by Caryn Lix
Our goal was simple: find the ship. Alexei provided firepower in case we needed it, and Cage, Mia, and I would keep us fast—and invisible, in case we ran into that Karoch thing. My heart thrummed. There was no sense delaying. “We’ve got this,” I whispered.
Priya and Hallam cranked open the trapdoor, leaving us staring into a deceptively silent dark pit, a ladder descending who knew where. I swallowed hard, and Cage took my hand.
“I’ll go first,” said Mia. She glanced at me. “I can keep Alexei, me, and Matt invisible if you can handle yourself and Cage. That way Karoch can’t surprise us.”
“Got it.”
“All right.” But still no one moved. We all kept staring into the darkness, and not even Hallam had anything to say about it.
At last Mia drew a deep breath and swore loudly. “Well,” she said, “what the hell are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
As if she hadn’t been standing around exactly like the rest of us. But she moved now, shimmering and vanishing, taking Alexei and Matt with her. The sand stirred as she stepped onto the ladder and began her descent.
I tightened my grip on Cage’s hand, searching for the courage I’d found only a short time ago. “We can do this,” I repeated, mostly to myself.
Cage nodded. “Damn right we can.” He inspected the rest of our team. “See you on the other side.”
I forced myself to breathe, drew on Mia’s power, and sheltered us in invisibility. No more delaying. This was it. Win or lose, live or die, we’d know soon enough. And maybe, just maybe, we’d find our way home in the process.
Incursion.
Advancement.
Decay.
Despair.
Source of power drawing near.
Hunger but awaiting and driven and cold. The lines are not clear. They have crossed. Worlds collide. It bides its time and it waits and it watches.
Time is flexible. Malleable. Awake.
Awake, and wait.
TWENTY-SIX
THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED FAST AS we descended into the army base, making the desert heat nothing but a distant dream. The second Cage cleared the ladder behind me, he found my hand again—nice in its way, but probably mostly so we’d know where we were in the dark. “Mia?” I whispered.
“Right ahead of you.”
I shuffled forward a few steps and found her outstretched hand. “We need to stay close,” I reminded them. “We have lights, but if Karoch is around, we don’t dare risk using them.”
“We’re going to have to,” said Alexei. “I can’t see anything beyond the light coming in the door. Besides, if Karoch is here, I think it’ll be farther in.”
“No lights,” Mia insisted in a much sharper whisper than I’d thought was humanly possible. “I’ve been gored by those things twice, thank you very much, and I’d rather not round out the number.”
I blinked. Come to think of it, Mia was always the one who seemed to get hurt. And not just by the aliens. She’d been the one Gideon shot, too.
Cage, of course, had an answer as to why: “Because you’re always the one running in front and making yourself a target. Stick to the back this time and let me and Alexei take the lead.”
I could almost hear Mia’s scowl. “Please. You two make more noise than a tank,” she grumbled.
“Okay, enough of this,” said Matt, and a sudden burst of illumination flooded the room. I threw up my hand to shield my eyes as the others muttered in protest. “See?” Matt swung the light around the room, illuminating a metal hallway lined with doors and, at the far end, a flight of stairs. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Oh, for …” At once Mia reappeared, Alexei and Matt along with her. “Well, no point maintaining invisibility for now, then.”
Relieved, I dropped my own shield of invisibility. Caution mattered, but at the same time, I liked to see my comrades. Besides, Alexei was right: the big bad alien was unlikely to be hanging out on the perimeter. Or at least that’s how it worked on the vids and in manga.
We advanced toward the staircase. There were about five metal doors, all sporting grimy windows. I peered in the right side of the hall while Mia took the left, but there was nothing of interest: abandoned briefing rooms, some tables and folding chairs, blank screens dominating the main walls. I’d expected claw marks, slime trails, signs of alien destruction. But except for the dust, the army could have been here yesterday. Worse yet, none of the tech looked particularly alien. If Rune was going to glean any information, she’d have to come farther in.
We moved as silently as possible. Alexei and Matt, with their bulk, had more trouble keeping quiet than the rest of us, but they were careful, and I didn’t think we were making enough noise to worry over—at least not until we saw or heard something more dangerous than old conference rooms. We reached the staircase and left the glimmer of light from the entrance behind, descending a flight of grated metal stairs that reminded me painfully of Sanctuary and Obsidian.
Sanctuary the first, of course. I swallowed at the reminder. It was at the very least strange to stumble across another Sanctuary here on an alien planet.
A replacement for the first, making up for its shortcomings?
Or a warning from fate that we were walking into a sanctuary even more dangerous than the first?
Too late to question it now. I stayed close to Cage and Mia. Tension radiated off both of them, affecting me even more than the dark, echoing descent. It was like being trapped on the alien ship all over again, crawling desperately through Obsidian’s vents searching for escape … I closed my eyes, clutching the handrail to keep myself steady. This was not the place for a panic attack. I had to keep myself moving.
Cage nudged my arm, and I opened my eyes and gave him a shaky smile. He didn’t seem much steadier than me, and he wound his hand around mine. The contact helped, but the silence and the darkness continued to oppress, a physical weight burdening our descent. The only sounds were our stiff breaths and echoing footsteps, and I imagined the facility had been deserted for centuries, not years, or that it housed a horror vid’s worth of alien nests and eggs and God knew what else …
A voice erupted in my ear: “How’s it going down there, princess?”
I leaped straight into the air, my heart ricocheting around my ribs as the others stared at me in shock, half of them also clutching their chests. Scowling, I waved them off, touched my hand to my comm, and whispered, “We’re descending a staircase and trying to be quiet about it.”
Hallam chuckled. “Second team’s ready to advance on your mark.”
“Yeah, great. Maybe wait until I give it and don’t scare the hell out of me so I alert any alien in the area, huh?”
“Can do, princess. Radio silence from now on. At least, until you say so.”
I rolled my eyes and deactivated the comm. “I hate that guy,” I muttered.
“Hallam?” Matt chuckled. “It’s just his way of dealing with stress. There’s no one better to have at your back. I guarantee you Rune and Imani will come home without a scratch, which is more than I can promise for the rest of us.”
“He still annoys me,” I grumbled, and we resumed our trek.
We reached a second floor, and Matt dimmed the light while we eased the door aside. I braced myself for an ungodly creak, but it slid open silently. “It was probably electronically locked and controlled at one time,” Cage murmured, inspecting it with the clinical gaze of a former corporate thief. “It’s heavy and solid, but not likely to break.”
We listened and, when we didn’t hear anything, risked illuminating the next level.
A corridor branched in three directions, each extending into darkness. “This is going to take all day unless we split up,” Cage said with a sigh. “I’ll take the left branch. Lex and Mia, take the center. Matt and Kenzie, go right. Make sure every team has a light.”
I spun on him, panic twisting my gut. “You’re going by yourself?”
“I can outrun anything I see,” he said gently. “Makes the most sense for
me to go alone.”
Matt passed him a flashlight, and Alexei held up his hand, a flame shimmering in his open palm.
Mia scowled at Cage. “We don’t have comms. Separating is a bad idea. Like, horror-vid bad.”
“So is spending longer here than we need to.” Cage shrugged. “Besides, call it a hunch: I don’t think we’ll find anything yet. I think we need to move farther in.”
“Fantastic,” I groaned, but I fell into step beside Matt as the others went their own way.
We took the right-hand corridor, which branched into a series of what looked like combat prep rooms. They were lined with benches and lockers, all of which were empty when I opened them, as if the soldiers who’d worked here had taken their armor and weaponry before fleeing to the surface. Which made sense, if they’d been under attack. “Not much here,” I whispered to Matt.
“No. I think Cage is right.”
“He’s right a lot,” I replied. “It makes him incredibly annoying.”
“And dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
Matt half smiled. “People who are used to being right have trouble accepting when they’re wrong.”
He had a point. I peeked at him in the shadows as we came to the final room in our corridor, which seemed to be another mission briefing room. “Matt … about what happened on Sanctuary …”
He sighed. “Kenzie, I know it was an accident. It’s going to take me some time to let it go, but … we’re on the same side. Priya and Hallam, too, believe it or not. We all want the same thing: to get home.”
“Yeah.” I fidgeted with the hilt of the gun against my waist. After I’d accidentally shot Matt, I hadn’t wanted to touch a gun, not for a long time. Now here I was, standing behind Matt with my finger on the edge of a weapon, and he didn’t seem nervous at all. “But I’m still sorry.”
“You already said that. And that you forgave me.” He rolled his eyes. “For what it’s worth, I forgive you, too. Now let’s get back to the others, okay?”
I smiled in spite of myself, a weight vanishing from my chest. If I had to face an alien death, at least I could do it with my conscience clear. “Okay.”
Cage, Alexei, and Mia waited in the main corridor. “Nothing of interest,” Mia reported.
“Me either,” said Cage. “Kenz, why don’t you go ahead and call in the second team? We’ll keep going down.”
I nodded and triggered my comm. “Reed, you there?”
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “We’re worried up here, you know?”
“Nothing to be worried about,” I reassured him. “So far it’s been pretty anticlimactic. Go ahead and bring your team in. We’ve made it as far as the second floor without finding any alien tech, but you might as well advance. We’ll keep you posted.”
We continued to descend, finding a mess hall, a gym, a firing range: a fully stocked government facility with no sign of life—human, alien, or otherwise. After five flights of stairs, Cage stopped us mid-descent. “Anyone else getting a weird feeling about this?” he asked. “I mean, Eden said this was a small facility. How much farther does this go?”
“I think I can answer that,” said Mia. She was standing at a wall, studying it intently. “Kenz, come look at this. Bring a light.”
I pushed through the others to join her. She ran her fingers over the metal grooves and I aimed Cage’s flashlight toward her, revealing an arch in the wall. “That’s a platform lift!” I exclaimed. “Or close to one!”
“Yeah. Now look over here. See these marks? I think they’re floor numbers.”
I peered more closely, and Mia rubbed at the metal once more with her fist. Slowly, a dark shadow emerged, forming the number 5. “Yes!” I exclaimed. “We’re on the fifth floor. Are there more underneath?”
“Working on it.” Mia wrapped her hand in a scarf and went to work, rubbing down the metal until she was crouching on the floor. I followed her with the light, staring in disbelief at what she revealed.
“Well?” demanded Cage impatiently after a few minutes of silence.
“That can’t be right,” I said, half to myself.
Alexei’s voice took on a dangerous note. “What can’t be right?”
“According to this, there are seventeen floors. Is that even possible? Seventeen floors to the bottom of the base?”
The others fell into silence. Their pale faces reflected in the light, worry etched in every line. “Well,” said Matt at last, “I guess we’d better pick up the pace.”
Exhaustion seeped into me. Seventeen floors to explore? That was bigger than Sanctuary, bigger than Obsidian. Eden hadn’t mentioned this. She must have known. She’d been military herself. And if she’d lied about that …
What else wasn’t she telling us?
TWENTY-SEVEN
WE DESCENDED THROUGH FLOORS OF barracks, training rooms, and high-tech computers—human computers, potentially useful even without alien information, but beyond my understanding, unfortunately. The other teams had not reacted well to learning the facility was massively bigger than we’d anticipated, but they were on the move now, descending in our wake. “Maybe Eden didn’t know how big the facility really was?” I said dubiously as we reached the thirteenth floor. We weren’t being quite as cautious now, having come so far without seeing any alien presence. “Maybe she’d never been here?”
Alexei frowned. “She knew about an alternate entrance,” he said. “One hidden in the sand. How did she know that but not know the extent of the facility?”
“I would like to point out how I never trusted her,” Mia announced.
“But what’s her endgame?” Matt sighed. “What does she gain from lying to us?”
Cage shook his head, clearly baffled. “I don’t know. But we’ve descended more than ten floors without seeing this so-called alien technology of hers. I’m not sure it even exists. What do you think? Do we turn back? Confront her?”
We all hesitated in the stairwell. “If we do,” said Matt at last, “we give up on that ship. Assuming it exists, of course.”
“Eden has nothing to gain by killing us,” I added. “And if she wanted to, she’s had a dozen opportunities. Whatever’s going on here, she didn’t send us to die. I think we should keep going. At least find out what’s at the bottom of the facility.”
A noise in the distance made us all freeze. It was a strange, scraping kind of sound.
“Eden?” I whispered. My mouth suddenly went dry, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
“The other teams would have alerted us if she’d followed,” Cage replied, moving to the front of the group and drawing his gun.
Mia fumbled for Matt’s light, and he jerked it out of her reach irritably. “Would you stop? Whatever that is, it’s not a twenty-foot-tall monster. Have you noticed the ceilings in here? No way Karoch’s stomping around this area. And I’d rather not trip over anything because you’re more comfortable in the shadows.”
Mia hesitated, looking ready to argue, but another thump came from behind the closed door. She swallowed and stepped back, shimmering into invisibility as a silent protest.
The rest of us followed Cage and Matt to the door. Matt took a position against the wall, suddenly very military in his bearing. How much training had Legion given him? He’d mentioned some prior training, but he hadn’t moved like this, not on Sanctuary, not when I’d known him.
Of course, he wasn’t some kind of cyborg back then either. It was entirely possible they’d implanted behavioral modifications, changes to his mind as well as his body. Did Matt himself know the full extent of what Omnistellar had done to him? Did anyone?
He gestured to the rest of us to stand back, and I moved a few steps up the stairwell. Alexei followed, half shielding me behind his bulk, probably intentionally. I wasn’t about to complain. Instead I closed my eyes and focused on Alexei’s power. I’d never drawn from him before, but I was getting better at this process. Each ability spoke to me individually now instead of the mishmash of
power I’d sensed before. Alexei’s talent, a sparkling, crimson shimmer, hovered at the edge of my senses. I reeled it in, wrapping myself in its warmth, ready to attack at a second’s notice.
Matt nodded to Cage, eased the door open a crack, and recoiled against the wall.
But nothing leaped out, and after a moment, Cage nudged the door the rest of the way open. He peered inside, glanced back at us, and beckoned for us to follow.
We did, weapons clutched, powers ready. I kept Alexei’s ability charged in my fingertips. Could I use it and Mia’s invisibility at the same time? I’d never tried. I hadn’t had much time to experiment with my newfound powers. None of us had. A combat situation probably wasn’t the time to start, but I might be left without a choice.
We wound through the corridor in a loose line, Cage and Matt in the front, me in the middle, Alexei at my back, Mia God knew where. After a few seconds the sound echoed again: a rattle, or a drag, or a shift. Whatever it was, it was coming from farther down the corridor.
Cage looked over his shoulder and our eyes met. In the dim light I couldn’t distinguish his expression, but his body was taut, his muscles standing out beneath the body armor. Would it provide any protection against alien claws? I doubted it. Maybe against the harvesters, but the memory of those razor-sharp, far-too-long hunter claws assailed me and I trembled. I clenched my fists and locked my jaw to hide it, but I was shaking so hard I wasn’t sure I dared use Alexei’s power.
Much less a gun.
We resumed our trek and then, as we rounded a corner, Cage and Matt both stopped short.
Alexei and I followed suit. For a moment we all stood there, silent and still. The boys blocked my view, their broad shoulders a shield of tension. Every inch of me wanted to scream, to demand to know what they saw, what was ahead. I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood and didn’t let a sound escape.
Finally, Cage and Matt nodded at each other and stepped aside. I already knew what we’d see from the way they moved: each step a careful placement designed to make no noise whatsoever. It took them a full minute to retreat four or five steps, to plaster their backs against the wall to reveal what lay ahead.
