Beyond the Red (40 page)

I sigh and twist around to show him my hands. “You’ll have to put it on for me.”

“Okay,” he whispers, and his little fingers work the bracelet onto my wrist. It’s tight as it slips over my hand, but once it’s on my wrist, it fits okay. “I’ll never take it off.” I stand and face Gray’s tent. “Be good, buddy.”

Someone nudges my back with a warm phaser and we step inside. Gray’s tent is the largest in the compound, but it’s clear they haven’t been here very long because he doesn’t have much set up. A simple bedroll, a pile of bags, and several cases of weapons lined up in the sand. That’s it.

“Took you long enough.” Gray steps toward me. “Now let’s hear it. Doer die.”

And so I tell him everything Serek told me. It doesn’t take long—the plan isn’t that complicated. With a few lines of code and the flip of a button, millions of people will die.

Gray is silent for a full mo after I finish. His face is pale and his fingers are slack. Finally, he turns to a guard standing by the exit. “Uncuff him.”

The guard steps behind me and removes the cuffs as Gray pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re sure about this?”

I nod and dig through my pocket. Hold up the tube Serek gave me. “I’ve been told this will glow when the order is executed.”

“That’s not helpful.”

I grimace. “I know.”

“You’re sure it’s nanites? You’re absolutely positive.”

“I believe Serek. He’d have no reason to lie to me—at least, not about this.”

Gray scowls. Runs his hand over his lips. Glares at the ceiling. “We can’t fight nanites.”

No one answers. There’s nothing to say, because he’s right—we don’t have a single defense against nanites. How can you fight something you can’t see? Something so small that a single breath of air could transport hundreds of thousands into your lungs? It’d be like trying to fight your own cells or the oxygen in your blood.

Impossible.

“I don’t know why you bothered even coming here to tell us,” Gray says. “There’s literally nothing we can do.”

I sigh. “I was hoping maybe someone here would have an idea. And I wasn’t going to stay there while you …” I can’t say it. I won’t say it. I take a breath and start over. “I figured a warning was better than nothing.”

“I don’t know about that.” Gray turns and crosses his arms. “As the old ones would say—ignorances blessed.”

I clench the vial in my hand. Stare at the sand.

Gray faces me again. “What happened to your eyes?”

I look up. “What?”

“Your eyes. They used to be green, but now they’re gold.” He squints at me. “What, you get some bizarre alien eye infection or something?”

“No. There were nanites in my system that made my eyes look green, but when they injected me with tracking nanites, they interfered with the ones already in my body and nearly killed me.”

He frowns. “Why? What’s your eye color matter?”

I shift. The truth isn’t going to help me right now, and it’s a long story we don’t have time for anyway. So I say, “It doesn’t.”

Gray paces back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. “But you got them out of your system.”

I hesitate. I might know where he’s going with this, but the answer isn’t going to be what we need. “With help.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure. A doctor was in charge—she said something about cleansing my system. Some kinduv filter or transfusion or something. I don’t know.”

“And I don’t suppose they were kind enough to provide you with one of those filter things when they sent you over here.”

I bite my lip. Shake my head.

“Of course not.” He stops and faces me. “Step back a mo—you said they
nearly
killed you.”

“Right. But the doctor stopped it before it caused permanent damage.”

“With the machine?”

I start to say yes, but then I think back to the incident. I wasn’t really coherent for most of it—all I remember is pain and blackness, but there was something else Kora said, after the fact. Something about the doctor shooting me …

My breath catches. “The phasers.”

Gray arches an eyebrow. “Phasers?”

“Kora said the doctor stunned me to short out the nanites, then used the filter to clean them out of my system afterward. But they were shut down first.”

“With the phaser,” Gray says.

A burst of energy rushes through me, quickening my pulse. The phasers—how didn’t I think of it before? “She stunned me, which shorted out the nanites. I think.”

“You think? This is a little important—”

“I was barely conscious when it happened, so no, I’m not sure. But that’s what Kora told me.”

Gray hesitates. Turns to his men. “Spread word to everyone with a phaser to set them to stun. Anyone who shows symptoms of—” Gray gasps and drops to his knees, clutching his skull. Screams slice through the air as the soldiers drop, one by one—some immediately and others writhing in the sand, clutching their heads.

The vial in my hand grows hot and glows red.

It’s too late.

As soon as the door shuts behind Roma, Serek leaps to the desk and grabs the rectangular glass sitting beside the medical unit, his fingers dancing across the screen. I step beside him and peer over his shoulder. He’s writing
some
thing, but the words are cut off and mixed with symbols and numbers and the text is flying across the screen so rapidly it’s a wonder he can read it at all.

“What is that?” I ask.

“I’m writing a program to shut down the nanites. It might take some time—I’ll need to write a stable enough entry point to get through the security checks installed—but I know it’s possible.”

Evidently, those rumors about Serek’s technical prowess were true. “How do you know how to get through the security?”

He stops typing and glances up. His eyes are soft and sad when he says, “I wrote the security program. I’ll be able to get in, but rendering the nanites useless is an entirely different battle—one that we won’t be able to test.”

I nod. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

He hesitates. “It will be faster if I do this on my own … but it might be a good idea to listen by the door for any further unexpected interruptions.”

“That I can do.”

He smiles grimly, nods once, and resumes his work on the screen.

I’m not sure how long we stay there, with Serek typing manically through the code while I lean against the door and listen for any potential interruptions—but the hall beyond the room is silent. The few times he pauses, his fingers twitch, as if eager to continue their work. My body hums with an eagerness to move, to do something, anything, but without Serek’s code, there’s nothing we can do. I close my eyes and pray for Eros. I can only hope he reached his people and figured out some sort of way to defend against the impossible.

When I open my eyes, Serek’s vial is glowing bright red, and a strange silence has fallen over the grounds. It’s as if the air itself knows what is happening—as if the whole planet is mourning this atrocious act.

And then the howling begins.

At first it sounds like a low whistle, or a groan carried on a breeze. I step toward the open window and a chill washes over me as the sound grows, building in intensity like a woman’s cries during a birthing. Serek looks up from the screen, his body rigid and his eyes wide.

“Is that …?” he whispers.

“Screaming,” I say. “From the city.”

It’s the most haunting sound I’ve ever heard—the echo of a cry, repeated and layered over and over again. Pain I cannot imagine, the horror of watching your loved ones die before your very eyes. I didn’t realize there were untracked redbloods in Asheron, but the sound of anguish is unmistakable.

I spin away from the window and step beside him. “We have to go. Now.”

He pulls a flat disc the size of my thumbnail out of his pocket and places it on the screen. A blue line slowly traces the edge of the disc, then finally, when it makes a full circle, Serek picks it up, slides it into his pocket, and passes me a phaser.

We don’t waste time with words.

He shoves open the door and we race through the hallway, down the steps, and into the screaming outside air. The Spire towers over the center of the complex, a circle of guards spaced evenly around its base. We race toward them without a plan, without anything but instinct and the push of agonized voices carried in the wind.

The soldiers notice us when we’re two hundred paces away. Out of the eight standing guard, two lift their phasers, but others are hesitant—they can’t very well shoot
ken Sira-kaï
and his betrothed, can they?

Serek shoots first—firing a burst of five shots, three of which hit their mark as the remaining guards dive out of the way. I take down two others and don’t stop running until we’re on top of the soldiers. A guard levels his phaser at Serek and screams “Stop!”—I shoot him in the chest with a white burst just as someone tackles me from behind. We hit the sand hard, the brunt of the impact on my forearms. Two high-pitched whines cut through the air and the guard on my back slumps over. His weight slides off me moments later as Serek helps me up.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” I nod to the heavy metal door in the sparkling gold tower just three measures away. “Let’s go.”

Serek presses his palm into the door and a blue light flashes above it before sliding open. I glance down at the men at my feet—they’re breathing, but unconscious. Serek set the phasers to stun.

“C’mon,” he says, and we slip inside.

Two guards stand by the door, apparently in mid-conversation as they break off and stare at us. Serek stuns them both without hesitation and drags one of the unconscious men to the door. He scans the guard’s hand, then his own. Two flashes of blue light, and that door opens as well.

Stairwell. A tall, curving set of stairs with seemingly no end, spiraling to the very top. I don’t have to ask Serek what level we need to get to—the control unit is on the top floor.

We start climbing.

I stun Gray first, then fire off bursts at the guards still moving in the sand. The ones who have fallen still I can only assume are dead, and I don’t have time to check. I duck out of the tent and start shooting anything that moves. The screams are awful—grating on my ears and heart and stomach. There are too many who have already fallen still in the sand, too many that are too late to save.

And as far as I can tell, I’m the only one left unaffected.

I can’t save everyone. The realization pulls me lower with every shot, stings my eyes and twists my gut. People are dying around me and I’m stunning as swiftly as I can, running as fast as my legs will take me, trying to find those still with fight left in their bodies. But it’s not enough. With every person I stun, two fall and stop breathing.

I need to find Aren, Jessa, Mal, and Nia. I need to find what’s left of my family and save them before it’s too late.

I race toward their tent, stunning everyone I see on the way, praying it’s not too late, blinking the sweat from my eyes and ignoring the burning in my lungs and legs and twisting through the rows of tents to reach the outskirts, where Jessa will be with the kids. There are too many bodies. Too many children who have fallen in mid-stride, too many mothers forever holding their babies in the sand. There isn’t any blood. The dead almost appear to be sleeping, but they’re too still for that. They’re empty shells of their former selves.