Evolution (10 page)

I frown. “You'd do that for me?”

“Yes,” Dean says, his voice unwavering.

“What if Sam wakes up and tells the real story?” I ask. Maybe he won't have any memory of what happened while he was doped up, but I doubt he'll forget I'm the one who stabbed him with the syringes. And I doubt he'll forgive me.

“It will be his word against ours,” Dean says. “As long as Skylar agrees to back us up.”

We both glance in her direction. Skylar's eyes meet mine, and for a moment I can see her debating whether or not she wants to help me. Weighing whether it's worth it to lie for me, or whether it would help her prove her loyalty to Commander Charlie if she told him I subdued Sam.

“Sure, I'll back you up,” she says, folding her arms. “Stars know the lieutenant needed someone to shut him up.” She smirks a little.

Dean glances at me again, looking for my reaction. I don't have anything to say. I don't trust Skylar, but what choice do I have? If it becomes clear reporting me for what I did could work in her favor, I'm sure she'll betray me again. But there's no point worrying about that until it happens.

“Okay, we'd better get him back to camp,” Dean says, stomping over to Sam's body. “Skylar, help me get him up.”

While the two of them heave Sam off the ground, I grab my pulse gun from where it landed and tuck it back into my holster. I toss the empty syringes and the one still full of serum into the bushes, where they can't hurt anyone else.

Sam makes a strange moaning sound as we start back to camp, and his eyes roll back farther into his head. I can't help smiling a little seeing him like this. Now the monster who's used his hands against me too many times is a weak, helpless human who can't even walk on his own, let alone wield a weapon. I still have plenty of dangers, but Sam is no longer one of them. At least until he recovers.

*   *   *

Back at the camp, Dean and Skylar tuck Sam's body into his sleeping bag. Darren and Cormac are both still awake; they'd also heard me call for help. I let Dean explain what happened, and avoid Darren's gaze when he hears I was nearly strangled to death by Sam. I don't need anyone's pity.

We only have a few minutes left until we have to leave if we're going to reach the Pipeline before sunrise. Hopefully I can still catch a few winks of sleep, enough to feel a bit more rested. I slip inside the warmth of my sleeping bag and finally close my eyes.

Exhaustion quickly drags me under. I dream I'm chained to a stake in the ground in the middle of the desert, far from civilization. The world is on fire all around me. Flames rain down from the sky, and the cacti and the tumbleweeds are alight. The air is so thick with smoke, I can barely breathe.

Amid the cacti and tumbleweeds, I make out human bodies. People with familiar faces. Nellie and Hector and Evie, the friends I made in the Crust camp. Their eyes are wide open, their mouths screaming. Their bodies are paralyzed. I call to them, but they only scream in reply.

I pull against my chains, trying to get to my friends before the fire does, but I can't save them. The flames scorch their clothes and lick their skin until their faces aren't recognizable anymore. They are charred corpses.

The flames drift closer and closer to me, licking my boots. I wrench and wrench to break free of the stake, but my chains only grow tighter. They cut into my wrists and make them bleed.

I wake just before the fire reaches me. Darren is shouting. It takes me several moments to understand what he's saying.

“Raiders! There are raiders in sight!”

The blood drains from my face, and every part of my body turns rock-solid with fear.

We didn't escape the Mardenites.

 

12

I scramble out of my sleeping bag and get to my feet. A slice of pain shoots through my injured ribs and I regret standing up so fast. My hand fumbles for my pulse gun.

Skylar, Cormac, and Dean are already up, their eyes on the sky through the trees overhead. The sky is growing lighter as the day moves closer to dawn. There are three dark forms flying above the mountain pass. Three raiders.

“What do we do?” Darren asks. His eyes are wide with fear.

“Stay out of sight,” Dean says, moving away from the opening in the branches. “The trees should hide us unless they get a lot closer.”

Skylar crouches beside a tree trunk with her gun in her hand. “As soon as they're gone, we hightail it for the transmission station so we can get the hell off the Surface.”

I move beneath the branches of another tree and drop onto my knees, not taking my eyes off the raiders. They're circling lower and lower like they're searching for something.

How did they find us again? They can't have known we survived, or they would've captured us back on the hillside. Surely these ships don't know we're here. It's just a coincidence they're flying overhead.

“We shouldn't have stopped in the first place,” Cormac says through gritted teeth.

“We needed to rest,” Skylar snaps back. “If we hadn't and the Mardenites ran into us before we reached the station, we'd have been in no state to fight them.”

I don't think we're in any state to fight them now. There are six of us, and Sam is completely useless. Which is why I'm hoping with all my might we remain unseen.

“I'll start packing up everything so we can leave,” Dean says, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and moving around the camp to stuff the sleeping bags into our sacks.

“Do we need the bedrolls?” Cormac asks. “We should just leave them here and go.”

“No,” Skylar says swiftly. “We should keep them with us in case something goes wrong at the station and we end up stuck on the Surface longer than we intended.”

“We're getting off the Surface tonight. We'll die if we stay out here much longer.”

While Cormac and Skylar continue to argue, I keep my eyes glued on the sky. The closer the Mardenite ships get, the more details I'm able to make out. They don't have curved, V-shaped wings or rugged bodies like the last raiders we ran into. Two of the ships are round like flight pods; the third is a small hovercraft.

“Wait!” I say, interrupting Skylar mid-sentence. “Look at the ships. Those aren't raiders.”

The others immediately stop talking and look at where I'm pointing. One of the flight pods is so low I can make out a symbol on its hull, the bronze shape of the moon.

“She's right,” Darren says. “They're Core ships.”

Maybe it's a rescue mission. Maybe they finally heard our transmission.

“We need to make contact with them,” Dean says.

Skylar quickly pulls out the hand-comm and twists the signal dial to the correct channel. “This is Cadet Skylar. I am with Lieutenants Dean and Sam, and we are stranded in Surface Sector H-9, close to the Pipeline transmission station. Does anyone copy?”

There's a long stretch of nothing but static. My heart pounds as I wait for an answer, if anyone's going to answer at all.

Please, please, please.

A voice crackles through the comm speaker: “Cadet Skylar, this is Lieutenant Patrick. What are your coordinates?”

Skylar lets out a whoop! of excitement. Relief, so much relief floods my bones.

She relays our exact coordinates to Lieutenant Patrick, and the Core ships lower into the clearing. The lieutenant disembarks with several soldiers and the ship medic. He takes one look at the disheveled state of our group and asks, “What happened?”

“We were attacked by Mardenites,” Dean says. “Didn't you hear our transmission from earlier tonight?”

“We received a transmission, but there was a lot of interference,” Lieutenant Patrick says. “I don't know exactly how much got through—I wasn't the one who intercepted it. All I was told was you were in trouble and we needed to help you get back to the Core.”

Commander Charlie did send a rescue mission. Help just didn't get here fast enough.

“What happened to the rest of your crew?”

“They were captured,” Skylar says.

“We'll tell you everything once we're on board,” Dean says. “We need to get to the Pipeline before any Mardenite ships come roaming the area again.”

“Right,” Patrick says, glancing fearfully at the sky. “Let's hurry. Get the wounded onto stretchers.”

Sam is hauled onto a stretcher by the soldiers. So is Darren, because of his leg infection. My ribs still ache, but I can walk well enough, so I go up the boarding ramp into the hovercraft on my own.

Inside, someone wraps a blanket around me and thrusts a canteen into my hands. The sweet, frothy drink warms my belly. Hopefully my teeth will stop chattering soon.

We buckle in for takeoff. I watch through one of the cabin windows as the pilot takes us over the mountain pass. The sun comes into view, casting sweeping rays of red across the snow-topped mountains ahead of us. I grip my armrests, bracing for any sign of raiders. But there are no ships on the horizon. No enemy contacts appear on our radar screen.

We descend into the valley below us, where the Pipeline entrance lies well hidden between the forested hills. The trees grow bigger and bigger, and finally I see the dark hole of the tunnel entrance. I don't let out my breath until we're well into the tunnel. The Mardenites don't know this tunnel or the lower sectors exists, so we're out of their reach. For now.

But the raiders are still out there with my friends aboard their ships. They're still attacking the Surface. Soon we'll know exactly how much damage they've done.

Soon I'll have to face Commander Charlie. I'm going to have to explain why I disobeyed his orders and broke free of his serum's control. I'll have to convince him not to go through with his threat to kill Logan.

But for now, I push aside those worries and focus on the fact I've escaped one of my enemies alive.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Patrick sends a transmission ahead to the Core, to let them know he has injured passengers on the way. In the meantime, the ship medic does what she can to treat our wounds.

First she checks my vital signs. Blood pressure is a bit high, but not a real cause for concern. Temperature is normal. Unlike the other survivors, I don't have a high fever or symptoms of nausea. My biggest medical problems are obvious: my ruptured eardrum, broken ribs, and the bullet wound that reopened thanks to Sam's attack. The medic stuffs a small bit of gauze into my ear to help it stay dry and heal on its own, though at this point I'm afraid I'll never recover my hearing completely—not without surgery or an implant. My ribs will also have to heal on their own, but the medic gives me a pain pill to take so it won't hurt as much when I breathe and cough. After all the times medicine has been used to control me, I'm wary of taking any pills. But my chest pain is becoming too much to bear, and I can't afford to let it slow me down. It's only a mild pill, anyway. The medic says I'll probably need stronger medicine, but I'll have to wait until we're back in the Core.

While she cleans and re-bandages my gun wound, I wonder about why the poison gas didn't affect me. It can't be because I ran faster than the others to escape it, or because I didn't inhale as much as them. I was right next to the bomb when it fell. Somehow, I was able to resist the poison the same way I've resisted the control serums better than everyone else. And I don't think it's a coincidence.

After the medic is finished with me, I'm given a fresh pair of clothes to change into. I won't need my safety suit in the Core, as the moon's acid can't reach us there.

I go into a supply closet, so I won't have to change in front of everyone. But the closet isn't empty, as I'd hoped it would be. Skylar's changing in here too. She pauses when I walk in.

“Hey,” she says, clearly uncomfortable to be in such close quarters with me.

I don't say anything in response. Just because she's agreed, for the time being, not to get me in trouble for the Sam situation doesn't mean anything has changed between us.

I turn my back on her.

Changing proves to be a difficult task. I remove my helmet easily enough, but I have a harder time getting out of the suit. The pain medicine hasn't sunk in yet, and even reaching my hand behind my back to unzip the suit sends slashes of pain through my chest.

“Here, let me help you,” Skylar says, behind me.

I hesitate. But clearly this is going to take forever if I try to do it on my own. “Fine.”

She finishes unzipping the suit for me and helps me ease it off my arms. After I've stepped out of it, she helps me remove the outfit underneath and pull on a new shirt and set of trousers. The process is painful enough with her help. I can't imagine how much worse it would've been without her.

When it's finally over I say, “Thanks.”

“Don't mention it,” Skylar says.

There's a long, awkward stretch of silence. She shifts from one foot to the other, looking like she wants to speak.

She starts to open her mouth, but I blurt out: “Why aren't you going to turn me in for what I did to Sam? You know Commander Charlie was waiting for me to do something like this on the mission. And I'm sure he'd praise you for your loyalty if you ratted me out. That's how you get your fix these days, right? By betraying people you once pretended to be friends with.”

“Sam attacked you first,” Skylar says, ignoring the second part of what I said. Her cheeks are turning pink. “I'm not that cruel of a person.”

I snort. “Oh, really?”

“Yes. And I don't think you should be punished for making a decision you had to make in order to protect yourself.” Her eyes meet mine, hard and challenging. “We do what we have to do.”

She's trying to say the things we've done are the same. She betrayed the Alliance in order to save herself from harm, so she doesn't deserve blame.