“A…what?” Scott said. He was next to me now, watching Andromeda, his eyes wide, his sandy blond hair streaked with dirt and grime from the ground. “A traitor?”
Her eyes flickered open, and she nodded, then focused on me, her brown eyes fading. “Remember me,” she said, her eyes still locked on me. “Remember me when you are cast back into the darkness, and I will light your way – I will show you the way.” Her next breath brought up more blood, but she smiled through it. She looked up, past me, into the sky. “The sun…haven’t seen it…for…”
Her grip on my arm loosed, the light faded from her eyes as she went limp in my arms, the smile disappearing from her face as the muscles went slack.
Chapter 3
“No time to mourn,” Scott said, abrupt, a mask of control wavering on his face. “We need to go.”
“She’s dead,” I said, whispering. “She’s dead, and—”
“And we’re next,” Scott said, snapping his fingers in front of me. “You know this. You’re the toughest among us. Come on, Sienna, come back to me here. I need you for this. We have to get out of here.”
I ran my fingers over Andromeda’s neck, thrust them against the skin, pushed hard, hoping for a sign, a pulse, anything. I waited almost ten seconds, but there was nothing. “Okay,” I said, and hoisted Zack up on my shoulders. “We go west. We haul ass.” I felt my face harden, felt the emotion slip away, behind a wall somewhere, into a box perhaps, in the basement of my mind where I couldn’t hear it, where nothing but the slamming of a metal door remained to mark its passage. “And if we can find a way to do so, we kill these bastards – every one of them.”
“I don’t love our odds here,” Scott said. “You think the Directorate is on their way with some help?”
“Possibly,” I said, lifting Zack up and taking a step forward, then another, before breaking into a run. “But I wouldn’t like to bet my life on them.”
“I think you’re gonna have to bet your life no matter what. I suspect that helicopter has thermal imaging, and they’ll keep tracking us until we find a town or some other way to lose them. Any ideas?” he asked.
“Keep running.”
We ran for minutes more, time seeming to stretch as we went. I tried to focus on taking one breath, one step at a time, tried to put Andromeda out of my mind, along with the thoughts of what would happen next. After a while the scenery ahead changed; I could see the light shining down, the trees ending. “Veer left,” I said, and we did, following the treeline down. The chopper was behind us, I could hear it. We continued our run, over hills, through ravines. Every once in a while, it got quiet, and a few minutes later the chopper would fly overhead, sending the two of us scrambling for the nearby trees to hide behind until it passed.
It overflew us again, and ahead I saw daylight. “Woods coming to an end again,” Scott said. I could hear the alarm in his voice. I looked right, and knew he was thinking what I was: we had two directions now cut off to us, west and south. “Back the way we came,” he said, “either east or north.”
“We just came from directly north,” I said. “Maybe if we work east for a while—”
The sound of a gun blast sent me to my knees and a sapling a few feet from me exploded into shards of soft wood, snapping in half where the bullet passed through it. “Great; the local lumberjacks are pissed off,” I muttered as I tried to get back up.
“When you chop down trees with a .50 cal sniper rifle, I don’t think you get to call yourself a lumberjack,” Scott said from nearby. “Pretty sure that’s against the union bylaws.”
“I know this is ironic coming from me,” I said, “but this hardly seems the time for bad jokes.”
“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know there was a time for bad jokes.”
“Try the Oscars. There are so many there, no one will even notice.”
“You’re taking her death well,” he said, flat on his belly, looking directly at me.
“I didn’t know her well,” I said, brushing it aside. “And we’re in a life or death situation of our own.” I felt the tug of emotions. “I may cry a little later.”
“So you do have feelings,” Scott said with a quicksilver grin.
“A few. Don’t tell anyone, okay? I might lose my rep around the Directorate as a total badass.”
“That’s not your reputation,” he said, his amusement dying.
I watched him for about a half-second, pondered what he meant, and stopped thinking about it as another shot boomed in my ears. “Think he’s getting closer?”
“He doesn’t need to,” Scott said. “He’s got friends. All he needs to do is pin us down while they approach from our sides or back, box us in.”
“Envelopment,” I said, remembering what Parks had called it when he was instructing us on small-unit combat tactics. “Any ideas for how to get out?”
“My well-oiled mind is failing me at present,” he said, rolling onto his back as another shot echoed overhead. “We stand up, they pop us. We belly crawl, they catch us and kill us when they surround us. We surrender…” His voice trailed off, and I thought again about Andromeda, who I had barely known, and I could see by Scott’s reaction that he was thinking it too. “What do you think they want?”
“Our heads,” I said, pulling Zack’s body closer to mine, feeling him snug against my side. “On a pike.”
“Oh, good, and here I thought they were only interested in us to harness and enslave our metahuman powers.”
“You don’t fire a fifty cal at things you don’t want dead,” I said sadly.
“We’re metas; we can take the damage better than a human. They might think we can survive a hit or two.”
“Andromeda was a pretty powerful meta,” I said. “She didn’t.”
“You don’t know that for fact.” He stared back at me, looking across his body, leaves mussed around him. “We had to leave her behind, but she might have healed from that, given time.”
“You think so?” I felt a surge of irritation. I hadn’t considered that. “You didn’t voice it at the time.”
“I don’t know it’s so,” he said as another bullet thundered into a maple tree a few feet from us. Loose leaves, stirred by the impact, drifted down to us, one of them landing on Scott’s face. He blew it away. “But I needed you to realize we had to leave her behind rather than carry the whole world on our backs while we’re trying to escape.”
“You ass,” I snapped. “What about Zack and Reed? Should we leave them behind, too?”
“If we wanted the best chance to live,” Scott said, dirt all over his tanned face, “yes, hypothetically that would have been a good move. Lighter to travel and all that.”
“‘Hypothetically’?” I said, annoyed, and I heard the sounds of movement in the underbrush around us as the chopper came around again, the blades thrumming in the summer air. I felt the sunshine on my face through the branches overhead.
“It’s just a theory,” he said, calmer than I was feeling, “and it doesn’t look like we’ll ever know the answer now.”
“Scott.”
“Yes?”
I tried to think of the things we’d been through; we’d met when he said some unkind things to me in the cafeteria at the Directorate and followed it up by leaving a nasty note under my door. We hadn’t really fought since then, but he’d annoyed me more than once. “You are…” I tried to think of the nice things he’d done for me, and there had been a few. “…an amazing person.” I couldn’t quite keep the irritation out of my voice, though, and whether it came from the past, the fact that he’d convinced me to leave Andromeda’s body behind, or just my aggravation and stress from the fact that I was fairly certain we were going to die in the next few minutes, I couldn’t really be sure.
“Your words say ‘amazing’, but your tone says ‘asshole’.” He didn’t put a lot of spice into his riposte; the first black-clad figure had appeared only a dozen yards away and was easing toward us one slow step at a time. They had us dead to rights, an easy kill. Scott started to stand, and his hands were in the air.