At this range, not the most effective weapon.
Raine thought: We’re fucked.
Then he pushed the useless thought away.
The grenade behind them exploded, blowing a hole. Raine had the delusional idea that if they got out and climbed down the gorge, they could get out of the sights of the Enforcers, the mutants, and the gun turrets.
About as an impossible dream as there ever was.
The only thing in their favor was that the mutants, as controlled as they might be, were wild shots. And only half of them had projectile weapons.
But what they lacked in skill and firepower, they made up in numbers.
The fence was open, but Raine didn’t think they’d make it.
“Come on, you bastards!” Loosum yelled.
And as Raine fired beside her, he thought… with people like Loosum in this world, the future had hope.
Regardless of what was about to happen.
Loosum moaned. Raine looked down. A shot right at the kneecap. She fell forward.
Raine went to her. No way she could move, her blood glimmering even in the predawn darkness.
But she reacted quickly.
“Give me that last dart. The grenades. As much ammo as you can.”
Raine didn’t understand.
“ Give me the fucking stuff, and get the hell out of here now. Get Marshall out.”
And half lying down, half squatting, Loosum turned around and began firing at the line of mutants.
“Go!” she screamed, without looking back.
“We can’t-” Marshall started.
But this wasn’t the first time either of them had been in such a situation. The moment where a sacrifice is offered, where a decision had to be made. For the greater good.
And you moved.
Raine gave her the grenades, another box of ammo. The last dart.
“Loosum-”
“Get the hell out of here,” she said.
Raine turned and led Marshall, bleeding badly from the shoulder, to the hole in the fence.
As they went through, shots echoed from below them, around the front of the carrier in front of them.
And from behind, Raine heard the steady firing of Loosum and the shotgun.
Fast. She was reloading and firing so goddamned fast. Then the sound of an explosion as she used the dart.
Raine kept lugging Marshall farther into the darkness, the turret guns on the fence not tracking them, still dead, not laying down a line of fire as he stumbled toward the gorge leading down.
He heard a grenade.
Another.
Raine didn’t dare look back.
Every second counted if Loosum’s sacrifice wasn’t to be totally in vain.
Then just the shotgun, all explosives gone. Mixed with the sound of the rifles the mutants fired.
Perhaps Enforcers had arrived.
Then No more blasts of the shotgun. No more grenades.
Raine felt Marshall-this hero of the Resistance, the man who came from the same time as he did, and started this world fighting back-turn more and more into dead weight with each step.
Neither spoke.
They reached the edge of the gorge, rocks leading down. It looked hopeless. How the hell could he get Marshall down? And even if he could, did they have enough time?
“Okay, okay,” Raine said. “We gotta, we just gotta-”
He knew that Marshall was too experienced a military man to not know the impossibility of what they had to do.
And yet they would try.
“Gotta get down.”
When Raine heard something, it took a moment. But it was a noise he recognized. A wheezing engine sound. The sound of a prop turning.
And with no lights on, looking like a rock rising out of the gorge basin, floating upward… the same balloon craft that had brought him from Wellspring to the Resistance base.
There were two shadows on the deck of the clumsy aircraft. As it came nearer, Raine could see Elizabeth at the wheel and Portman at the front, standing next to what looked like a small cannon.
So close.
“Get in!” Elizabeth said.
The craft hovered, rocking back and forth, actually banging into the rocks, as Raine dragged Marshall closer. Had Loosum bought them enough time?
The mutants weren’t firing-which meant that he and Marshall were hidden by the rocks here. But they had to be only seconds behind.
Portman had left his weapon to help haul Marshall in. Raine leaped without help, freed of the captain’s dead weight.
Portman’s two strong arms grabbed him at his forearms, pulling him into the ship.
Raine was surprised, then, to find that instead of rising, instead of flying up as he expected, the airship dropped down.
He thought: Are we too heavy? Is the thing sinking?
But as he saw Marshall sprawled on the desk, he caught Elizabeth talking to Portman. Saw that she was in control. And Raine could put together what was happening. They were dropping as far down as they could, to get lost in the jutting rocks of the gorge, to where they could level out… and follow the gorge basin away.
A plan. A goddamned plan.
But then Raine heard the familiar sound of bullets, now ripping into the deck. A few shots into the balloon of the ship and they would simply crash to that basin floor, and wait for the Enforcers to come down-if it even mattered at that point.
Raine looked up to see where the shots came from.
Something in the sky.
“Goddamned hovercraft! ” Portman said. “Shit.”
“Got to make us weave,” Elizabeth said. “Hold on.”
Raine looked over to Marshall, who really only had one hand to hold on. He saw that the captain had locked that hand onto one of the mastlike pieces of wood at the ship’s center.
Raine held on to the ship’s edge as it began to veer right and left.
He heard more bullets, landing dangerously close.
We’re sitting ducks here.
But when he looked forward, he saw Portman at the weapon at the ship’s prow, both the cannon and its user dark shapes. The bore of the small cannon now pointed up at a sixty-degree angle.
And finally Portman started firing.
The cannon produced shakes in the ship, a recoil that sent the airship knocking against the gorge’s side. Portman kept firing, shot after shot.
Raine saw a bullet tear into the balloon; had to be a few there already. Was there enough lift in the balloon to keep this thing in the air, this flying technology ancient and absurd?
Like a rejoinder to his disparaging thoughts, an explosion from above them produced a brilliant fireworks display as the Authority hovercraft exploded.
While the balloon craft kept moving forward.
And for the first time in a long time, Raine didn’t hear any gunfire.
They weaved their way along the gorge bottom, the only sounds the wind and the ship’s boiler.
Portman had moved over to the wheel while Elizabeth crouched beside Marshall, tending to his wound. With the amount of blood he’d lost, there was no telling if he’d survive… even after all they’d gone through.
Raine thought of Loosum.
The feelings… overwhelming. Confusing.
He saw a bit of color in the east.
The dark night finally giving way to the first hint of the sun about to rise.
And finally he let himself close his eyes.
EPILOGUE
FORTY-THREE
From the moment they reached the Resistance base, Elizabeth and Portman raced around, grabbing things, rushing.
Marshall, bandaged, sat in a chair to the side.
“What about the file cabinets?” Elizabeth asked the rebel leader, now back in charge.
Lassard turned away from his terminal. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth. Got them all backed up.”
“Then just blow that stuff,” Marshall said. “Leave them nothing. ”
Marshall looked over at Raine.
“You all right, Raine? I owe you a big debt of gratitude.”