This made no sense at all to her! Not only had they killed White’s boy, they had taken the only bargaining chip she had left. She stroked the child’s head, his hair, and she wept.
She wanted to be tough.
But with the dead child, and the realization that Logan was going to die — and that there was nothing she could do to prevent it — these things and every other thing she hadn’t cried about for all those years, all the way back to Manticore, came pouring out.
She knelt there, one hand on Ray’s head, the other on her forehead as she wept. Tears ran freely, her body wracked with sobs.
“Let it out, Little Fella,” the gentle giant said, kneeling beside her now.
Max wondered if she ever could, though — there was too much to let out, there had been so many wrongs, so much pain, with no end in sight. Was this the normal life she’d hoped for, this endless parade of pain?
At least little Ray White could sleep through it all — his pain, his travels, over.
Chapter eight
Joshua fit the battle
Eventually, as Max’s sobs began to abate, Alec stepped forward and placed a hand on her shoulder.
Max glanced back at the X5, surprised by the gentleness of the gesture and the genuine sorrow on the handsome face. She swallowed, nodding to him a small “Thank you” for his concern.
His hand was still on her shoulder as Max — making no effort to rise — looked down again at Ray, as she continued to run a soothing hand through the boy’s hair, her fingers inches away from moist, matted blood.
He looked just as she remembered him, a bright-looking boy, hair cut short like his father’s, the color more the blond of his late mother’s. Rather small for his age — some of White’s fellow cultists had doubted the boy had it in him to belong in their “exalted” ranks — he might have been asleep, but for the hole in his head.
“Max,” Alec said, “we gotta haul — somebody in the neighborhood must’ve heard the noise, and we got three dead people here.”
“Three?” she asked absently.
“I broke one,” Joshua said, furry face matted with tears. “Did I do wrong, Max?”
She glanced at the beast of a man next to her, and it came back to her, Joshua bleeding, wounded, breaking that Familiar’s neck. Kneeling next to her now, as if they were both taking communion, Joshua seemed oblivious to his own wound, much less the knife blade still in his shoulder.
“You okay, Big Fella?”
He shook his head. “Too late,” he said. The eyes brimmed with more tears. “Boy shouldn’t have to, Max.”
“Have to...?”
“Take one. For the team.” And the tears overflowed.
She removed her hand from the dead boy’s head and stroked the side of Joshua’s warm, wet face.
Alec squeezed her shoulder. “Max!”
“You’re right, Alec. Let’s shake it.”
She rose, self-control flooding through her; she willed herself into a coldly businesslike state. Her sense of purpose had returned, in spades. She quickly moved out into the hall, where Joshua had left the limp figure with its broken neck, a fact made obvious by the severe impossible angle of it, as that neck was almost nonexistent, the large head sitting on broad shoulders. The man’s wide eyes peered out emptily through the eye holes of the stocking mask.
She knelt over this corpse with considerably less compassion than she had the child’s. The Familiar wore familiar TAC fatigues, and Max had a pretty good idea what she was going to find even before she jerked the stocking cap off the man’s big head.
The blond guard from the Lyman Cale estate.
Otto. Or was it Franz? She didn’t remember.
Not that it mattered. She felt it safe to assume his partner, the dark-haired one — Franz, or Otto, whatever the hell — had been the one to escape through that bedroom window.
She stood.
Alec said, “Max... come on! We gotta blow this pop stand.”
“Shut-up,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
“Maybe you could do that in the car.”
“Alec, shut-up.”
What the hell was going on here? The Familiars, working for Lyman Cale?
Only, Lyman Cale was a vegetable, a CGI image in public, and in private a husk hooked up to life support... No one really worked for him, did they? That security team, including the two brawny ones — Familiars — reported to Lyman Cale’s private secretary, that slick ever-so-helpful bureaucrat, Franklin Bostock.
Was Bostock the answer?
A strong possibility, but Alec was right — this was not the time or place to work out all the maybes; they indeed needed to haul. Far away, but getting closer, sirens wailed mournfully, as if knowing in advance about the child’s tragic death.
“Company comin’,” Mole growled, at her side.
“Okay,” Max said. “Joshua, can you carry this guy?”
Still ignoring the knife in his shoulder, Joshua responded by reaching down, grabbing the corpse and tossing it over his good shoulder, like a sack of grain.
Alec’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped like a trapdoor. “What the hell...?”
“Mole,” Max said, no-nonsense, “get the boy. Wrap him in a white sheet.”
Mole’s cigar fell out of his mouth. “No freakin’ way! What kinda ghoulish shit—”
Max thumped the lizard man’s chest with two fingers. “The kid is dead. When I said we wouldn’t trade the boy for Logan, I meant a breathing Ray White. It’s not going to hurt that poor boy now, taking a ride with us.”
Alec, his eyes as horrified as they were huge, stepped up. “Max, have you completely lost it? This plan beyond sucks!”
She latched onto Alec’s shoulder with a hand that was nowhere near as gentle as his had been. “Toughen up, girls!... Ames White’s going to want proof of what happened here. That it was the Familiars who betrayed him, not us!”
“You mean, the boy... his body... is evidence,” Mole said, picking up his cigar.
“You’re goddamn right he’s evidence!” a wild-eyed Alec said as the sirens grew more insistent. “You’re gonna put two corpses in our car, what, in the trunk?”
“That’s the idea,” Max said.
“And if we get stopped by the cops,” Alec said, “how do we explain that?”
“Firmly,” she said. “Mole, Alec — do it... or bail. If you’re not prepared to follow my lead, right now — bail.”
Alec swallowed and sighed... and nodded his commitment. Mole was already heading back into the bedroom, to prepare the small sad package.
And Max was no longer a distraught young woman, nor was Joshua an upset oversize teddy bear — all four of the transgenics made up a highly trained combat team again (Thank you, Colonel Lydecker, Max thought, for small favors), and nothing the Familiars and/or Ames White had to throw at them was going to stop them.
They were out of the Gulliver house in less than a minute, and — with the two bodies, the boy’s sheet-wrapped, tucked in the trunk of Logan Cale’s car — they took off, but carefully, Mole scrupulously obeying the speed limit. Though the sirens increased, Max and her unlikely teammates never even saw a squad car.
When they hit the edge of town without being stopped, Mole sped up a little, but he kept within a few miles of the limit.
“Where to?” the driver asked at last. “Or are we just gonna cruise around with our passengers until they start gettin’ ripe?”
“Three Tree Point,” Max said.
Mole shot her a look.
She gave him a sharp glance back. “Do I stutter?”
“Why in the hell?”
“Someone we need to talk to.”