“Didn’t think about it, did you?” Stefani said. She pushed past him, heading for the controls of the fortress.
“Did I do something to upset you?” Jeff asked. “Because I didn’t mean to. I just . . . I don’t know what to do with Darwin. I just said what I thought.”
“Of course you did.” Stefani looked over the indicators, making sure there weren’t any Apostles or leeches nearby.
“What did you want me to do?” The tension within the fortress had reached him now as well.
“How come you never asked me why I came back for you in Dallas?” Stefani swiveled around in the chair from facing the controls and stared directly at him.
“I . . .” The question caught him off guard. “I don’t know.”
“There it is again. You don’t know. You don’t know. But you asked Carlee about why she saved you. She told me about that. She told me you worried about me when I was missing, and I believed her. Foolish me.”
A tear ran down Stefani’s cheek, and Jeff watched it roll in slow motion. By the time it fell from her cheek and hit the grated floor, he realized how blind he had been. A thousand moments raced through his mind, now replaying with a different context. When she had told him not to fall in love, she had been warning herself as well. When she had attacked Darwin so that he and Carlee could escape, it wasn’t only for her sister-in-law. When she had flown back to save his life during the biggest battle in a decade, it had meant more. More than he had ever realized.
“I didn’t—”
“Know,” Stefani said. “You didn’t know. Let’s talk about this later.” She smiled at him hopefully; she was more vulnerable now than he had ever seen her. She had always been such a warrior that seeing her as anything else had been difficult.
“Are you sure?”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up now.” Stefani looked past him, out the transparent, shielded walls of the fortress.
“Why?” Jeff followed her gaze and saw that they were passing by the rubble of what had once been the Kansas City courthouse. It was a feature of the ruined city he knew well.
“Because I promised to help you find your revenge.”
39 ROSS
JEFF RELAXED HIS SCATTER GUN and stared at his former home, where he had spent the last seven years in Fifth Springs living with Dane. It had been a memory filled walk from where Jeff and Stefani had left the fortress a mile away under the pretenses of recruiting. It was hard to remember the good times because it was hard to think about anything but betrayal. But they had happened.
He kicked some charred wooden boards by his feet and looked around the rest of the area. The people of Fifth Springs had inhabited the other homes in the subdivision, but only the one at the end of the street still stood. Oddly, the deserted landscape of his former home didn’t make him feel much. Even the moldering human remains that he occasionally passed did little to affect him. The people of Fifth Springs had joined the long list of humans who had died with no one to bury them. Compared with many, they had lived successful lives.
But he wanted to feel more. He wanted to cry for his dead neighbors and for the murdered children. He wanted to curse Horus and fire his weapon into the air. But he had already wept for them, and their deaths felt like a lifetime ago.
“My hood shows there is a body under there,” Stefani said.
Jeff looked over at her, unsure of how to react.
“You should take a look,” Stefani said. She wore a pair of sunglasses over her eyes, with her hood up over her head. The combination of sniper rifle and body armor made her look as intimidating on the outside as the day he had first met her. But she was different now; her strength was more alluring, and her confidence gave him confidence.
“All right,” Jeff said. He fumbled with the mental controls of his hood for a moment before he found the right setting. His vision changed, and everything went dark except for certain details. Sure enough, there was a pair of human skeletons buried underneath the wreckage. One of them looked to have died mostly intact; the other resembled how he had looked after the attack.
“Some more bodies,” Jeff said. “There are lots of them around.”
“Jeff . . .”
He switched his vision back to reality and readjusted back to the sunlight as he looked over to Stefani.
“What?”
“I promised to help you find your revenge,” Stefani said. “And here it is.”
“What? No. That isn’t Dane. It can’t be.”
“You told me there were leeches from Horus’s wings flying around everywhere, slicing people up and making a mess of things. Horus followed after them. Dane wasn’t a vagrant like you. You have to see that it’s extremely unlikely that he made it out alive.”
“He could have made it . . .”
“Jeff, your friend is already dead. If anything, pushing him out of the way of that laser saved your life and ended his. Horus thought you too weak to even bother with, but Dane was still whole.”
“He’s still out there.”
“I know you want him to be, but—”
“He is, Stefani. I know it,” Jeff said. She was suggesting something he was not ready to accept, no matter how much he wanted to.
“Do you, Jeff? Did you get a glimpse of another time line? Or are you telling yourself that so that you have something to hang on to? We’ll find your mayor and be done with it.”
“I saw glimpses when it happened. People made it out alive. Horus didn’t even care enough to do a thorough job; it was just taking a little pleasure detour on its way to kill Petra. If others made it, then Dane did. He’s out there.”
“Where?”
“Old Unity, maybe . . .”
“And if we don’t find him there?” Stefani asked. “Are we going to have to get tissue samples of everyone who died here before you admit that Dane is dead?”
“No.” Jeff thought about it for a moment, weighing whether he would be able to keep to the commitment he was about to make. “If he’s not there, we’ll just focus on the mayor. Carlee will get suspicious if we stay in this area forever looking for Dane.”
“And you can live with that?”
“With a little help,” Jeff winked at her, and Stefani blushed. Seeing her show even a hint of embarrassment made him want to laugh, but he didn’t. He didn’t know what to think of the whole thing, but luckily, he had plenty of other things to think about that were less confusing.
“Then to Old Unity we’ll go,” Stefani said. “But now you’re making me hope Dane isn’t there.”
Now he did laugh. Flirting was just so unnatural to him that he didn’t know what else to do.
“First, we should go check out that house,” Stefani said. “There are some folks inside who may be interested in joining our movement.”
“There were people in there this whole time?” Jeff asked. After almost giving up on Dane, he was filled with renewed hope. Dane dying by Horus’s hand was suitable, but after the way his best friend had left him on the ground to die, he wanted to return the favor. He had turned Jeff into a generous fool, giving his life for someone who, in the end, had cared so little for him.
“Five of them—armed, from what I can see. Just inside the bottom floor. I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet.”
They picked their way through the shattered and cluttered street that Jeff had walked down thousands of times. His heart beat faster the closer he got to the final house in the area. The glass in the windows was shattered, and he could hear voices chatting lazily on the inside about who had eaten what. Stefani positioned herself in front of the door. Jeff tapped her on the shoulder and furiously shook his head. He wanted to go in first.
“Don’t start with that chivalry crap.”
“I have the better gun for this,” Jeff said. “You cover me.”
She looked to her long barrel and shrugged before moving to the side of the door. Jeff took a deep breath and kicked the door in with his metal leg.