Legacy (Alliance Book 3) (18 page)

She walked over to the desk and picked up the paper, crumpled it and threw it in the trash. He didn’t move, eyes on her, watchful.

“I didn’t get a chance to look it up yet, so I am going to just ask. This thing you have, do you need medical care to make it manageable? Are you in pain, Darius?”

He shook his head, “No. I get tired easier than most, but no, I am not in any kind of pain yet, and I’ve been running all my blood tests myself for years now, so I’ll know before it gets to that point.” He said it calmly, very much the scientist, and she wondered if he ever told anyone else that he was sick, but didn’t want to ask just yet, so she just nodded at him.

“The newspaper hacks will be after me soon enough because of this, Darius. It may take them a few days, but they’ll come. They always do, and I don’t want to be here for that either. I don’t want Jason and my sister to have to deal with any of it, so I am closing down this lab for now. Jason can take over afterwards if he wants to, but I am done. I gave this twenty years. Twenty years spent in the company of Bonobos and rats and bloody formulas. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that wasn’t medical or had a conversation with another human being that wasn’t about this. I am asking you to come with me, for a week, if you can manage that. You can decide what you want to do after that. I want a bit more time with you. I can’t explain it beyond that.”

He looked uncomfortable, his fingers nervously tapping the edge of the desk. “All right. We’ll go. I’ll stay the week, unless you ask me to leave earlier. I can’t promise that I’ll be good company, but I am a decent cook, and I am pretty sure I still remember how to make a fire. I haven’t the slightest clue about much else,” and he seemed sad when he said it.

She walked over to him and wrapped her hands around his neck, looking up at his eyes, “I haven’t a clue either, Darius. No promises of a great holiday or anything. I won’t hold you to anything but this bit of time,” and she planted a soft kiss on his lips, and moved away, not wanting to scare him. His face was flushed, but he didn’t move towards her.

He nodded his head after a while and walked to the door, “I’ll pick you up at your place in an hour then,” and he was gone, softly closing the door behind him.

A week seemed like a lifetime now, and she hoped she could will the days to move slowly enough for both of them, however many of them they had left.

Amelia, June 11, 2236, Crylo.

R
iley wasn’t in the room when she went looking for him; wasn’t anywhere he should have been, and nobody seemed to know where he went. She checked every space on their floor and then ran to the bathroom the boys used. It’s the only room she’d never been in before. She heard the water running from the outside and pulled the door open just a crack to make sure it was Riley and not someone else she was intruding on. It was, only she’d never seen him like this before. He was wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, small drops of water making glittery tracks down his skin. He was standing in front of the mirror, running the blade of a knife over his face in slow downward strokes, but not drawing any blood, and his face was too calm for someone who was hurting themselves.

“What the hell, Riley? What are you doing with that knife?” He smiled at her, a full on smile, as if what she just asked was the funniest thing in the world, “It’s called shaving, Ams. At a certain age, we kind of have to do that or we get all these hairs, you know, and it makes touching us and kissing us decidedly uncomfortable,” and he laughed, making her blush.

She walked over to him and took the knife from his hand, suddenly wanting to do it for him, “Tilt your head back, Riley. I got the rest of it.” He did, face serious, all the laughter gone from him. He froze when she touched the blade to his neck, just under his chin, eyes on her, and looking very much afraid. “Please tell me you trust me not to kill you, Riley.” He didn’t move, letting her scrape at the stubble, his hands wrapped tightly around the counter, chest moving much too fast for how still he was standing.

She set the knife down after a little while, and put her hands on his, looking up at him, concerned, “What is it, Riley?” But he just shook his head at her.

Something was wrong, she could feel it.

She wrapped her arms around him, his hands on her back now. “You know, this might be the last moment of privacy we have together, Riley, and here we are, shaving,” she giggled softly, couldn’t help it. For weeks now she waited for him to do more than hug her to him in bed, but the few kisses they shared always ended in him pulling away from her, gently, looking serious and sad, as if it hurt him to do it, and then she could feel him watching her sleep for a long time every night, and she let him, pretending to be asleep sooner than she was, hoping he’d tell her whatever secrets he was keeping from her, secrets that made him not want to go beyond an occasional kiss and a hug, but he never did, and she was too afraid to ask.

She put her hands on his chest and he stilled, but she was done worrying about scaring him now. She reached up and kissed him, wrapping her hands around his face, wet and soft. She trailed her fingers down his neck, tracing the lines she had just shaved, and he was breathing faster but his hands were wrapped around the edge of the counter again, not touching her. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t like me any more, Riley,” she whispered, watching his face go hard.

He shook his head at her, “You’ve no idea, Ams.” His voice so quiet, soft, “I won’t survive today if we do this. I won’t be able to let you go to set off the explosives. I won’t be able to let you out of my sight. I am sorry.”

And she knew what it was then, this fear in his face. “We are going to come back from this, Riley. I can feel it. Now, would you please kiss me back. I want something nice to hold on to when I am blowing things up.” She lifted her face up and leaned in, closing her eyes, and suddenly she felt his hands on her face, squeezing it, holding it as if he thought she’d run and there was nothing soft about the kiss that followed. She couldn’t get any air in, couldn’t move, couldn’t think of anything but his hands and lips on her, making her feel hot everywhere, too hot. She looked at him and his eyes were large and shining as if he were about to cry.

He pulled away, eyes roaming over her face, drinking her in, “I love you, Ams. I am begging you not to get yourself killed today. I don’t think I could survive it,” and he let her face go and put his head down.

Everybody was ready to go by noon. She sat next to Riley in the flier, her dress making her uncomfortable. Nobody was talking when they took off, all lost to their own thoughts. She looked out the window, marking the changes in the landscape below them in her head, as if she’d have to retrace this journey on foot. She gasped when all the woods and fields abruptly ended and they were suddenly flying over something that looked like it didn’t belong here, plains of dusty beiges with no trees on them at all, punctuated by an occasional tiny purple or pink hill. It was the most incredible thing she’d ever seen, and finally her implant told her they were flying over something called a desert. It seemed so desolate and yet something about the colors of it and the soft wavy patterns in the way the sand was, as if constantly in motion, made it feel oddly appealing to her. She wanted to reach down and hug the purple hills, feel the softness of them under her body. She wrapped her fingers tightly around Riley’s hand, pointing out the window, making him look at it, “I think I want to come back there someday, Riley. I want to walk on that.”

He smiled softly at her and nodded, just once, “Okay, Ams.”

She heard Brody telling the boys to put the shields up, and knew they must be getting close now, only she couldn’t yet see anything that looked like a city of any kind, and then suddenly it was right there in front of her, as if appearing out of the haze by magic. Gleaming white towers shimmering in the heat, disappearing into the bright blue of the sky. So many towers, all looking exactly the same, clean and straight and slender, their whiteness interrupted only by the large dark windows and shiny metal roofs. And she could see the impossibly tall walls stretching around the city, curving away from view. They were aiming for a small ravine inside the walls, the one place they could hide the flier here, and she hoped their shields were good enough. This place was far too out in the open. She could see little dots of people moving along the symmetrical streets, black and white dots. She assumed the white ones were women, and she hoped Stan made their dresses exactly right. She caught Riley looking at her, concern in his face, and she realized she’d been making fists with her hands, so she uncurled her fingers and smiled at him apologetically, “I’ll be okay, Riley, I promise. I just wish there were trees here.”

She stuck her hand into the slit Stan cut in the folds of her dress to make sure the little pouch of explosives was still there in the hidden pocket, and it was, and it helped calm her nerves some. She looked around at the rest of them, catching Laurel’s eyes on her, and smiled meekly at her friend, feeling the apprehension in her, hoping they could both do what they had to do. Brody came out from the cabin and stood in front of them, not saying anything for a little while, as if trying to find just the right words.

“So... here we are. The trek to the block we need should take me and the girls twenty minutes at the most. Loren will drop the flier on the roof of 214 on my cue and drop off Lancer and Trelix, and bring it back here. We can’t hide the flier on the roof for more than a few minutes without risking it. So we’ll have to move the flier to 112 when they have everybody collected. Provided there is no resistance in the lab, getting the girls should take ten to twelve minutes. I need everyone to put in their coms and test with each person on your team. The explosions should provide enough of a distraction for a half hour, which is more time than we should need, even if something doesn’t work out exactly as we anticipated. Stan is in charge of dealing with all comm traffic. Lastly, and I really wish I didn’t have to say this part, but as discussed, if any one of us gets in trouble, the rest of you will stick to the plan and get those girls out of here. That’s what we are here for. We will not risk the lives of these twenty two girls to save any one of us.”

Ams watched everyone nod at Brody and then the blue light was blinking overhead, and she knew they had landed. She suddenly wished they had more time to prepare for this. A day or two more at least. She looked over at Riley and he seemed calm. She wished he could go with her and Laurel instead of Brody, but of course looking the way he did, he couldn’t. She would have to leave him in the flier with Ella and Drake and Stan. Laurel and Brody were off the flier already when she got up, Riley standing now too. He took her hands in his softly and looked at her for a long moment and then smiled a small embarrassed smile at her, “Try not to die, Ams.”

Brody led them at a brisk pace up the side of the ravine and into one of the narrow streets leading into the city center. He was walking just a few steps ahead of them, and she desperately wanted to hold on to Laurel’s hand, but she couldn’t do that here. The few people on this street didn’t pay any attention to them, and she knew Stan did a great job on their dresses, and on Brody’s uniform. They looked just like everybody else here, and she forced herself to breathe deeply and run through the plan in her head over and over again, only her mind kept drawing pictures of Riley from earlier, his head tilted back, fear in his eyes, and the desperate way he kissed her afterwards, as if he couldn’t get close enough to her. She shook her head, trying to clear it. Brody’s voice sounding alarm in her ear, “You okay, Ams?”

“Okay, Brody,” she whispered back.

They turned into the main street that the lab building was on. There were a lot more people here, and Ams hoped they still looked the part. A young man winked at her from across the street and she blushed, not quite knowing what the expected reaction to something like that was, so she ignored him and kept walking, eyes straight ahead. That’s what she did wrong, she knew now. She needed to stop looking around, as if she’d never been here before. Brody’s voice cut into her thoughts through the comm, “Second building away from us, we are stopping. I’ll be ten steps away from you, but don’t watch me. Drop the packages into the collectors on the sides of the door and keep walking until I tell you to stop.”

She put her hand inside the slit of her dress, wrapping her fingers around the small pouch and pulling it closer to the surface. She looked over at Laurel, her face set, serious, and whispered, “You get the one closest to us.”

She felt Laurel slow down and took a few more steps towards her bin. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to her. Her hand was sweating inside the fold of the dress, fingers clenched tightly around the seam of the pouch. She was at the bin now, passing it, but the pouch was stuck in the fabric. She stopped, pulling on it, afraid she would rip the dress if she pulled any harder. She felt panicky and forced herself to breathe, her fingers tracing the outline of the pouch inside the dress and finding the damn thread that was holding it captive. Finally, it was in the bin and she picked up her pace, searching the sea of people in front of her for the familiar shape of Laurel, only she couldn’t see her anywhere. She kept walking, not wanting to use her comm with so many people around her, and finally Brody’s voice told her to turn right at the next street.

She did, and after a few minutes of walking she could see Laurel and Brody standing under an awning to some store, waiting for her, and she smiled at them, couldn’t help but smile, regretting it immediately as Brody’s voice chided her, an angry whisper, “Don’t do that, Ams. Not yet.” Brody’s dark-clad form separated from the wall, Laurel following a few steps behind. She caught up to her, not saying anything, just walking, looking straight ahead. The street came to an abrupt stop, and Brody turned into a small courtyard between two short buildings. They were finally alone.

“I can’t go any farther or I’ll be out of range to detonate. I want you and Laurel to go back to the flier. I know we didn’t discuss this earlier, but I don’t know what’s going to happen once these things go off. You’ll be safer on your own.”