by Brian Fuller
“I need the rest of you to go to the extraction rooms now. You’ll have plenty of company today, but we need this done quickly. The schedule is tight, and some of you have a long way to go. Magdelene, we’ll pop you out of here and onto that yacht inside of an hour, so prepare. You’ll have a full satchel. Thank you everyone. May God bless you all.”
Deep 7 had four extraction rooms, and Helo queued up in a line ten deep to wait his turn to have his heart cut out, burned, and placed in a special envelope for Magdelene to carry to the outside. Corinth and Dolorem waited behind him.
“You think Cassandra still loves Goldbow?” Corinth asked while they waited.
“I don’t know,” Helo answered.
“I don’t think she could hate him so much if she didn’t,” Dolorem said.
Corinth frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Dolorem shrugged. “Sense has nothing to do with it, kiddo.”
“Maybe I’ll have a shot at her now,” Corinth speculated, rubbing his short mohawk as if primping it for a date. Dolorem and Helo looked at each other and said nothing. “You guys don’t think so? C’mon! I’ve always been smooth with the ladies! What’s not to like? I got the guns and the buns, right?”
A technician stepped out. “Next.” Helo darted in, leaving Dolorem to field the awkward question.
When they returned to the common room, Helo found his forms right where he’d left them. He noticed that Cassandra—who was missing—had dismantled her airplanes, taking the folded papers and using Helo’s monstrous stack as a paperweight to try to crush them back into flatness. She returned two hours later, countenance more peaceful than he had seen it since their encounter in the Morse home. She sat down and retrieved her undone air force from the table where Helo left it.
“You visit the shrink?” Helo asked.
“No, Helo. I visited a mental-and-emotional well-being professional,” she said, applying pen to paper after balancing the clipboard on her crossed legs.
“Looks like it helped.”
“Pffft! No. You know how many shrinks I’ve been to? I know all their ‘develop a trusting relationship’ and ‘build a foundation for healing’ and ‘cognitive behavioral strategy’ crap. I’ve developed an immunity to psychotherapy, but I also know all the right things to say to get them to see I’ve overcome my problems and am ready to face the world again.”
Helo threw her a disapproving look.
“Don’t look at me with that tone of face. Run along and do your forms, little Helo,” she said with a mocking tone that came off as a little too carefree. “You’ve got a date with an entire lake to prepare for.”
Just after midnight, Helo signed the last form and dropped his stack on the table he imagined would collapse under the weight of their combined paperwork. As usual, he came in last in the form-fill race, everyone else chatting among themselves or watching the news broadcasts Deep 7 piped in to help them pass the time. Cassandra spent a lot of time reading, a self-satisfied smirk on her face.
“So did the doctor approve you for duty?” Helo asked. “Is that the reason for your sudden sunshiney mood?”
Cassandra looked up from her phone. “If you think Ramis is going to let me out of this hole any sooner than two weeks from now, you’re stupider than I thought. Look. I’m a woman, Helo. My moods shift like the unpredictable water of mysterious Lake Michigan.”
“They do not,” Helo said. “You’re up to something.”
She shrugged and went back to reading. Her odd mood plagued him as the time ticked by, and he couldn’t shake the feeling she had manipulated someone into something. Magdelene was long gone with their ashes, and he seriously doubted Corinth and Dolorem would be able to pry anything out of her.
About an hour before dawn, Ramis joined them to review their updated assignments. Helo would wake on a small yacht owned by the Ash Angels and proceed to the coordinates specified by Goldbow. Magdelene would leave her heart in a secure location, get the boat out away from shore as far as possible, and heart travel back at dawn to meet with Dolorem.
Ramis left, and they passed the last hour nervously.
Helo said his goodbyes to Dolorem, who urged him again to leave the AAO and join him at the Redemption Motorcycle Club when it was all over. Cassandra sat reading with the irritating little grin on her face that seemed to widen as the hour of dawn approached. Helo walked over to her to say goodbye, not sure what to expect.
She spoke before he could, staring at her phone. “Helo, did you know Lake Michigan is the fifth largest lake in the world?”
“No. Look, Cassandra, I—”
“Fascinating, isn’t it? Let’s see, it’s 22,400 square miles. That is a lot of water for a careless Ash Angel like yourself to get himself killed in, don’t you think?”
“I don’t plan on dying, Cassandra.”
“Well, you really should, Helo,” she said with mock concern. “I mean, it’s sort of inevitable where you’re going. What else? Let’s see? Its average depth is 279 feet. Not that impressive, but still enough to drown in.”
“Anything else, professor?”
“The weather for today is a chilly forty-five degrees with an 80 percent chance of scattered showers. We Ash Angels don’t mind the cold. Hope they remember the umbrellas, though. The damp really flattens my hair.”
Helo’s eyes narrowed. “I think your hairdo is safe in Deep 7.”
She responded by unzipping her jumper to just below her sternum, showing a healthy chunk of cleavage. Helo noticed the stitched-up extraction cut puckered along her upper abdomen below her bra.
“Like what you see, Helo?” she said in a teasing, sexy voice. She zipped the jumper back up.
“There’s no way!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, there were so many people lined up for extraction today. Those poor techs can’t keep an eye on everyone, you know. And Maggie was so willing to let me put a personal note to my beloved trainee, Helo, in his envelope before she shipped out.”
Helo glanced at his watch. Twenty seconds to dawn. He glanced around the room. A comm panel was embedded in the wall by the elevator. Did he have time to alert Ramis?
She put her phone on the table and stood. “Silly Jarhead. It’s too late. Our ashes are waiting on a yacht bobbing on the choppy waters of Lake Michigan. Relax. You’re about to get what you always wanted.”
“What?”
“To see me naked.”
Rapture.
Helo came to finding his arm draped over the soft flesh of Cassandra’s hip, his face buried in her golden hair. Magdelene had placed the ash-filled courier envelope on a narrow bed in the stateroom. It was cozy. The boat undulated in the choppy water, rolling her into him.
“Thank you for a wonderful night, Helo,” she said, faking a sleepy tone. “Why don’t you make some breakfast. I like my eggs scrambled.”
He shoved her off the bed. “You impossible woman.”
She stood and faced him, putting her hands on her hips and throwing her elbows back, hair falling over her soft shoulders. “What’s wrong, dear? You afraid I’ll tell your little honey Tela Mirren you couldn’t resist a hotter woman?” She leaned forward. “Don’t worry. This will be our little secret.”
“Knock it off,” he growled, scanning the room.
A duffel bag full of clothing and equipment waited on a table at the foot of his bed, while Magdelene’s now-abandoned clothes lay on the floor in a heap next to the stairs that led above deck. Another bed waited across the narrow room, stained oak accenting the drawers beneath the beds and the armoire at the far end opposite the stairs. Weak light from a porthole in the wall revealed an irritated lake churning in the murky dawn. Tube lights stretching down both sides of the stateroom dispelled the gloom, revealing Cassandra’s form in all its majesty as she strutted to the armoire and pulled it open.
“Fantastic,” she said sarcastically. “All men’s stuff. At least there are boxers, though I think I could rock a pair of tighty whities. I guess I’ll
have to wear Maggie’s stuff.”
Helo reached over to the duffel and pulled it onto the bed, finding a comfortable pair of jeans, a polo shirt, and a heavy jacket. A BBG and three boxes of ammo waited under a pair of socks and sturdy cross trainers. He doubted the gun would do him any good.
They dressed in silence. Maggie’s ill-fitting clothing emphasized nothing on Cassandra’s body in the proper way. She cinched a brown, braided belt she found in the armoire to keep the brown canvas pants from succumbing to gravity and had to fold up the pant legs to compensate for her shorter legs. The white cotton sweater was too long and too tight in all the wrong places. Or right places, if he was being honest. She morphed her body, and the clothes settled more comfortably into place.
“Not exactly haute couture,” she said, spinning as if at a fashion show.
“Enough screwing around,” Helo said. She was really on one. “Why are you here, Cassandra? You know this is probably a one-way ticket.”
“You said you weren’t planning on dying today,” she reminded him. “Or were you just saying that to make me feel better?”
He made his way out of the small stateroom and up the stairs toward the cockpit. “I’m not planning on it, but I probably will. This is about Goldbow, isn’t it? Do you want to save him, or kick his face in, or see him one last time, or what?”
She followed him up, wrangling her hair into a knot behind her head. “Did it ever cross your mind that maybe I just wanted to help you?”
“Help me what? They’re either going to hold me hostage and torture me or kill me outright. I can suffer and die without your help. If they take me off the boat, just stay here, okay?”
“Not gonna happen,” she said. “You really know how to drive one of these things?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Why would the AAO buy boats anyway, considering our allergy to water?”
“We use watercraft in a number of missions, military and deep cover.”
The cockpit was sealed against the weather, three panes of glass overlooking the front of the boat and a sky and lake nearly indistinguishable from each other in the early morning. Gray clouds walled off the sunlight, a drizzling mist coating the glass and distorting the murky view. A wind from the east screamed and whispered, surging and dying as it beat against the yacht.
Helo surveyed the controls while Cassandra grabbed a phone left on the console by Magdelene, bringing up a map of their destination. After a couple false starts, the motor purred to life, and he pushed forward on the throttle, taking it slow while he got a feel for the vessel. As stronger light eroded some of the gloom, he throttled up, the craft skimming through the water toward the coordinates given them by the Dreads.
Morning struggled to take hold. The gray, drizzling day felt more like the onset of an early winter than the gradual emergence into spring. The occasional snow flurry mingled with the light rain, and the chill of the wind drove the outside temperature down close to freezing. As they knifed through the water, the uneven surface of the lake undulated and pitched the boat.
“This is it,” Cassandra said an hour later. “Or close enough.”
Helo powered down the boat and let it drift. He’d hoped the weather would improve with the day, but instead the clouds outside had darkened, the wind stiffening to a steady roar. Cassandra rummaged around in the stateroom and found a pair of binoculars. She opened the door to the foredeck, but the howling squall changed her mind and she slammed it shut.
“Keep the glass clean,” she ordered, and he punched the wipers up. She scanned the horizon for a few minutes.
“You’re going to want to see this,” she said after a few moments, handing him the binoculars. “Look where I’m pointing.”
Helo peered through the lenses out into the unsettled horizon. A dark-gray ship with two large cranes sat nearly camouflaged by the troubled sky above and behind it. To normal eyes, the ship may have even been invisible in the gloom, but an Ash Angel wouldn’t miss it. An enshrouding Vexus cloud emanated from it as if it were a maritime Sheid, making it visible despite the distance and weather. Lightning cracked behind it. Its running lights were off, and it almost seemed abandoned and adrift.
“That’s not the East Wind,” Helo stated. “The East Wind was a roll-on, roll-off ship. That’s a standard cargo hauler. I can make out its cranes.” Had he been wrong about Tela’s song? Was there something he’d missed?
“Who cares about the cranes,” Cassandra said, voice awed. “Look at the aura. I’ve never seen anything that could cast a Vexus aura that big except an atrocity site.”
“Maybe it is one. It seems . . . haunted. I bet a nice warm stack of freshly printed forms in Deep 7 is starting to sound good right around now.”
Helo turned the ship to face into the wind to minimize the uncomfortable side-to-side motion. They couldn’t tear their eyes from the cargo hauler. A thunderstorm hovered above it like an obedient raven. While they waited, the hail and rain traded places, hammering the glass and obscuring the ship behind a dirty veil.
Like a leaden ghost it floated toward them, the sky darkening to twilight at its approach, the gloom only broken when lightning tore the sky. Thunder deep enough to feel in the gut rattled their teeth and shook the windows. They grabbed the rails to keep from tumbling about as the yacht bucked in the white-capped waves. The storm was Sheid work, for sure.
“Helo!” Cassandra yelled above the racket of the howling storm. “You should have tried harder to convince me not to come.”
“You are a bit pigheaded, you know. I’m glad you’re with me, but I think you’ll regret it.”
The massive ship cut a line in the water, ponderously bearing down on them as implacably as the tortured weather. It loomed above them like an iron cliff, pushing an avalanche of water before it. Helo powered up the engine and grabbed the controls. If the Dreads’ plan was simply to off him by crushing the yacht and forcing him into the cold, violent sea, they had another thing coming. He pushed the throttle forward, and a searchlight from the ship ignited, beaming down into the cockpit. Helo raised his hands against it and throttled down. The radio crackled.
“Bring your ship to port.”
Helo swallowed reflexively as the breakers from the slowing ship added to the jostling they had already suffered. He pushed the boat through it, heading to the port side of the monstrous ship. His stomach clenched as they passed into the Vexus surrounding the vessel, the subtle torching effect beckoning in the back of his mind. What were the Dreads going to do to him? Was Devon Qyn really so desperate to get his piece of Helo just because he had spied the pendant? Or was he still angry about Primus?
Cassandra sidled up next to him and grabbed his arm as he tried to steer close to the cargo hauler without letting the waves drive the yacht into it. Helo turned and glanced at her, and she attempted a brave smile. She fought the demons inside too. The searchlight continued to guide them in. Once they got close, two Dreads threw a life preserver tied to a rope overboard. It dangled between the ship and the cargo hauler.
“They can’t be serious,” Cassandra said.
“Just one rope, Cassandra. I’ve got to get up there. You need to take this ship back and let them know the East Wind isn’t the target. Perhaps divine providence brought you here, after all.”
“I said I’m coming with you. That’s it. They can haul us both out.”
“I thought you might say that.”
He grabbed her and chucked her down the stairs, hoping he’d broken a few of her joints in the process. Wrestling open the cockpit door, he sprinted out on to the foredeck and dove into the lake before he could think about how dangerous it was.
The bitterly cold water smacked him in the face, his heart jarring to life as he was submerged beneath the waves. The shock to his sensate body filled his limbs with cement, the aching cold paralyzing him. Down he sank, lungs burning with the unfamiliar need to breathe. Up! His mind screamed at his muscles to extend and contract. The rigors of boot camp hadn’t been for
nothing.
Mustering his retreating will, he thrashed his legs and flailed his arms, fighting the water that pulled him down like an anchor. With a yell he crested into the whistling air, waves slapping him around. He spit the cold water from his mouth and swam for the life preserver before the numbness overtook him. The sounds of gunfire erupted around him, and he stopped and ducked under the water. Were the Dreads going to finish him right there? The cold forced him back up. He’d rather die by a shot to the head than get dragged down to a watery grave, sucking water the whole way.
Glass shattered. They were peppering the yacht with a fusillade from their newly forged weapons. Cassandra!
The numbness wormed its way into his body. Move! He didn’t want to. A wave pushed him past the life preserver, and he feebly flopped an arm at it. He couldn’t feel his hands. The cargo hauler loomed above him, the rain pelting down around him so he could hardly see. Another surge slammed his right shoulder into the hard metal of the ship.
The hit was like a knife cut. The water drowned out his cry as he slipped under the agitated waves. He had to move! His clothing felt like heavy chains constricting his limbs. He had enough grit for one more shot, then he was done. Clenching his teeth, he churned his arms and popped out of the ensnaring water, the acrid smoke of the burning yacht adding to his disorientation. He cast about frantically for the life preserver. Fifteen feet away. It might as well have been a mile.
Someone grabbed him from behind.
“For a Marine,” Cassandra said, “you suck at swimming.”
Cassandra did the work of two, Helo contributing what weak motion he could, the spray of the water and rain blurring his vision. The red of the ring was the only color in the world of gray, and they struggled toward it like nothing else existed. Cassandra gripped it first and then hooked his arm over it. The Dreads hauled them up. As their chests rose above the water, immediate relief from the pain and the cold invigorated them.
