She hated Jeff for it, just like she hated Bobby for the way he had left her heart shattered. But Carlee couldn’t really hate either of them. She loved Bobby, and Jeff was the first person she had met since who reminded her of him.
Carlee found Bobby in another reality and quickly pressed in an energy weapon from his time line. It appeared in her hands a split second later, and she quickly fired four blasts into the center of the approaching debris that was too large for her to dodge. It cracked under the force and split in two, allowing her to fly through the middle of it.
It was hard to believe that for the longest time, she hadn’t been able to press more than some marbles or ragged dolls from her childhood. She had simply never been able to connect to another time line strongly enough to do anything else, no matter how much Bobby had worked with her personally. It was a role she had settled into, being Bobby’s wife and supporter. But then he had died, and the limits on her mind were gone. She could press just about anything now, as long as it existed in a reality where Bobby was still alive. It made her feel close to him.
Her navigation system drew her attention. She was approaching her goal, but so was a source of temurim. An Apostle was approaching at high speeds, but so far, her sensors hadn’t picked up an Apostle near the heart of the explosion. Perhaps that was Darwin coming to meet up with Jeff.
She fought her desires to run away from the Apostle, accelerating instead. There was no way to know who was approaching, and if Jeff was still in there for some reason, she was going to get to him first. Sediment rained down on her as steadily as ever, but it seemed more violent now as she shot through it, ducking around boulders and trunks of trees.
Carlee set her suit to search for human life, but she feared that even if someone had somehow survived the blast, there was too much happening around her to get an accurate reading. She switched her personal vision to infrared as she arrived above the center of the blast, but it was no use. The ground at the center of the newly formed crater was superheated from the explosion, blocking out any readings. She switched through her enhanced vision options, finding none of them to be particularly helpful.
She floated in the air, moving side to side to dodge the larger pieces of the mountain that fell where she had paused, but those were growing less frequent now. She thought that Darwin had made its plan so eloquent that it would be quick and clean, but blowing up an entire mountain was anything but eloquent. She didn’t know what was going to come of this bombing, but she feared for the future.
The Apostle was closing in from the northeast, and another had just appeared on her radar from the south. She needed to run, to get out of here as fast she could. But she needed to find Jeff. She needed to be the leader Stefani believed her to be, and she had promised to bring him home.
But Jeff wasn’t here, and she didn’t have clues on where to look next or even if he was still alive. Looking at the absolute destruction below her, it was hard to imagine anyone surviving something like that, but Darwin had been confident. But Darwin wasn’t here either unless it was one of the approaching Apostles.
She pushed her way through the dust and out of the crater and flew right. It seemed like the dust was never going to clear and that the impact of the explosion was endless. She shuddered to think about the people and animals with no way to escape from the aftermath of Jeff and Darwin’s sneak attack on the temurim mine. None of them would have died if he had just listened to her.
Carlee’s sensors alerted her to a human not far away, but then the indicator disappeared a moment later. She veered in that direction, and the indicator lit up again. She moved forward faster now—the reading was weak, either from the dust cloud or because whoever it was in bad shape. Given the nature of the situation, she raced toward the flailing signal. No matter who it was, she would help.
It was what she did. It was what kept her going. For the first months after Bobby’s death, only Stefani had kept her alive. Then she had stopped living for herself and started living for others. She owed everything to Stefani, her sister-in-law, although there weren’t any laws anymore.
The nearest Apostle had reached the crater behind her, so it made more sense to continue to run, but she slowed as she approached the dying human. She switched to her enhanced x-ray vision built into her suit and gasped. Buried beneath a few feet of dust, a human lay, breathing weakly. A boulder pinned the arm of the dying person, whom she didn’t need to unbury to know that it was Jeff.
He was still alive, but not by much. She pushed the rock off what was left of his metal arm and dug through the dust until she found him, choking on dirt. His breathing was weak behind a partial helmet, half of his metal leg had burned away, and his human leg had fared no better. Most of the hair on his body had melted, and he didn’t respond to her touch. He looked to have been wearing some advanced set of armor, but there was hardly anything left of it now.
“Right back to where I found you the first time.” She delicately started to lift him from the ground, careful not to cause him any long-standing injuries from moving his broken body, but she also didn’t have the luxury of pressing or taking her time.
Her suit alerted her again. The Apostle at the crater was approaching them.
“Time to get you out of here, you fool.” Carlee picked him up and set him over her shoulder; her suit beeped louder and louder as the Apostle closed in on her.
She started to accelerate, gently at first so as to not cause Jeff more injury, but the air began to thicken around them, trying to lock her in place. She’d seen Apostles use this technology before, and she was ready for it. She found a force-field wall in a time line where Bobby had used it to stop this very attack and pressed it behind her.
The wall blocked whatever molecular manipulation was happening, and she broke free. Jeff groaned slightly, but she had no choice but to accelerate. She had her suit display what was happening behind her in a corner of her vision, and she shuddered at the sight. The outline of a massive floating orb peeked through the thick smoke and dust. It was a profile that she knew well. Bud had arrived at its mine.
“Sorry,” Carlee said. She pushed her suit to full speed. She shot away from the Apostle of her nightmares as fast as her suit could carry them. The g-force was likely compounding Jeff’s wounds, but if she didn’t get them both out of there, they were going to die.
Her armor alerted her to incoming projectiles, and she simply pressed some falling rock on top of them, causing a series of explosions. She followed up by pressing in wave after wave of force fields behind her, hoping to slow Bud’s pursuit.
In her nightmares, Bud had come for her almost every night since the day she had witnessed it kill almost everyone she had ever loved. But that wasn’t going to happen today. Carlee broke through the cloud of destruction and into the thin mountain air.
47 HEATHER
“PLEASE, I BEG YOU,” CARLEE said. “Tell your leader . . . Heather, I think, that I’m here. And I am in desperate need of her help.”
“That’s her, all right. I recognize that face. One of those vagrants that brought the warlord down on us!” The man who spoke had seen hard times, but she had seen his type before. He would help her. At the least, he would allow Heather to make the decision.
Carlee tried to smile encouragingly, but she was too tired to do it well. She was so far beyond the point of exhaustion that she could hardly stand. She leaned on the floating med bay that encased the unconscious Jeff. Whether he survived or not was still a question to be answered, but his chances would go down if she couldn’t get some rest.