Chapter 23
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
ARC
The CSS helicopter drops us off at Drift’s and Kilo drags Riann out with us.
“I’m not supposed to be here for these.” His protesting is pointless, the helicopter already left.
“You gonna walk home?” Kilo takes him by the back of the neck like a kid and steers him toward the door.
I get there first.
It’s too loud inside.
If they’re not talking they’re thinking, and I have to stop and take a deep breath.
Kilo and Riann go straight to Drift.
I look for my mates.
For a moment, I don’t think they’re here yet… but I feel them, I feel apprehension. And then, I see Risk.
He doesn’t look at me.
Trench gets in my way when I try to go to them. “What did you find out?”
“Drift’ll get to that.”
Jessica steps in my way this time. “Where’s Chrys?”
The question makes me go terribly still. “What do you mean?”
“They said she was with you.”
“They told you I took her with me to Calisan?”
I look up. Shock meets my eyes. She loves you. She wanted me to tell you that.
I don’t feel myself move. One minute, my body goes numb. The next, Shock is on his back, and my hands are around his throat.
He grabs my wrists, but he doesn’t actually fight me. I want to strangle him harder for that.
“Where is she?” I shake him as others try to pull me off of him.
We don’t know.
Risk’s thought pierces through the others’ panic, and I let go.
Everyone pulling at me falls backward as Risk helps Shock up.
“She had to go with him, but we will get her back.”
“Had to go with who?” Trench helps me up but I don’t look at him.
His thoughts are genuine concern with a small warning.
Shock and Risk look at each other and the name they think… “Who the fuck is Atker?”
“Wait.” Riann draws everyone’s attention. “He supplies your tech and you don’t know who he is?”
The room goes silent, questions fluttering in their thoughts, and Risk…
“He’s dead. I killed him.” I take a step forward again and Trench grabs my shoulder.
This conversation is only half out loud, he reminds me in his thoughts, and I level a scathing look toward him.
“Excuse me if I don’t fucking care who knows right now.” And then, because I really cannot deal with him right now, I whip around to Kilo. “What the fuck makes you think this is the time for popcorn.”
He freezes, looking at everyone, and then back to me. “How did you know I was here?” He clutches the bag closer.
“I always know when you’re here.”
He looks ill, and I don’t bother to make him feel better.
I turn back to Shock and Risk who are waiting patiently, and I have to clench my fists so I don’t lunge for either again. “He cannot be the Maker. If he was alive and in the Zone, I would have found him by now.”
“I don’t know how, but I do know that the man everyone else calls Atker is the Maker.”
“And you left our bondmate for him to take?”
“He won’t kill her.” Risk is absolute.
“I wasn’t worried about that. We all know how good he’s gotten at not killing his experiments if he doesn’t want to.”
Hazard flinches, and Core holds Cindy closer.
“Oh my god, she’s pregnant,” Jess says, suddenly.
She sorts through dates and times and divides by thirty-five and somehow, that means Chrys is pregnant.
Shock catches me a moment before my knees buckle and Risk grabs me by the back of his neck and holds me still, forehead pressed to mine. “You trust us. You trust her. It had to be this way.”
Shock promises, “I swear to you, we get her back.” Repeats it endlessly in his thoughts.
“Oh…” Jess says, staring wide eyed at Shock. “You see the future.”
“What?” Hazard chokes on his coffee. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Arc hears thoughts, Shock sees the future, Risk… I don’t know what he does, and my sister is in the hands of a madman.” Jess snaps her fingers thrice. “Keep up.”
“He’s not a madman.” Kimba sorts through the data we brought back with Andrea, seemingly disinterested in the rest of us. “He’s brilliant and cruel. It’s a shitty combination, but he’s not mad.”
She looks up at Drift. “You can tell Breaker, Ward, and Fault their outposts don’t have any marked hidden rooms. I’ve already sent Surge, Echo and Ion their floor plans.”
Shock and Risk let me stand so I can go to the overlaid map. “I’ve been looking at the wrong side of the Zone this whole time?”
“That’s why you do laps?” Richter interjects. “Why didn’t you ask for help?”
“Because he was dead and none of you needed to join me in my paranoia.”
“Apparently we did.” Drift nods at the others. “It seems like this outpost is safe. Bondmates and weeuns should stay here until we’ve cleared these labs.”
I’m already out the door and I know Risk and Shock are right behind me.
When I get in the driver’s seat, reversing out of the garage as Shock closes the car and the others get to their vehicles, I say, “At least if you’re wrong, I won’t have to kill you.” We’ll all be dead.
CHRYS
The room is cold, a cave by any other measure. Carved from the same kind of rock as the outpost, but with none of the finesse or consideration for life’s comforts. It feels like an afterthought.
I half expect him to throw me to the floor, but he doesn’t. He puts me in a cage built into a carved-out piece of the wall, and I grip the bars when he locks me in.
The Maker doesn’t say a word, moving around the space as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. Except that he glances at me every few seconds, suspiciously. He expected me to fight him, to kick and scream…
Maybe my quiet watchfulness actually scares him.
He doesn’t plan on letting me leave alive. I can’t imagine true crime podcasts would fail me on this planet either…. If he was going to let me go, he wouldn’t have let me see where we were going.
The ride here was a sharp, windswept flight across the open snow between the outer and inner calderas.
His helicopter looked like just another of the many that have landed to start hauling out the crash site.
I suppose I should be grateful that we flew instead of being forced to endure the sharp and biting wind on the back of a bike instead.
The entrance to his lair was a crack in the side of a glacier beneath the ruins of an outpost that looks like it was firebombed. Where Arc thought he’d killed the Maker.
We are on the inside of the caldera, and I know what that place was, what it used to be a part of. Arc had every reason to search for him.
The cage he’s placed me in is furnished… with oddly nice furniture.
There’s a bed that doesn’t resemble a cot and a chair that actually has cushions. I expected something different from a slapdash prison cell…
It’s not great, by any means, but I’m not afraid to sit down.
There are dozens of cavrinskh wandering outside my cell. None of them seem hostile, more than half of them are asleep between random pieces of equipment I don’t like the look of.
One walks up to Atker as he stands at a console, and he pets it absentmindedly as he reads out data and taps things into the screen.
It’s too quiet.
“Are you going to tell me your diabolical plan? Or what?” I ask.
He turns back to me, eyes narrowed. “Why would I do that?”
“When I decided to come with you, it was kind of expected. I am, as you say, a captive audience.” Literally.
“You decided?” He laughs and the sound makes my skin crawl. “Nothing that has happened to you since you were taken from Earth was your choice.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the one who picked out these gloves.” I look at them and wiggle my striped fingers. “You don’t seem like a pink and yellow kinda guy.”
He sighs the way my high school teachers used to, and I know he plans to ignore me.
“How are you alive right now?” I lean on a crossbar, trying to figure out what he’s doing. “I had it on pretty good authority that you were dead.”
“That’s what they needed to think.”
“So… they escaped and you just changed your focus, until now? That doesn’t make any sense.”
He laughs… again, like most adults in my Earth life, dismissive and annoyed.
“Do you really think they escaped me? What is the point of an experiment if you never actualize it? They are still my puppets. You may not be able to see the strings, but they are there and they are just as much under my control as they ever were when they were in those cages.”
He’s so sure of himself, but it’s my turn to sigh and speak to him like a child. “You’re wrong.”
It makes him hesitate before he dismisses me. “Believe that if it gives you comfort.”
“There’s very little in this place that would give me comfort, but thanks.”
He ignores that, so I ask, “Why have me kidnapped and then crash the ship I was on?”
“Forgive me if I don’t feel like explaining decades of work to you.”
I ignore the implied “shut up” in that comment.
“Okay, so you didn’t want the people you hired to be around to answer questions…
Which is why you had them put me in an escape pod, pretending it was a holding cell and popped me out remotely when you could bet I’d be found by Arc.
And then you had my medications changed…
but I didn’t bond with Shock like you planned. ”
His laugh is a breathy replacement for calling me an idiot.
Despite what he’s said, he couldn’t have known which of them would take me to town… “It didn’t matter which one of them bonded with me, did it?”
“It didn’t matter which one of them bonded to you first.” He might not want to tell me his plans, but I don’t think he can help himself when it comes to correcting me.
“So you’re a gambler.”
“I am an architect.”
That makes me snort. “Pretty sure you’re actually a villain.”
The way he looks at me… he might kill me if he didn’t need me. “Violent progress requires violent methods.”
“A villain who hasn’t changed his tag line in decades. Got it. At least you’re consistent in that.” Nothing else feels like he’s got a handle on reality.
“You are far too flippant for someone I could kill without the slightest remorse.”