Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller

by Inna Hardison

  And for the first time what Brody did that day made sense to him. Some debts could never be repaid, and they all had a few of those. Riley for keeping Brody a prisoner all those years ago, him owing Ella for every time she lashed out at Brent and his thugs so they’d leave him alone, and owing Riley for not being able to save him from Hassinger…. And this young man in front of him had more of these debts weighing on him than any of them, all but his father maybe.

  Drake walked around the table and took him by the shoulders. “I can’t promise you I’ll become his friend or anything or that I’ll ever trust him in any way, but I won’t hurt him. I won’t do anything to make it harder on you, is what I’m saying. I’m sorry, Brody, for all of it. I truly am. Now, I’m taking you to bed. Ella set up the guest room for you, so you didn’t get soaked on the way home, and Laurel knows you’re here.” He lifted him up and walked him to a small room they kept in the hopes that they’d have a kid one day. After the third miscarriage, they painted it white, put the crib he had made in the basement, and called it a guest room.

  Brody didn’t argue with him, letting him guide him into the room and put him to bed. “I lied to you earlier. I watched you for a bit. That’s how I knew where you went. I just didn’t think you’d stay out there for that long with all the rain,” Brody whispered.

  Drake winced, embarrassed. “I did too, lied to you I mean,” Drake said quietly, not looking at the kid. “What he did to you at that tree, Brody,” he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, “I wanted…. I needed to bloody save you, and I couldn't. Like I couldn’t save Riley that time. I don’t think I can ever forgive him for not letting me.” He looked at Brody then and the kid reached for his hand with his one good one.

  “Let’s not ever do this again, Drake. I can’t go through something like this again, not with you,” the kid asked tiredly and closed his eyes.

  Drake leaned in and kissed the top of his head, running his fingers through the short curls, and whispered that he and Riley were the closest thing to kids he’ll likely ever have and that as impossible as they were to deal with, he didn’t have any kind of choice about loving them. He saw a small smile play on Brody’s lips and he let him be.

  It felt strangely right for Brody to be the first person to sleep in this room. Everything about him being there felt right.

  16

  Dragon Slayer

  Brandon, July 5, 2244, Reston.

  Brody stormed into his room looking every kind of pissed off. Brandon hoped nothing changed with the Council’s decision to let this whole stupid trial go, or them choosing not to execute him just yet.

  “What is it?” he asked, dreading the answer.

  Brody quickly walked toward him, reaching for him. “Give me your arm.”

  Ella must have told him. He turned away facing the window and crossed his arms over his chest. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wore long-sleeved tees and thermals since he was a kid, so he’d never have to talk about it.

  “It’s private, Brody. She shouldn’t have told you. You need to let it go,” he whispered through clenched teeth.

  Brody stood next to him at the window, looking at their reflections, his face hard. “It’s all right. You don’t need to show me. Can you at least tell me who did it?”

  He shook his head, not wanting to spill that secret, not to him, not to anybody, but especially not to him. Every round scar on him should have been enough for him to know who his mother was, but he stupidly kept fighting it for all these years. It took him almost killing this man to finally know for sure that she was a monster, an un-redeemable monster who spent years putting her smokesticks out on her kid. The first time she did it, he was four or five and he screamed at the pain and the surprise of it, the surprise of her doing it to him. She whipped him for screaming, and he tried to keep it all in after that. He’d stand there as she jabbed the spent smokestick into his flesh, gritting his teeth, counting through the pain, and then they’d have supper and she’d be nice to him. He’d cry silently to himself when he finally made it to bed at night, and that worked for a few years until the night she caught him doing it and she whipped him worse than anything for it. He hadn’t cried since. He was nine years old and he’d never once cried after that, not even when Keran died.

  He felt Brody’s hand on his shoulder and flinched. “I really didn’t see you at all, when I did what I did to you. I don’t think I could have done it if I had…. I just saw her eyes, her face on you. I’m sorry. You don’t need to tell me anything. It’s all right,” Brody said and stepped back from him.

  “You would think I was the biggest idiot if I told you. I likely am, too. I should have known how she was, is what I’m saying. I shouldn’t have needed you to tell me anything about her after what I lived through, but I had this strange hope that maybe I made it up, you know? That I somehow imagined all the pain she put me through, and how she seemed to enjoy doing it to me…. And when I was free of her all those years in school, I thought that maybe she’d changed. I needed to believe that she wasn’t who I always thought she was, and I almost killed you for it.” He faced him and dropped his eyes for a beat, trying to get himself calm again.

  Brody didn’t say anything, just stood still, watching him.

  “I am twenty-five years old, and I feel like a scared toddler whenever I think of her. What I put you through in the woods,“ he swallowed hard, “I half expected that I’d enjoy it. I think I needed to know if I was like her,” he said very quietly, keeping his eyes on Brody’s.

  “Did you? Enjoy it, I mean?”

  “No!” He forced himself to look at Brody’s bandaged hand and winced. “No, Brody, it scared the shit out of me,” he said, looking the man in the eye, “still does. That I could even....do something like that.” He shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut for a beat. “She always told me I was weak. My whole life … she’d hurt me and then stare at me for the longest time, and if I so much as flinched, or my eyes welled up, she’d whip me while screaming at me about how I was a disgrace to the family name, and how she wished she was young enough to have another kid, someone who wasn’t like me. And I tried then, I really did. I took everything without flinching, without making a sound”—he walked back to the window, feeling more exposed than he had in years—“I wanted her to be proud of me, only she never was. That’s why she sent me away the way she did, I think. I just didn’t know it then.” He shut his eyes, remembering that morning when he woke up to all his stuff packed and waiting for him in the hallway, and the strange flier outside the house. How she didn’t kiss him goodbye or even let him have breakfast. She just pointed at the bags and told him his ride was waiting and to get on it, and turned away from him.

  He felt Brody’s hand on his shoulder and turned, and suddenly, Brody’s arm wrapped around him, just holding him. He surprised himself by not bolting, by letting this man hug him, enjoying the feel of it – the comfort of just being held. He couldn’t remember the last time he was hugged by anyone after Keran, and it dawned on him that he never was.

  “It’s all right,” Brody said after a while.

  Brandon stepped back, looking at the man’s face. “Thank you,” he whispered and turned away, feeling strangely at peace, and they stayed quiet for a long time after that.

  “The scars on your back...I didn’t pry or anything. I saw them when you were washing up at the stream.” Brandon turned, looked Brody in the eye. “Did she do that?”

  Brody shook his head. “My father did that,” he said quietly, “but he had a good reason for it. I can’t tell you anything beyond that.”

  Brandon nodded, leaned on the windowsill, wrapped his hands around the edge. “I caught you smiling out there, you know? It was the strangest damn thing... Didn’t know what to make of it, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t shoot you because of that, more than anything.”

  “I didn’t think I’d last as long as I did. None of us here did. And I’d buried plenty of better men who were killed for worse reasons.” Br
ody said, then smiled. “Plus, you let me take a leak beforehand....”

  “You could have at least tried to fight me,” Brandon said quietly. It had bothered him for days that he didn’t. “I gave you every chance to do it, I think—“

  “I would have lost,” Brody said sharply.

  “Maybe. I think you would have still tried, though, if you didn’t think I somehow had a right to kill you. I think you felt you owed me. Still do.”

  Brody ran his one good hand through this hair, said, “It doesn’t matter. Let it—“

  “But you’re wrong, Brody. You don’t owe me for that, never have. I would have killed anyone who’d killed someone I loved, in the worst way, too. You weren’t wrong to do what you did,” he said.

  Brody winced, turned to the door.

  “I don’t know if Riley told you yet, but I know you lied to me. I know you didn’t kill her. Laurel told me. I know you were protecting her, Brody, I’m okay with it. I’m actually glad it was a little girl who cut her throat. It seems fitting.”

  Brody’s stopped, his hand just shy of touching the door, and faced him. His face looked pale, and for the first time since he’d met him, he looked afraid.

  Brandon lifted his hands, palms up. “I’m not going to go after her for this, I swear I’m not. I’d been wishing that woman dead for as long as I can remember, I think, but I don’t think I could have ever done it. I’m happy she is gone. I think I’ve been, ever since Lancer told me. I just didn’t know that it was okay for me to feel that way, and it seemed a matter of honor to avenge the murder of one’s own mother….” He stopped, needing to catch his breath. Brody hadn’t moved at all, still looking at him, waiting. “Here is the important part. You don’t have nearly enough men to go after the Eagles, and that’s if your boys manage to find the damn hole in the ground they are hiding in, to begin with. Regardless, your group can’t take them, not with the people and the weapons you have. They know who I am. If this other scientist man can’t find anything on me, you need to let me go in there, once we find the place. Better yet, I can have them come get me from any clearing well outside of here. They’ll pick me up and take me right in there, no questions asked. The facility is under a mountain. I can bury it with one well-calculated explosion, and I’m sure your guys can find something small enough to stick on me to do that with. Something that’ll get past their scanners.” He said it as quietly and evenly as he could.

  Brody was shaking his head at him, his eyes angry. “We’ll find a way to get in there, but not like that. I get it that you feel you owe everybody because of her, because of your family…. But you can’t. We’ll figure something out.” Brody took a few steps toward him and put out his hand. “I need to know you won’t just run and do something stupid. I’d rather not put you under guard for every minute of every day, but I will if I need to. Tell me you will not go against me on this,” he said sharply.

  He took his hand and shook it. “All right, but if all else fails, I will bring it to the Council, and you will let me. It’ll be their decision then. I think that’s the way it works here.”

  Brody nodded. “Stan isn’t due until the day after tomorrow, so there is no need for you to stay here. You can stay with Laurel and me or you can bunk at Max’s. He’s got a couch. I have a spare bedroom and Laurel is a pretty good cook, so my place is a much better offer. Also, Lancer is at Max’s, and ever since he stopped dying, he’s been an unbearable pain.” He grinned.

  Brandon felt a hot wave of shame wash over him at this offer. He shook his head. “I’d rather not, Brody. I can stay here or you can put me wherever… wherever you keep your prisoners,” he said.

  Brody watched him for a long moment. “I don’t think anyone here thinks of you as a prisoner anymore, other than you,” he said quietly. “Laurel is all right with it, I asked. And if you want me to kick your ass for what you did to me, it’ll be easier to do it at my place. More privacy and all.” Brody was grinning at him, making light of all that happened between them and he wanted desperately to let himself relax into the strange comfort of it.

  “Your place it is then,” he said simply, and hoped he could bear the kindness of it, after everything.

  They didn’t talk on the way over. Brandon spotted a few tiny birch saplings in front of Brody’s house and it made him smile. He’d always loved these trees but didn’t know anyone who’d ever planted them at their house.

  “When we met, Laurel and I, it was in this clearing with a cave and all these birch trees around it. It was the first time Laurel had ever seen one. A lot happened in that place. These … they remind us of all that, of how we were,” Brody said softly and ran up the steps to the door.

  Laurel threw her arms around Brody’s neck, smiling in a way that made her whole face light up, and he was struck by how beautiful she was. It was strange that he hadn’t noticed it before, at the camp, when he let her go, or when she came to see him in his cell.

  She told him simply to come in and that food would be ready in a few minutes.

  Brody had him sit in one of the many empty chairs and ran in to help Laurel with the food. He was a guest, he was told, and as such, not allowed to help, not tonight. Laurel poured everybody a glass of home-made plum wine. He could smell the fruit in it. He swished the sticky purple liquid in his glass. His hand shook. He set the glass down and looked up, and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen on anybody were looking right at him from across the table.

  “When I was very little and my mother was still a mother to me, she told me this story about a small village that was besieged by this enormous dragon. It would burn all the crops and dry the river and streams…. The villagers sacrificed to it, letting it take their cattle, thinking that if it were fed, it wouldn’t destroy them. But the dragon kept coming back every night and it would take one of the little kids, the ones who weren’t asleep yet. For some reason, it didn’t touch the ones who were.

  “Anyway…. Nothing seemed to appease this beast, no matter how many cattle it took or the kids, so the elders called on volunteers to go after the dragon and wound it or hurt it enough to scare it away from their village, but everyone was so afraid of it that not one hand went up.

  “There was this little girl living there, eight or nine at the time, who was known to all the villagers as True Shot. She could hit anything with her arrow but she was little and weak, and girls weren’t thought of as capable of much there. This little girl, Karina her name was, she’d climb up to the top of the grain silo every night after that elders’ meeting with her bow and arrows and she’d wait.

  “The dragon saw her but because she was so little it didn’t bother with her. Didn’t seem to be much meat on her, so it would fly over her as if she weren’t there, but the girl…. She’d watch how it flew and learned all she could about it from watching it every night. And on the tenth night, she put an arrow straight through its heart.” He took a few small sips of his wine, set it down. “See, the villagers always thought this beast was heartless because of how it was, and they believed that anything that didn’t have a heart couldn’t be killed. But this little girl, she killed that dragon. You killed a dragon, Laurel, and I’m glad it was you who did it.” He raised the glass of the purple liquid to this beautiful girl, who was looking at him with wetness in her eyes now, and dipped his head.

  Nobody said a word after the story he told. They ate in silence, Brody helping serve, and there was a comfort, a routine with these two that seemed ancient, unshakable. And when they were done with their food, Laurel walked around the table and stood next to him, looking at him with softness in her eyes. He stood and she pulled him into her arms, and kissed him on the cheek, not asking any kind of permission for any of it.

  “You can stay here for as long as you like,” she said and walked away.

  Brody took him to the spare room and handed him a towel and a change of clothes. For the first time in months, Brandon felt he could sleep through the night, could let himself do it. He undressed down to his bo
xers and climbed in, pulling the cool, soft blanket over himself, and drifted off, thinking of this strange girl, trying to imagine her running the blade of the knife across his mother’s throat. He could picture that day now from everybody’s words, the clearing where they were supposed to get Brody’s girl back, and Brody’s crew pointing their guns at Brody and Riley because of what his mother had him do, and his mother’s laughter when she shot that girl. He couldn’t picture Brody after that, couldn’t see him, but he saw this blue-eyed girl standing calmly behind his mother, her hand going up ever so slightly, his mother still laughing at what she’d done to the Zoriner girl, not paying any attention to the girl behind her, even as she ran the sharp blade across her throat.

  He woke up to the sound of his own screaming and flicked the light on. He sat up, hoping the scream he heard in his dream was something he did in his head, something nobody else heard. He looked up and Laurel was standing at the door, hugging a robe tightly around herself, a concerned look on her face.

  “I am all right, Laurel. I’m sorry I woke you. I promise I’m all right,” he said, feeling all sorts of guilty.

  She sat on the edge of his bed, took his hand in hers, and then put her other hand on one of the round scars on his arm, tracing it with her fingers. He flinched and closed his eyes, holding the blanket to him with his free hand, wishing he hadn’t felt comfortable enough to take his damn shirt off.

  Laurel unceremoniously pulled the blanket off him, and he could feel her eyes take in every burn mark and every scar on him. She covered him up after a while. He made himself look at her and told her quietly that it didn’t matter anymore. That he was very, very young when it happened, and that he’d be more careful from now on to cover it up.