Deliverance

by Redwine,C. J.

  “I imagine they are.” His voice is still gentle, and it rubs against my anger like sandpaper. “But to be clear, I offered condolences for your father. I judged him based on the information I had once the tech went missing, and I was wrong. He was a good man. I did not, however, offer condolences for anyone else who died. Nor will I. Their deaths are just.”

  I open my mouth, but I can’t seem to find the air to speak. My heart pounds against my skin, a hammer that wants to crush me from the inside out. I see Sylph’s face. Donny’s neck. I see the streets of Baalboden wreathed with flames while her people screamed for help that wasn’t coming.

  Rowan leans forward. “You see, your father made the right decision. But you didn’t, did you?” He sounds like he expects me to confess my wrongdoing and ask for mercy. “And neither did your leader, Commander Chase.”

  “He isn’t my leader.” I grip the sides of the chair so hard my hands ache.

  “Do you know why Baalboden had to burn? Why your friends had to die?”

  “Because Ian is sick. Because you’re sick—”

  “Because justice requires sacrifice.”

  I lunge to my feet, knocking my tea over and sending the liquid splashing across the table. “You sacrificed innocent people!”

  He stands, and suddenly he doesn’t look so short anymore. “I sacrificed what mattered to Commander Chase. He thought he could steal from me. Subvert my technology for his own uses. Turn my citizens against me. A theft like that requires a strong response. He wanted to become the most powerful man in the world. I broke the seat of his power.” His eyes bore into mine. “It was just.”

  “Nothing about you is just.” I ball my hands into fists. “You destroy lives because your pride is wounded. That makes you a poor leader and an even poorer man. You don’t care if you hurt those who are loyal to you or those who are loyal to someone else, as long as you get to say that you made your point.”

  “Loyalty is something a leader earns.” His voice is still soft, but there’s a thread of steel in it now. “My people are loyal to me for a reason.”

  “Yes, because if they aren’t, you have them whip their family members to death.”

  “Shut your mouth!” Ian grabs my arm and spins me toward my chair. I plant my back foot and plow my left arm into his face as I turn. My momentum carries me into him, and we topple over backward, sending his chair skidding across the floor.

  Ian scissor-kicks, wraps his arms around my head, and flips me onto my back. I punch as hard as I can with my left hand, aiming for his internal organs and his windpipe, but I’m not doing very much damage. Ian, however, is pounding his fists against my body like he thinks if he hits me hard enough, everything that haunts him will just disappear.

  Someone is yelling for Ian to stop, but he doesn’t listen. He drives his fist into my stomach, and I choke. I can’t draw in another breath. I go limp as if I’ve been knocked out, and absorb another two punches before Samuel wraps his arms around Ian’s chest and begins hauling him off me.

  I wait until Ian is halfway between kneeling and standing and then draw my knee to my chest and slam my boot into his crotch. He shrieks in agony and falls to his knees when Samuel finishes pulling him away from me.

  Coughing and gasping, I roll to my side and struggle to take a full breath. A shadow falls over my face, and then James Rowan crouches beside me. He reaches a hand out as if to touch me, and I wheeze, “Don’t you dare.”

  His smile is a grim tightening of his lips. “I dare a great many things. Some of which you don’t approve of.”

  “You mean like having Ian kill his father in the name of justice and then sending him on a mission to kill hundreds of others as well? You’re right. I don’t approve. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to him?”

  He cocks his head and studies me. “Interesting. I detect a note of sympathy for the boy you seem to want to punish.”

  “Not sympathy. Understanding.” Behind me I can hear Ian struggling to breathe past the pain I dealt him. I should feel satisfaction at giving him an ounce of the agony he gave to me, but I don’t.

  “Understanding.” That awful sad little smile is back.

  “Yes. I understand how living under your rules could twist a person into the kind of sick monster Ian has become.”

  “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He extends his hand as if to help me up.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “There’s always a choice. Haven’t you learned that yet? You can choose to defy me and take the consequences. Or you can choose to be civil and get up to look at my garden with me.”

  How about if I choose to pretend to admire your garden while I plot the best way to defy you? I think as I ignore his hand and climb to my feet on my own. He leads me to the bank of windows and gestures toward the garden beyond. The blooming bushes, trees, and flower beds are bathed in golden light from the oil lamps that surround the garden and cut through it along a narrow cobblestone path.

  “What do you see?” he asks.

  I roll my eyes. “Is that a trick question?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Sure. Humor the man who destroyed my life. Sounds fun.”

  He sighs as if my insolence is another disappointment, and then points past a row of rosebushes. “Do you see that tree?”

  I shake my head. “There isn’t one.”

  He nods as if I’ve passed a test. “No, there isn’t. Not anymore. Do you know why?”

  “How in the world could I possibly know why there isn’t a tree in your garden?” I snap.

  “You’re a smart girl, Rachel. Why wouldn’t there be a tree?”

  I cross my arms over my chest and glare out the window. “Because there was never one in the first place.”

  “Wrong.”

  “What a shame. Are we done playing this game?”

  “There was a tree. A beautiful old pecan tree. It was my favorite in the entire garden.”

  “Is this the part of the conversation where I parrot back your condolences?”

  “Show some respect, Rachel,” Samuel says from behind us.

  Rowan waves his hand as if to tell Samuel not to worry. “Why wouldn’t that tree—my favorite tree—be there any longer?”

  “Because it blew down in a storm. Because you got cold one winter and chopped it up for kindling. Because you sent Ian after it before you sent him to Baalboden. Am I getting close yet?”

  “Because it became diseased.” His voice sounds just as regretful as it did when he told me he was disappointed in me. “I’d pruned that tree every fall. Cared for it every winter. Enjoyed its shade and its pecans every spring and summer. It was special to me, but then it began to rot from the inside out. By the time I discovered the rot, it was too late. The disease had spread from the branches down into the heart of the tree. If I didn’t cut it down, it would continue to die until one day, it might fall and hurt someone.”

  He waits as if I’m going to comment on the grand lesson I just learned, but I stay silent.

  “People are like trees. I prune them. Care for them. Guide them. And enjoy them the way a father enjoys a son when he becomes what he’s meant to be. But when I discover rot, I have to see how deep it goes. It isn’t enough to just cut off the obvious branch. I have to test the core of the tree to see if it’s still solid.”

  “And that’s why you had Ian kill his father? To see if Ian was still loyal to you?”

  “Exactly.” His smile is full of regret. “Sometimes a father must hurt his sons if he loves them.”

  “And sometimes a son must hurt his father if he loves you.” I turn to face him, this small man with the gentle smile and the incurable belief that people are pawns in a game that belongs only to him. “Why are you telling me this?”

  His smile dies. “Because I respected your father, and he is no longer alive to see the rot that has spread inside his daughter. But I can see it. The disrespect. The inability to comprehend that your actions led to the very th
ings you blame Ian for. Blame me for. I can see the rot, Rachel.”

  “So you’re going to cut me down like your favorite tree?”

  He meets my eyes for a long moment. “Yes.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF–NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  LOGAN

  The Commander and I reach the edge of the old city midafternoon the day after the attack. Our horses are worn out, their sides heaving, and their heads hanging low. We pushed them hard. I hope they can recover, but more than that, I hope the girls haven’t been harmed. We weren’t far behind the gang of highwaymen who attacked us. Now and then we caught glimpses of them, all riding horses—theirs and ours—as they traveled ahead of us. They couldn’t have been back at their camp for more than an hour.

  Hopefully, they used that time to stable the horses and settle in from their trip instead of using it to hurt the girls. If not . . . I try to run the scenarios, but I can’t force myself to think of all the grim possibilities. Instead, I follow the Commander into a copse of birch trees on a rise just outside the city, tether my horse, and then move to the edge of the trees so I can study what used to be a huge city before the tanniyn surfaced.

  The Commander joins me, and we stare at the sprawling grid of collapsed buildings, twisted metal spires, and piles of crumbled stone held in place by the hardy tufts of wild grass growing from their depths. A few blocks west of the city’s heart, the buildings are more intact, the streets cleaner. We can’t see clearly past the debris and ruined structures, but it seems likely that the highwaymen are using that area as their base.

  “They’ll have lookouts,” the Commander says.

  “Yes.”

  “We could enter from the east once night falls. Move through the city until we reach them. Then take them out one at a time.”

  “Or we could walk right in and pretend to be interested in trading for some of their wares,” I say because the girls have been in the highwaymen’s custody for nearly twenty-four hours now, and I am not going to take all night to reach them. If the Commander disagrees, I’ll enter the city alone, the Rowansmark device waiting in my pocket.

  “Trading.” The Commander snorts. “They’ll take one look at us and realize we’ve got nothing to trade. Especially nothing worth three girls, seven horses, and a piece of tech.”

  “I have a plan.”

  He takes his time measuring me with his stare. “I’m listening, and I’d better like what I hear.”

  I hold my ground, though it takes everything I’ve got not to reach for my sword. “You’re going to hate this plan until you hear how it benefits you,” I say. “I just ask you to listen to me until I get to that part.”

  He lifts his chin in my direction, an indication to keep talking.

  “We’re going to trade ourselves. Or, more specifically, you.”

  His scar twitches as he curls his lip. “You’re a fool if you think I’m agreeing to that.”

  “You haven’t heard how it will work yet.” I hurry on. “Rowansmark put a price on Jared Adams’s head, remember? A huge price. We’ll say that’s you.”

  “You want me to pretend to be Jared Adams.” His stare burns into me.

  “Yes. I’ll pretend to turn you over to them so that they can collect the bounty from Rowansmark. As a bonus, I’ll tell them I’ve recovered the thing you stole from James Rowan.”

  “You don’t offer something on the trading table that you can’t produce,” he says scornfully. “I don’t expect you to understand how these kinds of things work, so let me set you straight. If you tell a pack of highwaymen that you have something, and then you fail to show them the item, they’ll kill you. And then kill me because I was stupid enough to walk in there with you.”

  “I have the item.”

  His body goes still. “What?”

  “I have it. The device. Frankie recovered it from your tent before the highwaymen could pillage it. He recognized how important it was to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. He gave it to me.”

  His hand grips the hilt of his sword. “And you said nothing about this? You dragged me an entire day’s journey through the Wasteland because I thought we needed to recover the tech—”

  “Exactly. You wouldn’t have come, otherwise, and you wouldn’t have allowed me to leave. Not without a fight.”

  He pulls his sword free, and I take a step back. “You’d better get to the part where this benefits me, because I’m about to see the benefit of cutting you down where you stand.”

  I meet his eyes and make my voice steady even as I offer up the last piece of leverage I have against him. “You want to know how to work the tech. I’m going to show you. Consider the highwaymen’s camp to be a training ground for what you want to accomplish in Rowansmark.”

  And once he knows how to use the device, he’ll feel free to dispose of me as soon as we secure troops from Chelmingford. There won’t be any need for my technical expertise. He’ll betray me. I’ll just have to be ready.

  He smiles, and I shiver.

  “You’re a fool,” he says quietly. “I told you before that women are your weakness, and you’ve just proved me right. You’re giving up the one reason you still exist for the slim chance that we can rescue those girls and get them out alive. Your life for theirs. Be sure you think that’s a fair deal, because once we start this, there’s no going back.”

  “Are you saying you’re going to break your word and try to kill me before we take down James Rowan?” I raise a brow at him, though inside I’m shaking. He’ll kill me, wipe off his sword, and walk away without thinking twice if I let him. “What will you do if our one piece of tech can’t match what they have waiting for us there? What if we have to improvise or improve on it? How will you do that?”

  He watches me for a long moment, and then slowly sheathes his sword. “We have a mission. Our task is to engage and subdue the armies waiting for us and to remove James Rowan from power. Anything or anyone else is a distant second on our list of priorities. If you allow women on your team, you’ll worry over them. You’ll make decisions based on fear instead of on strategy.” There’s a tremor in his voice, a first for him. “And then those decisions will cost you your mission and the lives of others who depend on you to make judgment calls without emotion.”

  I frown as the shadows lengthen around us. “Are we talking about me? Or are we talking about Christina?”

  His mouth snaps shut, and he glares at me. “Who told you about Christina?”

  “Lyle Hoden mentioned her at breakfast. Is that what this is about? You cared about a girl and made a decision you regret?”

  “Let me tell you how leadership works.” His words are curt. “You can’t care about the individuals. You can only care about the group. The second you start caring about an individual more than the group, your ability to make decisions is compromised. You put one person above the whole, and it costs you the mission. It costs you the group.”

  “Caring about Christina cost you the group?” I stare at him. “Was she on your team?”

  I don’t expect him to answer me, but he does. His voice is weary. “She had talent as a soldier, but she hadn’t seen combat before the beasts surfaced. We were sent down that shaft to destroy the nest and seal up the hole. We thought we were facing one monster. Maybe two . . .”

  He stares at the ruined city where the late afternoon light lingers in pockets of golden, shimmering air. Finally, he says, “There were scores of them. Fat lizard things so big they could crush huge boulders beneath them. They were breathing fire and spewing smoke. We still might have been able to seal up the hole and get out, but Christina froze. Right in the path of three of the monsters, she just . . . froze.”

  “And you couldn’t detonate the bomb to seal the hole because she would’ve been killed.”

  “I tried to snap her out of it.” He jerks his gaze a
way from the city and straightens his shoulders. “But she couldn’t hear me. I tried to reach her. . . .” He touches the scar on his face as if remembering how he got it.

  “She died anyway, didn’t she?” I ask softly, feeling an uneasy sort of pity for him even while he visibly shakes off the effects of our conversation and squares his shoulders.

  “She died. Half the team died. All because I put her ahead of the mission. I never made that mistake again, and neither will you, because the second I think your ability to make decisions has been compromised, I’ll finish you. I’m not interested in dying because you feel a misguided sense of responsibility for the few instead of for the many.”

  “You loved her, didn’t you?” I know I sound too curious, too surprised, but I can’t help it. The thought that the Commander was once capable of love is too foreign to wrap my mind around.

  His eyes flash. “Let’s get this done.” He turns on his heel and stalks toward the city. I have to hurry to catch up.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF–NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  LOGAN

  We enter the city at mid-afternoon the day after the attack. I march the Commander in front of me, my sword out. I’m glad I don’t have to see his face while I do it. His necklace, the one that marks him as the leader of a city-state and is capable of keeping the tanniyn at bay, has been left behind. Buried beneath a tree close to where we tethered our horses. I carry the Rowansmark tech in my pocket, wired to the two additional transmitters I brought.