That night, I woke to find Carlisle gone.
After the initial surge of panic, I decided I wasn’t sure what to make of it. For the half-cycle I’d been there, so had he. We each went outside at least once a day to get some air and sunlight —sometimes together, mostly on our own. But other than that, we trained, and he researched. I still wasn’t sure he even slept. I’d wake up from nightmares most nights to find him still poring over his displays or pacing thoughtfully around the room.
Waking up to find him gone in the middle of the night didn’t feel right. Especially not after he’d spent the day giving me almost too much space for having witnessed my own funeral. I scanned the room for clues and noticed the message on the central of his three displays.
<
Just to be sure, I took the mag lift down to the underground bay.
The skimmer was gone.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.
Errands…
Maybe he’d simply needed to fetch supplies—fresh filters for the cycler, more nutrients for the fab. But then why in the dead of night? And why not take his stir-crazy trainee along?
Something told me Carlisle wasn’t shopping out there, which probably meant he’d gone on recon and left me behind. That kind of made me want to hit something. But there wasn’t much I could do about it now. So I returned to my cot, feeling more irritated and cooped up by the minute.
I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think about anything but Carlisle out there, potentially in danger. Without backup. The patronizing bastard.
Eventually, though, my anger cooled, and I found myself thinking about my last moment with my mom, her warm hands on my cheeks, wet with dishwater. Her tender kiss on my forehead. I thought about how much I missed Johnny and how he and the rest of our friends would slowly be getting back to routine now. Getting back to laughing, to checking out girls. Getting back to their lives.
Assuming, of course, that Johnny believed the newsreels. I’d wondered about that a million times. What if maybe—just maybe—he’d pieced things together and seen that something wasn’t quite right about the whole situation? Johnny had never been one to question the order of things. But he’d known Kublich was going to be at our house that night. And house fires weren’t all that common in Sanctuary.
What if he’d had his doubts?
I looked over to Carlisle’s desk node. It was hardly possible. And yet I couldn’t bury the thought now in the dead silence of the empty hideout.
What if Johnny had figured it all out and tried to contact me?
Accessing my personal messages here would be a risk, as Carlisle had been sure to point out more than a few times. But considering how many levels of redirects he’d routed his connection through, even he had to admit the risk would likely be a relatively small one.
Still, I’d agreed to leave it alone. Just like he’d agreed to take me on as his partner.
And where the hell was he now?
Running around doing Alpha knew what while he left me to sleep. That’s where.
Grop it.
I sat down at the desk, waved the displays to life, and made sure the redirect measures were enabled. Heart thudding with nervous energy, I navigated to the messenger login and typed in my identifier and password before I could lose my nerve.
Several unopened messages, all automated notifications they’d simply forgotten to shut off, from the look of it—Sanctuary announcements, reminders of assignments and other obligations. All but one.
A message from Johnny. Alpha be damned. It was dated from yesterday, only a few hours after the funeral. I tapped it open, too anxious to even breathe.
Hal,
* * *
I don’t know why I’m writing this. Alpha, I hope no one walks in and finds me writing this. My parents are already concerned enough. If my mom tells me one more time that it’s okay to cry, I’m gonna shoot my own wrinklies off.
It still doesn’t feel real. I mean, scud, I set my alarm to read, “He’s gone,” every morning after I showed up for drills the first day and realized it hadn’t all been a gropping dream and that you really weren’t coming.
Okay, upon writing that out in text, I’m starting to see why my parents might be concerned. Pretty gropped up… But I’m okay. I just miss you, broto.
I don’t know what else to say. Least. Useful. Message. Ever…
Wherever you are, though, I hope it’s good. If it’s a party up there, maybe you can find a way to give me the heads-up so I know to be extra good for the next seventy or eighty years. Especially if there are hot girls up there. Definitely then.
Ah scud, who am I kidding? Let’s make it twenty or thirty years. We both know I’m not that careful.
I don’t know why I’m joking about this. Or writing any of it at all (again). So I guess I’ll just say goodbye. Maybe I’ll see you around someday.
* * *
I love you, buddy.
* * *
-Johnny
* * *
P.S. If you boys at comms stumble across this message, don’t you dare tell a gropping soul. Hal, you have my explicit permission and plea to haunt the scud out of anyone who doesn’t heed this warning.
I blew out a shaky laugh and wiped the brimming tears from my eyes.
I’d already swiped over to reply before the rational side of my brain reminded me that logging in with my identifier had already been bad enough and that, for both our sakes, I couldn’t write back to him.
That didn’t stop me from staring at the waiting cursor, agonizing over the decision for several long minutes. Eventually, though, I powered down the node and crawled back onto my cot.
I wasn’t sure if Johnny’s message had made me feel better or worse. Mostly, it just made me want to talk to him—to tell him about everything that was going on and to hear him make his jokes about my being shacked up with an older man for six days straight.
But I couldn’t. Not while Kublich was still breathing.
At some point, I must’ve drifted back to sleep, because the next time I roused enough to take in my surrounding, Carlisle had returned. He was also, to my shock, asleep. For the first time I’d seen, he lay supine on his cot, brow furrowed and eyes flicking rapidly beneath his eyelids.
The guy looked less peaceful in sleep than he did awake.
It occurred to me that I should probably let him rest. Given how little I’d seen him sleep, it seemed safe to assume that, if he was doing it right now, he probably had great need of it.
But I was also pretty damn irritated at being left behind, and I wanted answers.
“Rough night of errands?”
My guess that he’d be a light sleeper wasn’t wrong. He came awake with a sharp inhalation, eyes snapping straight to me.
He blinked a few times. “Yes. Rougher than I was expecting, at least.” A hint of guilt crossed his features. “I’m sorry if you woke to find I’d disappeared on you. I… Well, after our talk last night, I needed to do something. I decided to visit the last office Andre Kovaks broke into before he was apprehended. I didn’t go inside. I certainly wasn’t expecting a fight, but, well...”
“You found one?”
He sat up and leaned his elbows against his knees, looking more exhausted than I’d ever seen him. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Gee, if only you’d had some backup you could’ve taken along. Alpha be damned, man. I don’t know what I’m doing here if you aren’t gonna trust me to cover your back when you need it.”
“I made a mistake,” he said.
I paused, mouth half-open, caught off guard by the admission.
“And I’m sorry for that,” Carlisle continued. “It won’t happen again.”
I closed my mouth, suddenly unsure what to say.
“Did you learn anything?” I asked finally.
“Two things,” he said. “For one, Alton Parker is a raknoth.”
I stared dumbly down at him. “That’s… You’re sure?”
He rose to go wave his desk displays to life. “Uncomfortably certain.”
“Right.” I rubbed at my jaw, thinking that over. “And the second thing?”
“The second thing,” he said, swiveling around to face me, “is that we need to find out what Vantage is doing with this new factory of theirs. And we need to do it now.”
12
Contact
I hopped into the passenger seat of the skimmer, eager for an adventure—or at least to escape the hideout for a little while. Carlisle, slipping into the driver’s seat, was markedly less excited.
“Tell me again,” he said.
“Seriously?”
He gave me a look that asked plainly enough whether I really thought he’d be one to joke about such things.
I sighed and waved the dark spectacles in my hand. “Until we get to your contact, the shaders stay on. I avoid talking, keep my hood up, keep my head down. If you say run, I run. And if anyone asks, you’re just a kindly goodfellow who promised me sweets to follow him to his skimmer.”
He arched one silvery eyebrow.
“I made that last one up.”
“This is hardly inspiring confidence in your ability to behave maturely and discreetly.”
I held my hands up. “So I’m excited to be doing something other than hanging out in a stodgy temple with an old kook for a day. Someone arrest me.”
“Someone may,” he said, but he powered up the skimmer and started toward the tunnel nonetheless. “Stodgy…” he said quietly. “I thought it was cozy.”
“I’m just kidding, Carlisle. The temple’s great. In small doses, though, seeing other people is okay too.”
“Yes,” Carlisle said as the darkness of the tunnel engulfed us and we began the descent beneath the Red River. “We wouldn’t want you going kooky too.”
The tunnel tresses sped by in the dark, jumping into existence at the edge of the skimmer’s lights one moment only to blink back out the next. I focused and managed to catch a glimpse of the startlingly crushing weight of the Red River above in my extended senses before falling back to my body. It was getting easier.
“Best activate your cloak before we get any closer to the city,” Carlisle said.
“Right.” I dialed the pendant to its active position. “Who built this tunnel, by the way?”
Carlisle shrugged. “My best guess is smugglers looking to bypass the Red Bridge back before skimmers.” I could just make out his smile in the dimly-lit cab. “I doubt it was intended for freedom fighters.”
Freedom fighters. Was that what we were?
That answer might depend on exactly what Vantage was up to.
“So this guy we’re meeting…”
“Franco.”
“Franco, right. He’s a friend of yours?”
“I’m not entirely sure I have what many would call friends,” he said slowly, “but if I do, then Franco might top the list. After you, I suppose.”
“Aw, you’re gonna go and make me cry, boss.”
The jest came easily enough from my inner-Johnny, but, in truth, Carlisle’s words made me ache for the man. Twelve years on the run from the raknoth, the Sanctum, the Legion, and apparently the rest of the world, too. I couldn’t imagine how lonely he must be.
“So you trust this Franco, then?”
“As much as I can trust anyone whose head I haven’t been inside. If nothing else, we can trust his obsession with collecting information. Especially that pertaining to the raknoth. They were responsible for his wife’s death.”
“Sweet Alpha,” I muttered. “How deep does their pile of dead go?”
“Deep.”
The way he said it made me want to shudder.
He tapped his palmlight, and the tunnel exit began to resolve out of the darkness ahead. The tresses flew by slower and slower, then we reached the small bay beneath the streets of Divinity, and Carlisle set the skimmer down.
I straightened the faded green canvas jacket Carlisle had given me and double checked that my new palmlight—also a gift from Carlisle—was set to private. Not that it mattered. Carlisle was the only one who knew the forged identifier the device was linked to. The device was primarily in case some unforeseen emergency separated us. I doubted that would happen, but it was a relief to be wearing one again anyway—even if I couldn’t reach out to Johnny or anyone else with it.
On a whim, I gestured at the windshield to display the passenger cam feed and take a look at my appearance. It was only then I realized I hadn’t had a good look at myself since the night Carlisle had found me.
Seven days hadn’t changed all that much. My cropped brown hair was still plenty short enough to pass Legion regs. I still had my mom’s hazel eyes and angular features, and my dad’s thick eyebrows. Everything looked more or less the same. And yet there was also something different there. Something more, or maybe something less.
My face looked thinner, the skin around my eyes darker. As tyros, we’d been expected to shave daily. Seven days hadn’t yielded as much growth as I would’ve thought, but the doceres still would’ve lost it at the stubbly afternoon shadow on my face.
I looked rougher. Older. Or maybe it was only that I felt that way.
“You still recognize him?” Carlisle asked.
I shrugged. “Same old kid, right?”
I pulled up my hood and slipped on the shaders before he could answer, then looked again and barked out a laugh. “Alpha, I might as well stamp ‘rebel’ on my forehead. I look like I walked straight off a wanted poster.”
Carlisle smiled, slipping on his own pair of darkened spectacles. “It’s not as bad as you think. Trust me, this look is not unusual in the less glamorous districts.”
“If you say so.”
“And so I say.”
Carlisle slung a small pack over his shoulder, and we headed up the ramp to a street-level door. The sharp clicks of the door unlocking ushered the first real twinge of worry into my gut. Then Carlisle pulled it open, and the roar of voices filled the dank bay, along with the whoosh of traffic and the half-charming, half-repulsive swirl of the city’s aroma.
“Remember,” Carlisle said, turning his dark spectacles on me and pulling his own hood up, “we are but two individuals in a sea of millions. As long as we don’t do anything out of the ordinary, we’ll be fine.”
I nodded, an eager grin spreading across my face, and together, we stepped through the doorway and onto the bustling streets of Divinity.
After days of quiet isolation, the throng of the city was cacophonous. Thousands of people scuffled to and fro along the wide walkways and the pedestrian conveyor lines beneath the shade of the towering buildings to either side. Overhead, a mag train whooshed by. Higher still, hundreds of skimmers and cargo transports soared along the air traffic lanes.
So many people. So much activity.
I wiped sweaty palms on my trousers and tried to ignore the suffocating feeling of it all.
It wasn’t only the fear of being discovered. As a child of Sanctuary, I’d grown up in a sort of cocoon within Divinity, a small military city nested within a much larger civilian one. And while Sanctuary had been plenty busy, there was a distinct difference between its bustle—always ordered, never without direction—and that of Divinity’s, which was a far wilder beast.
I’d never particularly enjoyed the latter.
That said, it was still nice to see people who weren’t Carlisle and to smell food that wasn’t from the fab. A few minutes into the chaos, I even began to relax a little bit. Carlisle led us northeast, away from the river and toward the heart of the city. We got a few curious looks—and a few disdainful ones—but, mostly, people ignored us. At least until we reached the fringes of the financial district. There, the crowd’s attire quickly shifted toward business dapper, which we most certainly did not match.
A curious look from a Legion enforcer nearly stopped my heart cold. Carlisle barely seemed to take notice as he gracefully navigated through the crowd. Thankfully,
he cut northwest after the next block, and the crowd quickly began to thin out.
Thin out and degrade, that was.
I wasn’t an expert on Divinity locales, but I didn’t need to be to know we weren’t headed toward the rich side of town. The clothes grew patchier and less flashy. Grizzled men with the uniforms and looks of physical laborers went about their business. Entirely too many people seemed to be stumbling into or out of taverns for the late morning hour. Homeless men and women sat on the cracked walkways outside several such establishments.
“You bring me to the nicest places,” I said quietly, when the traffic thinned enough that I could draw up beside Carlisle.
“I’ll remind you that I grew up in the streets,” he said.
Heat flowed into my cheeks, but when I looked over, he was wearing a small smile.
“As charming as this place may be,” he said, “we’re almost there.”
Grimy sheen and smart comments aside, I actually found myself more at ease here than I had back on the main line. At least here, no one seemed to give a scud about how we were dressed. Plus, the Legion presence was far lighter. If the raknoth had eyes out for us, I doubted this would’ve been their first choice of location.
A few beggars approached us as we went. Carlisle gave them gentle smiles and a touch on the shoulder here and there, but nothing else. I wasn’t even sure he had money to give. Now that I thought about it, for all I knew, he could’ve stolen everything he had at the hideout. The thought bothered me, but I pushed it aside for the moment.
“So what does Franco do, exactly?”
Carlisle hadn’t told me much about the man other than that he might be able to get us a look behind the curtain at Vantage’s new factory—permits, shipping manifests, and other similar manners of exhilarating tedium.
Shadows of Divinity Page 11
