“No, by baby I mean young. ‘Like father, like son’ sometimes has validity. These young men are taking after their disgruntled parents, and it’s leading them on the wrong path away from the court spirit.”
“What’s court spirit?”
“This is Blue Court. A group of communities banded together to create a governing entity whose board decides everything from the court economy down to personal freedoms, and everyone happily agrees—ergo, court spirit.”
Bodhi narrowed his eyes. “Are we going to have resistance from Green Court about looking for Selah? Is that why you’re getting backup?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to tell you. Green Court doesn’t want any Mountain TFs in their territory. They want to conduct the search for Cleon and his family.”
Bodhi lurched in his seat. “They don’t understand the situation—”
“And we can’t tell them. Let me handle it. I’ve got the right team.” Mojica slowed and dropped down to a street-level side lane.
The crowd separated to either side of the market area, allowing Mojica’s AirSkid to set down in front of a multiunit row of residences where MedTec and TF units had gathered. Pulsing blue lights on the official units bathed the area in a strange, almost icy glow. A long, lanky teen lay stretched across the rocrete walkway with his head on the single step to the incursion unit.
Mojica hopped out and looked back. “Do you want to come see how we work?”
Bodhi looked at the splayed-out kid and shook his head. “No, I don’t need to see any more death in the name of peace.”
“Death? What? No, that kid’s not dead. He’s just immobilized for an hour by a pulse cannon. Very effective new weapon. With one shot from out here, everyone in the house is incapacitated for an hour.”
Bodhi waved her off. “I’ll be here when you’re done.”
He watched Mojica stride up the walkway, check the boy’s biometrics, and then angle into the house around a couple of other TFs congregating in the doorway and hall.
Bodhi sat up. This was a perfect opportunity to strike out on his own. He bolted from the vehicle and dashed through a square grouping of trees and a fountain. Clearing the other side, he turned left and back west to Green Court.
He jogged down the long, wide road, staying close to the buildings. His armband vibrated. He stared down at it and stumbled to a halt. His heart thudded. He’d forgotten to take off the gear. Mojica knew where he’d gone. The armband buzzed again.
Bodhi started to unlatch the device but stopped. Probably every bit of gear had a locator, and he wasn’t willing to give it all up, especially the weapon. Besides, if he was out of uniform someone might notice faster than if he just ignored her. When she was ready to give help she could catch up.
He slowed. People had stopped on the street and were staring at him like he was naked or something. He walked down the road and his armband buzzed again, spreading the vibration up to his shoulder. He walked faster, passing slower-moving people. He could hear feet behind him. They were following him.
Bodhi wheeled, ready to fight. Two little boys of about eight or nine tripped over each other getting out of his way. They plopped to the ground with mouths hanging open and hands outstretched as though to ward off blows.
“We’re sorry, sir, please. You’re a TF, aren’t you?” the one on the right said. Bodhi noticed he looked just like the one on the left—twins, just in different shades of blue clothing.
Bodhi kept moving, trying not to notice the vibrations shooting up his arm. He glanced at the quickly thinning crowd, then up at the few still coming down the stairway from the MagLev. He could take the train to Green Court.
The other boy hopped up and ran after Bodhi, grabbing his arm. “Wait, please. You’re from the Mountain. Our brother is being attacked and no one else will help.”
“They all walked by,” the other boy said. “Please.”
The boys pulled him by the arm. Bodhi opened his mouth to protest, but then he heard a child’s wail echo off the underside of the MagLev tube.
Bodhi tensed. His eyes darted across the structures. “Where is he?”
“There!” The boys ran and Bodhi followed. His arm vibrated and he almost answered it to get help. They darted around the building closest to the MagLev. A row of trees blocked a container area in the back. A short, stocky man with a shoulder-length mop of dark hair was dragging a boy, who mirrored the other two, up a set of outdoor stairs. First he had him by the arm. The boy wiggled free, and then the man snatched him by the hair. The boy clung to the railings, kicking all the way.
“Help me!” he screamed, clawing at the hands dragging him up the stairs backward.
Bodhi clenched his fists and charged the stairs. “Let him go!”
“This is none of your business. I didn’t call for Mountain security. You got no jurisdiction,” the man yelled. “He owes me ten hours’ work to pay for my destroyed product.”
The boy’s eyes pleaded. “It’s his fault—the machine doesn’t work right and he won’t fix it. No one will listen to me. I’m only a boy.”
Bodhi pulled the boy free. “You will have to take that up with the proper authorities if you want to make a complaint, but you can’t drag children around by their hair.” The boy scrambled down the stairs, and the sound of his footsteps disappeared around the building.
“Why, you—” The man swung a right.
Bodhi pulled back and dodged the fist. As the man’s shoulder passed in front of him, Bodhi gave him a shove into the building. Maybe he pushed the guy harder than he needed to—his face smashed to the wall with a thud. Bodhi almost apologized, but the guy was a menace, dragging a kid that way.
The guy came away from the wall, leaving a spray of blood on the surface. He touched his nose and looked at the blood on his hand. He clenched his fists without a word and charged.
Bodhi captured the man’s outstretched hand in a scissors hold with his arms, used his leverage to rotate the man, and pushed him onto the hard rocrete surface of the stairs. Strange. It felt natural to make those restraining moves. Where had he learned that?
“Stay there and don’t try that again!” Bodhi said, moving his hand to his sidearm.
The guy held his nose and suddenly became all smiles. “I see you’re a new one here. For your well-being, you’d better go back to this section’s unit command and find out who you’re dealing with. Tell them you met JB, and then take the reassignment.” The man plastered on an evil smirk, pushed off from the stairs, and slowly went up to the next floor.
The man had never questioned Bodhi’s authority, but he had practically dismissed it. What was going on in this section that little children were working any hours, let alone long hours? He shook his head. Not his problem—he’d be gone in less than a day.
The cords in his neck tightened. Time was running out.
His armband buzzed.
Bodhi’s shoulders sagged. He punched the button. “What do you want? There’s nothing you can say that would make me come back. You’re slowing me down.”
“I’m not slowing you down. You seem to have stopped in the same area for quite some time,” Mojica said.
“There was a problem with a shop owner and an employee, I guess.”
“Oh, so a deviation got in the way of your plan and you actually stopped to do something, hmmm?” The lilt in Mojica’s voice indicated she was smiling.
“I don’t have time for sarcasm, Mojica. What do you want?”
“How about if I say Selah.” Mojica’s voice lowered. She must have turned away from her unit to speak to others around her.
Bodhi stared at the armband. “What about Selah?”
“I have her. And Treva.”
He stiffened. “How is that possible? Are they all right?”
“They were in the incursion unit. Apparently they were just netted.”
“What’s netted mean?” He dashed back in the direction of Mojica, but holding his arm up cramped his speed.
“Bas
ically kidnapped. We were very lucky. They might have never turned up if this gang had gotten them sold off during the night.”
“I’m almost there. How are they?” Bodhi didn’t wait for the answer. He dropped his arm and ran full-out.
Bodhi knelt on the hard-pad floor between the two bio-beds in the MedTec unit. The other occupants of the incursion unit and their old lady leader had been shipped off to security. Mojica promised him that Selah and Treva would be fine in a few minutes. By the time he got there, they’d worked through most of the cell displacement from being shot. Since it was such an effective method for taking down a riot, MedTec had great remedies to restore cell organization once security gained control of a situation.
He brushed the hair from Selah’s fluttering eyes and then rubbed the back of her hand. Just that small physical contact ran a bead of warmth through his tightened chest. She looked so peaceful.
A soft sigh escaped her parted lips and her eyelids fluttered again. This whirling fireball about to wake from being riot-grade pulsed was going to hit a new level of anger. Did he really want to be the first person she saw when her eyes opened?
22
Selah’s vision rippled in and out as though being stretched and folded like the ribbon candy Mother made for celebrations. Mother . . . Mother is here. Our hands pressed to the surface—
Her eyes opened a slit. Her vision cleared. Bodhi? Was she actually seeing him, or just wishing it? Selah willed away the gray covering clinging to her brain. Heat radiated from her head down to her toes. Her mind cleared. Bodhi held her hand. She wanted to smile but feared the feeling might evaporate if he knew she was awake.
Bodhi leaned on the side rail of the bio-bed and stroked her cheek. “Selah? Wake up,” he said softly. His voice hitched like he was anxious. It hurt her heart to see him worry for nothing.
She liked the warmth of his fingers on her skin. Her cheeks betrayed her by lifting into a smile, so she opened her eyes. “Bodhi, you’re really here. How can this be?”
He pulled her to his chest and wrapped her in his arms. She felt the tremble in his hug.
“It’s a long story, but Glade is in Stone Braide and I have to get all of you out of here. We’ve only got twenty hours left,” Bodhi said.
Treva’s eyes opened at his words. She rubbed her head and sat up on one elbow, squeezing her eyes shut several times. “What in the name of electrons hit me?”
“A pulse cannon. You walked into a TF capture operation,” Bodhi said.
“I should have listened to my gut. I knew something was wrong with that old lady. My brain feels like a cooked egg trying to congeal. I did catch your twenty hours comment, though. We can get out of here in an hour now that we’ve got your help. But why the time limit?”
“Glade accidently started a countdown. But we don’t know to what.”
Treva’s eyes widened as she scrambled to her feet. “We have to get out of here now! Before the Mountain closes. That’s the hum I felt in my head!”
“What does the hum have to do with this?”
Treva edged around Bodhi and pulled Selah to her feet. “It’s the machinery dispensing the chemicals and sealing the Mountain.”
“Sealing it for what? What does this have to do with Glade?” Selah ran her hands through her hair and lifted the old lady’s blue coat flaps. She stripped off the coat and threw it on the bed.
Treva sighed. “My parents’ Keeper journals said something like, ‘At the appropriate time a transitioned novarium will bring the three parts of the Stone Braide together to activate the key to the Third Protocol.’”
“But that’s good. The Third Protocol is necessary to keep Selah from fracturing,” Bodhi blurted out. His face turned crimson.
Selah turned to him. “What do you mean to keep me from fracturing? And why do you know it and I don’t?”
Bodhi’s mouth opened and closed. “Glade entrusted me—”
Her eyes narrowed and she glared at him. “Oh, so now you and Glade are cohorts? It’s bad enough my stepfather is a master manipulator, but then I get my brains scrambled by magnetic pulses and now find out my father and my boyfriend are plotting out my life—”
“Look, I hate to change such an interesting subject, but Bodhi said we have twenty hours. We can make that easy. Let’s get out of here now.” Treva motioned toward the doorway. “Thank goodness I directed Cleon and your family out of here.”
Bodhi pressed his lips tight. “Cleon, Pasha, and Dane were caught by Varro and a couple of his men.”
“Where are they?” Selah felt the blood drain from her face. She moved to grab his arm. “How could you possibly know this—”
“The same way he knew about you—through me,” Mojica said. She filled the open doorway of the MedTec unit.
Selah held out her hand. “Mojica, I’ve been trying to find you.” They clasped each other’s wrists and smiled.
“How do we track down where he took them?” Selah looked between Bodhi and Mojica.
“You’re not going near any fighting. Glade pledged me to protect you,” Bodhi said, his stance defiant.
Selah gritted her teeth. “You don’t get to tell me what to do about my own family.” Then, facing Mojica, “And who in the names of all my horses hit me with a pulse? I thought we learned in Study Square that those things are only used when there are clear unimpeded targets.”
Mojica appeared a shade flushed. “Since Noah Everling is no longer de facto head of the Company running the Mountain, the Politico Board took over. A lot of things are different now.”
Treva moved toward the doorway. “Where were Cleon and the others last?” she asked, her face ashen.
“You can’t get there. It’s in Green Court,” Mojica said. She moved away from the doorway for the exiting women.
“We’ve got the Keeper system. We get in there and we can get a lot closer without being seen.” Treva hopped down to the street.
Bodhi put his arm in front of Selah to keep her from following. “You didn’t say what happens when the machine seals the Mountain.”
Treva looked at Mojica and then back at Bodhi. “We need to be far away before that happens.”
Bodhi took Selah’s hand. She didn’t pull away. He faced Treva. “Tell us what happens.”
“The Mountain is going to be sealed from the outside, forever,” Mojica said.
Selah tightened her grip on Bodhi. “How is it going to happen?”
“This community is a bio-dome built inside the Mountain, which is going to collapse, sealing off the paths in and out with enough stone that it will take a thousand years to clear it,” Mojica said.
“The ancient government of this land made preparations to have an event such as we’re about to experience happen at a given period of time—after a series of events such as the Sorrows,” Treva said.
Bodhi locked eyes with Treva. “How . . . where did you get all this?”
“Oh, please! Have you ever met a child who didn’t snoop in their parents’ things? Mine had secret rooms, passages, and a collection of ancient documents. I read everything.” Treva grinned.
“So the Sorrows were engineered?” Selah asked.
“There are a lot of facts that have never been uncovered,” Treva said.
Selah felt a lightning spike cut through her head. She closed her eyes and then opened them to quickly vanishing sparkles of light.
“Are you all right?” Bodhi gripped her arm.
Selah recovered and nodded. “Yes, I was thinking. What’s the event that’s going to happen?”
Mojica pressed her lips together. “The Mountain has started the process of mixing millions of tons of stored chemicals that will seed the clouds over this range and bring rain.”
“And that rain will wash away enough of the ancient ash from the super volcano explosion in Yellowstone to open the paths to the West,” Treva said.
“How much rain?” Bodhi pulled his eyebrows together.
“A deluge. Like the worst of floods. We
need to be away from here,” Treva said.
Mojica looked up at Bodhi in the doorway. “I’ve only got one problem. I’ve got my TFs rounding up those we need to get out of here before the Mountain seals, and I can’t afford security to safeguard Selah’s travel back to the tunnels. She has to come with us.”
Selah grinned. Now she wouldn’t have to fight Bodhi to find her family. “Are you sure Varro had a weapon on Cleon?”
“Yes, I have the video stream log here.” Mojica pulled up the frames on her ComTex. She scrolled through the collected file. Bodhi and Selah hopped down out of the MedTec unit.
“Wait!” Selah grabbed her wrist. “Go back a couple of frames.”
Mojica fingered the frames a single move at a time.
“Stop!” Selah and Treva gasped at the same time. “Mari!”
Selah stared at a picture of Jaenen and Mari coming into the Mountain.
“Jaenen Malik rode with us all the way here, he’s being paid by my father, and then he does this?” Selah winced at the pain of his betrayal.
Bodhi’s eyes widened. “Wait! Jaenen came down here with you? Who’s the woman?”
Selah’s glance darted away and back again. “Mari Kief, the regent of WoodHaven. We stayed with her last night.”
Bodhi’s face seemed to pale as he averted his glance. Selah stared at him. “Is something wrong?”
He snapped back, “I was just thinking we now have someone else to save and nineteen and a half hours to get out of here without being killed or maimed.”
Mojica finished manipulating the screens on her ComTex. “I don’t know if it’s good news or bad news, but I just checked Jaenen’s log-in. He was entrance-validated by none other than Varro Chavez.”
“So they’re going to be congregating in the same place,” Selah said.
“I have to find a way to get you and Treva to the staging site in Green Court. I can’t transport civilians in Green without drawing suspicion, and we’re going into a high-risk situation with their security to begin with.”
Selah took a deep breath as sweat beads dotted her forehead. The tunnels. She had to get over it. They needed the speed. “We can get there faster than you can by using the Keepers’ tunnels.”
Lightning Page 20
