“Not interested,” she said.
He looked to Michael, but then scurried away when two militia soldiers approached.
“You at it again, Jake?” one of the guards said. “I told you, you can’t loiter here.”
The man held up his hands and grinned. “What? I didn’t do nothin’.”
Michael kept walking, through the throng of people filing out of a hatch at the end of the hall.
“When are you planning to tell me where we’re headed?” Layla asked.
He glanced toward the entrance to the lower decks. She reared back.
“What the hell are we going down there for?”
A woman holding a basket of potatoes stopped beside them.
“Would either of you like to—”
“No,” Layla snapped.
She grabbed Michael’s arm and dragged him to the edge of the corridor.
“Tin, what’s going on with you? Why won’t you tell me anything?”
He ran his hand through his hair to comb it back out of his eyes. “Because I know you wouldn’t come if I told you.”
She traced a finger across his arm—a gentle movement. “You can always talk to me.”
“You said you trusted me.”
A nod. “I do, but we should really be with the other divers, monitoring the mission below.”
Michael pulled an envelope out of his pocket. She tilted her head to one side.
“Is that why we stopped in our room?”
He nodded.
“Well, what is it?”
“Something Captain Ash gave me before she died.” Michael felt the smooth paper. He had spent hundreds of hours staring at the envelope when Layla was sleeping, wondering what it contained. But he had kept his promise to the captain and never opened it.
Until now.
“Captain Ash said not to open it unless we heard a legitimate radio transmission from the surface.”
Layla’s forehead creased. “You’ve got me intrigued, but why are we going to the lower decks?”
“You keep saying you trust me, right?”
She nodded.
“Then follow me.”
It could have been a minute or an hour. All Magnolia knew was that she felt as if she had been hiding forever. She held her battery unit in her gloved hand. The warmth bled through the worn fabric. Her comms, night vision, and life-support systems were all down.
The other divers had come for her. She couldn’t believe that Captain Jordan would risk lives to save her sorry ass. She wasn’t going to make him regret that decision. It still didn’t explain who was trying to kill her, but it did seem to rule him out as a suspect.
She heard scuffling sounds. The vines were searching for her again.
Red lights throbbed around the entrance to her hiding spot. The light blossomed over the room like an expanding puddle of water. She squirmed farther under the concrete platform where she had taken shelter, careful to avoid the raw end of rebar sticking out from the edge of the slab.
The sound grew louder. There were two vines inside now. The shadow of a third wiggled across a concrete pillar.
A barbed end suddenly darted forward. Watching it move, she held the knife a little tighter. Pale red sap trailed from the thick vine, and gashes marked the stem where something had fed on it. Directly in front of her visor, the barb split open into four small mandibles.
Instinct took over. She snapped her battery pack back into its slot in her armor and jammed the knife into the open maw. The jaws clamped shut around the hilt, and she yanked her hand out just in time. The vine twisted away, the knife still stuck inside its mouth.
Magnolia left it behind and ran for the staircase. She halted when she saw the dozens of vines creeping blindly up the steps. The only other escape route was to jump, but she had tried that already. She would never clear the gap to the next tower, and the four-story drop would telescope her legs.
What the hell. She decided to take her chances with another leap of faith.
Her battery glowed a cool blue amid all that flashing red. Dozens of stems snaked into the room, surrounding her. She turned toward the open area where windows had once been, and for the first time, she could see more trees growing through the floors of the adjacent tower.
This was it: the moment when she must make a decision that would probably kill her anyway. A flashback to the cyclops beast convinced her there was only one option.
Magnolia crossed the room at a sprint, weaving around the stems that whipped through the air. One of them wrapped around her arm, jerking her to a halt. The mandibles clamped down on her wrist monitor. Glass crunched. The screen was destroyed, and her hand was about to be next. She used her other hand to pry the thing off, ripping the plant’s jaws away from the monitor and freeing herself.
In seconds, she was running again.
She bumped her chin comm. It didn’t matter if these things heard her now, assuming they could even hear at all.
“Weaver, do you copy? I’m at the glowing scrapers just west of the ocean. Trust me, you can’t miss ’em!”
Magnolia could see the inside of the next building clearly. The vegetation there was flashing pink. Pink seemed a slightly less dangerous shade than red. She slowed as she approached the edge. The vines writhed across the dusty floor.
She turned to face them and backed down the sloping floor until she was at the edge.
“Weaver,” she said. “I could use some help!”
“I’m on my way,” he said. “Just hold on.”
Magnolia took another step back and looked over her shoulder. It was too far to jump. She raised her arms and shielded her body as the vines whipped toward her.
A sparkle came from the west—a battery unit in the clouds. Then a canopy flying toward her at a low angle. And with that sight, an idea emerged in Magnolia’s mind.
Reaching behind her back, she hit her booster, hoping it hadn’t also been sabotaged. The balloon exploded out of its canister, and as it filled with helium, she turned and jumped into the air.
The booster pulled her into the sky just as the barbed mandibles reached up for her boots.
She glanced up to see Weaver threading between the two towers. He steered toward her and reached out.
“Grab on to me!” he yelled.
Magnolia opened her arms wide. She was above the ninth floor now and climbing slowly toward the storm clouds. Weaver swooped in, and she wrapped her legs around his waist.
“Hold tight, princess.”
“Don’t think that saving my life will get you out of paying me,” she said, her voice ragged as she tried to catch her breath.
“Still on the straight flush, are we?” Weaver let out a chuckle that was almost lost in the noise of the wind. He looked toward the buildings below. “You wanna tell me what happened in there?”
Magnolia shook her head. “Freaky-ass shit is what,” was all she said.
This time Weaver didn’t respond. He reached up with a blade toward the lines connected to her helium balloon.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Why aren’t you punching your booster, too?”
A voice crackled over the comm before Weaver could reply to Magnolia.
“Angel One, this is Apollo One. Do you copy?”
“Roger that, Apollo One,” Weaver said. “I’ve got Magnolia, and we’re en route.”
“En route?” Magnolia said. She tightened her grip around Weaver.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We haven’t met our mission objectives yet.”
“You didn’t come down here to save me, did you?” she asked.
In answer, he sliced through her booster lines. The balloon soared away into the sky while his chute carried them gently back toward the surface.