Burn (26 page)

“And you believed him?” Race asks.

I tilt my head. “At the time Brayton brought the Sicarii onto the compound, he had none of the information we had, like what happened on the H2 planet. How they took over.”

Brayton raises his head, but it looks like it takes a lot of effort. “I heard everything when I got here, but the Sicarii said it was H2 lies.” His watery blue eyes peer at Race with suspicion. “He said you destroyed his home planet before coming here.”

Race glares at him. “Your misplaced trust in an alien who—by your own report—stole your appearance and hurt you in the process has resulted in heavy casualties.”

Brayton grimaces at the gun still leveled at his head. “I wanted to tell Angus everything. I asked to speak with him earlier, and I would have—”

“Too late.” Race looks more than willing to shoot him. “Does the Sicarii have the scanner now?”

“He does.”

“Did you tell it the satellite shield was live?” Race barks, and Brayton nods. I’ve never seen Race show this kind of emotion, but suddenly I’m wondering if he’s going to execute Brayton right here. Maybe it’s a good thing that I can already hear the running footsteps of a cadre of guards headed in our direction. “Where is the Sicarii now?” he shouts.

Brayton shakes his head.

Race’s finger closes over the trigger. “Where is the Sicarii?” he roars.

“Kill me,” says Brayton, rolling onto his back. “But then find Ellie.”

“She’s fine,” I say. “She’s with a bunch of factory workers testing the few Archers that . . .” I trail off as Brayton points to the residential building.

“He took her away,” he whispers. “She thought he was me. You have to find her.”

My stomach drops. “Race. We may be looking for the wrong person.”

“Did it take her appearance?” he shouts, leaning down and pressing the barrel of his weapon against Brayton’s forehead.

Brayton closes his eyes, sprawled on the pavement, looking like a drained, exhausted old man. “He took her away,” he says again. “He said I was useless. And he was right. I couldn’t protect her.”

But less than an hour ago, I was talking to Ellie . . .

“Shit,” I snap. “The Sicarii is with the Archers!” I take off, my feet pounding the pavement as I fly toward the side lot, dread beating a pulse in my head as pieces of a horrible, devastating puzzle click into place. The Sicarii stole the scanner. It knows our satellite shield is live and controlled within this compound. If it gets out or signals its friends that it has what it came here for, there’s nothing stopping them from coming in and destroying us.

Race is a few paces behind me. He calls out to the guards to secure Brayton and search the residential building for the real Ellie as I veer to the left and bolt for the side lot. Workers are busy with the interiors of the Archers, and in just the past hour, they’ve loaded the consoles into the heavy vehicles and are installing the systems. Several others are rolling carts carrying the live ammunition toward the Archers, and some of the workers are loading the cannons. The sun is setting, and the glitter of the massive lenses beneath the overhead stadium lights is nearly blinding, but so are the smiles on every face as they prepare these powerful machines to defend the compound.

No one realizes the enemy is right next to them.

Christina, Leo, Manuel, and Ellie are standing together at the rear of one of the Archers, watching as a worker secures the console to the floor. Christina sees me first, and her face lights up, but when she takes a good look at me, her smile dies. Ellie frowns as she sees Christina’s reaction, and her head whips in my direction. I don’t have to say a word. Her mouth goes tight, and she takes a step backward, looking around, assessing options. Leo’s brow furrows, and he looks back and forth between me and Ellie.

Ellie darts behind one of the Archers.

“Stop her!” Race shouts from behind me, but the crowd of workers is too stunned to move quickly. They look around as if wondering who Race wants them to stop.

An engine roars. The last Archer on the line rolls forward. Leo sprints for it just as it snaps the cables tethering its undercarriage. “No, Leo!” Christina and I shout at the same time.

Leo’s fingers skim the side panel of the massive armored vehicle as it lurches forward, trying to get a grip on it, but he stumbles when it zooms away. I change direction quickly, sprinting for the Archer that had been next to it, diving into the back and feeling the console rattle when I push past it to get to the driver’s seat. The gunner’s pit isn’t bolted down yet. It may not even be connected. As I look above me and notice that this one doesn’t even have a lens in place, I realize I may have picked the wrong ride. This one’s not battle-ready. No time to go for another, though—I can already hear a distant explosion. Cursing, I throw myself into the driver’s chair, twisting the square key in the ignition as I do. The engine roars.

At least there’s gas in the tank. I shove it into gear and shudder with the deep vibrations as the Archer rolls forward. Through the tiny windshield, I can see that the Ellie-Sicarii has made it halfway across the compound.

And it’s firing its hood cannon at the nearest perimeter defense station. I thunder after Ellie while I scan the controls in front of me, looking for a way to fire my own hood cannon.

“Damn it!” a voice shouts from a few feet behind me, startling the living shit out of me.

“What the hell, Leo?” I yell, jumping a curb and skimming around the lake that covers the eastern quarter of the compound.

He must have dived into the back right as I took off, and now he’s squatting in the entrance to the cramped driver’s compartment. “I wanted to be your gunner, but the weapons console isn’t hooked up back there!”

One of my wheels rolls over the side of a boulder as I try to avoid hitting a tree. “Is there a harness back there? Buckle yourself in!”

He doesn’t respond, and I focus again on reaching Ellie. All I can see is the rear of her vehicle—and then the bright burst of fire that zings from her hood cannon toward the perimeter station set into the inner edge of the mile-wide crater’s rim. The station explodes in flames, debris and bodies flung outward and colliding with the ground a few hundred feet below. I can barely hear Leo’s shouts of rage and horror over my own.

Ellie makes a sharp turn just in time to avoid colliding with the crater wall and roars toward the next station, only a half a mile away. I veer to the left and head after her. Movement on that side draws my attention, and I see another Archer in pursuit of her as well.

The autocannons on its roof are as still and silent as ours, which means that either they’re not hooked up or there’s no gunner in the back. I grab the small control stick on my console and try to aim my hood cannon at Ellie, but while I’m dodging trees and boulders and signs, it’s nearly impossible to get a weapon lock on her vehicle. My target is small and moving quickly—but hers—the defense stations—are huge and stationary.

“She’s going to reach that station in less than a minute,” Leo snaps. He wedges his torso next to my chair and reaches for the control stick beside my steering wheel. The hood cannon jumps to life again. His deft maneuvering spins the cannon around, its thick barrel aimed straight at the rear of Ellie’s vehicle. He jams his thumb down on the black button at the tip of the stick.

Nothing happens . . . except that Leo starts cursing fluently. “It’s not loaded!”

“She was watching long enough to know which ones were armed,” I mutter, trying to close the distance.

“Why aren’t the stations shooting at her?”

“They probably have no idea what’s happening! She’s supposed to be a friendly.”

Leo rips his hands off the hood cannon controls and withdraws into the low doorway between the rear of the vehicle and the driver’s compartment. “I should have been paying more attention,” he says, his voice thick with anger and frustration. “She’s the Sicarii?”

“Yes. I’ll explain lat— No!”

Ellie fires again, the shot flying wide and slamming into the rocky wall of the crater right next to the second perimeter defense station. The station’s massive guns are swinging around, but they’re slow. I can only imagine the chaos within that station, where the guards are probably shouting and scrambling. They were prepared to meet an enemy coming from above, from outside the crater, and now one of our own best weapons is firing on them.

And she does. Again. Direct hit. From behind me, I hear only clanking and a strangled cry. I grit my teeth and push the gas pedal to the floor, seeing my chance. Ellie careens to a stop and reverses to head for the next station. Already, the other Archer is racing ahead of her to protect that defense station, but the mixed signals and destruction must have terrified the station’s occupants, because their giant guns are gliding around and aiming at the friendly Archer, which careens out of the way as they fire at it. I push away the fear that Christina might be inside that Archer and focus on drawing even with Ellie, trying to get my vehicle in a position where I can run her into the crater wall to her right. We skim along the edge, her Archer just a few yards off my front bumper. I push my own vehicle a little farther, slowly gaining as her hood cannon once again aims at a defense station. There are only six, and she’s destroyed two. She’s coming at this one from the side instead of straight on, and the people in the station are obviously thinking the other—friendly—Archer is its enemy, because they’re focusing on it and not her. My stomach drops as Ellie fires, hitting a spot just below where the station juts out from the crater wall. A hail of rock and dust billows outward. I’m now only a yard from her bumper. If I can just—

Something flies across the distance between our two Archers and lands on the roof of Ellie’s vehicle, right next to the massive lens.

It’s Leo. He must have crawled up through the hole in my roof. “Goddamn it, Leo!” I shout as I watch him cling to the autocannon rails and inch toward the front of Ellie’s vehicle.

My heart is in my throat. I have no fucking idea what to do. I can’t ram her. I couldn’t fire, even if we were armed. Leo is out in the open, his wiry body clinging to the back of a metal monster in an arena of rock. I’m helpless.

But the defense station isn’t, and its heavy cannons are now rotating toward us. “Please see him,” I whisper as I race along behind Ellie’s Archer. “Please don’t shoot.”

I’m not just talking to the defense station. Because Leo has made it all the way to the front of the Archer and hurls himself onto the hood as Ellie sends another blast toward the defense station. It takes out the large cannon and part of the floor of the station, and I try not to look too closely when I realize one of the guards is dangling from the shattered paneling and wires.

I focus on Leo, who is crouched on the hood of Ellie’s Archer. Blood streams from his ears—the last blast shattered his eardrums. His arms are wrapped around the barrel of the cannon. He’s the reason Ellie’s last shot wasn’t a direct hit.

He’s kicking at her tiny windshield, but there’s no way he’ll penetrate the bulletproof glass. He is distracting her, though. She swerves to the side, clipping my front panel and fishtailing. Leo holds tightly to the cannon, his little muscles standing out in sharp relief as he wrenches at it. One of his hands is working at something at the cannon’s base, but I only catch glimpses as Ellie weaves back and forth across open ground. The other Archer has circled around, but the driver obviously sees Leo, too, because the vehicle is hanging back instead of racing toward Ellie. It’s put itself between Ellie and the next defense station on the west side of the compound.

Ellie makes a sudden, sharp U-turn, churning up turf like bunched fabric beneath the Archer’s massive wheels, and flies back toward the damaged defense station.

Leo’s body bucks as Ellie’s hood cannon swings forward, taking him with it. I can see his frantic movements, his desperate attempts to keep the heavy metal barrel from aiming at the men hanging from beneath the shredded metal and sparking cables.

I see the moment he makes his decision. His body goes still. He stops struggling with the cannon.

And he plasters himself across the narrow strip of windshield, including the camera ports for her display screens, completely blocking her view.

Ellie veers back and forth, trying to throw him off. My mind becomes an abstract whirl of physics calculations. Speed. Acceleration. Force.

Oh God.

“Oh God,” I whisper aloud.

She picks up speed with frightening abruptness. She’s only a few hundred yards from the crater wall. “Leo!” I shout. “Jump off! Get off that thing!”

He doesn’t.

Ellie makes a sudden left just before it reaches the edge of the crater, so violent that when its front right side slams into the rock wall, the Archer rolls. I watch, helpless, as Leo’s skinny body disappears beneath the vehicle.

And as the Archer rolls away, he’s left behind. Lying in the grass, not moving.

I slam on the brakes, my chest filling with dread, and throw open the small driver’s door. My feet hit the emerald-green grass, and for this random second beneath the lights of the damaged defense station, I think how beautiful the color is, how full of life and promise. And then I force my head up as I run around the side of my vehicle and sprint for the crumpled figure at the base of the rock wall.

Leo’s on his side. His fingers twitch in the grass. His blond hair is streaked with blood. The fabric of his shirt has been melted to the skin of his arms and stomach by the heat of the cannon. But he’s alive. I drop to my knees and skid as soon as I get close. “Leo,” I say.

His glasses are gone, and his green eyes are bright with terror and pain. His mouth moves, but all that comes out is a broken whimper. I blink and focus, taking in the rest of him.

It’s broken, too.

His legs are twisted in an odd way, and my thoughts scream as my gaze moves up his body . . .
spine shattered, organs twisted and hemorrhaging, ribs splintered, lungs perforated.
Afraid to move him for fear of doing more damage, I lie on my side so he can see me. I gently smooth his hair from his brow, noting with a sinking feeling the blood dripping from his nose and mouth.