Out of Orbit- The Complete Series Boxset

by Chele Cooke

  Alec adjusted the rifle hanging down his back beneath his coat. “If we can get information, the risk of changing locations will be worth it. I could stay above Crisco and keep a look out, if you wanted to take Dhiren to hide closer.”

  Georgianna glanced over to find Alec watching her with a curious and thoughtful expression. She shrugged and chewed on her lip, pulling her sleeves down over her hands. They’d armed themselves as much as they could while keeping the weapons hidden. There had been a time when Georgianna would not have been included, armed with nothing more than her medic’s bag. But these days, they all knew there was safety in numbers, even if some weren’t as skilled with weapons as the others.

  “If you think it’s safer for me to leave Crisco once we know where the meeting is, I could still come,” Alec said.

  “Maybe.” Georgianna fell back into silence.

  Alec huffed and dug his hands into his pockets, probably tightening his grip around hidden weapons. The streets were deserted and, despite their caution, they hadn’t seen a single soldier as they walked.

  “You know, Dhiren might not be entirely wrong,” Alec said, after a few more minutes of silence. “About running, I mean. We could use the distraction.”

  “I won’t leave everyone, Alec. I thought you understood that. I didn’t think you’d leave them, either.”

  “I wouldn’t, and you know that. But it doesn’t mean he’s entirely wrong. What if we could use the distraction to get others out.”

  “How? Sure, this meeting might be big. Keiran seemed to think it was. But there are thousands of Cahlven soldiers. They won’t empty the shield. We’d never get in far enough to help anyone.” She shook her head, reaching up to pull her hood further down over her face.

  They came to an intersection and Georgianna spied pairs of footprints in the snow across the street; maybe five or six people, it was hard to count. She pointed them out to Alec and he half-drew one of the copaqs from his pocket, fingers tight around the handle. He waved Georgianna towards the side of the street while he peered out and crept forwards, checking in both directions.

  Alec froze. He slid back a step and waited, his gaze fixed down the road. Even the clouds of hot breath in the cold air stopped. He crept forwards again, checking twice and then waving Georgianna to join him as they slipped, quickly and quietly, across the road and around the next corner. When they ducked into an alleyway, he walked backwards, swiping his foot from left to right to mask their boot prints with a fresh drift of snow.

  He rounded on her and propped his hands on his hips. “What is wrong with you? Did I do something?”

  Georgianna frowned and stared down at her boots. She shuffled in the snow as she shook her head. “No, but I think I did.”

  “What?”

  “Dhiren and I fought last night when I took over from him.”

  Alec’s eyes narrowed and a large bloom of his breath billowed in the air between them. “Which is why he’s gone wandering, I suppose?”

  “I think he’s gone.”

  “He wouldn’t just leave, George.”

  “I don’t know. It was pretty bad. He wanted to leave and I said… I told him Edtroka would have been disappointed in him, that he was only looking after himself.”

  Alec paused. She could see from his face, and the way he refused to meet her gaze, that he thought she was wrong for what she’d said. But he didn’t berate her. He considered his words carefully, taking off his gloves and stashing them in his pocket.

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said it was my ego keeping me here, that I’m stupid for thinking we can help.”

  Alec stepped closer and gritted his teeth. He leaned over, rubbing his hands up and down his thighs. His fingers were bright pink with the cold, and when he stood up straight, his face was flushed with it, too.

  “It might be stupid, thinking we can help win a war, but it isn’t your ego keeping you here, George.”

  “It’s not?”

  “You think it is?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Well, if you ask me—”

  “I wasn’t, but when has that stopped you?”

  He grinned. “I’d say it was stubbornness.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re stubborn, George, you always have been. Someone tells you not to do something, and you dig your heels in. We fought so much about the Compound and, I swear, by the end I thought you were going just to spite me.”

  “What’s that got to do with this?” She wasn’t entirely sure that he was wrong.

  “You’re not going to run. You won’t stop until you’ve exhausted all options.”

  “And what if none of them work? What if Dhiren’s right, and we should have run while we had the chance? What if all we do is hurt more people?”

  Alec touched her cheek. His fingers were almost as cold as the snow around her ankles.

  “We’re in a war. People are going to get hurt. But it’s better to fight, right? To try?”

  Georgianna sighed and looked up at him again. “So, how do we try to get people out?”

  He tapped his chin and grinned. “If only we had someone on the inside, someone who could get the word out. It’s such a shame it’s just us.”

  Georgianna rolled her eyes and batted his hand from his face. She forced him to turn around and pushed him towards the other end of the alleyway.

  “Come on, then. Let’s go back to the tunnels. Apparently, I have a date to go fight with.”

  The back door to the house was broken, hanging off the hinges. Georgianna eased it open, cringing as it squealed in loud protest. She kicked her boots against the wall, dislodging most of the snow, and stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her. She shuddered, and wrapped her arms around her stomach as she shuffled through the kitchen and into the front room.

  The weak sun didn’t penetrate the house, and the corridor was dim and close. She walked near to the wall, running her fingers over the bumps and ridges in the sandstone mix. Even in the gloom, she saw the silhouette that appeared in the doorway. She stopped and stared at it until the features materialised, staring back at her.

  “What is it?” Keiran said.

  “No, ‘Hello, George’?”

  “Last time you accused me of summoning you like a drysta. Now you do the same to me?”

  Keiran retreated from the doorway and Georgianna followed him into the front room. The light was a little better through the window, but not much. He still looked dim and insubstantial, like he was made of snow and smoke, about to disappear in the wind.

  “It was important that I talk to you,” Georgianna said.

  She unwound her arms from around her stomach, reached up, and took an earlobe between her finger and thumb, tugging gently.

  Keiran nodded and raised an eyebrow. “So, out with it.”

  Georgianna took a deep breath and drew her bottom lip between her teeth. She rubbed her fingers under her eyes. “Dhiren’s sick. I need my medic’s bag. It was left with the Cahlven when we were kicked out.”

  His head cocked to the side as he looked down at her. A small smirk formed as he shook his head.

  She nodded. Now she knew the boundaries she had to play with to tell Keiran what she needed.

  “What am I meant to do about it?” he said.

  Georgianna closed the gap between them: each movement slow, careful, and quiet. She touched his cheek, tracing her fingers from his temple down to his jaw. He was definitely thinner, but she couldn’t ask him whether he was eating, not while the Cahlven were listening. She wondered whether there was a team of soldiers who monitored him all day long, to decipher his conversations, to listen to his breathing, to find out if he was really asleep. Georgianna missed being near him while he slept.

  “I expect you’d be able to bring it to me,” she said. Trying to sound angry was tough when all she wanted was for him tell her everything was alright.

  “And why would I do that?”

 
His kiss was soft and insistent, drawing her up to him with a gentle pressure that pulled her in. Snow-bitten skin became a pathway for her dancing fingertips: down his jaw and neck to the warm material of his Cahlven uniform.

  Georgianna laid her hands against his chest as she pulled back. She smiled up at him. “It belongs to me, Keiran. Remember?” She beamed through the gruff anger. “I deserve to have it back.”

  Keiran edged away, his hands up in front of him, holding her back. His gaze drifted across the misty windows. He grasped the fastening at the top of his coat and pulled it down slowly, each notch letting out a click at it was released. He grimaced.

  “You deserve nothing.” He gritted his teeth as he pulled the tab further. “You abandoned everything here. People, plans, that damned bag. You only want it now because it suits you. Just like you left me because it suited you.”

  “You know that isn’t true.”

  “Isn’t it? You called on me only because you needed something.”

  The last latch unlocked, and Keiran waved Georgianna back as he slid each side of the jacket carefully from his shoulders. “Why didn’t you contact Olless? Because you knew she wouldn’t give in to you like I do. Every time, George. You leave me here, wait until I’m finally getting over what you did to me, and then you drag me back in again.”

  “Keiran, I—”

  “No!” He drew his arm out of the sleeve and crouched, each move cautious and deliberate. “I only came to tell you not to call on me again. I won’t come. You should go. Go back to Dhiren and Alec. Goodbye, George.”

  Georgianna’s eyes narrowed, but as Keiran jerked his head towards the door, she turned and marched out with loud stomping steps.

  Halfway down the corridor, he caught her, pushing the door open to her brother’s old room. He followed her in, easing the door as close to closed as it would go without the latch clicking into place.

  “They’ll start listening closer,” he said.

  Georgianna wrapped her arms around his shoulders, locking her body around his. He hugged her tight, one arm around her waist and his free hand coming up to tangle in her hair.

  “Are you okay?” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do this before. I only just figured out where the device is.”

  “It took you that long?” She smirked. “No one commenting about you singing when you wash?” He shook his head. “I should have known.”

  “I’ve missed you.” Georgianna cradled his face in her hands, drawing him down for another soft kiss.

  “I’ve missed you, too. But what’s happening? They’ll soon get suspicious about how long I’m standing around, lamenting you leaving.”

  She frowned. Keiran had said that they couldn’t see them, yet apparently they’d know he was standing around? Was it just because they couldn’t hear breaths of exertion?

  “We want to get the Veniche out during the meeting,” Georgianna said. “Alec and I will cause a distraction.”

  “We can’t.”

  She grasped his Cahlven shirt; it felt prickly and coarse in her hands.

  She tugged him closer. “I know it’ll be difficult, Keiran, and it’s a big risk. But we have to get people out. We—”

  “No, George. You don’t understand. We can’t get people out. We can’t leave.”

  “But…”

  “Everyone under the shield is tracked.”

  He prised her fingers from his shirt and tugged it up, revealing a small scar no wider than her fingernail on his side. She ran her finger over it, feeling the small bump under the skin.

  “Can’t we remove them?”

  “I don’t know the system. Maybe there’s some sort of hidden use for it.”

  “You mean like the cinystalqs?”

  “Exactly. Plus, it would take too long to remove them from everyone. Wherever we went, the Cahlven would be able to follow.”

  Georgianna chewed on the inside of her cheek, eyes darting around the room. She curled her hands into fists, grimacing. The cinystalq collars were difficult to remove, almost impossible to do so successfully if you didn’t have the right equipment. If Keiran was right, they would be trying to do the same thing from inside the body. They might lose a lot of people if these trackers had the same sort of failsafe.

  “Do they shock you? I mean, the cinystalq had that function. If this doesn’t, then maybe we—”

  “George.” He pulled her back to him. “The tracking isn’t all.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. It’s… I’m okay, but there are people getting sick. My access to civilians has been completely cut off. I was told it was for my own protection, so I didn’t catch whatever they have. But it’s spreading, and…”

  “And what, Keiran?”

  He sighed, his gaze downcast and his expression grim. Georgianna closed the gap between them and slid her hand into his. She squeezed his fingers gently, relieved when he squeezed back.

  “I think the Cahlven are testing on them.”

  The warmth of Keiran’s breath was still on Georgianna’s lips as she pushed open the back door and slipped out into the garden. The snow crunched under her boots all the way the fence. She took one last look at the house. She knew Keiran would be carefully putting on his jacket, ensuring that nobody would know it had ever been taken off. She grasped top of the fence, her gloves sticking to the frozen wood, and clambered over the top landing with a light thump on the icy ground on the other side.

  She should be obscuring her path and making it more difficult for the Cahlven soldiers to follow her, in case Olless decide she wanted to make it more difficult to get back in under the shield. But as her mind reeled with Keiran’s revelations, she couldn’t bring herself to brush the snow into each deep footprint behind.

  Georgianna approached the abandoned house that skirted the border, and pulled open the door against the most recent drift of snow. She huffed and tugged, forcing it wide enough for her to slip through. She took off her bag and shoved it into the gap. Keiran had managed to smuggle some more supplies into her old home, along with a couple more heated blankets, making the bag bulky and hard to squeeze through. It landed with a thump on the other side, and Georgianna manoeuvred herself into position, sticking her leg into the gap first and kicking the bag further out of the way. She braced both hands against the door and wiggled through, the damp wood flaking off in her fingers. She would have the same flakes all down her back where she’d rubbed against the frame.

  Georgianna picked up the bag and slung it onto her back. The cold had long since seeped into the small house, and the lack of wind didn’t make much difference to her shivers as she hurried through the building. She wondered if the snows had started down in what had once been Nyvalau. Would the southern drifts cover the multitude of sins they had blanketed in Adlai? The crater in the centre of the city was slowly filling with snow, entombing the ash of the bodies. Wrench was down there somewhere, buried under rubble and snow.

  Would this crater fill with water once the wash came? Form a new lake for the centre of Adlai? The tunnels wouldn’t survive it. The slides of rocks and rubble were probably not going to stop the water from flooding through. If they stayed in Adlai, they would need to find somewhere else to live.

  No. It wasn’t a question of ‘if’ any more; not after what Keiran had told her. Running from a war was understandable, but she had helped bring the Cahlven here, she had told people they would help. Instead, they were being tested on and getting sick. She couldn’t abandon them to that.

  The shield was grey and almost invisible in the dark of the house. She probably wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t known where it fell. She tugged her hood tighter around her head, took a deep breath and stepped into it. This shield was harder to push through than the one in Nyquonat, and Keiran had managed to tell her, through one of their feigned arguments, that the Cahlven had bolstered the shield after they’d destroyed the Mykahnol, expecting a retaliation from the Adveni. Had there had been attacks against the shield th
at triggered the reinforcement? Georgianna didn’t know. It felt like wading through water fully dressed and, even as she came out the other side, she felt weighted down with it. She shook herself off and dashed to the back door.

  Georgianna was so caught in her thoughts, she didn’t hear the drum of footsteps over the wind until her hand was on the door handle. She froze, leaning in to the door as the steps came closer, joined by voices.

  “Definitely around here.”

  She gulped. The voices in the street were Veniche. The Veuric was clear and unaltered by Cahlven or Adveni accents.

  “They can’t have gone far. The alarm has only just sounded.” This voice was a Cahlven.

  “You sure it’s not someone heading back?” the Veniche said. It was a man, and he sounded familiar, but she didn’t dare move and try to look.

  “This is not near a checkpoint,” the Cahlven said. “Orders are clear.”

  Georgianna pressed herself against the door, clutching the straps of her bag, trying to think. The voices were so close now they could push against the door at any moment. But there was nowhere else to go except into the shield, which apparently now tracked people passing through. That would make visiting Keiran again much more difficult.

  “People don’t like being caged, man. Probably someone getting stir crazy.”

  “Cahlven would not break orders.”

  “A Ven, then.”

  “Veniche have been quarantined for protection. You know this, Rian.”

  Georgianna’s mouth dropped open, her eyes burning wide against the cold. The man on the other side of the door was Taye. She almost pulled the door open then; she would be able to explain to Taye. Only, as he spoke again, she paused.

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks. Unless they’ve been dragged into doing these patrols. Funny how you’re willing to risk exposure for soldiers, but not anyone else.”