Valley of Fires: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) (18 page)

She felt him turn to her, studying her as he had never studied her before.

“I would like
you
to lead that force, Ravan. You traveled with them, you will know how best to crush them. After, I will grant you what you want. Command of the eastern zone, all the ships up and down the Mississippi. In the years to come, that position will set you up well for your challenge to my daughter.”

A part of her, far back in her mind, recognized she had just gotten everything she wanted, but it stirred no emotion now, her eyes were locked on Holt.

She and Tiberius were well away from the main part of the Armory. There were no guards. No workers nearby. Just some of the pirates on prison duty above, but they were too far away to do anything. She could kill Tiberius, right now. Take her knife and bury the hilt in his chest so deep it would never come out.

“I wanted to show you this personally,” Tiberius said. The words were weighted. He was all too aware of what she was feeling. “To be sure that we … understood one another.”

Ravan made herself look away, for the last time, from the figure in the chains, the only person to ever have held her while she slept, the only person she had ever allowed herself to love. The emotion was all over her face, she was sure, but she made herself stare into the man’s eyes and hold his gaze.

“No,” she said. “There are no misunderstandings between us.”

*   *   *

RAVAN EXPLODED OUT THE
door of the Armory and slammed into the railing that circled the tiny, uncovered perimeter of the huge platform. She gasped out loud, like she’d been drowning underwater and could finally breathe. Tears fell, hot and bitter, giant sobs racked her body, and she didn’t even look to see if anyone was watching.

The image of him, hanging there, was burned into her mind. She would never
not
see that image, she knew. The cuts, the bruises, the blood, the unnatural way he hung in the chains like some kind of ragged scarecrow.

God …

The kicker was, it was all her fault. She’d been the one to encourage him to come back, had even come up with the plan for doing so, for what to tell Tiberius, for what to offer and how, and it had all been for selfish reasons, if she were brutally honest about it. Wanting him with her, having him here again, where he belonged …

Some part of her consciousness was doing the math on the last time she had actually cried. It was when she was eight, growing up in that dead-end desert trailer park outside Las Cruces, and her father had done what he’d done while her brother watched. She’d allowed herself to cry then, but after it was done, she told herself never again. She stopped being a child that night because she had to become something stronger, and she had always prided herself on that, and lived up to that intention right until this very moment.

The tears kept falling. They wouldn’t stop.

Get control of yourself,
admonished that same piece of her, the one that had risen up and kicked her in the ass all those years ago, the cold, dark piece that always looked out for her.
Get. Control.

Ravan nodded and wiped the tears away angrily, cleaned her face, forced herself to breathe and stand upright without leaning on the railing for support. She looked around and confirmed there was no one nearby, no one had seen the display. The other Pinnacles stretched upward, the flames shimmering in the hot desert air. People swarmed on the platforms, or zipped through the air, thousands of them. It was the place she had lived for so long, the one place she used to feel she belonged. Now it all looked foreign to her.

They would put him into the cells tonight, they’d want him lucid for the execution. She knew where he would be. She was respected, she could get to him. No one suspected, not even Tiberius. She’d made sure of that, told him she was angry but that she knew when something was done and over with, and this was beyond done. Her desire for power outweighed her sense of vengeance.

It was what he wanted to hear. If she had said she was perfectly fine with Holt being strung up like a piece of trash, he would have recognized the lie and probably killed her on the spot.

She was still in the inner circle. She could free him.

Ravan felt a chill. She looked down at the eight-pointed star on her left wrist, its individual points like sharp iron spears. The two new ones she received only the night before were filled in with red now, and they still stung. Two more notches in her quest for what she wanted. It was in her grasp now, all of it, it had lined up perfectly.

Everything
she wanted.

Was she just going to throw it all away? Is that what she was
really
thinking about here? For what? For
him
? While he was lamenting the loss of someone he loved more than her?

Still … it was Holt. The thought of him, in those chains …

Could she walk away and leave him? She could, she knew. That part of her, the one that wanted her strong for survival’s sake, could. But that would be the end of her. The end of the last shred of humanity, the parts that Holt had always kept alive, the ones his presence never allowed to fade. Who would she be then? Was it really worth it, the power, if that was the price?

“Damn you, Holt,” she said, feeling the tears forming again. “Damn you.”

Get. Control.

Fine. She blinked the tears away, concentrated on her anger—it was always the most helpful emotion, the one that focused you the most. If she was doing this,
really
doing this, then that was that. You make a decision and you stick with it, you don’t ruminate on it like a weakling.

Ravan couldn’t do it alone, though. Freeing Holt was one thing, getting him out of the Pinnacle alive was another. She needed help, both before and after the ordeal. The “after” was obvious, though it meant a radical change in her future. The “before” was the real problem. Her men were loyal, they had fought and bled together, some would follow her, but others were just as loyal to Tiberius, and there was no real way to know which were which. There was only one other solution Ravan could think of, assuming what she guessed about the girl’s plans was correct.

But where to find her? Masyn was a White Helix warrior, not a master of disguise. She wouldn’t try and blend in, she would hide and observe, but from where?

Eventually, the answer occurred to her.

Ravan looked up to where the towers of the Pinnacles stretched into the sky, the giant plumes of flame billowing upward. She frowned at the obviousness of it. “Naturally.”

14.
ROSE

ZOEY WOKE INTO A SQUARE,
blackened room, with walls of the same strange, organically flowing metal, and everything inside was out of place. She lay in a bed with a pretty red canopy and a white, lacy top. There were two couches: a black leather one, and something that looked like it was from a museum, with a bright floral pattern. The walls were lined with paintings and posters, and none of them seemed to fit any sort of theme. The whole room seemed like it had been thrown together at random.

Zoey left the bed and studied the room closer. It was definitely an improvement over the cramped pod, but the obvious attempts to make it feel more familiar had really only made it more disturbing. There were neither windows nor doors, and the realization frightened her. Had they walled her away in a prison where no one would ever find her?

The far wall across the room shuddered and dissolved suddenly, not exactly like it was melting—it was more mechanical than that, like microscopic pieces were moving and reforming themselves into new shapes, and as they did, the wavelike patterns in the surface ebbed into a new orientation. It became a doorway, allowing a view to a hall beyond, made of the same black metal.

The pretty woman from the lab, the one Zoey had helped the entity blend with, stepped into the room, carrying a silver tray, just as out of place as everything else. She paused, surprised to see Zoey out of bed. “I wanted to be here when you woke. I’m sorry.”

Zoey said nothing. It was uncanny looking at her. The only real memories she had from her time before the Assembly, before the invasion, came from the Oracle, and even those felt like someone else’s. Regardless, the woman in front of her looked almost identical to the memories she had seen of that night, when Zoey and her mother both watched the invasion as it began over Bismarck, but it couldn’t be her …

The woman wore blue pants and a white blouse that clung to her lightly. Her hair, sparkling blond, was loosely braided down her back. She was the only thing in the room that didn’t feel random in its appearance.

Zoey realized something odd. She couldn’t read
anything
from the woman in front of her. In fact, there were no other sensations from the hundreds of thousands of Assembly here either. As in the pod, the silence was a blessing, but it made her uncomfortable, how easily they could block her ability.

“I hope you weren’t frightened,” the woman said. “I would have been, waking up like that.”

Zoey still said nothing. The woman studied her strangely, as if in both recognition and not. Eventually she moved toward a wicker dining room table, with mismatched chairs, and set the tray on it. Zoey didn’t have to look to know it held food. She could smell it. Real, hot food. Her stomach growled at the thought.

“I know you’re hungry, Zoey,” the woman said. “How are you feeling? You have been asleep for more than a week.”

Zoey remained silent. Her eyes glanced behind the woman, where the strange doorway still stood.

“Does this form frighten you?” The woman kneeled down to Zoey’s level, but made no attempt to move closer. She seemed perplexed, disappointed at the little girl’s silence. “We expected the opposite. She is from your past, isn’t she? Someone who meant a great deal to you. No one will hurt you here, I promise. You are more welcome than any entity in the entire universe.”

Zoey just kept looking at the door, about twenty feet away.

“I decorated this room for you,” the woman continued. “Do you like it? It’s based on memories. This level of the Citadel was made for
us.
A horizontal orientation instead of vertical, I think you’ll—”

Zoey dashed as fast as she could around the woman.

“Zoey!” the woman yelled, lunging for her, but it was too late.

The doorway began to shudder again, to reform itself, but she was through it before it could. She heard it reopening, knew the woman would pursue; she had to hurry.

Her plan wasn’t escape, that wasn’t why she’d come. She was inside the Assembly’s most powerful structure, and the answer to defeating them must be here somewhere. She had to find it.

As she burst into the hall, her mind suddenly flooded with sensations. It made her falter, the sudden emotions and thoughts from the Assembly. There were so many it was dizzying. The room she had just fled must have been shielded to prevent her from connecting with the aliens, and now she was out of its protection.

Zoey found her footing and dashed down a hallway made of the same black, organic wave shapes, and the way they flowed made it look like the whole thing was corkscrewing ahead of her. The woman hadn’t lied; everything here was arranged horizontally, and it too was decorated. Movie posters lined the walls, odd paintings in varying styles, pictures of people and places no one remembered anymore.

Zoey ignored it all. The swirling hallway split in four directions ahead. She reached the intersection, turned right …

… and screamed as two mechanical constructs moved toward her. She’d seen these before, when she first arrived. Four legs, maybe five feet tall, with thin bodies and four, tendril-like arms. Three-optic red, blue, and green eyes stared into her.

They stomped forward, their strange arms reaching out.

“Zoey!” The woman again, coming from behind, down the hall.

Zoey backpedaled and took a new route. The hallway became oblong, it moved in waves ahead of her, making corners she had to run around, and there was no telling what was going to be on the other side of—

She ground to a desperate stop.

In front of her the hallway ended right into the massive structure’s giant vertical shaft, stretching out around her, up, to the sides, and
down,
so far down she couldn’t even see the bottom.

Zoey saw gunships and walkers, moving along the walls and through the air, and their projections filled her mind. The complicated rail system wound and branched its way up through the shaft, thousands of the pods and platforms buzzing through the air below.

Everything in that shaft maneuvered and was built around the center, and in the center rose the same, brilliantly bright column of energy, each particle of it almost visible, rising up toward the top. There, the crystalline entities pushed in and out of it, and like before, it was all beautiful. The sight made her hesitate.

“Zoey!” the woman shouted again, her voice close. There was nowhere left to run. Desperately, Zoey looked up and down, trying to find handholds or anything she could—

Something happened.

Directly across from her, the energy of the giant column began to slowly bend out
toward her.

As it did, the projections in her mind were overwhelmed by a new sound. Something like static, distorted and powerful. It was mesmerizing, watching all that strange, flowing energy bend and morph forward, as if slowly reaching out for her.

She felt a strong desire to help it, to touch it, and she started to raise her own—

“Zoey!
Please!
” The woman’s voice snapped Zoey’s attention away from the energy. Not because it was loud or close, but because of the
emotion
she suddenly felt from the woman. Genuine emotion, the first she had sensed.

Zoey turned around and saw her standing a few feet away, the strange machines behind her, waiting. Where the woman had been blank before, now there was fear and concern, even dread, and all of it at the idea Zoey might hurt herself.

Then came confusion. Confusion at having those feelings in the first place. Zoey didn’t need to read the woman to know, it was written all over her face. She was experiencing emotions … and they weren’t expected.