“Prepare to fire!” the voice said. There was a distinct feeling that whoever was in charge didn’t know what else to say. There were people flying in the air. This was not in the playbook.
Gretchen was about to fire the second titanium dart when Clooger slammed into her from behind. He smashed the knife into her back, but it was like hitting a slab of marble with the tip of a sword. Gretchen turned on him, thrust the titanium dart into his arm, and pushed him away. She pulled the dart back—it was far too valuable a weapon to waste on a single pulse—and veered in the direction of Faith.
That was when the bullets started flying.
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” the commander shouted. The whole quad between the buildings erupted with sparks and reverberating sounds as Clooger, stabbed and bleeding, flew back up through the walkways toward the top of the building he’d come from.
“Things are getting pretty hairy down here,” he said into his sound ring. “How’s that escape plan coming?”
“Just about got it, really close,” Hawk said. He’d never worked so feverishly in his entire life. His brain was fizzing with data as he went around every firewall the Western State had and dug right into the brains of the drones themselves. The dreadful voice reared up in his head like a warhorse: Plans proceeding as expected; it won’t be long now. Fire! Fire! Fire!
Hawk shook the voice free and kept programming as Clooger landed on top of the highest bridge, just below the line of buildings. He looked up and saw the blue sky above, looked down and saw the red blood pouring out onto his upper arm, dripping onto the white bridge. The shadows moved beneath him: people, running for their lives, trying to make sense of the brutality outside.
Down below, Faith was realizing something she hadn’t expected.
She knows. She knows I’m a second, and she’s got a weapon that can get through.
It was this thought that sent Faith flying out of the melee, around the first of many buildings. Gretchen took chase, the two of them leaving three military convoys scratching their heads and wondering what had just happened.
Faith hadn’t expected the maze of bridges and buildings to be so difficult to navigate, and she bounced from turn to turn like a badly thrown bowling ball skidding across multiple lanes. Along the way she saw people walking outside along the pristine streets, staring up at her as if she were some sort of aberration, a ghost or a phantom from another dimension.
“Hawk!” she yelled, pressing her sound ring. She turned a corner around a building and felt as though she was going in a big circle. “Where’s the field? Guide me in!”
This was the kind of distraction Hawk didn’t need, and it was only made worse by the other voices that were pressing in all of a sudden.
Dylan: “Faith, get the hell out of there! Whatever you’re doing, it’s not worth it. Get to safety!”
Clooger: “Patching up a wound here, just about back in business.”
Meredith: “Everyone stay calm and let Hawk focus. No more chatter! I mean it.”
The line went dead, and Hawk switched to a split-screen view on his Tablet. On one side, the coded brain of a drone lay before him; on the other, Faith’s position in the Western State, the location she needed to get to, and the route she had to take.
“Left around the next building, straight for seven buildings, right for three, you’re there. Got it?”
“Got it!” Faith yelled, and she was moving faster, thirty feet up, darting between the endless web of bridges spanning the towers.
Gretchen gamely followed, doing her best to destroy as much as she could as she went. Faith was attempting to leave no trace; Gretchen had a stated goal of wrecking as much as she could. She flipped armored vehicles as she passed over them, threw white Western State vans into bridges, killed innocent bystanders with complete and utter disregard for human life.
“I’m doing you a favor,” she said to herself as she watched a military truck slam into a plateglass window, crushing bystanders as it tumbled end over end.
Faith felt the wrenching regret for her decision to take Gretchen head-on and wished her plan had never included the Western State. Why couldn’t she have lured her out into the abandoned world and done this? Out there they could have gone head to head for hours and no one would have been hurt. But she knew this was Gretchen’s plan, too. She knew it would end up here, that it would be violent. She knew Gretchen was sent to do some terrible deed here, in the Western State. The collateral damage wasn’t Faith’s fault, but she felt the weight of guilt all the same.
I have to get her out in the open, she thought. And fast.
It was as she thought this very thing that Faith Daniels finally arrived in the place where her best friend had been murdered: the outdoor coliseum, the location of the Field Games. The grass was a bright green beneath her as she flew into the middle of the field. White stone columns, tall and thin, encircled the field, and behind them, the vast seating in row after rising row. It looked like something out of the Roman Empire, a beautiful expanse of white and green, the red ribbon of a track separating the two.
Faith glanced at her arm, crimson with blood from the slight wound, and felt a sudden burst of energy. She liked the pain and was glad to have it. It was she and Gretchen now, standing on the otherwise empty field, staring each other down.
“This is for you,” Faith said, looking up into the cobalt sky and thinking only of Liz. She looked at her arm and saw the tattoo of the chain and the ivy, then looked at the palm of her hand and saw the hammer. All she wanted was to feel no more pain, and the only weapon against the deep chasm of sadness that held her was the hammer of justice served.
Faith saw the titanium dart heading her way as Gretchen moved in closer. A column of stone stood to Faith’s right, and moving with sudden speed she avoided the weapon. But Gretchen was all business now. Killing Faith had become her complete and total focus. She moved with stunning speed, around the side of the column with another dart in hand. She rounded the corner and pulled to a stop as Faith backed up in midair, staring at Gretchen.
“I have you now,” Gretchen said. “You can run, but there’s no place to hide.”
Faith nodded curtly, as if she understood but didn’t really care one way or the other. Gretchen held the dart at the ready. One clean throw would do it. She was trying to decide whether to go for the head or the heart, savoring the moment. She was also enjoying the idea that she was taking this opportunity away from Clara. God, how she hated Clara’s arrogance. She had a radio receiver of her own, though she’d been careful not to use it for security reasons. Now that she’d unleashed the Western State army and cornered Faith, she felt it didn’t matter who knew where she was. And besides, she was invincible. Nothing could touch her.
“Connect CQ,” she said, which automatically sent a signal to Clara’s receiver, where Clara was soaring above the clouds in the prison.
“Everything going as planned?” Clara asked, her voice projecting out in the air as it sent waves of rage pumping through Faith’s veins.
“Oh, I think it’s going better than that,” Gretchen said. “I wanted you to hear this. It’s going to be something special.”
“Whatever you say, Mother.”
Faith could practically see Clara rolling her eyes with boredom.
“I didn’t know my own weakness,” Faith said. “I should thank you for pointing that out to me.”
“Sorry I couldn’t return the favor,” Gretchen said.
Gretchen had put all the pieces in place. Her spoiled brat was on the line, listening in. She’d gotten Faith out in the open where there was no place to hide. She had the weapon that would finish her in hand. It was perfect.
Which was why, when she should have been more aware of everything happening around her, Gretchen was caught unaware. A mass of water was beginning to rise from directly below her, where Faith had carefully planned its arrival in a fifty-gallon drum. The barrel itself wasn’t moving, only its contents. Fifty gallons of water, rising slowly an
d quietly up through the air, dripping like the tentacles of a poisonous jellyfish. Only now it was moving much faster on the power of Faith’s thoughts, so fast that Gretchen had time only to glance down before it surrounded her body, rising to the level of her neck.
“I don’t know if you’re hearing this or not, Clara,” Faith said. “But your mother is having a little bit of a moment here.”
Gretchen was choking. It sounded like she’d swallowed a small potato that was now stuck in her windpipe.
“Cat got your tongue?” Clara asked, and Faith couldn’t be sure if Clara was kidding, not at all aware of how much trouble her mother was really in. Either way, Faith’s work wasn’t finished yet. She had enlisted the help of Liz’s special somebody, the guy with the softest hands on Earth. Noah, the one who had been sitting next to Liz when the hammer came down, the one who had placed the barrel of water right under the column where Faith could find it. Faith looked across the long length of the green field and saw him standing alone.
“Time to go,” Faith said and, raising her hands out in front of her, swept away Gretchen, encased in a prison of water. Faith followed closely behind as Gretchen descended toward the far end of the field, where Noah waited. In his soft hands, the hands that had caressed the one he loved, he held a javelin. One end of the javelin was stuck in the ground, the other end angled up in the air at forty-five degrees.
“Better say good-bye,” Faith said.
Gretchen took a massive, gulping breath and found the strength to form words.
“Titanium. Her weakness is titanium!”
And with that she somehow managed to remove her hand from the watery prison that surrounded her and release the dart. It was, Faith would later recall, poetic in a way. She felt the piercing sting of the dart enter her side at the same moment Gretchen landed, back first, on the javelin. Coated with water as it slid into Gretchen’s spine, it passed through her heart and out the other side. The water surrounding Gretchen like a clear cocoon turned a divine shade of pink in the morning sunlight, then clouded into an ugly swirl of red.
Faith let the water fall to the ground, but Gretchen stayed where she was, pinned to the field like a bug in an experiment. Faith would always remember this as a moment of sweet release, a letting go. If her vengeance was a cancer the size of a melon in the pit of her stomach, she’d just chopped it in half with a clean, violent slice. She felt lighter, less weighted down. She would also later discover that the biggest reason for this new lightness in her head was the blood quickly staining the side of her shirt. The dart had gone all the way through, burning like a hot knife as it passed. “Personally, I like the javelin. It’s a good weapon, don’t you think?” Faith said, a little weakly.
Noah didn’t know what to think. He’d gone along with the plan because he owed it to Faith and Liz and Hawk, but now that he was standing there staring at the dead body of someone he didn’t even know, he wasn’t anything but scared shitless. He started backpedaling.
“You better get out of here, Faith,” he said. “They’re coming. You don’t want to be here when they show up.”
Noah started running at about the same moment the signal on Gretchen’s end popped and fizzled and faded away, the water finally having worked its way into the sealed casing of the device strapped to her belt.
Clara wasn’t entirely sure what her mother had said, garbled as it was through a wall of water, but she was smart enough to record the conversation. The first four or five replays revealed the whole message, which was as clear as a bell but far, far away, as if being heard from behind many doors.
Her weakness is titanium.
“Thank you, Mom. That information is going to be helpful. And thank you, Faith. I couldn’t stand the old bag any longer. You did me a solid. I won’t forget.”
“Clooger!” Hawk yelled. “You’re clear! Go now! Go!”
“Any chance he could swing by and pick me up?” Faith asked. She was lying on the field, a red stain growing slowly wider at her side. Blood was pumping not through her but out of her as she stared up at Gretchen’s terror-filled eyes. Faith half expected the body to reanimate, for Gretchen to pull the javelin from her own chest and begin laughing hideously.
Clooger didn’t think twice. He was in real trouble and he knew it, but it sounded to him as if Faith wasn’t doing much better. He was expendable; she was anything but. How she could have gotten herself really hurt he didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. He had to get her the hell out of the Western State, and fast. He looked up, saw nothing but blue sky, and went for it.
“Five buildings down, then a right,” Hawk said. “Make it snappy; this diversion I’ve set in motion isn’t going to last all day.”
“Roger that,” Clooger said, flying at breakneck speed between bridge spans, any one of which could have killed him on impact. He was giving it all he had, taking every risk he possibly could that wasn’t completely out of control.
He was one, maybe two minutes from his destination when Faith and Dylan started talking on the sound ring.
“One down,” Faith said, and then she got confused. Was it one down, one to go? Or one down, two to go? Two sounded weird, but she thought there were two: Clara and Wade. Or was it one?
“Are you okay?” Dylan asked. He was done worrying about who might hear him. The world outside was coming apart at the seams. “Tell me the truth.”
“She throws a damn good uppercut,” Faith said, the world of reality swirling like an eddy of water around her. “But I knocked her out. I took care of it.”
Dylan could tell she was fading. Faith was in real trouble. He wanted to break out of his cell, fly to her side, take her out of the mess he’d gotten her into. How had he allowed himself to end up in such a helpless situation? Trapped in a prison, no way out, flying away from the one he loved when she needed him most.
“Don’t leave me, Faith. I mean it. I’m not going to make it without you.”
“Such a romantic,” Faith said. “I always liked that about you.”
“I’m sorry,” Dylan said, trying to hold it together. “I’m really sorry.”
She thought of the secret places that were theirs alone: the top of the old Nordstrom building, the Looney Bin. She started to cry, tears clouding her vision as the sky turned into milky sapphire liquid.
“I love you, Dylan,” she said. “I only ever loved you. Come home.”
Dylan got up and went to the bars of his cell. He took one in each hand and pulled, harder than he’d ever pulled before. He screamed with effort and frustration, and the bars gave way, inching apart. But it wasn’t enough. He was in a maximum-security prison. The place was designed to hold the Hulk, and he wasn’t getting out until someone let him out.
“I love you, too,” he said, and felt his heart ripping in two at the thought of losing her. “I’m coming for you. Wait for me!”
Faith saw the frozen look of desperation on Gretchen’s lifeless face and summoned the will for one more thought before passing out.
“I might have been wrong about this revenge business. It’s not as great as I thought it would be.”
Meredith had remained quiet throughout, listening as she crossed into Arkansas territory with the rest of the single pulses, but now she spoke.
“It never is.”
Clooger couldn’t believe his eyes when he arrived at the coliseum. Gretchen, one of only five second pulses, pinned like a bug with a javelin to the ground. It was at once horrifying and beautiful, the kind of vision he knew all too well from one too many days as a soldier. The joy of a good victory was always overshadowed by the overwhelming bleakness of death.
He saw the stain of blood surrounding Faith.
Clooger had played doc plenty of times in the field and knew he needed to get her medical attention, and fast.
“Hawk, find me a hospital,” he said. He looked skyward and saw the crisscrossing trails of drones and the first of many explosions.
“Copy that,” Hawk said, thinking for an
instant how he, too, was beginning to sound like a stowaway on the Starship Enterprise. “Just get airborne. I’ve set the drones to attack each other, but that’s not going to last much longer. They’re going to override my hack. Matter of time.”
Another explosion in the sky above as one drone blew up another and Clooger had Faith in his arms. She stirred momentarily, looked into his eyes.
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be,” Clooger said, the tone of his voice full of strength. “I have you.”
Anyone who had come up against Clooger when he was in this kind of mood knew what it meant: proceed at your own risk. It didn’t matter if you were a warrior or an army or a second pulse; you knew there would be hell to pay. You might kill him in the end, but there would be consequences for messing with this guy, and those consequences would be harsh.
A few seconds later Clooger was airborne, where he dodged and parried his way through a maelstrom of explosions and drone fire, flying away into the blue, carrying the most important cargo the free world had in its arsenal.
Chapter 15
Doctor Doom!
Dylan and Hawk kept up a heavy chatter on the sound ring as Clooger and Faith escaped the Western State by the skin of their teeth. The number of drones in the sky over the city had swelled to more than a hundred, exploding into one another all around them as Clooger raced for the outer edge of the city.
“How’s she doing?” Dylan asked, but no sooner had he asked the question than the door of cell block D was thrown open and a blistering wind ripped down the corridor.