by F P Adriani
I finally reached them and then I, too, went at Ronin with my good hand and arm, punching him in the stomach. He went down hard then—fast, onto his back. “You killed my fucking parents, you piece of shit—I want to hear you say it!” I screamed, brutally shaking him now.
He stared up at me, his eyes frowning as if he were both trying to remember but found he couldn’t.
“The Royal South Mine. You set off the bombs. Let me hear you say it!”
He gave me a little shrug. “All right, I killed them. I was paid to do it.”
I raised my fist to crash it into his face, but, before I could, I was yanked from behind, right off my damn feet.
I kicked and screamed and yelled, “Let me kill him!” But when I heard Jeremy’s voice near my head say, “Calm down, Pia!” I did, a bit.
Her face a tight mask of pain, Arlene hobbled toward us and finally bent over Ronin. “Pia, he’s worth too much alive. He’s one of my bargaining chips.”
“He’s mine,” I said.
“We had a deal, Pia,” Hu said now, turning her head my way. “We’d both walk away satisfied.”
“But they’ll let him go like the last time!” I glared at her, feeling my chance slipping away yet again: I’d always known I’d never get the people who loaded the gun at my parents, but at least I could get the person who pulled the trigger.
Hu’s head shook quickly now. “No, Pia. I don’t know what they’ll do exactly, but this time’s different. A confession will be backed up somewhere, I assure you.”
“What confession?” Ronin asked, raising his head.
“Yours,” Hu said, and her right fist reached down and punched where mine would have moments before.
*
Thankfully, my pack containing my case had survived the corridor run. So had Arlene’s pack.
Inside hers, she now located a large medical kit and quickly injected Ronin with a sedative as she said to me: “I always keep some on me. You never know when it will come in handy.”
I grunted at her as I removed some tape from my pack to tie up Ronin’s limbs, and then Tan called over to us that Chuck had started waking up more, only he was still too groggy.
“I’ve got something for that,” Hu said, her voice uncharacteristically catching a bit. When I glanced at her, her lips were loose and shaking. I felt something then: a sharp moment of sympathy…and admiration. If what had happened to Chuck had happened to Tan instead, I wouldn’t be as well-composed as Hu was.
She slowly limped toward Chuck now, and as I watched her move, I began wondering how the hell John and Ronin had gotten here so fast. We hadn’t run into them along the way up the mountain….
That transport.
I shot up. “We’re not out of this yet. We forgot to ask how they got here. Maybe we shouldn’t have knocked out the piece of shit.” I sneered down at him. “But they didn’t have packs, so where did they come from? And are there others who know about this spot?”
Everyone else just sort of turned and stared at me, including Tan.
Chuck began speaking then, his voice no longer its usual baritone. He sounded out of breath even though he hadn’t moved in a while. “They couldn’t have come from too far….”
“Then we’ll have to find that place,” I said. “And we can’t go far. We’re a wreck here—all of us.”
I looked at everyone now. At some point during the corridor run, Cal had broken two fingers, and Jeremy was sporting a marked limp.
Tan and I were probably in the best shape, but even we weren’t in great shape. Tan’s clothes were torn, one of his forearms was badly bruised. And he had lost his pack; there had been nothing that important inside there, but still….
“So how will we get back, especially when we’ve got to secure Ronin the whole way?” I asked now because no one had said anything in response to my previous statement.
“Well,” Hu replied, “I don’t know. And unfortunately I dropped my communicator somewhere in the cave—”
“Great,” said Jeremy, sighing toward the corridor’s entrance, which had fully collapsed closed.
“Even if you had it,” I said to Hu, “you’d want the transport here? Look what’s happened—who knows what that thing’s vibrations might do? Where would it fit around here anyway….”
I suddenly remembered we were on a semi-plateau. Then I remembered that transport yet again. Maybe John had found a nearby bare spot that was big enough for making a landing.
My eyes were on Jeremy now, on his blond hair, on his height. Then my eyes fell on Ronin.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ve got an idea.”
*
Tan and Jeremy and I moved along the ridge. When we finally spotted the black transport farther down behind another patch of forest, we began sliding through the vegetation, slowly, remaining close to the ground; we only had the one gun Tan had grabbed inside the cave. All the others had been lost, including my Granger, and including, apparently, whatever Ronin must have had on him when the corridor’s entrance area had started collapsing. Already it seemed like the corridor had destroyed so much….
“I hope this is one of your better ideas,” Tan said as he crawled beside me.
“Of course it is,” I replied in an irritated tone. Then I nodded at Jeremy, who now wore Ronin’s clothes and the dusty dirt I’d thrown over him; between that, his limp, and the blood on his pants, he looked quite beaten up.
He rose and moved toward the transport. Someone came outside and began pacing in a worried fashion; he had a gun stuck into his belt.
Keeping his head hung low, Jeremy half-stumbled out of the forest.
And then the pacer shouted, “It’s about time! I’ve been waiting for ages. Ronin—what the hell happened to you? Did you feel that earthquake? Where the hell is….”
The guy’s voice died as Jeremy whipped out the gun and pointed it at the guy’s face. “Anyone else on the transport?”
The pacer’s back stiffened; his mouth clamped shut.
So then Jeremy added, “Do you enjoy living? If you want to go on living, you’ll answer my question.”
“No, no one else,” the guy said on a sigh.
Jeremy slid around to the guy’s side and yanked the gun from his belt.
“Surprise—surprise!” I yelled as Tan and I walked out of the forest. “Your friends are either dead or tied up.”
Jeremy gave me the second gun, and now Tan moved behind the guy to tape his hands together. Then Jeremy watched over the guy while Tan and I scoped out the transport.
It was one of the smaller kinds, designed just for moving, not for sleeping. And Tan and I soon found nobody at home inside.
Outside again, I told Jeremy to lock the guy in one of the rooms.
Tan and I moved back toward where the others were. He grinned at me in his big beautiful way then. “See? I told you we’re good together in both good times and bad times.”
I grinned back at him.
*
It turned out Cal was a pilot—not the best pilot, but not the worst either, especially considering his broken fingers.
He flew us back to the plateau by the smaller Astrals, where the other transport was waiting for us. Jeremy carried a still-knocked-out Ronin over to it while Cal walked the other guy there.
Soon after, Hu and Chuck, and Tan and I were moving in the same direction. Tan still had to help Chuck walk a bit, so they moved more slowly and finally fell behind me and Hu.
And that was when she said to me, “I want to thank you for coming back to get me and Chuck.”
I wasn’t sure what words to respond with, so I simply nodded at her.
“Come onto the transport and get the rest of your things. Then Cal will take you both to the nearest city here. This is goodbye from me.”
I frowned and stopped moving. “What do you mean ‘goodbye’? We haven’t solved everything—”
“Did you expect we would?”
Tan reached us at that moment, and he looked as c
onfused as I felt. “What about the cave?” he asked. “We just left it there—vulnerable!” That seemed a strange choice of words given how powerful the cave’s insides were, but I still knew what he meant.
Now Hu shook her head fast at him. “As soon as I get on the transport, I’ll send a message to Frank Burroughs over the grapevine. Someone will be here very soon. Someone I can trust.”
“Is there someone like that on Diamond?” I asked, my voice ironic.
Hu’s tired eyes fell on me. “Do you trust me at least somewhat now?”
“I suppose so,” I said, my voice suddenly sounding as tired as her eyes looked. “But what about Ronin? I feel like he got away from me yet again. He’s just getting away, dammit.”
“But he isn’t. I’ve got him,” she said, her voice suddenly taking on that old icy quality of hers. Then her voice just as quickly warmed a bit. “And you should also know by now that I won’t let anything bad happen to Diamond if I can help that. If nothing else, my intentions there have always been good. Of course, sometimes, that’s just not enough. But I’ve been saying all along that this is bigger than us, so more people than us need to handle it. You’ll be hearing about it soon, I’m sure. Thankfully, the camera’s still intact and I hope all my videotaping survived. But then we’re all witnesses anyway, aren’t we?”
Both Tan and I nodded as Chuck finally came closer, on his own.
Hu had tied a bandage around his bloody head; from beneath it, he eyed Tan warily, but I saw unwanted respect mixed in with the wariness. “I’m surprised you helped me,” he said now. “I wouldn’t have if I were you because I didn’t give you much reason to.”
“I do what I can to help people,” Tan said.
“Tan always walks the straight and narrow,” I noted, with admiration.
But he shook his head now. “Not lately—suddenly I’ve been moving in some really wavy lines. I don’t know how you crowd do this all the time. I’ll be dizzy for months.”
I laughed, and, amazingly, so did Chuck and Hu.
Tan was smiling a little now, and he shyly lowered his head to stare down at the ground. I soooo wanted to kiss him, but that would have to wait….
Hu was looking at me again. Then she said in a quieter voice, “Pia, I know we can never be friends, but I hope that from now on, we at least won’t be enemies.”
She held out a hand. And I took it.
*
“I feel so confused and yet so knowledgeable at the same time,” Tan said to me a few days later.
We were back trying to put the pieces of our “normal” life together as best as we could while we had no idea what the hell might have been happening as a result of our cave trek.
All that time I’d spent dreading hearing from Hu again, complaining about her phone calls to me—now I spent my days wishing she would contact me again. When I didn’t want her to call, she did; when I wanted her to call, she didn’t. Would my life ever not be screwed-up crazy?
I had never followed the news a lot, especially with respect to the government. But I watched and read the news every day now, hoping to hear something from someone—anyone—about the cave discovery. Yet no news came.
I did, however, learn of one interesting tidbit: a report of an unusual spontaneous earthquake in The Astral Mountains, the second of its kind….
But no matter all the recent problems and disasters, I was still incredibly happy to get back here and find all my friends in perfectly fine shape. Whatever Hu had done in protecting them had worked.
And soon I’d probably be able to get my business back up to snuff again, which I knew would please Nell and Roberto and Mike. Unfortunately, every time I saw them now, they all had so many questions for me about the time I’d been away, and I possessed only very few answers.
I had questions too, and they crossed my mind repeatedly: was I still under threat? Or would there be a spotlight on Hera now, and would the Thorntons then back off? And what was happening to Ronin, what would happen to him….
The next week, Julianne was finally released from the hospital, and she and Lori would now be staying at Lori’s brother’s house.
I showed up on Julianne’s first day there, and I finally got a chance to have a private extensive conversation with her, which was when she told me that she and Lori wouldn’t be living in the house ever again.
“I can’t stop thinking of Libby or my mom…. And it’s too big for two people anyway,” Julianne said to me as she lay in bed. She was still confined to doing that quite a bit until she’d healed more. But she had color in her face again, and seeing that pleased me greatly. At first, I couldn’t stop smiling at her.
“I’m thinking of turning the house into a science museum,” she said now. “And some of the money I make I’ll donate to Libby’s family. I think my mom would have liked that. What do you think?”
“Yes, I think she would have too.”
She sat up a bit, and her voice turned wary now. “Did you…did you ever find out who killed her?”
My smile finally faded. “Not directly, no, not the exact person….”
“But the same people who killed Libby and hurt me?”
“Yes,” I said, with confidence this time.
“Will they try to hurt me again?”
“No,” I said, even though I wasn’t entirely sure there and probably never would be….
“Then you went to the map locations,” she said flatly now.
I didn’t answer her directly. “Julianne, did you know about what your mom found in the ground?”
She was staring into her lap. She finally nodded, only once, and so gently that I almost missed the nod.
“But how? Did she tell you then? I mean, the notebooks just didn’t explain that much.”
“The disks,” she said now, “the disks explained more.”
My eyes widened at her bent head. “What disks?”
“My mom voice-recorded most of her research details. But I destroyed the recordings right after she died.” She finally looked up at me, a pleading in her eyes. “What else could I do? They were bad. I didn’t think they should exist. So many details—dangerous ones! My mom said how someone was killed in one of the locations. That the force holding the planet together—maybe it wouldn’t do that anymore if people kept interfering. Maybe all the plants, the Sanders—everything would be ruined! I didn’t want anyone to find out what was in the locations—remember? I didn’t even want to tell you.”
“I remember,” I said. “But then why did you want me to go there? I mean, you knew it would be dangerous….”
“Not to get hurt—no! Is that what you think? No, honestly, I was worried you’d get hurt. But someone has to watch there. I can’t—I’m just a kid!” There was a long pause. Then, “So what did you do—have you protected the places?”
I shifted on my chair, feeling uneasy now: I had failed her on two fronts.
Ultimately, I’d been unable to do anything about protecting the locations. And since I’d been there, others had probably learned of the sphere. So now what would happen there?
Also, when John had last spoken, I’d never had a chance to establish who in specific had killed Amy Castano. I wasn’t sure if it was John or Ronin or someone else, though I knew they were all either beside or behind it, probably including the Thorntons, at least indirectly when they’d engaged John’s help.
In the cave I had been too worried about my own skin and Tan’s skin—and, yes, Hu’s and her friends’ skins too—for me to question other issues. And now I’d probably never be able to solve them.
I sighed now, suddenly realizing that neither Julianne nor I had achieved any satisfaction over our parents’ killers. I really had a lot in common with the girl.
…I also finally realized that I couldn’t ask her for the rest of the money; I hadn’t earned it, though I really could use it, considering all the money I’d spent because of the whole fiasco.
At the same time, the power of that huge diamond, the k
nowledge of the greater forces both within Diamond and within the Universe—all this made money problems seem quite insignificant now….
“I’m not sure yet what will happen, Julianne. But it seems the places can protect themselves. Right now, you should worry about yourself, about getting better.”
“I will get better—I will,” she said in her eager young voice. “And I hope Diamond will too.”
*
Later that night Tan and I were watching TV in his black living room when he repeated his statement about feeling confused.
“Did we actually achieve anything?” he asked this time. “I feel like we know more, but, physically, we’re in as precarious a state as ever.”
I looked at him: compared to when we’d been on the trek, his face held more color now, and neither his hair nor mine was rat’s-nest looking anymore. But he was still too pale, and so was I. This past week we’d both had trouble sleeping, as I had predicted about never sleeping well again….
“The thing is,” Tan continued, “well, did the damn thing get destroyed somehow? What the hell was all that light at the end?”
“I don’t know…” I said. “I can’t figure out if the ground shaking was a defense mechanism to prevent the diamond being tampered with even more, or if the tampering’s done damage we don’t know about yet. And then even further tampering would crack all of Diamond, like Amy claimed. I have to think she was right. She knew more about all this than we do.
“But, if the diamond sphere got destroyed that day, I’m pretty sure we would have been destroyed too. I think it’s still there, doing its thing.”
“You’re probably right…but none of that makes me feel any better.”
Something suddenly changed on the TV screen—something interesting had finally shown up. Or at least someone interesting: Burroughs.
“Raise the volume!” I shouted to Tan. So he did.
Now we both listened, our eyes glued to the screen….
“…the Detective received a tip about last year’s Diamond Sand Festival bomber. And he’s revealed to Channel Eight exclusively that the tip came from Arlene ‘Princess’ Hu, who’d apprehended the bomber and has been using him as a bargaining chip for when she’ll finally be giving herself up to custody next week. Negotiations are still ongoing about her jail-term….”
