Angeli (17 page)

He did. It felt like stabs of disappointment in his veins.

“If I head for California now, I can be back in less than an hour,” he told her after a moment. “Where do you want me to leave you?”

She cast him a sharp glance. “You’re not leaving me.”

“This is reconnaissance. Get in, get out. Tomorrow is when you participate,” he lied. “Remember the plan?”

“I don’t think we should be separated.” She buttoned the shorts. “If you’re not with me, Nikolas could find me and hold me hostage to make you give up. He seems the type.”

What would he do if Niko betrayed them? He hadn’t decided. Would he throw himself to the shades and doom Ship in hopes the leviathan would ignore the planet? Or would he choose Ship and let the shades overrun Terra?

If he chose Ship, would Adelita choose him?

He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out. Every minute he was with her, he was less sure he’d do the right thing. He was less sure of the right thing.

“I’ll leave you a blaster,” he finally offered. “If Niko comes looking for you, shoot him. He won’t expect you to have one.” The band wouldn’t work for her, but she didn’t know that.

“I want my own wings. I’ll take the broken ones and you can keep the good ones.”

“No can do. You’re not conditioned to withstand implantation.” While multipurps and other enhancements had worked for Adam Alsing, Gregori’s team had tweaked his body without altering his DNA as part of the Chosen One’s training. There was no time to tweak Adelita, and he didn’t know how anyway.

“You think I can’t handle pain?” She arched an eyebrow. “You must not have noticed my tattoo.”

He hadn’t, and refused to be distracted wondering where it was. “I’m sure you can handle whatever gets thrown at you, which is why I can leave you behind. I won’t be gone long.”

She hoisted her backpack and glowered at him. “If it’s more than five minutes, it’s too long.”

“The less attention I attract doing the survey, the better. We don’t want the horde stirred up.” Because he’d shown the Terrans how to starve the horde, all entities within a certain radius of the kill zone would be drawn to sentients like starving magnets. He’d seen daemons take down squadrons of military jets that flew too close as if the planes were ladybugs.

“What if you miss something? We need two sets of eyes to double our—”

“During this part,” he interrupted, “one sentient is better than two and will attract less interest. Stealth mission.”

“Okay, fine.” She yanked on her backpack, lips tight. “Take me to the hotel at Old Faithful.”

He tried to follow her chain of thought and failed. “If Niko wants to double-cross us, your being at the drop-off site makes it easy for him.”

“If Nikolas wanted to double-cross us, we’d already be in custody or dead.”

Gregori raised an eyebrow. “So you
don’t
think he’d take you hostage?”

“Only if Ship or your general forced the issue. He hopes this will work, too. That’s why he agreed to steal the bomb. Couldn’t you tell?”

“Maybe. I can’t decide.” He unclasped an extra blaster and squeezed it into a smaller shape. “He spent the past month trying to stop me instead of help me. That can’t be overlooked.”

In all the years they’d worked together, Niko had never been incompetent, yet on this mission he’d violated code as a handler and failed as a tracker. It did make Gregori speculate.

“Would it have taken you a month to find him if he went rogue?”

Gregori considered how he’d have gone about stalking a runaway handler. “Two days, max.”

“Then he was helping you. Somehow.”

Hearing Adelita express it solidified his vague suspicions. Why
had
Niko taken so long? Why had he kept appearing alone? He didn’t believe the other man had spent his time screwing his way across Terra, no matter how often he’d slipped up during the original mission.

Niko hadn’t been himself in months. As such, he was unpredictable. “I don’t think we can be sure of anything with Niko.”

“I’m sure.” She found her ponytail holder and snared her hair out of her face. “I may be a primitive who can’t bear the pain of angeli wings, but I can read people. That man is even more conflicted than you are.”

“I’m not conflicted.”

She laughed. “And here I’d begun to wonder if your code allowed you to make jokes.” She held out her arm for the band. After he clicked it in place, she shook it. “How do I make it shoot?”

“You concentrate on it and tell it to fire. It will need time to acclimate.”

“How long?”

“It varies. A week. A few days.” More like three to four weeks. There were serums on Ship that could reduce the time to a matter of days—they had to be careful when altering DNA so it would still register as native to the entities—but it wasn’t as if he had access to Ship’s medtech.

“That’s not enough time for me to shoot Nikolas,” she said, eyes widening. “I’d really like to shoot him.”

“It will work faster if you, ah, think about it a lot.” He picked her up and spread his wings. “Hold on.”

She locked her fingers behind his neck. “I haven’t told you my terms. If you leave me behind, I want a way to communicate with you.”

They rose above the smoking hot springs and craters of the Yellowstone Basin. Up here, the swath of geothermal wasteland next to lush forests made the landscape seem alien even to him. “I can’t give you a comm. Our arrays are endo-organic.”

“You’d think you people would have had the sense to rig it where you could stick one end of your bits and bobs in a computer,” she said. “They do stuff like that on sci-fi shows all the time.”

Even if Gregori could figure it out, which was unlikely, Ship monitored the comm channels. It was hard to keep secrets from Ship, but not impossible if you stayed off-comm. “The comms aren’t secure.”

“What about the signal Nikolas is going to send us?”

“I don’t know how he’s planning to do that.” Perhaps, in all his spare time when he was supposed to be stopping Gregori, Niko had created an encryption that Ship couldn’t decipher. And perhaps he just hoped he could comm Gregori under Ship’s radar. If Gregori had his way, delivering the bomb to the nexus would happen so quickly, Ship wouldn’t be able to stop him anyway.

Adelita’s arms tightened around his neck as they increased velocity. “That one knows more than he’s telling. I guarantee it. Dios, you’re fast with these new wings. I can hardly see the ground.”

They reached the hotel in minutes. “I want you near the big springs up the road.” It was possible the mineral content of that area would confuse the arrays of anyone searching for Adelita.

“Motel,” she insisted. “I want to see Old Faithful. It’s on my bucket list.”

They argued. She won. He let her.

He’d only be gone an hour. That part was true. He needed a real-time assessment of the kill zone, the radius of the shade zone that surrounded the kill zone, and the number of shades, daemons, and begetters in the area. He needed to calculate the best flight path to get him to the nexus so he could reasonably expect to hit it with the bomb. The entities would sense him no matter what he did. Detection was bound to happen. The question was whether he could deliver the payload before he got swarmed—and whether the bomb could neutralize the nexus before the swarm analyzed his DNA.

The part that wasn’t true was how Adelita’s job would be to lure entities away from the kill zone long enough for him to burst through the defenses. A lone sentient wouldn’t sidetrack enough of the horde to make a difference. A lone sentient who wasn’t trained, enhanced, and raised to kill entities would never survive either way.

Adelita was going to have a chance if it was the last thing he did. And it would be.

Chapter Thirteen

On the bench near Old Faithful, Adelitawatched Gregori desert her without shedding a tear.

She watched Nikolas arrive within minutes, and it was harder, then, not to cry. It made what she suspected about Nikolas, and about Gregori’s chances, all the more real.

He landed as gracefully as Gregori, his wings just as wide, his glow bright. The resemblance ended there. His skin was the darkest of the angeli, his hair the blackest, and his reputation the pits. “I’ve been watching you.”

“Sounds like something you’d do, creeper.” She wondered what he’d witnessed at the springs and decided she didn’t care. “Nice wing pack.”

He shrugged. The feathers rippled, glinting at the tips like diamonds. “I have spares.”

Adelita crossed her arms and stretched out her legs. “Are you here to convince me one Ship is more important than my entire planet? Take me hostage? Bring me jewelry?”

“None of the above. I want to talk.”

She noticed he didn’t get close to her, even taking into consideration the aliens’ generous definition of personal space. “How thoughtful. I love to talk. When are you getting the bomb?”

“Tomorrow about four a.m. your time.” His glow faded and his wings retracted until he looked almost like a normal man. Normal except for the knee-length white tunic and silver breastplate. The geyser spluttered behind him briefly. “I’ve run Gregori’s scenario all the ways I can think of. It’s not going to work.”

She didn’t think it would, either, which was why she’d been expecting Nikolas.

“It might,” she said anyway. “It’s better than giving up.”

“You’re willing to kill Ship and everyone on it?”

She tilted her hat brim. “You’re willing to kill my planet and everyone on it.”

He studied her. The sun beat down on them both, and he was not sweating. Adelita removed her hat and fanned her face, trying to appear unmoved.

“You’re a surprise, Miss Martinez,” he conceded. “I did not expect Gregori to pick up a sidekick.”

“He’s my sidekick.” Adelita wished Nikolas would get to the point. He was here to make her an offer she couldn’t refuse, and that was her favorite type to decline. “You’re the invading aliens. I’m the hero. I’m the one with a sidekick.”

“Could be.” He tapped one of the bands on his wrist. He must have had spares of those, too, and a spare tunic and armor, because he showed no signs of his and Gregori’s bloody skirmish. “We have forty-eight minutes before he returns. I have to be out of his sensor range by then.”

“
His
sensor range. Is it not the same as yours?”

He smirked.

Gregori had mentioned Nikolas was the IT guy for their team. He could have cobbled something together, like the signal he claimed he could send them undetected by Ship. “If you’re such a great spy, why did it take you weeks to find him?”

“It didn’t suit me to until today.”

“Uh-huh.” That wasn’t the whole story. “What changed?”

He didn’t answer immediately—probably deciding what lie to tell her.

“You,” he finally said. It didn’t feel dishonest, but again, it didn’t feel like the whole story, either. “I saw you with him and knew he’d become weak. Because of you, he could screw things up instead of being so insufferably perfect.”

She recognized a guilt trip when she heard one. She also recognized envy and some other deadly sins. “You’re jealous of him.”

When he glared at her, she continued. “You wish you’d done what he’d done and fought for what was right.”

“You think I’m not fighting?” He took two steps toward her before stopping himself. His hands fisted. “You think I’m happy about what’s happening to this planet and the people on it?”

She didn’t, but this was a man longing to confess, a master plotter who wanted someone to appreciate his scheme. All he needed was goading. “What have you done beside fail?”

His teeth flashed in an angry sneer. “Let’s just say I’ve had a frag of a time explaining why Gregori keeps evading me and how he can be in so many places at once, killing daemons and keeping the shades from advancing across the continent.”

“He works hard, unlike some people I could name.” Adelita pretended to buff her nails and watched Nikolas through her eyelashes. “He’s tough and smart and determined.”

“He also had help.” Nikolas smiled. “Don’t tell him.”

Adelita put her hat back on her head, shading her face. The geyser spurted and hissed. “You. I thought so.”

“You did?” His eyes widened briefly. “Never mind. Your presence still changes things.”

“How so?”

“Because of you, he’s going to kill us all.”

“Enough with the blaming.” She jumped up and stomped across the concrete. He backed away immediately. “He’s going to die trying. Unlike you. You’d die running and screaming.”

“It’s not my intention to die at all.”

Her anger blasted through the lump in her throat that appeared whenever she thought about Gregori dying. She swatted at Nikolas, and he dodged. “I should punch out your lights.”

“Get away from me,” he said. “Just stay back.”

“What are you scared of? A teeny thing like me?” She held up the wrist with Gregori’s silver band, feeling like Wonder Woman. “I don’t know how to use this yet, and I don’t have my binoculars handy to knock you out.”

“Miss Martinez, please.” His expression pained, he held up both hands. “This will go a lot more smoothly if you stay over there and I stay over here.”

“You can’t possibly have a thing for me.” She stuck her hands on her hips. “I’m fantastic, but I’m not interested, you got that?”

“Trust me, I’m not interested, either. But I can’t stop myself from—” He swiped his mouth but failed to conceal a groan of frustration. “I don’t want to talk about this. It has nothing to do with anything that matters right now.”

“Okay, okay.” She quit provoking him. Maybe alien humans had mating cycles and he was in his. As she understood it, the angeli weren’t supposed to screw around with Terrans, yet Nikolas had. Perhaps the other angeli had, too. Gregori had waited until he’d rebelled from his Ship and met her. “I’m guessing you’re here to do something behind Gregori’s back. Otherwise we could have talked anytime between when we met you and now.”

He smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “I didn’t want to interrupt your earlier activities.”

“Whatever.” If he was trying to embarrass her for having sex with Gregori, it wouldn’t work. As far as she was concerned, the only embarrassing thing was that she hadn’t taken her angeli to bed their first night together. She’d missed several days’ worth of the last sex she might ever have. “What is it you don’t want Gregori to know? I suspect he realizes the other thing, about him dying. He’s got martyr shining out his butt.”