Scavenger of Souls (28 page)

“Mom . . .”

“Do as I say!” she snapped, louder and more angrily than I expected. She shoved with her one hand, and in the dark separation between us I sensed the thing moving in for the kill.

“Mom!”

A spark.

A moving flare.

The fire caught.

A pulse, bright as the sun, filled the room.

In its glare I saw the Skaldi attached to her, its scar split wide, preparing to suck her in. Then its body caught fire and sloughed to the floor. The light died almost the instant it appeared, only to be replaced by the dance of flames across my mother's body. I saw her mouth widen in a scream.

“Mom!”

I leaped at her and threw her to the floor, dousing the flame with my body. Darkness fell again, and I felt her chest heave, heard her ragged breathing. Footsteps and shouts sounded from across the room. My hands burned, and the air I drew into my lungs stank with the odor of charred flesh.

“Querry.” Her fingers touched my face. I could feel the
rough skin where she'd been burned. “Find Mercy. She knows how to reset the signature.”

“Mom, no. No. Please, no.”

“Find her.” Her hand traced my cheek before falling to the floor.

I stepped clear of her and searched the darkness until I heard a sharp scratch and caught sight of a red flare. The footsteps resumed, and in seconds Mercy, Nessa, and Ardan appeared in the ruddy glow. I tried not to falter at the sight of my mother's body stretched on the floor, angry burns covering her, the black remains of the creature enclosing her in a ring of ash. The wrist cuff lay open near what was left of her leg, its cold curve like a cruel smile.

Mercy dropped to a knee beside her. Aleka touched her face, whispered things I couldn't hear. Mercy scooped up the wrist cuff and stood, gesturing for Ardan to pick my mother up, then headed toward the control panel. Nessa held the flare, lighting the way. When we arrived at the panel, Aleka reached up with trembling fingers and swiped the touch pad, and the room filled with light. I blinked, willed my eyes to adjust. The burns I'd thought were bad in the flare's wavering glow revealed themselves fully: the shriveled creature Ardan held in his arms, its hair and clothes nearly gone and its flesh the red of a body turned inside out, bore no resemblance to the woman who'd been my mother.

With Aleka's bright eyes following her every movement, Mercy entered the code to reprogram the control panel. I thought she'd
substitute her own signature, but she nodded at me, and I reached out numbly to press my index finger against the touch pad. When the panel whirred and an image of my own print appeared briefly on its surface before being pulled into the metal's depths, I knew I was now in control of the compound.

Ardan carried my mother to the bunker's medical wing, where Tyris and Adem watched the giant lay her on one of the beds. Neither of them made a move to tend to her, though. Even if Doctor Siva had still been alive, everyone could see she was beyond their help.

I stood beside her, leaned over to kiss her cheek, burned and reddened as it was. I thought about the woman I'd known, pale-skinned, gray-eyed, severe and serene. The woman who'd led two colonies, fought monsters and insurrections and her own lasting grief. I thought about the long road she'd traveled from the young woman she'd been, the expectant mother I'd glimpsed in the protograph the first time I'd visited Udain's compound. The years that followed had whittled her body down to nearly nothing, but somehow her spirit had remained strong. Now she stood at the road's end, and I could do nothing but hold her hand as she took the final step into the darkness.

Her eyes shone, her lips moved. “Mercy,” she said, and Ardan's sister moved to the bed beside me.

But Aleka wasn't talking to her. “Mercy,” she said again, her eyes fixed on me.

I nodded. Her face relaxed. I hoped that, when she made it to the other side, she'd arrive like that. At peace. Whole.

Healed.

“I saw him,” I said. “In a dream. I saw Yov.”

Her eyes brightened, gray as the moon.

“Maybe you'll . . .” My voice trailed off.
Maybe you'll see your husband
, I was about to say.

Her ruined face tried to smile.

“I love you, Mom,” I said. “I won't let them win.”

Her eyelids closed, the skin as red and blistered as the rest of her face. I touched her cheek one last time as she died. Grief would have overwhelmed me if anger hadn't burned it away. Not anger at her.
This doesn't begin with you
, she'd told me. And it didn't begin with her, either. None of this would have happened if not for Athan and Udain Genn. And none of the choices they'd made would have been necessary if not for the monsters that roamed the land above us, the creatures from beyond the stars. Forgiveness could come later—forgiveness for my creator, my people, myself.

For now, vengeance was all I had.

“Get the others,” I said to Mercy. “Tell them this is the night the Skaldi die.”

My first official act as
commander of Survival Colony None was to order the destruction of the base I commanded.

The
None
was Mercy's idea. Something about how that was almost
Nine
, but with an
O
for “unknown.” Like most of her jokes, it didn't make much sense, and it didn't seem like the right time. But my next official act was to ignore that.

We wrapped Aleka's body in a sheet and eased her onto a storage shelf in the infirmary, where a sedated Udain slept beside his wounded soldiers, his feet spilling off the edge of a normal-size cot. From the location where my mother had fallen I collected the two things not so badly burned as to be useless: a pistol that had fallen from its holster—silver like the one she'd lost to Asunder's colony—and the battered but still functional miniature protograph. A search of the war room turned up the remains of Doctor Siva, heaped on the floor
beside the table, identifiable only by his white jacket. Everyone else was accounted for, which meant that the creature had infected him before he'd gone underground. To be certain there wasn't another one, Mercy subjected everyone to the military version of the Skaldi trials: a flat black wand that hummed with the same energy as the guns. I wished Aleka had thought to use it on Siva before she locked the war room door, but I guess she'd had too much faith in the man who'd twice saved her life to suspect him. And she'd been too eager to show me the protograph recording to perform the act that might have saved her own life.

I sat with Mercy at the war room table while she showed me the basics of the compound's integrated network. She'd been clingy ever since Aleka's death, snuggling up to me with her arms draped over my shoulders and her cheek pressed against mine. Not like she was trying to start something, just attempting to console me—or to scare off Nessa, who she practically hissed at every time the girl came near. Still, the touch of her hands seemed wrong, especially since I was the only one who knew why it seemed wrong. I wiggled uncomfortably, and she got the idea—or at least, the idea that I wasn't ready for anyone to get close to me yet. Like so much else, the full story of who I was and why it would never work out between us would have to wait for later.

“So the entire compound's visible from here?” I said.

She guided my hands to the proper buttons, and a glowing
map appeared on the screen. Thousands of pinpricks of red light swarmed the surface compound's outline like a disease.

“That's them,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of figured that out.”

We zoomed and scanned the image, focusing on the tunnel to the bunker. A handful of red dots sprinkled the passageway up to the first door, but after that there was nothing. Those few were probably holding the corridor while others searched for a different way in. At least for now, they hadn't found it.

“Is there another entrance?” I asked.

“There's a rear escape”—she moved my hands over the controls until a long, straight tunnel appeared—“right there. It extends for miles to the east, out into the desert. But our friends don't seem to know about it.”

“What about the drone?” I said. “Shouldn't it show up on the map?”

“Apparently not,” she said. “But I can work on finding it if you want.”

“Hm.” Something about the way she said that told me she was just being something she never was: polite. “So we slip out the back way . . .”

“And blow them to kingdom come before they know we're gone,” she said with a smug smile. “Check this out.”

She called up a map of the compound's final fail-safe: charges set in a ring around headquarters that could be
detonated by the commander, turning the area aboveground into an inferno. This could all be accomplished, she announced confidently, through the remote function on the wrist cuff I'd locked onto my right calf. But her glee turned to bewilderment, and then to fury, when she discovered the remote wasn't working. She monkeyed with it far longer than I thought was prudent before spitting out that it had probably been damaged in the fire. Other hardware—the guns, the protograph—had responded to my signature and come back online, but the charges would have to be set by hand.

My hand.

“You'll need a guide,” Mercy said when I told her the plan.

“No way, Mercy.”

“Oh, come on!” she said. “It'll be just like old times!”

Nothing will ever be like old times
, I thought. “I'm your commander, you know.”

“Ha!” Her expression was about what I expected, but the motion she made with her finger was new to me. “Command
this
.”

I didn't have the time or energy to fight her, so I gave in. I'd have to ask about the finger thing later.

I assembled the others. All of the kids volunteered to join us, including Zataias, who raised his hand so high it was like he thought I was picking an “it” for a game of freeze tag. I ruled him and the rest of the kids out immediately, plus the injured colonists and medical personnel. Geller must have
been high on Mercy's praise from earlier in the day, because he volunteered too, but I told him I needed him to stay with Udain. Tyris tried to make a case that we might need her if the plan went wrong, but my answer was that if the plan went wrong, there'd be too many little pieces of us for her to do a thing about it.

In the end I decided on just me, Mercy, and Ardan. Any more I was afraid would attract too much attention. Any less I was sure would produce my first mutiny. Nessa hadn't said anything while I described the plan—probably because Mercy was staring daggers at her the whole time—but now she insisted on both her and Adem coming along. Though Adem looked like he was strangling when she volunteered his name, he didn't refuse. I considered telling them no, which would have pleased Mercy, but I found myself saying yes. Maybe it was because I knew how solid Nessa was. Or because, with her hair cut short, she looked a lot like my mother.

We took the bare minimum in terms of supplies. Energy guns, the miniature protograph to chart our course and keep track of Skaldi, the wrist cuff in case some of its functions still worked, a flashlight, a set of walkie-talkies. I left Aleka's pistol on the war room table, asking Tyris to bury it with her if we didn't return. Her team would exit the compound via the rear passageway, with Geller and most of the other guards transporting their former commander. If my team didn't make it, the others would try to pry the drone's
location from Udain. If and when we regrouped, we would hold funerals for Siva and my mother.

We arranged a meeting place and an “if we're not back by” time. I was about to make one last check of everything when Mercy touched my arm. “Querry.”

I stopped.

“I'm sorry about your mom. I don't remember her from when I was a kid, but she seemed like a great lady.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She was a lot like you.”

She laid a hand on my cheek, looked at me with her dark eyes. When I looked back, it was like I was seeing the girl I'd begun to think about being with through the ghostly image of the girl I knew I never could. Then the first of those girls grinned.

“With the possible exception,” she said, “of the lady part.”

We finalized plans with the others, then turned the protograph on and headed back into the tunnels.

No sooner did we set off than Mercy dropped behind with me and tried to sneak a kiss. Which I thought was kind of inappropriate, considering what had just happened. But like she said, she was no lady.

I shook her off, edged away. That was hard to do in the narrow tunnel. “Not now, Mercy.”

“Come on, live a little,” she said. “This is the first free moment we've had since you woke up.” She batted her eyelashes.
“And for all we know, it might be the last.”