Oliver Invictus (Annals of Altair Book 3)

by Kate Stradling

  “Hurry,” Jenifer whispered, “before he changes his mind.”

  Oliver, still only in socks and pajamas, shuffled across the gravel. The thick darkness pressed upon him like walls closing in, and the scrap of open air ahead, with its scant light, was too far away to offer any comfort.

  Up ahead, the side door unlatched. Smith’s silhouette slipped out on the other side of the grate. Terrified that the man might actually leave him behind, Oliver quickened his pace.

  The guard in the bypass, a feeble light on a band around his forehead, held the door open. “Thanks for visiting,” he quipped with a wry grin. He slammed the portal shut behind them and shoved its bar-lock back in place.

  Ten steps later they emerged into softly falling snow, with a broad expanse of clouds overhead. Oliver had never been so happy to see the sky in his life, the sub-zero temperatures notwithstanding.

  “Put this on.” Smith thrust a helmet and goggles into Jenifer’s hands. “We need an extra helmet,” he added.

  Oliver craned his neck to see who he was talking to. One of the white-clad soldiers of the Brotherhood cell stood a few yards down the perimeter. Next to him, a snowmobile gleamed in the dull light, a row of bucket seats on its back end.

  “Did the commander say you could take two people?” the soldier asked.

  “Would I be taking them if he objected?” Smith replied. “We need another helmet. Do you have one?”

  The soldier, grumbling, rummaged through a rucksack. He produced an extra set of goggles and a knit hat. “That’s the best I can do for you, unless you want me to head back inside to the supply room. That’ll take fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on how well the shaft elevator is running right now.”

  Smith handed the goggles and hat to Oliver. “Put them on. Bundle up tight, both of you.”

  The snowmobile’s engine churned to life. Oliver climbed into the row of bucket seats, wedged between Smith and Jenifer. Their driver revved the engine and they jetted into the night.

  Oliver buried the lower half of his face in his blanket, thankful for that feeble barrier against the wind that assaulted him. His teeth chattered as the snowmobile flew past wintry forest on either side. The goggles that protected his eyes were dark enough to obscure the terrain around him. Their path twisted and snaked through unseen trails. The cold cut into him like a knife.

  Jenifer leaned closer. Like him, she had only a blanket between her and the biting chill. She was exposed to the elements on one side, though. Oliver belatedly wondered if he should have offered her the middle seat.

  Trading now was out of the question.

  After twenty minutes, they arrived at a tiny cabin, little more than a hut jutting from the snow. The snowmobile stopped in front of the door.

  Smith confiscated the helmet, hat, and goggles from Oliver and Jenifer. “Get inside.”

  The door, thankfully, was unlocked. A blast of hot air hit Oliver’s cold-numbed face. He hurried in, grateful to see a fire crackling in a wood-burning stove. Out in the frigid night, the snowmobile engine thrummed into the distance.

  A man entered through an interior door. “Two extras?”

  “As you see,” Smith said grimly. “If you have any surplus gear I’m sure they’d appreciate it.”

  “I’ll check.” He passed back through the door into the other room. “There’s hot water in the pot on the stove if anyone wants coffee or cocoa before we go.”

  Jenifer practically lunged for the kettle. Oliver plopped down into a chair and looked about himself in wonder. The cabin appeared to be a hunting lodge, with just the one great room and what he presumed were a bedroom and bathroom beyond the door.

  Smith plopped down in the seat next to him. “Don’t get too curious, kid. No one likes to feel like a bug under a magnifying glass.”

  Oliver focused his attention on rubbing some warmth back into his frozen hands. Jenifer had located some mugs and was pouring powdered packets into two of them. She added the water and presented one mug to him.

  “Drink up. It’ll be worlds better than the fare they fed us.”

  Since his food rations that day had consisted of a soup that was primarily potato chunks boiled in water, pretty much anything would be better fare. He sipped the hot cocoa slowly, grateful for its warmth if nothing else.

  The man in the other room returned with two scarves and an extra pair of gloves. He noticed Oliver’s socked feet and stopped short.

  “We don’t expect you to provide shoes,” Smith said, reading the emotions that flashed across his face.

  The man, though, immediately returned to his room. He came back with a worn pair of combat boots, which he thrust at Oliver. “See if these fit.”

  They were a size too big.

  “Better that than nothing,” the man said.

  Oliver quietly thanked him.

  They bundled up and loaded onto another snowmobile, this one kept in a shed behind the cabin. Oliver made Jenifer take the gloves. He sat on one of the outside seats this time, wrapped again in his blanket, with shoes to keep his feet warm and a scarf to cover his mouth. Never in his life had he expected to be so grateful for such meager items.

  This leg of the journey lasted half an hour. They passed into another cabin, warmed themselves with another cup of cocoa, and moved on to the next leg. And another after that. And another after that.

  In the wee morning hours, they arrived at a cluster of buildings, a tiny town nestled along a snow-clotted two-lane road. Smith ushered them inside through a back door and down some stairs to the basement as their ride continued back the way it had come.

  “You’ve got about three hours to sleep,” he said. “Take advantage of it.”

  Two sets of bunk beds lined the wall. Jenifer collapsed onto one of the lower bunks. Oliver crawled into the other. He was asleep in no time at all, even before the overhead light clicked off.

  Chapter 10

  Hiding in Plain Sight

  Saturday, February 23, 7:43 AM MST

  They were in Idaho, brought across state lines by the Brotherhood cell that first night. The leg-to-leg journey via snowmobile couldn’t have covered nearly that much ground.

  They were at a bed-and-breakfast, too, with the television tuned to the National Public News Network.

  “Authorities are still sifting through the rubble of the Prometheus Satellite School Bombing,” said the news anchor, her face a portrait of grim resolve. “The official death toll is now four hundred twenty-six people, with thirty-five survivors listed in critical condition. One hundred ninety-seven of those deaths were students at the school, in what has become the bloodiest school massacre on record.”

  Oliver flinched as his face flashed on screen. They were using the particularly dour school picture he had taken at the start of the year. Poor lighting and a sullen expression made him the perfect image of a teenaged psychopath.

  “Authorities say that fifteen-year-old Oliver Dunn emailed a thirty-two-page manifesto to Prometheus administrators the night of the attack, decrying school policies and an undisclosed disciplinary action against him. It is unclear whether Dunn acted on his own or if he had outside help. His whereabouts are still unknown.”

  “Veronica looks tired this morning,” remarked the B&B owner as she refilled Oliver’s cup of orange juice. “She should take a break from all this reporting.” She winked at him as she crossed back into the kitchen.

  “She looks tired every morning,” said her husband from his chair by the fire. He sipped his coffee as he worked on a crossword puzzle. Oliver didn’t know either of their names. Jenifer had advised him against asking questions before he had come up from the basement, and the couple had not volunteered the information.

  Jenifer leaned over and bumped Oliver’s shoulder with her own. “Are you going to be okay?”

  He leveled a flat look at her. “I’ve just had the blame for the bloodiest school massacre on record laid at my doorstep. What do you think?”

  She had no response. S
he turned her attention instead to her plate of eggs—fluffy, perfect scrambled eggs, like Oliver hadn’t seen in years. He tucked into his with fatalistic resignation.

  The death toll was grossly inflated because no students had died, but the grain of truth he took from the report was that plenty of adults had. He fought the rising lump in his throat.

  So he’d been framed for the most heinous school crime in the history of school crimes. So what? His life was over long before this. He had no real reason to lament a shattered reputation.

  Even so, he couldn’t shake the thought that somewhere, Emily might be watching the news. Somewhere, his own parents and the sister he’d never met might be staring at their television screen in horror.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t recognize anything other than his last name. He’d been taken from them when he was only a year old. Maybe they didn’t even remember he existed.

  Maybe if he’d exposed Kennedy Ross to the administrators, all those people would still be alive. Except that Kennedy’s quizzical message was what put the whole chain of events into motion.

  The B&B owner returned with a pan of hot, sizzling sausages. “So nice to have you here,” she told Oliver as she transferred two links to his plate. “We usually have to mute the news when we watch it and just read the subtitles instead.”

  These people knew that the news anchor, Veronica Porcher, was a verbal projector. They knew that the stories broadcasted over NPNN were orchestrated narratives. They knew that Oliver hadn’t bombed the school, and they were trying to make his bad fortune up to him somehow.

  Sausage was a nice gesture, his teenaged appetite said.

  Footsteps thudded down the stairs from the upper floor. Smith appeared, pulling his coat on over one shoulder.

  “Your eggs are on the stove,” the woman told him. “You know where the plates are.”

  “Thanks.” He passed through to the kitchen.

  “He’s a good boy,” she said to Jenifer with a smile.

  “Oh? You know him well?”

  The woman merely winked and went on her way. From his chair by the fireplace, her husband snorted into his coffee cup.

  Smith joined them at the table moments later, his plate loaded with sausage and eggs. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “I have travel papers for two. I can come up with something more for the kid. I can’t, however, have him showing his face to the checkpoint inspectors, and if we really want to be safe, it would be better if he were asleep.”

  Understanding dawned upon Oliver. “You’re a projector.”

  Smith waved a negligent hand. “Level 1, nothing to sneeze at. It gets me past the authorities when I need to. I’ll be completely useless with you around, though.”

  “Unless I’m in a deep sleep,” Oliver said. His mouth pulled to the side in frustration. “Got any tranquilizer darts?”

  “We have pills,” said the husband from his chair. “No need to go shooting kids unnecessarily.”

  “We have to get going soon—” Smith paused on this word to eye Oliver, still in his pajamas, the only clothing the teenager had to his name. The dark blue flannel might have doubled as the standard attire for residents of a sanitarium. “I’ll see if we have any extra clothes for you to change into,” he said dubiously.

  Oliver was too emotionally drained to care what he wore.

  “I think there should be something in one of the trunks upstairs,” said the wife. “You know whereabouts to look.”

  Smith grunted, his mouth full of sausage. From the mantle over the fireplace, a small black box emitted a chirp.

  In an instant, the room scrambled into activity. The husband bolted from his chair to the window. The wife snatched the black box from the mantle and shoved it into Jenifer’s hands. “There’s a safe space under the stairs. Go quickly, both of you.”

  Oliver gaped as Jenifer pulled him from the table back to the staircase. His throat constricted as he hurried down the narrow passageway. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The box signals when someone does an ID sweep of the area. It could be a surveillance drone. It could be a GCA agent or a military sweep.”

  She wrenched open a low, slanted door tucked beneath the stairs. She and Oliver ducked inside. A row of shelves sat at an angle from the wall. Jenifer pushed Oliver into the space behind it. She shut the exterior door, drowning them in darkness. He hunched up against the wall as she joined him and pulled the shelves into place. They latched with a click.

  Last night’s claustrophobia assaulted him anew. “Our ID chips have already been disabled,” he whispered in the blackness.

  “Which means that if they come in for a visual inventory or run an infrared check against their data-sweep, there’ll be two too many bodies here,” Jenifer said. The floor overhead creaked. She and Oliver both hushed, listening for sounds of government inspectors.

  There was room enough in the safe space for him to crouch to the floor. As the minutes passed, Jenifer joined him, both of them too exhausted from the past two days to stay standing.

  “Hey, kid, is this your first time locked in a closet with a pretty woman?” she quipped wryly.

  The awkwardness of their situation had danced at the edges of his mind, but he’d suppressed it fine before she said anything. “Are you kidding me right now?” he asked. “The government might be bearing down on us, and you’re cracking jokes?” He didn’t think of her as a woman. She was Not-Emily, an impostor.

  “You wish your Emily was here instead?” Jenifer teased.

  “Yes,” he hissed, honesty breaking through in the moment’s duress. Before she could tease him further, he continued, careful to keep his voice low. “She’s what I imagine a mother might be like. Since I didn’t know my own mother, and every other handler I had treated me like a chore, Emily was the closest thing I had to someone who cared about me. So go ahead and laugh about it, the stupid kid who got so attached to someone he could only keep for a paltry two months—and a horrible, paltry two months at that. Yes, I wish she were here instead of you.” He checked his rising fervor and finished in a mutter. “I wish she were here instead of everyone else in the world.”

  Silence met this speech. Oliver thought he had well and good shut her up until,

  “I wasn’t going to laugh,” she said quietly.

  He scoffed.

  “I wasn’t. I was just trying to lighten the mood. It’s weird for me to get pulled from place to place with a kid I only met three days ago. I thought it was probably weird for you too. Isn’t it?”

  Oliver scowled in the darkness. “Weird’s not a luxury I get to indulge. Up until this week, my life had one path, and it was pointed directly to Prom-E, whatever that would involve. Do you know anything about Prom-E?” he asked.

  “Not much more than that it exists. It’s a closely kept government secret.”

  “So no one’s ever escaped from there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Altair is better at keeping secrets than spreading them.”

  Footsteps strode across the floor overhead. “What’s to stop them from imaging us in here?” Oliver asked.

  “Safe spaces are usually lined with glass or sheet metal. There’s no guarantee that they won’t find us, but unless they’re looking in earnest, we’ve got a good shot. There’s no guarantee that anyone will even come inside, or that they’ll make more than a cursory inquiry and check papers.”

  He shifted to his knees, the crouch too uncomfortable to maintain. The small space was getting warmer with each passing minute. Jenifer stood and leaned against the wall, and they continued to wait.

  Last night Oliver had almost frozen to death. Now he might die of heatstroke. He was almost ready to surrender to whatever government goon would allow him a breath of fresh air when footsteps creaked on the stairs overhead. The closet door opened, and the latch on the false wall in front of them gave way.

  “All right, you two,” said Smith as light and a blissful gust of air swept into the space
, “change of plans. Looks like we’re staying here for today.”

  Jenifer left the confines of the closet. Oliver, close on her heels, instantly dropped to the lower bunk he had slept on the night before. He listened to the adults’ conversation as he laid flat and breathed the cool basement air.

  “What’s happening?” Jenifer asked.

  “There’s a military convoy going through town, headed up into the mountains. They’re canvassing the area to give notification to all residents that they have a lead on a terrorist cell nearby. They’ve blockaded the roads in and out of town and ordered everyone to hunker down until the blockade lifts, or else. The written notice is upstairs.”

  “Great,” she muttered.

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “Can I take a shower or something?” Oliver asked. “I’m filthy right now.”

  It didn’t seem like a lot to ask, especially if he was going to be here for a while.

  Chapter 11

  Disaster Strikes

  Saturday, February 23, 10:24 AM MST

  The shower did wonders for his morale. So, too, did the worn set of clothing that Smith provided. The pants were a size too big in the waist, but the legs were the right length and the t-shirt fit well. Oliver had never dressed in civvies before, having lived his whole life at Prometheus with its school uniform. He stared back at his reflection in the mirror in wonder.

  He almost looked like a normal teenaged boy.

  It was a fleeting observation. Even away from Prometheus he would never be normal.

  He combed his wet hair into its usual order, but the result reminded him too much of the sullen picture he had seen on the news. With reckless fingers he mussed it up again and cast the comb aside. He exited the bathroom, discontent gnawing at him.

  The others were in the breakfast room, gathered around the television broadcast. Oliver slouched into a chair apart from them. On screen, Veronica Porcher was reporting about the school bombing again. This broadcast included a helicopter view of the blackened husk of a building that marred the snowy landscape of its grounds.