by Natalie Grey
He could not put his finger on what Ellian’s plan was. He would not have been able to name a mechanism. He could not see the jaws of the trap swinging shut. All he could see was chaos—not the carefully-orchestrated chaos of a Dragon op, but the true chaos that could take good soldiers as well as bad, civilians as well as combatants. When she didn’t move, he shook with anger—anger that wasn’t hers to fix, but that he could barely suppress.
“We need to call it off.” The words were clipped.
“We can’t.” Her face was white. “The satellite uplink is off until morning, the Warlord’s scanning this area. He knows we’ve been planning at night, we can’t—”
“How far are they?”
“Fifteen kilometers.” She shook her head at him. “The roads are watched.”
“Then give me another way,” he snapped. “If not satellites, then comm links, radios, smoke signals if we need. Give me something.”
Bless her, she really thought about it instead of shutting down, as many might.
“There’s a radio tower at the edge of the district,” she said slowly. “If we can get there, we can use it.”
“Let’s go.”
“It’s … not that simple.”
“It never is,” Cade said savagely. His coveralls had been pushed down over his arms while he slept so his wounds could be treated, and he shrugged the cloth up over his shoulders, wincing at the movement. “Let’s go.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Is this your only gun?” Cade pointed at the rifle she carried slung over her shoulder.
“Yes.”
“And you know how to get in contact with them once you reach the radio tower?”
“Yes.”
“Give me the gun.” Cade plucked it from her hands and swung it around to the side wall, tilting his head to peer through the sights. “It’s calibrated?”
“Yes. It’s one of the new ones.”
“All right.” Cade dropped it down and nodded to her. “Stick to the shadows, and make for the tower. I’ll be nearby. If you hear gunfire and no command, start running. Don’t look back. Don’t try to save me. Do you have that?”
She nodded tightly.
“Then let’s go.”
The tunnel to the surface was twisty, tiny, built for someone much smaller than the average Dragon. Cade hauled himself upwards, muffling grunts of pain as well as he could, waiting under the surface as Samara poked her head out to look around. With a hiss, she urged him up after her, and pulled him into the shadows. In the distance, a green light blinked on and off from a tower near the wall.
“Got it.” Cade nodded down at her, then pushed her into the deeper shadow of an alcove as a patrol materialized ahead. “Wait here.”
He padded quietly forward, hugging the wall. He was close before they saw him—much too close—and they were slow after years of a weak rebellion. Their weapons weren’t drawn, and they groped for the guns sluggishly, terror slowing their reactions as he launched himself out of the darkness.
It was done quickly, quietly, one of them slammed against the wall, trachea crushed, the other stabbed with his own knife. Cade turned to the last one, knowing he had to keep his momentum, feeling the familiar creep of guilt. These guards were young, too young to die on some backwater planet…
But the third one was already down, Samara wrenching a knife out of his neck. She looked up at Cade impassively as she wiped the knife on her pants and stood.
“You were supposed to stay put.”
“I’m not helpless,” she said simply. “Either one of us could die here. There’ll be more patrols. If you get to the tower first—the frequency is 2182 kilohertz.”
“Thank you.” Cade nodded to her to help him drag the bodies into the shadows.
They were lifting the third body when they saw it: the sparkle of a life monitor from under his shirt, flashing red as it registered the man’s missing vital signs. The comms in their ears were buzzing with activity, and the next moment, the wail of a siren went up behind them.
“Run,” Cade whispered harshly. He grabbed Samara’s hand and they burst into motion, sprinting down the broad avenue as the floodlights along the street came on.
23
Talon leaned out of the way for Aryn to peer between the rocks with the tiny set of military binoculars. She gripped the rocks for balance, dizzy as the scope of the eyepieces zoomed and focused.
“What do you see?” Nyx’s voice was low. She crouched behind Aryn, presumably to tackle her and keep her from running away.
The two Dragons had been watching Aryn like a hawk for hours. When she woke up in the bunker, it was to find Talon and Nyx nearby, conveniently placed between her and the door. If she was Cade, Aryn reflected wryly, she might have been able to get away from them—but she had neither the speed nor the combat skills to get past one Dragon, much less two. They’d been emphatic about tying her up before they left to scout, until she pointed out that she knew the contents of each nondescript building better than they did. Even now, they seemed half-sure she was about to go running down the mountain to find Cade.
They didn’t need to worry. Aryn had long since given up on that endeavor, beginning with the part where Talon refused to tell her just which district Cade was in. Aryn had a new plan now: find Samara, and ask her help in locating Cade. She’d left a message in the bunker in case Samara came back while they were gone; for now, she would have to wait.
“The building with the four raised corners is just documents,” Aryn told them.
“It’s huge,” Talon protested.
“There are a lot of documents.” Aryn laughed, a bit bitterly. Documents were part of the lifeblood of Ymir. Everyone needed papers to go anywhere or do anything, and checkpoints along the streets ensured that workers went only where they should. It occupied a lot of time, leaving even less for people to join the resistance—the penalties for missing or incorrect paperwork were high.
“Okay, what’s the one to the right of it?” Talon was marking things on a roughly sketched map.
“That’s one of the armories. It…wait a second.” Aryn tilted her head to the side and wiggled forward.
“What?”
“There’s something….” She was getting close to the edge and wiggled one of her legs. “Hold me up.” Someone’s hands grasped at her feet and she crawled forward until her torso hung out in the open.
Beyond the borders of Io, where the walls made an easy line to show who was where they shouldn’t be, there was a strange sense of movement to the darkness. It was something Aryn could not quite seem to see, no matter how sure she was that something was there. She frowned and dialed in the scope, trying to focus, clear her head. Why couldn’t she make sense of it?
“What is it?” Talon asked softly.
“It’s like the … darkness is alive.” Aryn wiggled her way back and stripped off the binoculars, holding them out and rubbing at her eyes. “It’s like when something’s filled with maggots and they’re all writhing around, only I can’t actually see anything when I look.”
“Hold my feet.” Nyx plucked the binoculars out of Aryn’s grip and eased herself down off the ledge. She held herself straight as she dialed the scope, and then began to scan, looking past Io to Persi, and over on the other side, toward Hanin. She nodded decisively as she moved back in. “ShadowBlack,” she said to Talon. “There’s infantry arrayed along this side of the habitable zone, at least.”
“Infantry?” Talon looked over at her, eyes narrowing.
“What?” Aryn asked.
“We thought the Warlord was going to be using chemical attacks,” Nyx explained. She leaned over the map, frowning as she marked the locations. “Infantry movements, though….”
“Are ideal for us,” Talon said bluntly.
“They are?” Aryn craned to see the numbers Nyx was writing down. “There are thousands of them.”
“That’s thousands less near the palace. The Warlord’s troops that are already h
ere are a contract army. If we can take him out, we can pay them to leave. They have no loyalty to him. If we can strike before they start moving, we’ll end this before it even starts.”
Aryn’s breath caught. He couldn’t be serious. It couldn’t end so easily, not after all this time. But Talon was giving a sharp, feral grin.
“He’s really going senile, then.”
“Has to be,” Nyx agreed.
“How do you know that?” Aryn looked between them. “There are so many of them…”
“Infantry aren’t as good as they used to be,” Nyx explained. “Gigantic troop movements, lining up thousands on one side and another few thousand on the other and running them into each other? It worked when everyone was still riding horses, but it’s not all that effective now. Technology makes it easy to take out an array that big, and while we could, they’ll be hamstrung as soon as they move into each of the districts. He means to go door to door, breaking in and taking all of the resistance leaders out.”
“And he’ll be able to,” Aryn hissed back. “Don’t you see? There’s going to be so many of them in the streets that the resistance won’t be able to run.”
“Because he still views the resistance movement as infantry, too,” Talon reminded her. “But most of the resistance is already holed up in the bunkers. If they can get outside the walls, they’ll be able to get to the palace easily—and from the number of people here, it’s clear enough that the palace is almost deserted. The Warlord will have no backup.”
“Why would he do something like that?” Aryn shook her head.
“First, because he’s panicking. Ellian denied him something, and the chatter suggests that he knows the rebels have guns. He’s putting on the pressure, but Ellian’s not budging.”
“Which still doesn’t make sense,” Aryn interrupted. She looked over at Talon, shaking her head. “You’re sure Ellian got the message about me being safe?” She’d seen the messages they intercepted, with Ellian continuing to demand Aryn’s safe return.
“I’m sure.” Talon shook his head. “Maybe he hasn’t responded because he’s worried about the networks being compromised. Maybe he thinks the Warlord won’t admit to losing you, and is now trying to use that for counter-leverage. Whatever the case, he’s not handing anything over. He hasn’t even left his rooms.”
“I don’t like that,” Nyx murmured. “He should have gotten out.”
“Whatever he has, he knows it’s something the Warlord can only get through him,” Talon said, with a shrug. “But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we move tonight. Those troops are primed to go as soon as the Warlord feels threatened enough. If we can keep the districts quiet, he might hold long enough for us to take him out without anyone else getting hurt.” He pulled the map toward him and began marking. “I’ll send three detachments through the gate here, at the south-southwest point. Nyx, you’ll take out the guard tower first. We’ve got a hook into the alarm systems, so we can deactivate anything that goes off.”
“Got it.”
“Loki will go here, and take out that guard tower—”
He broke off as a wail of sirens went up in Hanin. Floodlights and spotlights came on, lighting up the distant city center like a beacon, and the bottom dropped out of Aryn’s stomach.
“Oh, my God.”
“What is it?”
“They’re starting an operation,” Aryn whispered. “Those sirens…they’re for soldiers. They’re what go off when they think they have resistance fighters in the area.”
“That’s odd.” Nyx grabbed the binoculars and began to scan. “None of the troops are moving. If anything, they’ve hunkered down.”
“Now, what the hell is that about?” Talon narrowed his eyes, leaning to peer out at the flashing lights as if he might discern something there.
“Turn it off,” Aryn said urgently.
“What?” They looked over at her.
“You said you were hooked into the alarm system. Turn those off.”
“Once we do that, they might know we can.”
“Then get on the radio and tell them it was a mistake!” Aryn threw up her hands. “Don’t you see? You said keep the districts quiet. Well, this isn’t quiet. What if they’ve found the bunker in Hanin? You want to know how they operate? The soldiers come out before they know anything. They’ll be going for one of the control towers to hear what their mission is. If you turn it off before they get there, they’ll just go back to their barracks.”
Nyx and Talon looked at one another.
“It’s a lot to risk without knowing what’s going on,” Talon said quietly. “We need to have that hook-in for when we move at nightfall.”
“Do it,” Aryn hissed. “Jesus, these people are your allies. And maybe Cade can take care of himself, but they aren’t all like him! Turn the alarms off.”
He looked at her for a moment, and unhooked piece of equipment from his belt. A few touches, a dial, and a quickly-entered code, and the alarms died an instant later. Nyx held a finger up to her lips and held the comm up.
“Command Center Hanin, this is Kell HQ, what was the disturbance?” A voice crackled down the line, and Nyx watched Talon as he pressed a few more buttons, then gave her a thumbs up. She took a deep breath before clicking the button to talk.
“This is maintenance. Raccoons got the transformer.” She filled her voice with disgust, and raised an eyebrow until laughter echoed back at her. “Sorry, boys. Everyone back to bed.”
“How did you do that?” Aryn whispered, when Nyx handed the comm back.
“It’s not foolproof. The people in the command center will go out to check the transformer soon enough. But it might buy whoever those people are a bit of time. Also, I’m pretty sure that was a Dragon on the other end.”
“Sounded like Suka,” Talon agreed.
“So why didn’t you—”
“We didn’t know who else was listening. And we should get back. We’ve got the plan. I’ll assign coordinates as I go. Loki can take them before dawn.”
The radio crackled, and all of them looked at the handset on Talon’s belt.
“Rift?”
“Cade,” Aryn breathed.
“Williams.” Talon’s voice was wary.
“Thanks for turning off the alarms.” There was a laugh behind the hard breathing. “Haven’t sprinted like that since Shenzin.”
Nyx stifled a laugh against her hand and Talon relaxed.
“Vineyard ops are the best ops. Sorry we couldn’t arrange another wine river.” He was grinning. “So why are you setting off alarms?”
“Had to reach you before you started planning the op,” Cade said shortly. “Is anyone in position yet?”
“Not yet. The palace is deserted. He has his troops outside the districts.”
“Mm. Probably not his.” There was a very long pause. “I have to go. Don’t move anyone. Pallas has a horse in this race you haven’t accounted for yet. I don’t know what his game is, but it’s an even bet those troops are his, not the Warlord’s.”
Talon sucked in his breath.
“Williams—”
“Is Io still safe?” Samara’s voice took over.
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll meet you there.” The line cut and Aryn looked over at the shadowy bulk of Hanin as if she might see, even from kilometers distant, two figures making their way over the high walls.
He was alive. Cade was really, truly alive—and with Samara. Aryn felt her shoulders slump in relief.
“Come on. We have to get back. We’ve got a few kilometers to cover before dawn.” Talon started down the mountain, drawing his weapon, and Nyx took up the rear.
“You never rest, do you?” Aryn asked quietly.
“Should we?” Nyx sounded amused.
“No. I guess…I guess not. You’re just not like people I’ve met before.” Aryn hopped over a boulder, taking Talon’s proffered hand to steady herself as she landed. “You pick a direction and you go. No regre
ts. No looking back. Are all soldiers like that?”
“You were in the resistance.” Talon smiled down at her.
“The resistance isn’t really soldiers,” Aryn countered.
“True enough.” Talon considered. “I guess you could say most Dragons are like that. Cade wasn’t, of course.”
“What do you mean, of course?” She frowned over at him.
“Well, after getting out like that. He was never a man who could kill without thinking twice. It’s why he made the vow.”
Nyx’s warning tut came a second too late. Aryn stopped, looking between the two of them.
“What vow?”
Talon stopped as well, his face suddenly grave.
“I thought you knew. It’s…not my place to say.”
“Talon. If he told all of you—”
Talon and Nyx looked at one another, and after a moment, Nyx shrugged.
“It’s, ah … nothing big.” Talon managed a smile that looked more like a grimace, and sighed when he saw Aryn’s face. “He got out of the game. You must have guessed that much. He said he couldn’t take another life.” Appreciation sounded in his voice. “And he’s the only one to say that, that I know, who kept his word.” His half-smile faded as he looked at Aryn. “What? What’s wrong?”
She didn’t want to say it. Guilt was worming, cold, in her chest.
“He broke his vow,” Aryn said, her voice very small. “Because of me.”
24
They got back to the bunkers as the sky first lightened in the north, a pale glow that hastened their footsteps and began the low thrum of awareness in Cade’s veins. They raced the fleeing pools of shadow along the streets, and only just made it to the entrance of the tunnel as the district stirred to life behind them. An alarm signaled the shift change with a mechanical blare, and Samara cast one look over her shoulder, her face mask-like. Everything here spoke of the Warlord, from the soldiers that were beginning to swarm the streets, to the bowed heads of the workers on their way to the mines.
