24. Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
T orres
Luke’s rooms are big enough that five grown men can spend an entire morning in them without anybody admitting that’s what we’re doing.
I’ve been here since breakfast. So has Declan. Soren showed up before seven and hasn’t left. Renzo’s been in and out twice.
At some point I found a basket of clean laundry beside Luke’s bedroom door, and now I’m sitting on the floor folding his T-shirts because apparently this is what my life has become.
“You own too much black,” I tell him.
Luke doesn’t look up. He’s on the couch with his boot off, working his ankle in circles because he rolled it sparring on Tuesday and won’t go to the infirmary about it.
Declan’s at the table with a book he hasn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes.
Soren’s at the window.
He’s been there since Jessica’s cars left at seven.
It’s eight thirty on a Thursday and the whole block is suspended, so there’s nothing for any of us to do until somebody thinks of something.
Then her fear comes down the line and my chest locks up.
Pain hits a second later, left side, high, and my arm goes hot.
I look down. My arm is fine. Luke’s shirt is still in my hand.
“Jessica?” Luke’s on his feet.
“Yeah.”
Soren’s already moving. He grabs his jacket from the back of the chair and heads for the door.
Declan’s up. “What?”
“She’s in trouble. Right now.”
Soren pulls his jacket on. “Where?”
I reach for her. Her fear fills the whole thing.
“East. A long way.”
Luke’s shoving his foot into the boot on the bad ankle. “The archive road. They left before seven.”
Soren gets the door open. “How far out?”
“Ninety minutes. More, the way they routed it.”
Renzo’s coming up the corridor eating when he sees us.
“What happened?”
“Jessica,” Declan says.
That’s all it takes.
Renzo drops the food and comes with us.
We hit the front steps moving fast.
The motor pool is a shed with a padlock and a sign-out sheet and a man named Petrus who doesn't come in until nine. Declan sprints for security. Sophia's halfway across the courtyard from the other direction because Renzo called her. Luke's got his phone at his ear and is getting nothing back.
I stand on the gravel and she's still fighting. I can feel her fighting. Every second I'm on this step is a second of that.
Ander comes around the corner of the hall at a flat run. He's been out there since eight — he's been out there most mornings since the yard, and nobody has ever asked him about it and nobody's going to now.
"Where is she?"
"Taken," Soren says.
Jon comes out of the administration door behind Declan with his keys already out.
"Let’s take my car."
The lights flash on something black at the end of the staff row.
I stop.
"Holy shit."
Luke looks at me. "What?"
"Do you know what that is?"
"It's a car."
"That's a Cayenne Turbo GT."
Jon opens the driver's door. "Get in."
I get in.
Declan and Renzo don't. Jon points at them on the way past — "Voss, then the gate, tell them everything" — and Renzo says "Sir," and Sophia waves with tears in her eyes.
Jon goes down the drive and out the gate, and at the top of the north road he takes the bend without lifting off, and Ander grabs the handle above the door.
"Professor."
"I'm aware."
Nobody says anything for a long time.
What I get off her is mostly anger. I'll take anger. Anger means she's still up. Twice it's pain instead, sharp enough that I check my own body for it, and both times there's nothing there.
Soren rides with his eyes shut.
"She's still fighting," he says once.
"Good," Jon mutters.
Then, past the second bridge, it eases, she’s stopped fighting.
All morning she's been getting closer, because we've been driving straight at her.
Then she starts getting farther away.
"Fuck."
Luke turns his head.
"She's moving away from us.”
Ander leans forward between the seats. "Is she alive?"
"Yes."
I reach again. She's faint and getting fainter. But she's there.
Jon hasn't asked me one question since we got in this car. Luke keeps asking. Soren keeps asking. Jon just drives.
"She's alive," I say, to the windshield.
He doesn't answer. His grip shifts on the wheel, and the car goes faster.
There are cones on the road.
Tape along the shoulder, a woman in a coat standing in the middle of it with a clipboard, and further up a line of people walking slowly with their heads down.
Jon stops the car sideways across the drive and I'm out of it before it's finished moving.
"JESSICA!"
Somebody says something to me and I go past them. Nobody tries very hard to stop me.
The work-zone sign is still standing at the bend, folding and metal, pointing traffic left. Nobody's moved it.
Then the cars.
The lead one's windshield is gone — not cracked, gone, lying in white gravel all over the seats. There's blood on the door of the second car and a long smear on the road going down into the gap between the car and the ditch, where somebody was dragged.
There's a woman on a stretcher at the roadside with two paramedics working on her and an IV up. Gray face. Eyes open.
Cassel.
"She's been shot twice," one of them says, without looking up. "Somebody pulled her into cover."
Past the cars there's a shape under a sheet, and I make myself look at it, because it’s one of her security.
Two more from the lead car are sitting on the shoulder with emergency blankets around them, and one of them looks up at me.
The first van's on its side in the ditch. There's a boot sticking out from under the back corner with a marker set beside it, and nobody's working on him. Another man fifteen feet on, face down in the water.
The ground's torn up going right, so I go right, up into the beeches. There's a man at the base of a trunk with the bark stripped off above him at head height, and another one thirty feet away in the leaf litter who isn't getting up.
I stand in the trees with my hands shaking.
"JESS."
Back onto the road.
The second van's upright. There's a man beside the front wheel, face down, a launcher a yard from his hand.
The net's lying in the road in two pieces, torn at the corner, and there's a groove in the gravel about thirty feet long with a man's heel marks in it.
My stomach turns over.
Soren's reading the road behind me. Ander's gone straight up it, and it's Ander who stops at the top.
"Torres."
A third of a mile up, where the drive comes out of the trees and you can see the barrier and the hut, there's a field entrance on the left. Mud pulled out onto the road. Two sets of tire tracks, wide ones, and the grass inside the gateway flattened in two long strips.
Ander crouches and puts his hand flat in one of them.
"Two vehicles. Heavy."
Then he turns toward the left-hand side of the road, where there's a ditch and then a bank and then a field. The grass in the bottom of the ditch is flat, and there are gouges up the far bank, deep ones, where something very heavy came up it fast.
I go over.
Forty-odd yards out, in wet grass up past my knees, the ground is torn open in a long slide with black earth showing under it, ending in a churned patch about the size of a car. Thirty feet on there's a second one, shorter, and then the field is just field.
I put my hands on my knees for a second.
There's a green tarp bundled off to one side, and three aluminum poles lying in the grass with wire loops on the ends. One of them has blood on the shaft.
Nearby a black plastic case lies open with a foam insert in it. Six recesses, two of them still holding darts.
I go back down to the road because Luke's calling my name.
They've brought Freya in a vehicle. She's in the second car with the door open, a blanket around her and a dressing above her eye.
She opens her eyes.
"Took your time."
Luke's already down in front of her. "Where's Jessica?"
"Gone." She swallows. "She made me run. She went the other way and she made them all follow her." She gets a breath. "She got me out."
Jon crouches and turns her head toward the light with two fingers under her chin and looks at the dressing, and says something to her I don't hear, and stays there.
The man from the gate hut is standing a few feet away with his hands hanging.
"Freya got to me," he says. "All the way to the barrier." He looks down the road. "So I got her through the gate and up to the building — it's a couple hundred yards inside and I called for reinforcements."
"How long were they here?"
"Six minutes."
"And how long before anybody got back down?"
"Nine."
I go back over the ditch because I have to move. I can't stand there while Freya tells us Jessica sent everyone after herself.
So I walk.
I keep going down the ditch, farther than any of the searchers have come.
He's twenty yards past the second slide, on his back. The grass out here is high enough that from the road he's just more grass.
I almost walk past him.
Then his chest moves.
“Jon!”
I'm down beside him before I know I'm moving.
His right hand is wrong and one of those poles is lying a couple of feet away with blood on it. His shirt's dark all down one side. His breaths are shallow and wet, but he's fucking breathing.
Jon reaches us and drops down on his other side.
I grab the front of the man's shirt.
“Where is she?”
His eyes move toward me.
“Where are they taking her?”
His mouth moves and nothing comes out.
“Come on. Where?”
He tries again.
“Home.”
“Where?”
Nothing.
“Fuck. Where?”
Jon reaches for his neck.
I know before he looks at me.
He's dead.
Jessica was taken. Her mates have one clue: Home. Read the thrilling conclusion, Legacy Ascended , Book 3 in the Luftis Academy series.