Chapter 5
“No, not that.”
The familiar, raspy voice trickles down into the catacombs of my brain and stirs me into consciousness.
Squinting at the analog clock to my left, I make out the shape of eleven o’clock.
My captor is strictly a bed-by-ten kind of gal, so an after-hours rager is extremely unlikely.
However, if she is going out, I find it doubly rude she didn’t invite me and woke me up with the noise.
“The twenty-two. The Sig. And the bow. No, the other one. Yeah.” A man’s deep bass grumbles in response. As quietly as possible I inch out of my bed, but as I reach the door, it swings inward and forces me back. “What are you doing?” Taylor hisses at me.
“What are you doing barging into my room at night?” I counter, crossing my arms over the front of my borrowed flannel pajamas.
“This is not ‘your room,’ princess. Go back to sleep.”
Before she can close the door, I wrench it open to peer behind her. Mason is fumbling with a duffel bag, dressed in black, staring at me like I caught him in bed with my lover. “Sleep. While you go out and do God knows what, leaving me here unprotected?”
Mason gives Taylor a look. “Theia did tell you we had to take her with us.”
“On the missions,” Taylor presses.
It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. Clandestine whispering. Dark clothes. Empty duffel bags. I’ve snuck out of my own house enough to know what it looks like.
“You’re sneaking out!” Taylor widens her eyes for me to lower my voice. In a normal speaking voice I ask, “You’re sneaking out and not taking me with you?”
Triply rude.
Taylor huffs impatiently. “We are going to the island for a couple hours.”
“The island? My island? The city?” My heart races like I drank ten coffees. “But—but the Lightbringers.”
“I know,” she says solemnly. “I made a promise, and, Lightbringers or not, I intend to keep it.”
A million dangerous scenarios flash through my mind, but the look on Taylor’s face is peculiar. It appears she wasn’t expecting me to wake up and I’ve stumbled into a secret. “I want in.”
“Good for you. You are staying here, Miss Piccolo.”
“Am I?”
If I can go toe-to-toe with Luciano Piccolo, a girl in the woods of Pennsylvania is naught in comparison. But, actually, she’s a lot in comparison, because she is a killer with insane reflexes and not a portly old man with a soft spot for me.
“Yes. Go back to sleep or I will put you to sleep.”
She almost gets me. But the tiny eruption of fear inside my heart cools off and I school my features as best I can. “Didn’t Lady Leather explicitly tell you, ‘Where you go, she goes’? I believe the phrase ‘no exceptions’ was used. I could go ask her, if you want.”
We square off until she turns on her heel to consult Mason. They have a silent conversation—complete with facial expressions, posture changes, and hand motions—and Taylor faces me again. “Get dressed. Wear dark clothing. Five minutes.”
The door slams in my face.
Groggy but triumphant, I disrobe out of my sleeping clothes and pillage the dresser.
The clothes are rather pedestrian, so I need not worry about standing out in a formfitting black sweater and snug black jeans.
When I join them, Taylor and I startle at the sight of one another, like kittens playing hide-and-seek.
Her tan skin pales a shade or two, as if she’s seen a ghost. Like Papa when I snuck into my mother’s boudoir and tried on her clothes.
Perhaps the stranger whose clothes I’ve rummaged is dead, like my mother.
Maybe they’ve gone away. Maybe they were kidnapped by a rebellious organization designed to kill them.
Maybe they were a nobody like I am now. But clearly, they were somebody to Taylor.
And really, every nobody is a somebody to someone.
Taylor, however, looks like an entirely different person stripped of her cookie-cutter soldier uniform.
She looks absurdly casual, like an Underclass punk I could meet in a bar, who’d lean on the counter with a masculine gait and a feminine smile, telling me what “girls like me” enjoy.
People love to tell you what you like. The only difference being if it were Taylor at that bar, I may have listened.
She tosses me a jacket and gestures ahead. “Come on, the others are waiting.”
What others? I ponder this as we cross the lawn toward the woods from which we came when I arrived.
They’re as imposing and ominous as I remember, like if this were a fairy tale, I’d come upon a gingerbread house.
While I find this labyrinth dizzying, Taylor is able to navigate as if each tree were a street sign, fingers tracing along the rough bark like the familiar skin of a lover.
Neither the darkness nor the claustrophobic density of trees appears to bother her.
“Aw, it’s like being kidnapped again,” I say as we approach the clearing.
“I don’t recommend attempting to escape.”
“Why? Can’t bear to part with me?”
Rolling her eyes, Taylor leads me to the helicopter resting anxiously on the grass, two strangers already inside.
One, an older man with a shock of white hair and a stern, dark face, gives me only the barest of acknowledgments as I climb in.
The other, a middle-aged Indian woman with a curtain of black hair and deep brown eyes, smiles at me, flashing brilliantly white teeth in my direction.
Once Taylor gets in and shuts the door, the helicopter ascends and makes my stomach flip but I squeeze my eyes shut to ignore it. Deep breaths.
We ride for about an hour in uncomfortable, awkward silence before it occurs to Taylor to introduce me.
“Miss Piccolo.” She’s squished in next to me, her thigh flush against mine, and she nudges me with her knee.
I open my eyes. “That is Sergeant Javier Perez. He is our lead researcher, developing technology for the Order.” She gestures to the woman next to him.
“Master Sergeant Alisa Perez. Master Sergeant Perez is also a doctor. The pilot is Specialist Peter Hollis. He’s…
a pilot.” A cheery man gives me a short wave from the driver’s seat. “Soldiers, this is Miss—”
“Lucy, please.” This guise of formality is grating on my nerves.
“Nice to meet you, Lucy,” the woman says. “You can call us Alisa and Javier. No need for ranks.”
“Thanks, I would feel left out otherwise.” Alisa chuckles politely, but Javier’s cold stare remains wary of me. “What do the ranks mean?”
“They’re loosely based off old US army ranks,” Javier says. He looks like someone carved him out of brittle wood, and if he smiled it might crack his face into pieces. “The Order simplified them years back. I’m a sergeant, my wife’s a master sergeant.”
“I outrank him.” Alisa grins with obvious glee.
Javier smirks. “Yes. We all outrank Petey up there.”
“Yet I hold your lives in my hands,” Peter says through the mic. “And Eos outranks everyone.”
I arch an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
Javier shifts in his seat. “That’s why none of us questioned why Piccolo’s daughter is in this copter with us.”
“Oh, pipe down, Javier.” Alisa slaps his knee in admonishment. “Eos knows what she’s doing.”
He rolls his tired, gray eyes. “Bet you Theia isn’t okay with it. Her leverage strolling back into her city? She ain’t gonna want that.”
I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe she had a change of heart and wants to let me go home.”
Javier snickers. “Right. Over her dead body.”
“What makes you think you know what Theia wants?” Taylor sits up primly. “Miss Piccolo is not leverage. She is to be treated as one of us.”
While I appreciate Taylor taking up my side—even if it’s solely to prove a point—I don’t like being spoken for. “Lady Leather said I had to be under this one’s constant watch.” I jerk a thumb toward Taylor. “And we must do as she says, lest she haul out a riding crop.”
Alisa’s eyes light up as Taylor jabs me in the side. “Lady Leather? Are you talking about Theia?” I nod my head and Alisa bursts into high, lilting laughter. “That’s an appropriate nickname, don’t you think, Jav?”
The cantankerous man snorts. “Don’t let her catch you calling her that.”
“Why not?”
“Though she does wear a startling amount of leather, I imagine it unwise to ridicule her appearance,” Alisa says.
Javier grumbles. “She ought to lighten up.”
“You should understand, Perez. You don’t like it when we point out your rapidly receding hairline,” Taylor says.
“Sure, now that we got company, the stoic finally makes a joke.” With everyone laughing at his expense, Javier joins in and chuckles. “I’m gonna tell on you,” he singsongs.
“Not if I drop you out of the copter first,” Taylor replies. “Peter won’t tell on me, will you, Peter?”
Peter turns and beams at us. “Never, Eos. Sorry, Jav, she’s the boss.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Alisa pats Javier on the knee and he gives her a warm smile. “All of them are.”
The next hour and a half are less awkward than the first. The Order members chat amongst themselves about the Lightbringers, sharing intelligence about the automatons.
The concept of these deadly machines doesn’t faze them.
They are committed to Taylor, Lightbringers or not.
It’s a show of loyalty mundane to them, but extraordinary to me.
I can’t see anyone doing the same for Papa. Or for me.
Gazing out of the window, city lights blink their white eyes at us and my gut constricts. Somewhere down there is my home. My family. My room.
Not long after we pass over the West Side Levees, our helicopter lands in an abandoned park, way uptown near the Katherine Piccolo Bridge. One by one, we hop out of the copter and scamper away from its ascent.
“Five hours,” Alisa says. “The helicopter will return to this exact location. It will rest for three minutes before leaving, with or without us.”
Everyone nods, so I do too. Yes, I understand what is happening. I’m not totally out of my element. She defers to Taylor, who steps forward and transforms into Eos.