United: An Alienated Novel (10 page)

Aelyx pointed at the wing. “We’ll have to walk across it to get inside.”

Troy’s face paled a shade as he stared at the ground. “Will it hold us?”

“It’s stabilized. Watch.” Aelyx leaned through the window frame and planted both palms on the warm metal wing. He shoved down with all his weight, but the shuttle remained fixed in place. “Want me to go first?”

Troy nodded vigorously.

Heights had never bothered Aelyx, so he gauged the wind speed and climbed onto the wing, keeping his knees bent when he stood. In a few short steps, he reached the pilot’s seat and gripped the roof to maneuver himself inside. After loosely fastening his safety harness, he extended an arm to help Syrine, who’d already followed in his footsteps. He pulled her inside, and she climbed over his lap into the backseat. Cara went next, moving steadily on her hands and knees, and then Elle crossed the wing in two swift bounds. That left only Troy … who seemed to have stopped breathing.

Three hundred feet below, sirens wailed as police cruisers converged at the base of the building. From somewhere in the distance, Aelyx heard the choppy whir of helicopter blades.

“Hurry,” he said, motioning to Troy with one hand.

Troy didn’t move.

The stairwell door burst open, and a flurry of soldiers and gunmen swarmed into the hall behind Troy, shouting for him to drop his weapon and lie down on the floor. Troy froze. Moving only one arm, he extended a pistol and let it fall. Cara called to him from the backseat, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

“Listen to me,” Aelyx yelled. “Jump and grab on to the wing. I promise I won’t let you fall.”

Troy laced his fingers together at the back of his head.

“Jump!” Aelyx shouted over the chaos unfolding in the hallway. Someone fired a warning shot. That seemed to get Troy’s attention. “Do it now!”

Troy’s chest expanded as he drew a fortifying breath. His face crumpled in a grimace, and then he ran for the window and leaped onto the wing. Aelyx lifted the shuttle sharply, using the force of velocity to keep Troy in place. Gunfire popped from below. With bullets pinging off the hull, Aelyx soared until they cleared the roof, and then veered directly above it, out of the range of fire. He hovered there, a few inches from the rooftop, and reached out to shake Troy’s arm.

“You can look down now.”

Troy pried open one eye and then the other. He peered over the wing, and when he saw the roof’s flat surface within reach, he dropped onto it and proceeded to lose his breakfast. The noise of helicopters grew nearer. Troy spat once more onto the roof and climbed inside the shuttle. Aelyx cloaked the craft, and for the second time in less than a day, they fled for their lives from the city.

Chapter Seven

F
rom her window in the backseat, Cara noticed Central Park approaching. She reached forward and grabbed Aelyx’s arm. “Wait, stop the shuttle.”

He slowed to a midair halt and turned to face her, his chrome eyes searching her as if checking for damage. “What’s wrong?”

“Where’re we going?”

“To the safe house.”

“Why?”

“Well,”
he said in the patronizing voice of a kindergarten teacher, “Aisly just signed your death warrant—”

Troy raised his hand. “And I might’ve committed treason.”

“—so I’m taking us where we’re least likely to be shot on sight.”

“But we’re invisible,” Cara pointed out. “And the shuttle’s quieter than most taxis. As noisy as the city streets are, no one will hear us.”

Elle caught on, sitting up straighter. “So why not go back and look for Aisly? If she took the stairs from the thirtieth floor, she couldn’t have gone far.”

“I remember what she’s wearing,” Cara said. “Gray shirt, black leggings. If we hurry, we can find her. She might lead us to Jaxen.”

Syrine massaged her temples again. She’d been doing that ever since Aisly attacked her in the stairwell. “Forget her; she’s gone. I think we should go to the safe house before your president announces what Aisly put in her head. The soldiers might not help us after that. Larish is still there, and all of our things.”

“I’ll call Colonel Rutter and explain what happened,” Cara said. She leaned forward and squeezed Aelyx’s arm. “We might never get this chance again.”

He didn’t reply, but instead gripped the wheel and made a hard left turn that tipped her sideways. The shuttle rocketed back to the United Nations building, and in seconds they were floating above a traffic jam of police cruisers, fire trucks, SWAT vans, and armored cars. High above them, helicopters swept the city skies, but Cara kept her gaze fixed on the sidewalks, searching for Aisly’s petite frame and her long, brown ponytail.

Troy pressed his forehead to the front passenger window. “I don’t see anything this way.”

“Same here.” Cara glanced through the windshield. “Make a left at this intersection, and we’ll try the next block.”

They didn’t find Aisly there either. To give them a wider view of the surrounding streets, Aelyx lifted the shuttle, and Cara squinted at the people below, scanning for anyone in gray. She was starting to worry Aisly had taken a cab when Troy tapped an index finger against his window and said, “I think I see her.”

“Where?”

He pointed ahead. “There, past that bus stop, on the right-hand corner.”

Aelyx brought the shuttle around, and Cara perched on the edge of her seat to peer out the windshield. She held her breath in anticipation while they soared closer. As soon as she spotted the profile of Aisly’s small, upturned nose, she exhaled in relief.

Gotcha
.

“Hold back a little,” Cara said to Aelyx. “We don’t want her to hear us.”

They slowed to a virtual crawl and trailed Aisly as she strode down the sidewalk, her ponytail swinging to and fro. Like Jaxen, her behavior seemed a bit bolder than usual, but not as extreme. She passed a silver breakfast cart and stopped, doing a double take. She said something to the vendor and stood on tiptoe to trap his gaze, probably telling him to give her a free bagel. Cara was right. The man handed over a paper-wrapped pastry and a cup of coffee, and Aisly continued on her merry way.

While they crept behind her over the next block, Cara used her com-sphere to call Colonel Rutter. She didn’t expect him to answer on the first buzz. She barely had time to set her sphere on the console when his miniature hologram appeared, demanding, “What did you do, Sweeney? Everything’s FUBAR over here!”

“FUBAR?” Cara looked to her brother for a translation.

“F’ed up beyond all recognition,” he supplied.

“Oh.” She cringed. “I guess you heard.”

“That you’re public enemy number one?” Rutter hollered. “Damn right, I heard! By now, every corn-poking yokel in America has heard. The anti L’eihr folks are going nuts—this is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.”

“It was Aisly,” Cara said. “She got to the president and the Earth Council before we could stop her.”

The colonel muttered a long string of curses that required no translation whatsoever. “That explains a lot.” He rubbed his jaw a bit too hard, stretching his weather-beaten skin. “The president just held a press conference. She said the Earth Council revoked all L’eihr visas. It’s an immediate expulsion for all nonhumans.”

“But she’s brainwashed.”

“Doesn’t matter. She’s commander in chief. I can’t disobey a direct order from her, and neither can any US soldier.” The colonel’s eyes shifted to Troy. “By the way, Sergeant Sweeney, I’m relieving you of your post, effective immediately. When the Marines court-martial you—and make no mistake, they will—at least it won’t be for dereliction of duty.”

Troy saluted the colonel. “Thank you, sir.”

Rutter dipped his chin. “As for the rest of you, unless you can unscramble the president’s eggs by tonight, I’m personally escorting Larish and the ambassador to the L’eihr transport tomorrow at zero six hundred hours.” He glanced around the shuttle, nodding at Aelyx, Elle, and Syrine. “I suggest you meet me there. I can’t protect you anymore, and I don’t want you kids going home in body bags.”

At those words, a beat of silence hung in the air. The colonel was right. There was no place remote enough to hide from the full force of the American military, at least not for very long. Their only hope was to convince Aisly to undo the damage she’d caused.

“I’ll hold on to this,” Rutter said, lifting his com-sphere. “My commander might’ve ordered me to neutralize you, Sweeney, but she didn’t say I couldn’t talk to you in the meantime.”

Cara understood the subtext. He would help her as much as he could. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

The call ended, but it put a damper on the mood. Nobody spoke as they tracked Aisly across three more blocks. Then she crossed another street and stopped suddenly to dig inside her pocket.

“She’s answering a call,” Cara said.

Aisly’s device was too small to see, but she was definitely talking to someone, most likely that
fasher
Jaxen. After tossing her coffee cup onto the sidewalk—never mind the recycling bin at her elbow—Aisly stepped off the curb and hailed a cab.

“This is about to get interesting,” Troy murmured. “Everyone keep your eyes on that taxi.”

They followed the car through a sea of identical yellow cabs until it reached the outskirts of the city and merged onto the expressway. There it was easy to track. Cara breathed more easily as they sped along the highway. It felt good to move faster, to do more with her rapidly diminishing time.

The trip lasted longer than she expected, taking them all the way upstate. Her stomach growled for lunch when the taxi finally pulled to a stop in front of an industrial complex that appeared to be some kind of factory—Nitrate Solutions, according to the sign. No cars stood in the parking lot, but judging by the semis and trailers parked in the loading area behind the main building, the company was still in business.

“Are we lost?” Cara asked. Maybe the cab had stopped to radio for directions. But then Aisly stepped out of the car, and the taxi drove away. “Guess not.”

Aelyx hovered outside the property line, just above the trees. “What’s she doing here of all places?”

Cara poked her brother, the only one of them with a smartphone. “Look up Nitrate Solutions and see what they make.”

Troy shook his head. “I shut down my phone so the government can’t track the signal.”

“I don’t like this,” Syrine said. “Let’s go back to the safe house.”

“She’s going inside,” Elle announced, pointing through the windshield.

Sure enough, Aisly had managed to unlock the front door. Either that or someone had let her in. Regardless, Cara hadn’t followed all this way to turn back.

“Set us down,” she told Aelyx. “Between the five of us, we can take her.”

“Unless Jaxen’s in there with his staff,” Troy added.

“So we’ll park somewhere close,” Cara said. “Worst case scenario, we’ll run back here and go invisible again.”

Syrine kept muttering that she had a bad feeling about this. She started massaging her head with more pressure than before.

“Did you look Aisly in the eyes?” asked Cara.

“Of course not. I know better than that.”

Cara chewed the inside of her cheek. Maybe Syrine should sit this one out. “You and Elle stay here and try to contact Larish. See what he can find out about Nitrate Solutions. The rest of us will go inside.”

With that decided, Cara stepped out of the shuttle, along with Aelyx and Troy. The asphalt scorched her bare feet, forcing her to hop on alternating tiptoes until Aelyx noticed her plight and swept her into his arms.

“Next stop, the shoe store,” he said as he carried her across the parking lot. The moment didn’t last long, but there in his embrace, Cara remembered what she was fighting for.

“I don’t know,” she teased, wiggling her bare toes. “I could get used to this.”

Troy skewered them with a glare. “If you two are done making me want to vomit, maybe we can focus here?” He thumbed at the door. “Remember to keep your heads down. Our best weapon is the element of surprise.”

They slipped inside, and Aelyx set her down on the cool lobby tile. From there, they proceeded through a pair of swinging doors that led to a short hallway and a thicker set of doors marked CAUTION: double hearing protection required in this area. There was no noise, but an unpleasant scent clung to the air, an odd mix of sewage and chemicals, similar to portable toilets at a fair. The narrow walls were covered in occupational safety procedures and government regulations. This was definitely a manufacturing plant, though Cara didn’t see any clues to indicate what kind.

Troy pushed open the doors a crack and peeked through. “Looks empty,” he whispered, and they continued inside to the main factory.

The concrete floor was gritty, dusted with sand or dirt. All around, enormous machines stood dormant, each unit connected by long stretches of motionless conveyer belts. Cara glanced around for a label machine or finished products to tell her what was made here, but a faraway
clink
caught her attention, and she snapped her gaze toward the sound.

Aelyx and Troy heard it, too. All three of them stared at the far end of the room near the ceiling, where a set of metal stairs led to a catwalk that stretched into the next part of the factory. They’d just started for the stairs when the distant echo of voices sounded from the rear of the building, and Cara tugged both boys to a halt.

She pointed between herself and Aelyx, then toward the sound of the voices. She hated to split up, but it was the smart thing to do. Troy nodded. He gestured toward the stairs and touched the com-sphere in his pocket, a message that he’d check in when he found something.

As Cara crept across the factory floor, an eerie chill puckered her skin into goose bumps. She’d toured plenty of factories during field trips, but there was something unnatural about the silence of the machines and the angular shadows they cast on the floor. She reached for Aelyx’s hand, but pulled back and wiped her sweaty palms on her skirt. When she stretched out her arm to him again, he wasn’t there.

She spun around and found him facing the opposite direction, his muscles tense and his backbone locked.