“You’re sure we’re safe,” she said.
He was a silhouette, black on black against the stars to her left. “They’re past us already,” he told her. Which was not the same thing.
“There go the intercepts,” Laurie said behind them. Brief novae flared near Hercules—not contrails, but the ignition of antimissile salvos dropped from orbit. They’d be below the horizon by the time they hit atmosphere.
It was after midnight. They were standing on a rocky hill south of Freeport. Almost everything was stars and sky; the insignificant circle of earth below the horizon was black and featureless. They’d come here following the beeping of Ken’s handpad, linked to a periscope floating somewhere in the ocean behind them. Evidently their submarine— Phocoena, Laurie had called it— was a stargazer.
Taka could see why. The Milky Way was so beautiful it hurt.
“Maybe this is it,” she murmured. It was unlikely, she knew; this was only the second attack since they’d put their plan into motion, and how far could the word have spread by now?
And yet, three attacks in as many weeks. At that rate, they had to get lucky before too long...
“Don’t count on it,” Ken said.
She glanced at him, and glanced away. Not so long ago this man had stood at her back, one hand clamped easily on her neck, instructing Laurie in the disassembly of weapons systems that Taka could barely even name. He had been pleasant enough, then and since, because Taka had cooperated. He had been polite because she’d never stood in his way.
But Ken was on a mission, and Taka’s little experiment in grass-roots salvation didn’t seem to factor into it. He was playing along with her for some indecipherable reason of his own; there was no guarantee that tomorrow, or the next day, he wouldn’t run out of patience and go back to his original game plan. Taka didn’t know what that was, although she gathered it had something to do with helping Ken and Laurie’s waterlogged kindred; she had learned not to waste time pressing either of them for details. It had involved getting into the Portland clave, which evidently Ken had not been able to do on his own.
It had also involved hijacking Taka’s MI, which he had.
Now she was alone with two empty-eyed ciphers in the dead of night and the middle of nowhere. Beneath the intermittent camaraderie, the humanitarian pitching-in, and all the best-laid plans, one fact remained unassailable: she was a prisoner. She’d been a prisoner for weeks.
How could I have forgotten that? she wondered, and answered her own question: because they hadn’t hurt her...yet. They hadn’t threatened her...lately. Neither of her captors seemed to indulge in violence for its own sake; hereabouts that was the very pinnacle of civilized behavior. She had simply forgotten to feel endangered.
Which was pretty stupid, when you got right down to it. After the failure at Portland, there was every chance that Lubin would revert to Plan A and take her vehicle. Laurie might or might not go along with that—Taka hoped that some bond remained beneath that cool reinstated façade—but that might not make much difference either way.
And there was no telling what either of them would do if Taka tried to get in their way. Or if they ran out of more efficient alternatives. At the very best, she could be stranded in the middle of the wildlands—an immunized angel with clipped wings, and no Miri to back her up the next time some red-eyed man came looking for salvation.
“I’m getting a signal from Montreal,” Ken said. “Encrypted. I’m guessing it’s a scramble.”
“Lifters?” Laurie suggested. Ken grunted an affirmative.
Taka cleared her throat. “I’ll be back in a sec. I have to take a wicked pee.”
“I’ll come with you,” Laurie said immediately.
“Don’t be silly.” Taka waved downhill into the darkness, where the peak they occupied emerged from threadbare woodlands. “It’s only a few meters. I can find my way.”
Two starlit silhouettes turned and regarded her without a word. Taka swallowed and took a step downhill.
Ken and Laurie didn’t move.
Another step. Another. Her foot came down on a rock; she wobbled momentarily.
Her captors turned back to their tactics and machinery. Taka moved carefully downhill. Starlight limned the bare outlines of obstacles in her path. A moon would have been nice, though; she tripped twice before the tree-line rose before her, a ragged black band engulfing the stars.
As it engulfed Taka herself, a few moments later.
She looked back up the hill through a black mesh of scrub and tree trunks; Ken and Laurie still stood at the top of the hill, motionless black cutouts against the sky. Taka couldn’t tell whether they could see her, or even whether they were looking in her direction. She’d be plainly visible to them if she were standing in the open. Fortunately, not even their night-creature eyes could penetrate tree trunks.
She had a few minutes at most before they realized she was gone.
She moved as quickly as she could without raising a racket. Thankfully there wasn’t much undergrowth; in better days the sunlight filtering through the canopy had been too sparse, and more recently—more recently, sunlight was hardly the limiting factor. Taka felt her way blindly through a maze of vertical shafts and leaf litter and thin soil rotten with ßehemoth. Low branches clawed at her face. Gnarled old tree trunks resolved from the darkness barely a meter ahead; young spindly ones jumped out at her with even less warning.
A root caught her foot; she toppled, biting back a cry. One outstretched hand came down hard on a fallen branch. The sound it made, snapping, echoed like a gunshot. She lay twisted on the ground, nursing her scraped palm, straining to hear any sounds from up the slope.
Nothing.
She kept going. The slope was steeper now, more treacherous. The trees that sprang up in her path were only skeletons, dry and brittle and eager to betray her with the firecracker report of every snapped twig and broken branch. One of them caught her just below the knee; she pitched forward, hit the ground, and couldn’t stop. She tumbled down the slope, rocks and treefall stabbing her in passing.
The ground disappeared. Suddenly she could almost see. A broad dim swathe of gray rushed towards her; she recognized it in the instant before it struck her, peeling skin from her forearm.
The road. It ran around this side of the hill like a hemline. Miri was parked somewhere along its length.
Taka got to her feet and looked around. She’d had no way to plot her course down the hill, no way of knowing exactly where on the road she’d landed. She guessed, and turned right, and ran.
The road was clear, thank God, its dim gravel albedo just enough to keep her oriented and on track. It unspooled gently around the shoulder of the hill, shattered stone crunching beneath her feet, and suddenly something glinted in the darkness ahead, something straight-edged and shiny under the stars...
Oh thank God. Yes. Yes!
She yanked open the driver’s-side door and piled inside, panting.
And hesitated.
What are you going to do, Tak? Run out on everything you’ve been trying to do for the past two weeks? Just drive away and let the witch take over, even though there may be a way to stop it? Sooner or later someone’s going to strike gold, and this is where you’ve told them to bring it. What happens when they show up and you’ve run off with your tail between your legs?
Are you going to call for help? You think it would come before Ken and Laurie had their way with you, or just hopped into that submarine of theirs and disappeared back into the Mariana Trench? Do you think it would come at all, these days? And what about tipping off the enemy, Tak? What about whoever or whatever is trying to stop the very thing you’re trying to help along? Are you going to risk all that, just because of something two borderline personalities with funny eyes might do if you got them angry?