Wonder Woman: Warbringer

by Leigh Bardugo

  The loop closed over Alia and the soldier, snapping tight as Diana yanked back hard. The soldier’s head connected with the lip of the door as he was pulled back into the plane. He and Alia toppled inside, but his body was limp. Nim and Theo fell on them, drawing Alia close as she clawed at the lasso, trying to get away from the soldier.

  Diana gave a shake of the knot, and it slithered loose. She leaned against the wall of the jet, panting. She could feel her body healing—a cool, crawling sensation that rippled over her flesh. The wound at her side had closed, but she was still reeling from the pain, from the wet feel of her own blood on her fingers. At least the bullets had gone clean through.

  At that moment, the wail of the alarm picked up speed.

  “Incoming,” Ben’s surprisingly calm voice noted over the speaker. The plane banked hard left. They tumbled against the seats.

  A sound like a thunder crack split the air, and the jet quaked with a cacophonous boom. A strange quiet descended as the alarm and the engines went silent. For a moment, they were in free fall. Then one of the jet’s engines roared to life, and Ben pulled them out of the dive.

  “Kids, it is time to exit the aircraft in an orderly fashion,” he said over the radio. “I will not be setting this bird down.”

  Diana dragged herself to her knees, pulling Alia up with her. “Go.”

  “You don’t have a parachute—” Alia began.

  Ben appeared in the cockpit doorway, a pack strapped to his shoulders. “We can go together,” said Ben. “I’ll take her.”

  Another clang sounded above them. Footsteps racing toward the door. Who were these men? How were they doing this? All Diana knew was they were determined to see Alia dead.

  “We only have one chance,” said Diana. “I’ll block them; you all get out. No arguments. Ben, get behind me with the others.”

  Ben cocked a pistol. “With all due respect, ma’am, a SEAL doesn’t hide behind a lady’s skirts.”

  A flood of soldiers dressed in black poured through the door.

  “Now!” Diana shouted. She and Ben rushed the soldiers. She heard gunfire, felt the sear of a bullet grazing her thigh, and then she was grappling with one man, two.

  These soldiers were strong, better equipped and better trained than those she had faced at the museum. Maybe Alia’s foes had realized what they were up against.

  The pain in Diana’s side was slowing her movements, but all that mattered was getting Alia and the others clear. She allowed herself a swift glance at the door and saw Nim leap with a shriek and vanish from view. Theo must already be gone. Alia met Diana’s eyes, touched her fist to her heart. Sister in battle. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and jumped.

  Diana grunted and seized a wide wrist, felt bones splinter, kicked hard. The soldier screamed and collapsed, but another soldier was already at her back, grabbing her arms.

  In horror, Diana saw Ben slumped against the banquette, eyes blank and staring, his chest riddled with holes. Apparently, courage couldn’t stop bullets, even for a SEAL.

  Two soldiers had hold of her now, yanking her wrists behind her. One of them drove a fist into the still tender wound at her side, and she screamed as pain exploded through her, stealing her breath.

  “Heard about you,” said one of the soldiers from behind his black helmet, advancing on her with a notched knife in his hands. “Heard you can take a bullet. Let’s see how you do when I carve the heart out of your chest.”

  From the corner of her eye, Diana glimpsed movement, but her mind refused to believe what she was seeing. Someone was clinging to the wing of the plane.

  Jason was clinging to the wing of the plane.

  Impossible. No mortal had that kind of strength. But as she watched, he pulled himself over the side and launched himself back into the jet.

  He slammed into the helmeted soldier, knocking his knife free, and with one swift gesture snapped his neck.

  It can’t be.

  The soldiers reached for their guns and took aim at Jason. Diana seized them and threw them hard against the walls of the jet. They slumped to the floor.

  For a moment, she and Jason stared at each other, the jet shaking as it plummeted toward the earth.

  “You lied to me!” she shouted over the roar of the wind.

  Jason bent and pulled the parachute from Ben’s back, looping it over his own shoulders. “No more than you lied to me.” He offered his hand. “Is it worth dying over?”

  Diana took his hand. He yanked her close.

  “Hold tight,” he said, and then the sky had them.

  The terror of the fall came at Alia like a wave. The world rushing up to meet her, her brain trying to remember everything about skydiving at Jason’s birthday party and instead spitting out a list of the bones in the human body—every bone she was about to break.

  The details of the earth grew clearer—in green, gray, brown, ridges and shadow, clusters of trees. Her fingers fumbled over the latches and bits of metal at her shoulders.

  Her body felt heavy, impossibly awkward as she tried to hold the position Jason had described. Jason. She saw the wind grab him, hurl him from the jet. It had happened so fast. A hard fist of despair pressed at her chest, fear and sorrow and disbelief tangling together inside her.

  The wind and the pounding of her heart filled her ears. All of that tough talk about Diana killing her for the sake of peace and the only thought in her head: I do not want to die. She grabbed hold of the toggle at her hip and yanked hard. A whirring sound. She’d pulled the wrong cord—for a moment she was sure of it, certain she’d made some horrible blunder. Then her body was yanked upward with a hard jolt. A choked sound between a sob and a bleat escaped her lips as the harness dug into her thighs and her momentum slowed. She was pretty sure she’d left her shoulders and pelvis somewhere above.

  She forced herself to scan the terrain. She knew she needed to try to find somewhere flat and treeless and steer into the wind. She pulled gently at the toggles, testing them. The world looked alien and mysterious beneath her. Her mind registered barns, houses, cultivated land. She needed a field, someplace flat. She tugged gently at the toggles, turning left, then right, trying to slow her descent.

  One moment she was gliding over the shine of a river, and in the next, the earth was too close, speeding by beneath her. She lifted her feet and hit the ground with a painful thud, then tumbled forward, unable to control her momentum. She felt her ankle twist, felt rock scrape along her back and sides. She tucked her knees and rolled. The canopy caught the wind, dragging her along, then finally collapsed. She skidded to a halt.

  Alia lay on her side, trying to catch her breath, trying to make her rational mind catch up to the adrenaline coursing through her body. She batted at the latches and straps of her harness and wriggled free. Her left ankle throbbed. She could only hope it wasn’t broken. She forced herself to sit up, but every part of her felt like a Jell-O mold that hadn’t quite set. She was at the base of a terraced hillside covered in tarps and netting to prevent erosion.

  She heard a shrill whir and peered up into the sky, saw a trail of smoke—the jet spiraling downward. It disappeared behind a rise of hills, and Alia heard a loud boom that shook the earth beneath her. A scream rose in her throat as a plume of black smoke blossomed from the horizon.

  She glimpsed a shape moving through the sky, the translucent bowl of a parachute trailing behind it. Could it be Diana? Ben? One of their attackers?

  Alia struggled to her feet. Jason had said there were trackers in the packs. Jason.

  “Alia!” Nim’s voice. Alia had never heard a more beautiful sound. She turned, saw Nim stumbling toward her, and forced herself to stand. They staggered the rest of the distance to each other, and Alia threw her arms around Nim, wishing she could hold her close and keep her safe forever.

  “Did you see where Theo came down?” Alia asked.

  “No,” said Nim. “It all happened so fast.”

  Alia felt panic swelling up to choke her brea
th. “Let’s get to the top of the hill,” she said. “Maybe we can see more.”

  Alia leaned on Nim, and they scrambled past the tarps and netting as fast as their wobbly legs would carry them. When Alia looked west she could make out a sapphire strip of sea. To the east she saw only farmland.

  “There!” she said, pointing to where the parachute was sailing toward the earth near what might be a grain field. It had to be Ben and Diana. It had to be. They stumbled down the other side of the hill, Alia limping slightly, trying to walk the pain out of her ankle as Nim rolled the sleeves of her Keralis T-shirt up over her shoulders. It was late afternoon, but the sun above was strong.

  Alia wanted to slump down right there, cover her head with her hands, and just scream. She couldn’t stop seeing Jason’s face as he vanished through the jet door. Keep going, she told herself. Just keep moving. If you stop, you’ll have to think.

  They rounded an overgrown hedge, and she thought she heard voices.

  Nim’s head snapped up. “That sounds like—”

  “It can’t be,” said Alia, but she would have known her brother’s voice anywhere. Especially when he sounded angry.

  “I don’t owe you an explanation,” Jason spat. “You’ve been lying and dodging my questions since the moment we met.”

  “No ordinary man could do what you did,” came Diana’s reply.

  Alia stepped around the hedge and saw Diana pacing back and forth in a field spotted with poppies, as Jason lay on the ground, trying to untangle himself from a mess of parachute cords. He was alive. He was okay. She didn’t care how or why, just that it was so.

  “Help me out of this thing,” he said to Diana.

  “Help yourself,” Diana shot back.

  Alia exchanged a glance with Nim. “We interrupting?” she asked.

  Jason and Diana turned and saw her at the same time. “Alia!” they shouted.

  Diana loped toward her and swept Alia up in her arms, swinging her around like a little kid. “You made it!” She threw an arm around Nim’s shoulders and pulled them both into a hug. “You made it.”

  Jason gave a frustrated growl and said, “Would someone please help me out of this thing so I can hug my damn sister?”

  Alia limped over to him, tears in her eyes, and said, “Yes, I’ll help, you big grump.”

  He dragged her down and hugged her tight. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “Same here.”

  “Are you getting snot all over my shirt?”

  “Probably,” she said, but she didn’t let go. “How the hell did you get down here?”

  Jason sighed. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all of it, but we need to go. Whoever shot us down will have people on the ground, searching.”

  “Did Ben get out before the plane went down?” Nim asked.

  Jason shook his head. “No.”

  “He died bravely,” said Diana.

  “But he died just the same,” Alia replied. Another death on her conscience, and all the more reason to make it to the spring.

  After a few minutes of fiddling, they managed to get Jason free, though Diana kept her distance, arms crossed, jaw set. He pulled a Velcro patch free from one of the straps of the parachute pack, revealing some kind of screen. His fingers moved over it, entering a code, and a cluster of green dots appeared beside an electronic compass rose.

  “That’s us,” said Jason, using his fingertips to zoom out. Another green dot appeared to the southeast.

  “And that’s Theo,” said Alia.

  “Or his parachute at least.”

  She punched Jason hard in the arm. “Don’t say that.”

  They followed the signal through the poppy field into an olive grove, through row after row of gnarled trees. In the late-afternoon light, their gray-green leaves took on a silvery cast, like boughs clustered with clouds of sea foam.

  Nim stopped short. “Oh God,” she said, and when Alia followed her horrified gaze, she saw Theo’s limp body hanging from the twisted branches of an olive tree, like a puppet gone slack on its strings.

  “No,” said Alia. “No.” She had done this. She might as well have snapped his neck herself.

  Then one of Theo’s pointy shoes wiggled, his knee, his thigh, up to his wrist. Alia grabbed Nim’s arm, relief gusting through her. “He’s alive!” she said on a happy gasp.

  “I should have known I couldn’t get rid of him that easily,” said Nim, but she was smiling.

  Diana peered at Theo’s wiggling form. “What exactly is he doing?”

  Jason sighed. “I’m pretty sure he’s doing the wave.”

  Alia cocked her head to one side. “Maybe the robot?”

  Diana frowned. “Is this the way your people celebrate cheating death?”

  “What exactly are you doing, Theo?” Alia called.

  He tried to twist against the strings, to no avail. “Alia?” he shouted. “Guys?” His feet bicycled futilely through the air. He was only a few feet off the ground, but it was a crucial few feet.

  “He looks like a manic Christmas ornament,” said Nim. “And God, who told him those pants were a good idea?”

  Personally, Alia thought the pants were great. Was it wrong to notice how good someone’s butt looked when a second earlier you’d thought he was dead?

  It only took a few moments for Diana to scale the tree and cut Theo loose. He fell to the ground in a heap and gazed up at them from the dirt. “Can we never, ever do that again?”

  “Sold,” Jason said, offering him a hand. He pulled Theo up and drew him into a quick hug, clapping him on the back. Alia wanted to plant kisses all over Theo’s ridiculous face, but she was going to have to fall out of a few more planes before she had the guts to do it.

  “How did they find us?” said Nim. “How did they know we were headed to Greece?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jason. “It’s possible they found the jet via satellite. Maybe they were just waiting to see where we intended to land, and once we were in range—”

  “They took a shot,” said Theo.

  “They’ll have seen where the jet went down,” said Diana. “We need to move. If they don’t already know we escaped the crash, they will soon.”

  “But where are we?” said Nim. “And where do we go?”

  Theo pulled out his phone.

  “Don’t!” said Alia, swatting it out of his hands onto the ground.

  “Hey!”

  “Maybe that’s the answer to how they found us,” said Nim.

  Theo looked almost insulted. “You seriously think I let anyone track me through this thing? If anybody goes looking for Theo Santos, they’re going to think I’m sunning myself on Praia do Toque. Which, honestly, I wish I was.”

  “I wish you were, too,” said Nim.

  “Does anyone else have a phone?” said Jason.

  Nim shook her head. “It was in my clutch at the party.”

  “I never got a new one,” said Alia. “And Diana doesn’t have a phone.”

  Theo clutched his chest. “No—no phone? How do you function?”

  Diana cast Theo a haughty glance that looked like it had been pulled straight from Nim’s playbook. “I wear practical shoes and avoid the branches of olive trees.”

  “So cold,” said Nim with a grin. “So accurate.”

  “Shhhh,” Theo said to his pointy-toed shoes. “She didn’t mean it.”

  “Just keep the phone off for now,” Jason said.

  “Fine,” Theo retorted. “But for a guy who knows so much biology, you don’t know shit about tech. This thing is literally untraceable.”

  In the end, Diana led them southeast, the setting sun to their backs. They made their way through olive groves and farmland for hours, lurching along, lost in their own thoughts. They kept away from the roads and left a wide perimeter as they skirted farms and houses, keeping Theo at the front of the line and Nim at the back, since they didn’t seem to be able to stop insulting each other, regardless of the danger. Alia still caught
them throwing angry glares each other’s way.

  Occasionally, Diana or Jason would jog ahead to scout their route, and it was nearly dusk when Diana returned to say they were on the outskirts of an area called Thines.

  “Do you think we’ve gone far enough?” asked Alia. She refused to complain, but her feet ached and her whole body felt weary with fatigue. Though her ankle was obeying, she was desperate to take her weight off it for a while.

  “Even if we aren’t, it’s getting too dark to see,” said Jason. “We need to find shelter for the night.”

  “I don’t think we should risk seeking lodging,” said Diana. “I saw what looks like an abandoned building not far ahead.”

  “How are you not tired?” said Nim grumpily.

  Alia smiled. She’d almost gotten used to Diana’s limitless reserve of energy. “Annoying, isn’t it?”

  They followed Diana through another mile of orchards and across a dry creek bed, where the stones glowed nearly white in the gathering dusk, then back into another olive grove. Through the trees, Alia occasionally caught sight of lit windows or the shape of a building. Once they passed close enough to a house that she glimpsed a television through the window, flickering blue in the living room. She felt like she’d looked through a portal to another planet. How could something so ordinary be happening when they were running for their lives? She was glad when they left the cultivated groves and began picking their way up a low rise, through a tangle of dense trees and scrub that provided plenty of cover.

  Eventually, they came to a building that looked like it had once been a chapel but had long since been abandoned. They’d almost missed it, tucked into a copse of cypress and deadfall. Hopefully, the men looking for them would head straight for the neighboring farms and never think to seek them out here.

  Alia felt along the wall near the door and found a small lantern hanging from a rusted hook. “It still has oil in it,” she said. A few more minutes of fumbling and they’d found safety matches in a tin box tucked into a niche in the wall.