“We have found an ideal point of entry, as close to the center as possible. The route inside will take you direct to the heart of the ship. It is there where you must detonate your bomb. Only there will it do enough damage to destroy them for good.”
“Inside…,” Cade muttered, his mind spinning.
He’d had his share of risky plans. But this one was something else. Another thought dawned on him as he processed the information.
“Did you say detonate? Not set a timer?” Cade asked.
Song shifted on his feet. “It is the only way. If the pantheon come online before the timer runs out, all will be lost.”
Cade gritted his teeth. “So the best-case scenario ends with me dying?” he demanded.
The Gray took a step back and held his hands up in peace. “And for me?” he asked. “What is my best-case scenario?”
Cade felt his anger seep from him, soon replaced by pity.
“I am the last of my kind,” Song said. “And as soon as the pantheon return, my life will be extinguished. Perhaps they will torture me first. Tear me apart, atom by atom. But I do it. I do it so you can have this chance. To save your species. Save the universe, because I could not.”
Cade swallowed. “Can you give me a chance to escape the detonation?” he asked. “Five minutes?”
Song shook his head. “I could lie to you and say I can. But I will not. I have watched you ever since you were brought to this planet. It is you, not any other human, who I chose to bring here and task with this mission. When the time comes, I know you will do the right thing.”
He pressed the toy into Cade’s hand and strode out of the antechamber.
“It is time,” the voice echoed as Song walked away. “Do your duty.”
CHAPTER
30
Cade stumbled through the hologram wall, back into the darkness of the tunnel. The Codex, now clutched in his arms, seemed to stare at him with its blank lens.
He hurried up the slope, his heart full of mixed emotion. Hope and despair. Bittersweet in his mouth. A chance to win, and a chance to die.
But there was no time to think on it now. He had to find the others. Tell them what he had seen before the pantheon reawakened.
His legs, weighed down by armor and exhaustion, burned and shook as he staggered uphill. He called to the others. Screamed their names.
None came. He could only stagger on.
Worst of all, he was lost. The tunnels branched in myriad ways, left, right, up, and down. He could only guess, turning back at dead ends, cursing through snatched, ragged breaths.
It felt like an hour before he made it back to the large, central chamber of the fortress. A legionary was there, slumped at a table, his eyes gazing ahead in a thousand-yard stare.
He mumbled something in Latin, but Cade ignored him. He knew where to go, as more legionaries moved in from a tunnel to his right, arms full of spears, armor, and shields. The looting had begun.
Cade shouldered past them, an outstretched hand balanced against the wall like a drunk’s. He kept on. Even as his vision darkened at its edges, and the nausea of overexertion made his face twitch and his stomach roil.
“Quintus,” he wheezed. “Amber.”
Light. He could see it at the end of the tunnel, and he forced himself to push on. Past the gouged walls, where the falconets had torn them. Past the blood that pooled through the cracks of his armored feet.
He fell. Crawled, one handed, the other clutching the Codex and the toy. His hands were sticky with blood.
Then, light. Fresh air, intoxicating as he gasped.
Only, his friends were not there. Just the smoldering embers of the Roman funeral pyre. Ash and bone, strewn among the long grass like an open wound.
“Cade,” Marius called.
The man appeared in Cade’s blurring vision, strong arms lifting him to his feet. He vomited, then choked a question through his bile-burned throat.
“Where are my friends?”
Marius shook his head. “Just a boy,” he muttered. “I forget, he is just a boy.”
“Friends!” Cade demanded, falling to his knees as his strength left him completely.
“They are in the fortress,” Marius said gently, wiping the vomit from Cade’s chin. “Looking for you.”
Cade grasped at Marius’s skirt, his weight pulling the man closer.
“Find them,” he croaked. “Find them! Now!”
Marius slowly prized Cade’s fingers from him.
“Rest easy, my son,” Marius said. “I will.”
Cade heard the orders shouted. Saw the feet of the legionaries passing by, as they hurried into the fortress.
Then, a crackle. A shift in his arms. The Codex rolled free, tumbling onto the ground before levitating into the air.
Cade stared into the empty eye of its lens, a silent hiss of frustration sputtering through gritted teeth. Behind him, Cade heard his friends call his name. And then … the world changed.
Like a blink that never happened. Faster, even. No flicker, no blur. What had been before no longer was.
He was on a mountaintop. No. A spire.
His feet were splayed upon a rough-stone platform, one so narrow he could topple from it with a single step. Beneath him, the rock sloped out and out again, a curving pyramid of crags and bluffs, as if some giant had pinched a tablecloth plateau between its fingers and pulled it high and taut.
It was devastating in its height. And the surrounding air was clear as day, such that he could see for miles. And all was desert. Not a single living thing.
Cade could have been anywhere. Another planet. Another galaxy. A hard reminder to the awful power of the pantheon. They could pluck him from existence with hardly a thought.
He still wore his armor, and it hung heavy on his body. The toy Gray remained in his hand, and he wondered if throwing it from the cliff would save him from Abaddon’s wrath. He was so tired.
“Cade.”
The voice crackled, as if the Codex had been damaged in the EMP attack. And it was indeed the Codex. Hanging before him in the air, its empty gaze focused upon him.
Then, she appeared. Skipping through the air like a ghost, yet so real he could reach out and touch her. Abaddon’s avatar. The girl.
“Did you enjoy it?” Abaddon asked. The girl’s voice did not belay the veiled fury beneath it.
“Enjoy what?” Cade asked.
The girl flickered, though whether it was emotive or glitching, Cade could not tell. “Your brief interlude of freedom.”
Cade felt himself gulp involuntarily, even as the little girl’s eyes bore into his. Though he knew they were but a projection, and Abaddon observed him through other means, it made him no less nervous.
“Just because the Codex ran out of battery doesn’t mean I was free,” Cade said, furrowing his brows in an attempted look of confusion.
The little girl giggled and twirled, the image crackling briefly. “That’s right, Cade. Don’t you forget it.”
Cade said nothing. He wanted to go back to his friends.
“What’s that?” the girl asked suddenly. She pointed a dainty finger at the Gray toy in Cade’s hand.
He looked down at it. Inside, his heart pounded, but he turned the fear into rage. “To remember,” Cade said in a low voice.
“Remember what?”
“What you made me do,” Cade said.
He held up the toy, jabbing it in Abaddon’s face. “There were children in there!” he said. “Civilians. Innocents.”
Abaddon’s avatar shrugged. “So?” she asked mildly.
“You made me a murderer!” Cade bellowed through his raw, bile-bitten throat. “They didn’t have to die!”
The girl giggled. “Well, of course they didn’t have to. Nothing has to happen. But wasn’t it fun? This is real war, Cade. Don’t you like the taste?”
Cade spat, phlegm passing through the avatar and plummeting below.
“Now, now,” Abaddon said, wagging her dainty fi
nger. “I’ll forgive you this once. Do it again and I will transport you into the sun.”
Cade opened his arms wide. “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked. “What’s the point? There’s nothing for me here. No joy. I might as well give up now.”
He lied easily enough; it was how he had felt in his despair but a few hours earlier.
“Then why don’t you jump?” the little girl asked in a chocolate-sweet voice.
“Maybe I will,” Cade bit back.
There was no response this time. Only the movement of the Codex, shooting into the sky.
And then, he was alone. No girl. No Codex.
Just him, alone on the spire.
CHAPTER
31
It was cool on the rock, despite the sun in the cloudless sky. Cade sat upon the spire’s edge, letting his feet dangle.
Cade was on another planet. He knew this by the enormous white moon in the sky, just visible upon the line of the horizon.
He was as alone as any man had ever been, he imagined. Even Neil Armstrong had company.
Thoughts consumed him. Imaginings of his journey into the jungles. Collecting the bomb, and returning to the keep. Flying into the sky.
Dying.
Joy and triumph. Then oblivion.
Tears dribbled down his face, left to dry as he stared across the empty plains.
It was bittersweet, dreaming of a victory that only ended in death. Yet it was not for himself that he cried. First his family. His father, who had taught him so much. And his mother, whose love had been unconditional.
But most of all, Amber. Or rather, her absence from his life.
That he would never know her. Truly know her, the way only time spent in comfortable companionship allowed.
Not moments snatched in a battle for survival. But walks along the beach. Kissing in the rain. Netflix and chill. All the clichés, and then some.
But if he did succeed, she would live on. Humanity would. People across time immemorial would love where he could not. He was willing to make that sacrifice.
Because what was the alternative? To live one more year? Two? Then die anyway, for the entertainment of a psychopathic god.
Given the choice between a long, happy life and what Song had proposed, he might have found temptation eat away at his resolve. It was not the choice in front of him.
And there was selfishness in it too. Better to die quickly, in a flash of light, than be torn to pieces by slavering beasts. That was the fate that awaited him. The fate that awaited Amber and his friends, if he did not do what he had to.
He stared out for a while longer. It was peaceful here, in the empty sky. No dangers. No timer, counting down. Not even the Codex, watching over his shoulder.
Here, he would make peace with himself. With his choice. Alone on a nameless planet.
Cade did not know how long he waited. Time ran into itself, with only his thirst and hunger to measure it. He did not need anything else. Just a break. A break from the relentlessness of it all.
It was only when his head began to nod, exhaustion endangering a fall from his perch, that he stood and screamed at the sky.
“I’ll fight,” he yelled. “Is that what you want to hear? I’ll fight!”
The Codex materialized in front of him.
“Good boy,” Abaddon’s voice said.
* * *
Desert. White as a lamb’s back, stretching to the horizon. Cade turned slowly, then breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the bone fields, and the walls of the keep at its end.
Abaddon had taken him home. He had almost thought Abaddon had another punishment for him—a trek through the desert to reach home. Small mercy, but mercy nonetheless.
He walked forward, his armor clanking, legs burning. He still clutched the Gray’s toy, so tightly he had to relax his grip. It was his lifeline. His path to vengeance.
The keep neared as his feet scattered bones and squelched through the mire. He reveled in the cool mud, sopping his aching feet.
He pictured the cold, clear water of the keep’s baths. Imagined the sweat, grime, and blood of an entire week sloughing from him like a second skin. Heaven was but minutes away.
And then, a yell. Faces appeared over the wall, alongside javelins and drawn bows. For a moment, Cade was startled. He was so used to the keep being near empty.
But he recognized the helmets of the legionaries, even some of the faces above the parapet—men he had fought alongside in the battle.
He frowned. Their weapons were still drawn.
His frown deepened as his eyes scanned the walls. There was plenty he did not recognize. The walls, once crumbling, had been repaired and refaced. There were stakes in the ground too, and a deep trench in front of them. Only a narrow path allowed entry to the keep, and he navigated it with care, even as he saw smaller stakes, tips just above the mud, waiting for an unwary foot to step onto them.
Had he really waited that long?
A cry came from above.
“Cade!”
It was a frantic cry, one drawn deep from the lungs. He caught a flash of dark hair and pale skin, but it was gone before he could look. He trudged to the doorway.
His hands reached for the wood, only to have the door open, and a figure come barreling out, near knocking him off his feet in an embrace.
“Cade,” Amber sobbed. “Cade, you’re alive.”
He laughed, relief flooding through him. She was here. She was alive.
At the back of his mind, he had imagined Abaddon abandoning his friends in the Gray territory, a final twist of the knife to complete Cade’s misery.
“Of course I am,” Cade said as Quintus emerged from the doorway, a broad grin on the young legionary’s face. “You think Abaddon was gonna let me wriggle out of the next round?”
He extricated himself from her grip and took her hand, pulling her behind him as he passed through the doors, and on through a crowd of confused-looking soldiers.
Quintus followed, and Cade took note of the young man’s new clothing. He was dressed in red cloth, with Roman armor in far better condition than that of the other men.
“Where … what…,” Amber stuttered.
“Let’s talk in the baths,” Cade croaked. “I’m desperate to get out of this armor.”
He hurried on through the keep, stopping briefly in amazement. This too had changed. Long tables and benches had returned to the atrium. New shutters, complete with wooden bars to block them, covered the windows, and torches crackled merrily in their sconces.
“These guys work fast,” Cade murmured, limping on through to the stairs, and down into the depths of the baths.
Here, thankfully, it was empty. Cade tore at his armor, aided by Amber’s and Quintus’s fingers.
“Cade, where have you been?” Amber asked.
“In a minute,” Cade said, groaning with relief as the armor fell away, piece by piece.
Soon, he was in just his underwear, and he had the forethought to jump into the cold pool before Amber had a chance to see the ragged state of them. He only took care to place the Gray toy safely beside the stairs before he did so—who knew if the thing was waterproof?
It was a blessed relief to sit in the cool water, and he buried his head beneath the surface. He remained there for as long as his breath would allow, letting the liquid slough away the grime and sweat, rubbing himself with his hands.
He erupted to the surface with a gasp, pulling his long hair back from his eyes.
“Cade, you’re hurt!” Amber pointed at his arm, where water had dissolved the coagulated blood, and red rivulets traveled down his wrist to stain the pool red.
“Yeah, I should get that looked at,” Cade said. “But it’s not too bad. Already starting to scab.”
With the armor removed, he was finally able to look at the wound. Up on the spire, he’d hardly noticed the pain.
It was deep, but hardly wider than a dime. He wiggled his fingers and was glad to see the tendons were unharmed. It would l
eave a nasty scar, but he’d live.
“How did it happen?” Amber asked.
Cade shrugged. “A javelin, I think.”
Amber leaned forward, taking a closer look. “Was it another species on the leaderboard? Did Abaddon have you fighting another round while you were away?”
Cade stared at her. “No…,” he said slowly. “You know about this. I got it in the battle. Quintus got hurt too.”
He pointed at Quintus’s arm as he did so, only to slowly drop his finger. Quintus’s arm had a puckered scar. No wound.
“But it’s bleeding,” Amber said. “You’d ha—”
She trailed off.
“How long have I been missing?” Cade whispered, realization hitting him like a sledgehammer.
Amber took his hand and brought it to her lips.
“Six months,” she said.
CHAPTER
32
Cade was numb. He said little as they led him, wrapped in sackcloth, to bed. Ignored their questions, their hugs and touches.
And now he lay on a cot within the storeroom, among renewed piles of broken weaponry, wood planks, and other detritus—and not the commander’s bed where he had slept all those months before.
The contenders had been given the room for their quarters, as the barracks were full of Roman soldiers. It had a door they could lock behind them, which gave them some comfort from the unknown dangers of time-lost soldiers.
It was a long, dreamless sleep. Cade woke twice, only to chew down jerky, use the toilets, and have his wound cleaned and stitched by the Roman physician. But each time he returned to bed, a black, numbing exhaustion robbed him of the ability to talk, listen, or respond.
He was in a fugue state. Almost out-of-body, his consciousness floating beyond as his friends coaxed him with questions or spooned food into his mouth.
It was hard to return. To let himself wake up. Acknowledge the great task ahead of him, and learn of what had transpired while he had been away, frozen in time by Abaddon in some cruel trick.
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