The Proving (25 page)

“What was that?” Gabriel exclaimed.

“One less Specter on our asses,” Skye said calmly.

“Turn right!” Reza and Ben shouted.

“What?” Cleo searched the area around the road for some kind of side road, or at least some kind of clearing. The area along the right side of the road was lined with dark trees.

“Turn right now!” they both shouted again. She pressed her pointer finger and thumb hard on the console. The Tumbler’s computer sensed the increased pressure and jerked the wheels right. The steel nose of the vehicle tore through foliage, crushing saplings underneath its massive frame. Cleo could feel branches grating against the bottom of the vehicle. The headlights cut through only a few inches of foliage, but beyond it she could see another much larger obstacle.

“Veer left, butthead!” Reza told her.

Cleo turned the Tumbler left, avoiding the tall tree that stood behind a heavy bush with lazy-looking banana-shaped leaves. The right wheels rose up on an exposed root, then the weight of the vehicle snapped it in two and the Tumbler bounced on its shocks. She could see farther ahead now: it
was
a road. An old, old road with broken concrete caused by decade-old saplings with white bark infesting old cracks and fissures. They seemed to be everywhere, in every direction. There wasn’t any clear way through.

“This way,” Cassidy said, illuminating a route on the windshield. “It’s not perfect, but the Tumbler can handle it.”

“Hold on!” Cleo shouted, following the blue line, weaving the Tumbler between a pair of young trees. She edged one, then ran full-on into another, snapping it in half. “Sorry, little guys,” she whispered.

The Tumbler’s engine dulled and the vehicle jolted again before revving up and returning to its set speed.

“Another Specter down,” Skye announced.

“Is that it?” Gabriel asked. “Are we safe?”

“Oh no,” Ben said. His voice was distant in Cleo’s ears, drowned out by the knocking of tree branches against the exterior of the Tumbler. It sounded as if the forest itself was attacking them in every direction, ferociously hammering on the Tumbler’s reinforced armor.

The Tumbler lurched again. The console flickered and the engine seemed to stop for a moment.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Cleo said through gritted teeth, “but that big gun isn’t working the way it should.”

“It’s working
exactly
the way it should,” Skye said. “Cassy, bring up the speed to twenty kilometers.”

“Wait!” Cleo said, unable to force her eyes to look away from the windshield. “I’m driving through a forest and every pore on my body is sweating and I’m totally freaked out!”

“Cassy speed up this Tumbler right now or we’re going to die!” Skye shouted.

The Tumbler sped up. Its wheels ripped through bushes and weeds. Branches bounced off the exterior to Cleo’s left, causing her to flinch. By Hades, she could have kicked herself for agreeing to this. Since when was she the heroic type, anyway? It was that corpse. That stupid, horrible corpse — Mrs. Walker, she corrected herself. Mrs. Walker had a kid. Now that kid didn’t have a mom. Maybe there were others in the super-secret facility with kids, too. And Cleo knew what it was like to lose your parents. She didn’t want anyone else to feel that way.

“Here they come . . .” Ben said. Something about the (dark) tone of his voice sent a chill down Cleo’s spine.

“What’s going on?!” Cleo asked, turning the Tumbler left and crashing it through a cluster of bushes. A flock of black birds took flight, causing her already taxed heart to skip a beat. She couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. Her muscles felt so tense that her brain was actually telling her it would be a good idea to just pull her hands away from the console, unbuckle and move to the back of the Tumbler and somehow, things would be all right.

The only thing keeping her sane was the chip implant. She could almost feel it sending little neural signals through her brain, helping her calculate each turn, the velocity of the vehicle, the estimated impact of any sapling.

The Tumbler shook again. The lights flickered. This time, it felt different. As if something had knocked against the side of the vehicle. The shield! A Specter had brushed against the Tumbler’s shield! A warning appeared on the windshield:

SHIELD POWER 65%

“How many, Ben?” Skye asked.

“Lots,” he said. His voice sounded shaky. Cleo kept her eyes on the path Cassy laid out, slipping between two tall pines with thick trunks with about a finger of room to spare. The road was less damaged here, and the bright headlights gave her a good half-second of reaction time. Just enough time for someone with an EX980 chip implant. She could feel it working, helping to process the visual input coming in from her eyes. It sped up her reaction (just a little bit), helping her brain identify the biggest florae-themed threats (just a little bit). She was
getting used to this!

“Give me a number, Ben!” Skye shouted

“Six . . . no, wait! Seven!”

Cleo coughed on her own spit, eyes watering, doing her best to steer the Tumbler left. Her left contact fell out of place and she cursed, trying to keep the Tumbler from slipping off the side of the road. “Not now, baby,” she whispered. The forest floor was clearing out. The headlights illuminated heavier chunks of road and — farther ahead — the base of a mountain, pitch black.

Then she saw it. A Specter. A
Manteidos
Specter. An insect taller than a human being emerging from the line of pine trees along the left of the road. Its head was large, cresting at the top and shaped like an upside-down triangle. All four of its wings were extended, spanning the width of the old road. It had a dark orange glow, and as it turned to face the Tumbler it cocked its head as if considering its prey.

“Crap,” Cleo said.

“Cass, the forward guns,” Skye said. “The guns, Cass!”

Two bright blue proton bullets fired from underneath the hood of the Tumbler. One grazed the Specter’s shoulder. It leapt . . .

. . . and landed right on the hood of the Tumbler. Its four legs dug into the shield, causing white ripples to flow away from each leg. The Specter’s right claw, a veritable buzz saw of a limb, reached up and slammed down into the invisible shield. It was as if the shield was a delicate soap bubble, and the Manteidos had managed to slip inside without popping it. The claw had pierced the shield, its sharp glowing tip just millimeters from touching the windshield.

So close that Cleo could see through the creature’s skin. She could
see
its little veins underneath the ghostly carapace. And it. Was. Terrifying.

“Skye help in the name of Hades do something; I’m freaking out!” Cleo shouted over the ear-piercing screaming of the children in the back. The Tumbler’s right wheels bumped over a chunk of concrete, causing the vehicle to shudder. The Manteidos shifted, two of its legs losing their grip on the shield.

SHIELD POWER 24%

“Cassy, the brakes!” Skye shouted.

Her brother reached out, sliding his shaking finger across the blue velocity bar until the blue was entirely gone. The Tumbler stopped on a dime, and Cleo felt her chest jolt uncomfortably against the chair’s nylon straps. The Specter seemed to float away from the windshield, landing softly on the ground where it had to dig one ghost-like claw into the blistered concrete to stop its momentum.

A red targeting reticule appeared on the windshield, right in the center of the Specter’s thorax.

“Now, Cassy!” Skye said.

More proton bullets fired from underneath the hood. They hit the Specter, cutting through it and causing its ghost-like body to burst apart in a flurry of yellow sparks.

“Punch it!” Skye ordered.

Cassidy’s hand reached out, sliding the blue acceleration bar forward. The Tumbler immediately reacted, its engine under their feet emitting a low groan. They picked up speed, tearing through the remaining sparks; each one bounced off the shield before dissipating.

“I’m plotting the last few shots into the autofire system,” Skye said, unbuckling.

“Those autofire systems are spotty,” Cleo said over her shoulder.

“My sis is right,” Reza piped up. “They’re pretty new tech. Lots of bugs.”

“It’ll have to do,” Skye said.

Cleo, breathing fast, glanced over her shoulder and did a double-take when she realized the Spartan wasn’t at her console anymore. “Wait, what?! Where are you going?!”

“We’re making a hot evacuation,” Skye answered calmly. “Everyone takes a gun, no one stays behind.”

“But I’m scared!” Wei wailed from the rear of the Tumbler.

They hit another bump and the Tumbler bounced on its shocks. The headlights dimmed and the vehicle shook as the proton gun fired twice more.

“The battery,” Cassidy said. “We’re at twenty percent, Cleo.”

“Cool,” Cleo murmured, fighting the muscles in her left arm. They were so tense now that it hurt, and keeping the vehicle straight at such a fast speed on such a damaged road was impossible. The Tumbler swerved left and right. Its wheels rolled over a fallen tree, lifting the front of the vehicle into the air, so high that for a moment, all Cleo could see through the windshield was the Ring cutting through the night sky. As the Tumbler came back down, it bounced on its shock absorbers, rattling her teeth. Behind her, someone fell out of their seat and began crying. Reza? Was it Reza?

“There! The facility!” Cassidy said, pointing ahead. It was built into the mountain, unassuming, a concrete façade fabricated into the rock with two thick pipes that jutted out of the steep rock face, reaching down into a single cylindrical steel tank. Cleo recognized the system: emergency cooling gas tanks that pumped into a small Phenocyte reactor.

The road evened out, causing the murmuring sound of the tires to soften the way primary school kids did when a teacher entered the room. The headlights illuminated the area in front of the facility. A targeting reticule appeared on the windshield, providing a detailed description of the carnage ahead. Cleo didn’t need any details to know just how badly they’d miscalculated.

“Oh no.”

“Make sure everyone has a pistol, Gabriel,” Skye called out from the back of the Tumbler. “Everyone gets one. When we stop, we move into the facility. Everyone repeat after me: Chi, shields on.”

“Chi, shields on,” the kids (and Ben) repeated.

“Skye!” Cleo shouted. “Skye, there’s . . . crap, I don’t even know!”

A big, fat capital-D Disaster. That was the only way to describe it. The steel loading bay built into the façade was half-lifted. Adjacent to the loading dock were a dozen panes of glass, each one divided by white steel frames built into the solid rock. And a door, half-open, with something human-shaped lying in the doorway.

And a Tumbler. A Spartan Tumbler, parked next to the loading bay, with a dozen bodies lying near it. Unmoving. Lying in a distinctly
I’m-not-sleeping
sort of way.

“Skye,” Cleo squeaked.

“I see it,” Skye said. The headlights dimmed again and this time the Tumbler shook violently, its engine coughing.

“We’re low on battery power,” Cassidy said. “Thirteen percent now.”

“Everyone hold on!” Skye shouted over her shoulder. She leaned in between Cleo and Cassidy, her gloved hands squeezing the backs of their seats. “Cassy, speed up and don’t hit the brakes until we’re flush with the other Tumbler. Cleo, get ready to make a sharp left. Let’s create a barrier between the Specters and the entrance to the loading bay. Maybe that other Tumbler’s shield system is still on.” She lifted her leg, pressing her boot on the control console. The Tumbler was on a crash course to the steel shutters of the loading bay; Cleo’s right hand found the armrest of her chair, squeezing the spongy foam. She gulped a deep breath and held it. Her heart thudded against her chest.

“Now!” Skye shouted. Cassy’s finger slid across the blue accelerator. Cleo pressed her left pinky finger down on the pressure-sensitive console. The disc braking system clicked, fighting the wheels as they turned left. Cleo felt her body thrust forward, stopped by the nylon straps. The muscles in the back of her neck burned as her head lowered, her jaw bouncing off her chest, her soft skin rubbing against the spidersilk Ecosuit.

They were stopped.

“Now!” Skye shouted, punching the manual door switch over her brother’s head. “Go go go go go! Turn left and duck inside the loading bay!”

Cleo’s shaky hands fumbled with her seatbelt. “Come on,” she whined. “Come on come on come on!”

The metal lock disconnected. She jumped out of the seat and turned, suddenly aware of a terrible reality: she was the last person in the Tumbler, and there was no telling what was directly outside. “Crudmissile, call map.” The map appeared in the lower right-hand corner of her right contact lens so it appeared floating near the floor of the dark Tumbler.

Jump outside. Sharp turn left.

She jumped out, sure that a Specter was going to tackle her out of nowhere. When it didn’t happen, she dug her heels into the concrete ground, turning left. Her left lens was still out of alignment but her right lens adjusted to the darkness, turning everything a neon green by adjusting the spectral range and intensity range, pinging her VRacelet to utilize its (obsolete) CPU. “Thank you,” she huffed between breaths, running as fast as her out-of-shape legs would allow. She felt a pop in her left knee, an old Disc Toss injury that her idiotic parents had told her she would heal from. She imagined little gears in her knee breaking under the stress but willed them to keep turning for just a few more steps.

So close. Her lenses alerted her to the facility’s Wi-Fi signal, weak but functioning. She used the chip in her brain to call up her Piggypacking program to make a connection. “Crudmissile, close loading bay doors,” she commanded.

The steel shutter door began to lower. Cleo ducked under it, screaming in victory as she fell to the ground, letting the Ecosuit absorb the brunt of the fall. She rolled a few times, swallowed bit her tongue, then came to a stop at someone’s boots.

The steel shutter closed.

They were (temporarily) safe.