And how could he even know that she was thinking the same thing he was? A touch on the cheek and lingering gaze may have meant something else in her world. For all the sincerity in her eyes, he couldn’t read them, couldn’t discern what she wanted.
So he cleared his throat and ripped his eyes away from her. It felt like ripping a bandage off his heart.
Sierra’s smile receded as she stepped away sheepishly.
“I, uh, I’ve got something for you.” Davin walked to his locker and pulled out a small, leather holster with a black weapon lodged inside. He pried back the magnetic seal, took out the lightweight gun, and extended the handle to her. “Take it.”
Sierra held up her palms and shook her head. “Davin, I appreciate it, but I’m not going to use a—”
“It’s a stunner,” Davin said. “Non-lethal. Don’t think of it as a gun. A shot from this thing could hit a person square in the head and they wouldn’t die. They’d look dead, but they wouldn’t be. It just shocks the body into paralysis for a little while. Long enough to get away.”
Sierra stared at the gun and thought it over. The lines in her face revealed her inner conflict, but clearly she couldn’t come up with any good reasons to turn him down.
“As a last resort,” she murmured, thinking out loud.
“As a last resort,” Davin affirmed.
Her slender shoulders relaxed. “Will you teach me how to use it?”
Davin smiled. “Of course.”
The Prima Filia
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Jerusalem felt like an ancient city. Wind and time had worn its stones raw. Its narrow, claustrophobic streets were choked with pedestrians and vehicles. Its buildings an asymmetrical blend of archaic sandstone and modern steel. Its people an unwashed and untidy assortment of races, nationalities, cultures, and religions, half of them peddling jewelry or electronics produced in some cheap, automated factory, the other half avoiding them with practiced indifference.
Some women walked the sidewalks covered entirely in black, only a mesh over their eyes to see. Some men wore robes and tall, peculiar hats. A group of boys passed by with long sideburns curling down to their shoulders and white caps hugging their heads. Hebrew writing lined a band around the edge of the caps. The boys laughed and joked in another language, as comfortable in this city as Sierra would be in Baha’runa.
How she missed her home. Her bed. The quiet of Dewvine Garden in the morning. The meals the prime mansion chefs prepared. She yearned to be home, to know she was safe and that she had stopped the war. At the moment, if she was honest with herself, she cared more about her own safety than the galaxy’s.
Davin, walking beside her, sliced his eyes her direction but looked away when she turned to him, as if he didn’t want her to see him checking on her.
The man confused her to no end. First he turned down a fortune to save her life. Then he moped for days as they approached the Sol system. Then he acted awkward and surprised when she touched his face in the locker room—as if she’d spoken in another language. Then he gave her the stunner gun that now hugged her thigh, which she found abundantly thoughtful. Not to mention all the time and money he’d spent delivering her to Earth. And what’s more, he couldn’t seem to go ten seconds without looking at her.
What was he thinking? What did he want from her?
Sierra tried to clear her mind of Davin and all the conflicting memories. Why did she care so much what his feelings were? She just wanted to know how to act around him, whether she could be herself or if she needed to pull back to guard his feelings. At least, that’s all she thought she wanted. When she remembered the locker room—the touch and the quiet moment between them afterward—she couldn’t figure out what she wanted. Or why she had lingered so close to him for so long.
“Which way?” Davin asked her.
Sierra looked up past the buildings at the huge, skeletal dome ahead. The Bastion, they called it: a metallic framework arcing to a peak a few hundred meters above the ground—right over the Temple Mount. Ten anti-bombardment dishes clung to the thick steel beams like blooming flowers on a vine. Each bore the Terran Confederacy symbol. The Confed apparently took the job of protecting the holy sites seriously.
Jai and Jabron stopped ahead before going into an intersection where electromobiles and hovertrams and countless people passed back and forth. Sierra and Davin stopped, too. Sydney caught up from behind. Everyone glanced around, making sure nobody recognized any faces.
Sierra looked at the street signs, trying to picture which direction they were from the dome. The Carinian consulate sat on the west end of the Bastion. That’s all she remembered.
“Turn left here,” Sierra said, guiding more from a gut feeling than from memory. “Then we’ll go right in a few blocks.”
They entered the open, staying close as they waded through the crowd. Sierra tried not to act out of place or stare at anyone. It was a striking mixture of modern clothing and the trim, black garments of the religious, a throwback to an ancient era. The assortment of hats especially tempted her to stare.
At the next corner, they came upon a shirtless street performer contorting himself into ridiculous positions while balancing a soccer ball on his foot. He’d drawn a small crowd. Sierra wished she could join, but Jabron forged ahead, crossing the street in front of a line of electros waiting for their green arrow.
The buildings packed tighter the closer they got to the Bastion. Jabron led the crew into a narrow, winding alley. The stones on the wall looked ragged and bare. They felt rough, snagging Sierra’s skin as she ran her fingers over them.
A few e-posters dotted the buildings at eye level, peeling back in places. One showed a video of a Jewish man with curly, brown hair sitting at a table with a combat rifle set before him and two armed men behind. As he spoke, Hebrew words appeared at the bottom of the e-paper. The next poster down, on the other wall, showed an Arab man sitting in the same scene. Again, there was no audio output, but Arabic words at the bottom of the e-poster changed every five seconds or so.
Sierra paused at the next e-poster, which displayed an African woman with gaunt cheeks and eyes as hard as nails. Words in Anglo-Universal appeared at the bottom as she spoke. At the top was written: “Statement from the Defenders of Glory.”
“Hold up,” Davin said, noticing Sierra pause. His crew gathered around the poster.
“Notice the men in uniform,” the subtitles read, “how they look down on us. How they watch us with suspicious eyes . . . They hate us, even as they profit from us. They are not from our land . . . They are not even people of faith. They have no religion, at least none they care to live by. And yet they control our holiest places . . . They decide who goes in and who goes out. They tell us when we can worship, how we can worship, where we can pray.”
“The hell she talking about?” Jabron rumbled.
“She’s a Defender,” Sierra explained. “The Defenders of Glory. They’re a—” She almost said terrorist but stopped herself for some reason. Suddenly, it felt too biased. “An insurgent group. They’ve got a huge network throughout the Mid East.”
“What do they want?” Davin asked, still reading the poster.
Sierra recalled her old teacher Lydia’s words. “Freedom from the Confed, I think.” She put puzzle pieces together in her mind, things she’d never thought about before. Things that never mattered to her before. “I guess they don’t like their holy sites controlled by irreligious people.”
Davin grunted in agreement. “Apparently.”
“What else could bring together Muslims, Jews, and Christians like me? We fought each other for centuries over these places . . . But we stand together now, united against a common enemy . . . an enemy that welcomes Carina’s pilgrims with open arms and shuts the rest of us out . . . An enemy that aligns itself with Orionite anarchists but treats the people of this land like cattle.”
Davin chuckled at that line. Sierra noticed Jabron staring intently back the direction the
y came from but said nothing of it. She got the impression he disdained her, so she preferred not to make conversation.
“We are tired of our temples being turned into martekplaces.” The African woman jabbed her finger against the table, eyes ablaze with passion. “Our cities turned into tourist destinations. Our wealth sent across the world to Beijing and Washington and Berlin . . .”
“Jai, you’re from Beijing, aren’t you?” Davin asked.
Jai shrugged. “Close. Outside the city.”
“Everybody’s rich there, right? You been stashing your fortune on the Fossa?”
Jai laughed and shook his head. “Some people rich as kings. Most people? Dirt poor—like me.”
“Nah, I don’t believe you,” Davin teased. “You’ve been holding back on us.”
Sydney gave Jai a playful shove. “Yeah, where’s your Levant money, punk? You too good to share it with us?”
Jai couldn’t keep from laughing his bashful, subdued laugh. It was infectious. Davin and Sydney laughed, too. Then Sierra joined in, laughing more at the moment than the flippant joke. Laughing because it felt good to laugh. To let off steam. In that brief, lighthearted moment, Sierra looked between the members of the Fossa crew and saw a glimpse of what Davin saw. She saw people who cared for each other and defended each other no matter what, people who shared enough in common to make fun of their differences. She saw a family.
“Get down!” Jabron shouted, startling them all.
He whipped open his jacket, pulled out his handgun, and fired—all one swift motion. Stifled electronic snaps ricocheted between the buildings, not deafening like normal gunshots but loud enough to startle.
Sierra ducked down and pressed herself against the wall. A few muffled snipes returned, cracking into the sandstone bricks over her head. Behind Jabron, a pair of military-shaped figures in dark clothing—one man and one woman—ran toward them from down the alley, holding handguns in rigidly straight arms.
Sierra pointed, trying to spit out words. “Look! Behind!”
Davin stood and snapped off a few rounds, hitting the man in front. The familiar, grim-faced woman ducked behind him and fired her silenced gun at the Fossa crew. One shot thunked into the back of Jabron’s arm, spraying blood out his biceps. Davin kept shooting until the Abramist man stopped moving and the woman retreated.
“Come on,” he said, taking Sierra’s arm. “We gotta move.”
“Where?” Sydney asked. “They got us trapped!”
“There’re more,” Jabron said between clenched teeth. “Saw ‘em following us.”
“How long were you gonna wait to tell us, Bron?”
Davin led the way down the alley toward the Abramist he killed. Sierra followed close behind, still dazed from the sudden skirmish.
“Wanted to be sure,” Jabron grumbled. He came behind Sierra, hardly showing any signs of having been shot. It just seemed to make him madder.
Sydney and Jai took up the rear.
“Better question is,” Sydney said, “how the hell did they find us?”
“I don’t know,” Davin replied.
He paused at a wooden door with faded, cracking blue paint and tried the handle. Locked. He rammed his shoulder against it. Twice. It didn’t budge. Jabron shoved him out of the way and fired two shots, splintering the handle, then kicked the door in. The grim-faced woman hurried around the bend again, weapon up, already shooting as the Fossa crew filed into the house. She only missed twice before a round connected with Jai’s leg, just above the knee. He yelped, and Jabron yanked him into the house before slamming the door shut and shoving an end table in front of it.
The rooms fit Sierra’s mental image of an Arab household: zigzag-patterned rugs, framed Arabic sayings on the walls, a water pipe beside the couch.
“Anybody home?” Jabron asked the quiet apartment. Apparently not.
Jai whimpered as Davin helped him to the couch. Jabron crouched in front of the back door, aiming his gun at it.
Davin found Sydney’s eyes. “Check the front. We need to keep moving.”
“Aye, Cap.”
Sydney ran into the next room while Davin ripped off a strip of the tan-striped curtain. He knelt in front of Jai and delicately tied the strip around the bleeding wound. Jai winced as Davin pulled it tight.
“Shit, Cap, we got a problem,” Sydney called from the entryway. “I count four more up here. They’re lookin’ for us.”
“Okay, front’s a no-go,” Davin said.
A breath later, a succession of shots blasted through the alley door, leaving thumbnail-sized holes where light filtered in. Jabron fired back, but Sierra heard no yelps or grunts of pain from outside. The air hung eerily quiet.
“Back won’t work either,” Jabron muttered.
The Abramists had both sides covered. They were trapped again, but worse this time. Sealed even tighter. Sierra wedged herself between a wall-projection stand and a wide cabinet filled with books and various electronics. She spread her knees enough to unholster the stunner at her thigh. Davin and Jai pulled back the couch and hid behind it. Sydney crawled back into the living room and pressed her back to the wall.
“Guys in front know where we are!” she hissed. “They’re right outside.”
Davin’s eyes blazed at Sierra. “Stay there,” he whispered. “Don’t move unless I say so.”
Sierra nodded.
“Strange, get upstairs,” Davin ordered. “We’ll follow.”
Sydney thrust off the wall and stayed hunched over on her way to the stairs.
That second, the alley door exploded in a flurry of splintered shards, knocking Jabron onto his back and blasting Sydney against the wall going up the stairs. Her shoulder punctured the weak drywall.
Two pairs of feet stormed in from the alley. The Abramists placed shots seemingly at random, fracturing shelves and breaking lamps and puffing through couch pillows. Dust clouded the whole room, enough to help Jabron blend in amongst the shards of wood on the floor. He snapped two shots in quick succession. Both Abramists fell hard and fast.
Sierra heard a metallic chink and swoosh of a door opening from the front entryway. More footsteps. Jai leaned around the couch and fired.
Snap, snap.
One of the Abramists let out a muffled shriek and retreated behind a wall.
Snap, snap, snap.
Jai shot through the wall. The Abramists shot back, tearing up the couch and ripping holes in the rugs. Jabron craned his head to look upside down and fire at the invaders from the front. One peeked around the corner and aimed, but Jabron hit him in the shoulder before he could.
While he was distracted with the other side of the room, the grim-faced woman popped into the doorway and looked for a target.
“Jabron!” Sierra screamed.
He swiveled back to aim at the alley door, but it was too late. The woman fired two shots into his stomach before disappearing again. Jabron groaned behind tight lips. Blood escaped the corner of his mouth and streaked across his dust-coated cheek.
“Bron, you alright?” Davin asked.
Jabron coughed, unable to speak.
“You’re alright, buddy,” Davin said, voice flimsy. “Hang in there.”
Feet stamped around in the entryway. Sierra panicked, realizing they knew where to shoot now. The gunshots came a few seconds later—two weapons firing at once, lashing into the couch. One landed, thrusting Davin against the wall and knocking the air from his lungs. He gasped as he held his side and fired back.
Silence took over the room. Davin wheezed and spat. “Dammit.”
Blood pounded in Sierra’s ears as she listened. Listened close. Heard nothing. Until—
A long, thin canister bounced into the center of the torn-up room. Sierra had seen one of them before, back at the mall on Agora. She covered her ears, pressed her eyes shut, and hid her face a split second before the flashbang went off. She saw the bright, blue flare even through her scrunched eyelids. It stole her hearing and replaced it with a high
-pitched ringing. The vibrations of feet and handguns firing rippled across the ground and through the air.
She blinked away the sunspots as the grim-faced woman ducked away from Jabron’s blind potshots and fired a series of shots into his chest. Davin stood behind the couch, watery eyes squinting and ears bleeding, gun firing in the woman’s general direction, missing every time. She placed a shot in his upper thigh, then another in his shoulder. He collapsed.
Adrenaline and instinct took over Sierra’s motor functions. She lifted her stunner and aimed, keeping her arm straight like Davin taught her. The Abramist woman saw but not in time. Sierra fired the round into the woman’s chest just below the neck. She fell twitching, but calmed to utter stillness after a few seconds.
More activity swirled in the entryway. Jai fired blindly through the wall as he hobbled over Davin toward the stairs. But the Abramist officer—the same one from her yacht wreckage and the mall—dashed out from behind cover and planted a shot in the center of Jai’s back. Sierra watched him cry out and fall against the stairs. He struggled to pick himself up and crawl to the steps, but the Abramist leader put another shot in his back before he’d made it up the first stair. Sydney, watching in horror halfway up the stairs, crab-crawled backward to the second floor, staying quiet.
Sierra would only have one shot at the leader. She held herself perfectly still, waiting for him to come out. Soon enough, he did, sneaking back into the entryway. More of his soldiers entered, spoke to each other, glanced around. Sierra couldn’t understand them, but she didn’t think they saw her. Yet.
She doubted she could take all three of them. Not if the entire Fossa crew couldn’t. She looked at Davin as he writhed. The leader hadn’t seen him after Davin’s last few hits. The couch blocked Davin from the entryway.
Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series Page 37
