Invaders

  Was it simply the human governments fighting back against a perceived alien invasion? Could they rally their resources that quickly? I’d seen it happen in movies, but I wasn’t sure it was possible in real life. That kind of mobilization took time and effort, and we’d given no indication of what was going to happen until the very last moment, when those Fed ships carrying the shield-bearers were already on their way to their designated locations. It looked like Navan was just as baffled.

  “Get the ambaka to drink it slowly, if you can,” Lazar said, handing the bottle over to Ezra.

  Ezra smirked. “I doubt he’s in the mood to cooperate.”

  “Lazar! Autopsy room, now!” Orion snapped, drawing Lazar away from Ezra.

  “Of course, Chief Orion,” he mumbled, as he ushered Navan and me toward the door of the windowless room. Flanked by two extra guards, Lazar led us out through the disorienting gloom of the corridors, and back onto the elevated walkway outside the main door. Orion was following behind us at a leisurely pace, no doubt anticipating the pleasure of snuffing out my life, as I’d snuffed out Pandora’s.

  Navan and I exchanged another glance as we walked along, with him tilting his head discreetly toward the guard to his right. I gave a small nod to let him know I understood. If we were going to snatch Orion, we’d have to get rid of the guards first. How we were going to do that was another question entirely.

  “Here we are!” Lazar said with forced brightness, letting us in on the situation.

  “I know where the autopsy room is,” Orion muttered, as we all entered the room beyond. It looked like something out of a horror film, with buckets of festering limbs and organs littering the place, and row upon row of vicious-looking tools lining the walls. In the center of the room, there were six mortuary-style slabs, all of them presently vacant. I had a feeling that was about to change.

  As soon as the door to the autopsy room was closed behind us, Navan nudged me in the arm, giving me the signal. We broke away from Lazar, slipping easily from our bonds. I shuffled out of the blue coat and ripped my gun from its hidden holster, aiming to take one clean shot at the guard’s forehead. As I pulled the trigger, nothing happened—something had jammed inside the mechanism of the weapon.

  See, this is why I prefer knives, I thought furiously, scanning the room for anything else I could use. On the workbench nearby, I could see the glint of scalpels, five of them all set up in a neat row. Without missing a beat, I sprinted for the blades and snatched them up, before turning to hurl them toward the guard. Two scalpels caught him square in the throat, the third skimming across his jugular and the fourth landing just below his eye. The fifth hit the wall behind him, the handle swinging from side to side. At first, nothing happened. Then, the guard buckled, collapsing to his knees in a state of shock as the severed artery suddenly exploded in a rainstorm of blood.

  Using the awful distraction to his advantage, Navan lunged for the second guard, yanking the saber out of its hidden scabbard and slicing the blade across the neck of the unsuspecting rebel. Blood spurted out, making the floor even slicker underfoot. We’d have to be careful where we stepped.

  I had to check myself for a second, wondering when I’d become so desensitized to the sight of violence. Right now, it was barely registering a response. I knew I had to fight, and the rest seemed to drift into the background. It horrified me, to think I’d gotten used to it.

  In the chaos, Lazar swiped up a bucket of limbs and threw them in Orion’s face. Covered in blood and viscera, Orion stumbled backward. Lazar pulled cuffs from his belt and tried to latch them on to Orion’s wrists, but the rebel leader was much too quick for that. He recovered rapidly from having limbs and guts chucked in his face, tripping the one-eyed coldblood and sending him sprawling backward.

  “Really, Lazar?” he taunted.

  With his focus turned toward his newfound betrayer, I reached for another set of scalpels and flung them toward Orion. He dodged them easily, swiping them out of the way using an Aksavdo move I’d never mastered—every time I’d tried it, I’d ended up with cuts all over my forearms. Meanwhile, Navan tried to slash at him with the blade of his saber, but he seemed to move in all directions at once. He was definitely a much stronger foe than we’d fought before.

  Every attempt we made to get close to him was thwarted, either by a keenly placed punch or a swift kick, or an autopsy tool slung in our direction. Lazar was trying his hardest to get the cuffs on Orion’s wrists, but nothing seemed to be working. It would only be a matter of time before he managed to evade us, slipping out of the door and sounding the alarm. We couldn’t let it happen.

  “How would you like to feel the shock of another chip in your neck, Riley?” Orion shouted, pulling what looked like a chip-gun down from the wall. “I should very much like to see you suffer.”

  “The only way you’ll get one of those things in my neck is if I’m lying dead on one of these slabs,” I snapped back.

  He laughed coldly. “That can be arranged.”

  Picking up a jagged-toothed saw from one of the mortuary slabs, I ran at him, diving to my knees at the last moment, using the slippery blood to skid along the floor toward him. I wanted to strike at his thigh, to sever the femoral artery, though I wasn’t sure if his anatomy lined up with mine. Even so, I knew it’d hurt him, and it would definitely distract him.

  As I shot through the gap between his legs, his eyes followed me in amused surprise. The jagged teeth of the saw passed across his leg, but they didn’t bite as deeply as I’d wanted.

  “Nice try, human,” he taunted, his focus straying from Navan for a moment too long. It was all the time Navan needed to hurl himself at Orion and force the barrel of the chip-gun upward, until it was resting against Orion’s throat. He pulled down hard on the trigger, inserting a chip straight into the neck of the rebel leader.

  Scrambling to my feet, struggling not to slip on the slick floor, I reached up to the wall for the device that accompanied the chip and turned it on. I pressed the button I’d seen Orion press when our roles had been reversed and watched as he sank to his knees in pain, his face contorting in agony. A guttural cry tore from his throat.

  Now, it was our turn to use Orion like he had used us.

  Chapter Ten

  Wielding the device that controlled the chip as though it were some sort of all-powerful relic, I stared down at Orion on his knees. Like this, with his face twisted up and beads of sweat forming on his forehead, he didn’t look nearly as frightening.

  “Lazar, Navan, grab him. We’re taking him upstairs,” I instructed, trying not to let the power of the chip-device go to my head. Overconfidence makes people vulnerable; I’d just seen that firsthand.

  Lazar frowned. “Upstairs?”

  “Up to the roof. I want to make an example of him.”

  “And what about the notebook?”

  I flashed him an impatient stare. “We can get that out of him later. Right now, we need to make the rebels see just how weak their leader is—we need to knock their confidence in him. If we can do that, we’ll have won half the battle.”

  Lazar didn’t look entirely convinced, but he did as I’d instructed anyway. They lifted Orion up, and Navan forced his arms behind his back as Lazar cuffed his wrists. I held the threat of the chip-device over Orion’s head, letting him know that I meant business—a simple set of cuffs was no assurance that Orion would stay securely captured, and I didn’t want to risk him calling for the cavalry.

  “We should gag him,” Navan suggested, glancing around the room. He found the solution a moment later, picking up a ball of bandages and shoving it into Orion’s mouth, before binding it in place with several reams of the same stuff. At least it would keep him silent.

  However, as we exited the autopsy room, with Lazar dragging Orion along and Navan pushing him from behind, it seemed the rebel leader had other ideas. He knew he was captured, but I could see he had no desire to be cooperative. Every so often he would stop, digging his heels into
the ground, forcing me to shock him to get him to move again. As much as I despised Orion, it never got easier to inflict pain like that, at the touch of a button. There was no equality in it, like in a real fight.

  With me acting as the group’s scout, peering around the corner of each walkway to make sure no guards were heading our way, we took a backward route up to the rooftop. Lazar called out the directions to me as we pressed on, taking us a different way through the alchemy lab, where we wouldn’t be as obvious to the patrolling guards. Within a few moments, we’d come to a steep stairwell tucked away in the side of one of the vast chambers. It seemed to go on forever. I really wasn’t looking forward to getting Orion up the stairs, though I realized Lazar and Navan were the ones doing the heavy lifting.

  “You sure there isn’t another way?” I asked tentatively.

  “Not unless you want guards crawling all over us,” Lazar replied.

  “Will you guys be okay, carrying him all that way?”

  Navan nodded. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll manage. And if he steps out of line, shock him.”

  I was worried he’d say that, but what choice did I have? If Orion wouldn’t cooperate of his own accord, then he’d have to be made to. As if to prove my point, Orion tried to brace his legs against the bottom step of the stairs, pushing back with all his might to try to unbalance his captors. I pressed down hard on the button. His legs buckled instantly as a wave of pain washed over his face. He would learn, one way or the other.

  After what seemed like forever, we reached a doorway at the far end of a narrow walkway, which sat at the top of the relentless staircase. It looked like an emergency exit. Reaching for the rusted handle, I pulled hard, and the door creaked open. Hazy blue light streamed in, the sunlight filtered by the nudus shield Stone was still holding up. It really did look like a summer’s twilight, though I knew it was still daytime outside, beyond the new dome Orion had forced the ambaka to build.

  “We can’t take him out there with a gag in his mouth,” I warned, hesitating on the threshold that led out to the rooftop. “If the rebels see that, it’ll only make them angrier.”

  Navan frowned thoughtfully. “Take it off, then, but if he breathes a word you’ll have to shock him. We can’t have him rousing his troops when we’re supposed to be doing the opposite.”

  “And the notebook?” Lazar chimed in, almost nervously.

  I cast him an apologetic glance. “Sorry, Lazar, it’s still going to have to wait.”

  “As long as you make good on your promise, Riley.” There was a hint of warning in his voice that I didn’t feel like testing.

  “I will, but we have to do this first. We need to minimize Orion in the eyes of his followers and make them doubt what they’re doing. Then, we have to get Stone back.”

  Taking a deep breath, I reached down to remove the bandages from Orion’s face. As I put my fingers near his mouth to pull out the ball, I half expected him to bite down on my hand, but he didn’t. Perhaps the threat of the device was working after all.

  We’d just taken him out onto the rooftop, though we still weren’t visible to the fighters below, when he spoke, shattering any illusions I might have had about his newfound obedience.

  “If you kill me, Riley, you do realize that you will make a martyr out of me, don’t you? With my death, you will only spur the rebel cause further into action—you will reignite their flagging spirit by giving them something else to fight for. Vengeance is a powerful tool, one I have often used to my own advantage,” he said, a note of amusement in his voice. There was something else, too, though I didn’t dare name it out loud… Could it be fear that I was hearing?

  “Who says we’re going to execute you?” I asked. “I only want them to see how weak you are.”

  “Their loyalty will never bend away from me,” he continued. “Those people down there, the ones who are fighting for me and my cause, they are the ones I took under my wings as outcasts and pariahs of their nation. They were the ignored, the useless, the bereft… and I gave them purpose. They won’t run from the bonds that tie us together, as a brotherhood, a sisterhood, a family.”

  “They will when they see how false your message is,” Navan remarked icily. “You didn’t give them purpose—you fed them a lie. You told them you were going to offer something different, but you just want to give them more of the same. You wanted to be king, and that’s all it boils down to.”

  Orion spat at Navan. “What would you know about being an outcast? You’re an Idrax. You have always been welcomed to the inner sanctum of high society. My comrades, they felt hopeless in the face of a divided Vysanthe and a monarchy that had forgotten who truly mattered. They were the ordinary folk who your kind decided to use as pawns in their game of war.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “We are equal here. We are a true society,” Orion insisted. “Back on Vysanthe, they didn’t feel like citizens of anywhere. They were forced to watch the home they’d all loved so dearly, the home that had once been so breathtaking in its accomplishments, brought low by the petty squabbles of two teenage girls.”

  “As I say, your complaints and your actions were, and are, motivated solely by your desire for the throne. You just offered up your surrender in return for a third of Vysanthe. Tell me, what is it you think I’m missing? It all seems pretty obvious to me.”

  Orion’s eyes narrowed in rage. “I didn’t want to be king. I don’t want to be king. I was forced into the role of leader when those queens decided to tear our planet apart. I only want to do what is best for the future of Vysanthe,” he replied venomously. “My comrades wanted a purpose in life—a home and a reason for being—and I gave that to them. Even in death, I will continue to accomplish that. I will carve a path for them, back to the world they were forced to flee from, though I’ll make sure they find it in a much better state than they left it.”

  “You’re living in a fantasy land, Orion,” I said softly.

  His head whipped around, his cold gaze connecting with mine. “You do not get to speak on matters that do not involve you, Riley, though you can rest assured that my Pandora will be avenged, one way or another. After all, you were the one who made it personal.”

  “Let’s get him out where everyone can see him,” Navan suggested, leading Orion forward, though I was already unsettled by what the rebel leader had said.

  We paused just short of the main stretch of rooftop, where Stone was still kneeling, his arms bound. His third eye had been covered up again, but the nudus on his arm were still forming the dome above him, the creatures continuing to sap his concentration and energy. I guessed the energy elixir had worked, considering he was still breathing.

  Crowding the ambaka in a circle were Ezra and his soldiers, while a small ship stood off to the right-hand side. I wasn’t sure what it was there for, but the sight of it made me even more nervous. The last thing we needed was a clear escape route for Orion, if the rebels took him out of our hands again. Honestly, I’d expected to see Ezra up here, with a few guards, but I hadn’t anticipated a group this size. What if they weren’t in a bargaining mood?

  Clearing my throat, I strode across the rooftop, keeping a healthy gap between us as I came to a halt. Lazar and Navan followed, shoving Orion to the ground. At closer range, Stone didn’t look good at all—he was swaying from side to side, all three of his eyes shut tight, his body prevented from slumping forward by a rebel guard’s strong hands gripping his shoulders.

  “Still alive, I see,” Ezra remarked, his voice carrying a hint of surprise. He glanced down at Orion. “Let me guess… you’ve come to bargain?” A strange glimmer flashed across his eyes, but it was a mixture of emotions I couldn’t quite gauge. It was almost as though the two of them were saying something to one another, communicating in silence.

  “If you try to snatch him, I will kill him,” I warned, brandishing the chip-device. “We put a chip in his neck. I assume you know what they’re capable of?”

  Ezra grinned.
“A sneaky move, human.”

  “We’ll remove the chip from his neck and hand Orion back to you, in exchange for Stone. And that ship over there,” I said, gesturing at the small vessel. It hadn’t been part of my initial plan, but it was a good way to get Stone off the roof and out of danger as soon as possible.

  A murmur of panic rippled through the gathered rebel guards, all of them exchanging worried looks. Evidently, nobody had expected their leader to be brought low like this, especially not by a ragtag trio.

  “Orion’s safety is paramount,” I heard one murmur.

  “How could he allow himself to be caught?” another hissed—his was the thought I focused on, praying the mentality would spread amongst his peers.

  Hysteria trickled through the congregation of rebels, with only Ezra remaining calmly at its center. I didn’t shift my gaze from him for a second, knowing he would strike at the merest sign of me letting my guard down. It unnerved me, the way he kept glancing at Orion, as though they were sharing information, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

  “You want this pathetic creature?” Ezra taunted, gesturing at Stone. “Our ‘weapon’ seems to have had an adverse reaction to dear Lazar’s energy elixir and is quickly becoming catatonic. It won’t be much longer until he’s completely useless to us, anyway, so I don’t think we’ll be exchanging anything. Besides, I doubt you’d uphold your end of the bargain, even if we agreed. I wouldn’t, if the roles were reversed.”

  “But we aren’t like you, Ezra,” I said.

  He gave a humorless chuckle. “Oh, I think you’re more like me than you know.”

  “Then trust what I say, Ezra,” Navan interjected. “I’m a man of my word—if I say we’ll give you Orion in exchange for Stone, then we will. If he’s useless to you, then you stand to lose nothing by giving him to us. If you refuse, then you stand to lose everything. Riley won’t hesitate to kill Orion if you don’t do as we ask.”