Spark Rising (25 page)

Alex checked back along the path for any rear guards. Satisfied, he put the binoculars in their case and secured them in the pocket of his pack. He didn’t want them damaged in what was to come. With no further movement along the pathway, he eased into a crouch and gestured for the others to follow him out of their hole.

They worked their way along the hillside and moved down to the path at the bottom of the canyon where they had more freedom to move. When they reached the mouth, Alex headed for the wall of the canyon. He eased out, checking along the river and down the shore.

The humming of the riverboat’s engines drew closer, but it still wasn’t visible around the curve of the river and the tall butte to the right. The guards had moved the girls further up to sit on the rocky shore, but not far enough to guarantee a gunshot wouldn’t echo up the canyon to the prison. The guards, clearly bored, stood over the girls. They were waiting for the steam barge and its shore boats to collect their human cargo.

He was marking the position of each guard in relation to the girls when he felt more than heard a pressure shift behind him. He’d made it clear to Lena and Jackson they should hang back. He turned, brow furrowed.

Alex froze. A neo-barb crossbow hovered in front of his face, held in an unwavering grip that kept the head of the bolt pointed at his right eye socket. Alex tracked back along the crossbow pointed at his face to meet the implacable blue eyes of the long-haired blond man holding it. Alex was aware of the scene behind the man—Lena restrained by a neo-barb behind her with a hand across her mouth, Jackson with a pair of crossbows keeping him in place. Four more men ranged at varying distances around them, and a fifth crouched behind the brush at the opposite canyon wall, focused on the guards and the girls up the river shore.

The neo-barb hunting party had moved around the buttes and circled back while Alex had dismissed them.

He knew better than to focus all of his attention on the target. It left you open to movement from the rear and sides. He’d made a rookie mistake that might get them all killed.

The man in front of Alex allowed his lips to curve up in a smile. He eased a foot back, cocking one finger along the side of the crossbow in a beckoning motion for Alex to walk with him back into the canyon.

Alex cursed himself for a fool.

Chapter 21

Lena remained still and loose. She’d rather the man behind her, with his big hand wrapped tight across the lower half of her face, believe she posed no threat. She hoped Alex understood why she hadn’t dropped them immediately. They were all too close to the group of guards. They couldn’t afford sounds or movements that risked the girls. She would be taking those girls to safety today. She’d made a solemn vow on her parents’ souls the moment before she’d told Alex the same.

The men holding them had the same general look and coloring. Their leader had lank, dirty blond hair hanging past his shoulders, pale eyes, and a nose that had been broken more than once. His clothes were a none-too-clean, hand-made combination of tanned skin and wool. He probably smelled as ripe as the one holding her.

Alex and the man backed away into the relative safety of the canyon. The two with bows on Jackson gestured for him to move, too, and all of the others but the man crouched against the far wall watching the guards and the girls moved back with them. She was ready when the one holding her unceremoniously wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted.

When the man with the bow trained on Alex deemed they’d gone far enough, he stopped. The others followed suit.

Lena stared at him, waiting. What did they want? Why were they interfering?

The man in charge allowed a ghost of a smile to cross over his face again, before he asked in a voice so quiet it was less than a whisper, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same,” Alex answered, his own words as soft.

“Except I’ve got the weapon.” The man waited.

“We’re from the South, near old Nevada,” Alex finally gave him, “and we’re here to rescue our girls.”

The man’s square jaw jutted out and his eyes narrowed. “Your girls?”

Alex shrugged. “Not all of them. But it’s not like we’d take ours home and leave the rest to suffer with these Council bastards.” His low voice throbbed with honest emotion. “So if you’re going to shoot us, shoot us. If not, back the fuck off so we can finish this and get home.”

“Old Nevada, huh? Wanna be more specific?”

“We call it Fort Nevada. Southern end of Zone Five, far away from everything.”

“Fort, huh? Military group?”

Alex nodded, the movement slow and deliberate.

“You think you’re strong enough to take on the Council?”

He shrugged. “We already have. They just don’t know it yet.” It was the truth.

The man searched Alex’s face with a long look. “I thought you were Council yourself, or maybe LDS. Too well-provisioned to be one of us.” The man pointedly looked at their gear. He stepped back and the bow went down, although he still didn’t remove his fingers from the trigger. “I guess Fate’s working in both our favors today. One of those girls, the tall one, she’s ours. And we mean to get her back.”

The two men stood, silent, weighing each other.

“I’m Roddric,” the Neo-barb offered.

“Alex.” He nodded at each of them in turn. “Jackson. Lena.”

Roddric turned to the others, and with a lift of his chin, told them to back off.

She stepped away as soon as the Neo-barb’s arms unfolded, side-stepping closer to Alex.

Roddric kept his focus on Alex. “Plan?”

Alex hesitated. Roddric’s fingers tightened on the crossbow. Alex raised a hand. “Trust comes hard.”

“It does,” Roddric agreed. “You got a plan, or you wanna sit back here and watch us?”

“We have a plan.” Alex looked at Lena. He arched a brow at her.

Jackson made a noise of protest, but Lena grinned.

“I’m the plan,” she murmured matter-of-factly. “I’m going to paralyze the guards. Then while all of you finish them, I’m going to deal with the collars.”

“You’re going to—” Roddric shifted. “You’re like Rose.”

“Rose is your girl out there?” Alex asked.

“Yeah. She can take any machine, no matter what, charge it up. Make it work. You like her?”

Lena made a more-or-less face. Of course, she meant more. Much more.

“You’re going to take out all of those guards?” The man who’d been holding her spoke.

“I said that, yes,” she answered, then looked at Alex. “I’m ready when you are.”

She turned and picked her way to the wall of the canyon. She peered around and marked all four guards. The men fanned out around her. If the guards turned, they’d all be seen.

She slipped a breath in, eased it out, and let her vision blur, reaching to the Dust, sharing what she wanted. The Dust raced through the men’s bodies, eager and quick.

Seconds later, she pulled back to herself and nodded at Alex and Roddric.

Roddric looked at her, then at Alex. He took a deep breath. Being told the men would be paralyzed and being willing to believe it and step out into the line of fire were apparently two different things.

She rolled her eyes, bent to scoop up a rock, and threw it at the back of one of the guards. She missed. The rock clattered past him and rolled away toward the river. Two of the girls nearest the guard looked up, startled and blinking as they shivered. The guards, of course, were still.

Alex and Jackson stepped out. She joined them, with Roddric only a step behind. His men moved in on the guards. The Council men collapsed to the ground in a flurry of metal glinting in the sunlight and four fanning sprays of blood.

Someone whooped in excitement. “She did it! She really did it!”

Lena ignored them. She had tunnel vision, moving straight to the smallest girl with her oddly canted chin. Lena smiled at her and made soft noises of comfort as she deactivated the collar. The girl’s eyes went wide when Lena reached down and fumbled with the collar. She couldn’t get the little hollow for a finger or thumb print to respond to her, so she wiggled her hand in the tight space between the collar and the girl’s neck to protect her skin and instructed the Dust to part the collar. The heat released by the Dust as it complied went a step beyond merely painful, but Lena considered it a small price to pay. She pulled the broken collar apart and tossed it to the ground. Her arms went around the little girl.

“It’s okay. It’s okay now. You’re safe.”

The girl resisted for a moment, unable to keep from looking at the nearest guard, his blood reddening the rocks around him.

“No, no.” Lena told her. “Look at me. Look at me.”

The girl brought her enormous brown eyes up to Lena.

“I won’t let them hurt you. I’m Lena. What’s your name?”

The girl regarded her for a moment. She glanced away to take in the other girls sitting near them. When she looked back, she answered in a voice so breathlessly soft Lena wasn’t sure she’d heard her.

“Missa?” Lena asked.

“No.” The voice was soft, but stronger. “Marissa.”

“Marissa. Okay. I’m going to put you down, now, Marissa. But I want you to stay right here with us, okay? We’re going to take you away from these bad men, and keep you safe.”

Marissa nodded.

Lena sank down. She knelt on the rocks and settled Marissa beside her, her back to the dying or dead man. A chestnut-haired girl was bold enough to dart forward. She looked at Marissa’s collar on the ground and pulled at her own with one shaking hand.

Lena nodded and reached out, deactivating the collar a second before she slid her hand between the collar and the girl’s skin. She separated the collar and pulled it from the girl’s neck, wincing at the oozing blisters hidden beneath it.

“Oh, Dust.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and she promised the girl, “I’m going to fix those for you as soon as everyone is free. I’m going to make sure you’re okay.”

The girl nodded and slid over to sit tight beside Marissa.

Lena turned to the next, and the next, pulling off collar after collar, ignoring the painful burns she inflicted on her own hands. She tried to place hoarse and whispered names to hollow-eyed faces as she winced at the injuries beneath and around the collars. Her rage grew.

She kept it buried deep, smiling reassuringly at the girls even as she wanted to rise and go to the guards to beat them, kick them, defile their bodies for what they’d done to these girls. For what cause? Because they were different? Because they had the audacity to be born?

Lena blinked away tears of anger and frustration to stare at the ring of solemn faces around her. The men, Alex, Jackson, Roddric, and the others, encircled Lena and the girls.

Rose stood in front of her, tall and proud before lowering herself into a squat. She stood the tallest and, with her appearance placing her near Lena’s own twenty-four years, easily the oldest. She was the last of them.

Lena deactivated the collar and pulled it off.

Rose blinked. She sucked in a deep, cleansing breath to center herself. Had she been the newest addition? No wounds hid under her collar. Lena’s gaze dropped down, noting the bruises on her chest, and what appeared to be the semi-circular imprint of teeth, disappearing under the ‘V’ of her prison shirt.

Lena looked up, meeting Rose’s hard, angry eyes. “Do you have any wounds needing attention?”

Rose turned her lips down in a derisive snarl. “Nothing you can fix.”

Before Lena could explain, Rose stood and looked around. She found Roddric and went to him. They wrapped their arms around each other in silence.

Lena looked to Alex. “Do we have time for me to heal them? Some of their wounds are—”

The man closest to her grunted. A warm mist sprayed across her face. The little girl across from the man gasped wetly and slumped into the girl beside her.

The gunshot rang out and echoed off the cliffside.

Before Lena could catch her breath, a body forced her to the ground. She could hear shouts and shots.

“Where is he?” Alex demanded.

“The cliff, the cliff!” Unfamiliar voices.

“Where?”

It doesn’t matter
. She desperately scrabbled at the man on top of her.
It doesn’t matter to me
. Jackson? “Jackson! Let me up!”

“No, Lena! Stay down!” His hand pushed on the back of her head, trying to force her down.

“Lena! Stay down, dammit!” Alex shouted at her. Then, to someone else, “Get those girls! Cover them!”

The hard squeals and whimpers of terrified girls finally did it. “Get off!”

Jackson flew back with a crackling pop. He thudded into the ground.

Lena pulled herself up to her hands and knees, spitting dirt from her mouth.

She flipped herself onto her back and crab-walked backward, scanning the cliff ahead of her. All she needed was a direction. Bolts and arrows arced up toward the right. Motion, a flicker behind a pocket of scrub leaning out from the edge.

Her hand, reaching beside her to pull herself back, landed on soft flesh. She glanced down. A thin arm, unmoving beneath her hand, led her up to a slack jaw, staring hazel eyes, wisps of rich chestnut hair being lifted by the gentle breeze still blowing across them.
Lydie
. A little girl who might have been ten beneath the grime and thinness of her captivity.

Breath hitched in Lena’s throat. She turned back to the cliff and shrieked wordless rage up at the bastard on the cliff.

“Lena, no!”

The wave pulsing up and out from her slammed into the cliff below the scrub. The cliff side exploded with a roar of dust and flying rock. Lena curled into a ball over Lydie. The tiny sharp blows of pebbles on her back were brief, but the pattering of rocks sliding down the cliff went on longer.

It was quiet. Nearby, one of the girls made a frightened mewl. Quick footsteps responded. She lifted her head.

Rose leaned down and lifted Marissa into her arms, wiping the dirt from the terrified girl’s eyes.

The other girls stirred.

Behind her, a man’s rough voice asked, “Is he down?”

“He’s in pieces,” came the grim reply. The Neo-barb leader’s voice. Roddric? “How about us?”

Lena counted small heads. All of the girls were moving. All but one.

She lifted herself to her knees and ran her hands down Lydie’s small face to her chest, where bright red bloomed across the front of her shirt. She spread her shaking hands over Lydie’s wound, trying. With a frustrated cry, she shoved one hand up to the girl’s forehead, smearing bloody dust, searching.

She couldn’t spark if there was nothing there. Death had come too fast.

Lena leaned over the girl until their foreheads met, her voice thick. “I’m sorry. I told you you’d be safe, and you weren’t. I’m sorry.”

A hand landed on her back. She refused to move.

“Lena.” Mere seconds, and then the hand slid to her shoulder and pulled her up. “Lena, you can’t help her. You can’t. But you can help him.” Alex leaned in, shook her slightly. “Lena. Look.” He turned her.

One of Roddric’s men splayed flat on the ground, coughing blood. His wound gaped high on his chest, blood bubbling. The bullet had gone through him and continued its trajectory down from the cliff into Lydie.