Tia jerked on the controls, hard, but the trajectory didn’t shift. The wingjet turned in a long, graceful arc over the ocean and headed back toward Atalanta. With a shimmer, the cloaking tech engaged. She flipped the toggle, but nothing happened. Everything had been rewired to render her useless.
With the wingjet invisible, Atalantan forces wouldn’t be able to track her or shoot her down. She’d given Balias the last piece of tech he needed to make his plan foolproof.
Now everyone in Panthea was going to die. By her hand.
No. No.
Sweat beaded along her forehead and the back of her neck. She’d only commandeered the wingjet to destroy Balias.
“This can’t be happening,” she muttered, frantically tapping the nav panel, her injured hand aching. Part of her plaster had ripped off at some point. She hadn’t even noticed. “I never wanted this.”
They’d figure out eventually that she wasn’t Aris. They’d figure out who she really was: Tia Pallas, a Safaran spy. She’d be vilified. Her family’s deaths would go unnoticed, just like their disappearances had, and no one would ever know the truth. That she wasn’t willing. That she loved her dominion and wanted to fight for it. That the things she did to save her family ate at her, as insidious and agonizing as a cancer.
They’d only see the monster.
You can still fight. The soft, clear voice in her head almost sounded like her mother.
Tia stilled. She had a knife and a solagun. Balias hadn’t expected her to be armed, to have tools.
She released herself from the harness and contorted her body sideways, until she was wedged under the nav panel in the footwell.
Ward Balias’s voice slithered into the cabin, a shade less smug. “What, do you think you can split the machine with your bare hands?”
Tia unsheathed her knife and held it up for an instant before using it to pry off the panel housing the controls. A nest of wires fell free.
“What are you doing?” Balias’s voice vibrated with fury. “You realize you’re putting Major Vadim’s life at risk every moment you defy me.”
With shaking hands, Pallas explored the tangle, holding it up to the glow of the nav, looking for recent splices.
There.
“You touch those wires, Milek dies.” The ice in Balias’s voice crackled through the cabin.
Tia ignored the words and the shiver they sent down her spine. He was getting nervous. That meant she was on the right track. She picked out a cluster of three wires with silver shining through gaps in the darker outer casing. Holding her breath, she wrenched her knife through the wires. A shower of sparks filled the footwell. The wingjet jerked and fell, and her head slammed into the underside of the dashboard with a thud. Mini fireferns exploded in front of her eyes.
Fighting back a wave of nausea, Tia dragged herself into the seat with white-knuckled hands. Then she tapped the pedals and pulled up on the controls, and oh Gods . . . the wingjet steadied. No more free fall.
She pressed forward experimentally, and the jet changed course.
She’d done it.
A sliver of a smile twisted her lips as she sent the wingjet into a wide arc. Back toward the prison.
Ward Balias was silent. She didn’t know if she’d cut the comms wire, or if he had nothing to say now that he’d lost control of the wingjet.
She didn’t care.
On the nav, the red line of her trajectory disappeared. The veiling tech faltered, and the wingjet’s nose shimmered back into visibility in the darkness before her. But there was one thing she couldn’t reverse.
The bomb was still armed. Which meant she had to get back to Ward Balias. The flaming scorpion was his prize. His right.
She sped back to the prison, every sense focused on her mission of vengeance. No doubt Balias would send a team of flyers to intercept her; she’d have only seconds to drop the bomb.
But as she approached, niggling doubts began to pop like bubbles in her mind. Killing Balias meant killing Aris and Milek, too. And the family that had been coerced into pretending to be hers. All the other prisoners Balias had locked up.
Everyone at the prison would die.
Tia shook her head, trying to dislodge her sudden hesitation. She didn’t want to kill anyone, but she hadn’t wanted to be a spy for the enemy either. Ward Balias had taken everything from her. If killing him meant others had to die, too, that was a price she was willing to pay.
Are you willing? Truly?
She didn’t know if the internal voice was her own or her mother’s, but it dug down deep, shoving aside bone and muscle and organ until it reached her beating heart.
Tia closed her eyes, just for a second, and saw her mother’s soft, pale skin, her blond hair, her blue eyes that were just the same shade as Tia’s. She felt her mother’s arms around her, holding so tightly, all her determination and pride there in her embrace. If her mother was here with her now, what would she say?
Are you truly willing to kill your friends? To kill innocents, men and women with families just like yours?
The realization broke over Tia, as steady and irrefutable as the tide.
Balias had made her a monster. But she didn’t have to die one.
The lights of the prison rose from the darkness, just as a fleet of wingjets lifted into the air. They made a beeline for her but didn’t engage. Not yet. She dipped and spun, evading them for the few precious seconds she needed.
Moonlight illuminated her path, glittering against the black hole of the ocean. She didn’t know if her revised plan would work, but she had to try. By degrees, she gave up her hatred of Ward Balias. She gave up her need for blood.
With the first easy breath she’d taken in months, Tia sent herself up to the stars, up to her mother, her father, and to her brother, even as the wingjet dove, deep deep deep into the silent water.
And when the bomb blew, all she saw was light.
Chapter 37
Within the Panthea Capitol building, Galena watched Aris’s panicked face in horror, while the chaos of scrambling advisors and techies whirled around her.
On the streets, people were trying to evacuate, but there wasn’t time to be organized about it. Civilians violated the no-fly rules in droves. Terrans were abandoned in the middle of the road. The city’s protectors struggled to keep things under control. Pyralis’s advisors kept urging the wards to leave, but they insisted on staying at their posts. There wasn’t time, really, to get them far enough away.
Commanders Freni and Quin were beside themselves, and the techies they’d brought in to help oversee the rescue mission were wide-eyed with fear.
“Can we shoot Lieutenant Haan down?”
“Where’s the signal coming from?”
“Is there a way to disarm the bomb remotely?”
Galena herself stood frozen before the monitor, watching Aris scramble. And then something happened. Aris got her hands on some wires. The grainy glow of the nav against her face changed. Her expression changed.
A voice cut through the frantic crowd. “She just popped up on radar. She’s changing course. She’s turning around.”
Come on, Aris. Come on, dear.
“How close is our recon team?” she asked in the sudden silence. Every single person in the room was standing, staring at the unauthorized vid.
One of the techies dropped into his chair, his hands flying across his monitor. “Just about to land at the prison,” he reported, his gaze flicking back to the main screen.
“Tell them what’s happening. She might need an escort . . .” Galena’s voice trailed off. She never took her gaze from Aris’s face. The vid was blurry, interrupted by blasts of static, but she recognized the look in the soldier’s eyes.
All around Galena, people began shouting orders and sending comms to Jax and his team, but when the vid flashed white, everyone froze.
A minute later, just as Commander Freni turned and opened his mouth to speak, the office rocked. Galena dropped to her knees, and someone grabbed her hand. A monitor fell off the wall with a crash. All the lights went out, and someone screamed in the darkness.
Galena didn’t need to see to know who held her hand. She and Pyralis said nothing, just rode out the aftershocks with their fingers tightly joined.
Chapter 38
The strategic team landed their invisible wingjets at various points around the prison. Dysis’s jet, with Lieutenant Santos as flyer and Otto as retriever, was one of three to land on the actual landing pad, which extended out over the ocean.
Moments after they touched down, a comm blasted through the small cabin.
“Lieutenant Haan has gained control of the wingjet carrying the flaming scorpion. Flyers en route, look for her and assess whether she needs an escort. The weapon is—”
Santos was already powering back up when a giant undulating light unfurled from the ocean at a frightening speed, like it was ripping the sky in half.
Seconds later, the power went out. Everything. The nav screen blinked off, the spotlights that framed the landing pad disappeared into darkness. A great, rolling earthquake followed, as if some terrible monster rumbled under the ground, crumbling the earth in its wake. Dysis held on to the straps crisscrossing her chest and closed her eyes, the glow of the flaming scorpion turning her lids pink.
She thought of Calix and how they were supposed to be together when the bomb was dropped.
And she waited to die.
Eventually the earth stilled. The lights blinked back on. And Dysis kept breathing.
“We’re not dead,” she muttered. Was there some kind of delay with the bomb’s effects? Or were they truly safe?
“You noticed that, too? I thought it was just me,” Otto quipped, but his voice shook a little.
Santos didn’t say anything. He slipped a diatous veil off the back of his neck, briefly transforming into a stranger—a female stranger—before replacing it with another, and becoming Aris.
Aris.
They were here to rescue her, but if she’d been the one flying the jet with the weapon . . .
“Aris . . . she dropped the bomb in the ocean. She survived, right?” The question was swallowed by the silence of the wingjet.
“Sure, sure,” Otto said, a frantic edge to his voice. “Probably.”
“If she didn’t, what about our disguises? The misdirection?” They’d still need to rescue Major Vadim. Dysis couldn’t be thinking about . . . worrying that Aris was . . .
Lieutenant Santos said in Aris’s voice, “We follow the command. If Haan is dead, let the soldiers chase ghosts.” He opened the glass dome. “Time to go.”
At the other edge of the tarmac, another prong of the strategic assault engaged with the enemy, lighting the night with solagun fire. Dysis and her team were able to slip into the building that hulked at the edge of the pad with limited engagement.
She hoped Jax was okay. He was in one of the wingjets that landed at the rear side of the prison. He’d be sneaking in on a subfloor and working his way up. He was in charge of retrieving the weapon. But now . . .
She wondered if he’d still call for the full contingent, now that their parameters had changed. There would be no flaming scorpion to retrieve. Just Major Vadim.
And Aris, the more hopeful part of her brain added.
Still, defenses were high. The sounds of battle echoed around them as they ran down the hallway. The earthquake had been strong, but the prison was apparently built to withstand such threats, because Dysis saw no signs of structural damage.
When the intel had come through about the prison, Jax had obtained schematics from one of his Safaran contacts; according to the blueprints, most of the cells were underground, on the bottom level of the compound.
The bulk of the disguised soldiers would split up and move along the upper floors, drawing as many guards as they could. While they provided a distraction, Dysis and her team were supposed to find their way to the cells and retrieve Major Vadim. Of her crew, only Santos was disguised.
“Lift!” Santos-as-Aris shouted, pointing to a chrome door at the end of the hall.
Just then, several Safaran troops rounded a corner and stopped dead, shocked, in front of Dysis and her team. Dysis and Santos raised their weapons and plowed them down. Dysis grabbed their passcards and key rings and kept moving.
They reached the lift just as someone shouted behind them. Otto took out one of the newcomers before the doors closed, and then they were plunging down into the bowels of the building. There was an ominous groan, and Dysis thought again of how the earth had rolled beneath them.
With a jarring bounce, the lift stopped. Dysis, Santos, and Otto readied their solaguns as the door slid open.
Water flowed in around their feet. “That’s not a good sign,” Dysis muttered as she splashed into the hallway.
The corridor was lined with steel doors. One by one, they used the passcards and keys to open the doors, but the rooms were empty. No prisoners. No guards. Just more water, pouring in from somewhere.
In the distance, Dysis picked up the sound of shouts.
“This way.” She sprinted toward the end of the hall. Santos and Otto followed, their feet splashing in the water. Already, Dysis was wet to her knees.
At the end of the hall, a heavy door led to what they’d been looking for: the cells.
As soon as Otto pried the door open, screaming and cries for help washed over them in a headache-inducing wave.
Here, the water was deeper and swirling. Rising fast. The ocean would soon claim this room. Maybe the whole building.
“We need to get everyone out or they’ll drown!” Dysis shouted to Santos and Otto.
They split up, using their utility knives and the butts of their solaguns to break the electronic lock panels. Luckily, the ceiling lights still worked.
“Major Vadim!” Dysis called, staying focused on her mission and hoping against hope that he was being held here. The building was huge, with interrogation chambers scattered on every floor. If he was being held somewhere else—
Up ahead, an Aris look-alike dragged a prostrate form from one of the cells. She—he—was struggling to keep the unconscious person’s head above water. Dysis splashed forward to help.
The body was bruised, with deep gashes that still bled, coloring the water pink. His swollen face was nearly unrecognizable, but the blue Ruslanan pants were not. Major Vadim.
“Good work!” she shouted over the sound of rushing water. “Let’s get him out of here.” She bent to thread her arm under Major Vadim’s shoulders, but the soldier holding him grabbed her in a sudden, tight embrace.
“Oh holy, Dysis! You’re here. Gods, I’m so relieved. I thought for sure . . . that explosion, was it the bomb? What did Pallas do? I thought we were dead for sure, but now—”
The babbling continued, but Dysis stood frozen, half of Major Vadim’s body draped over her arm. She studied the Aris before her. Same dark hair. The eyes were right. What if . . .
“What do you mean about Pallas?” Dysis asked abruptly.
The Aris look-alike smoothed back Major Vadim’s hair. “Pallas showed up and killed my guards. They were going to make me fly the wingjet with the flaming scorpion, but Pallas had a diatous veil. She looked like me. She fooled them . . . I don’t know why.”
Dysis took a deep breath, the first in what felt like hours. “You’re Aris. The real one.”
Aris raised a brow. “Of course I am.”
Dysis couldn’t help it; she laughed. “You need to stop pseudo-dying on me. It’s getting to be a bad habit.”
Aris gave her an odd look. She shifted Major Vadim into a more secure position. “Milek needs serious care. He’s been unconscious for at least an hour. I’m wor
ried he’s got internal bleeding.”
Dysis cleaved through the water with renewed energy. “Right. Let’s get out of here.”
Inside, her heart did tiny cartwheels of joy. Aris was alive. And by Gods, if Dysis had anything to do with it, she was going to stay that way.
Chapter 39
“What’s it look like out there?” Aris asked, as she and Dysis hauled Milek out of the cell. Aris wasn’t sure why they were still alive, but she said a prayer of thanks anyway. When Pallas had run for the wingjet carrying the bomb, she assumed that would be the end.
But the danger wasn’t over. Milek’s heavy body dragged against her sore arms, and the water in the lower level was rising fast. She tried to see the fact that he was still breathing as evidence that he’d be okay, but the alternative kept niggling at her, sapping her hope.
No. She wouldn’t let him die.
Dysis adjusted her grip on Milek so she was carrying more of his weight. “The only structural damage I’ve seen is on this level. But there are a lot of Safaran soldiers here. Jax has reinforcements on the way.”
All around them, other prisoners were splashing toward the door. The roar of water got louder. The lights flashed, and part of the long room plunged into darkness.
Cold water licked at Aris’s waist.
“That’s everyone,” Otto said as he approached.
“Otto!” If her arms hadn’t been full of Milek’s unconscious body, she would have hugged him.
He gave her a strange look. “Yeah, Santos. What’s so exciting about me?”
At that moment, another figure wearing her face approached them. “This floor’s about to go. We need to get out of here before the whole building collapses.”
Otto looked between the two of them in confusion for a second, but there wasn’t time to sort it all out. Aris and Dysis handed Milek off to the taller soldiers and pushed toward the door. Most of the prisoners had made it into the hall.
Torn Sky (Rebel Wing Trilogy, Book 3) (Rebel Wing Series) Page 18
