“Good work, Nazari,” Flaherty said, clapping one hand on Saskia’s shoulder. She gave a wavering smile that Saskia doubted anyone saw. “Now, is there a way to jam that door before the Jackals find their way in too?”
Saskia’s relief evaporated. Of course. The man with the light—it was Rees—came over to her side and held it up to the door. Saskia could just make out the screeches of the Jackals’ conversation on the other side.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Dorian’s the one who told me about the service tunnels.” Why hadn’t Owen just sent him? It made no sense.
“It was a mechanical latch,” said another member of the team. Latre, Saskia thought with a spark. She was an engineer for the Meridian Army. “Old-rebel-style. Give me a minute.” She pushed past Saskia and knelt down in front of the latch, frowning. The light bobbed over her head. The Jackals chattered outside the door.
Then Latre reached over and snapped the latch with a quick flick of her wrist. She stood up, turned to the others. Her face was hidden in shadows. “That should do it,” she said. “I’ll show you how once we’re back at camp. Could come in handy again.”
Almost immediately, a grinding sounded out from deep in the walls. Saskia froze, her heart pounding—but the door stayed put.
Latre grinned. “Told you. But that won’t hold them forever. They’ll try to blow their way in here next.”
Flaherty looked over at Saskia. “You know how to get us out of here?”
Saskia took a deep breath. “The service tunnels were used to maintain the old tourist houses,” she said.
Latre snorted. “And to smuggle Inny supplies, I imagine.”
“That was fifty years ago,” Flaherty snapped. “Saskia, go on.”
“This should lead us to one of the houses,” Saskia said. “I don’t know where exactly we’ll come out, though.”
“So we’ll need to be careful.” Flaherty lifted her rifle, stock gleaming in the halo of the light.
They set off into the tunnel. Saskia walked alongside Flaherty again, hoping that Dorian was right about the service tunnels. She wondered too about what Latre had said—if the tunnels had been used by the Insurrection, they probably went all over town, probably all the way out to the woods. She felt certain there was one that led to the hangar where they’d found the old Insurrectionist ship during the rescue.
She filed this information away to take to Dorian and the others. If they had to be guides, at least they could be good ones.
Victor couldn’t believe this crap.
Why had ONI even bothered to send them to training if they were just going to be traipsing around the woods, something they had gotten extremely good at three months ago? What was the point of specialized training with ONI if they were just going to be glorified maps?
He pushed aside a damp fern with the barrel of his rifle and wound more deeply into the underbrush. The team marched softly behind him, their footsteps almost sounding like rainfall. He sighed and breathed in the faint toxic whiff of plasma from the Covenant installation in town.
They were deep in the woods, but they were close too. Coming at the drill site from the back. Pretty soon they’d start seeing the dilapidated old tourist houses.
He was leading the team toward 21 Rue Coquillage, where the service tunnel had expunged Saskia and her group twelve hours earlier. Their assignment was to explore the tunnels more thoroughly, see if there was any way to use them to access the drill site two blocks over.
A reconnaissance mission. Fine. They needed information before they could act. But when Victor had brought up the possibility of being involved in that action, Owen had just sighed, looked away. “Haven’t you had enough of that?”
The question burned at Victor’s thoughts as he swatted away vines and broken branches. Enough? His hometown was being drilled into dust and stopping it was something he was actually good at. Something he could actually do, something that for once in his life felt right and that made his family proud.
A flash of color appeared through the trees. Victor stopped, held up one fist. His team leader, Mousseau, stopped beside him.
“That’s it?” he said. Mousseau was a great hulking mountain of a man, his voice and skin rough. He was the only one of the entire militia that came remotely close to Owen’s size, but even he fell about a half meter short.
“That’s it,” Victor sighed.
Mousseau’s dark eyes glittered. “You want to fight, kid?”
Victor just glared straight ahead, at the faded houses, at the dark smoke trailing up behind them from the drill site.
“Well, this is the first step.”
“Yeah, I know,” Victor snapped before he could stop himself. “Gather information, then enact a plan. But I’m not going to enact anything.”
Mousseau glanced down at him. Victor’s cheeks went hot. He wanted to defend himself, wanted to point out that he and the others had gotten almost three hundred people away from the Covenant and off the moon and there was no point in him just playing tour guide now that all of Meridian was at stake.
But Mousseau didn’t say anything more about it, just gestured with one hand and called for the others, two men and a woman almost as gruff as he was. They had all served together as part of the same squadron on Caernaruan, the northernmost Meridian continent.
They walked single file down to the houses, Victor cutting a straight trail through the ferns with his rifle. Smoke twisted up toward the pale sky, dark, foamy streaks that made his stomach feel heavy.
“Keep a sharp eye out,” Mousseau said behind him. “They’re getting to work over there. Probably have some scouts around.”
Victor gripped his rifle a little more tightly. He’d show them how well he could fight.
But they made it to 21 Rue Coquillage before any of the scouts made themselves known. When Victor saw the number 21 in faded gray lettering on the side of a big yellow house, he sighed in disappointment. Mousseau glanced over at him, smiled a little. Said nothing.
Mousseau pushed open the front door of the house, did a quick check, gestured for the others to follow him inside. The place was gutted, the floors littered with the detritus of Brume-sur-Mer kids sneaking out for the night: empty glass bottles, crumpled wrappings from the sandwich place around the corner, long since destroyed by the Covenant. Victor felt as if the air had been knocked out of him; he stood, swaying a little, remembering the time before the invasion. Saturday nights staying up, making props and miniatures for his holo-film, never being cool enough to come to parties at 21 Rue Coquillage.
But none of those cool kids were here now, were they?
He turned around and looked at the group. “The first scout team said they came out of the tunnel in the master bedroom closet. They said it looked as if there were additional service tunnels branching off from the one that led them here, and Dorian corroborated.”
The team knew this already, but they indulged him. Mousseau nodded. “You heard the kid,” he said. “Let’s head to the tunnels.”
The master bedroom was in the back of the house, a vast room with a rotting bed collapsing in the center. The closet door hung loose on its railing, and when Victor shone a flashlight inside, he saw only walls graffitied with various obscenities.
One of the other team members, Valois, chuckled and nudged at Victor. “Guess there wasn’t much else to do around here, huh?”
Victor stepped into the closet, scowling. Before the invasion, he’d complained of the same thing, but hearing it from a stranger rankled him. He pointed the light at the walls, looking for the symbol that Dorian had shown him. Not that he could see anything through the graffiti.
“You sure this is the right place?” Valois asked.
Victor knelt down and ran his fingers along the wall, feeling for the indentation Saskia had described—there. Was that it? He pressed hard and the wall slid away, revealing a narrow metal stairwell.
He stood up and tossed the light at Valois, who fumbled for it and then shot
Victor a dark look. Victor just grinned at him.
“All right, good job.” Mousseau sounded bored. “Take it away, Gallardo.”
They made their way into the service tunnel. It was narrower than the shelter tunnels, the ceilings lower. At times, Victor had to duck to keep from hitting his head. As he walked, he pictured the layout of the street overhead. He knew the neighborhood fairly well, having shot a few scenes for his holo-film here. It seemed childish to him now that he had been so into filmmaking. As if any of that had ever been important when humanity was being forced to the brink of extinction.
Still, when the corridor split off to the left, he knew it was heading toward the big falling-apart gray house on the corner of Rue Coquillage and Rue Flot. And Rue Flot was where the intel showed the Covenant dig site.
Reconnaissance for now, he told himself as he motioned for the others to follow him down the split. Even if I’m really hoping for a fight.
They walked single file, Victor leading the way. Their footsteps clattered against the metal walls, bounding off one another. If there were any Covenant scouts down here, they’d hear them coming.
Victor was so focused on the sound of their footsteps that he didn’t notice the other sound at first. It was like wind moving through the tunnel, even though the air was utterly still, almost to the point of stifling. And it was getting louder.
“Do you hear that?” He stopped, turned around to Mousseau.
Mousseau nodded, frowning.
The rushing wind sound swept around them. It reminded Victor of the beach, only more steady than the roar of waves. More mechanical.
He gasped and then slapped his hand over his mouth. Suddenly, he knew where he’d heard that sound before.
“What is it?” asked Bellamy, the youngest member of the team aside from Victor.
Victor looked up at the team with a slow-creeping apprehension. “It’s the drill,” he said weakly. “The plasma drill.”
All of them stood in the dark tunnel, listening. Then Mousseau said, “How close do you think it is?”
Victor shook his head a little. “Not on top of us.” He was pretty sure, anyway. “But close. Maybe—” He pressed his hand against the wall. It was warm to the touch, a warmth that sent a chill shooting straight down his spine. “They’re digging beside us,” he said hoarsely.
The others erupted into frightened chatter. Half of the team wanted to go back, and the other half wanted to tear the walls down themselves.
“Quiet!” shouted Mousseau.
Everyone looked over at him. Victor pressed his ear against the wall, listening to the drill’s constant roaring, trying to picture where it was positioned. This tunnel was heading toward the dilapidated gray house, which sat on a big lot, if he remembered correctly. It had always looked as if a fragment of the jungle had been dropped in the middle of the neighborhood. An overgrown garden. If the service tunnel ran under the street—and he was fairly certain it did—then the drilling was happening in the garden.
The drilling stopped.
Every member of the team froze in place. Mousseau lifted his rifle, pulled back softly on the bolt.
Then, abruptly, a new sound started up again. Quieter, much less organic, like an insect whine from a mechanical mosquito. It shifted up in pitch, squealing and shrieking. Victor thought about all the time he’d spent building models for his holo-films, the different sounds of the different tools. Higher pitched meant a smaller movement. A more refined movement.
“I think they found something,” he said.
“What?” Mousseau jerked his gaze toward him. “What are you talking about?”
“Maybe they switched out the drill?” Victor said, tilting his head toward the wall. “You can hear it, right? It sounds different. They probably hit something and are trying not to damage it.” The words came out faster and faster. “I bet I can get up there and see what it is.”
Valois laughed. Victor ignored him. Mousseau just narrowed his eyes.
“I’m serious,” Victor said. “There’s this overgrown garden thing—that’s where they’re drilling. I know it. I used to—” He stopped himself in time from mentioning his stupid holo-films. “I used to hang out around here. If I can get up there, we can find out for sure.”
Mousseau stared at him. The whine of the new drill carried on in the background. Victor didn’t look away. He held eye contact. He knew he had already made a decision: He was going up there regardless of what Mousseau said.
“Valois, go with him.”
Victor expected Valois to protest, but he just stepped forward. “You sure about this, kid?” he asked.
Victor bristled at that but nodded.
“All right, then.” Mousseau took a deep breath. “We’ll patrol down here. I’m giving you thirty minutes. You’re not back by then, we’re coming out for you.”
Victor adjusted his rifle. “We’ll be back.”
“Good boy.”
Valois slapped Victor on the shoulder. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
He led Valois down the service tunnel, following the symbols carved into the walls to indicate the exit. It didn’t take long for them to come upon a metal staircase leading up to a barred door. Victor slammed the butt of his rifle on the bar, and it shattered into dust.
Valois laughed. “Probably gonna want to be more subtle out there.”
Victor glared at him. “I’ve done this before.”
Valois raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? You got this close before?”
“Can’t tell you.” Victor stared at him, deadpan. “It’s classified by ONI.”
That shut Valois up, and Victor slid the door open. Like the entrance they had taken, it opened into a small, dark room that smelled of mildew—a closet. Victor stepped out cautiously, pushing open the doors to reveal a cavernous room littered with broken glass and rotting carpet.
Everything was lit by the purple glow spilling in through the empty window frames along with a strange, toxic heat.
Valois let out a low whistle. “They were closer than I thought.”
Closer than Victor thought too, but he didn’t say anything. He crouched down low and crept over to the closet window. It looked out into the garden, flat glossy leaves and huge red flowers all overgrown with weeds. And choked out with smoke from the drill.
“Stay here,” Victor said. “Watch the entrance.”
Valois laughed. “I was supposed to watch you.”
Victor glared at him. “You know this place is gonna be crawling with scouts. We can’t let them find out that the service tunnels run this close to the drill site. We’re lucky they’re so distracted by their work that they haven’t set up patrols down there.”
The expression of resignation on Valois’s face gave Victor a surge of superiority.
“Fine,” Valois said. “But if you get killed out there, Mousseau’s gonna kill me. So don’t die.”
The superiority vanished. They still just thought of him as a kid.
“I won’t,” Victor snapped.
He hoisted himself out the window, landing softly in the mud outside. The whine from the drill sliced through the trees. Victor darted over to a towering jacaranda tree and scrambled up the thick hanging vines into the spread of branches. He moved to the edge of the canopy, grabbing at leaves to keep himself steady. This had been Evie’s and Dorian’s thing, getting up high, but it had worked for them.
He peered out from between the leaves and couldn’t see anything aside from a swell of purple light arcing over the garden. He was going to have to get closer.
He inched toward the end of the branch, took a deep breath, and jumped. For one exhilarating moment, he was slicing through the wet, fragrant leaves. Then he grabbed on to the outstretched branch of an empress tree and swung hard, slamming into the trunk. The air fell out of him, and he hung there, arms aching.
The drill sang through the air.
Victor pulled himself up into the tree’s canopy, the branches bending beneath his weig
ht but not breaking. He pushed through the leaves at the top of the tree, making sure to keep his head covered with the purple blossoms.
Directly in front of him, crouched over the crushed remains of houses, was the Covenant’s drill.
“Got you,” he whispered.
He tapped the side of his helmet and zoomed in on the site. The drill was enormous, much bigger than the Locust he and the others had taken down before—it was as big as the surrounding houses, if not bigger. However, the plasma beam it emitted was wider and brighter. Victor counted five Elites on the ground, and none of them looked like they were equipped to fight. They stood in a clump, conferring together, their eyes fixed on the drill. Grunts churned around them, jumping up and down, knocking up against one another. A pack of Brutes at the edge of the scene bellowed at the Grunts with triumphant nods.
Celebrating, Victor realized with a cold slow creep of dread. They’re celebrating.
Immediately, he zoomed in as far as his HUD would take him. The image was blurred a little at the edges, but he could still make out the beam of the drill shooting straight into the ground, ringed by the charred wreckage of the neighborhood. The light flickered and burned at his eyes.
He pushed the zoom away. So they found something enough to celebrate, but they were still drilling? He wished he could get closer, find out what they were actually drilling at.
Mousseau’s voice crackled in his ear. “You on your way back? Because we’re about to come get you.”
Victor cursed, checked the time. He’d been out here almost twenty-five minutes. He sank down beneath the canopy. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m on my way back.”
“Good.” A pause. The drill’s whine sang out in the background. “What’d you find?”
Victor took a deep breath as he sent the feed to Mousseau. “I think they’ve found something,” he said, staring at the patterns in the tree leaves. “I think we’ve got to act fast.”
Here’s what we know,” Commander Marechal said.
They were all huddled together beneath a tent in the center of the camp. Rain battered against the fabric, distorting the camouflage patterns, and blew in sideways through the flaps. The air was hot and muggy, and Dorian could barely breathe. He actually found himself missing the dry, sweltering prairies where they had done their training.
Meridian Divide Page 5
