Zero World (40 page)

Melni left her there and ran for the door that Caswell had stormed through.

HE HAULED THE SQUIRMING
body up three flights of stairs. He was short of breath and nauseous from the post-acceleration headache, and his legs began to buckle. Limp at first, Alice fought him now. Every step he took earned a barrage of fists against his side and back, then finally claws against his cheek.

Caswell ducked into a random room off the third-floor hallway. The trail of blood she’d left would guide the enemy right to him, but he hadn’t heard any footsteps on the stairs behind him so he figured he had enough time to complete his task even after a few questions were answered.

Alice bit his ear savagely. He clenched his jaw to hold a scream back and dumped her unceremoniously to the floor in a corner of
the room. A cloud of dust erupted from her impact and filled the air. The whole place reeked of mildew and earthy vegetation. Vines curled in around the space where a window had once been, looking like the fingers of some deformed giant trying to pull the very walls off.

He took a quick glance outside. The city square was fifteen meters below. The crowd had grown some, and seemed to be jostling nervously along a wavy line down the middle. Confusion and fear were fueled by the sound of combat within the palace. Some had drawn weapons, and shouts of accusation and alarm rang out from both left and right.

“You’re making a mistake,” Alice Vale hissed.

He glanced at her curled form in the corner. She hadn’t moved. “I have orders and I intend to follow them.”

To his surprise she pushed herself up to a sitting position against the wall, her face a mask of agony. She turned her head and spat blood in a stream along the wall beside her. A dark red trail ran down her chin and dripped onto her shirt. With a force of will she managed to fix a steady gaze on him. When she spoke her voice was barely more than a whisper, thick with wrath. “You failed once. And you’re hesitating even now. Why, you son of a bitch? Get it over with.”

“I have questions first.”

Her lips curled back from teeth immersed in blood. She spat weakly, not bothering to turn her head. The liquid just splashed down the front of her shirt. She coughed. A wet, ugly sound. “Fuck you,” she said.

Behind him the door burst open. Caswell whirled and dove, lifting his weapon in the same motion, finger on the trigger.

“No!” the person in the doorway shouted.

He recognized her from the train, and held back. He hit the ground and rolled, coming up to a half stand, still pointing the vossen.

“Oh no,” the woman said upon seeing Alice. She raced across the room to the wounded woman, ignoring Caswell. “Garta’s light, no. What have you done?”

Confused, Caswell took a tentative step toward the pair. “My job,” he said flatly, yet he could hear the doubt in his own voice.

“No,” the woman said. Melni, she’d said her name was. “Caswell, the guards came before I could tell you everything. Your goal was to kill her, but it changed. You and I learned much since you arrived. We need to save her. She
must
live.”

He swallowed. The woman’s words were sincere, yet it didn’t matter. Alice Vale was already dead; it was only a matter of time now. “Explain yourself, Melni. Learned what?”

She spoke of something called the Conduit, of worlds linked by similarity, and the powers that sought to control these planets in order to harvest their ideas. A group called Prime.

“The person who sent you here, Monique, is one of them.”

Melni sat on the floor beside Alia and cradled her in her arms, laying the wounded inventor sideways across her lap so blood would not pool in the mouth. It dribbled out into a rapidly spreading puddle on the floor instead.

For the last two years Melni had spent virtually every waking moment studying this woman, spying on her, trying to comprehend her genius. Then she’d learned the truth, that it had all been an elaborate lie. This should have filled Melni with rage if not for the motivation for that deception. She’d been trying to protect Gartien from something much worse.

And now here she lay, dying in Melni’s lap. Gartien’s golden daughter. Earth’s cunning escapist. Her breaths came shallow and rapid. Whatever Caswell had done, the internal damage seemed massive and entirely fatal.

“So she killed her crew and came here—” Caswell started.

Alia’s face came alive then. She cast a glance at the man and said, “It was you who killed them. You tried to get me, too, but I hid….” She paused and coughed up a mouthful of blood that splattered across the floor. “So you set a bomb and left me there, but I figured
out how to escape. I took everything I could and fled in the lander before the station was destroyed.”

Caswell stared at her. His expression, hard as stone, began to crack. “It was me,” he whispered. “I killed them.”

It was not, Melni realized, a question. “Caswell, there is so much you don’t know. So much you’ve forgotten.”

The assassin grimaced. Squeezed his eyes shut and shook away whatever doubt had begun to creep in. “Why not contact Earth? Tell them what happened, and what I supposedly did.”

“Because that would have led them to the Conduit,” Melni said for Alia. For Alice. “If Earth became aware of the Conduit, that would trigger Prime to take action against both planets. The Warden said—”

Alia glanced up at her. Her eyes were cloudy now, half-closed, but the surprise there came through. “You spoke with him,” she said. She’d only just realized it. “Before the airships I sent bombed the site?”

“He told us much,” Melni replied, nodding. “But not all. The bombs fell too soon. He seemed unsure of your intentions, Alia.”

The dying woman closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but no words came. A silent apology, perhaps. Melni would never know.

Several seconds passed. Alia’s face became very still. There were sounds of commotion in the square outside. Somewhere below she could hear boots on the steps. Melni pressed her palms to Alia’s chest, the left side instead of right. A weak pulse beat there. As if Melni needed any more proof that Alia and Caswell were of the same origin.

Alia groaned. Her eyes flickered open. Caswell came and knelt beside Melni. He’d put his weapon away.

The dying woman’s words were barely audible. A liquid, feeble whisper almost drowned by the voices from beyond the window. She said, “The Warden and I had our differences, but our goal was always the same: Help Gartien reach space as quickly as possible. Block the Conduit, or at least be prepared for the day that Prime finally
discovers the Zero Worlds beyond Earth. Your presence here means we failed. They’ll come soon. They’ll come for Earth as well. We were…too late. Unless…”

Caswell leaned in. “Unless what, Alice?”

“Unless you finish what we started.”

The last word fell from dead lips.

Alia Valix was gone.

“We need to leave,” Caswell said.

Melni rocked back on her feet and closed her eyes. She’d been wrong. She’d devoted her career to hindering Alia’s. How much had she and her fellow spies delayed the woman’s efforts? What state of preparation would her world be in right now had only the petty war between North and South been ended long ago?

“Melni,” Caswell said. “They’re coming.”

“What difference does it make? We can do nothing now but wait for Prime—”

“No,” he said. He grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her to her feet. “I’m still baffled as to just what the hell is going on here, and there’s a gigantic gap in my memory being filled by bits of cryptic jargon. But I know this: Though I forgot you, I trusted you enough to tell you my anchor phrase, and that’s good enough for me. So you listen: My lander is here. It still works, and I plan to take it.”

She shook her head. “It was destroyed in the mountains—”

“No. It’s here. I saw it. I went inside.” He produced a tube from his pocket. It gleamed in the moonlight. The weapon he’d used on the guards below. In the battle she hadn’t had time to contemplate where he’d found it. “The ship is in the terminal next door. Come with me.”

“Where…where will we go?” she asked, thinking of all the remote corners of Gartien and how easy it would be for Rasa Clune and her Hollow to find them.

Caswell looked into her eyes, searching for something. Whatever
it was, he evidently found it. “Alice sought to blockade this Conduit. She failed.” He squeezed her arms. “Failed because this world doesn’t have the tech, but Earth does….”

She watched as his eyes scanned some horizon in his mind. He stood that way for many seconds. Footsteps in the hallway snapped him back to the present. He whirled and tugged her along by her bound hands. At the door he let go and pressed his palms against his temples in a gesture she now felt a great deal of fascination with.

Caswell, in his formal meeting suit, which now bore numerous bloodstains, dove through the door. As he flew out into the hallway he raised his weapon and it spat those tiny glowing dots that hissed away on puffs of gas. Caswell hit the floor and rolled into the far wall, grunting with the impact and yet somehow positioned perfectly to keep his weapon pointed toward the top of the steps. She heard the sound of toppling bodies, and cries of alarm from farther off. She took a chance and peeked around the corner. Three plain-clothed Northerners lay on the floor, utterly still.

Across the hall Caswell pushed himself up the wall to a shaky stand. “Get behind me,” he said.

She obeyed. Together they backed down the hall toward another room that faced the rear of the building rather than Summit Square. He kept guard at the door and ordered her to go to the window. “What do you see?” he asked, his voice low.

“There is a street, maybe twenty feet wide, then a large building with a flat, dark roof.” As she spoke she sawed her wrist bindings apart on a shard of old, broken glass protruding from the window frame.

“That’s the terminal. Anyone down there?”

She glanced left and right and told him no, it seemed to be quiet. Everyone, North and South, had likely entered the palace. She could only imagine the tense standoff below.

It was a forty-foot drop to the street, not something she thought either of them could handle without breaking bones. “There’s a pipe attached to the wall,” she said. “It might be sturdy enough to climb.”

A rattling sound filled the air. Bullets thudded into the wall and doorframe, forcing Caswell to duck inside the room.

Melni swung her legs over the window frame and grabbed the metal pipe, two feet away. Brackets bolted into the much older bricks held the pipe in place. As soon as she put some weight on it the bolts squealed in complaint. Bits of rubble and dust fell to the ground below. She let go. “This will not hold us.”

A hand at the center of her back forced her out the window. Melni grabbed the pipe with both hands as her body swung out and smacked into the bricks. She glanced back, ready to curse Caswell’s haste, only to see him perched on the windowsill and coming out. There was a pop as one of the brackets came free of the wall. The pipe tilted outward. She hung in space, ten feet from the wall now, and she could see the shapes of people in the window. Caswell leapt from the sill, angling himself toward the pipe. He hit the metal length and clanged against it. Another bracket popped free from the bricks, and they were both falling.

Melni dug her fingers into the brittle old pipe. A shrieking sound filled the air as the tube bent and began to collapse. Thirty feet above the ground the motion stopped abruptly. She felt as if her shoulders would pull from their sockets as the pipe wedged itself into the dark wall of the terminal and stayed there. She was only a few feet from the shadowed surface. Caswell clung to the pipe about ten feet back, halfway between the two buildings. He had one leg looped over the length of metal. As she watched he hauled himself up onto the narrow beam. He made eye contact with her, opened his mouth to speak.

A popping sound from above filled the air. Bullets, fired out of desperation, hissed by her and thudded into the cobbles below.

“Go!” Caswell shouted.

She turned and started to shimmy toward the wall. Suddenly a line of light appeared in front of her. It grew into a rectangle. A shuttered window, opening. Someone was silhouetted within. Melni brought her legs up and kicked hard, sending the person sprawling
backward into some sort of mealhouse. There were rows of tables behind the person, and he or she crashed into the nearest and went head over heels across the surface.