Which was… odd.
“What exactly are you talking about?” Jace asked, his jaw clenched in an attempt at patience. “Why would these suits have tracking devices in them? And how would they magically be connected to whatever software is already on those drones?”
“Yeah, and while we’re on the subject, how do you know so much about this ship?” Marco asked, shouldering his way forward and punching the screen of the drone’s controller. “You changed it. How?”
Alexy snorted.
“Buddy, I know more about this ship than you could ever dream of. You were never up to its standards. You had no idea what you had at your fingertips.” She shifted her gaze over to Jace and grew suddenly more serious. “As for the tracking devices, why do you think Montague got the suits in the first place? You never thought he might have improved them before he handed them over? We knew it was all going to go to hell—and we needed a way to track everyone when it did. Even an idiot could have figured that part out. Now, get to those screens and find the rest of our team before we have to fight our way through any more enemy ships.”
We were all too shocked to argue the point. We moved quickly toward the screens we’d always used for X-ray views, our eyes pinned to the shadowy reflections of the forest below us. Marco was leaning out the door of the ship, his fingers rapidly working on the drone controller. He frowned, pressed his lips together, and then nodded sharply to himself.
“Got it,” he said, whirling toward us. “The drone is in the air and stable, and I’m sending its feed right to the screens on your right. Should be showing up right…”
I turned when he tipped his head toward the screens, my jaw dropping. I could already see blue dots moving through the darkened version of the landscape. Our crew was down there.
They were alive. And with Alexy at the wheel, I couldn’t help but believe we just might be able to save them.
It didn’t take us long to find the first group of blue dots—four of them. The moment we brought them to Marco’s attention, he turned toward Alexy.
“Just below us and directly to your right by about one hundred yards,” he said quickly. “Roughly three o’clock, if you’re working on an extremely small clock.”
“Got it,” Alexy murmured. Without another word, she took the ship into a steep dive, almost directly downward, and we all started sliding toward the front of the ship.
“Some warning would have been nice!” Ant called, desperately clinging to the same seat I’d grabbed. I was holding onto him more than the seat, having grabbed for it late, and we were definitely not going to last much longer.
“In war, buddy, there’s no time for warnings,” Alexy snapped over her shoulder. “Do you want to rescue your friends or not?”
“I want to know whether my brother is down there, that’s what I want,” he grated out, and I threw him a glance. “Julia would know. Why isn’t she saying anything?”
I adjusted my grip on the chair in front of me and turned, my eyes flying through the ship in search of Julia. Sure, she and Marco had been out of the loop and off the comm, but that didn’t mean they were in the dark about what had happened. We’d been working together through OH far longer than we’d known anyone from OH+, and our small team would have been their top priority. They would have tried to locate every one of us, maybe even had some success, given the sharper tech we now seemed to have on the ship.
I finally spotted her in front of me, thank God, because it would make what I wanted to do a bit easier. I pointed her out to Ant, then let go of the seat to which I’d been clinging. I let myself move/fall forward, toward the nose of the ship, which now seemed to be pointed directly downward.
Ant came thudding after me in a scramble of arms and legs, a stream of curses following him.
I had absolutely no control over my movements, and when I got to Julia I was moving at what could only be called a tumble, courtesy of the injured ankle and unpredictable movements of the ship itself. I ran right into her, paused for long enough to be thankful that she’d been propped up against a wall of the ship, and then gasped an apology. It was smothered a moment later by Ant crashing into us, and I had to take a few seconds to recover—during which Ant completely stole my thunder.
“Sorry, Julia,” he breathed. “But I need to know: did you or Marco hear anything from Abe or anyone else before things went haywire?”
She turned her deep gray eyes toward him, and I saw the answer there before she said anything at all. My heart sank right into my feet.
“We didn’t talk to anyone,” she murmured. “We warned you guys about the Ministry ships, and then we were fighting for our lives. Or rather, running for our lives. The minute they appeared, I knew we were in trouble, and that feeling just got worse when the comm link went down. Nelson disappeared, you guys were out of range, and we were on our own. I…” She paused, her eyes moving to Ant and then back to me. “I didn’t even try to get in touch with anyone. I thought the comm link was down, and I didn’t know who might be on it, even if it was still working, so I didn’t touch it. We only found you guys by luck—happened to be flying over that clearing when you suddenly appeared. As for anyone else…”
Her eyes turned to the screen on the wall, and I followed her glance. Yes, there was no telling who we’d find down there, only that they were from our team.
If Alexy was right.
I gave Julia a single nod and then turned and started to climb back toward the door, using the handles and various screens on the walls as levers to pull myself up again, and trusting that Ant was following me. If we were about to run a rescue mission, we needed to prepare the winch; it was the quickest and easiest way to get people up to the ship. I’d never been in charge of running it before. But Ant had, which meant it was time to put him back to work.
Good news would just have to wait until we actually knew more about who was still on the ground awaiting rescue.
As for the bad news… well, I wasn’t going to let myself consider it. Not yet. And not unless I didn’t have any other choice.
5
It didn’t take long for Ant to start questioning my direction. We’d barely passed the seat we were using as a support before he grabbed my shoulder and shook me.
“Robin, where do you think you’re going?” he shouted. “Now isn’t exactly the time to be wandering around the ship!”
I whirled toward him, shifting my gaze up several inches to meet his eyes.
“The winch,” I said, my breathing labored after the climb back up the ship. “It’s the best way to get people up here as quickly as possible, and I need your help to work it.”
I saw realization dawn in his eyes, and then turned back toward the machinery. I felt him come after me as I lunged from seat to seat, grabbing them to keep myself from falling back and shouting to the others while I moved.
“The winch!” I yelled. “It’s the best way to pick people up! Everyone to the base of it, now!”
We would need at least four lines to take care of everyone we saw on the monitor, and I figured we should probably have two extras ready, just in case someone else showed up at the last second.
I reached the base of the winch and the equipment cupboard a second before Ant, stumbling a bit on the ankle I’d damaged in the forest. We dove in and started pulling things out.
“Four lines, plus two extras just in case,” he ordered, as if he’d read my mind. He yanked the equipment out of the back and began handing it to me more quickly than I could take it. I saw the lines, tied up into neat packages, and then the loops that accompanied them. Those were the loops that we normally tied to our belts.
“And the loops?” I asked. I hadn’t thought about those, but whoever was on the ground would need them also.
“We just put them at the end of the lines,” he answered just as quickly. “Easy. Then they hook them to their suits when they catch the lines.”
I stared at him, impressed with his quick thought process. Then I gasped and tried to
catch myself when the ship took a sharp right turn.
“We’re nearly there!” Alexy called from the captain’s seat. “What are you guys doing back there, having a tea party?”
“Only if tea equals preparing for the possibility of death!” Jace shot back. He’d dropped to my side seconds earlier and was taking the equipment as I passed it to him and rapidly shuffling it back to Julia, who was standing closest to the hook of the winch.
“Got it!” she shouted after he threw her the first line. She reached up, yanked the winch down, and went to work on getting the lines attached.
“How many people can that thing hold?” Zion asked, propping himself against the base and studying the controls.
“We’ve had as many as six people on it before,” Julia replied. “We should be able to handle four easily, as long as they’re not all as big as you.”
I barked out a laugh but stifled it quickly. The chances of anyone out there being as big as Zion were slim, and for that I was grateful. Julia was right: we didn’t know what the actual weight limit was for the winch. We’d always just used it sparingly in the past and counted on it to come through for us.
Which was exactly the opposite of what we were doing now. There would be no “sparingly” included in the coming situation. Someone had thrown the doors back up, and a quick glance at the ground below us showed me that there were lights in the woods, and that meant that there were soldiers nearby, with their flashlights—and their guns.
We weren’t going to have time to hover in any clearings while our teammates made a run for the airship. We weren’t going to have time to land or even get anywhere close to the ground. This was going to be a fly-by rescue, and we were hoping for the best. It would have been a hell of a lot easier if we’d had a way to let our team know that we were the good guys and not the ones who were trying to either shoot them or drown them in fire. Lines dropping out of the sky weren’t going to look like any sort of rescue if they didn’t know what they were for. I doubted they’d even see them unless they were actually looking. But how the hell were we supposed to get them to do that?
Suddenly I remembered that we did have a way to warn them and to get them to look for the lines we were about to drop. We’d just neglected to use it. The comm link was still working, or at least it had been when Zion used it in the woods.
Granted, we weren’t technically supposed to be on it, since we didn’t know who else could hear the communications. I was betting no one else had even thought of it as an option for that very reason, but how much damage could it really do, at this point?
It wasn’t like those Ministry soldiers didn’t know we were in the forest, trying desperately to get away from them.
I slammed my hand against the link in my ear, then the one in the collar of my shirt, and sputtered.
“OH+, OH+, do you read me? Forward team, decoy team, are you there?”
I was answered by a barrage of voices through the comm, all of them shouting in a combination of relief and panic. I almost melted with relief right on the spot.
Then I noticed that the people in the ship were shouting at me too, and I glared at them.
“What? It’s not like the soldiers don’t know we’re here, and it’s not like they’re going to increase their rate of speed if they know we’re communicating. They’re shooting to kill, we know that much, and I don’t think it can get any worse than that. Do you?”
Silence met my question, and I knew I had them. It was a good point, and there was no further argument. The most important thing right now was to rescue whomever we could, and we needed communication to be able to do that.
I ran to lean right out the window and shouted.
“Who’s down there? Who’s directly below an airship right now—one that’s maybe about fifty feet above you?”
“Robin, is that you?” Jackie’s voice was cracked and grainy over the line, but she also sounded as if she was mostly in control of her emotions. “If you’re in that ship, I’ve got you in my sights. We’re almost right under you, but you need to swing a bit to the side. Um… to the right, if you’re facing the ship’s nose. Not by much. What’s your plan?”
Jackie.
Thank God, it was her. I nearly gasped at how relieved I felt, not having realized until now just how attached I’d become to the girl. I was gathering myself to respond when another, younger voice cut through the melee on the line.
“This is Allerra. I read you, Jackie. We’re going to be throwing lines out for your group. We’ve recorded four of you, is that correct?”
Jackie answered in the affirmative, and I looked over at Allerra, shocked at how mature she sounded, as she continued.
“Right, that’s good then. We have four lines hooked up and ready to go. We’re tossing them out of the ship… now.”
At her words, Jace and Ant threw all four lines, now hooked to the winch, out the open door. The line ends plummeted toward the ground directly beneath us, and a moment later Jackie was responding.
“Got them. Terrific. We’re hooked up. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Alexy, who had turned on her comm link also, reached back and gave us a thumbs-up.
“Hold on, team, this is going to be steep!” she shouted. She turned the nose right back up into the sky and hit what must have been the airship equivalent to the gas pedal.
We shot back up toward the stars at terrifying speed, Jackie and her team flying behind us on their lines. The winch was working overtime as we tried to tow them up to safety, and I spent the next five minutes scared out of my mind that the bullets coming from the forest around us were going to hit the people we had flying below the ship. But it didn’t slow me down.
Julia, Jace, and I yanked and pulled on the cords of the winch, trying to speed them up and probably doing more damage than good, while Zion worked the controls. As far as I knew, the winch could really only pull up at the rate of speed for which it had been programmed, and the thing was already starting to smoke at its apex as the lines retracted at double time. Zion had somehow managed to make the thing work harder than it had for us when we were on missions. When I finally figured out that I should get to the door to grab the people who were coming at us, I realized that they were coming a lot more quickly than I had anticipated.
The moment I got to the opening and leaned out to look for them, Jackie came flying up and in, promptly knocking me over.
We struggled on the ground for almost half a minute, trying to untangle our metal arms and legs from each other, and from the line she’d been using, before we finally got to our feet.
Jackie, who I’d always thought to be collected above all else, promptly started shouting furiously.
“What the hell is going on down there? Who are those people? How did they find us, and why didn’t we have some warning that they were coming? Julia, I thought you were supposed to be watching the area! And speaking of those people, did you see the freaking suits they’re wearing? Did you see all the toys? They make ours look like cheap knock-offs! What about the way they suck in the light? Can you imagine if—”
Ant strode toward her and grabbed her by the shoulders, giving her a shake.
“Jackie. Shut. Up. How many other people are down there? Who’s with you? Did you see anyone else? Have you seen my brother? Have you seen Abe?”
Her mouth snapped shut, and she gave him a long look that spoke volumes.
No, she hadn’t seen Abe.
A moment later, one of his other questions was answered, as first James, then Ida and Alice came flying up and into the plane. Jackie must have attached and retracted her line first, leaving the others to fend for themselves, and I couldn’t blame her for that. Though she’d evidently nominated herself leader of that particular group, she must have also known that it was every man for himself down there.
Still, I wondered how the hell she’d gotten hooked up with these particular people in the first place. They’d all been in the decoy group, which meant that they a
lso should have been in a completely different area of the parking lot than us when we were discovered. Where had Jackie actually found them?
None of that mattered at the moment. I gave myself a quick shake and started pulling them away from the door and checking them for injuries. I did the best I could, given that they were also encased in metal suits.
“Everyone okay?” I asked quickly. “Has anyone been hit? Anyone injured?”
The three of them shook their heads but all looked slightly dazed, and I wondered if I’d get a straight answer out of them anyhow or if they even knew whether they’d been hit.
Before I could ask again, Alexy was screaming back at us.
“Marco, what’s going on now?” she snapped from the cockpit, waving her hand madly to get his attention. “Where are we going next? People, I need directions here! Are there more team members on the ground or what?”
Suddenly realizing that we’d been neglecting our other duties, those of us who knew what we were doing rushed back to the screen on the wall as Marco manned the controls on the drone. He sent it in a completely different direction. For several seconds we didn’t see anything, and I bit my lip, wondering if Jackie and her crew were truly the only ones who’d made it out alive.
Surely there were more. This was only a little over half the team.
Surely there were others.
Or was that only wishful thinking?
With a shout, Jace jabbed his finger at the screen, pointing out two blue dots that were moving quickly toward the top of the scan.