Reaping (43 page)

Remy’s beside me suddenly, arm slipping into the crook of mine as if she’s done this a thousand times.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi back,” I say, the flush of pleasure at her touch startling me. She pulls my hand up to her lips and presses my fingertips into a soft kiss. My whole body buzzes and I struggle to stay hitched to reality. I close my fingers around hers and squeeze.

“Okay you two, hop to. We gotta finish loading everything onto the goddamn airship,” is what I hear Firestone bark behind me, and both Remy and I jerk away from each other as we turn towards his voice. He strides up the loading dock into the passenger bay looking like he hasn’t slept in a year. “Gotta be out of here in a half hour, so says the Director. So get your butts moving.”

Remy drops my hand and turns away. I want to reach out for her, but she’s gone out the hatch, disappeared from view in the rising, glaring sunlight.

I sigh and follow Firestone up from the passenger bay to the nose of the ship.

“You loaded up the coordinates on the drop point yet?” I ask, pushing thoughts of soft skin and moist lips from my mind.

“Just about to. Should take about two hours.” I know this already. “Smooth sailing, I think. Not expecting any trouble in the air. You all should be clear until you make it inside the Sector’s drone range.”

“We’ve all got detectors,” I respond, nodding. “We’ll know when they’re around.” We’ve got an old-drone blocking unit installed on the ship, but it’s not foolproof like Firestone’s new version. The new one’s not portable yet, so for now, we’ll still have to avoid them when we’re in Okaria.

“Tell the others to finish loading up and strap in. We’ll be on our way shortly.”

28 - REMY

Spring 28, Sector Annum 106, 07h00

Gregorian Calendar: April 16

“Strap on and get ready!” Firestone hollers from the cockpit. We’re approaching the drop point, and we have to be ready to line down. Just as I’m securing all the straps on my pack, making sure it won’t come loose in the descent down the magnetic lines, I hear a strange knocking noise on one of the panels in the airship.

Vale and I exchange glances. Soren stands behind us and we each grip our weapons and walk, unsteadily, to the floor panel where the knocking is coming from. Soren follows.

“What are you doing?” Linnea calls from behind us. “We’re dropping in five.” But just then, the panel pops up and open. I jump back, startled, my heart pounding my chest, my Bolt pointed squarely at the gaping hole in the floor, where Jeremiah’s head has strangely appeared.

“What the hell?” Soren shouts.

“Hey,” Miah says casually, grinning up at me and Soren as if popping out of hidden compartments in airships was an everyday occurrence for him. His arms appear at his side, and he puts his palms on the floor and lifts the rest of his body out of what appears to be a tiny nook of space under the floor.

“Are you shitting me?” The sarcasm bleeds into Linnea’s voice.

“How did you fit in there?” Vale asks.

“I’m not the man I used to be,” he says, patting his belly, dusting himself off and smiling.

“Better question is, what the hell are you doing here?”

“What’s it look like?” Miah asks. “I’m coming with you.”

“It’s too dangerous,” I protest.

“When I heard you all were going to the capital on a top-secret mission—Firestone’s not very good at keeping top-secret missions top-secret, by the way—I just had to come along.”

Even Soren and Vale look none too happy to have him along.

“Why?” Vale asks.

He stares at him.

“You know why.”

“We’re not going to see her. Not unless everything goes sideways. If you wanted a rescue mission, this wasn’t the one to come on.”

He shrugs.

Soren clasps Miah by the arm. “So this is about Moriana?” Since his initial tryst with Osprey has blossomed into something so much more than what he and I had together, Soren’s been way happier, but at the same time, more thoughtful. Not so quick to anger—a strange trait for Mr. Soren Skaarsgard.

“It may be my only chance,” Miah explains.

Finally Chan-Yu speaks up behind us, whose quietude throughout this trip has been even more pronounced than usual. He’s clipping his weapons to his belt and strapping his bag across his shoulders.

“Miah is an engineer, correct?” It seems strange heading back into Okaria with Chan-Yu at my side as a comrade in arms. We all nod in response to his question. “It would seem beneficial to have another engineer while we’re setting up the equipment necessary to transmit information back to Okaria.”

“He’s too recognizable,” Vale says.

“With him 
and
 Linnea, we’ll be too recognizable,” I say.

“What the fuck is going on back there?” comes Firestone’s angry, loud voice over the intercom. It occurs to me that we’re supposed to be jumping from the airship into a rugged, mountainous area in about thirty seconds.

“Look, I brought my own gear and my own food,” Miah says. “I’ll keep my head down and stay out of the way.”

“We need to disembark,” Chan-Yu, calm as ever, pressing a button with his gloved hands. He slaps on the magnetism and grabs a line as the bay doors on both sides of the airship slide open. “The man’s made his decision,” he says, now shouting over the sound of the rushing air and wind. “I’m jumping. If he chooses to jump as well, I’ll meet him on the ground.”

I nod at Chan-Yu, whose fatalistic approach to change actually calms and encourages me. Chan-Yu hops up and out over the side of the airship, and I watch as his line unravels, letting him descend slowly. Linnea, cursing under her breath, follows suit.

Vale and Soren stare at Miah as if they don’t know what to do with him, but then they shove their gloves on, slap on the charges, and grab a line. Miah grins like a child with a face full of birthday cake and grabs his pack from the line where all of ours were arrayed, moments before. Right in plain sight. He unclips a pair of gloves and jams his hands in them.

“You dumb shits never thought to count them, did you?” He laughs.

Vale shakes his head in astonishment.

“Jump before I flip this goddamn airship upside down and toss you all out!” Firestone bellows.

We each grab a line and drop, weightless for a moment, through the air.

It’s so hot that steam rises around us as we push through the ferns and bushes of an old road. We’re hiking down through the Adirondack Mountains and Chan-Yu says there’s hard asphalt buried beneath the pine needles and centuries of forest decay. Because the terrain is so rugged, there’s no agriculture. The Outsiders have been using the Adirondacks to slip through Sector territory for decades. We’ll come down out of the foothills not twenty-five kilometers from the furthest exurbs of Okaria, a distance that can easily be covered in a day—or a night, if necessary, but we’ll be coming from a direction no one will be watching.

The downside is it’s a three-day hike from the drop point to the exurbs. And we weren’t counting on rain. The volatility of the weather is always something we have to prepare for, but hiking down steep mountainsides in slippery terrain is not the most auspicious start to our mission.

“Storm coming,” Chan-Yu observes.

“No, did the dark, ominous clouds clue you in?” Linnea mutters.

“Need to get to shelter before that hits.” Chan-Yu shows no sign of registering her sarcasm. “We have about an hour.”

“I’d be happy to have the rain cool me off,” Vale offers, walking ahead of me.

“Maybe we should strip naked and get a shower while we hike,” Miah suggests. He raises his arm and sticks his nose in his armpit. “Some eau de rainwater could enhance my pure animal magnetism.” He leans over Linnea with his arm still up. “What do you think?”

“Get away from me!” She pushes him away with a violent shudder. “You are such a child.”

“Yeah, so are we there yet? When’s lunch? I’m tired.” Miah shoots back with his typical smile. He may be a dangerous liability, but he’s also entertaining.

“Do you ever think about anything but your stomach?” Linnea spits back. “If you mention your stupid tomato sandwiches one more time I’m gonna scream.”

“You know, I brought these really awesome tomato sandwiches with cheese and spicy mustard covered with—”

Even Soren can’t hold back a laugh as Linnea clamps her hands over her ears. The first time she bit into a real tomato she threw up. Seems she’s allergic. And she can’t stand the smell of spicy mustard. To top it off, it turns out she’s lactose intolerant and spent the better part of a day in the bathroom after her first cheese binge. Watching—or rather hearing about—her going through withdrawal from her MealPaks has been an adventure in itself. Vale said she was always sharp-tongued, but without her MealPak meds, her tongue is more like a double-edged sword wrapped in razor wire.

As we walk through the hills, following Chan-Yu’s lead, the slate-colored clouds roll in over us, dropping dense bullets of rain. We pull on our slickers and continue, but the storm wets the path to the point where it’s so muddy we’re sliding up and down the hills rather than walking them.

“There’s an old house not far from here we can shelter until the storm passes!” Chan-Yu shouts back to us in between the rolling thunder, pounding the air with its heavy fists. My teeth chatter at the sudden drop in temperature, and I now wish for the earlier heat. Vale, next to me, doesn’t shiver, but just clenches his jaw, puts his head down, and plows ahead.

Chan-Yu leads us off the path a little ways, all of us stumbling through underbrush and the slick mud to follow his lead. On the top of a modest hill, I can see a ramshackle building, less of a house than a hut, tiny, decrepit with age. We shuffle up, pelted with raindrops the size of bumblebees dripping off the trees above us. I can’t think of a time in recent memory when I’ve been hotter, sweatier, wetter, or colder all within the same hour. Chan-Yu shoulders the rickety door open to get in, but as it swings open I realize the inside is absolutely nothing like the outside.

It’s spare but neat, clean, and surprisingly well-insulated against the roaring winds and rain outside. A little drip in one corner of the house pit-pit-pits onto the wooden floor, but who cares? It’s well-equipped with eight bunk-bed style cots, (small, granted—Miah and Soren would hardly fit), a small solar-powered refrigerator, a tiny kitchen, a bathtub behind a silk screen, and a little adjacent room with a toilet dug into the ground.

“There aren’t many of these outposts,” Chan-Yu says, rubbing his hands to warm them up. “They’re hard to keep secret, and hard to keep up. But there’s one here, one on the southern side of these mountains, and a few others scattered in various hard-to-reach places that the Sector considers to be their own territory, but in reality, we Outsiders move through with impunity.”

“This is wonderful, Chan-Yu,” I say, imitating him and rubbing my hands together.

“So, how about we dry off and get a meal, then?” Miah says, pulling off his rain gear and seating himself neatly on one of the cots, which bends and creaks under his weight. He pulls out what I presume is one of his sandwiches, neatly wrapped in waxed, preserved leaves.

Linnea, too, drops her pack and sits on the cot nearest me.

“I’ve been hearing about food for so long, I might as well eat something.”

“Eat quickly,” Chan-Yu says. “We move out as soon as the storm has passed.”

“What?” Linnea turns to Chan-Yu, surprised. “I thought we were going to stay here overnight.”

He shakes his head.

“We’ll still have at least four hours of daylight, Linnea,” Soren says. “We can’t stop just because there’s been some rain.”

“But it’s so slippery. We can’t even stay on the trail.”

“When the rain stops, I’ll see how bad the trail is. If we have to stay, we will. But I’d rather move.”

Linnea casts a longing glance over at Miah’s sandwich, which is by now more than half-gone. She bites, regretfully, into an apple, and speaks so quietly only I can hear her.

“I knew I shouldn’t have left Okaria.”

29 - VALE

Spring 28, Sector Annum 106, 15h30

Gregorian Calendar: April 16

We soon come to the most dangerous part of our journey into Okaria. Down in the flats, in the river valley as we approach the city from the east, drones everywhere and hovercar highways crisscross into the exurbs. We attempt to stay off the roads, but the land is swampy and open, with the exception of a few patches of trees that don’t actually provide much cover. I try to stay alert and focused, but my mind is preoccupied.

The storm had taken longer to pass than Chan-Yu anticipated, and by the time he was ready to check the trails, Soren, Miah, and Linnea had all fallen asleep. Remy, who before had been practicing a similar sort of meditation as Chan-Yu, opened her eyes when the door closed behind him and looked at me.

“Your mother,” she whispered, so soft that I had to cross the room and ask her to repeat as I sat next to her on the cot, “do you still love her?”

The question took me by surprise. I examined Remy’s face, trying to gauge if she had an ulterior motive by asking me, but she just inhaled and exhaled soft, even breaths as she waited.

“It’s okay,” she said, “I won’t judge you.”

I nodded. “I’m … not sure. If she stopped all of this, this—” I gestured with my hands to indicate something like 
madness
 “—but I don’t believe she will stop.”

“She needs to be stopped,” Remy said, placing a hand on my knee, sending my heart into an all-out sprint. I didn’t want to think about my mother, about the ways evil can creep into even the most steadfast hearts, about … “And so does Evander Sun-Zi, and Aulion Faulke, and—”

“I know,” I whispered, leaning in, inhaling the scent of crushed peppermint, the earthiness of rain still clinging in beads to her course hair, and the alluring, overpowering temptation of her skin. I wanted to will her blacklist from our minds, push the inevitable into the distance, and kiss her. Remy lowered her eyes, licked her lips, tilted her head up—
that is an invitation, right?—
and just as I almost touched her lips with mine, Chan-Yu swung the door and slammed it behind him.