The comm line to the Sea Wolf was still down, and it wasn’t going to be back up until one of them manually turned it on—unless the AI broke X’s order to keep radio silence.
Part of X wanted to prove that the AI had betrayed them, but doing so would mean they were stranded here. No, as much as he hated robots, he didn’t want to be proved right if it meant getting stuck in this muddy hellhole.
He still had Cazadores to kill.
Magnolia sliced through the jungle growth ahead, her curved blade cutting down orange bamboo stalks three times her height. Orange sap sluiced into the dirt, turning it the color of rust.
X hacked at stems leaning into the path she had cleared. The sap dripped on his armor, sticking to his battery unit. He pushed through the giant bamboo forest at a good pace, checking his rear guard every few minutes and listening for hogs.
If any more were out here, he would hear them crashing through the thick growth or see them with his NVGs, which he kept on.
He gripped his machete tighter and flattened his body to move between two more of the barb-sided poles. Several of the tips scratched his back armor.
Lightning hit a tree on the mountainside, and he turned as sparks rained over the jungle. The rain beat the flames to death before they could mature.
Miles waited a few feet ahead. He trailed Magnolia, turning every few minutes to make sure that X was still behind. X had hardly taken his eyes off his friend since rescuing him from the nest.
The distant, melancholy wail of a vulture reminded him they weren’t out of danger yet. But this sound wasn’t the sound of a predator on the hunt. It was the call of a mother or father mourning a child. X had slaughtered the babies, and he would do it again if it saved Miles or Mags.
In just the past hour, she had made up for every screwup and then some.
He owed her an apology for his dismissive behavior over the past few days, and if they managed to get back to the Sea Wolf and get it running, he was going to do just that—after he apologized to Pepper, assuming the AI hadn’t left them out here.
X hacked another bamboo with his machete and slipped through the gap between two more. The barbed stalks scratched his armor again, smearing him with the sap. The amplified speakers picked up the sound of Magnolia cutting down the stalks ahead, and another sound…
Waves. They were getting close.
X moved faster to catch up with Magnolia. She was nearing the end of the thinning foliage. The darkness on the horizon split in half, the ocean finally visible under the stormy sky.
Magnolia stopped outside the bamboo forest, taking a knee and motioning for him to join her. Miles sat on his haunches—a sign the coast was clear.
“Timothy, do you copy?” Magnolia asked over the comm.
There was no response.
“Pepper, this is X, do you copy?” He sheathed the machete and unslung his rifle while listening to the crackle of static.
“Guess he finally listened to one of my orders,” X said.
Magnolia looked over her shoulder with a frown. Behind her, the forest ended on a cliff overlooking the city, beach, and bay to the east.
X spotted the Sea Wolf right away and trained his scope on the vessel. The hull had caught on another shipwreck a quarter mile out into the bay. If Timothy had been trying to escape, he had failed.
“We lucked out,” Magnolia said.
“How do you figure? One of us is going to have to swim out there.”
“True, but at least we still have a ride.”
X looked over the sea cliff. Over a hundred feet separated them from the water below. Miles let out a whimper as if he could sense what was going through his master’s mind.
“Don’t worry, boy,” X said. “You’re not going to swim today.”
Magnolia stood up and moved to get a better view, and X followed her to find a way down to the shore. The radio equipment clanked on her back as she moved, the bag hitting her armor.
“Why don’t you put that down?” X said quietly. “You sound like a bag of cans.”
She did as he suggested and set the bag gently on the ground while X continued looking for a way down. He scanned the entire bluff to the east, all the way to the beach, but there didn’t seem to be any easy access to the water.
He glanced back down at the rocky shore.
The Sea Wolf wasn’t that far, but the prospect of plummeting into the bay—or onto the rocks—made his gut tighten.
“No,” Magnolia said, as if she could read his thoughts.
“You want to go back through there?” X pointed at the bamboo forest and the jungle beyond.
Magnolia shook her head. “Not especially, but I also don’t want you to break your legs—or your neck.”
“Looks pretty deep to me, and it won’t take long to swim to the boat. One of us will have to do it.”
“You do remember that shark, right?”
X looked back out over the choppy waves and cursed. He wanted to scream at the ship and tell Pepper to come back online, but that wouldn’t do any good, and it might well attract more beasts.
It was odd how the tides had turned.
Now X needed the damn robot.
“Hold my rifle and cover me,” he said, giving his weapon to Magnolia. She took it but didn’t seem sold on the plan.
X bent down in front of Miles. He checked the dog’s wounds again. There were several gashes on his suit, but they didn’t look that deep. He would be okay, especially since his genetically modified body healed faster than a human’s.
X was the one who needed medicine. His arm was burning something fierce, and he wasn’t sure whether the sweat on his forehead was from a fever or just from the stuffy air in his helmet.
He patted Miles on the head and walked to the cliff edge, where he shucked off his boots and armor.
“X, this is crazy,” Magnolia said.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Sometimes, you got to do something a little crazy to survive, because sometimes there’s no other option.”
“I thought you wanted me to work on not doing dumb stuff.”
“I do, and for the record, I’m sorry for being such a dick. Thank you for saving my life. I’ll hit you back if I survive this.”
He took a step back and then ran toward the ledge. About two feet away, he leaped into the air and fell toward the black waves.
NINE
“So this is how the world ended,” Katrina whispered. She sat at her desk next to Michael, scrolling through the data Magnolia had uploaded and sent hours earlier. Timothy hovered behind them, hands at his sides, his glow filling the dim office with soft white light.
“I knew some of this already,” Michael said.
Katrina raised a brow. The timeline of Industrial Tech Corporation’s rise to power and its dominance throughout the world was mostly new to her.
“You knew that ITC was leading the charge to end the energy crisis?”
Michael tightened his ponytail. “Yes. From our experiences at the Hilltop Bastion, Layla and I were fully aware of the breakthrough scientific research ITC was doing before the war.”
He threw a sidelong glance at Timothy. “Thanks to our AI friend here. He also provided Layla and me some new information a few days ago, after I told him of Layla’s interest in the history of our species. You know, after Jordan purged most of it from the Hive.”
Katrina checked Timothy’s facial reactions. Something was off. The AI was an emotional entity. That much she knew from Magnolia’s description of his reaction to finding his family’s remains in the living quarters on this very airship.