United: An Alienated Novel (16 page)

There was a long pause, followed by, “What about Aisly? Did she know?”

“Yes. But I don’t think she was involved directly, if that matters.”

“It doesn’t,” Syrine said in a flat voice. Aelyx worried he’d overwhelmed her, until she finished her statement. “But my opinion still stands. They might have information we can use. We should question them first. Then kill them.”

“She has a point,” Elle added. “The Aribol are a mystery. We can’t fight an enemy we don’t know.”

Aelyx scratched his jaw and weighed their logic against his own. On the surface, capturing the hybrids might seem like a good idea, but interrogating the pair wouldn’t necessarily yield the truth. “I think it’s too much of a risk to let them live. If I get a clean shot at either of them, I’m going to—”

A low rumble interrupted him, originating from somewhere high above. Aelyx flattened his back against the wall and nestled into the bushes for more concealment. “This is it,” he called through the sphere. “As soon as the ship lands, report its position. Then disconnect and go silent.”

But as it turned out, they never had the chance.

The ship remained cloaked and didn’t land, instead hovering above the factory for several long seconds. Aelyx heard light plinking noises, like hail falling onto the roof, and then Jaxen’s amplified voice called out over the whirring engine.

“I’m disappointed, but I can’t say I’m surprised.” The voice boomed from all around, menacing and almost godlike in its effect. Aelyx’s stomach clenched because he realized what this meant. Jaxen knew. Somehow he knew they were waiting for him. “I gave you a chance to return where you belong, so don’t let it be said that I’m not reasonable. This is the outcome you deserve.”

Still invisible, the ship’s engines roared, and it jetted into the distance, leaving a warm gust of wind in its wake. Aelyx jumped to his feet as understanding dawned. He yelled, “Run!” at the top of his lungs and sprinted away from the building, pumping his legs as fast as they could carry him. He’d barely made it halfway across the parking lot when a surge of blistering energy came from behind and swept his boots off the ground.

He was flying, hurtling through the air with dizzying speed toward the wooded acreage beyond the lot. He flailed his arms and watched in horror as a thicket of tree limbs rose up to meet him. He saw bark, rough and patchy, and shut his eyes. In his last moment, there was no reflection or regret, only fear of impact as he tensed his muscles for the blow. Then his body collided with unmoving timber, and the earth went dark.

Cara was already in the shuttle when her brother called. “I’m on my way,” she told him.

“No rush. The ambush was a bust.” As if anticipating her next question, Troy quickly added, “Don’t freak out. I’m fine and so is Larish.”

“What happened?”

“Aisly was here,” he muttered darkly. “I fired on her as soon as she stepped out of her shuttle. Hit her too, but she’s slippery as sin. She ran around the other side and climbed back in before I could catch her; then she was gone. She didn’t have a chance to blow up the factory, though, so there’s that. Maybe she’ll come back.”

Cara slouched in her seat. They’d lost the element of surprise. “Not alone, she won’t. Any word from the other group?”

“No. They’re not answering their spheres. I don’t like it.”

Cara didn’t need to hear any more. She veered east toward Aelyx’s location. “I’m going to check it out. Find someplace to lie low until I can come and get you.”

“Hey, Pepper?”

“Yeah?”

“I know you can hold your own, but promise you’ll be careful, okay?”

“Promise,” she said absently, and disconnected.

Her mind was already reeling with terrifying explanations for why Aelyx hadn’t answered his sphere, and it didn’t help to see a turret of smoke rising in the distance where his factory stood … or had once stood. She’d seen smoke like that before, and she knew what it meant.

She pushed the accelerator to the limit, occasionally glancing at the roads below for emergency response vehicles. She didn’t see any, which told her the explosion had just happened. As she approached, her fingers trembled on the controls, her grip so sweaty that she overshot the destination and had to turn around.

The demolition was noticeably different from the site in upstate New York. Instead of a pile of rubble, half the factory walls remained standing, as if the building had been detonated from above. The ruins were engulfed in flames, so she hovered close to the ground, below the smoke, and scanned the rubble for Aelyx.

She had to keep wiping her clammy palms on her jeans and reminding herself to breathe. Each time she came up empty, she fanned farther and farther out from the building. As she continued searching without any sign of him, it began to occur to her that his group might’ve been inside when the structure collapsed. Her eyes watered, and she roughly scrubbed them clear.

She couldn’t afford to think that way.

Movement from her periphery caught her eye, and she whipped her gaze to a line of broken trees adjoining the property. A petite body rolled over to face her. It was Elle. Cara landed the shuttle so abruptly her skull rattled. In an instant she was by Elle’s side, shouting in a rush, “Are you all right? Where’re the others? Where’s Aelyx?”

Panic had tunneled Cara’s vision, so it took a moment before she noticed the blood seeping down the side of Elle’s shirt. She searched for the source of the wound and discovered a six-inch sliver of wood protruding from Elle’s shoulder.

Elle used her other arm to push into a sitting position. Half her face was blackened. “Is my med-kit in the shuttle?”

Cara nodded. “I’ll get it.”

“No.” Elle gripped her sleeve. “Help me inside. I’ll start treating my wounds while you look for the others.”

Cara wrapped an arm around Elle’s waist and gently lifted her to her feet. Soon the shuttle was airborne again. While Elle rummaged through her medical kit, she told Cara that each of them had been stationed at a different wall before the explosion. Cara glided south, and soon afterward, she spotted Syrine rocking back and forth on the ground, cradling a broken ankle. Cara helped her into the shuttle, too. As she returned to the pilot’s seat, she detected the distant wail of sirens and knew it wouldn’t be long before the authorities arrived and proceeded to blame her for this, assuming they didn’t shoot her on sight.

She had to find Aelyx, fast.

While scanning the area for him, she remembered an advanced function in their com-spheres that allowed one user to track another. She called over her shoulder into the backseat, “Someone track Aelyx’s sphere.”

Syrine whimpered in pain but did as she was asked. She pointed a trembling finger north. “Go that way for three hundred yards.”

The signal led to a dense expanse of trees, the tops of which had been blown off during the blast. Below the scorched tips, enough leafy branches remained intact to block Cara’s view of the ground, so she landed as close to the woods as possible and hit the grass running. She followed the tracker to Aelyx’s sphere, buried beneath a pile of leaves, but he was nowhere to be found.

“Aelyx!” she shouted, turning in a clumsy circle.

The only reply was a chorus of sirens, growing louder by the second.

She ran deep into the trees and called out to him. Her eyes burned from the haze of smoke in the air, but she forced them open as she pushed a trail through the underbrush. She grunted in frustration, slowed by low branches that slapped her arms and face, until a familiar gray shirt came into view, and her heart turned over in her chest.

She’d found him, crumpled on the ground in an unnatural position that sent a surge of panic through her veins. She skidded to a stop beside him and dropped to her knees, instantly checking his face for color. He seemed to be breathing, but her hands shook too violently to check for a pulse. She lightly slapped his cheek and said his name.

He moaned and slurred something she couldn’t understand.

Instincts took over. As if operating independently of her brain, her eyes scanned the lacerations on his face and the angle of his limbs to assess his injuries while her fingers gently probed his spine to determine whether it was safe to move him. She didn’t feel any irregularities, but she was no expert. “Can you move your legs?”

He answered with a groan and shifted his feet.

That was good enough for her. She stood up, grabbed him beneath the arms, and began hauling him back the way she’d come. He struggled to maintain consciousness, lifting his head and then letting it fall back. At one point, he opened his eyes and asked in his native language if she was real.

“I’m real,” she panted, stumbling across the scorched, littered landscape. “Try to wake up. Keep talking to me.”

“I don’t want to fight anymore,” he slurred in L’eihr.

Neither did she. She couldn’t believe she had ever cared who was right and who was wrong. She didn’t want to be right. She only wanted him to be okay.

Elle was waiting outside the shuttle, having already removed the jagged splinter from her shoulder. Together she and Cara hoisted Aelyx onto the backseat. Then, as the first fire engines and squad cars pulled into the lot, Cara raised the shuttle and piloted them away from the smoking ruins.

This place didn’t seem so fertile anymore.

Chapter Eleven

H
uman scientists claimed that pain couldn’t be felt in dreams, but Aelyx knew better. On a regular basis he experienced pain while he slept, either because he wasn’t human or simply because the scientists were wrong. Regardless, his mind had been replaying the events of the attack, forcing him to relive every detail of his suffering: the sick sensation of falling, the crunch of his bones upon impact, the dull, pulsating throb of his organs as he lay on the ground unable to move. He watched it happen in a detached sort of way, but his nerve endings screamed just as loudly as they had in real life. When the dream began to falter, interrupted by fingers of reality, his agony faded by gradual degrees until the only discomfort that remained was a slight ache between his temples.

He groaned in immense relief.

Someone whispered, “He’s waking up.” It sounded like Syrine.

The first thing Aelyx detected was a mildew scent, not the kind found in nature, but the concentrated dampness of an old, neglected home. He was aware that he lay on his back, stretched out with a pillow supporting his head. As he shifted his limbs, he felt the cool brush of linen on his bare skin. He knew this sensation. He was naked between bedsheets.

His eyes flew open. Where was he, and why was he naked?

He darted a glance at his surroundings and found himself lying on a thin mattress situated on the floor of what appeared to be a formal living room. Right away he could tell the house had been abandoned. There were no furnishings in the room other than a dilapidated wingback chair missing its seat cushion and a broken, upended coffee table resting beside an empty fireplace. The wood floors were dirty, and someone had defaced the walls with red spray paint. With no electricity, the only illumination came from between the slats of a boarded-up window. Judging by the dim orangey glow outside, dusk had fallen.

He didn’t see Cara, but he noticed her brother leaning against the open doorframe, his arms folded and his face concealed by shadows. In the opposite corner, Syrine sat on the floor wearing an expectant smile. One of her feet was propped up on the chair’s missing seat cushion. Elle knelt at the foot of the mattress. As soon as his eyes met hers, she crawled across the sheets and sat beside him.

“Hello, brother.” Her mouth curved in a triumphant grin, as if she’d beaten him in a game of sticks and couldn’t wait to gloat about it. “Feeling better, are you?”

Aelyx cleared the thickness from his throat and pushed slowly to his elbows. His muscles protested against the movement, but only with the slight soreness that followed an intense workout. He noted the med-kit lying open on the floor. Half its contents were missing.

“Remember the other day,” Elle said, “when you wanted me to use the healing accelerant to fix your
l’ihan
’s bruises, but I insisted on saving the medicine for an emergency?” Her teeth flashed. “Well, your spleen can thank me for that. And your ribs. And your concussed head, which isn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be.”

“And my ankle,” Syrine added, pointing at her elevated foot.

At these words, Elle lost her smile, and her posture stiffened visibly. Aelyx noticed a reaction from Troy as well, who clenched his shoulders and released a loud breath through his nose. Syrine seemed to detect the abrupt change in them too, because she quickly turned her eyes to her lap. In the time it took to blink, the tension in the room had grown heavy enough to carpet the floor.

“Yes.” Elle forced a grin that didn’t fool him. “We were lucky. There was barely enough accelerant to go around.”

Troy announced, “I’ll go tell Cara you’re awake,” and then he walked away without a backward glance.

Sacred Mother. What had happened inside this house?

“Cara went to find you some clothes,” Elle prattled on. “We had to cut off your old ones before I could treat you.”

For the first time, Aelyx noticed his sister wasn’t wearing her L’eihr uniform, and neither was Syrine. They’d both changed into oversize sweatpants, rolled up at the ankles, and mismatched, loose-fitting T-shirts. But that didn’t matter. He wanted to know what they weren’t telling him. “Where are we?” he croaked, and cleared his throat again. “How long have I been asleep? And why is everyone acting so strangely?”

Elle flicked a lightning glance at Syrine and then seemed to make a concerted effort not to look at her again. Aelyx might assume the pair had been fighting if it weren’t for the way Syrine curled against the wall, pressing herself to the plaster as if wishing she could disappear inside it. He knew his best friend well enough to see she felt guilty about something.

Elle smoothed a wrinkle on the top sheet. “It’s been about four hours since the explosion. Cara picked us up in the shuttle, and then we went to fetch Troy and Larish. Jaxen bombed their factory, too.”