The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  Alaric listened attentively as they filled him in.

  “Shit,” he agreed when they’d finished. “I need to bring this to the council.” He glanced at Drogan. “Zar’Krogoth should be consulted too.”

  “Krogoth will not raise a finger to help Zar’Kole,” Drogan said, “no matter how much we will need him in the coming fight.”

  “Well then,” Alaric said, “maybe Zar’Kole should get his ass outta Dodge while he can.”

  “That’s what I said,” Rachel muttered.

  Jarek shifted his weight, not liking where this was headed. “Yeah, but—”

  “We can’t extend ourselves so far,” Alaric said, his expression firm. “Not when this Kul’Gada could just as soon drop down on our heads at any moment.”

  “We need Kole alive, Alaric. He’s probably the only one our people might be willing to—”

  “You need to stay here until we get this sorted out properly,” Alaric said. “No gallivanting off with dreams of saving the day. Is that understood?”

  Try as he might to conjure up his cheerful charm, Jarek couldn’t seem to find a carefree joke to turn aside the sudden feeling of the chains of command wrapping tight around his chest and arms.

  “Is that an order?”

  Alaric studied his face for a long stretch. “That’s an order. No one leaves until the council has discussed this with Krogoth.”

  With that, Alaric gave them all one more stern look, turned on his heel, and strode down the ramp and back toward HQ.

  Jarek watched him go, feeling the chains tighten.

  This wasn’t what he’d signed up for. In fact, it was exactly why he’d avoided signing up for anything and everything since he’d learned his lesson well and good nine years earlier. Or maybe not so well and good, considering.

  It had all sounded tolerable when the mission was simple, their goals unified. But the problem with agreeing to give yourself over to an outfit like the Resistance was that you just couldn’t count on anyone else to always see shit straight when it started to bend.

  Of course, it wasn’t like the Resistance owned him. Sure, he’d agreed to participate in their command hierarchy and everything, but it wasn’t like there was some supreme court of law that would be waiting to strip his suit and toss him in the ol’ irons if he took matters into his own hands. And why shouldn’t he?

  Because bucking the reins would probably only drive the wedge deeper into the heart of this piss-poor alliance they all had going on—not to mention further ostracize him personally from the Resistance. It might even lose him any chance at having their support in the fight that was probably going to end up finding all of them, one way or another. Which would be ridiculous, sure, but Jarek had a feeling the force of nature that was human spite wasn’t about to just lay down for something as trivial as the end of the world.

  “Goddammit,” he whispered.

  As Drogan, Lietha, and Rachel all looked at him, Jarek knew that, no matter how solid the logic arrayed against the idea, he couldn’t just rationalize his way out of it. He needed to do something.

  “I don’t suppose you have some master plan to rescue Saint Kole?” he asked.

  Lietha looked affronted by the question. “I will take whatever ship I must and fly to my Zar,” he said, red eyes brightening. “And if anyone tries to stop me, I will—”

  “Okay,” Jarek said. “So no plan. Got it.”

  Lietha gaped at him, too furious or indignant to make a sound.

  “I’ll take you,” Jarek said before the raknoth decided to try to take his head off instead.

  “You can’t,” Rachel said.

  She looked tired, disappointed, as if she’d been waiting for him to say those exact, distasteful words all along.

  “We can’t wait for the council to somehow magically convene with Krogoth for once.” Jarek waved a hand at Drogan. “We’ve got his envoy right here. Plus, they’re gonna say it’s a bad idea anyway.”

  “It is a bad idea,” she said.

  “But it’s our bad idea.”

  Rachel was less than impressed.

  “You think this is funny?” she asked, quiet anger flickering in her tone.

  “We can’t just let him die, Rache.”

  “He’s probably eight or nine thousand years older than both of us combined. I think he can make his own decisions.”

  Jarek held her gaze, uncomfortably aware of the weight of Lietha’s and Drogan’s stares. “And what about the people living down the mountain in Katashina? None of them decided to be ground zero for the heavyweight round. Do they deserve to die too?”

  She hesitated, jaw tight. “We might not even be able to stop it, for all we know. If Kul’Gada is even a fraction as powerful as the rakul Haldin showed me, it’s insane for us to try to take him out away from our seat of power.”

  Lietha looked like he wanted to refute the statement and declare he’d rip the Kul’s throat out himself, but apparently his fear of the rakul trumped his indignant fury.

  “I think we’re all totally with you on that one, Goldilocks,” Jarek said. “Which is why I’m thinking a snatch and grab is in order.”

  Her eyebrows raised. “You want to kidnap a Zar and drag him back here?”

  He shrugged. “I wanna convince Kole it’s best to have his peace talk where his friends are all within easy stabbing distance of his enemy. If a little elbow grease is required for said convincing, so be it.”

  Rachel looked at Lietha. “And you don’t have anything to say about that? No, ‘You dare lay hands on my master, pathetic human?’ or anything?”

  Lietha showed teeth that were quickly becoming sharp fangs. “Zar’Kole must live. Even if it must be at the intervention of… humans.”

  “We’ll be there and back in the blink of an eye,” Jarek added.

  Rachel splayed her hands incredulously. “It’s literally across the world.”

  “Two blinks of an eye.”

  She shook her head. “This is ridiculous.”

  “As is this pointless dallying,” Lietha said, shifting impatiently. “We do not require your aid, human. If you do not wish to be here, perhaps you should step off the—”

  Lietha’s compact Japanese frame lifted off the deck and slammed into the bulkhead before he could finish telling Rachel exactly what she could step off of. After a brief moment of stunned inaction, he gave a growled curse and started struggling.

  Drogan stepped forward with a low warning growl of his own.

  Jarek planted a firm hand in his chest and took a calculated risk in turning his gaze away from the raknoth and back to Rachel.

  “Goldilocks…”

  For a long few seconds, Rachel did nothing aside from furrow her brows at the strain of keeping Lietha telekinetically pinned. Then her face contorted in a snarl, and Lietha dropped back down to rock the deck with a small thump.

  Jarek didn’t need to catch Lietha when he threw himself at Rachel. Drogan was already on top of that.

  “This is a bad idea, Jarek,” Rachel said, her eyes not leaving the struggling raknoth until it became clear Drogan would not be letting Lietha pass. “We should wait.”

  Would that he could.

  But leaving a good ally and a bunch of innocents hanging in harm’s way? Going against his instincts because of orders? Because it was the safe thing to do?

  If Jarek was built for anything in particular, it wasn’t that.

  He was thinking about what he could say to make her understand when it properly occurred to him what she’d just said.

  “We?”

  She rolled her eyes, and there was nothing playful about it. “If I can’t convince you not to run off like a dumbass, I’m sure as hell not gonna let you do it alone with two…” She looked at Drogan and Lietha once more, then shook her head and pushed past Jarek for the cockpit with a muttered, “Whatever.”

  Behind, Lietha finally stopped his struggling.

  Jarek traded a long, somber look with Drogan, told Al to close
the hatch and plot the course, and headed for the cockpit after Rachel, trying to remember any other time he’d felt so wholly unsatisfied in getting what he’d wanted.

  Flying at top speed, it turned out that two blinks of an eye, or at least the first half of it, was still going to end up taking about ten hours.

  This had been a terrible idea. Rachel grew more certain of it with each passing mile.

  The rakul were too close—within a day’s travel by every estimate they had. What if they arrived at HQ while she and Jarek were off on a wild goose chase with a couple of raknoth? What if there were more events, more furors, and something happened to Michael or the others?

  Any one of a thousand things could go wrong, and somehow she’d still let her concern for Jarek pull her into this exercise in lunacy. But maybe it wasn’t all for naught.

  For one thing, there were the innocent Japanese civilians whose proximity to Kole made them ripe targets for Kul’Gada’s fury if and when he arrived there. Much as she loathed to admit any such thing right now, Jarek was right: they couldn’t just ignore that.

  At the very least, though, they should have told Resistance command what they were doing before jetting off. Not that they wouldn’t figure it out the instant Alaric finished briefing them and the commanders realized the four of them had disappeared from HQ along with Jarek’s ship.

  What they would do when they did realize… Well, that might be the least of their concerns right now.

  “Time zones, man,” Jarek was saying in what had to be his thousandth attempt to spark some conversation from her.

  For some reason, she hadn’t exactly been in a talking mood since take-off.

  “It’s been 2 PM for like nine hours,” he continued. “Am I the only one who thinks that’s weird?”

  Given that the raknoth had chosen to heed her not-so-subtle disdain and remain in the back cabin for the flight, Rachel had to assume the question was directed at her.

  She fixed him with her least captivated stare.

  He shrugged. “Well excuse me for my undying childlike sense of wonder.”

  “Childlike implies you’re no longer a child,” she said.

  Hope lit in his eyes. “Touché, my golden-haired—”

  “Incoming, sir,” Al said through the ship speakers.

  They were both upright and alert in an instant.

  “Talk to us, Al,” Jarek said. “What are we dealing with?”

  “It’s… Oh!”

  “Spit it out, Mr. Robot.”

  “It’s the Enochians, sir. They’re hailing us locally.”

  Jarek traded a frown with her. “Locally?”

  “See for yourself,” Al said.

  The speakers crackled.

  “Nice of you to invite us along,” came Haldin’s voice.

  “Hey, you know how it is,” Jarek said. “You step out for a quick run to Japan thinking no one’s even gonna notice and then all of a sudden you’ve got no net coverage, and you can’t turn back ’cause a wise old raknoth master—who coincidentally happens to be acting pretty freaking unwisely—has his life hanging in the balance. You know, that old chestnut.”

  “Uh-huh,” Haldin said.

  “Speaking of which, how did you guys—”

  The dark purple hull of the Enochians’ raknoth ship raced by overhead with a roar of rushing air. It gained at least a hundred yards’ lead in the space of seconds before slowing to match their pace. The odd material of its hull seemed to eat the sun and then give it back as a fluid glow rather than a gleam or a shine.

  “This ship is pretty fast,” Haldin said. “We left HQ two hours ago.”

  Jarek cocked his head in a not bad expression.

  “I’m assuming you didn’t come out here for a race,” Rachel said.

  “Not exactly.”

  Jarek looked wary. “Alaric didn’t happen to send you out here to throw us in irons, did he?”

  “He did express pretty explicitly that we should bring back you, uh…”

  “Chicken-chasing fools,” came Johnny’s voice.

  “Right,” Haldin said. “That. But they decided we might as well try to grab Kole too while we’re at it.”

  Huh. Maybe—just maybe—this whole expedition might not end up being the worst decision ever.

  “Huh,” Jarek said. “Well rock on, then, team.”

  There was a pregnant silence, the kind that sat heavy in Rachel’s stomach for some instinctive reason she couldn’t quite place.

  “There’s something else,” Haldin said. “New intel.”

  Rachel traded an uncertain look with Jarek. “What is it?”

  “Michael had another episode—a mild one, but he caught flashes of some kind of attack, maybe another furor. He didn’t recognize the place, but Alton thought it sounded like it could’ve been Japan, from what Michael told us.”

  “What?” Rachel heard herself say.

  “What?” Lietha echoed from the cockpit doorway, eyes blazing scarlet fury. “The attack has already begun?”

  “We’re not sure what’s happening,” Hal said, “but—”

  “You must fly faster!” Lietha spat, and the floor hissed and smoked where the stuff landed.

  “Dude!” Jarek said. “Not cool. We’re flying as fast as we can.”

  Lietha spun and punched a hole straight through the cockpit bulwark. “Cursed void!”

  “Motherfucker!” Jarek cried. “You wanna get your pal under control back there, Stumpy?”

  Lietha’s skin was shifting to mint green scales as he rounded on Jarek. “You think to—”

  Drogan grabbed Lietha and dragged him, biting and gnashing, into the back cabin. There was a loud crash and then Drogan’s low growl of, “Control yourself.”

  The ruckus calmed.

  “This is why we can’t have nice things,” Jarek muttered.

  “Is Michael…” Rachel started to ask toward the console. Then it dawned on her.

  New intel. Interpreted by Alton. Out here where net coverage was largely nonexistent.

  “When did Michael see all this?”

  “Twenty minutes ago,” came Michael’s voice, “give or take. And I’m fine.”

  The sound of Michael’s voice—of Michael’s voice on the local broadcast, more specifically—made her feel like she’d just fallen out of the moving aircraft.

  “You brought him with you?!” she cried.

  “I’m not luggage, Rache. Or an invalid, despite what everyone seems to think.”

  “I know that, Spongehead. But you’re also sleeping eighteen hours a day and having routine seizures. You don’t belong in the middle of a fight right now.”

  “With any luck, there won’t be a fight,” Haldin said. “Assuming it’s another furor, we’ll stabilize the situation in Katashina and get Zar’Kole’s people out safe. Then, if we can, we should get word about all this to Al’Brandt in the Himalayas. We haven’t been able to reach them by comm. Having the one guy who seems to be able to see what the rakul are up to might help us do those things and get everyone back and ready to fight before they find us.”

  “Or home base,” Jarek said.

  “Right,” Haldin said. “Which is why we need to move fast.”

  “Well excuse me if my primitive subsonic flying machine isn’t up to your standards,” Jarek said.

  “Looks like we’re almost there anyway,” Haldin said.

  Well wasn’t that all just tidy and swell, then? Never mind that they’d dragged Michael out here like a defenseless rakul compass.

  Jesus, when was life ever going to be simple again? Or safe? Hell, she’d settle for just getting back to an average of non-life-threatening.

  Something told her that wasn’t going to be happening anytime soon, though.

  As they closed on Katashina, Jarek caught the Enochians up to speed on Kole’s bold plan for martyrdom, taking particular care not to say anything too insulting about the decisions of Lietha’s Zar. Judging by the fact that the steady growling from the ba
ck cabin never got above a low rumble, he must have succeeded.

  They were flying high over Tokyo and Jarek was leading a discussion on how they might best accomplish a snatch and grab with a stubborn super-powered raknoth when they first noticed the dark spot on the northwestern horizon.

  Something about the spot made Rachel immediately uneasy. They were already too late. She was suddenly sure of it.

  “No…” Lietha hissed from the doorway. He was gaping at the steadily approaching dark spot ahead. “It cannot be.”

  “Oh dear,” Al said quietly. He zoomed the view on the cockpit display, and the cause of Lietha’s consternation became clear.

  The wafting columns of darkness were unmistakable.

  Katashina was burning.

  9

  Jarek had seen a lot of bad shit in his life. Hell, he’d made some pretty grisly displays with his own two hands. When they crested the last ridge and stared down into the wide ravine of Katashina, though, even he wasn’t ready for the magnitude of the violence that had taken the sprawling village.

  On the flight in, the long-abandoned ruins of Tokyo proper had been peaceful and quiet. The sight of the smoke that had filled up more and more of the skyline as they’d reached the northwestern edge of the city and skirted over low mountains had planted the seeds of dread.

  Now, crawling slowly over the carnage, those seeds blossomed into much more. Shock. Revulsion. Anger.

  He wanted to cover Rachel’s eyes and tell her not to look, but he couldn’t seem to look away or move, and the sounds of her raspy breaths beside him told him it was already too late anyway.

  Some buildings were already burnt to ashes, but several of the bigger ones were still in their death throes, spewing their contribution to the thick plumes of smoke they’d spotted from a distance. The property destruction was the least shocking feature of the scene, though.

  Dozens upon dozens of bodies littered the streets between the smoking shells of the village buildings, twisted together in a sick collage that told of brutal violence and reckless abandon. The disturbingly meaty smell on the air made him think plenty more must have been caught in the burning buildings as well. Most disturbing of all, though, were the smaller bodies tangled in the bloody mess. Children…