It took her awhile to position her wings comfortably enough around her to sit upright. Her neck was cramping, and she rubbed it with her hand. Pulling it away, she frowned as she noticed fresh blood on her fingers.
Jax had been busy while she’d been out. At least the tracer was one less thing to worry about. “Thanks,” she said to the man at her left.
His brows furrowed. “For what?”
“For cutting out the tracer.”
“Oh. No problem.”
“It’s good to no longer feel like I’m being watched and tracked everywhere I go,” she said before wincing, tentatively touching her throbbing temple. Laze had always had an impressive right hook. She’d participated in hand-to-hand combat before, many of those times with her brother. The swelling would be down within the day, but it would take at least a week for the bruising to fade. She rolled her neck from shoulder to shoulder, her neck cracking with each motion.
Jax looked her direction and winced. “Christ, that’s a shiner,” he blurted out.
Since she could hardly see out of her eye, she could only imagine what she looked like. Still, she gave him a once-over. “Not looking so great yourself,” she said, but that was a lie. Even covered with soot and wearing a torn shirt, he looked sexier than ever. She could only imagine how devastating he’d look with powerful, marked wings.
He stammered in a rough mumble. “I didn’t mean — ”
“I know. I’m just playing with you.”
She’d already discovered that his lips were as delicious as she’d envisioned. She’d kissed him without thinking, assuming she was about to die, charging against insurmountable odds with her brother. Then she frowned, a sudden tension creeping through her body. “Where’s Laze?”
Jax’s lips tightened.
“Where’s my brother, Jax.” An order, not a question.
The steering wheel creaked as he clenched his hands around it. He replied quietly after a long pause. “He’s not coming.”
“That’s impossible. He — he … ” She sat for a moment, unable to focus. “What happened?” she whispered.
“He bought us time to get away.”
“No.” She shook her head.
Ta deiti.
“He wouldn’t do anything that stupid.”
“You are the only thing he had left worth fighting for.”
“That’s not true,” she said as a surge of numbness spiked with intense emotions took control. She couldn’t stop the tears. They just came. “I should’ve been there with him. He shouldn’t have had to die alone.”
Jax’s hand squeezed her knee. The movement was awkward, clumsy. And meant all the more for it. First her hands, then her entire body, shook. Talla sobbed, clutching the dashboard for support. The tears burned her swollen eye. She liked the pain. It made Laze feel
real
. He was her older brother. He’d taken care of her since she could walk. He was brilliant and strong and good. He couldn’t be dead. He
couldn’t.
She wept, long after her thoughts were no longer focused, long after she could rationalize Laze’s actions. She wept for Laze and Sarah and Jacen and all the others lost to senseless violence at the Etzee this morning. She just couldn’t stop the tears. Whenever she’d cried before, Laze would be there. But he wasn’t there now, so she kept on crying.
She let her tears end on their own accord. Leaning back in the seat, she stared in numbness at trees flashing by as the Jeep sped down the road. She let her wings spread just enough to catch the cool breeze, though the fresh air did little to soothe her soul.
Still feeling outside herself, she vacantly noticed that the sun had not yet reached its highest point, which meant that they couldn’t have been on the road more than an hour, two at most. The attack, Laze … everything felt like an eternity ago. With each minute, she reclaimed a bit of herself again. Sensations returned to her skin. The clouds lumbering in her mind dissipated, replaced by a newfound sense of duty.
Laze had given up everything for her to survive. She’d never let him down before, and she wasn’t about to start now.
The Jeep slowed, and Jax turned off the road into a driveway overgrown with weeds. He parked behind the cover of several shrubs and trees and cut the engine. He reached behind him and pulled out a folded paper and bottle of water. He handed the bottle to her. The water was warm; it had a slight plastic taste to it, but it was refreshing. Her throat felt raw, mostly from smoke inhalation, but some from her earlier sobbing. After another drink, she passed it back to Jax, who took a long swig. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and handed the bottle back to her.
He unfolded the paper and started scanning the green layout. “We should be safe here for an hour or two until we figure out our next step.”
“Is that a map?” she asked, her mouth opening.
“Yeah, I need to get a fix on our location. I had to ditch my phone so they couldn’t track it,” he replied without looking up.
“But it’s
paper.
”
“And your point?”
“It doesn’t have GPS. It doesn’t show where you are or where you’re going. What good does it do?”
He cocked his head and watched her for a moment. A smirk curled his lips. “You don’t always need technology.” Then he pulled out a small compass and laid the map over the emergency brake that separated them. “Here. I’ll show you.”
Talla should have noticed its approach. She was off-balance, distracted, until the sound wouldn’t be denied. Two pairs of eyes widened at each other when they recognized the unmistakable small engine sound above them at the same time. Without even looking up, Jax and Talla shot from the Jeep in opposite directions, the instant the
pzoosh
of a small shell firing erupted from the drone overhead.
The shell whistled through the air and slammed into the engine of the Jeep. Talla ducked behind a tree, covering her head with her arms and wings. An explosion shook the ground and sent a wave of hot wind past her, and she braced herself with a hand. A storm of leaves tumbled down upon her back.
Coming to her feet, her ears ringing, she chanced a quick look at the drone. It now hovered just above the tree line, scanning the ground. A narrow red laser-line crossed over the wreckage and spanned a good ten feet on either side. After a second scan, the tiny camera disappeared with a
whir
inside the drone. Another, larger slot opened and something shot out and into the ground several feet from the wreckage.
The drone moved off, and Jax jumped out. “Talla!”
She was already running toward him. “I’m okay. You?”
He nodded, and then glowered at the object the drone left behind. It reminded her of a chaos-charge connected to several arrows. The top round portion had several lights and indentations. It was attached to metal sticks stabilizing it above the ground. “What is it?” she asked.
“A tracer. They’ll send a cleanup team here.”
She pulled out her shiv. He held out a hand to stop her from approaching it. “No. If the tracer goes off-line, they’ll know we’re alive and send in a team right away. Either way, they’re coming. No need to tip them off any sooner.”
“
Fyet
,” she sighed, looking around. But, while the vehicle was clearly out of commission, the blast had been contained. The engine area was gone and the seats were charcoaled, but the back end remained relatively intact. The cleanup crew would quickly notice the lack of bodies. “You don’t happen to have any explosives on hand to obliterate the Jeep and any proof — or lack of proof — so they’ll assume we’re dead?”
He looked down and held out his arms, like he was saying,
does it look like I’m carrying anything?
“How much time do you think we have?” she asked.
“A couple hours, maybe more, depending on how things are going at the Etzee. The Ozarks cover a good chunk of land. It will help us evade troops longer. That they’re using drones right now instead of helicopters with troops for tracking runaways is a good sign. I’m betting on the fact that the Etzee is still keeping their hands full.”
“I hope we’re not the only ones that got away,” she said quietly, the sense of loss all too fresh.
Jax stood before her. “If there was anyone nearby, I would’ve taken them with us. You know that, right?”
His expression was intense yet sympathetic at the same time, as though he was looking to her for forgiveness. Everything about that man was a dichotomy. Talla craved to discover the man hidden under the masks. “Yes,” she whispered, a small smile pulling on her face. “I know that.”
Something in her response or her expression caused him to frown and he stepped away. He always did that. It was as though he couldn’t risk someone seeing inside him, and he’d close himself up tighter in response. “Did Roden say anything about another rendezvous point?”
Talla gave a quick shake of her head, feeling a pinch of disappointment at Jax’s unerring control of emotion. “The
Striga
is the rendezvous point. Everyone is supposed to find a way to get to it.”
“That doesn’t sound like a walk in a park. It’ll be completely surrounded by the time it lands.”
“True,” she said. “But once we get to it, we’ll be safe. Roden did say that if we can’t get to the
Striga
, his Earthside base is the backup plan, but that’s over a thousand miles from here, and without my wrist-com I don’t have the exact coordinates. All I know is it’s in the northwest corner of the United States. Do you think you could get us there?”
Jax grunted. “So the core ship it is. And we’ll have to hoof it from here.” He turned back to the wreckage. “They must have put a tracer on the Jeep.” His fists clenched. “Son of a bitch. I should’ve thought of that.”
“You’d have no way to know that they’d be tracking their own people,” Talla said. “Good thing it was on the Jeep and not on you, or else we’d be dead right now.”
The tracer had to be the drone’s target. Its targeting system hadn’t even tried to scan for heat signatures. The first bit of luck they’d had all day.
Holding a hand out to protect his eyes from the heat, Jax stood by the cargo compartment, reached to unbuckle the ammo boxes, and yanked his hand back. With a muttered curse, he pulled off his shirt, wrapped it around his hand, and this time unstrapped the two metal cases.
Each case dropped onto the ground with a
thud
.
He bent over, flinging his dog tags around his neck to be out of his way. Aside from a burn on his left shoulder that he’d gotten back at the Etzee, his skin was smooth and accentuated acres of tight muscles. His cargo pants were slung low across his hips. For the first time in her life, she looked at a man’s wingless back and found it even sexier than a Draeken back.
She watched Jax as he poured out the contents of one box and then moved to the other. The contents snagged her attention. Talla came down to her knees to sift through the items. A small first aid kit, a bottle of water, a protein bar, an emergency blanket, and a large Swiss Army tool. “Impressive,” she said.
“I go off-roading on the weekends. I like to keep a few bare essentials in an overnight kit just in case.” From the other box, he pulled out another knife and a hand gun in a small black holster.
She gave a low whistle. “That’s quite the overnight kit.”
He shrugged, then turned and gave her a boyish grin. “I was an Army brat as many years as I’ve been in the Army.” He frowned. “
Was
in the Army, I mean.” His last words were quiet.
She watched him for a moment. “Your affiliation doesn’t make you any less heroic. Warning everyone, you did it to save more than my people or the Sephians. You did it to save yours.”
He stood abruptly and pulled on his shirt. A flash of frustration slipped through Talla. He fastened the holster around his chest and checked the M9. He picked up the knife, also in a sheath, and tossed it to Talla. “This tanto will work a hell of a lot better than the baby shiv you have.”
“Thanks,” she said as she tied the sheathed blade to her thigh. It was military-issue, with a solid six-inch blade and would be far more useful than the short tape-wrapped metal in her pocket, even though she kept that as well.
Jax and Talla stuffed their pockets with the remaining gear. “We better get going,” he said. “We should find somewhere to hide before nightfall.”
Talla would’ve volunteered to fly over the area to scout for caves and holes, but the risk of being seen by any human was too great. They’d have to do this the old-fashioned way. She grabbed a medium-sized branch off the ground. The wood was brittle and light and relatively straight and made a good walking stick. “I’m ready,” she said.
He gave her the once-over and turned, heading down the embankment and up the other side. Talla kept pace as they moved deeper into the forest. They would have to keep moving to stay ahead of the humans. There would be little time for rest. She had been on the lam before. It was how they ended up on Earth. Running wasn’t fun, but she was confident they could avoid their pursuers if they stayed smart.
Soon, however, their pursuers wouldn’t be the greatest risk to their survival. There was no way to hide her wings. They couldn’t blend into any populated area. Worse, they only had enough water to get them through one day. How long could they survive in this alien environment?
The birds chirped and flew around as though it was just another day, as though Jax and Talla weren’t running for their lives. He’d been on the other end of the chase plenty of times. Hell, only a couple years back, he had hunted Sephians through woods much like these. Being on the flip side of the coin wasn’t much fun.
There were few clouds to block the afternoon heat. The tall trees, with their thin needles, did little to buffer the sun’s harsh rays.
His stomach growled. They’d finished the protein bar two hours earlier, and there were only a couple drinks of water left in the bottle. They’d have to find a house to restock before nightfall or else risk weakening. They simply didn’t have the luxury of time to hunt or purify water while on the lam. They were quickly becoming getting desperate.
Talla muttered a curse behind him.
He turned to find her trying to dislodge the sharp bone spur that tipped her wing from a clump of low branches. Closing the distance, he reached up and pushed the branches away from her scraped wings.