The Cure (33 page)

“I don’t like this.” Jace dug at the ground with a boot. “This is the Emporium we’re talking about. They’re not giving up just because it’s a burial ground. We have to go in and get them.”

“Give them a few minutes.” I looked up to address the Maya, but he’d disappeared.

“We could go for them now.” Jace took a couple steps forward.

“No,” Ritter and I said together. Grabbing Jace, we turned in the direction of the Pinz. The way back seemed much longer. We were only halfway when a flurry of rapid shots halted our progress.

“Machine gun,” Jace said grimly. “Or something similar.”

“Forget this!” Gritting his teeth, Ritter whirled, launching into a run. Jace hurtled after him. Ritter was nearly back to the mound of rocks when the vines covering them began moving. The vines pushed aside, revealing a cave—and the barrel of a gun.

Ritter raised his own rifle, leaping to the side to find cover.

D
IMITRI’S WIDE SHOULDERS EDGED FROM
the cave opening, his rifle ready. Cort was right behind him, followed by the Maya we’d just talked to—or someone who looked enough like him to be his brother. He wasn’t wearing the colorful cloth bag, though, so maybe it wasn’t the same man.

“Oh, it’s you.” Dimitri relaxed and lowered his gun as he saw Ritter. Jace and I skidded to a halt. “That’s a relief.”

“What happened?” Jace asked.

Cort pushed past Dimitri. “We were pinned down behind the waterfall. Fortunately, this fellow appeared and showed us an underground tunnel that came up on the other side of these rocks. There’s a cave—or a tunnel, rather—that goes straight through this whole rock pile. Unfortunately, the Emporium caught sight of us going into the other side. But I guess you heard the shooting.”

“We gonna take ’em?” Jace’s face glowed.

“No!” everyone said.

Guttural shouts came from the tunnel.

“Get to the Pinz,” Ritter barked. “Hurry!”

Dimitri led the way at a run. Cort spoke to the Maya, making an urgent motion with his hands. I ran after Dimitri. When I looked back again, the Maya had vanished. Jace hurtled past me, leapt into the cab of the Pinz, and brought the engine to life with a roar. He was turning the vehicle before I reached it, and I jumped into the back, rotating to see Cort coming fast. Ritter was a blur behind him.

“All in!” I shouted to Jace as the others vaulted into the back. Jace stepped on the gas and we left the rocks behind before anyone else had emerged from the cave. We clung to the benches to avoid being tossed around like our supplies. Something heavy crashed against my leg; I pushed it away. Only Ritter didn’t secure himself. He crouched near the back, his rifle ready, shifting his weight with each lurch, somehow maintaining balance.

Jace continued in a mad race down the incline that had seemed so gradual on the way up. I was glad I hadn’t eaten any real food since yesterday, or I might have lost it all over the supplies, and Ritter would request additional training for me.

When we neared the two deserted Jeeps we’d passed earlier, Ritter pulled a rocket launcher from one of the cases in the back, though how he managed when Jace wasn’t slowing down was a mystery. “Let’s make it harder for them to catch up to us.”

Destroying their transportation was a great idea. We were far enough away from the Palenque ruins that they wouldn’t get there in time to help Justine carry out the assassination.

Swiftly, Ritter lifted the weapon. “Ears!” He shouted as we roared past the Jeeps.

A flash of red made me grab his arm. “Wait!”

He hesitated, blinking as he spotted Mari standing near the Jeeps, her red T-shirt clearly visible under her blue bulletproof vest.

“Jace! Stop!” I screamed. Dimitri and Cort echoed my plea, and we all tumbled from our places as he slammed on the brakes. Ritter was back on his feet instantly, reaching for Mari as she ran toward the Pinz.

A spray of bullets from the far side of the clearing had us all ducking for cover. Mari suddenly disappeared from outside and reappeared next to me. “Go!” Dimitri shouted. Jace punched the Pinz into motion.

Ritter swept up the rocket launcher again and fired. One of the Jeeps erupted in an impressive explosion. Before Ritter could take another shot, Edgel appeared behind the Pinz, showering the back with more bullets. We hit the floor. Next time, I was going to request a complete hard body Pinz instead of one with a back tarp. Not as much protection as we needed.

Jace drove faster, and Edgel’s figure receded. “Everyone okay?” Ritter asked.

“I’m going to need some bandages,” Dimitri said. “And some curequick.”

I turned to see Cort sprawled half on the bench and half on the supplies. Blood dripped from his neck and out the bottom of his bulletproof vest.

“Injectable,” Dimitri added, checking Cort’s pulse. “He’s unconscious. I’ll need a painkiller as well. Looks like one of the bullets hit him under the arm. Might have hit his heart because I can’t find a pulse. Another got him in the neck. I won’t be able to remove the bullets while we’re moving.”

I found the syringes with curequick while Ritter dug for the bandages. I began injecting Cort’s chest and neck, and then sat next to Mari while Ritter assisted Dimitri in packing Cort’s wounds. We didn’t dare stop, but the less blood he lost now meant a faster recovery. It was strange seeing Cort like this. He seemed to be dead and he had no heartbeat, but before long, he’d heal enough to wake.

Mari frowned at Cort’s inert body. “He really is going to be okay, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Believe me, this isn’t the first time for him. But what about you? How are you feeling?”

“I’m good.” She gave me a lopsided smile. “In fact, I’m embarrassed to say that I’m
really
good. Oh, Erin, it’s everything you said it was! I feel . . . I feel . . . incredible!”

I had to admit she was looking pretty incredible, and not all of it could be attributed to my favorite jeans. Her silky black hair lay around her—not tangled but definitely windblown—her face had a healthy color, and her eyes gleamed with excitement.

“Shifting . . . it’s like I . . . was meant to do it.” She lifted her hands, fingers splayed as though trying to capture something invisible. “I see the numbers and all I have to do is move them around until they fit where I want to go. Then I’m moving through space. It’s like finding what I was meant to do, like I’ve been searching for something my whole life and it was there all along inside me. I feel alive for the first time!” She paused before adding, “I’ve hardly even thought of Trevor. Isn’t that terrible?”

“No, it’s not terrible at all.”

“I’m different,” she said fiercely, “and I like it. I like it a whole lot.”

That was good because she really didn’t have a choice. You couldn’t cut out the Unbounded gene. It would do whatever it wanted in remaking us. I glanced over at the men. “They told me you gave them my location, but what happened after that?”

“Well, we went to find you. But the Emporium caught up to us somehow and they had some heavy guns, so Dimitri and Cort decided to create a distraction. There were so many bullets flying around that Dimitri told me to shift out. That’s all I know. When I couldn’t stand not knowing anymore, I shifted back, right to the same place I’d left. I hid in the trees until I saw you coming, and then I shifted right by the Jeeps so you’d see me.”

“You almost got yourself blown up.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess that wasn’t such a good idea. I was just so glad to find you guys.”

“Where’d you go?”

Her eyes widened. “That’s another reason I couldn’t risk that you wouldn’t see me. When I shifted back to the hotel, I found Keene. He’s been trying to reach you all. When he couldn’t at least get you on your phone, he figured something was wrong.” She lowered her voice and whispered. “He wanted me to let him know once they found you.”

The comment made me aware that Ritter had finished with Cort and was watching me, his dark eyes shuttered. I didn’t look away for a long moment.

“Anyway, nothing’s changed with the senator,” Mari continued. “But Keene’s got some feelers out about what’s happening.”

I shook my head. “We need to warn him to be more careful. Apparently, he’s been causing a lot of headaches for the Emporium and they decided to plug the leak. His coming here was a setup. They know about his informant.”

Dimitri looked up from Cort. “Mari, we can’t stop for at least another few miles, but would you be able to find Keene again without putting yourself in danger?”

“Yeah. We set a place to meet.” She felt the pocket of her jeans, frowning when she realized she didn’t have a phone. Almost immediately, her frown vanished. “Wait, that’s right. I don’t need the time. I’m supposed to meet him in eighteen minutes.” Scarcely concealed contentment laced her voice.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Easy—I’ve been counting in my mind. We agreed on forty minutes, but some of that time I was waiting in the trees.”

“We should be able to stop before then,” Ritter said. “I hope he doesn’t get himself killed.” He took a compass from a pocket. “Hopefully, we’ll find an actual road soon. We need to get to those ruins. There should be a hotel nearby to stash Cort.”

We moved along in silence for several minutes, jostling back and forth over the uneven jungle trail. Dimitri sat on a duffel that held one of the tents, a hand on Cort’s exposed flesh above the bandage. This put Dimitri in the aisle, brushing up against my knee, but neither of us moved away. I didn’t know what that meant.

“You don’t think the Emporium will hurt those Maya back there, do you?” I asked no one in particular, wiping a trickle of sweat that skidded down my temple. The heat inside the Pinz was growing more intense by the moment, signaling the passage of the day.

Ritter took his gaze from the terrain behind us. “I doubt it. They’re less than ants to the Emporium, and they know how to make themselves scarce.”

“Yeah, they did that at that little village.” I sighed. “Guess they’ll think twice about renting one of their huts to someone in the future.” I wondered what Justine had paid them, or if she’d simply turned on the pheromones. Somehow the Maya we’d seen in the jungle didn’t seem the type to lust after her.

“Not sure how that Maya figured out we were the good guys,” Dimitri said.

Ritter’s hand ran down his weapon—still the rocket launcher. “Probably because you weren’t shooting up their artifacts.”

“How many more minutes?” Dimitri asked Mari, who lay on half of our shared bench, her head propped on a green army blanket behind Jace’s seat.

She squinted at the ceiling in concentration. “Seven. But we both agreed to wait for ten or fifteen minutes, if we could, so I can be late.”

“Erin?” Ritter looked at me.

I shook my head. “I can’t sense anyone close. I think we lost them. At this point they might be more interested in meeting up with Justine than tracking us.”

“We’re all headed to the same place.” Ritter handed me the rocket launcher. “Keep an eye out. I need to talk to Jace about where to stop.”

I nodded as he squeezed past. “I don’t even know how to shoot this,” I told Dimitri.

“Nothing to it really. Aim and shoot.”

“Ha. If I see something, you’re taking it.”

He laughed. “Okay.”

I glanced at Cort. “There’s something else I learned. Tom is Cort’s brother. Half brother, I mean. Like Keene. But there’s something wrong with him. His mind, I mean. I think that woman Delia did something to him. If I’m right, why hasn’t he healed?”

Dimitri looked pensive. “Most damage I’ve seen does heal, even mental damage. Unintentional damage, that is. But both the Emporium and the Renegades have been fighting for so long that we really have depended too much on the combat ability. Only in the last hundred years when things have become so regulated—when people dying or disappearing is noticeable and punishable—have we realized that brute force isn’t going to win the war. So it doesn’t surprise me to learn that the Emporium might be investigating intentional mental damage as an option. For the record, I’ve known Unbounded who were actually insane, and I couldn’t heal them.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Frankly, it’s been a lot of years since I’ve heard of anything like that.”

“You helped Mari.” I glanced over to where she lay resting.

“Her mental state was shock, not a true psychosis or a manipulation by a sensing Unbounded. There’s a huge difference.”

“Well, she seems to be adjusting.”

Dimitri smiled. “She does at that.”

We fell silent, with nothing but the sound of the engine and the rocking of the Pinz between us. Emotions rose to choke me. This broad man who’d been born in Russia a thousand years ago was my biological father. I knew he cared about me as a Renegade. Why did I want anything more?

I chewed on my bottom lip. We were entering into battle, and we might never have another opportunity to settle what was between us. “I know what happened in the fertility clinic,” I said quietly.

For a moment, I thought my voice was too soft for him to understand. Then his body shifted toward me, one hand still resting on Cort’s chest. His dark eyes urged me on.