Reaping Day: Book Three of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  As far as they’d pieced together, it had mostly been those ones who’d gone promptly and utterly ape shit crazy fifteen minutes ago. Michael, on the other hand, hadn’t stayed conscious to rage out like the others, but he had been having the worst seizure Jarek had seen when Rachel peeled Jarek’s nearly-flattened ass off the floor and swept him into the room.

  Thankfully, with an army of trained, unaffected soldiers around, coming together and containing the ragers had happened quickly and effectively enough. That hadn’t made the raving wild people any less disturbing, though. Bullets and blades and mean-hearted thugs, Jarek could handle all day long. Mindless human rage puppets that made rabid dogs look like well-mannered socialites, though?

  Apparently that one had direct access to his freaky button.

  Who knew?

  Luckily, they hadn’t had to deal with any more berserkers after Rachel had shown up. None but Alton, that was, though the raknoth hadn’t actually put up any more of a fight after Rachel’s first big girl body slam.

  In fact, even speaking as the one who’d nearly been eaten, Jarek thought Rachel had been a bit extreme in how brutally she’d contained Alton—how hesitant she’d been to release him when his sense returned, how savagely she’d told him to stay the hell out of Michael’s room once she finally had.

  On some level, and probably not a particularly deep one, if Jarek’s intuition was worth much, Rachel had wanted to kill Alton in that hallway. And whether it was their alliance or good old reason and morality that had guided her hand in pulling it back together, Jarek thought it was safe to say the urge hadn’t simply come from nowhere.

  Something was going on between her and Alton. He was sure of it now. But whatever it was, he doubted he’d be helping anyone by interjecting himself—at least not before they’d collected themselves and processed this lovely new crap storm.

  “So you wanna tell us what that was all about?” Jarek asked Alton when it became clear no one was readily going to speak.

  Alton didn’t look up. “From what I gathered, there’s at least one Kul nearby—most likely Gada—and he wanted to let us know he’s not very happy.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “How nearby?” Rachel called from the room. “And how the hell strong are these things that they can remotely control that many people and you all at once?”

  “Clearly quite strong,” Alton said. “Now that I know to expect it, I should be able to maintain control if it happens again, but … Well, it’s lucky you stepped in when you did, Rachel.”

  Rachel somehow managed to convey distrust, displeasure, and maybe a touch of loathing all in one monosyllabic grunt. For Jarek’s part, he didn’t think Alton sounded like a man—or a raknoth, rather—blowing smoke up their tailpipes, but it wasn’t like he had any real insight into the telepathic mind games.

  “As for distance,” Alton continued after a pause, “I might wager a day’s travel out, but it would only be a wild guess.”

  A buzz from Lea’s direction drew Jarek’s attention.

  “The commanders want us in the council chamber,” she said.

  Alton glanced up at them and over at Johnny. “Perhaps we should go find Haldin and Elise.”

  “Actually,” Lea said, “I think they’ll want to hear what you have to say about …”

  She trailed off with a helpless wave of her hand, apparently unsure exactly what to name the ethereal golden rage storm that had just swept the base off its sound feet.

  Johnny tapped at his comm. “Sounds like Hal and Elise are almost here anyway. They just got caught up in the, uh … thing.”

  “The furor,” Alton said.

  “Yeah, right,” Johnny said. “That.”

  “Did he just say furor?” Jarek asked, trading a bemused look with Rachel. Or trying to.

  She didn’t look so bemused. “That’s what you’re choosing to take away from all of this?”

  Before he could say anything, Lea lightly cleared her throat.

  “We should probably all get over there.”

  “We’ll find Hal and Elise and meet you guys there,” Johnny called in from the hallway.

  Alton didn’t argue or give anything more than one last expressionless look at Rachel before he turned and fell in with an unusually apprehensive-looking Johnny.

  “Rache?” came Lea’s voice from behind, hesitant.

  Rachel plunked her staff to the ground harder than necessary and used it to hoist herself up from the foot of Michael’s bed. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

  Jarek teetered with the words on his tongue.

  He could just let all this go and move along. That was absolutely the easy play here. But he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something had gone awry for Rachel, something that seemed more and more like it might sabotage everything they’d been fighting for. Something that seemed to already be doing that to whatever existed between the two of them.

  Now wasn’t exactly an ideal time, but when rage parties—or furors or whatever the hell anyone wanted to call them—and super monsters could drop down on their heads without a moment’s warning, it seemed prudent to apply some you take what you can get philosophy to these things.

  He fixed Rachel with a serious look. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  At the edge of his vision, Lea glanced back and forth between them. “I’ll, uh, see you guys over there?”

  Rachel held Jarek’s gaze for a stretch, then finally turned to Lea and gave a short nod.

  Once Rachel had broken the staring contest, Jarek did the same. “Wouldn’t miss it for a hole in my head.”

  “Yeah …” Lea looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if she could smell a fight brewing in the air, but, after only a small hesitation, she nodded and pushed past them, only stopping to touch Michael’s peacefully sleeping shoulder. “They’ll be starting soon,” she said at the door.

  Then Lea was gone, and Rachel and Jarek were alone—Rachel making a quiet point of keeping her attention directed to her sleeping brother, and Jarek taking an acute refresher course on just how loaded and uncomfortable silence between two people could be.

  But why so uncomfortable?

  “What is it?” Rachel finally said, her voice quiet but decidedly not soft. When she looked up at him, her eyes weren’t either. “What do you want?”

  Ah. Right. That was why.

  Some uncharacteristically wise portion of his mind nipped the retaliatory words bubbling up in his chest. He let the heat out as a steadying breath instead.

  “I wanna know how you’re doing.” He waved an encompassing hand. “With all of this. These past couple weeks … I know it can’t be easy.”

  “Do you?”

  Was that accusation in her eyes?

  “It’s hard to tell what with all the ‘Stumpy’ this and the ‘buddy’ that.” She gave her head a sharp shake, her breathing clearly elevated now. “Alton would have killed you if I hadn’t stopped him. And for all I can see, you’re not even pissed about it.”

  Yep. Definitely accusation, mixed with a healthy dose of scolding.

  “I had it under control,” he said, more by reflex than anything else. “And yeah, I’m not happy at having to play rabbit to Alton’s bloodhound, but—shit, I don’t know! I don’t understand what’s happening in your heads. He says he can control it now that he knows to be on guard, I can’t know if that’s bullshit or not. So talk to me, Goldilocks. Tell us what’s going on. Tell me what you know that I don’t.”

  She skewered him on the end of a tight-lipped glare. “What I know is that we crawled into bed with monsters. They’re not your friends, Jarek. No matter how much you want them to be.”

  The way she said it, the desolate gravity in her tone …

  “What the hell’s going on with you?” he asked before his better mind had time to massage the words into something softer. “What did …”

  No. Probably better not to mention Alton specifically and launch her into the defensive stratosphere.<
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  He softened his tone. “Did something happen?”

  The stiffening of her posture and the edge that crept into her eyes told him his caution had been insufficient.

  Defenses fully engaged.

  “We need to go,” was all she said as she pushed past him for the door.

  “Rachel.”

  She paused in the doorway but didn’t look back.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For saving me back there.”

  “You shouldn’t have needed saving—shouldn’t have …”

  Tension built in her shoulders and flooded out in a heavy sigh. Finally, she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Come on. They’re probably starting.”

  She set off into the hallway without waiting for his response.

  Jarek watched her go with an unpleasant swirling of frustration, failure, and flabbergast.

  “Man,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  “Chin up, sir,” Al said in his earpiece. “It’s only the end of the world.”

  Resistance HQ’s council room was about as impressive in its grandeur as your average basement, but Rachel supposed they weren’t there to admire the decor. They were, as far as she could tell, there to talk Furor 101 with Professor Alton Parker and to generally go weak in the knees at just how screwed they seemed to be right now.

  “You’re telling us that the rakul could use these messengers to drive an entire damn planet insane if they wanted to?” asked a hard-faced Commander Nelken, still sporting the leg brace the doctor had put him in after a hefty hunk of the common room ceiling had come down on him in Zar’Golga’s attack.

  Rachel watched Alton exchange an uncertain look with Drogan and Lietha, who’d come either at Krogoth’s behest to learn what they knew or maybe just to hold their sad little human hands through the scare.

  She waited for an answer, knowing damn well she wouldn’t be able to believe any of it for the absolute truth.

  It wasn’t just that she couldn’t trust a word out of any of their mouths. Sure, despite everything else, she couldn’t ignore that Alton and the others had never seemed to intentionally lie (as far as she knew, at least). But the problem was more that she wasn’t so sure any of them could be considered credible sources after Alton had fallen prey to the furor himself—a detail that hadn’t yet been brought to the council’s attention.

  “The entire planet would be a stretch,” Alton finally said. “But something on the scale of a city is possible.”

  “This is not standard practice for the rakul,” Drogan added. He looked irritated to be wasting his time listening to the humans dither, and Lietha even more so. “Perhaps they suspect humans are more easily swayed by such tactics than the species they’ve preyed upon in the past.”

  That started a round of murmurs from the attending council members.

  “Helpful, Stumpy,” Jarek murmured in his seat next to Rachel.

  No one else in the room could have heard him—except for a raknoth.

  Lietha frowned in Jarek’s direction, but Drogan’s lips twitched upward in mild amusement.

  To his credit, Alaric didn’t seem the least bit perturbed as he replied from the commanders’ table. “Well, seeing as they may decide to make it standard practice against our people, what is there to be done about it, aside from cloaking everyone we can?”

  Lietha showed teeth that looked just a little too sharp to be human. “Humans cannot rampage if they are dead.”

  The murmurs caught fire.

  At least until Rachel called, “And we could say the same thing for the raknoth, couldn’t we?”

  That shut everyone up nice and quick.

  “Are you implying the raknoth could experience similar … symptoms in future events?” Commander Daniels asked from the head table.

  Rachel half-expected Jarek to give her a little leg kick or otherwise tell her to shush up until they had a proper handle on this thing, but he was too busy looking at her like he’d only just seen her for the first time.

  “Careful, Rachel,” a voice murmured in her mind. Haldin. “I know you’re angry, but think what this could do to the alliance.”

  “Any sentient mind could theoretically fall prey to telepathic attack,” someone was saying out loud. Haldin again, she realized.

  Jesus, how much control did he have?

  “Hound, human, raknoth,” Haldin continued, “all technically fair game, except—”

  “Except that raknoth are not so easily overwhelmed as humans,” Lietha said. “Telepathically or otherwise.”

  That started another round of conversation—this one much less murmured and much more inflammatory. Rachel couldn’t say she blamed the council for getting irritated with this shit.

  Haldin shot Lietha his own irritated look then glanced back to Rachel, probably wondering if she was about to blow the lid on Alton’s slip-up.

  She thought about it. They probably deserved it, and she wasn’t sure she was doing anyone any favors keeping it quiet for now.

  But something about the way Jarek was looking at her gave her pause.

  “Enough,” Nelken’s voice boomed through the room, restoring some order before she could further stir the pot. Nelken joined Haldin in scowling at Lietha. “Need I remind you that your continued existence is contingent upon ours?”

  Drogan shot a warning look at Lietha. “We do not forget so easily.”

  “On the bright side,” Haldin said into the tense silence, “our cloaking fields do seem to dull the effects to some extent. It wasn’t a surefire switch out there today, but most of the people near us eventually regained their senses once we had them covered.”

  Alton bobbed his head, latching onto Haldin’s lifeline. “The messengers could feasibly penetrate the cloaks to some degree, depending on the quality of the work and the individuals they’re protecting, but I imagine they’d offer sufficient protection in many cases. That said, those already affected by the furor may not simply recover once they’ve been cut off from the signal, so to speak.”

  “As in, they may be psychologically damaged by these attacks?” Commander Daniels asked.

  “It’s entirely possible,” Alton said. “And those who aren’t may still take some time to calm down.”

  That might have explained Rachel’s experience with the lone berserker who’d charged into Michael’s room early on in the chaos. It was hard to say for sure, as she’d pinned him to the wall and forced his mind into unconsciousness before he could hurt anyone, but she’d thought she’d glimpsed a hint of sanity just before she’d taken him down.

  Jarek’s ruckus with Alton had started down the hall before she’d had much chance to think about it.

  “Outside of somehow mass producing and distributing glyph stamps,” Nelken said, looking between her and Haldin, “is there anything we can do to protect people on a large scale in the event of another attack?”

  Protect entire cities of scattered people from unbelievably powerful telepaths? No problem, right?

  At least Nelken seemed to have taken it to heart when she’d told him a week earlier that she wasn’t even sure how their old glyph stamp device would have worked, much less how to make one. Of course, Nelken hadn’t been able to offer much in the way of explanation either, other than that theirs had passed through several different hands prior to reaching them—several hands who apparently knew little more than that the thing had been crafted by a man named Ren.

  Luckily—or not—Haldin looked less dubious at Nelken’s question than Rachel felt. “We could make bigger versions of our cloaking pendants to cover, say, a building at a time,” he said. “Maybe even entire blocks.”

  Yeah. Of course they could. Except that powering such a monstrosity would require more energy than—

  “It’s mostly a matter of how much power we can feed them,” Haldin continued. “The demands get pretty high pretty fast.” He turned to Rachel. “How many arcanists do you know?”

  �
��None that are still alive, as far as I know.”

  “Guess we have some work to do, then,” Haldin said.

  “And little time in which to do it,” Alton added.

  That started a slow wave of uneasy murmurs until Nelken called the room back to order and turned the discussion to the matters of non-lethal options for dealing with future furors and lethal ones for dealing with the rakul.

  For the latter, Drogan finally saw fit to fill the council in on limited details of their forces’ preparations. Krogoth had his men building a variety of traps in the old central park across the river, where Krogoth was hoping to force the confrontation. Only a quarter of the roughly eighty raknoth on Earth had given any promise, however tenuous, of standing beside them in battle. Of particularly concerning absence from that list were Zar’Taga, with his clan of ten raknoth, and that prick Nan’Ashida, who had no raknoth with him but controlled a considerable army of humans.

  Rachel had begun to tune out when, midway through Drogan’s report, Lietha glanced down at his comm and hurriedly left the council room. That alone didn’t seem so weird, but when Drogan hastened to conclude his spiel and promptly marched through the double doors after his companion, Rachel couldn’t help but wonder what was going on.

  She leaned closer to Jarek. “Do you think—”

  “We should follow them? Methinks yes.”

  Not exactly what she’d been about to say, but she didn’t disagree, either. If something was up again this soon …

  She ignored the look of irritation from Nelken as well as the looks of suspicious curiosity from the gathered council members and followed Jarek to the back. The double doors closed behind them to cut off what sounded to be a fascinating discussion of the Resistance armory’s current non-lethal inventory.

  Hell, maybe the two raknoth had just been supremely bored.

  But the tense look Drogan and Lietha were exchanging just down the hallway didn’t look like a case of the post-meeting yawns. Their eyes were both emitting soft crimson. Something had them agitated.

  Drogan caught sight of them and turned without a word to shuffle Lietha along toward the exit.

  “What gives, Stumpy?” Jarek asked, speaking at normal volume though Drogan and Lietha were well down the hallway. “Don’t pretend like you can’t hear me. You’re gonna frighten the children walking around like that, man.”