I nodded, the watcher’s hand warm and rough, squeezing my windpipe. Then he let go and my feet dropped back to the floor.
“I and I be seeing you,” Crow said. “In the next one.”
I scrambled down the corridor and away from him. Not ever once turning back.
When the first charge blew, it made a broken sound. A crack, then a boom. I was almost at the damn ladder, had almost made it. I felt the heat as I slid forward, and I watched the fireball tear down the tunnel behind me like it was being sucked through a straw.
The flames rolled like the sun, and I tugged at the low rung of the ladder, heaving myself up as the air itself seemed to melt.
I crawled into the pipe as the fire surged and ruptured, the force of it pushing me higher, propelling me up, burning the soles off my shoes.
Top of the ladder, I rolled onto the walkway. Black and smoking. Flames spiraled through the darkness as I leapt to my feet.
I kicked off my melted shoes as I sprinted back into the cockpit, and right away I could see through the window why the ship had seemed so empty of crew.
They were out there. All of them. An army, like Jawbone had said. An army of gray men in gray plastic jackets. And each one of those men looked exactly same. Even from a distance, I could see it. Their faces as identical as the clothes they wore. The same hairless skull. An army of copies. A thousand King Harvests.
They were crawling over Old Orleans, rounding up pirates or mowing them down. It was a war zone. Chaos. And there in the cockpit was Zee and Hina. Waiting on me.
But Jawbone was straddling the control panel with a gun in her hand. And pinned beneath her was Harvest himself. The one man who might hold all the answers. The one man who knew where the slave ship was bound.
Jawbone fired before I could even holler. Before I could do any damn thing at all. She had the pistol rammed under Harvest’s chin, and the bullet splattered bits of his brain across the sparkle of the control panel, his blood spraying at the monitors and levers and knobs.
Someone was screaming and I realized it was my own voice, the sound rising out of me with no warning.
Jawbone stared at me, brushing the bits of skin out of her hair as she leapt off the console. “Relax, Banyan,” she muttered. “The man wasn’t worth crying for.”
She lowered her gun too soon and the cockpit door sprang open, and a man who looked just like Harvest came sliding in with the rain.
He was packing artillery and he let the bullets fly, unloading a round clear into Jawbone until her little body ripped and shuddered and was pinned lifeless against the console. Then the man was done with her. And he turned on Zee.
I leapt across that room like there were two of me, one standing still, watching. The other nothing but speed.
I slid into the man, knocking him from his feet as he squeezed at the trigger and his gun pointed at the ceiling and drilled it with holes. Suddenly, I had hands helping me. Zee and her mother. The four of us all tangled together like our bodies had been joined and only one brain could rule.
I scratched and clawed at the man’s waxy skin, yanking and squeezing at that gun until it was in my hands, my finger on the trigger. I got on my knees and sank the weapon into his face, making sure he could see it, making it all nice and clear.
“Where did you come from?” I screamed at him, scaring the girls clean away.
The man just stared at me. His features bloodless and blank. He looked like Harvest. Hell, he was Harvest. But he wasn’t. Not quite. Not in the eyes.
“Where do you take them?” I said, leaning down into him and forcing the gun at his cheek.
“He can’t tell you.”
I spun around. My mouth open. It was Hina who spoke, and I’d never heard her make even a sound.
“What do you mean he can’t tell me?”
“They can copy the body,” she said. “But not the mind.”
I stared down at the man. I glanced at Zee, then back at Hina. “How do you know?”
Her gray eyes stared deep into mine. “Because your father told me.”
I didn’t know what to say. But it didn’t matter. Because right then the transport cracked and moaned beneath us, the cockpit shuddering as somewhere deep in the hull, the fuel tank began blowing itself to pieces.
The second explosion threw the four of us to the ceiling, pinning us there as the floor reared up. The control panel flared and each window shattered. I lost track of my prisoner. And then I lost Zee. Hina, too.
I scrambled and bounced as the transport shook, broken glass puncturing my skin, smoke billowing around me. I plunged forward, picking my direction based on nothing but the sound of rain. There it was again. I could hear it. Closer now. I stretched an arm forward. And then I could feel it, slippery and warm on my hand.
My body wriggled into daylight and I rolled on my back, the platform all warped and quaking. The plank that had led off the deck was long gone. But as the transport swayed, it reached close to the city walls, bashing at concrete and knocking it loose.
I squatted amid the steam and sparks. I peered back into the rubble and saw limbs moving.
“This way,” I shouted. “Follow my voice.” I kept yelling as I pried my way back into the remains of the cockpit. I caught Hina in my arms and tugged her free. “Where are you?” I screamed for Zee. “I can’t see you.”
No answer.
“Zee?”
It was useless. I hollered again. But we were all out of time.
I grabbed Hina around the waist as the transport toppled. She strapped her arm across my shoulders as I ran and jumped.
Must’ve been a good ten feet and it felt like twenty. We hit the wall and it broke powdery beneath us, but it held as we sank our arms across it, our feet scrabbling up the concrete blocks.
The transport let out a groan as it tumbled to the mud, and it sank and flamed and split. Gashes all down the side of it. The top all full of holes.
The rain had quit and the air crackled with gunfire. I crouched on the wall and stared down into the city, where the pirates had clogged the walkways but the Harvesters showed no sign of retreat. Middle of the city, I could see the walls of the mud pit, the ramp still raised. And beyond it was the forest of cypress and fern, and the woman in the middle of it, still dancing above the rest of the world.
I don’t know who detonated the generators. But those juicy suckers damn near scorched the sky. Was like the clouds themselves were burning, and I heaved in the black fumes as I staggered into the middle of the forest.
Hina didn’t weigh much, but I dropped her like a sack of stone when I reached the statue, everything taking too long as I scrambled in the undergrowth and wrestled the panel free. She was barely conscious as I dragged her to the foot and squeezed her up through its entrance.
I groped in the mud where I’d left my tools. I found the nail gun and loaded that sucker full. I stood. Stared back at Old Orleans and watched it burning. I needed to find Sal. Get that damn coordinate for the GPS and get the hell away from this city.
But I had to do something first.
I had to find Alpha.
One good thing about a world made of stone and steel, that world can’t burn for long. Once the fire had eaten through the juice, it fizzled into fuming stacks, molten piles of rubber and plastic. But the smoke was almost worse than the flames had been. Black and toxic, steaming in the brown water.
Just like the fire turned to smoke, my sprinting turned to stumbling. I had the nail gun held before me and my shirt pulled across my face. The concrete was doing a real number on my feet now, shredding me to pieces one step at a time.
I stopped running, stared ahead through the streaky blackness. Coming out of that smoke were two of Harvest’s commandos, a pair of washed-out twins with vacant stares, sub guns rattling before them as they darted through the fumes.