“Ugh!” Layla groaned. “Why are we at the library?”
“Do you remember when Captain Ash died?”
She looked at him strangely. “Of course. We were in our first year of engineering school and about to start our apprenticeships.”
“The last time I saw her and Mark, I was fifteen years old. Except that I didn’t know it would be the last time. I visited her in her private quarters. By then, the cancer had eaten her throat. She couldn’t speak, but she could write. The instructions on the note she gave me with this envelope said to open it here.”
Layla wrapped her arms around him. “I’m sorry, Michael. I know how much she meant to you.”
“I was close with Mark, too. They were the closest thing I had to parents after mine died.” He thought of them both every day, but sometimes it was just too painful. Mark had died of a heart attack two months after the cancer took Maria. They had loved each other fiercely for over thirty years. Michael hoped he would get a fraction of that time with Layla.
She kissed his cheek and stepped back. “I went through the same pain when I lost my parents. It never fully goes away.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
He pulled the note out of his pocket and pushed the door open. They stepped into a small room furnished with three desks and lit by a single candle. The glow danced over shelves of ragged books with faded covers.
“May I help you?” an ancient voice croaked.
“Hi, Mr. Matthis,” Michael said to the librarian. “Been a while.”
Jason Matthis stood and squinted in the candlelight. “I’m sorry, but my vision is failing me and I don’t recognize your voice.”
Michael and Layla crossed the small space, stopping in front of Jason’s desk. He smiled, flashing decayed teeth at them. The whites of his eyes reflected the lonely, flickering flame.
“It’s me, Michael Everhart.” He paused and then added, “Tin.”
“Ah,” Jason said. “And who is with you, Commander Tin?”
“Layla,” she said.
“And what brings you two here?”
She looked to Michael. He cleared his throat. “Research.”
“Then please let me know if I can assist you.”
“Thank you,” Michael replied. He led Layla over to the desk near the starboard bulkhead and took a seat. Before sitting down beside him, she fished a lighter from her pocket, lit the candle on the table, and pulled it close.
Holding her gaze, Michael used a fingernail to unseal the yellowed envelope. For five years, he had held on to this note, and for five years he had fought the daily temptation to open it.
Captain Ash had been the one to lift Michael up. She had taken him in after X didn’t return from Hades. She had saved his life, and he loved her for it. But she had always kept things hidden from him. Now he was finally going to find out the secrets she was hiding.
Michael unfolded the letter and held it to the light, reading the text in a whisper. “The New World Order. Page ninety-four.”
“That’s it?” Layla asked.
“No,” he replied. “That was just the beginning.”
ELEVEN
Rodger followed Andrew through the rubble. He swept his rifle over the terrain, searching for contacts. Though he didn’t look it, he was one of the best shots of all the Hell Divers. That didn’t mean he enjoyed killing.
He gripped the wooden stock with one hand and raised the other to check the rad readings on his monitor. There was a joke somewhere in his mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to crack it. Today, he was all business. No jokes, no farts, no laughs. This wasn’t some green dive. His life and the lives of his fellow divers depended on him.
Magnolia’s life depended on him.
“You think she’s okay?” he asked.
Andrew turned slightly. His big shoulders cast a wide shadow on the path.
“Shit, Mags is tougher than you think.” Andrew stood there a moment and then laughed. “You really dig her, don’t you?”
Rodger felt his cheeks warm. Was it that obvious?
He kept walking, eyes on the sky. The gift he had been making for her wasn’t finished, but he had brought it with him anyway. Tomorrow was never a guarantee, and a mostly finished present was better than nothing.
The sharp crack of thunder made Rodger flinch. A few hundred feet to the left, and the strike would have ended him. But the lightning arced into a pile of broken rock and concrete instead.
Thirty minutes had passed since Weaver’s last transmission, and Rodger was growing anxious.
“We need to find that crate,” Andrew said. “It’s gotta be close.”
Rodger nodded. According to the minimap on his wrist monitor, they were almost on top of the supply box that their shipboard team had dropped. The nav marker he had set blinked.
“After you, Mr. Pipe,” he said, bowing.
Andrew shook his head, shouldered his assault rifle, and took point on a path lined on both sides by ten feet of debris. The nearby buildings had been reduced to rubble. In the distance, a hill rose above the destruction. On top of it stood an almost cubical concrete structure with a domed roof.
That was their target.
But first, they needed supplies.
Rodger raised the scope to his visor and zoomed in on the charred slope of the hill. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the trees that had once shaded the dirt. He had seen pictures of trees in the archives, from spindly saplings to forests of giant ponderosas. Why couldn’t he have been born three hundred years earlier? He would have built himself a nice little cabin away from everyone, a place on a lake with a good view of the mountains.
It was a pipe dream. In this devastated world, his greatest ambition was that someday he would see a real tree.
They skirted an immense crater. This wasn’t from a bomb. Rodger could tell by the radiation readings. They were high, but not that high. The hole was probably once a man-made lake. A place where people picnicked. Now it was just poisoned dirt.
He took a second to scan the sky, searching again for Weaver and Magnolia. “Those rads are increasing,” Andrew warned.
Rodger checked his wrist monitor. They were already in deadly territory. Without their suits, they would have been dead after a few hours. The numbers didn’t inspire confidence of finding any survivors—at least, not aboveground.
The mountains of rubble continued after they passed the crater. Andrew stopped in the center of the road to look at the one on his left, then his right.
“Damn,” he muttered. “I bet the crate landed on one of those.”
Rodger followed Andrew’s finger to the top of the four-story pile on the right. It wasn’t the first time their supply crates had been dropped somewhere inconvenient. Sometimes, he thought the support crew did it on purpose.
“Better start climbing,” Andrew said.
“Why me?” Rodger cradled his gun across his chest and glanced up the pile of concrete, glass, girders, and plastic.
“’Cause I hold rank. Stop wasting time and get your skinny ass up there.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Pipe, sir,” Rodger said. He laughed and looked for a route up. Hunks of concrete sidewalk stuck out from the pile. They looked sturdy enough. He would use them as makeshift steps. He threw the strap of his rifle over his shoulder and climbed up the first two with ease. Then he jumped onto the loose rubble. The loose grains slid under his boots. He took another step, packing it down, but still it felt unstable. He grabbed a piece of rebar sticking out of the mess and used it for balance.
Glass crunched under his boots. There was a little bit of everything out here, like a giant scrap yard of shit from the Old World: plastic, sheet metal, concrete, brick, and even some preserved wood. He was always on the lookout for it. But rarely did he find anything he could use in his shop. Most of the time, he didn’t have lift capacity in the crate to get any noncritical items back anyway.