by Amy Braun
“But what about the Hellions? Aren’t you worried they’ll find you?”
“No,” Sawyer replied curtly. “If they track us down, we kill them.”
I gaped at him. “You fight them directly? Are you insane?!”
The anger in his expression both answered my question, and worried me.
“It’s not easy and we don’t always seek it out. But the Hellions are butchers. If I get the chance, I’ll kill every last one of them.”
The way he said it left no room for questions. I had no love for the Hellions, but even I knew that fighting them in direct combat was pointless. They were fast, strong, resourceful, and tireless. I would get Abby from the Behemoth and bring it down if the chance presented itself, but I would never fight a Hellion one on one. I’d never, ever seen one of them killed. I wasn’t sure it was possible.
But the look on Sawyer’s face told me that it was possible, that he had done it, and it hadn’t sated the anger swarming his soul.
Without warning, he stood up and walked away. I watched him disappear into the shadows, not sure what I had done something wrong.
“Be careful when bringing up the Hellions,” Gemma said solemnly, getting my attention. “They’re a prickly subject for our captain.”
“Why? What did they do to him?”
“The same thing they did to all of us,” replied Nash, his dark eyes serious. “They took away people he cared about.”
Of course that was the obvious answer. I’d lost both my parents and countless friends to the Hellions. Abby was their prisoner. My little sister, who always looked for bags of sugar on Scavenging Days. It would cover the outside of her clothes in a sparkling power, and she would sprinkle it on anything. Even hard bread or dry meat. She would see me shaking my head and smile, saying, “putting sugar on it makes it a treat.”
My heart pinched in my chest. I absorbed the pain, pushed it away, and glanced at the shadows Sawyer had disappeared into.
Where my fear blinded my rage, the opposite was true for Sawyer. Whatever– or whoever– he lost to the Hellions had pushed him beyond the point of pain. I suspected the only reason he hadn’t completely snapped was because Gemma and Nash knew how to hold him together.
“Do yourself a favor, Claire,” Nash added. “Don’t ask Sawyer about his past. He doesn’t know how to let go of it yet.” Nash made it sound like he never would.
Time seemed to move without me after that conversation ended. Gemma returned to ignoring me, so I mumbled replies to Nash’s questions, though I couldn’t remember what he asked. Eventually, the two marauders stood up, packed away the food and told me to get some sleep. All I did was nod.
When I was left alone, I plucked the silver chain around my throat and held up the skeleton key. I turned it against the light of the kerosene lamps, still not seeing what was so special or important about it. My mother seemed convinced that I would use it to help the steadily dying survivors. How was I supposed to do that when my mother had left me no instructions, and the very mention of my parents made colonists cringe in anger?
I tucked the key back under my shirt and decided that it didn’t matter. The only thing I could do now was rescue Abby, and maybe bring down the Behemoth. Anything else was asking too much.
Like Sawyer, there were some things I just wasn’t prepared to deal with, and some secrets that belonged to me alone.
Chapter 5
Unlike the marauders, I wasn’t able to sleep that night. While they rested, I wandered around the air hangar and looked for materials to build some more flashbangs. Their construction was easy, if you had all the materials. There wasn’t much in the hangar that I could use, so I was only able to build two. Still, it was two more than I had before.
True to his word, Sawyer led us out of the hangar as soon as they’d strapped their weapons to their belts. Gemma surprised me by allowing me to use her battered, forest grey messenger bag, but Sawyer refused to let me have any weapons other than my flashbangs and pocketknife. He claimed that he trusted me about as much as I trusted him. I was ready to argue, especially when I he told me to leave the Volt behind, but decided against it when I saw the dark bags under his eyes. He didn’t seem to have slept, either.
The best way to get to the Junkyard was to walk. Even if all the sloops and smaller ships hadn’t been shot down during The Storm, the risk of flying was too dangerous. The Hellions would see a ship from the Behemoth and instantly send a raiding skiff to destroy it. I’d seen countless ships try to evacuate past the barricades. It was rumored that a few had made it, but I’d never seen them. Rumors weren’t always truths.
Luckily, the South Junkyard wasn’t far from the ports. A couple hours of walking through crushed machineries and broken factories, combined with another hour of checking and double-checking that the Hellions weren’t coming down for another morning raid, we arrived at our destination.
The Junkyard was the only area in Westraven that had been a mess before the Hellions attacked in The Storm. Mountains of scrap metal sat next to piles of broken wood. Hollowed out airships were covered with trash I could barely recognize. A soft breeze pushed sand over our feet as we approached the gate. I looked past the thick chicken wire fence, trying to see if any Junkers were in the yard.
The Junkers were isolated men and women who willingly lived aboveground. The attacks from The Storm had damaged their minds. The Junkers were erratic and twitchy, and I never liked dealing with them. The slightest provocation could startle them enough to put a knife in my back.
“Looks empty,” Sawyer commented from my side.
“They usually stay inside,” I explained, “even when they know Garnet’s people are coming. But we should get in and out quickly.”
He looked at me. “You expecting trouble from them?”
“No. But that lock wasn’t on the gate before.”
The four of us walked closer to the gate, and I quickened my pace to get a better look at the padlock holding it shut. I knelt down and studied the thick black device covering the lock. Bare copper wires tangled and looped around it, plugging into the sides while the far ends wrapped around the wire fence. With the plastic cover on top, I couldn’t tell what the device would do. But my instincts told me enough.
I straightened up and stepped back.
“Damn,” I muttered. “It’s a Pitfall.”
“A what?” Sawyer asked.
I looked over my shoulder, unaware that he’d gotten so close to me. My back was almost touching his chest. This close, I could see the line of his cheeks, the glints of gold in otherwise bronze eyes. Sawyer didn’t seem to have that dark severity to him anymore. He was looking at the Pitfall with curiosity. Then he looked at me.
I don’t know why my breath caught, or why my heart was beating just a little bit quicker. He was attractive, but he was a pirate. I didn’t trust him because I knew he wasn’t safe to be around.
And yet, I didn’t feel threatened. I could almost feel safe, comforted by Sawyer’s presence. Maybe that was the biggest danger to my situation.
“What’s a Pitfall?” Sawyer tried again when I didn’t answer.
I blinked and quickly looked away, embarrassed that I’d been staring at him without knowing why.
“It’s a booby trap,” I answered, glad for something else to focus on. “The black box holds a huge amount of electrical energy. The stripped wires help channel it across whatever it touches.”
“So,” Gemma said from behind me, “if we touch the box or the wires, we get fried?”
“Severely,” I confirmed. “I’ve seen these on other substations before Garnet took them over.”
“But you can dismantle it, right?” Nash asked.
“Yes,” I admitted. “But it will take time, because I have to go slowly. I don’t have anything to just blow it open–”
Sawyer had been moving beside me while I was talking. I couldn’t see what he was doing until he pulled the flintlock pistol from his belt and aimed it at the Pitfall. With
out a word of warning, he fired a shot straight into the black box.
The effect was instantaneous. Orange sparks erupted from the Pitfall, sending a rippling current through the copper wires, which made harsh zaps as blue lightning shuddered over the wire fence. I jumped back and stared with wide eyes until the current stopped. Then I turned and shoved Sawyer’s chest. He leaned to the side, but didn’t lose his footing.
“What the hell did you just do?!” I demanded.
Sawyer spun the gear-like hammer at the back of his flintlock– a modification to load another round and save time on manual reloading– and looked at me.
“I got us inside. The door should be open now, right?”
I looked at the smoking Pitfall. The bullet had completely destroyed the trap, and probably gone through the lock, too. I turned on Sawyer angrily.
“They could have had another trap set underneath it,” I scolded. “You could have been killed.”
Sawyer grinned. “So nice of you to care, Firecracker.”
I ground my teeth and balled my fists. “Don’t call me that.”
Sawyer just laughed, causing my insides to flip. His shining eyes held mine as he said, “You said it could only be powered electrically, and I doubt the Junkers would want to destroy their own gate. You also said that dismantling it would take time, which neither of us have.”
I opened my mouth to protest, and realized I couldn’t. Damn him for being right. He looked at Nash and Gemma, tossing his head toward the gate. Without needing to ask what he meant, the two marauders walked to the fence to open it. Sawyer looked at me.
“I want my ship fixed,” he said. “You want to find your sister. Shooting open the door gets us both what we want faster.”
Memories of Abby flashed through my mind. Her bright smile when I found her a tattered book or a small bag of hard candies. How she fussed over me when I got so much as a prick on my finger. The way she curled into my body when I read her a story and stroked her sweet, sugar-smelling hair until she fell asleep.
Thinking of Abby made my chest ache and dissipated my frustration at Sawyer. I turned away and hurried to the fence, which Gemma and Nash were pushing open. Nothing happened to them, and I was surprised at how relieved that made me. I shouldn’t have cared, but I knew I would feel terrible if something happened to either one of them.
But they pushed open the gate without any aftershocks, and stepped inside. As they entered the Junkyard, Gemma drew her pistol and a knife. Nash took out a set of brass knuckles from his pocket and slid them over his fingers.
They didn’t look easy going or harmless anymore. I couldn’t be willfully blind to what they were now. Behind me, I heard Sawyer drawing his cutlass. He had the same stony expression his friends did. His eyes were darting back and forth, as if he expected an attack to come from behind the junk piles at any second. I looked up at the Behemoth. The skiffs were still docked underneath it.
“You won’t need the weapons,” I told Sawyer when I lowered my eyes. “We probably won’t even see the Junkers. They have a deal with Garnet that allows me to take what I need.”
“What kind of deal?” Sawyer asked, still scrutinizing the landscape.
“Trade,” I answered. “They let me take the parts I need without charge, and I build whatever they need when they ask.”
Sawyer glanced at me then. “Like a Pitfall?”
He didn’t suggest it with accusation, but I still scowled at him. “No. They made that on their own somehow.”
“Huh. Wonder why they made it now.”
I paused, because I was beginning to wonder that myself. The Junkers were unstable, but they respected and feared losing Garnet’s power enough to never deny him. What, if anything, could have changed that in the last few months?
I decided I didn’t want to know. I wanted to get the parts for the power core, and get out of here before the Junkers saw us.
“So how does this work?” Gemma asked, holding her weapons firmly. “Do we look at a particular pile or just wander in circles until we find something shiny?”
“We’re here for the Dauntless,” Nash teased, though he was just as alert as she was. “Not to add to your collection, darling.”
Gemma made a pouty humph noise that got a chuckle from her lover. It almost took away the tension they had in their shoulders.
I scanned the Junkyard, stopping when I saw a jagged pile of broken metal. I pointed to it. “There. Nash, Gemma, you can get the sheet metal I need for the exterior. I need about four feet of it, but it doesn’t have to be in one full piece. Make sure it’s thick, but not too heavy.”
They nodded, put away their weapons, and started on their mission. I turned to Sawyer. “The stuff I need for the internal parts and wires are in that stack there,” I pointed the sloppy pile across from Gemma and Nash, which was a mess of knotted wires, hydraulic pipes, tubes, gears and cogs.
Sawyer glanced at it, then to me with an incredulous look. I rolled my eyes. “I’ll tell you what to look for.”
He slid his cutlass back into its scabbard and followed me to the pile. I checked the sturdiness of the slant, then climbed up. I leaned on my side and picked through the debris. I pulled out some wire and checked the tips. They weren’t burnt and had clean edges, so I took them. Past the coil of wires, I found a slightly dented power transformer about half the size of my forearm.
“Here.”
I looked down, seeing Sawyer holding a tin box up to me. I reached down to take it and looked inside. The box was filled with every size and shape of gear, screw, and cog available. I grinned, closed the box, and shoved it in Gemma’s messenger bag. When I looked up, Sawyer was still watching me. A warm, soft smile curved his lips and stirred my heart.
“What?” I asked, glad I still had my voice.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile.”
Sawyer’s words caught me off guard, and filled my cheeks with warmth. I fumbled for something to say back, but I was too flustered. Sawyer smirked at my reaction, widening my smile and lightening my mood–
The dull snap and buzz took me out of whatever moment I was falling into. I squinted and looked around, wondering if I’d been hearing things. But one glance at Sawyer told me he’d heard it too.
He whipped his head to look at Gemma and Nash. They didn’t seem to have heard the noise yet. They heard him draw his cutlass, though. Both marauders quietly set their collected scrap metal aside and walked toward us.
That was when the trap sprung.
I couldn’t see past Sawyer, so I didn’t notice the Junkers coming around the tall piles of garbage until it was too late. They were dressed in tattered clothes and wore dented scrap metal like armor, and their dreadlocks bounced against their heads as they ran. The two that I saw were carrying thin metal batons with sparks spitting from their tips.
Nash and Gemma reacted instantly, pivoting and lunging into powerful attacks. Nash darted in front of Gemma, closing his hand into a fist and making the brass knuckles gleam. He threw out a powerful punch to the face of the Junker on the right, shattering his nose and knocking him down. He was probably unconscious before he hit the ground.
The second Junker shoved the electric baton at Nash, but the big marauder saw him coming. He spun around, grabbed the man’s wrist before he could be electrocuted, and hooked a punch into his jaw. The Junker was barely standing afterward.
It was clear that Nash didn’t need help, but two more Junkers with batons were appearing from the piles on my right. Gemma intercepted them. She didn’t have any weapons drawn, but it soon became clear that she didn’t need them. She ducked under the swing of a baton, and punched her opponent in the stomach. He doubled back, her fist flying into his face and rocking his head back. While the Junker was stumbling, his friend was rushing Gemma. She wrapped her arm around the dazed Junker, spinning behind his back and turning him into a target. She let go just as the baton slammed into the Junker’s chest. He went rigid and screamed as white bolts of
lighting zapped along his torso. While the other Junker was figuring out what to do next, Gemma was coming around to attack him. She pounced on him with a furious scream, knocking him off balance and into the sand. He landed on his back, her knees slamming hard into his chest. Before the Junker could throw her off, Gemma grabbed his head in both of her hands and dashed it against the ground.
The sudden flash of movement from Sawyer caught my eye. He was running around the wire pile to fight something at our back. I twisted to see three Junkers running for us. These had batons and knives. Sawyer must have seen them, but he didn’t slow down. If anything, he sped up.
The Junker on the left was the first to reach him, pushing out the baton. Sawyer sidestepped to kick him in the knee and make him stumble. I was hardly aware that I was sliding down the pile of wires, scraping my hands and legs as I went. I was trying to get to Sawyer, who was fighting three against one. I was about to scream a warning as the Junker in the center aimed a knife at Sawyer’s back, but the marauder was already moving. He twisted sharply, throwing back an elbow. There was a dull clink as the pommel of Sawyer’s cutlass knocked against the blade, making the center Junker stumble and miss his stab. Sawyer kicked the face of the left Junker to knock him out, then spun again and kicked the head of the center Junker. As all this happened and both men went down, the right Junker lunged at him with a baton and a serrated knife.
