“Alexy, twelve o’clock!” Marco shouted. “Maybe five hundred yards from here! Two of them, and it looks like they’re being pursued!”
I agreed with him on that.
When we’d found Jackie and her group, they’d been standing still, as if they were hiding. This pair was moving quickly, and there was only one good reason for that.
There were soldiers right on their heels, which meant we needed to get there in a hurry.
6
Jace, Ant, and I hurried back to the winch and started winding the lines up again. We re-threaded two of them through the machinery so they would work smoothly when we needed them for this next group.
I spared Jackie a quick glance and saw that she was standing there with her mouth hanging open. First, she stared at Marco, then at Alexy, who was quickly maneuvering the ship downward. She was following the directions Marco had just given her.
“JK, wanna lend a hand with this whole rescue thing?” I asked calmly. “If we’re going to pick up two more, we need to make sure that the winch and lines are ready, that there’s enough room for them, and that we get them up and into the ship as quickly and painlessly as possible.”
She turned to stare at me without bothering to close her mouth.
“Who the hell is that?” she asked, throwing her thumb out at Alexy. “And why the hell is she driving our ship? What’s Marco doing, taking some time off?”
“Jackie. God. You were literally just looking at him. He’s manning the drone, which is doing the tracking of our team members,” Ant said quickly. “Evidently the suits have tracking devices that are sending out some sort of signal for the X-ray equipment to pick up. It’s how we found you. Doesn’t work if that drone’s not flying, though, and if Marco’s handling that thing…” He paused to work a tricky knot out of the line he had in his hands, then looked up at Alexy and shrugged. “We need someone else. Besides, she seems to know what she’s doing. Even better than Marco did.”
“I heard that,” Marco snapped, ducking back in from the door. He’d been watching the ground below us as he sent the drone streaking through the sky. “It’s not my fault she knows the thing better than I do. Who knows what her background is?”
That was a good point, and I frowned and turned toward the helm.
“Alexy, how do you know so much about the ship?” I shouted. “Who are you, anyhow?”
“I’m just a girl like you, Robin,” she shouted back. “Just a girl fighting the man. The system is broken, and I want to fix it. Isn’t that what we’re all here for?”
Without warning, she jammed the steering device forward, and we dove directly toward the ground, the rest of us grabbing at anything we could to keep from sliding right into her.
“Get that equipment ready!” she shouted. “We’re going in hot, and something tells me these two aren’t going to have as much time as the last group!”
Ant and I wormed our way back up to the winch on our bellies and used the pedestal to pull ourselves up again. Each of us took one of the lines we’d readied. Seconds later, we heard, “Throw them!” from the captain’s seat, and we released the lines.
We hadn’t had time to communicate with this particular group, and I could only hope that they’d somehow see the ship and perhaps the lines. Hopefully that would help them figure out what was going on.
The line in my hand drew taut, having hit its full length, and jerked suddenly. It reversed, flying through my hand so quickly that it would have left burns if I hadn’t been wearing a suit. Almost instantly, the other line followed, and I screamed for Alexy to get us up and away from here. We had our load, and I could hear the roar of flame machines—did the soldiers have them, too, or was that coming from one of the airships? Bullets ricocheted off the ship we were flying.
Alexy yanked on the control wheel, sending the ship upward and into a spin, which then made me worry that the people we’d just picked up would fly right back into the line of fire. They appeared seconds later, though, having hooked on more quickly than Jackie and her crew. When we righted the ship again, they were in it with us.
“Cl—Boyd!” Jace shouted, remembering to use a nickname for Cloyd just in time before rushing forward and wrapping his friend in a bear hug. “Thank God. I was so worried that I’d lost you. I—”
He glanced beyond the hulking man toward the door, and I didn’t have to ask what he was thinking. He was hoping that Kory was with Cloyd, and it would have made sense for the friends to have stuck together.
But the slight man standing there wasn’t Kory, but Samuel, one of the other members of the decoy team.
I felt the twin looks of dismay and disappointment from Ant and Jace and cringed. I wasn’t as invested as either of them, and it wasn’t that I wished Samuel any harm, but I’d wanted to see either Abe or Kory, too. They were people I knew, people I cared about. The fact that they might be dead or in the Ministry’s hands was almost more than I could bear.
“Guys get down!” Alexy abruptly screamed, interrupting my thoughts, and I dove to the floor, used to this by now and fully aware of the fact that when she said it, she was deadly serious.
Zion, Jace, and Ant hit the ground next to me, and I could see Allerra and Julia on the far side of the ship, on their butts and braced against the wall. Their hands were holding the handles embedded into the side of the ship. Marco had grabbed the line that Cloyd had just dropped and tied himself to the pedestal of the winch while we were talking, evidently expecting this sort of action. He was now dangling out of the door, his hands moving quickly over the controls of the drone’s remote and his eyes scanning the forest below us.
Jackie, true to form, had been standing in the middle of the ship with her mouth hanging open. She was strategically placed to go flying through one of the two doors when Alexy banked the ship. She was already in the action of falling, and I opened my own mouth to shout at her that she needed to get down, but quickly decided on action instead and launched myself toward her. It wasn’t pretty, and it seemed to make my ankle even worse, but I managed to take her down just before she hit the open door. When the explosion happened, we were wedged safely underneath a row of seats, our arms up over our heads.
I opened my eyes to see that Jackie’s were twice as big as they’d been before, taking up the eye holes of her mask, and gave her a quick thumbs-up. This was our new normal, after all, and I wanted to show her that things would be okay. Then I was sliding out from under the seat and rushing for the front of the ship. If Alexy had some sort of plan, I wanted to know about it.
When I got there, I was shocked at what I saw in the sky. This was the first time I’d actually faced directly toward it, and the battle that was going on was a lot bigger than I’d realized.
There were at least ten different crafts in front of us, none of them the same. The sky was full of flames and smoke. I wondered suddenly how many ships there had been to start with. I knew Alexy had taken at least two of them out.
“Who are they?” I breathed, time slowing down around me.
“The Ministry,” she said grimly. “Though I trust you know that. We discovered something they didn’t want discovered, and they’re here to make sure that we don’t tell anyone else or do anything about it.”
“And the others?” I asked. It had become obvious to me that though there were Ministry ships out there and they were trying to shoot us down, there were also other ships. Ones that weren’t quite as sleek or fast and didn’t seem to have the flamethrowers attached to them. However, they did mysteriously, weirdly, appear to be on our side. When one of the Ministry ships looked as if it was coming for us, one of the other ships apprehended it. It either got between us and the Ministry vessel or worked to take the Ministry vessel out of the sky entirely.
We had allies up here in the air. I just didn’t understand why or how.
There was a long pause from Alexy, and I glanced over to see her frowning, as if she knew something that she wasn’t at liberty to share. Although, she did
seem to be considering it.
“Those are the good guys,” she finally said. “And that’s really all you need to know. Get to the back and get the winch ready again. Let Marco know I need another location. We don’t have everyone yet, and that means we still have people on the ground. I want to know where they are. Our time here isn’t going to last much longer. The good guys won’t be able to stay much longer, I don’t think.”
I stared at her for a moment longer, wondering how the hell she knew so much about it all, but then turned and darted back into the body of the ship. She was right about one thing: members of our team were still down there, and some of them were my friends. We needed to find them, save them, and get the hell out of here. Then we could figure out where we’d gone wrong and what we were going to do about it.
By the time I got back to the winch, Marco had untied himself and was turning toward us.
“Guys, I need you on the screens to see if I’m missing anything,” he said. “I’m… I’m not seeing any more blue dots down there, but my eyes are so tired that I can’t be sure of anything anymore.”
I gaped at him, shocked by his words, then spun and made my way quickly toward one of the screens. Allerra was already standing there, her eyes on the monitor.
“You got anything?” I asked quietly, coming up beside her.
“Not a thing,” she answered. “I can’t see anything down there, but it could be because Marco’s drone is in the wrong place, right?”
She looked at me hopefully.
“Couldn’t it be that he’s just not flying in the right place? I mean, that’s a big forest, and—”
I didn’t wait for her to finish, because I was guessing she was right. I spun toward him and shouted at our team pilot.
“Marco, are you using the full range of the forest for the drone, or are you staying in some specific area? That’s a big forest down there!”
“And check the fields around the forest, too,” Jace added, coming up to stand next to me and stare at the screen. “There’s no guarantee that everyone got into the forest itself. A lot of them probably just ran for whatever cover they could find, and the grass in some of those fields is pretty tall.”
I could see from Marco’s face that he hadn’t considered it, and he whirled back toward the door, his face already bent over the drone’s controls. I assumed he redirected its flight path toward new territory.
I turned quickly from him to the screen again, praying, and supporting myself against the side of the ship to make up for my bum ankle. Surely there were other blue dots to be found, other markers of our teammates. We were still missing so many people, and I didn’t think any of us were willing to leave them behind.
Within moments, Marco gave a shout of victory, and my eyes flew over the screen, looking for what he’d found.
There, I realized. Only one, and whoever it was moved in the field next to the forest, just as Jace had said. I didn’t need to have motion sensors in the software to know that whoever it was left a wake through the grass, marking their path. There would be soldiers following it.
And, unlike the rest of us, that particular team member was alone, without reinforcements if he or she was ambushed or captured.
7
The good thing about this rescue was that we knew what we were doing. With only one person down there, we only had to wind one line and prepare one hook. This one should be easy. It should be a no-brainer, if anything was going to be a no-brainer in this situation.
For the first time, when we got overhead, we had a clear view of exactly what was happening below us. It had taken about forty-five seconds for us to get here, with Alexy’s piloting capabilities, but by the time we did, it was already almost too late. There was no tree cover down there, nothing to hide behind and nothing to shelter the person fleeing from the bullets.
I didn’t know how long they’d been shooting, and it didn’t look like the shots had gone through the suit yet, but they must have weakened the scrambling person below. I knew how much it hurt to be pinged by those bullets. The shock was big enough that it made you want to stop immediately, just to take stock of yourself and ensure that you were still in one piece.
Even for someone as big as Winter, it had to be taking a toll.
That was who ran down there. I would never have recognized her except that we were close enough to see how big the figure was now—and Zion had gone onto the comm link to ask.
Though I didn’t know why she was by herself or how she’d allowed herself to be pushed into the field, rather than running for the better cover of the forest, it was obvious that she was at the end of her rope. Her run had a stumbling quality to it. It appeared as if she was falling forward rather than using her full power.
“I’m in trouble, guys,” Winter huffed. “Been hit too many times to count, and one of the bullets has come through. It got me in the leg.”
“We’re going to get down there and get you out of it, Win,” Alexy told her confidently. “Just hang tight.”
She pushed the steering column forward and down, and we shot toward the staggering form, the spotlights from the ship shining down on the scene.
I could see that we weren’t going to make it. There were four soldiers after Winter, and they’d been closing in for some time. Now they were coming at her from several angles, creating a chute, and she wasn’t going to be able to hit the opening of it before they reached her.
We had made it there just in time to see our friend get captured.
We threw the line out anyhow, though we hadn’t yet caught up to her, desperate to give her some chance. Alexy leveled the ship out and flew along parallel to the ground. It was lower than I thought could be safe, but we were trying to reach our friend before the Ministry police did.
It didn’t work.
The first soldier jumped on her and took her to the ground. Within seconds the rest of them were on her as well. They didn’t shoot her, at least, but they had her hands behind her and had secured them before she could really fight them. When we flew over, I had a quick shot of her head, which was turned to the side and back up toward us, and though I couldn’t make out her expression, it didn’t take much imagination to put myself in her place.
Terror, that’s what she must’ve been feeling. She was in the Ministry’s hands now, and we had no idea what they might do with her.
Or to her.
I stopped my thoughts there. I didn’t want to consider what might happen.
“Get out of here, guys,” she managed, sending us one last desperate message. “I don’t know if you’re looking up, but you’re freaking surrounded, and I think our friends have fled the scene. Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure something out. But you’ve got to get out of here while you still can. If nothing else, I’ll need you free so you can spring me from jail.”
With that last jest, which wasn’t a joke at all, her line went dead.
I stared back to where I’d last seen her, too shocked to think straight, and then turned quickly to look at the sky.
“Oh my God,” I murmured.
Winter was right. We’d been so busy looking down, trying to get her the line that would save her life, that we’d forgotten about the sky and all the Ministry vessels that were out for our blood.
Now it looked like we had to start paying attention, because I counted at least ten of them hovering over us. They weren’t moving, and whoever had been running interference with them before seemed to have deserted their posts. Those ships and whoever was flying them had eyes for no one but us, and even I, who had never been to war in my entire life, could see that each and every one of them had their weapons aimed directly at us.
We were surrounded. They’d cut off our only avenue of escape, just like they’d done to Winter.
The one flaw in their plan was that they didn’t realize that we now had Alexy flying the airship. She shot one look into the sky, gave a deep sigh, and then hit several buttons on the console. In one quick move, she turned her se
at toward us and gave us all a glare.
“Get into seats. Now. Those things have seatbelts in them, unless you’ve made some stupid change to that. Use them. And don’t get back up again until I tell you it’s safe. This is going to be tight.”
None of us asked any questions. We’d been with her long enough now to know to take her at her word, and we rushed for the seats that were still standing. My heart broke at the idea that we’d had to leave Winter behind, and I looked around, trying to find a way to distract myself. Something good, there had to be something good here. Then I realized that we’d filled up all the seats in the airship—and that had to be a positive aspect, right? We’d rescued so many people in what had seemed to be an impossible situation, and surely that meant something.
I dove into the seat next to Jackie and fumbled with the seatbelt, the suit’s fingers making it difficult to hold something so small. Looking over, I could see that Jackie, who had hurt her hand along the way, was having more trouble than I had. I leaned over, yanked her hands away, and secured the locking mechanism for her, earning a quick, rueful grin in return.
A moment later, the doors to the ship slid up and closed, shutting out the world around us except for what we could see through the tiny porthole windows. Alexy hit the accelerator. However, instead of going straight up, as she’d done before, she shot forward, right through the grass of the field. It whipped up and against the belly of the ship, sounding like a million pebbles on our windshield, and I cringed, turning to stare out in front of us.
The forest was coming up quickly, and I was sure that we couldn’t go right through it. There had barely been enough room to run there. And we were people—much smaller than the airship.
“Um, Alexy, I don’t mean to be a pain in your ass or anything, but, uh, don’t you think the forest is going to be kind of… tight? I mean, for this ship?” Ant asked quickly, putting voice to my thoughts.