Unity, Elly Bangs [best mobile ebook reader txt] 📗

body, and my techs want to see how it works in living tissue.”

“No,” Standard said. The word fell like a bomb.

Duke stared uncomprehendingly. “No, what?”

“They’re my clients. I won’t betray them.”

I stifled a yelp.

Duke leaned slowly forward in his throne, and his gruesome jacket creaked with the movement. “You mean . . . you know where she is. She’s there with you right now.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me exactly where you are, Alexei.”

Standard shook his head. “No.”

“I am commanding you to tell me where you are.”

“I can’t do that.”

Duke’s eyelids peeled back. The harsh overhead light and the interfaced contact lens combined to make his sclera burn like neon. His jaw rings glittered in the shadow of his scalp like a row of monstrously curved teeth.

“We will find you,” he said. “I will never forget this betrayal.”

“I know.”

“I will personally scrape the flesh from your bones, Alexei. The prolonged agony of your public vivisection will be my magnum opus. The spectacle will be etched into every optic nerve in Epak, broadcast on every pane, exhibited to every child. They’ll tell the story of it for a thousand years to come.”

Standard’s image nodded solemnly. “I accept.”

“You don’t—!” Duke bellowed, but his image froze. Standard had hung up on him.

I huddled there behind our cover, speechless and shivering as Standard’s boots clanged back down the stairs. Naoto jumped to his feet and trained his wave pistol on the mercenary’s head, but his hands were shaking so furiously that I doubted he could shoot straight.

“Why did you do that?” I shouted. “Why are you helping us? I barely paid you anything. If you were working for the Keepers, I believe you’d already have me burning at the stake. Even they couldn’t pay you a fraction of what Duke just offered.”

The mercenary looked past the gun quaking in Naoto’s hand—past both of us, as if we weren’t even there—and for an instant I thought I saw through a break in his icy calm, to an exhaustion so long held and bone-deep that I felt a surreal ache of sympathy for him.

“Why are you helping us?” I repeated.

Alexei Standard replied simply, “Because I told you I would.”

He winced in pain as he descended the last steps and hobbled past us, a few steps out into the sterile plane. The weapon gradually sank down in Naoto’s still-shaking grip, and a distant whine of motors and plume of dust announced the arrival of our ride. We shared a long, shell-shocked look, but then there was nothing to do but climb up into the hulking cargo compartment and look for a place to sit between the stacks and barrels; whether we trusted Alexei or not, it was either that or stay in Crossroads.

Just as the rear hatch was groaning shut, an odd intuition cut through the whirlwind of my thoughts. I looked back.

A stranger stood there by the tower, half-shadowed in the waves of blowing sand. With his head nodded down against the sun, he stared out from under his brows, straight at me. His face was unfamiliar, but his smile— that smile—

The hatch shut and locked between us.

“What is it?” Naoto asked me as the motors whirred. “Danae? What’s wrong?”

It couldn’t have been Luther. The drug, the stress, the physical toll of all this travel—any one of those could have caused me to see someone who wasn’t there.

Luther had died a long time ago. I had to believe that.

I must have only imagined that stranger’s mouth forming one voiceless word before the hatch closed:

Sybil.

BORROWER

Sybil.

I had seen her, and for the first time in seventy-two years, she had seen me too. For that single, shining moment of mutual recognition, all was right with the world.

Then the truck’s hatch swung shut and locked, and my smile faded at the sight of it pulling away into the wastes—and I panicked. This should have been it. If only my damned alpha copy had been here, we could have overpowered the two men traveling with her, and I would have her already. Years of toil and planning would have come to fruition, and I would finally have in hand the solution to all my problems. But instead I was standing here, alone and impotent, watching her recede into the distance on a trail of billowing dust.

This should have been it. This should have been it!

I punched the tower. I hit it over and over again, throwing the whole force of my body into it, screaming at the top of my lungs into the hazy distance past the encampment’s edge. I ground the sand between my teeth and cast my curses to the sky.

Then I composed myself and went to work.

I went back to the truck depot and asked to speak to the chief. One of his guards ushered me into his office alone.

“What is it, Rutger?” the chief asked, draining his daily bottle. “I’m closing up after one hell of a day.”

“A truck pulled away from the south gate just a moment ago,” I said. My mind was still racing from my encounter with Sybil, and I couldn’t spare the focus to affect Rutger’s usual speaking style. “Can you tell me its destination?”

The chief looked up distrustfully from his desk and reached down to slide a drawer shut, hiding something metallic from my sight. “Why would you want to know that?”

“It’s a personal matter,” I said.

“There was no truck at the south gate,” he told me. “Understand? You didn’t see any truck pull away from there.”

The depot chief was an old man, by my standards. Frail. I imagined his liver swimming in a puddle of alcohol, the rotgut aftertaste in his spit, and I very much dreaded the thought of having to put on his flesh—but I would, if it was what it took to get access to his data pane. I had one last card to play before resorting to that.

“You can trust me,” I said. “How long have we known each other?” I