Shadow Heart (21 page)

She answered quietly, and with some reluctance, “301.”

Grace jerked at the reply, and the needle pulled hard against her skin. She cried out and bared her teeth, but forced it back down. At least the woman hadn’t stabbed her with it…yet. “What about him?”

Liz sighed, still holding on to a shred of hope, “Did he never mention me?”

“Of course,” Grace said. “He spoke to me about everyone in Specter.”

“I was the one who got you out,” Liz said, wishing she could see Grace’s face to get a read on her emotions. “That night, when he snuck you out of the palace…I was the one who set off that Crippler.”

Another moment of silence passed, and then Grace continued to sew her up, “I see.”

Strange
, Liz thought,
how a person can speak volumes with only two words
. She could sense Grace putting the pieces together. Trusted enough to help 301 commit treason, admitting a struggle of grief at his death…but Liz did not go on. She had gone out on the limb a little ways, and now needed Grace to come to her. There was no need to get pushy.

“One of the soldiers along the perimeter saw that I was a woman. Without that explosion to distract him, we would never have made it out. It seems I owe you thanks for that as well.” She raised the scissors and cut the thread from the needle. “But then again, I suppose you didn’t do it for me.”

“No,” Liz said honestly. “I did it to get rid of you.”

Grace pulled bandages from the pack and began to unroll them, “You succeeded then…for a time.”

“It didn’t matter. I was already too late. Whatever happened between the two of you during your enslavement, it changed him. He was no longer the man I once knew.”

“Earlier you spoke of an orphanage,” Grace said as she pressed the bandages against Liz’s back. “I assume that means you grew up in the Capital Orphanage, with him.”

Liz swallowed hard, remembering that little boy: her closest friend, “I did.”

“Were you close?”

“As close as you can be to another human being in a place like that,” she smiled. “He was my rock, then. He always tried to protect me, though most of the time I wouldn’t let him.”

There came another long moment of silence, and then, “Did you love him?”

Liz sighed. Somehow Grace had managed to make her just as uncomfortable as she imagined the commander herself must feel. It was an interesting skill, one she would need to watch out for. “When I was young I thought I did, so I tried everything imaginable to push him away. After a while I realized I don’t really believe in love. Companionship, yes. Affection. Attraction. Satisfaction. Those are things I understand. But love, not so much. Still, when I heard he was dead…” her voice trailed off and she had to clear her throat. “Well I suppose it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Grace smoothed out the bandages along their edges, perfecting their adhesion to her skin, “It matters. Better to learn from the truth, not run from it.” She zipped up the pack and sat back, leaning on her hands, “You’re all set. Wasn’t as bad as the bleeding made it look. Only one of the wounds broke open during the fight.”

“That’s good.”

“But you still lost a lot of blood. Chances are good that we’re both going to crash from the adrenaline highs very soon. We can rest here for 24 hours, then we need to head west.” Grace activated her Spectral Gladius and then turned off her diamond armor, using the blade to stand as she had back in the camp. “I saw a stream nearby. Let me have those clothes and I’ll go wash them. You should wear one of those body warmers you packed.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Liz asked. “Going out there in the cold and the dark, with lions and other predators…not to mention Derek Blaine?”

“You can’t travel in just a warmer,” Grace said. “And you can’t walk around smelling to the high heavens, attracting every predator we pass with the stench of your blood. It won’t take me long.”

Liz pursed her lips in a thin line, then sat up. She lifted the disgusting shirt she had been lying on and handed it to a Grace with a grimace.

“Pants, too,” Grace said. “They’re soaked red all the way down the leg.”

“You want me to freeze to death?”

“You want to get eaten?” Grace retorted.

She rolled her eyes and removed the uniform pants, then reached immediately for the pack to get the body warmers. She had had quite enough of being naked in the Wilderness in the middle of winter. She was halfway into the wetsuit-like material before she noticed Grace was leaving.

“You never did say,” Liz said, stopping her. “If you loved 301.”

Grace paused, but did not turn, “Do you even need to ask?”

“No,” Liz thought. “I guess not.” She stood to zip the warmer up the back, and ventured on, “If you ever want to, you know…talk…about him… I don’t mind. We each have parts of him in our memories, pieces that might help us understand why he did what he did. I know you don’t know me, but…we both knew him, felt something for him. And to tell the truth…I miss him.”

Grace said nothing, but going back over her own words Liz realized how much she herself wanted that conversation. 301 had shown Grace a side of himself that she had never known, a side she was desperate to learn more about. Perhaps if she did, she would understand why 301-14-A had died.

“Just…think about it. Please.”

Grace remained silent, but then gave a nearly imperceptible nod. Afterward, she continued on her way to the mouth of the cave, leaving Liz alone by the fire with nothing but her bittersweet memories for company.

T
HERE WAS NO TELLING
how long the skeletons had been there. Exposed to the elements a human body could decompose at an exponential rate, to say nothing of animals who would scavenge for food wherever they would find it. Could be months. Could be weeks. The same, however, could not be said for clothing.

It was soiled and torn, ripped to shreds in some cases, but there was no mistaking the shape of the Spectral Cross on the breasts of the dead. These had been part of a roaming Silent Thunder band, dead now for some time. Likely they had fought alongside them in Alexandria, grieved with them at the death of Jacob Sawyer, rubbed shoulders with them on the stairs of the Communications Tower. But after the evacuation they had all gone their separate ways, abandoning their dreams in the face of certain defeat.

“We have the count, sir.”

Commander Aiken tore his eyes from the bones at his feet and turned to his lieutenant commander, one of the few left in his band who had once fought under Jonathan Charity. So many of the others had succumbed to despair or the perils of the Wilderness, while still more had died in Great Army raids or within Alexandria itself. At least half of his men were young, born after the fall of the Old World. They had joined to make a difference with their lives, believing they would become part of a legend. But in times like these, in this graveyard of heroes, Aiken wondered if they wouldn’t all have been better off living quiet lives in the wild.

“How many, Robert?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

“Forty-three operatives,” the lieutenant commander replied. “And at least forty more who were not wearing uniforms that we could find.” Robert paused and looked away. “Some were children.”

Aiken felt a spike of hatred and had trouble keeping the rage at bay. So much death over so many years. Sometimes he thought about the world he was born into and wondered how it and the one he lived in now were the same planet. How long could it go on?

“The Spectorium, I presume.”

Robert shook his head, “We haven’t found any wounds consistent with the Spectral Gladius. Looks like this might have been a Great Army raid, likely from Montreal. We’re only a few miles south of the wall.”

Aiken nodded, realizing the implications. Few Silent Thunder bands wanted to be anywhere near Alexandria after the evacuation, and for these to be so close to the capital—about halfway between the borders of the two cities, actually—meant they had likely been killed not long after leaving Alexandria. Dead near a year, then, left to rot in the open.

But the saddest part was that this was not the first such scene Aiken had come across. Silent Thunder bands had been dropping like flies all over the Wilderness. Few, if any, remained of the group that assaulted the Communications Tower outside his own team and the main force with Sawyer. They had left Alexandria to save themselves, but it appeared they had only delayed the inevitable.

“We should bury them,” Aiken said.

Robert winced, “I agree it would be kinder not to leave them…but we must get back to Commander Sawyer and the 2nd. They must know what we have seen.”

Aiken’s expression grew even harder, though this time it was not because of anger or pain, but fear and uncertainty. Crenshaw had sent him north to the ruins of New York City, with only a map and little explanation of what he sent them to find. All he knew was that once they got there, only an empty hole remained where Crenshaw had said the item would be. Until that moment he had doubted there would be anything there at all, but whatever Crenshaw’s game, someone else was also playing.

But that was not the event to which his lieutenant commander referred. He thought back to their journey out of the decrepit streets filled with ruined skyscrapers, when the ground beneath them began to shake.

Aiken ordered his men to return to the ruin and take cover in the shadow of those broken husks, for decades of war and still more in the Wilderness left little doubt as to the source of the quake. He and Robert picked their way through the nearest old skyscraper, careful not to fall through its rotted floors, to get a better vantage. About halfway up he made his way to the windows, glass long shattered, and nearly cursed.

The Great Army had taken the field. And not just an execution squad or a token force. This was an entire division. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers, swarming across the landscape like ants, bringing the horizon itself alive with their movement. Sometimes it was easy to forget the kind of power Napoleon Alexander could wield. In Alexandria the army had been spread out to maintain order, but here—seeing them all together in formation like this—it was humbling. Terrifying.

It made him wonder what they were even doing. Even with the Spectral Gladius, they were rodents beneath the paws of lions.

“Where do you think they’re headed?” Robert had asked.

“North,” he had answered. If they had departed even a few moments later they might not have realized the army was present until it was too late to take cover. Fortuitous, then, the extra time they had taken to make absolutely certain Crenshaw’s artifact was missing.

“I thought the Imperial Guard was holed up in the south. Seems like they’re headed in the wrong direction.”

“Sullivan has ships,” Aiken said. “Perhaps he opened a second front.”

“Maybe,” Robert conceded. “Whatever the case, it isn’t good news for us. We’re low on supplies, and we’ll have to wait for the army to pass before we—” Robert cut off suddenly, eyes on the army in the distance. “Commander. Something is happening.”

Aiken squinted into the gloom and lamented that his eyesight wasn’t quite what it used to be. A shockwave began on the horizon at the northernmost edge of the troops and reverberated throughout the army like a stone dropped in water. The soldiers had halted their march.

“A Great Army force that size never sets up camp in the Wilderness,” Robert said. “What are they doing?”

“They’re staying in formation,” Aiken replied. “Almost like—”

Orange light suddenly erupted from the front line of the army, throwing a shower of metal toward some unknown foe. Aiken squinted harder. For the life of him, he could see no opposing force. The Great Army seemed to be firing at nothing. So what then? A training exercise? For a group this large?

Robert must have been following the same train of thought, but his eyes were a bit better, “Jesus…what the hell
is
that?”

Aiken marked the strange movements of the Great Army line. The direction of the gunfire seemed to slowly shift, turning inward upon the army as though the two halves had suddenly decided to fight one another. But as the anomaly spread toward them he finally saw its source: a single thread of white, pushing its way swiftly through the Great Army’s ranks with little resistance. The gunfire did not appear to be slowing them down in the least. Every now and then he thought he caught a glimpse of a man’s silhouette through the white, but couldn’t be sure.