“Are you sick?” Rory asked. “We have medicine… Maybe we can help.”
“Medicine?” The girl’s voice wavered. “Who are you?”
“We’re here to help.”
“My mom… She’s the one who’s sick. I think… I think she’s dying.”
“Let us try to help her.”
The crossbow trembled in the little girl’s grip, lowering slightly.
Bas shook his head. Rory Kerrigan, feral child whisperer. Bas lowered his gun slowly and took a step to the side, out of the crossbow’s path, confident now that this wasn’t a Coalition trap. They would need to make decisions about how to handle this girl and her sick mother, but first they needed to get through the front door so they could fix that transmitter.
“Your mother will know who we are. Let us help her,” Rory repeated.
The girl shook her head again, fear coming back into her eyes. “Who are you?”
Rory gestured to the eave right above the girl’s head, to the faint five-pointed star carved beneath it. Then he rolled up his sleeve and flashed his wrist at her.
Fuck. Rory had just signed this child’s death warrant. What the hell was wrong with him?
Bas tried to contain a growl as the girl’s mouth opened in a little ‘o’ of surprise when she saw the five-pointed star tattooed there.
“Haven.” The girl uttered softly. She squinted, taking in Rory’s tattoo and the infinity-shaped scar it was meant to cover up. It was as if all the strength leached from her body—her arms went limp, and the crossbow clattered to the porch.
She lifted one thin, pale arm into the dawn light toward Rory. It was bare, smooth, clean, unlike the rest of her. “You’re a Protected,” she whispered. “So am I… but… I was born free.”
Bas’s throat tightened, and he holstered his gun and stomped up the stairs, kicking the crossbow to the side of the porch. The Protected girl ignored him, keeping her shining, hopeful gaze on Rory.
Behind Rory, Nova scanned the area and sky for any signs of the Coalition, but Lex’s eyes were riveted to the child, an odd faraway expression on her face.
“Can you really help my mother?” the girl asked Rory.
“We’ll try.”
She nodded and whirled, pushing through the front door and into the cabin.
Bas threw Rory a veiled look, but he wasn’t even paying attention as he walked past and followed the girl into the dark cabin.
“Lex,” Bas ordered, snapping his fingers to knock her out of her strange stare. “Watch the road.”
She nodded and hurried toward the front gate.
Nova locked eyes with Bas and spoke in a harsh whisper. “That kid is a threat to this mission now.”
Rory should never have shown her his wrist. Never. But even if he hadn’t… Nova was only saying what Bas had known all night but hadn’t wanted to think about.
Pandemic Control was burning everything linked with the disease this kid’s mother likely had. They’d sweep the quarantine zone—all of it—and it was only a matter of time before they found this homestead.
Haven and Haven’s path was at risk—not just this mission. But even if it wasn’t, Bas couldn’t afford to let anyone see him and his team alive and live to tell the tale. Not even a Protected child.
It would hurt, losing a Haven safe house. But, in truth, it’d been lost the minute Pandemic Control moved in.
“We do whatever we have to do. For Haven.” Bas held Nova’s gaze for another second until she gave him a stiff nod.
Then, together, they entered the cabin.
The stench of sickness washed over Bas as they stepped inside. It was fainter than anything he’d smelled in that barn but worse for the fact that it belonged to the living—or to someone who wouldn’t be alive for long. That’s what it was about this place—about the dying vegetation outside, the silence and stench in this house. The only thing worse than seeing a dead thing, was being forced to witness death-in-progress.
The specter of death looped worse than Bas on stims. Always chanting the same words, the only words it understood.
I’m coming for you, Bas. Soon.
Bas shook off the morbid thoughts and did a quick sweep of the cabin’s interior with Nova. There was no immediate sign of tech or equipment, but Haven safe house owners knew to hide that, and those cables had led to this house.
The floor plan was open—chairs, a couch, and a handcrafted wooden table against one wall, a wood stove and old-fashioned fridge against another, a foldable privacy screen half-concealing an antique claw-footed tub and toilet.
There were two doors along the right-hand wall, and Nova disappeared through one of them. The other door was open, yellow light spilling out from where Rory was dealing with the sick mother and her kid.
“They had an antenna,” Nova muttered from the other bedroom, shining her light around inside. Curtains were pulled across a single window, but some light leaked through, revealing a narrow mattress on the floor and several crates filled with what appeared to be supplies and junk. She cursed. “Ask that kid where the hell they’re hiding their tech.”
Bas forced himself to walk through the second door, facing the source of the stench.
A middle-aged woman, late thirties or early forties, lay in a bed, unconscious as Rory readied a syringe he’d pulled from his open medkit.
Sweat-soaked auburn hair stuck to her skull, and her chest barely rose and fell. Sheets were rumpled up, shoved beneath her body as if the little girl had attempted to change them. By the rotten smell in the room—piss, shit, and blood—she’d failed.
The open sores Bas had only seen scabbed over in the dead were weeping freely on the mother, and acid climbed up his throat. He averted his eyes, focusing on Rory.
“I’m going to give her something for the pain, Iris,” Rory said quietly, looking at the child as if he needed her permission to do anything.
The filthy kid nodded from her place in the corner, where she stood with her hands clasped behind her back, and Rory administered the medication.
That almost-dead woman was unlikely to be any help to the team at this point. Hopefully Rory knew the only right response to this was to put her permanently out of her misery. Now.
Bas exchanged a look with Nova, who was shifting back and forth on her feet with a scowl on her face. They’d given Rory long enough to win this kid over.
“Kid…” Bas cleared his throat. “Does your mother have computer equipment somewhere in here? We need to see it.”
She hesitated, her eyes flicking back and forth between Bas and Rory. Suddenly the room seemed to shrink around Bas, constricting his chest like a vise, making it hard to breathe.
This room was too small, just big enough for a bed, bedside table, and the faded blue wardrobe pushed up against one wall. No windows. No fresh air. Bas’s heart rate picked up, and he forced himself to unclench his jaw.
“Do you have any tech—computers, screens? We need to use some of it.” Rory said gently.
The girl gave him another nod and pointed at the wardrobe. Then she darted for the bed to grab her mother’s limp hand in her smaller one.
“Go get Lex,” Bas barked at Rory.
Nova pulled open both wardrobe doors and peered into the shallow space, shining her light into it. Nothing but clothing and boots.
Bas helped her shove the heavy furniture off to the side, dragging it across the thick knotted-wood floorboards. Moving it revealed grooves in the floor, as if this wardrobe had been shifted many times in this exact way.
Bas’s heart beat harder. There was definitely something here, like the girl had said.
The wall between this room and the main living area wasn’t thick enough to be hiding anything like what they were searching for, so Bas dropped to his knees and started searching the floor for a sign of a trapdoor. He’d only visited a handful of Haven safe houses while on missions, but two houses like this one had kept theirs beneath the
floor in basements.
“Hey kid, where’s the stuff?” Nova asked, her voice harsh. “Is there a trapdoor or something? Where’s the latch?”
“I don’t know.” The little girl shook her head. “I’ve never been down there.”
“What? Why the hell did you tell us it’s here if you don’t know?”
“Because what you need is down there.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. My mother never let me go down there, but I know that’s where she goes and why. She sends messages to Haven there.”
“But how do you know?” Nova said, her voice rising with anger.
“I don’t have to see it to know it’s there.” Iris bit off every word sharply, matching Nova’s disdainful tone perfectly. Then she physically dismissed Nova, turning her back so she could look down at her mother. She wiped a closed fist roughly over her eyes and sank down at the edge of the bed.
Bas had been running his palms over the floorboards repeatedly, trying to feel the outline of the door, searching for a pressure point that might spring it open or a hidden latch to lift it up.
Rory and Lex walked through the door, and the tight space grew even tighter. Heat surged through Bas’s body, creating an intense sensation that made him want to rip his skin off. He needed to escape this fucking cage of a room.
Too many stims, not enough food or sleep. Without some kind of breakthrough right now, Bas was going to break down. Drop the last threads of control he had over his patience and temper. And losing control was never an acceptable option.
Lex wiggled past them all with her short, slim body and knelt on the floor where Bas had been searching for the latch. She pulled her small globe from her pocket and tapped it on, waving it along the wall to illuminate the wooden boards there.
“It’s a trapdoor in the floor, you idiot.” Nova snapped. “Move out of our way.”
She tried to lunge forward to push Lex aside, but she slammed into Bas’s raised arm instead. Nova’s eyes widened at the way he’d blocked her, taking on a crazed look that reflected Bas’s own racing heart, desperation and exhaustion threatening to push them both over the edge. He had no idea why he’d blocked her. She was right about the trapdoor. Lex needed to move. The tech wasn’t aboveground or in the wall…
If they could just see the outline of the trapdoor, then they could figure out how to pry it open. But Lex was blocking the spot where the wardrobe had been standing.
“Look.” Lex’s voice was soft as she touched the crack between two of the boards that formed the wall. She waved her light across that section again, and something glinted, reflecting the light. Bas leaned closer, his mouth bone dry as she traced a quick path down the space in the paneling until she reached the baseboard. The thin line glinted the entire way—there was definitely something hidden in the tight space between these two boards.
As Lex’s globe reached the floor and the baseboard… Bas realized the baseboard looked off. Like it had been repaired or patched in the exact spot where she was shining her light.
No one spoke or seemed to even be breathing as Lex frowned and tapped the baseboard. When nothing happened, she pushed on it.
A whisper sounded from the crack in the wall, and a thin piece of metal popped out halfway up.
The slightest smile curved Lex’s lips as she carefully stepped to the side, clearing the area she’d been kneeling in. She pushed down lightly on the piece of metal. On the lever.
With a slight pop, a piece of the floor lifted up, and Bas reached a hand under it, pulling it the rest of the way off.
This trapdoor had been cut perfectly, lined up to match the rest of the boards, invisible to the naked eye and direct light. He peered down into the hole. A ladder descended into pitch darkness.
“Good work,” Rory murmured as Lex stepped back to let Bas and Nova lead the way into the basement.
Bas’s pulse skyrocketed as he climbed down into the tomb, finding his way only with the weak light of the globe attached to his waistband.
When Nova hit the ground, she pulled the string on a light bulb hanging above their heads, illuminating the space as Rory and Lex joined them.
The basement was larger than Bas had expected it to be, and the pressure in his body dissipated as they all caught sight of the cables running down the wall at the far end of the room.
A table and chair were pushed against that wall, PC towers beside it, screens cluttering the table’s surface, and best of all—the white box Bas would recognize anywhere—the device used to encrypt messages intended for Haven. Several crates of equipment and tools were stacked on both sides of the table.
“My hundred-year-old tools,” Nova said in a rush, and she was next to the table, lifting the top crate to unpack it before she’d even finished her sentence.
Shelves filled with canned food and supplies lined the other wall, and an old, well-polished guitar was propped against them. A mattress and battered couch piled with blankets took up the rest of the space, and Lex collapsed onto the bed, hugging her knees to her chest. Her last pain mod had worn off… or was starting to.
“I got what I need!” Nova said, breathless, banging on one of the crates. She started rifling through her pack for the broken transmitter.
“Get it working,” Bas said. “Send our coordinates to Haven with a message that we’re tracking Jeremiah… and he may be captured.”
He darted a glance at Rory, who was staring at him with intensity, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Do you have something to add?” Bas asked sharply. “You want to tell me why you thought it was a good idea to flash your scar at that kid?”
Rory gave a slow shake of his head.
“Lex needs painmod. Get it. We sleep in shifts.”
Rory held Bas’s gaze for another split second, then hopped on the ladder and climbed up.
This breakthrough had given him a fresh burst of energy and clarity that shouldn’t have been available to him after so many hours without sleep. Lex had her eyes closed now, but her lips were in a thin line against whatever pain she was feeling, so she wasn’t asleep yet. She and Rory could sleep first. He’d take the first watch.
He strode over to where Nova was fiddling with the transmitter and her newfound tools. It took less than a minute for Nova to locate what she needed to connect their transmitter to the PC. As she fired up the system, Bas darted a look into the crates, scanning their contents. Then, he focused all of his attention on what Nova was doing.
She slid into a chair in front of the screens, mumbling curses to herself as she pounded the ancient keyboard on the table. He opened his mouth to speak, but something dragged his gaze back to the crate against the wall that had been at the bottom of the stack.
He took two steps and knelt down, searching for whatever had caught his attention.
There.
A glint of metal, a round edge of something half-buried beneath scrap metal. Nothing remarkable about it, but Bas impulsively plucked it from the crate and stared down at it.
His skin prickled, the hair raising on the back of his neck as a jolt of electricity radiated through him. It was a ring that he’d found—with a silver band of medium-thickness, neither feminine or masculine—stamped lightly on the inside with a tiny silhouette of a lighthouse.
The deep purple center stone mocked him.
Star sapphire.
Bas’s hand shook involuntarily, and six lines of light, like a star shining in dark space, seemed to move and dance across the gem’s surface. He had looked them up once, star sapphires. Some valued those lines in the stone, but Bas knew the truth: they were flaws—inclusions that ruined the value of a true sapphire. Why would anyone choose to represent themselves with a stone so fractured and flawed?
Bas’s entire body heaved in response to the ring, as if he could purge the reality of finding it now, on this mission, in this place that belonged to Haven.
“What the fuck?”
Nova cursed and scooted her chair closer to the screens.
Sweat popped up anew on his forehead, and dizziness swept over him as he made a fist to hide the ring. He darted a quick glance at Nova, but she was typing furiously, not even looking his way.
Bas shoved the ring deep into his breast pocket where it seemed to catch fire, burning a hole a through the fabric, announcing its existence to the world.
“What is it, Nov?” he asked, his voice raspy.
She just shook her head and waved him off. She hadn’t seemed to notice what he’d found, hadn’t witnessed his reaction… She had no reason to suspect anything.
The ring didn’t belong here. It couldn’t be here.
The reality of the ring’s existence pounded through Bas’s skull so hard, he found himself clutching his temples as Rory hopped down off the ladder with his pack and medkit. Bas could hear and see everything, yet experienced nothing at all as the world went in and out of focus, spinning as his heart and mind raced.
He had to get out of this fucking grave.
Nova bolted out of her chair, falling to her knees to rip the plug from the wall beside the PC tower. “Shit, shit, shit!”
The screens went black, and Nova whirled on them all, eyes wide, sweat glistening on her forehead.
“What happened?” Rory’s voice sounded distant.
“There was a message in the queue looping repeatedly—these off-gridders were trying to send a coded message to the next Haven safe house. Probably trying to get past the jammers.” Nova was breathing faster, and she swallowed hard. “When I connected our transmitter, it boosted the signal… the message might have gotten past the jammers. I don’t know if the Coalition will pick it up… or if they’ll be able to trace it back to this location.”
Bas clenched his jaw tight. Their encryption tech was better than what the safe houses used to create their coded messages, but his racing mind couldn’t make sense of the threat the unnecessary broadcast posed or what to do about it right now. Nova just kept fucking up. First the bullet through a Coalie skull. Now this. Maybe they should just walk right up to a Pandemic Control checkpoint and ask if they had Jeremiah.
Defective (Fractured Era Book 1) Page 21
