Chapter 5 #3
Shouts and confusion followed. Our people fired more flares in rapid succession, most of them reaching the interior of the ship.
The smoke from the flares, combined with the gas, made it all the more difficult to see, but I could hear the ramp creaking and beginning to close.
The nine nomads who had entered the storage room raced back out.
“Take them out!” a rough male voice boomed from above, crackling through some kind of speaker.
My blood froze as the nomads on the platform reached for their weapons. I wasn’t even sure if our men had noticed they had come back out yet—the smog was getting so thick in the center of the clearing, and their attention still seemed to be on shooting flares up at the aircraft.
My fingers were opening my matchbox and striking a flame before I could think. I yanked the first flare from my backpack, positioned it, and then scorched the fuse.
The flare burst into life, launching off and barreling toward its target with a precision that surprised me.
Sparks erupted as it hit the platform. The nomads cried out, falling to the floor and covering their heads.
It didn’t look like the flare had seriously injured anyone, but the shock gave me the delay I needed.
“Get to cover!” I bellowed at our men.
My father’s visor locked on me through the haze. I felt a stab of guilt at the sheer horror in his voice when he yelled my name.
“We need to get to cover, too!” Jessie hissed. She grabbed my hand and jerked me down.
The nomads climbed back to their feet. One of them had spotted us. He raised his gun and fired. A red-tipped dart shot out, missing the side of my head by inches and lodging into the branch behind me. Apparently, their bullets were different from ours.
Jessie yanked me backward. We were about to retreat into the storage tree house behind us when my ears picked up on a familiar voice, drifting through the trees from our left. It was slightly muffled, but still distinguishable.
“Tani! Tani!”
My mother. She had left Bea to come looking for me.
“No!” I screamed across the treetops. “Mom, stay away!”
ZAP.
Another dart hit our tree. Jessie tugged at me harder, hauling me through the door and closing it behind us, just as a third projectile thudded against the wood.
I raced across the sacks of rice to the staircase in the corner of the room and scaled it, bursting out onto the rooftop. Here, I had more cover from our immediate attackers. It was by no means safe, but I had to somehow warn my mother.
I moved to the edge of the roof and looked out through the branches. It was too late. She had already mounted the last zip line. She hurtled toward our platform at full speed. A mask covered her head and three flares were tucked into her harness.
The nomad who had been firing at us noticed her too. He turned his gun on her.
“Mom, watch—!”
Her cry interrupted me as a dart—or bullet?
—lodged in her thigh. Her body went limp from the pain and she struggled to maintain her balance on the line.
The harness would hold her as long as she kept upright, but these things weren’t made for acrobatics.
If she didn’t catch her balance she would flip, and. ..
Another gun sounded, a deeper, more guttural noise than that made by the nomads’ guns.
I turned to see the man who had shot my mother fall to the floor, writhing and clutching his hip.
My father landed on the platform of our tree, then launched off again, whizzing toward my mother, who was dangerously close to tipping over.
He reached her just in time, grabbing her waist and steadying her against him.
The atmosphere was now a cacophony of noise, guns firing and flares sizzling, so chaotic that I didn’t even know which side was winning at this point.
All I knew was that the nomads on the platform had spread out to deal with our men, and nobody had yet noticed one of their own go down—nor, thankfully, my parents, dangling exposed on the line.
Pushing past Jessie, I raced back down the staircase and through the room, desperate to help my parents.
My father’s momentum had stalled my mother’s, which meant they were currently static.
Without my assistance, it would be difficult for them to gather enough momentum to get back to the safety of either platform.
Before I reached the front door, I heard their shouts. The desperation in their tones sent chills down my spine. I hauled the door open and gazed out.
Nothing was left in the space where my parents had been dangling a moment before. The whole zip line had been severed.
And the man I’d thought my father had disabled was sitting upright, leaning heavily against a wooden post. He held a large, barrel-shaped weapon with a smoking tip in one hand.
I pressed myself against my platform’s barrier, gazing down in horror, and then exhaled when I saw my parents lying on a mesh of branches about twenty feet down.
Their fall had been stalled, though their limbs were sprawled out at terrible angles and they were groaning in pain.
I didn’t want to contemplate how many bones they might have broken—and more worryingly, the fact that they had lost their masks during the fall.
“Tani, duck!” Jessie cried out from behind me.
I had been standing out in the open for too long.
A projectile flew at me from somewhere to my right.
This time, I was too slow to miss it. It hit the hard frame of my mask, creating a deafening echo in my ears.
While it didn’t reach my skull, the old piece of equipment cracked down one side, instantly letting a spurt of gas into my lungs.
I gagged and doubled over, clutching my stomach as a familiar nausea rolled through me.
Jessie clutched my shoulders, dragging me back toward the door as another projectile flew our way—this one sent by the injured man.
As we dodged it, I looked up to see his eyes glinting with pain and anger behind his mask—a look that told me he wanted nothing more than to end us.
My heart clenched in fear for my parents, lying helpless, and maskless, beneath us. I didn’t know how long any of us could survive without masks when the gas was this concentrated. Worse, if that guy looked down and realized they were still alive…
A bullet exploded from ten feet to our left. The injured nomad crumpled and his blood splattered the walls of the building. The sight combined with the gas invading my lungs overwhelmed me. It was all I could do to hold in the contents of my stomach as I retched.
I had seen dead bodies before, but I had never witnessed a person die—and definitely not so brutally.
I had barely begun to process the feeling when three heavy thuds sounded on our platform. I turned to see Jessie’s father along with two other men, Peter and Samuel, rushing toward us. Judging by the morbid look in Jessie’s father’s eyes, he had fired the deadly shot.
He grabbed Jessie and me by the arms, tugging us back toward the line he had come from—the only line that remained connected to this platform.
“We’ve got to retreat,” he growled.
“No, Ethan!” I gasped, pulling my arm away. “My parents! They’re down there!”
A deep sadness shrouded his amber eyes, the harsh lines of his mouth softening. “I know, Tani, I saw. But we’ll get shot before any of us makes it down there. We’re losing this fight, badly, and we’re running out of ammunition. We have to retreat, now, or we’ll all die.”
Die. The word hit me like a sledgehammer. Die. No. My parents were not going to die.
Ethan renewed his grip on me. I fought against him, but I was becoming weaker by the second thanks to my leaking mask. When the two other men grabbed me, I could barely struggle.
“No! We can’t leave my parents down there!” I rasped, tears prickling my already stinging eyes. He was right—I didn’t know how we could reach them all the way down there, or how we would get them back up safely—but we couldn’t just leave them there to die!
“I’m sorry, Tani,” Ethan said hoarsely as he bundled Jessie onto the line. “I promised your father I would look after you. Your uncle may try to help them, but we can’t.”
He reached out a hand, gesturing for me to join Jessie on the line, but I held back, unable to move, unable to breathe.
That wasn’t good enough. The nausea was making me feel close to passing out, but I gritted my teeth and held on.
My parents still needed me. I couldn’t rely on my uncle; he was probably caught up in the fight. I didn’t even know where he was.
I turned around, needing to get back to the edge so I could figure out how to reach them. Peter and Samuel gripped me firmly and forced me toward the line.
“No!” I screamed, clawing to get away.
And then another sound pierced the air, drowning out everything else. The pain in my head, the projectiles ricocheting around the clearing, even the humming of the aircraft’s engine.
It was loud and foreign, and yet now familiar—I’d heard something like it barely an hour ago. It was the sound of another aircraft, except this was even noisier, rumbling through the sky like the beginnings of a storm.
Another aircraft roaring toward us.
My first instinct was to assume that the nomads had called for backup. But before that crippling fear could overtake me, everyone around me began to stall as they too noticed the noise—even the nomads themselves. The firing all but halted. Everyone lifted their gazes to the sky.