Waybound (8 page)

The network of tahniks collapsed like shelves of glacier ice.

BOOM—
Massive orbs—
BOOM—
thundered to the ground.
BOOM—
Like a—
BOOM—
meteor shower.

CRASH!

The kids took shelter as the world tremored in a barrage of tahniks. The colossal boulders settled. Phoebe and Micah coughed, fumbling for the facemasks built into their coveralls.

With the hoods sealed, they peered out through their visors. The Covenant camp was an unrecognizable hellscape. The symphony of war continued unabated.

“Dollop!” Micah shouted, plunging into the haze.

Phoebe realized their friend was no longer with them.

“DOLLOP!” he screamed again.

“Micah, wait!” she pleaded, trailing after him.

A shape emerged from the smoke ahead, lit in dreamlike flashes of distant fire. The figure was tall, stalking with precision.

A Watchman soldier. He was facing away.

Micah snarled and fumbled for his gun.

“No!” Phoebe reached out to stop him.

But it was too late. Micah's rifle flashed to life.

The Watchman whirled sharply out of the way.

Micah had missed. He released the trigger, and his spinning barrels whispered to a stop.

“What are you doing?” Phoebe shouted.

Micah had given away their position.

Bonding rounds pocked the ground around them as Watchmen returned fire. Six enemy soldiers charged. Micah bolted, dragging Phoebe with him. They stumbled behind a fallen tahnik that sang with ricochet.

A silvery-blue tornado enveloped the enemy from behind—a demon of whirling blades, born from the smoke. Her scythes flurried between the legs of a Watchman, sundering the group of attackers and sending them reeling. Her rings hooked around another's midsection, using the victim as a shield to soak up rifle fire before lashing out in a swirling dance.

Watchmen fell to sparking pieces before Orei. One of those thrashing mehkan worms that powered the Foundry automatons wriggled free from a mechanical brain casing and slithered away.

“Follow,” Orei commanded.

“What about Dollop?” Phoebe insisted.

Orei turned her hollow, unreadable face to the kids. The apparatus of her shifting body measured them.

“Headed to stables. With Overguard Treth.”

Phoebe looked at her, unsure.

“Follow.”

Overguard Orei inverted her body and raced back into the smoke-swollen dark. They sprinted after her. Phoebe and Micah faltered over the cratered ground, but Orei was effortless in her flight. She swept charging Watchmen from her path with wide, arcing slashes to open an escape route.

Mist swirled around the kids. A brilliant flash of white blinded them completely.

Micah grabbed Phoebe's sleeve. “Stay close!”

“Orei!” Phoebe shouted. As her vision returned, she thought she saw a glimpse of the Overguard, just a flicker of movement. But her shifting and twisting silhouette was impossible to follow, and it was soon swallowed in dust and gunfire.

The kids stumbled away, tripping on roots and wreckage. They hit the canyon wall and felt their way along its surface, finding a tahnik sphere embedded in the cliff face. The kids wedged in beside it, hoping for some cover.

A crack in the wall gave way. Phoebe fell back, toppling into a nest of jungle growth. Micah helped her up.

There was a narrow crevice behind the embedded tahnik. A gust of sweet, soot-free air hit their faces.

Phoebe wriggled in, trying to scramble around the obstruction and up into the cramped crawl space.

“Wait!” Micah rasped. “We gotta stick with Orei!”

They glanced back into the battlefield behind them.

A wall of Watchmen advanced toward them.

The kids crammed into the crevice, ripping through the undergrowth. Another purple blast. Approaching thunder, spheres flung across the camp like marbles. A wrecking ball tahnik smashed through the wall, closing the path behind them.

Phoebe and Micah coughed, clawing their way up and up.

Above the thicket and the dust glimmered a trickle of light.

A way out.

A
Foundry soldier presented a polished pewter mug to Goodwin, who savored the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. It was a well-earned luxury after a strenuous, yet exhilarating night. Goodwin surveyed his surroundings and sipped himself awake.

What was once a circular courtyard marked by gentle sloping mounds was now a pit of smoldering debris. Masses of mehkan bodies had melted during the intense heat of battle, fusing into a grim knoll. It reminded Goodwin of the skin of corpses that once cloaked the Citadel—a fitting, even poetic payback to the Covenant for its destruction.

“Your instincts appear to have served you well, James.”

“This time,”
cautioned another voice in his earpiece.

“Although you exceeded your authority.”

“Of course. My apologies,” Goodwin said with a smile.

He did not need the Board's commendations. They knew the significance of this victory. Goodwin had caught the boogeyman. He had smashed the Covenant, and now he felt a sense of completion.

Goodwin took another drink of coffee, enjoying the fullness of its flavor. Through the gauzy atmosphere, he saw Watchman soldiers march another mehkan prisoner to a magnetic corral where captives snarled in their grating language. There was no telling what intelligence he would gather once the translator arrived and interrogations began.

“Have you identified the remains yet?”

Goodwin approached the dark, crumbled plinth at the back of the courtyard where a tarp-covered form awaited. He pulled away the sheet to reveal a body burnished in gold with a crusted red mark on its chest. Goodwin recognized this bizarre mehkan rite, but he never imagined it might be done for a human.

“Dr. Plumm is dead,” Goodwin announced, his voice heavy.

It was a solemn prize. Jules may have been a traitor, yes, but he had also once been a friend.

There was a soft click, followed by a moment's silence. Then his earpiece came alive once more.

“That will be all. Return to the Depot with a full report.”

Goodwin ground his teeth in annoyance. The coffee cup quivered in his hand. “I have only just begun. There is still—”

“Chairman Obwilé will be overseeing the Covenant camp.”

A spark ignited in Goodwin's blood. His ingenuity had led to the discovery of this camp. He had orchestrated the assault and secured a cache of Covenant materials, including military plans and maps that charted unknown territories. Goodwin alone deserved the credit, and he would not forfeit his spoils so easily.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, addressing the Board with complete emotional control. “I have uncovered evidence that the enemy's network extends far beyond what we previously imagined. Give me time to exploit my discovery and—”

“You have your orders, James.”

The coffee had gone sour. Goodwin tossed out the remnants and stroked the coarse stubble on his cheek.

“Acknowledge,”
demanded a voice of the Board.

Goodwin did not unclench his jaw. “Right away.”

Within seconds, two Watchman soldiers were flanking him, their dead, black gazes fixed upon him from behind glossy face shields. He was escorted out of the ravaged courtyard.

Goodwin crunched over the scorched ore, fuming at this newest humiliation. He passed under a Mag-tank, its coil-tipped cannon humming as it was recharged by a generator. The loud rumble almost caused him to miss a nearby croaking voice.

“Ashtal incorrieki il gha Phoebe t'lar Loaii.”

He stopped short and turned to find who had spoken.

The words came again, and this time he found their source—the glowing purple corral occupied by Covenant prisoners of war. Mehkans were gathered around a diminutive creature clad in tattered veils. The wounded thing's face was hidden behind a headpiece of golden chains, adorned by that symbol he had seen throughout the camp—a circle bisected with a jagged line.

“Ashtal incorrieki il gha Phoebe t'lar Loaii!”

The words meant nothing to Goodwin, but the girl's name was unmistakable. Fumbling, he withdrew his Scrollbar, slid it open, and recorded the peculiar phrase.

The crumpled creature pointed a clamp claw at Goodwin as it growled the words again.

“Ashtal incorrieki il gha Phoebe…”

The mehkan slumped back into its comrades' arms, spent.

Far above, the smoke parted as an Aero-copter arrived to return Goodwin to the Depot, dousing him in a brilliant bath of orange morning light. The clouds parted in his mind too.

The children had been in this camp.

Goodwin was beginning to see a way forward.

And his future was bright.

P
hoebe awoke in the fetal position, the whist encasing her like a silent womb. Time was a deck of scattered playing cards, moments strewn haphazardly across her mind—climbing after Micah through the crevice, stumbling through the jagged jungle. Then finally, fragments of fitful sleep.

The air was humid with a loamy scent. Phoebe peeled back her whist and heard the distant thrum of Aero-copters mingling with the groans of suspended metal and a drone of insects.

She lay in the muddy ore, surrounded by iron vines that trailed across the ground. Above was a dense tangle of tahniks, ebony planets fringed in a canopy of red, swordlike fronds that permitted only a few drops of light.

Micah was perched a dozen feet above her, playing lookout amongst the tahnik branches. Phoebe did not stir. Her body felt heavy and lifeless. She wished she could drift off to sleep again.

He saw her rousing and started to make his way down, that idiotic body armor and helmet of his clanking like pots and pans. Of course, Micah had that stupid rifle with him too, as if simply lugging it around made him somebody. She wanted to rip it out of his hands and throw it off a cliff.

Instead, she rolled over and turned her back to him.

“You up?” Micah said, landing with a clatter.

She ignored him.

“So…what now?” he asked.

A long moment passed while he waited for her to respond. Phoebe heard his footsteps plod around to face her.

“Come on, I know you're awake. We gotta figure this out.”

She pinched her eyes shut and didn't move.

“That how it's gonna be? You just gonna lay here in the mud like some kinda—”

Phoebe pulled the hood of the whist over her head to silence his words, but he tugged it back.

“Oh no, you don't,” he warned.

“It's over.”

“Bull crap it is!”

She didn't budge.

“Don't be all…” Micah gnawed his lip, clearly trying to turn his words into a whip. “It ain't over till I say it is. Now get up.”

“They're dead. Axial Phy, Dollop, all of them.”

“No way. Dollop's fine. He was with that big ol' Treth guy.”