Do you know what kind of scud people are muttering behind my back around base? Do you know what that steel sipper Bucky is saying about us? Command’s already called me in five times to question me about you.
Life could be better.
Look, I don’t expect you to answer this. You didn’t answer the last one. I don’t even know if I want to hear what you have to say. Alpha’s faded old wrinklies, I could probably get shipped off just for sending this message. (To a guy who’s supposed to be dead. Just in case we’re forgetting that part.)
I guess I just needed to know that you know, wherever you are, that I wish to the end of Alpha’s beard you would have talked to me before it was too late.
You know who I serve. You know where I stand.
If there’s anything left of my friend in there, please, Hal. Please don’t make us find you.
* * *
-Johnny
(Your ex- best friend. In case you forgot.)
* * *
PS On the off chance this is all some big misunderstanding and we’re actually on a manhunt for your evil twin or something, I actually AM sorry for slinging an angry message at my dead best friend. But, again. Not looking likely.
PPS You’re still my broto for life, broto.
PPPS But I’m still gonna shoot you. I hope you’re gropping happy.
I stared at the message for a long time. Read it again, just to make sure I had it all. I felt hollow inside. Wanted to cry. Wanted to scream and rage and break something. Most of all, I wanted to tell him not to give up on me yet—that this wasn’t me, that there was far more going on behind the scenes. But I couldn’t. Reading my messages was dangerous enough. Sending one when the entire Legion was hounding after us would just be plain stupid.
For all I knew, Johnny might report it straight to command at this point.
So instead, I filled a water jug, gathered some food from Carlisle’s stores, and set out to go find Elise. Because I needed someone, and she probably did too. And right now, all we had was each other. Just the two of us against the world, like some romanticized storyvid. Except I didn’t feel like some ill-fated hero. I just felt ill.
It didn’t take long to find her. From the temple ruins, I could just make out the figure at the crest of my favorite hill, outlined by the afternoon sun. By the end of the climb, my breathing was labored, my wounds aching in hot, pulsating waves. But it felt good to be moving.
If Elise saw or heard me approaching, she didn’t show it. She sat knees-to-chest under the two oaks, facing Divinity. I sat next to her and offered her the water jug, which she took and drank from deeply.
“Thanks,” she said quietly.
I suppressed the urge to ask if she was okay, knowing all too well how worthless the question was right then. Instead, we ate in silence, watching the slow dance of radiance and shadow on city and river as the sun crept low enough to light the White Tower and its shorter neighbors into the flaming, skyward hand I’d often studied in the evenings.
“Do you believe it?” she finally asked, still gazing over the river.
“No,” I said—too quickly, judging by the look Elise shot me. “I don’t know… I don’t know what to do. About any of it.”
Her hand found mine, a soft, simple touch. Tears were pressing at my eyes before I knew it.
“Plus I just found out my last friend in the world thinks I’m a terrorist,” I droned on, flat, chest threatening to burst. “So there’s that.”
She wrapped an arm around me, cupping the side of my head, gently nestling me in.
This wasn’t right. She was the one reeling from the news of her father, her family. I’d come out here to take care of her. And yet here was my head on her shoulder. Here were her fingers so tenderly stroking my hair.
The first sob racked through me.
“I don’t know what to do, Elise,” I whispered, hot tears sliding down my cheeks, salty at the corners of my mouth. “I don’t… I’m so sorry.”
She just pulled me tighter without a word. I wrapped my arm around her, every bit as tight, and then she was crying, and I was crying, and for a while, we were just two children again, afraid and alone in the world.
By the time the tears dried, the sun was retreating behind the horizon, and the air was growing chill and dark.
“We better go back in,” I said.
She nodded. I rose and helped her up.
Our hands remained intertwined as we strolled back to the temple, both of us seemingly in better spirits, even though nothing had really changed. Wading through a sea of helpless sobbing had that effect, I guess. But it was more than that. As we’d huddled together, crying our eyes out, it had felt like an unspoken agreement. An understanding that, no matter how bad things got, we had one another. It wasn’t any guarantee that things would work out or that we’d be safe. But it was enough for now.
“I never told you how amazing you were back there,” I said, tilting my head back toward the city. “I had no idea you could fight like that.”
The first traces of a smile tugged at her lips. “I tried to tell you. But hey, how could the pretty little flower possibly know anything about fighting, right?”
“Well, in my defense, you are, like, really pretty. Maybe too pretty. How was I supposed to know?”
“Sexist!” She threw a playful punch at my good shoulder.
I dodged it, backpedaled her grab, and all of a sudden, we were running through the maze of the temple ruins in a mad game of tag, laughing all the way. I skittered into the temple, conjuring light in my palm. Through the front hall and up the stairs, Elise hot on my heels, until I rounded the corner, extinguished the light, and whirled to catch her in the darkness with a loud, “Aghhh!”
She crashed into me with a startled yip, and then we were laughing again—deep, belly-aching laughter that went on until we were doubled over, panting for breath, eyes wet with new tears. Even when the return to our empty nest sobered our frivolous mirth… even when I glanced at the empty displays and remembered Johnny’s words with a dull ache… I thanked Alpha that I had Elise.
We collapsed into my cot, thoroughly exhausted from the tribulations of the past days, content to simply enjoy one another’s presence. Soon enough, I drifted into an easy sleep.
Only to snap awake what felt like minutes later.
According to the displays on the wall, I’d actually been asleep for hours. It was the middle of the night. But there was nothing. The room was silent, but for Elise’s breathing and—
There. A faint hum. The mag lift, I realized, descending to the skimmer bay below.
Someone was coming.
33
Insider
I leapt from the cot and snatched my pulse gun.
“Hal?” Elise groaned sleepily. “Wha—”
“Shh,” I sent. “Someone’s coming. Get behind me.”
I took up position behind the lip of the stone wall. Elise padded up behind me, collapsed staff in hand. The lift was humming back up now. Almost here. I telekinetically killed the lights.
It was just Carlisle. It had to be, right?
“Close your eyes,” I sent.
I wanted to believe I was overreacting. That we were safe here.
Safe. Just like we’d been at Franco’s. My head was spinning with thoughts of the scent-tracking hybrids and raknoth ripping the temple’s location straight from Carlisle’s mind.
The lift doors parted with a faint scraping sound.
I thrust my gun hand around the corner, channeled from the hideout’s main energy cell, and let loose with my best imitation of Carlisle’s snap flare attack. I’d never tried it before, and the effort left my head tingling oddly, but it worked. The dark room flared brilliantly through my closed eyelids. I leaned out, gun raised…
And drew a sharp breath of relief.
Carlisle stood in the open lift car, hands held up in surrender. He appeared quite un-blinded, as did James, who was frozen mid-hunker behind him, arms extended protecti
vely, blinking in confusion.
“Did… Did you just catch a snap flare blast?” James asked.
At the sound of his voice, Elise gasped and poked out from cover behind me.
Carlisle was too busy running his eyes over us and letting out a relieved breath of his own. “Thank the fates you’re here,” he said, flicking the lights on and lugging a large gear bag out of the lift. “I was hoping, but I… Well, I’m glad to see both of you.”
I lowered my gun. “Carlisle?” It felt silly leaving my mouth. Clearly, it was him. But I was too stunned—too overwhelmed with relief—to think of anything else. At least until Elise registered what I hadn’t yet.
“Where are the others?” she asked, a slight quaver in her voice.
Carlisle’s relieved expression turned somber. I glanced past him and saw nothing but James slinking almost guiltily out of the lift. No Franco. No Phineas.
“You’re both safe,” Carlisle said, going to deposit his cargo by his desk. “That’s no small victory.” He turned back to us, reluctant. “The others…”
“We lost them.” James’ voice was bleak as he joined us, and he looked more grim and deflated than I’d ever seen him. “They had Franco pinned when we got there. We got him, got as far as the training room, but… Well, Carlisle was working on a way out when they overran us. Phineas and Franco were holding the door, and…”
“Are they…?” I didn’t want to say the next word out loud.
“They were alive, the last I felt them,” Carlisle said quickly, “but the Legion has them now.”
“I’m so sorry, Elise,” James said, head hung low.
Elise stepped forward, eyes brimming with tears, and wrapped him in a tight hug.
“You think they took them to Sanctuary?” I asked Carlisle quietly.
“Most likely.” He frowned. “Almost convenient, in a twisted sort of way.”
Convenient was a strong word, but I understood what he meant. Because if we still had any interest in going through the suicidal effort of infiltrating Sanctuary, at least now we could fell two fowl with one slug once we were on base. Except without the Vantage drive, we had no hard proof to broadcast aside from our own accusations and some shaky vid footage of our excursion. Unless…
I studied Carlisle’s expression, but it gave little away. “Does that mean…?”
He gave a slight nod. “We stopped at Franco’s safe house to pick up a few things.”
James stirred at his words, disengaging from Elise, and I felt a flutter of hope at the sudden excitement in his eyes. “I don’t think the Legion was all that far behind us,” he added, bending down to rummage through the bag they’d brought. “But it was worth it.”
From the bag, he pulled a dark, unmarked case and a boxy piece of electronic equipment. He deposited both on the table, giving the latter an affectionate pat.
“Please, Alpha,” I said, sinking into a chair and eyeing the ambiguous electronic block, “tell me that’s the Vantage data.”
“This,” James said dramatically, “is the… wait, did you just say—”
“You got the Vantage drive?” Elise asked, snapping out of her reverie to come lean against the back of my chair.
“I…” James looked back and forth between us, taken aback. “Well, yeah, but…” He frowned at his tablet. “I just thought it was gonna be a good surprise.”
“It’s a great surprise, James,” Elise said.
“And a very clever backup system,” Carlisle said, his tone unusually affirming.
“Oh.” James puffed up a bit and gave a little shrug. “Yeah, well, it’s just something I set up in the safe house a few years ago. The tech’s a little old, but it works. It’s all right here.” His face fell. “We’re just lucky Franco managed to dump the drive before they got in.”
I reached for Elise’s hand, feeling her tension.
“Maybe on to the good news, James,” Carlisle said.
“Right,” James said, tapping at his tablet. “The good news. The good news is that we found something.”
I perked up as James turned his device to show us a list of files, each labeled simply with a date. Audio files, I saw. A log of some kind?
“What are they?”
“Journal entries from one of Vantage’s head researchers,” James said, clearly excited about the fact. “We were lucky to bump into them when we did. There’s a lot of stuff on that drive. But this…” He shook his head. “This is pretty unbelievable.”
“Evidence?” I asked.
“Oh, we’ve got evidence,” James said. “But this is even better. Answers.”
Carlisle even looked half-optimistic about these entries. Maybe there was hope yet.
“Tell us,” I said.
“Hear it for yourself,” James said, setting the tablet on the table.
He started the first entry.
<
My name is Therese Brown, and I was recruited eight years ago to join Vantage’s regenerative medicine team. Within three years, I was heading it. That’s when I was first approached by Alton Parker himself. That’s when all of this started. You have to understand, working at Vantage isn’t just another—>>
I looked up as the recording skipped and found James swiping the footage forward with his palmlight. “Maybe just the good parts first,” he said.
We didn’t argue.
<<—the CEO of Vantage himself comes to tell you that aliens—honest to Alpha extraterrestrials—have appeared on our doorstep. That they need help and that—>>
“No…” James murmured, skipping again. “Here.”
<<—story went like this: In their past travels, these aliens—these raknoth, as they call themselves—happened across a planet populated by a people not unlike our own. It was there they fell prey to an illness against which they had no immunity—pathogens that apparently posed no problem to the local life but were quite deadly to the raknoth. By the time the raknoth realized they were sick, though, they were already halfway across the galaxy.>>
“That’s insane,” I said, holding up a finger to pause the recording. “Another planet of people like us?”
“I know,” James said, fiddling with his palmlight again. “Believe me, they were plenty skeptical. She goes on about it for a while. But then…”
<<—then we got a look at the samples Mr. Parker brought us, and… Well, I guess it’s easy to lose sight of things when you’re sitting on the biggest scientific breakthrough the world’s ever seen.>>
James swiped forward again. “She goes on about how those samples were like nothing they’d ever seen. Like, totally foreign. Apparently they don’t even have nucleic strands. It gets a bit dense, but Alton Parker basically had them in there for five years trying to learn an entirely new branch of biology.”
“And they didn’t think to tell anyone about all this?”
“That’s exactly what these logs are. You have to understand, no one on their team had even left the compound for years at this point. Alton Parker owned these people. Therese was terrified to even be recording this, but I guess she’d seen one too many cracks in Parker’s story. Like the fact that they kept receiving raknoth samples even though the raknoth were supposed to be hidden somewhere in the northern wastelands to quarantine this foreign illness of theirs.”
“Which, what’s the deal with that?” I said, glancing at Carlisle, who hadn’t spoken. “Are they actually sick? And what about the rest of it? The blood, the racks, the hybrids?”
Carlisle deferred to James.
“Yeah,” James said. “So this is where it starts to get weird.”
Elise and I stared at him.
“Weirder. Right. So yeah, their samples were apparently chock-full of parvobes astoundingly similar to the millions you’d find crawling around on all of us.”
“Why’s that weird?” I asked. “Isn’t pretty
much every living thing on Enochia covered in parvobes?”
“He said similar,” Elise pointed out, looking unsettled.
James pointed at her. “Right. Similar to ours, but almost definitely not from Enochia, according to Therese. Something about evolutionary branches and…” He waved a hand. “Look, you should probably listen to the whole thing, but first”—he swiped the tablet over to the second audio entry and scrolled through a little ways—“this is important.”
<
It was no good.
We tried all manner of treatments, from mild to aggressive. Interestingly, the tissues themselves were incredibly resilient to pretty much any harmful substance or stimulus we could think to throw at them, and what little damage we left was usually regenerated within minutes. But that was only short term. Eventually, no matter what we did, they would die. There was talk going on of trying to splice pieces of our own immune systems into theirs when Mr. Parker came to offer another potential treatment.
Human blood.
That should have been the first warning bell. Why human blood? And why in demons’ depths was Alton Parker the one suggesting it? It was preposterous. Nonsensical.
And it worked.
Human blood—not swine, not rodent, but only human blood—was able to keep our samples alive and well as we worked over the next few years. It was… Well, the logical side of me always assumed there was some human-specific protein at work there. Maybe a combination of them. It had to be something. But years passed and no one found a satisfying explanation for it.
Shadows of Divinity Page 29
