The effort to keep to herself was becoming more futile. More soldiers were arriving each day. None took long to get the memo; it was almost as though don’t be seen talking to the redhead. She was a government spook, was some part of the orientation.
Rivers wasn’t treated the same. He had been at first, but now that he’d accepted one of the implants and trained with the other soldiers, he seemed to have been deemed part of the family.
For Leah, it was a lot like being the unpopular kid in school. No one wanted to be seen talking to her. People watched her when she came and went. Awkward silences entered rooms the moment she stepped into them.
She’d busied herself reading Rylee’s journal entries from a tablet Mr. Clean had provided her. The transcripts had been stolen along with everything else during the escape. She found herself talking to the AI a lot when she was alone in her quarters. He wasn’t human, but he was a pretty good stand in for company.
“If I stick with Sesame Street, then I guess I’d call the Alphas . . . Cookie Monsters? Grovers? Big Birds?” Bodhi said.
“Tar-asaurus?” Sam offered the word with the same uncertainty.
Bodhi’s face soured. “Probably a good thing we aren’t the ones naming things.”
Leah muffled a laugh, as someone took a seat at the table behind.
“You seen an Alpha?” Bodhi asked.
“In the projection chamber. Jonathan has us all reviewing old records from the Foedrata Arena,” Sam explained. “Kind of like watching Ferox fight Super Powered Cavemen.”
“I would totally watch Ferox fight Super Powered Cavemen,” Bodhi said.
Sam shook his head. “It’s not entertaining . . . it’s brutal. I’m losing my appetite just thinking about it. Funny thing is I don’t think we are seeing the worst records. There is a whole cluster of them that Mr. Clean made off limits.”
The records of the bonded pair, Leah thought. Jonathan didn’t want people seeing them.
“Hey, Leah.”
She was surprised to hear her name and looked up from her tray. She found that Hayden had sat down behind her. She turned slowly and found him watching her with a pitying sort of smile.
“You don’t have to sit alone again,” he said.
“I . . . I wouldn’t want to get you shunned by the We Hate Leah club.”
Hayden grinned. “That’s not what the club’s even called.”
“Oh?”
“We haven’t voted on names yet, it’s on the agenda for tomorrow.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Clean speaking to Bodhi for a moment. She didn’t hear what was said, but Bodhi nodded, said goodbye to Sam, and got up to leave in a bit of a hurry. She frowned at that, then turned back to Hayden.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to be nice to me.”
Hayden sighed. “It’s hard to stay mad when I can tell you’re angrier with yourself than I could ever be.”
She considered that for a moment then slowly picked up her tray and moved to his table.
“You know you’re not actually public enemy number one around here,” Hayden said.
“Do tell.”
“Everyone hates Grant just a little more,” he said.
“Ahhh, I’m slightly more popular than the one guy in the brig.”
“Take the win.”
“I was pretending,” Leah admitted. “It did make me feel a bit better.”
There was a lull for a bit and Hayden took a few bites of his oatmeal.
“What do the others say?” she asked.
Hayden thought about it as he chewed. “Paige is having a rough time here. It’s not just you. She’s trapped in an alien space craft with her father who she . . . well, she hates far more than you. I think the worst of it is she wants to talk to her best friend, but...”
He didn’t finish the statement, choosing instead to wave his spoon in her general direction.
“Right,” Leah said.
“Collin is a harder read. I don’t think it’s any secret that he, well . . .”
Hayden paused mid-sentence as though he was reconsidering the wisdom of what he was about to say.
“He’s in love with her,” Leah said, saving him the trouble. “It’s painfully obvious to everyone. I mean, except her.”
Hayden laughed. “Right. Well, you hurt Paige, and he loves her. So . . .”
“That’s fair,” Leah said. She hadn’t really been eating her oatmeal, at this point even pushing raisins around her bowl with her spoon seemed to make her lose her appetite.
“For what it’s worth,” Hayden said. “I . . . I do get it.”
“You get it?” she asked.
“Why you did it,” Hayden said. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
She looked up from her bowl. No one had ever acknowledged it. That she had reasons for what she had done. It felt good, to be understood, even if it didn’t mean she was forgiven. “Thank you, Hayden.”
He shrugged, awkward in the face of her gratitude.
“Jonathan seems pretty indifferent about the whole mess. You’d think he’d be the angry one. Then again . . .” He paused, lifted his spoon and twirled it in a few circles as though pointing to everything about their new reality. “Might be a bit like throwing stones in a giant glass alien space craft he neglected to tell his friends about.”
Leah smiled, but shook her head. “It’s not really the same. He kept secrets to protect us.”
“Us?” Hayden asked.
Leah nodded and sighed. “As infuriating as it sounds, I can see it now, why nothing I did was ever going to get the truth out of him. He was protecting me too.”
“Irony,” Hayden said.
Another lull followed. Hayden got a refill of his coffee and came back. “Sometimes I want to blame Heyer for all of it. What if he’d just told The Cell what was happening, maybe things could have gone differently, but—I really don’t know.”
Hayden’s expression was doubtful. “If science fiction tells us anything, it never works out well for aliens that get involved with the government, especially if they mean well.”
Leah raised an eyebrow and it turned her face into a question mark.
“E.T, Starman, The Day the Earth Stood Still, X-Files,” Hayden said. “From what I hear, Olivia isn’t exactly Agent Mulder.”
Leah held up her spoon. “You’re not wrong. She’s not even a Scully.”
Hayden grew more thoughtful as he ate, looking around them once again. Finally, he dropped his spoon into the bowl and sat back with his coffee. “The week before we got kidnapped, Jonathan asked me about the heroine’s journey.”
Leah blinked. “Okay, that came out of nowhere.”
Hayden shook his head. “No, I was just thinking about how it doesn’t hit you all at once. Where Jonathan’s weirdness suddenly makes sense.”
“So, you’re saying something suddenly makes sense to you?” she asked.
“It’s a weird thing to ask out of nowhere,” Hayden said.
Leah looked at him as though maybe he hadn’t considered who Jonathan had been asking.
“Okay, yes it would be weirder if he’d asked someone other than me, but still . . .”
A few weeks ago, Leah would have recognized the signs. Would have known Hayden was about to trap her in a longer dissertation. She might have tried to head him off, but this was the first polite, almost normal, conversation she’d had with another human being since arriving at Hangman’s Tree.
“Last few months, Jonathan’s been interested in things he’d have only smiled politely at if I brought them up before. Though, I guess you probably already know that, because . . . you know . . . spying.”
He didn’t say it as though taking a jab. Rather, he was simply saying she probably knew exactly what he was talking about because she’d been watching. It was a bit surreal when she found herself discussing work like anyone with a normal job might. She explained that, actually, The Cell couldn’t listen in on the conversations in the house. The alien h
ad some way of scrambling audio devices. Even after they brought in lip readers, they believed the video was being tampered with and it turned out they had been right.
“Still,” she said with a grin, “not exactly a stranger to Hayden rants.”
He nodded.
“Well, I had a bit of an insomnia problem. So, one night after everyone but Jonathan was asleep, I sat down on the couch. He was just staring into space, then he suddenly asks if there is a difference between the hero and the heroine’s journey.”
“Seemed weird at the time but . . .” he trailed off a bit as his face saddened, and his voice lowered, “. . . he was sleeping on the couch because Rylee had shown up the night before.”
“I get it,” Leah said. “He was asking about heroines because of Rylee, and you just realized it.”
Leah stopped playing with her food. “So, what did you say?”
“At the time, I was surprised how little I remembered. I mean, yeah, I’d heard of the heroine’s journey, I just hadn’t pondered it much. I had to go find one of my old notebooks from sophomore year.”
“And . . .”
“Well, thing is, he may have been asking because of Rylee. But gender doesn’t have much to do with it,” Hayden said.
“Because, the misconception is that the journey of the hero or heroine, implies a male or female. Hero and heroine are just labels some scholar gave to the journey itself.”
She got comfortable. She’d seen this with Hayden. When he got a captive audience, he had a habit of slowly orbiting his point. Jonathan always said it was best to let him get there on his own. “I get it, the sex of the person taking the journey doesn’t matter. So, what is the difference between the journeys then?”
He licked his lips. “The one that always stuck out most to me is where the protagonist’s power comes from. In the typical story, the hero is on a journey for individual strength. A man or woman on that path is trying to harness power they intend to wield alone,” Hayden said. “In the heroine’s journey, power is acquired through gaining allies.”
Leah gave a knowing frown. “Sounds like something a man came up with.”
Hayden put his coffee on the table and drew his arms across his chest. “There are other differences. Some people say the heroine’s journey is inward instead of out, into the self instead of out into the world. Others will tell you the hero usually starts from a place of privilege while the heroine doesn’t. Some will talk about replacing the sage with the old crone. So instead of Yoda you get Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother.”
Hayden, sensing he was losing her interest, stopped drilling down into the details. “If you think about it in the context of stories like the Wizard of Oz or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is an underlying message that, even when you’re the chosen one, your greatest strength will come from knowing with whom to ally yourself.”
He uncrossed his arms and picked his coffee up again. “After all, when the poop really hits the fan, even Superman needs the Justice League.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
COLLIN SLAPPED AT a mosquito as the sun finished setting on Sucia Island.
“So,” he said, checking his nonexistent watch for the umpteenth time. “Been five hours now, we still feeling good about this plan?”
They were in an unoccupied campground that bordered the island’s southwestern beach. Jonathan stood over a picnic table, arms folded as he studied a map of the island’s geography one last time.
“Warned you it could take a while,” Jonathan said.
“Right, it’s just . . .” he said. “Well, I didn’t say anything while you were explaining the plan to the Tibblers, but didn’t you tell me it was a bad idea to engage these things in the woods. Let alone the woods at night.”
Collin was nodding to the setting sun as Jonathan turned away from the map to look at him. “The Tibblers?”
Collin shrugged. “We had to call them something.”
Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t let anyone hear you call them that.”
“What the Tibblers don’t know won’t hurt them . . . or me,” Collin said. “But still. Forest? Night?”
“The Ferox normally have the advantage in low light. They’re harder to spot in the dark, move through the trees pretty fast, and have better vision than us. Their claws do better on loose soil as well.”
Jonathan picked up the lantern that had been acting as a paperweight against the wind and handed it to Collin. “While none of that is good, I think we’ve taken the necessary precautions.”
He’d just finished rolling up the map as chatter came over the earpieces.
“Jonathan, the breach is about to open,” Mr. Clean said. “This is the last chance to abort.”
Jonathan gave him a glance before taking a few steps back and dropping down on a knee in the sand. He opened a line to the others, “Not going to waste any more opportunities. Everyone good to go?”
In his own earpiece, Collin heard Bodhi, Perth, and Beo sound off one after the other.
“I . . . I’m ready,” Rivers said.
Jonathan took a long breath and laid flat in the sand.
Lastly, he opened a channel to Rivers that the rest couldn’t hear. Collin only overheard because he was standing right there. “Not gonna lie to you Rivers, this ain’t going to be pleasant.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Rivers said.
“Good man,” Jonathan said. “Just stay back unless you’re absolutely needed.”
“I got it,” Rivers replied.
“We’re good, Mr. Clean,” Jonathan said. “Do your thing.”
Collin put his ear buds in and turned away, temporarily blasting his music at a volume that risked permanent hearing damage. In the past couple days, he’d seen enough device activations. They were as disagreeable to watch as they were to hear. A close tie with seeing someone get their leg amputated without anesthesia. He knew that if he were able to hear it, Jonathan’s screams would be joining the chorus of others that now shared that same activation agony from all of their various locations around the island.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he waited it out. When he didn’t sense any movement behind him, he opened one eye and turned to look, finding Jonathan’s face had gone serene and his chest was beginning to blaze.
He grabbed the binoculars they had brought along, tossing the strap over his neck before starting his climb up a small lookout tower. The island was only two miles across. It had few, if any, civilians present on any given day of the year. More importantly, it was far enough from the coast that it should theoretically force the gate’s safety protocols to deliver its passenger somewhere in the forest.
The entire point was to keep the Ferox surrounded by water on all sides, and make sure no one was around to see it.
All this, because Jonathan had just given Mr. Clean the order not to bring The Never into existence. What played out here tonight was on true Earth—and that meant it was for keeps.
Bodhi was the targeted node of tonight’s arrival. That meant he was the only one amongst them tied to the portal stone the Ferox would be carrying. Only Bodhi would be able to track the Ferox with his internal compass. It also meant, that everyone else on the island, save Collin, was running on Mr. Clean’s batteries.
Collin looked out over the forest. He’d been given assurances that the gateway would be hard to miss and it proved true. Despite the dense tree cover, he quickly spotted an unnatural red light glowing in the woods near the island’s center.
“You spot the portal?” Jonathan called up to him.
Collin blinked a few times when he saw Jonathan on his feet below. He had to wait for him to zip up his coat, hide the light on his chest, before he could look at him without squinting.
“There is definitely a large ominous glow out there,” Collin said. “It’s northeast of—oh.”
“Problem?” Jonathan called up.
“Uh, it’s already gone.”
Jonathan didn’t look surpr
ised. “Mr. Clean said the portal might be short lived. Doesn’t take as long to punch a hole into true Earth as it does The Never.”
Bodhi’s voice came in over the radio. “I’ve got its position, south of me, feels like less than a mile.”
Jonathan reached to his ear once more. “Ocean perimeter teams, keep your eyes open.”
The people he was addressing were their men on the water. They were mostly there to make sure no boats picked tonight to approach the island. According to Jonathan—and pretty much everyone else who had faced these creatures and lived to talk about it—they had yet to meet a Ferox who could swim. Still, he didn’t want anyone getting comfortable. With Malkier and Heyer in open war, whatever rules they previously relied on might be out the proverbial window. He didn’t want to risk drawing The Cell’s attention to tonight’s operation. At least—not yet.
Jonathan gave him one last glance, then pulled a visor over his eyes. Collin opened the screen of a laptop they had set up in the watch tower. He checked that the camera feeds were all coming in and recording, and confirmed all of their people were accounted for on a map tracking their individual locations, then put his hand out the window to give a thumbs up.
“Alright, we’re heading in,” Jonathan said. “Rivers?”
The man’s reply was a little slower than the rest. “Unpleasant was an understatement. But yeah, I’m on my feet.”
“Good. Remember, close enough to see for yourself, but don’t get involved,” Jonathan said. “Everyone else, let’s go hunting.”
Collin felt like he was watching a first-person shooter. The feeds from each man’s cam suddenly blurred as they burst forward into the trees. The light was getting scarce, and it was worse once they were under the forest canopy, but the cameras quickly auto adjusted to night vision. Once the men were deeper into the forest, they restrained from showing off any superhuman speed, taking more care to mask their movements.
Bodhi and he were the only voices on the comms.
Bodhi whispered location updates as he tracked the Ferox. Meanwhile, Collin kept an eye on the map, helping them to coordinate a shrinking net.
The Never Army Page 49
