Mortal Brother

by Teyla Branton

  “Okay, but keep your eyes open. More Renegade scum could be arriving.”

  “Got babe here to protect us.” He patted his assault rifle and disappeared through the door. The woman took a tool from her belt and began to unscrew the metal plate behind the light switches.

  The others were out of my sight, though I could hear their footsteps echoing in the hangar. I eased to my feet and tried to move soundlessly along the catwalk until I was positioned above the woman.

  Wait, I told myself as I knelt and took careful aim. I had to make sure her companions were far enough away that they wouldn’t hear the soft whoosh of my silenced bullet or notice her go down. I hoped with the positioning of the tool carts near each plane, they might not see her body even if they looked this way. My rifle and a scope would be better for this job, but the nine mil would have to do. The hit team were most likely wearing some kind of body armor, so I had to try for a headshot.

  Now. I pulled the trigger. Whoosh! She slumped almost immediately, her head making a cracking sound on the cement when she fell. Blood and brains spread over the ground around her head, leaking from her skull, though I couldn’t see exactly where I’d hit her.

  I stood and moved as fast as I could to the space above the entry. I was in the light now, if anyone had been there to look up, but the Emporium agent was beyond seeing anything. Positioning myself directly above the lobby door, I waited. How long would it take the male agent to discover the breaker wasn’t in there? Not long, I hoped. There were no gunshots coming from the other side of the hangar, but I itched to get back there. My own success had proven that the sound of silenced shots didn’t carry that far.

  The door opened almost before I was ready. My hands waved into position as the man came through. “I can’t find—Sasha!”

  He’d taken only two steps toward his fallen companion when I fired. This time two shots, because I wasn’t sure of my aim and he was moving. The first hit him near the top of his head and the second embedded in the base of his skull. I felt a momentary triumph, until the urge to vomit nearly made me fall from the catwalk.

  Don’t think about it. Not yet.

  Ritter had been right about all those target practices paying off, but he hadn’t told me about this revulsion. Maybe because he’d lost that in the years he’d sought revenge for his own family’s deaths.

  Stella. Charles. I had to think of them now.

  I debated briefly over whether or not I should climb down the ladder and hide the bodies, but there was no way to clean the blood from the cement, so that was rather pointless. Better that I go help the others. Pulling myself together, I started again along the catwalk.

  Two down, four to go. The odds had just gotten slightly better.

  I had the hangar divided mentally into four parts, corresponding with the electric circuits. I passed gratefully from the first and into the second, going slower now, treading with caution. I’d almost reached the third section when light footsteps below alerted me to someone coming back this way. I paused and waited. An Emporium agent came into view below, walking with exaggerated steps, his hands holding an assault rifle. He was white and young, probably young enough that he didn’t know if he’d Change and become Unbounded or if he’d serve the Emporium as a second class citizen for the rest of his mortal life.

  I thought of my brother Jace, newly Changed and, like Stella, younger than most Unbounded. Maybe this man had Changed early too. It didn’t matter, though. The hit man below supported the Emporium and there was simply no excuse for coming here with that assault rifle.

  Heart banging inside my chest, I waited to fire until he stepped over to the wall and the light switches. My bullet hit him in the head, and he fell against the wall and slid down slowly without a sound. I waited only to be sure he wasn’t moving.

  Three against three now.

  I began moving faster, experiencing a strange urgency. It was a miracle I didn’t fall as I tore through the third section. Slow down, I told myself. Ritter had emphasized repeatedly the importance of waiting every bit as much as the will to attack, and I had come too far to give up the advantage I held up here in the dark. So far, Ritter’s training had not failed me. I popped out my old magazine, still more than half full, and slid in a new one. Twelve rounds in all.

  A loud shout farther ahead and to my right urged me on. The sound came from below somewhere near where my plane or the one next to it was parked. I hurried forward as quickly as I could, reaching one of the intersections of the catwalk where it shot out over each parking space.

  Below, I heard a flurry of whooshing sounds I’d been dreading. Silenced bullets.

  I reached the halfway point on the catwalk where it again intersected another line that paralleled the first. Nothing was under me except a plane, and I couldn’t yet see beyond it to my own. I pushed forward along the catwalk. Finally, I caught sight of an Emporium agent standing near my plane, her gun pressed into Charles’s back.

  “Who’s shooting at us!” she demanded, shielding her body between Charles and the stairs to my plane.

  “Maybe the IRS? Did you pay your taxes?”

  I never knew Charles to be such a wise guy. Maybe all that kelp on his pizza was having a strange side effect.

  “I’m going to enjoy killing you,” the Unbounded said. “Now get up these stairs and open the door, or I’m going to start shooting off your fingers one by one.” The way she said it was more of a promise than anything else, and I suspected that without intervention, Charles would lose all his fingers even if he did open the door. I contemplated shooting the woman as I had the others, but she was too close to my plane. Almost under it now. The angle was poor enough that to hit her, the bullet might first have to go through Charles.

  I had only seconds to decide. In the dark, I spied two shadows taking cover behind the next plane’s tool station. A flash of a gun going off showed me Stella was firing from behind our own station, the one we’d hidden behind earlier. I wanted to backtrack across the catwalk and drop in behind the other Emporium agents to help Stella, and I knew Charles would insist on it if he had a choice, but my doing so would leave him vulnerable. She was Unbounded; he was not. I knew where my duty lay. I couldn’t let my feelings for Stella fool me into thinking she’d thank me for sacrificing Charles. She could hold her own.

  “What’s the code?” screamed the Emporium woman. “You know what? If you aren’t going to help, I’ll just kill you right here!” She dug her gun into Charles’s neck. “Tell me the code and I might let you live.”

  Charles shook his head. “Go ahead, shoot me. I’m dead if I let you in anyway.”

  In a quick motion, she put her arm around his neck and pulled back. Charles began to choke.

  I knew what I had to do.

  HOLSTERING MY GUN, I GRABBED the catwalk and eased myself down until I was only three feet from the top of my plane. In all our training, we’d never practiced jumping from heights onto a curved surface, but how much more difficult could it be?

  I let go, and my feet clunked hard against the plane. I swore silently, struggling to retain my balance. No dice. I slid off the plane, landing feet first on the ground, remembering at the last second not to lock my knees but to bend and roll. I came up ready to shoot, hoping my rolling angle was enough to give me a line to the woman agent without Charles in the way. I fired.

  They both fell, but not before the woman let off a shot that dug into the cement inches away from my head. Only the fact that I was still in motion saved my life. I fired again at the woman’s slumped figure and hurried to Charles, keeping my gun on her. Charles was out cold, but he was breathing and his windpipe seemed intact. I could see no other wounds besides a few punch marks on his face that were going to be nasty bruises in a few hours. The woman stirred and I pulled the trigger again, this time hitting her between the eyes. I stopped only to make sure she wasn’t breathing.

  I hurried to the end of the plane, where even in the dull light I couldn’t miss the drama playin
g out with Stella and the remaining two Unbounded. She was swinging a large wrench at a man who blocked with a sword. Another agent lay on the ground behind the first, stunned but still moving. They’d evidently used all their extra ammo, or Stella had shot their guns from their hands.

  Or not.

  Even as I watched, the fallen man lifted a gun. I fired first, missing his head, but hitting him in the shoulder and causing his bullet to go wide. His second shot was better.

  But so was mine, and he finally lay still.

  The remaining Emporium agent had Stella by the hair, the point of his sword digging into her neck. “Shoot him!” Stella said. “Now!” Blood oozed from the front of her black skirt, a last parting gift from the man I’d just shot. I hoped he hadn’t hit an artery.

  “Okay,” I started to take aim, my movements exaggerated.

  “I’ll cut off her pretty face,” the agent growled.

  “Hmm,” I said. “Do you think you can cut her into three before I stop you? It might be an interesting test. If you’re a combat Unbounded, you might actually make it before I manage to hit you, but I don’t think you can kill her and get to me, no matter how fast you are.” I hoped I was right. “Next thing you know, I’ll be the one using your pretty sword.”

  The Unbounded thought about it and then nodded. “Let me go, and I’ll free her.”

  I met Stella’s eyes, not his. “I don’t think so. Say goodbye.”

  Stella twisted as I fired. Thankfully, she’d understood my signal. Thankfully, it was enough. The shot hit him in the throat, though I’d been aiming for his eye. Good thing Stella had moved. The last thing I wanted to explain to Ava was that I’d shot Stella and she’d be out recovering instead of flying to New York.

  I rushed to Stella, grimaced at the blood seeping from her neck. “It’s okay,” she muttered. “It’s not deep. My leg’s worse.”

  “Lie down. I’ll bandage it. Then we’ll tie up these guys.”

  “Not here.” She gritted her teeth against the pain. “They called for reinforcements when I started firing. They could be here any minute.”

  “Okay, but you’re coming with me.” She didn’t argue and I knew that meant she was feeling worse than she let on. “Did you leave anything important in the car?”

  “No. I only need what’s in my shoulder bag over there.”

  I scooped up both her and the bag and ran for the plane. It took only moments to punch in the code, while Stella placed her hand on the reader. The door slid open. Ducking inside, I set her on the first row of seats, tossed her a first aid kit, and hurried back down the stairs for Charles.

  “Come on, wake up,” I said, gently slapping his face. That didn’t work. Charles was a rather large man, so I ended up having to mostly drag him up the stairs. My ribs ached horribly by the time I finally laid him on the row of seats that faced those where I’d placed Stella. I set my backup pistol on the table between the two rows, just in case those reinforcements showed up before we were out of here.

  Stella had tied a bandage around her upper leg to stem the blood flow, and now had her phone out. She’d also hung a small neural transmitter over her left ear, its metal prongs digging into her scalp. It was a smaller version of her regular headset, which was packed away and sent ahead with the others to New York. Two blinking lights on the transmitter showed it was working.

  “Hacking into the airport systems now,” she said. “I’ll have your flight information and registration numbers changed five times and then some before we’re anywhere near landing. You’ll look like you came from Arkansas or somewhere in Virginia. In another two minutes, this plane will have never been anywhere near Mexico.”

  That was good. No way did I want more Emporium agents waiting for us in San Diego. We had measures in place to stay under the radar, from a way to change the actual physical numbers on our plane to getting through security checks with our weapons intact. Part of it involved bribes and connections with people who knew about Unbounded and the secret war being waged, but more was because of Stella’s intricately designed back door into their network and her ability to manipulate and process data. She had previously created hundreds of backgrounds for this plane. It was just a matter of choosing one. Or as many as it took.

  Of course the Emporium had a similar setup, which was why they had been able to find us and get this close to our hangar with weapons, but they wouldn’t be able to trace us or our interference once we erased the connection to Mexico.

  “Thanks,” I told Stella. “While you’re at it maybe you can clear us for flight a little sooner.”

  I hesitated at the plane door, wondering if I should go back for at least a couple of the Emporium agents, but the worry I’d heard in Stella’s voice made me nix the idea. I needed to get her to safety, and that meant out of the hangar and into the sky. I hit the switch to pull the retractable stairs into place in the underbelly of the plane and sealed the door.

  “I also need you to go over all the security footage for the hangar,” I told Stella. “The alarm wasn’t triggered, but it’s possible they were here earlier and sabotaged the plane.”

  “I’ve already downloaded the footage. It’ll take fifty seconds to skim through the time since you last landed. The data connection here isn’t as fast as it should be.”

  I grinned. “I think I can wait fifty seconds.”

  I headed for the cockpit, ticking off in my mind all the minimum checks I had to do before we took off. It was standard protocol to keep the plane full of fuel to speed up takeoff in an emergency, and I’d filled it after Mexico, but there were certain things I had to do before every flight. There would also be more security checks before takeoff, including making sure our weapons were secured in the specially lined compartments in the floor. I wouldn’t store them until I was sure we weren’t going to run into any more Emporium soldiers.

  Inside the cockpit, I had an opener for one of the three hangar doors spanning the length of the hangar, but belatedly I wondered if the door was on the same circuit as the lights. I was betting not.

  “Go ahead,” Stella called through the open cockpit door. “We’re clear on the security footage.”

  I began flipping levers and pushing buttons, and when the time came, the hangar door slid open, verifying my guess, though I’d already planned what it would take to splice back the electric wires and defend the hangar just in case. Finally, something had gone our way.

  Twenty minutes later, we were on a runway awaiting final clearance. That we’d only had to undergo one brief physical inspection was a tribute to Stella’s ability and genius. Plus, she’d already scheduled herself on another commercial flight out from San Diego. We kept emergency clothes on the plane, so she wouldn’t even leave the airport.

  I looked up from my readouts as a hand fell on my shoulder. Removing my headphones, I stared into Stella’s face, glad she appeared less pinched after a couple of shots of curequick. “You should rest,” I said, swiveling toward her.

  She was still wearing the neural transmitter, but it emitted a series of flashes and then went black. “About the baby,” she began.

  So we were back to that. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been expecting it.

  “You just saved my life,” she continued. “The way I see it, you don’t owe me anything. I mean that. But I’m still asking.”

  “Why me?” I didn’t remind her that I was mortal—just like Bronson—or that she could have any number of Unbounded sperm donors who would be more likely to create a child who would grow up to have the active Unbounded gene. She knew all that far better than I did.

  Her smile filled me with warmth. “Because you’re a good father, and I want that for my baby, whether he’s mortal or Unbounded. I want a man who will be there while he’s growing up.” She paused and then rushed on. “For the record, this has nothing to do with Bronson. I wanted his child because I loved him, but he already had children and knew he wouldn’t be around for our baby. It never meant the same thing to hi
m. He’d had a vasectomy before we married. He only agreed to let Dimitri heal him for my sake.”

  I stared into her eyes. I couldn’t say no. If she wanted me to father her child, to raise and love him, I would do that gladly. I loved his mother; why wouldn’t I love him? Maybe Bronson and I were both fools. Still, I liked the idea of Stella’s genes and mine going on forever inside our posterity.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Her lips parted in disbelief, filling me with desire. I struggled with myself not to stand up and start kissing her again, to lose myself in her touch.

  Give her more time.

  She started to speak, but I reached up and placed a finger on her lips. “First you’re going to New York with the others to help free our people, and I’m going to get the house in San Diego ready to protect all of us, especially my children. When you get back, if you still want to, we’ll start this baby.”

  The happiness in her eyes made me catch my breath, but I forced myself to continue because I’d regained enough control to remember that she needed more than just a baby. “We’ll create him or her with all the genetic options we have available. And, yes, that means in the lab. We both want this child to have the greatest chance of becoming Unbounded.”

  An Unbounded female’s eggs couldn’t be tampered with, but the Renegades had created several processes to alter a man’s sperm, raising the likelihood of having an Unbounded offspring by twenty percent. Since I was descended from Ava, our chances of having an Unbounded child would be forty percent after genetic alteration, which was a lot better gamble than she’d had with Bronson, who had no Unbounded ancestry. Stella might not have to watch her child age and die while she remained young.

  A smile curved her lips, though her eyes shone with tears. “No relationship?”

  “What do you call this?” I moved a hand back and forth between us.

  “You know what I mean.”

  She meant a physical relationship. Sex. I also knew that casual relationships weren’t her standard, or something Renegade Unbounded condoned. Family to them was everything, and since all their physical relationships resulted in offspring, they were careful with their intimacy.