United: An Alienated Novel (15 page)

Suddenly, Cara knew exactly what she needed to do.

She strode to the front of the shuttle and crooked a finger at Troy and Elle. Then she hollered at Aelyx, “Change of plan. Elle’s joining your group. Troy and Larish are coming with me.”

Chapter Ten

C
ara had crossed multiple galaxies and lived on two different planets, but she’d never visited Canada before now. The instant she’d caught her first glimpse of its pristine white-capped mountains and its forests of rich pine, she mused there could be no greater contrast to the sand dunes she had left behind. Where the desert was dead, this place exuded life. Even in the industrial area where the shuttle had landed, the very air she breathed seemed fertile—ripe with cool moisture and buzzing with insects.

Unfortunately, the change in temperature had done nothing to soothe her temper. If anything, her hurt and anger had built like steam inside a pressure cooker. Each moment Aelyx refused eye contact, each time his hand rested beside hers but never connected, she felt another stab of rejection. She supposed she could apologize—be the bigger person—but she didn’t want to. What she wanted was for him to choose her, to put his faith in her. Until that happened, she had nothing to say to him.

So she spoke to Elle instead. “Did you scan the building for explosives?”

Elle stood across from her in the empty factory parking lot. Their group was already divided: Aelyx and his team on one side, Cara and her crew on the other. If this were a teen movie, a dance-off would happen next. “I think—”

“Yes,” Aelyx interrupted, lifting the
iphal
Troy had taken from the ambassador. He kept his gaze fixed on the empty space above Cara’s head when he spoke. “Remember, shoot to kill, but only after you have a visual on Jaxen’s ship. He’ll probably cloak it, so we’ll need to know exactly where it lands in order to access his flight log.”

Troy checked his ammunition clip, then shoved it back inside his spare pistol and tucked the weapon beneath his waistband. “What about Cara’s reboot? I’ve got no problem taking out the hybrids, but I don’t think I can ice my own sister.”

For the briefest of moments, Aelyx flicked a glance at her. “The replicate is not your sister. She’s her own person. I was cloned from a L’eihr who lived two thousand years ago, but that doesn’t make me him.”

“Wait a minute,” Cara said. She had no desire to swap friendship bracelets with her clone, but that didn’t mean she wanted Rune dead. It was one thing to kill Jaxen and Aisly; they had once intended to purge half the human race. But Rune’s only crime was being born to the wrong person. “She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Aelyx used a hand to indicate the bruises on her face.

“Nothing serious enough to
die
for.”

He heaved a sigh. “Then capture her if you want. Let’s just get on with it. The next plant is fifty miles away, and for all we know the hybrids could be there by now.”

Cara narrowed her eyes at him. “Excuse me for caring about a human life. I’ll try to do better next time.”

“Don’t twist my words,” he snapped. “I’m trying to save your entire race.”

“
My
entire race? What about yours? I thought we were in this together.”

He opened his mouth as if to argue, but clamped it shut again. Then he turned and began making his way toward the factory while Cara’s shoulders sagged in disappointment. She didn’t know what she’d expected from him, but a simple
goodbye
would’ve been nice.

To her surprise, Syrine ran after him and grabbed his shirt. She hissed something to him, which caused him to shake his head. Cara chewed the inside of her cheek and watched as the pair argued in hushed tones. She couldn’t hear them at first, until Aelyx flung a frustrated hand in the air, and Syrine raised her voice loud enough to trip a probe in the next solar system.

“David said it to me over and over,” she shouted in L’eihr. “But I never said it back because I thought we had more time. I was wrong. One minute he was there, and the next minute he was gone.” She shoved Aelyx’s chest. “So tell her. Then you can go back to being angry.”

“Fine,” Aelyx said, then spun to face Cara and spat, “I love you!”

Cara gasped, never imagining those words could sound so ugly. She gripped her hips and hurtled at him, “Yeah? Well, I love you
more
.”

“Jesus, you two are weird,” Troy muttered. He nudged her toward the shuttle. “Come on, let’s go.”

Face blazing, Cara clambered into the shuttle. The rest of her team joined her, Troy in the passenger seat and Larish in the back. They lifted off before Aelyx and his group had made it inside the factory building. As much as she hated to admit it, Aelyx was right. The hybrids could show up at any moment.

With the cloaking mode engaged, she zipped across fifty miles of airspace as if the shuttle were nothing more than a stone skipping over a pond. They arrived at the second factory so quickly Troy hadn’t finished fastening his safety harness. Cara alighted in the parking lot and peered around, finding no signs of the hybrids. But that didn’t mean anything. If Jaxen or Aisly were here, their crafts would be cloaked, too.

“Are you sure you’re okay doing this without me?” she asked Troy. Maybe she should stay here and investigate the storage unit later. “Because Larish is a thinker, not a fighter.” She glanced at Larish in the backseat. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Larish said absently while using a handheld electron tracker to scan the area. “You’re right.”

“I’ll be fine.” Troy cocked his pistol and surveyed the area though his window. “This is what the Marines trained me to do. It’s actually better if you’re not here. It’ll be easier to focus if I’m not worried about keeping you safe.”

“Hey.” She objected to that. “I can hold my own, you know.”

He smiled and tugged her braid, then stepped outside. “Yeah, I know. But still, go on. Find out what’s in that storage unit. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

“If you need me, buzz my sphere,” she called to Troy as he and Larish strode across the parking lot. “I can be back here in just a few …”

She trailed off when it was clear they weren’t listening. With her lower lip caught between her teeth, she sealed the doors and lifted into the air once again. But this time, she hovered there for a few beats, feeling as if her ankles were tethered to Troy’s by an invisible rope. It wasn’t until she watched him break into the building’s rear entrance that she found the strength to veer south and punch the accelerator.

The flight to upstate New York didn’t take long, but unlike the deserted fertilizer plants she’d left behind, Sherzinger Self Storage
bustled with activity. She floated above a small city of storage sheds, arranged in dozens of rows across the fenced-in property, and watched movers unload furniture and boxes from trucks and U-Haul trailers.

Because she didn’t have the luxury of waiting until closing time, she checked the inscription on the key Larish had given her—unit number 113—and landed at the end of the corresponding row, making sure to stay in the blind spot of the nearest security camera. After ensuring no one could see her exit the craft, she slipped out the door and used her fob to raise the cloaked shuttle ten feet into the air.

She kept her head down and the brass key in her hand as she jogged to unit 113. Up close, she found the shed was smaller than she’d expected, about half the size of a single garage, with a similar style sliding aluminum door. She unlocked the door and slid it up just high enough to duck beneath it, and once inside, let the door fall to the ground.

Darkness surrounded her, and a chill brushed her skin, raising the hair on her arms. She knew some of the units offered air conditioning, but this one seemed too frigid, like the inside of a meat locker. She felt along the wall for a light switch, and as she did so, her fingers slid along the surface as if frost had formed there. She grew colder and colder, and by the time she found the switch, her body was trembling.

She flipped on the lights and blinked her eyes to adjust to the brightness. At once, she noticed tendrils of smoke curling and rising around the room, obstructing her view of the floor. Her heart jumped, and for an instant she thought a fire had broken out. But then she realized the substance was more of a water vapor, the kind produced by dry ice.

She didn’t see any ice. In fact, she didn’t see much of anything at all. The entire space was vacant except for one large, rectangular box at the far end of the room, near the wall. Dark and metallic, it was raised off the floor by two wooden supports, and when she looked more closely, she saw an attached power cord that stretched to the middle of the floor and disappeared into the fog.

Curious, she crept forward, careful not to kick anything hidden by the swirling vapors. Her breaths clouded into fog in front of her face. The icy puffs came more rapidly as her pulse ticked in anticipation of what lay ahead. Something heavy congealed in the pit of her stomach. Her instincts told her to turn back, but her feet refused to obey. More than ever, she wanted to know what was in that box.

She reached the spot in the center of the room where the power cord disappeared and crouched down, waving her hand. The fog parted and revealed a volleyball-size chrome sphere that Cara recognized. She’d seen others like it at the colony. It was a L’eihr energy sphere, a battery pack designed to provide months of power.

She stood and glanced at the rectangular box. A hint of familiarity tingled at the back of her skull, as if her subconscious had already made the connection but the rest of her mind hadn’t caught up yet. She inched across the smoky floor until she stood close enough to the box to make out the tiny temperature gauges and pressurization readings displayed along its side. Then a new shiver rolled over her, one that had nothing to do with the temperature.

She knew the purpose of this box.

A layer of frost had covered the small window located on the lid. Using the hem of her shirt, Cara scrubbed away the ice. There, beneath the thick glass pane, lay Private David Sharpe, frozen in the eternal slumber of his cryogenic tomb.

Aelyx crouched in the bushes outside the factory’s northern-facing wall, trying to listen for the approach of an overhead engine but instead hearing the mental echo of Cara’s furious final words to him.
I love you more
. There had certainly been no love in her voice, though in all fairness, he hadn’t showered her in affection either.

He hated fighting with her. Such occurrences were rare, but they always left him feeling disoriented, as though he’d misplaced something very important, but he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be searching for. It was a horrible sensation.

Before meeting Cara, he’d had no experience with love. It never failed to amaze him how many unexpected tortures the emotion could generate. Missing her caused a suffocating pain directly behind his breastbone; wanting her created an ache low in his core; the fear of losing her was so acute it manifested in every one of his nightmares. And then there was jealousy, a phenomenon that defied logic but tormented him nonetheless each time he caught another male admiring her.

Make no mistake, the suffering was worth it. He would sacrifice his sanity on a thousand separate occasions for one night in Cara’s arms, but that was no comfort to him now. He thought back to what Syrine had told him earlier about running out of time. What if the worst truly came to pass and his last exchange with Cara was one of anger?

Maybe he should call her …

Except he couldn’t. He’d used his sphere to create a three-way connection with Elle and Syrine. They had to keep it open to communicate from their various stations along the building’s perimeter.

“Anything?” called Syrine’s voice.

“Nothing on my end,” Elle said.

Aelyx shifted aside to take the pressure off his knees. In doing so, he earned himself a shrubbery-poke to the eye. “It’s better that we arrived too soon than too late. They’ll be here. I’m sure of it.”

“Maybe one of us should go inside,” Elle suggested again.

“There’s no reason to,” Aelyx reminded her. He prayed to the Sacred Mother, the gods of L’eihr, and even a handful of Cara’s earthly saints that Jaxen came to this plant and not the other one. He’d waited a long time for a second chance to put that
fasher
in the ground. “They won’t make it that far.”

“Are you sure we should kill them?” asked Syrine. “Maybe it would be smarter to interrogate them and learn more about the Aribol.”

Aelyx scoffed. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew—”
how David died
. He cut off just in time.

“If I knew what?”

“Nothing. I’ll tell you another time.”

“Tell me now.”

“It’s not the right—”

“I know it’s about David,” she interrupted, “because you’re treating me like an infant. So stop it. Whatever this is, I have a right to know.”

Aelyx hesitated. It was only Syrine’s refusal to use Silent Speech that had allowed him to hide the truth for this long. Perhaps he should tell her. She would find out eventually.

“All right,” he began. Then he told her everything—how David had been diagnosed with a fatal degenerative disease, and Jaxen had offered him L’eihr drugs. The medication had worked temporarily. But instead of providing the entire cure at once, Jaxen had doled out small doses according to his whims. Next he’d required David to perform tasks for him, sabotaging alliance efforts. Then he’d given David an ultimatum: In order to receive the final lifesaving dose, he would have to kill Aelyx. “He didn’t want to do it, but by that time, he’d fallen in love with you. He said you’d given him a reason to live.”

Syrine didn’t respond.

“In the end, he couldn’t go through with it,” Aelyx went on. “There was another man with us who was working for Jaxen. David turned on the man to save me, and they shot each other. His last words were begging me not to tell you—I don’t think he understood how Silent Speech works—but you deserve to know what happened.” Aelyx ran a thumb over the
iphal
holstered at his hip. “And why Jaxen deserves to die.”