tray was surprised to see the bay door wide open. The humid air instantly dampened his clothes.
“Amanda,” Danny admonished, seeing her first, even though she came in behind Tray.
“My shoes are on. I’m going,” Amanda insisted.
“Same here,” Tray said, looking at his feet to make sure his shoes were in fact on. The move made him dizzy.
“Tray, sit down,” Danny groaned. “Lie down. You’re barely standing!”
“You can’t keep me here,” Tray snapped, surprised by his own vehemence, but figuring it was the memory of the ransom that stirred the resistance.
“I will tie you to the bed if that’s what it takes,” Danny said.
Tray’s skin went cold, his fingers aching as though Danny had sliced through them. A part of him knew Danny wouldn’t be so cruel, and a part of him feared he might. For a moment, he imagined them back in Quin, Tray desperate to leave the ship to see his son, Danny holding him hostage.
“That’s what it will take,” Tray said, choking on the words. Chuckling, Danny ruffled his hair, nearly knocking Tray off balance. Tray shivered, not trusting the apparent concession, but taking advantage and stalking off the ship.
The barren landscape took him off guard, but he continued forward until he reached the shade of the Dome. The gate opened with a light push and he squeezed through the narrow opening. His eyes didn’t adjust fast enough to the dark, and he knocked into Sky, jarring his neck in the process. Through the spots, he felt her catch his elbow, and she knelt with him.
The stagnant air carried the smell of oil and clay. The roads and buildings inside had that same sandy color as the outside landscape. The gate opened into a wide loading dock with a few streets heading out and the back en
ds of storage buildings. The street was lined with robots and droids, all powered down. The doorways were dark and hollow, and many of the stone frames slanted to one side. The structures were cracked worse than the Dome wall.
“This is where the Xentu brought the exports,” Sky said, her eyes misting. “The Praet took the northern gate. Nomadic tribes would buy weapons from one side and sell to the other. There was a trade market over there, and fuel over there. And these droids were always moving. The bots came to greet you, asked to guide you, cleaned any tracks. They were all still moving when I came in. Still working, even with no one here.”
Dappled sunlight came through a giant hole at the peak of the Dome, and through a few wider cracks. If any part of the Dome was lit, Tray couldn’t tell.
“There was a man—a droid builder—and he would paint candy-colored stripes on the greeter bots so the kids would know they were friendly,” Sky recalled, picking up the disabled bot. There was no trace of paint on it.
“What was his name?” Hawk asked. He knelt by a hollowed storage building a few yards away, knife drawn.
“Hawk, it’s been years,” Sky began, but then she noticed what he was doing, and her face softened. Hawk had become fixated with epitaphs, eulogies, and funeral rituals ever since Danny let him bury that dead bird in Fox Run. “Brandon. Remembered by his dear friend. Don’t put my name.”
“The city is dead,” Tray shuddered. “The disease that Danny and Saskia got in Fox Run—the Havara Pytr. It came from a dead city. Are we going to get sick?”
“They’re recently dead here. And died differently,” Sky said, drawing circles in the dirt with her tear-dampened fingers. “Brandon’s engineering bay—if it’s still there, we can use his tools to fix the hull. I’ll get you home and you can get me that ship you promised me.”
“That’s still the deal,” Tray agreed. “Is this where you grew up?”
“No. I was still a teenager when I came through the first time,” she sniffled, wiping her hands on her thighs, rising to her feet. “I had such hope for them. They were going to turn Quin into Sexy.”
Tray chuckled at the joke, accepting her hand up.
“Hawk, put your gloves on,” Danny ordered, striding through the gate. “Sky, are you ready?”
“Hardly. Welcome to Boone,” Sky said, taking a deep breath, shining her light through a door to the left, and leading the way up the loading dock. The building was vacant, and smelled like chemical fuel; the floor was covered with something sticky.
“This place has looks picked clean. As much as I love an archeological expedition, I think we need to prioritize patching the ship before Amanda has another breakdown,” Danny said.
“That’s not funny,” Amanda griped, taking Danny’s hand. “I’m better here. I feel like I’ve lived here. Or I will.”
“Go back to the ship if you want,” Tray snipped, his nose wrinkling at whatever was making his shoes stick to the ground.
They emerged from the building, and found themselves on a typical city street. Packed dirt and wheeled track marks showed that the path to the right had been traveled many times before. To the left, everything was covered with a layer of dust and marred only by a few footprints.
“There must be something worth coming back for,” Saskia commented, kneeling and counting the footprints. “These divots are wagon tracks, consistent with the kinds of vehicles the Drava used, but too wide for any of the droids we’ve seen so far.”
“How recent?” Danny asked.
“Have you felt a breeze?” Saskia returned. “Could be ages.”
“These weren’t left by ghosts,” Hawk commented, studying the tracks.
“Some ghosts leave tracks,” Tray taunted. “It depends on what they want you to find. Sky, which way to the hospital?”
“Tray, just go back to the ship and lie down!” Danny groaned.
“There aren’t even windowpanes, Tray. Do you really think there would be medicine left?” Saskia added.
“Maybe they never had windowpanes! Whole districts of Terrana don’t have them,” Tray argued, dropping his voice threateningly because he lacked the strength to raise it. “You don’t have weather in Domes. You don’t always need windows. Especially when you have droids guarding your streets. You’re sick! All of you. I want to find a nurse with a decent bedside manner.”
“See that tower there, Skipper,” Sky said, pointing down the street to a bell tower at the city center. “Hospital’s right next door.”
“I’ll check it out. Meet up with you in an hour,” Tray decided, hobbling down the street.
“Tray!” Danny started, then caught himself and counted to ten under his breath. “You’re not going alone. Take Hawk.”
“Hawk wants to see a droid factory, not a hospital,” Tray said.
“I do want to see the factory,” Hawk echoed.
“I’ll go with him,” Saskia volunteered.
“Shouldn’t we stay together and see what the ghosts want us to find?” Hawk asked, tapping his gloves nervously against his hands.
“You go find what they want you to find. I’ll talk to the ghosts on this side of town and see what they know,” Tray said.
“You can talk to the ghosts?” Hawk gaped.
Tray gritted his teeth, then smirked. “Of course I can,” he teased.
“What are they saying?” Hawk asked, pointing up toward the bell tower that Sky had indicated.
“He’s lying, Hawk. He doesn’t talk to ghosts,” Danny said.
“They’re not talking,” Tray said ominously, delighting in the way Hawk’s eyes went wide. “They’re watching us. Making sure we don’t overstay our welcome.”
7
“Did you get the drone to fly?” Sky asked, rolling away from Brandon, taking the bed sheets with her. Brandon was a lanky engineer with a goofy smile and a wavy mop. He had a bushy beard today, and he would have shaped it had he known he’d see her. Sky appreciated his confidence as much as his workshop. They were the type of friends who preferred to say hello without clothing. When she’d visited three months back, she’d brought him a gravity source to play with.
“I started to, but since you wouldn’t show me how to make more, I went another direction,” he chuckled, sliding his hands across her chest and rolling on top of her. “Using grav-levitation on a drone is more efficient than the rotors, but what’s the point of having just one grav-powered drone? And the source you brought was too small to lift a vehicle.”
“But it worked for the drone?” she asked, wriggling underneath him so their bodies pressed together again. It would be easier for her to have a vessel of her own if she weren’t constantly running out of fuel. A gravity source could keep her going for years if she could focus the energy into levitation.
“Yeah. It turns out the copper avalan focuses the gravity source really well,” he hummed, his lips brushing against hers. Avalan was the name given to the clay-metal alloy that fueled their machine industry. “So I fashioned this.”
His weight pinned her as he leaned off the side of the bed to retrieve his newest invention. He brought up a six-inch metal case that used a combination biometric and physical lock. When he opened it, there was a curved, pink and silver weapon inside.
“A gun?” she asked, disappointed that her gift had been turned into a weapon. It seemed every time she came back through the city, the Xentu and the Praet were closer to explosive violence.
“Just a convenient mold. It’s a cross between a trash compactor and a tractor beam. Low setting, you can push things around,” Brandon said, aiming the device at the door, using a blast from the gun to nudge it closed. “High setting, you crush. A Xentu strike team can do a lot with one of these.”
He didn’t demonstrate the crushing feature.
“It’s pink,” Sky said, taking the weapon. It was weighted heavily toward the grip, and she could feel the differential pull of the grav-source on her skin. The device needed better shielding.
“I was thinking of
you when I made it. Of your lips,” Brandon said, kissing her again. “I was hoping you’d be flattered enough to show me where to get another source.”
Sky wrapped her arms and legs around him. That was her last night in Boone.
Sky’s hand closed on her grav-gun as they approached the old machine shop. She felt Hawk’s hand slip into hers, lending moral support. A stream of broken robots lined the building perimeter, as if they’d queued up for repair, not realizing their builder was gone. They were mostly smaller bots—greeters and janitors—short, boxy, and mobile. They were designed to glide over a paved street, and couldn’t move as easily over the rubble that remained. Still, seeing them lined up waiting for Brandon made her smile.
Inside the shop, the memory of her old friend dissolved. His work station was lined with prototype energy guns, assault rifles, and cannons. Missile bodies were cracked open and the power sources removed. Only two mechanic droids were left, and their casing was scorched from weapon’s fire.
“Strange that the droids are still here,” Danny said, squatting to examine the three-foot-tall, copper-streaked mechanic droid. A drill arm was folded against its side, the warped metal around the arm suggesting a covering had been ripped off.
“There were two sides in the war. The droids are programmed not to respond to the other side. Makes sense they wouldn’t respond to scavengers either,” Sky said. “It’s easier to walk off with a nuclear source than the AI that controls it.”
The second droid buzzed to life.
“I fixed it!” Hawk cried gleefully.
“Intruder!” the droid said, its covering sliding aside, revealing a whirring saw blade. The first droid activated as well, its drill arm sparking and piercing Danny’s skin.
“Hawk, watch out!” Sky cried, pulling Hawk clear of the saw. “Stand down, droid. Stand down!”
Hybrid: A Space Opera Adventure Series (The New Dawn Book 4) Page 6
