But they were on the wrong side.
“What the hell?” One of the standing mercenaries shouted at the one who’d done the shooting. The shooter stared down at his weapon, looking completely baffled. Before he could respond, the first soldier smashed him across the face with the butt of his rifle.
Another, standing nearby, stared at Taylor. He pointed.
“Wait! It’s her! It’s her!”
Taylor telekinetically yanked his weapon away as far as she could with the tether, pulled it taut, and used it to clothesline the nearest soldier.
The last one standing lunged at her. Taylor had to resort to more physical tactics. She kicked him in the groin, then swept out his legs. A move that Isabela had taught her. Before he hit the ground, Taylor telekinetically grabbed his rifle and smashed it into his face.
“You—you’re supposed to be on our side,” one of the wounded mercenaries mumbled.
Before they could regain any footing, Taylor focused on their weapons and bent the barrels down so they weren’t usable.
“Stay down,” she said. “And maybe I’ll heal you when this is over.”
Five plodded forward, two of Caleb’s duplicates clinging to his legs. He stomped down on one, crushing its head and causing it to vanish. He snarled and picked up the other one just as Daniela unleashed a torrent of stone-vision in his direction. Five used the clone as a shield, then slung the chunk of rock back in Daniela’s direction.
“Get out of my way,” he growled.
“I can’t do that,” Caleb responded. He stood on the ramp to Sydal’s saucer, the last line of defense.
Five moved closer. In response, Caleb unleashed a trio of new duplicates to tangle him up. Five yanked at him with his telekinesis; Caleb pushed back and remained unmoved. He was drenched with sweat from the exertion of churning out the copies. Five dispatched them easily.
“You think that man cowering in there would protect you?” Five yelled as he smashed his steel-plated fist down on a Caleb’s head.
Caleb kept his mouth shut. Focused.
He knew the answer to Five’s question was no, just like he knew that Five would eventually break through the duplicates and reach him. But still, he had to fight.
Behind them, against the wall, Isabela was trying to wake up Einar. Caleb couldn’t wrap his head around that girl’s motivations. He wasn’t sure she even knew herself.
Five broke a duplicate over his knee. Caleb replaced it.
To his left, Daniela got woozily back to her feet. She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead. Five had clipped her with the rock he’d thrown at her. Melanie was there to help her up.
“Daniela,” she said, eyes wide, this whole thing too surreal for her. She’d done nothing but take cover since the fighting started. “You’re bleeding.”
Daniela slapped her across the face. Hard.
“Bitch, you have superstrength!” Daniela shouted at Melanie. “Help us fight him!”
Caleb heard a clanking noise behind him, but didn’t have time to react before the ramp was pulled out from under him. He fell to the ground and rolled as the entryway was retracted back into Sydal’s saucer. The magnate had sealed himself up in there.
And he’d caused Caleb to land right at Five’s feet.
Five pulled him up with his telekinesis before Caleb could stop him, and he grabbed him around the throat. Caleb’s team of duplicates tried to pull him free to no avail.
“You should’ve listened,” Five said almost sadly before clubbing Caleb across the face with his metal hand.
Caleb saw a flash of light and tasted blood. He lost control of his duplicates and fell face-first to the ground, his jawbone snapped in two places.
With the shooting stopped, Nigel was free to run full speed at the girl dragging away his mother. She was nearly to their ramshackle Skimmer. Duanphen’s stride was purposeful, her grip tight on Bea’s upper arm.
His intention was to take her by surprise. He aimed his shoulder for the space between her shoulder blades, an old-fashioned rugby tackle.
But Duanphen had worked security for years. She knew when a threat was bearing down on her.
At the last second, she ducked and let Nigel stumble by her. She reached out and brushed her fingers against his neck, sending a mild electric charge through him.
“Gah!” Nigel yelped, arching his back. He put himself between Duanphen and the ship. “What’ve you got? Legacies of an eel?”
“Mm,” Duanphen replied, stone-faced. She shoved Nigel’s mother to the ground and took up her Muay Thai stance. “I am not here to fight you.”
“Then don’t,” Nigel replied. “But I can’t let you take my mom.”
“I know your mother. I knew your father,” Duanphen said. “Perhaps better than you do, I think.”
“You a therapist, too?”
“They are not worth fighting for,” Duanphen said. “Let justice be done.”
Nigel took in a huge breath of air, readying a scream.
That’s when Sydal’s ship lifted off.
Einar came awake slowly. His face hurt. It felt like his nose was broken, his lip split, and one of his eyes was swollen half-shut. He’d never been beaten up before.
“Unacceptable,” he said, the word coming out garbled.
The first thing he noticed was Caleb, sprawled out in the grass just a few yards from him. Like Einar, Caleb’s face was a bloody mess. Einar couldn’t exactly remember the last few minutes, but maybe he’d done that in some kind of adrenaline surge. Given back to Caleb a beating just as hearty as the one he’d endured.
No. Unlikely.
Isabela knelt over Caleb, stroking his hair, shielding him from the battle still going on. Einar’s head swam. He needed to rejoin the fray, but couldn’t focus yet. For the moment, he watched, playing possum.
There was Five. He must’ve been the one to take down Caleb.
A good friend, that one.
A shadow fell across Einar. Sydal’s ship was taking off, the saucer wobbling into the air with a burst of thruster power.
Damn it. They’d failed.
Five didn’t give up easily. He roared in frustration as the ship lifted off, and attempted to fly after it, but a beam of silver energy crackled forth and hit his feet. In the blink of an eye, Five was connected to the ground by a stalagmite of stone, courtesy of Daniela.
So Earth Garde was still in the fight. Not good.
Five bellowed—half floating and half suspended by Daniela’s rock. He was forced to double over and pound away at the craggy snare, trying to break his legs free.
That’s when Melanie sprang into action. Of course Einar had noticed the so-called face of Earth Garde when his squad first showed up. As expected, she shrank away from actual conflict. And yet, there she was, charging towards Five with a scream. She swung the briefcase that Sydal had collected from Barnaby like a wrestler would wield a steel chair.
Melanie might not have been much of a fighter, but she was strong. Really strong. And apparently motivated. Even with his metal-plated skin, the blow sent Five’s head jerking hard backwards. The reinforced case broke open from the impact, spilling some strange vials onto the ground. Five slumped, hanging from Daniela’s stone growth by his ankles. He groaned, not quite unconscious, but close.
Melanie reared back for another swing, but stopped before connecting. She turned around slowly. She had been so focused on psyching herself up to attack Five that she’d completely missed the fact that Sydal was leaving without her.
“Wade? Wade—wait!” As Einar watched, Melanie’s face crumpled in a mixture of shock and dejection. “Where—where is he going?” She put both of her hands in her hair, pulling it, and looked imploringly at an equally surprised Daniela. “He’s—he’s just leaving us?”
Einar snorted. Their plan might’ve failed, but at least he got to see the figurehead of Earth Garde realize just how little humanity cared about her
Isabela looked in his direction, realizing that he was
awake. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it. She didn’t alert the others that he was conscious.
She was giving him a chance to retreat. Einar intended to take it.
Einar stumbled unsteadily to his feet. He looked at Five, still trapped in rock, only semi-awake. There was nothing Einar could do for him. He needed to save himself.
With Daniela and Melanie still distracted by Sydal’s departure, he scrambled towards his Skimmer.
Duanphen was too fast for Nigel. As he was about to scream at her, she lunged forward and clamped a hand tightly over his mouth.
“Please don’t,” she said. “My ears are still ringing from the last time.”
She hooked her arm through his, bending it at the elbow. Nigel grunted in pain, felt the electric tickle of her palm against his lips.
Nigel’s eyes darted around. His mom was on her hands and knees, breathing hard. No help there.
But here was Taylor, running across the battlefield towards them. Duanphen hadn’t seen her yet.
Suddenly, Taylor flipped up in the air and came crashing down on her shoulder. It was like someone had chopped her legs right out from under her.
Einar. Great.
The Icelandic psycho staggered towards them. Blood coated the lower half of his face, the skin above pale, making him look like a zombie.
“Duanphen!” he shouted. “Get Mrs. Barnaby and let’s—”
He was cut off by a high-pitched whistle.
A missile. Its smoky tail leaving a trail that led back to the cable car.
Nigel knew his mom had posted someone up there. Someone with a bloody rocket.
They all stopped to watch the impending destruction.
It wasn’t heading for their battlefield, though.
The rocket made a fiery red-and-orange blossom when it struck Sydal’s saucer. The silver disk teetered, wobbled back and forth, black smoke snaking up from its engine. Then, with a burst of crimson light from the thrusters, a second explosion split the craft in two, the glittering chunks crashing down into the Alps.
“We . . . ,” Einar breathed. “We are going to be blamed for this.”
Nigel turned to look at his mother in horror. This was her plan.
She had arranged to make this deal with Sydal—a powerful man, a public figure, a supposed ally of Earth Garde.
And at the same time, she’d been dropping breadcrumbs for Einar, luring him here.
She had engineered this whole confrontation to kill Sydal. But why?
What had she said before?
There were fortunes to be made through chaos.
Bea wasn’t on the ground anymore. She wasn’t cowering. In fact, while all the others had been distracted by the missile strike, she had drawn a small pistol from inside her coat.
The pistol she used to shoot Einar in the throat.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE BATTLE OF ENGELBERG
ENGELBERG, SWITZERLAND
NIGEL COULDN’T EXPLAIN WHY HE DID IT. HE hated Einar. The bastard had dredged up some of the worst memories of his life, used them to make Nigel feel weak and helpless, nearly killed him.
But Nigel’s family had been making him feel weak and helpless all his life.
As Bea pulled the trigger a second time, Nigel used his telekinesis to rip her gun away.
Einar groped at his throat, his eyebrows raised in surprise. Blood poured in a fountain down his shirtfront. He opened his mouth to speak and a bubble of dark crimson came out.
He clamped a hand over the wound and fell down.
“Am I . . . ?” he managed to say. “Am I dying?”
Even at this distance, Isabela could feel the heat rolling off the wreckage of Sydal’s spacecraft. One of those Blackstone mercenaries must have shot it down. What kind of game was Nigel’s mother playing?
She didn’t have time to think about that. Melanie was wailing at the sight of the explosion, Daniela was trying to console her and Caleb was breathing laboriously through his smashed face.
But that wasn’t what drew Isabela’s attention.
Although still suspended by Daniela’s rocky protrusion, Five had shaken off the effects of Melanie’s vicious blow to his head. His breathing now came in quick rasps that reminded Isabela of a bull penned up before release. As she watched, a bit of froth fell from his lips.
Five dangled directly above the contents of Sydal’s briefcase.
“This . . . ,” Five spoke through his teeth. “This is what they’re selling? This? THIS?”
In a blur of motion, Five pulled himself up and bashed his way free of Daniela’s stone bond. Floating now, he let out a roar and plummeted straight down at Daniela. She barely had time to turn around before Five was on her, hitting her in the sternum with both fists. He slammed her to the ground with enough force that Isabela heard the girl’s ribs break.
“Daniela!” Melanie shouted. There were tears on her cheeks, but she still managed to lunge at Five.
Five took to the air, floating over Melanie’s outstretched arms. As she stumbled past, he spun and slammed his knees into her back, running her towards Daniela’s wall of stone. Melanie had time to scream before Five slammed her head first into the rock and she went limp.
Breathing raggedly, Five floated above them all. He grabbed the vials of black goop that had set him off—Isabela noticed how the empty obsidian color matched the splotches of dead skin on Five’s body. The vials spun around him, under his control. He glared down at Isabela, fire in his single eye.
“This stuff is evil,” he snarled. “Pure evil.”
“Okay,” Isabela replied, holding up both hands. “Now relax.”
“They should die for this,” Five replied. Isabela followed his eye—it was wide enough that she could see the white—as Five scanned the field and located Nigel’s mom. “Starting with her.”
Before Isabela could try to talk him down, Five flew towards the others.
After Nigel ripped his mother’s gun away, Duanphen acted quickly while Nigel was still trying to figure out what to do. She charged Bea and struck her under the chin with a flying knee. The older woman screamed and fell onto her back. Nigel noticed Duanphen wince when she landed—one of her legs was injured.
Instinctively, Nigel grabbed Duanphen around the waist and tried to drag her away from Bea. She shucked him off, though, grabbing his wrist and twisting until he flipped onto the ground. She let a brief jolt flow into him, then released him.
“You still defend this woman?” Duanphen asked. “Even after you’ve seen what she’s capable of?”
“She’s—she’s my mom, for shit’s sake,” Nigel said. “Just stop fighting and I promise she’ll pay for—”
“She will pay now,” Duanphen replied.
Of course, Nigel had a feeling that Duanphen wasn’t going to just stand down. That’s why he focused on the sound of flames crackling behind her from where Sydal’s ship had gone down. He amplified the noise so it sounded like a wall of fire was rushing towards her back. Duanphen flinched and turned, and that’s when Nigel kicked her in her bad knee.
Before she could recover, Nigel grabbed a nearby stone with his telekinesis and smacked Duanphen across the face. He stood up, rubbing his wrist where she’d twisted it.
“Now, let’s take a deep breath and—”
Five swooped down and grabbed Nigel by the throat. His grip was literally iron, his fingers digging into the side of Nigel’s neck. Five lifted him up, floating them above the scene. Nigel couldn’t get a breath in to scream.
Five saw Einar then. He was still clutching his throat, clinging to life, but there was an impossible amount of blood pouring over his fingers.
“He wouldn’t want me to kill you,” Five said to Nigel, his voice shaky with rage. “But you are a traitor to your own kind. Working with the Foundation. You deserve this.”
His grip tightened. Nigel couldn’t get a word out. He saw spots.
And then, a chunk of blue stone the size of a refriger
ator struck Five. The impact sent him cartwheeling through the air and knocked Nigel free. He hit the ground next to the mysterious mass of Loralite, hacking and gasping for breath.
The stone had come from the direction of the road. Only telekinesis could propel something that large that fast. He squinted in that direction and was able to make out a few vague shapes and another glint of azure light. Who had saved him?
And could they please do it again?
Nigel rolled over and saw that Five had righted himself in the air and now loomed over him. Instead of pressing the attack, he stared confusedly at the Loralite.
In a flash of light, two figures burst forth from the stone. Nigel’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of them.
Ran and Kopano.
They put themselves between Nigel and Five, Ran’s fists glowing with stored energy.
“You stay the hell away from him,” Ran snarled.
By that time, the Blackstone mercenaries that Taylor had taken out were beginning to stir. With all their weapons broken and dismantled and many of them hurt, there was no way they were going back into the fray. Not with so many Garde running around. They intended to beat a hasty retreat.
Until Karen Walker pointed her gun at them.
“All you bastards back on your bellies,” she said. “No one moves until this is sorted out.”
The mercenaries could have rushed Walker, maybe taken her, but some of them noted the teenager wearing a hijab at Walker’s side. No way that she wasn’t another Garde. They did as Walker said.
Not worth it.
From their vantage point near the edge of the clearing, Walker and Rabiya had a clear view of the carnage. Bodies both dead and injured, discarded weapons of human and alien origin, a broken-down Skimmer, a random wall of stone, a burning spaceship—and just a few Garde left standing.
“Shouldn’t we help them?” Rabiya asked.
“I know that guy out there,” Walker replied. “That’s Number Five. If Ran and Kopano can’t stop him, our best chance is to just hope he doesn’t notice us.”
Kopano recognized the monstrous one-eyed guy with steel-plated skin as Number Five. How many times had he watched that video of Five battling Professor Nine in New York City? It was literally the coolest thing Kopano had ever seen.