The Reckoning (21 page)

One went for his gun, but I jumped in his direction so fast that he didn’t have time to draw. Adrenaline from the fight zinged through my body, increased by both my Unbounded genes and the ability I was borrowing from Jace.

I slugged the man hard and snatched his gun, stepping into him as I kicked backward at his companion, who was getting the wrong idea about jumping me from behind. The man hurtled backward, slamming into the chairs. I pointed the gun at his face. “Where is it?”

He remained silent, but his thoughts went to the trapdoor in the floor, where he customarily hid his contraband.

“Tell me,” I said again.

“I tell you, I’m as good as dead.”

I shrugged. “That says a lot about who you work for.”

Where were Ritter and the others? If Jeane had done her job, they should have dispatched their opponents far more quickly than I did. Which meant Jeane hadn’t nulled anything. I was going to kill her when I caught up to her.

Taking my tranque from a pocket of my suit, I shot the man. For good measure, I shot his unconscious companion as well. Not being Unbounded, they’d be out at least six hours. I glanced at the trapdoor his mind had indicated. It looked like any other metal section of the floor. I hoped the plutonium really was down there or I’d have to shoot one of the sailors with something else to waken him for questioning.

Closing my eyes, I searched for life forces. Was that a faint burning under the metal floor? And why wasn’t it moving? If it was a person, it would be the tenth man I’d counted. So not nine as Keene and Mari had hoped.

My earbud was smashed during my skirmish with the guard on deck, so I had no way of checking up on anyone except mentally. I could see that Ritter was doing double duty, battling his own opponent and helping with Stella’s as well. Stella was one of the best fighters I knew, but she couldn’t hold up forever against someone both gifted and trained in combat. I didn’t dare talk to Ritter, to tell him what I intended, lest I interfere with his concentration.

Jace, though he did seem to be getting the best of his opponent, was inexperienced enough that any communication with him might change that in a heartbeat, so I didn’t talk to him either. Keene was holding his own, even without a combat ability, and I could only attribute that to his years of training with the Emporium.

I couldn’t see Jeane’s life force anywhere, and if the greedy glow coming from the box in my head was any indicator, she wasn’t nearby. Had she jumped ship and abandoned us to our fate? If so, I’d kill her, and after she recovered, I’d kill her again.

It didn’t take me long to find the latch under the control desk that popped open the floor panel. The resulting hole was larger than I’d expected, revealing a steep, narrow stairway instead of a cubby hole or ladder as I’d anticipated. I went down slowly and carefully, holding the sailor’s gun ready and trying not to make too much noise on the metal stairs. It descended about twice my own height, landing in a very narrow hallway that was dimly lit by tiny lights set in the floor. If I had the lay of the ship correct, this hidden corridor was behind the passenger cabins below deck. I didn’t mind the closed-in space. In fact, I felt more secure—despite the fact that an Emporium agent lurked somewhere close by.

The life force was burning more brightly now, unhindered by layers of metal that had previously separated us. I didn’t even have to reach for it. I started down the cramped hallway toward the mental glow. Latches holding panels on the wall bumped my shoulders on both sides as I passed. I was curious about the panels and what might lie behind them, but opening one would alert the guard—if I hadn’t already done that. I edged forward, keeping my link with Jace but trying to ignore his fight. I had to focus on what might happen next. Especially with Jeane having gone AWOL.

I set my foot down and a loud creak echoed through the tight space.

The light force moved. Fast.

I brought my gun up as the man came at me, his body a blur. I squeezed the trigger, hoping he wasn’t moving too fast for me to hit. A binging of the bullet as it ricocheted off the metal walls confirmed that he was. The figure kept coming. I started to tug on the trigger again.

He stopped two feet away, coming into focus—a young, slightly built man with wispy blond hair, a small face, and crunched features. His blue eyes laughed at me, and my finger on the trigger stilled, and not because of the gun he had aimed at my face. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Hi, sis.”

“HELLO, JONNY.” I WASN’T HIS
sister, or even his half sister, and if not for Delia’s continued deception, he would know by now that I wasn’t the daughter of Stefan Carrington. He’d know that the sperm Ava had stolen from the Emporium arrived too late for my mother’s insemination, to be saved for a later date. He might guess that Jace was really his half brother, but I’d die to keep that knowledge from the Emporium . . . and maybe even from Jace himself.

Jonny was over a hundred years old, though he looked twenty-eight, and often acted like a gleeful child in a man’s body. As a side effect of a forced Change at eighteen, he was aging at five times the rate of a normal Unbounded—so ten years for every hundred he lived. The last time we’d met, his thoughts had told me he was bitter about his life expectancy of only four hundred years as opposed to two thousand. He’d pulled a gun on me then, too, and almost cost Ritter his life.

I was surprised that Jonny was here and apparently in some form of command position. His gift was speed, a variation of the combat ability, and while he could move faster than anyone I knew, he had only limited fighting skills. I’d thought it likely that I might run into some of the Emporium agents I knew, given our various encounters, but I’d expected an Unbounded with more skill, someone held in higher regard. While Jonny’s parentage set him apart, his lack of full ability and his limited life span made Emporium investment in his future less likely. Iran was important in their plan to start a war; it seemed they would have sent someone . . . better.

“Where’s the plutonium?” I demanded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His shield was tight over his mind, so I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. But if I was to get the plutonium, I’d have to get past him, which wouldn’t be easy without either borrowing his speed and beating him to the prize or flashing light into his mind and rendering him unconscious. Unfortunately, like so many of the Emporium agents we’d met recently, his shield was stronger than I was at the moment. The snake inside me was feeding faster since I was using my ability, seeming to drain my strength even as I watched. The blue lights emanating from the outer box grew brighter as I summoned the image of my machete and began hammering at his shield.

I upped my absorption rate in an attempt to alleviate some of the energy drain. “I can’t let you kill eight million people. Eight million, Jonny. Not to mention all the others who’ll die after the war starts. They’re women, children, innocents. Civilians. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

He laughed. “They’re mortal, Erin. Their lives are short anyway. It won’t make much of a difference, not for long. Sixty million mortals died in World War II, most of them civilians, and look at the world now. Most people don’t know or care about what happened back then. Everything continued on well enough without them.” He sounded almost as if he’d been there, maybe somehow helped start that war. And maybe he had.

“The people we’ll target are replaceable,” he added, “and their sacrifice will pave the way to a new world for the Unboundaried. We, who are destined to rule.”

That made me angry, especially his use of the full name Unboundaried, as if he had the right to godhood because of his lack of temporal boundaries. “If mortals are inferior because of their shorter lives, what about you? What about what the Emporium did to you, forcing your Change?”

“Shut up.” His smile didn’t waver, but emotions leaked from him: anger, resentment, regret. His gun hand dipped slightly and then came back up again—too fast for me to react.

“What about your friend who died when they tried to force her Change?” I could see that his shield was weakening as I worked at it with the machete. I had left the real weapon back at the hotel, not wanting to risk it in the water, but the mental image of it remained constant.Jonny’s surface emotions dampened. “She was weak. Probably never would have Changed.”

“You loved her. What was her name?”

“Shut up.”

But my comment had weakened his already battered shield; a tiny hole opened and I slid inside. His thought stream was erratic, bouncing up and down. In his mind, I saw what I’d hoped not to see: a thread of a shiny black undulating in his sand stream. Now appearing and just that quickly being buried. The thing was similar to the snake inside my box, and I knew Delia had put it there not only to protect certain thoughts inside Jonny’s head but also as a trap for any unsuspecting sensing Unbounded. I’d already made that mistake once.

I also saw the girl he’d loved, her pretty face contorting in unimaginable pain as he’d watched her die. She’d been a volunteer for the program like he had been, despite the lack of knowledge about the possible consequences and side effects. Anything for the good of the whole, for the Utopian dream.

I still didn’t know her name because he didn’t think of it, his mind overwhelmed with grief that should have lessened after a hundred years.

If I lost Ritter, would I mourn him that long? Would he mourn me? He’d mourned his family longer than that, and I believed what was between us ran far deeper. Why had I waited so long to make him mine?

Regret washed over me.

No, Jonny’s regret. I had a future. I wasn’t Jonny and his loss wasn’t mine. Yet I felt it was, and I understood why he clung to the ideals of the Emporium. Because once he stopped believing, the girl he had loved would have died in vain.

“Don’t make another mistake,” I said. “Step back. Let me by.”

I saw him decide to pull the trigger before he actually did, and I flashed light inside his mind. Crying out, he fell, his thought stream vanishing instantly. I withdrew, feeling suffocated in the lake of his unconsciousness. I tried to take a step, but the next second I collapsed on top of Jonny in the narrow corridor. The feeding snake made flashing a hundred times more draining, and it was fortunate I was still able to see.

As I lay in the darkness, gathering my strength, a radio at Jonny’s waist crackled. “ETA, four minutes by chopper. Can you hold them off that long?”

So he’d reported us, and now the plutonium was in danger of being lost. I took Jonny’s gun from his loosened grip, tucking it and my other stolen weapon in different pockets. Then I crawled forward toward where I’d first seen Jonny’s life force. I wished I could check on the others, maybe tell them where I was, but I had to preserve my strength.

By the time I reached Jonny’s hiding place, I was able to stand, steadying myself on the metal lockers lining the walls. The place was an alcove, little more than an indentation just large enough to hold a stiff-looking love seat that had probably been down here since the ship was built at least two decades ago. Nestled next to the couch was a rectangular metal container two feet long, eight inches wide, and about a foot tall. I reached for it, but it was too heavy to pick up, and I had to content myself by lifting a handle on the end and pulling it along the floor on the set of tiny back wheels. The wheels scraped over the metal floor more than they rolled, sounding ridiculously loud to my ears.

Plutonium was a heavy metal at about seven hundred and fifteen pounds per cubic inch. About twenty-two pounds were required to make a bomb. While I had no idea how much plutonium was inside the cask, I was sure the packaging weighed far more than the actual plutonium. The double containers were normally built to withstand a two-thousand-foot drop from an airplane, submersion in water for eight hours, and thirty minutes in fire. A cask would also prevent plutonium leaks during transportation that might cause mortals exposure and endanger their lives. In theory, moving the cask was perfectly safe.

The corridor seemed twice its previous length, and I contemplated opening the box and removing just the plutonium. But I knew it had been packed precisely to avoid forming a critical mass which could then start a chain reaction, so messing with it really wasn’t wise. So I tugged the cask along the corridor, realizing I wouldn’t be able to get it up the narrow stairs alone. How many minutes had passed?

A soft clink drew my attention to the staircase, and I pulled out a gun, reaching with my thoughts. To my relief, it was Keene, his mind unblocked. He was looking for me.

I felt a rush of gratitude.
Keene,
I pushed into his mind,
I’m here with the plutonium. It’s safe.

He came fast down the stairs toward me, bending briefly to look at Jonny. They had been friends once. “Anyone else?” he asked.

“No. But this is too heavy. Awkward. We’ll need one of the others.” I wanted to ask how he’d been able to rid himself of his opponent when Stella hadn’t been able to, but now was not the time to ask. Maybe the agent he’d faced hadn’t been gifted in combat.