Sector 4 - Alderson
Jayson Coley, Alyssa Ophidian
Jayson heard the train before he saw it.
It started as a rumbling, just enough to shake the ground. He was sitting against the wall on the eastern end of the long shed, so he felt it under his legs, waking him from a light slumber. He shook his head, clearing the sluggish exhaustion from his mind, and focused on the dirt beneath him.
It took him a few moments to realize the source of the vibration, and when he did he sprang to his feet. Something big was coming down the tracks.
The vibrations rolled in from the west, opposite where they’d been walking during the day.
The train was coming from the city.
“Do you feel that?” he asked.
Tricia was resting near the eastern door of the shed, leaning against the rusty wall next to Richard. She looked haggard and weak in the dim light. She glanced up curiously at Jayson as he spoke.
Jayson rushed across the dirt floor, dodging a pair of low-hanging chains and barely daring to breathe. He made his way to the old sliding door along the western wall. He grabbed hold of the rusty handle and yanked; it ground open with a mighty squeal, heavier than expected. He didn’t stop but kept pulling until his muscles ached and the doorway stood open.
Outside the night was thick and cool with a breeze rolling across from the west, chilling his skin. It was also quiet and empty. He stared deep into that darkness, willing a train into existence. The fire Tricia built a few hours earlier was on the opposite end of the building, shining light to the east. They’d been so concerned with traveling to the Academy they’d never even stopped to wonder what was behind them. The fire was just past the eastern door, so he couldn’t see very far out this direction.
He could see enough, though, to wonder if he was going crazy: there was nothing out there except flying bugs and a few trees hidden in the gloom.
A minute of deathly silence passed. Jayson felt his stomach clench in anguish. He knelt and pressed his hand to the ground. Nothing. Whether his position was bad or the train wasn’t real, he felt no vibrations through the ground. Please let it be real, he intoned silently. It must be real. Please tell me I’m not going crazy.
A few seconds that felt like an eternity flowed past, and…
…nothing. The breeze picked up, causing his ripped and stained shirt to flutter, but otherwise, the landscape was unchanged. The tracks bent after only a few hundred meters in front of him, curving into the forest and out of sight. He couldn’t feel any vibrations.
But…
But he could smell smoke!
“What is it?” Tricia asked, coming up alongside him. “What did you hear?”
“There’s a train coming,” Jayson said breathlessly, running back into the shed. “There’s smoke through the trees. A few minutes away. Grab Richard, we need to be ready.”
“A train?” Tricia repeated. “Thank God.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Tricia asked, confused. “They’ll have food. Water. Supplies. We’re safe.”
“You’re assuming they’re here for us,” Jayson said, kneeling and lifting Richard up into a sitting position. Richard was ashen faced and exhausted, too tired to even groan from the pain. “But I’m betting not.”
“They couldn’t just go on by,” Tricia said in disbelief. “Richard will die.”
Jayson didn’t reply. He lifted Richard to his feet and Tricia took his other arm. He wobbled but didn’t fall. “What’s up?” Richard muttered, eyes barely focused. “We going somewhere?”
“Yeah,” Jayson said. “Home.”
“You can’t seriously think they will leave us,” Tricia argued.
“The train is coming from the city. I doubt they even know we are here.”
“So, what do we do?” Tricia asked.
They stumbled their way to the west exit and into the night. It was quiet still, but now they could hear the train in the distance. In a few moments, it would come into sight. They had about a minute before it was upon them. It wouldn’t be moving very fast, he hoped.
“Here,” he said. They lowered Richard to the ground and leaned him against the outside wall of the building. “Keep out of sight for now so they don’t—”
“Jayson,” Tricia repeated, grabbing his arm before he could turn away. “What are we going to do?”
Jayson blew out a long breath. “Ever hijack a train?”
2
“I think I’m going to kill Maven,” Alyssa mumbled to herself, punching an embroidered pillow lined with velvet and azure. It was expensive and pretty but terrible to lie upon. Which meant useless in her estimation; she hoped to soften the padding to make it more comfortable, sure, but if it doubled as stress relief when she hit it, she wouldn’t complain.
She tucked the pillow back behind her head and leaned into it. It was warm and itchy against the back of her neck and entirely too stiff to be comfortable. With a curse, she flung it across the way.
“Yep. Definitely killing her.”
Alyssa stared out the window as the scenery flowed past. It was night, and the train had poor lighting, but she was satisfied that she wasn’t missing anything in the darkness.
“A tree. A tree. A tree. Oh look, another tree. Damn it,” she growled, adjusting her black miniskirt. It kept riding up every time she shifted in the seat.
She’d decided to wear it with its matching blouse and boots because she looked cute as hell, but it was turning out to be a terrible decision. The material chafed her skin, and she’d already decided to burn it once this trip was over. If she’d known she would be wearing it literally all day, she would never have put it on.
But that was a minor problem compared to how the rest of her day had gone. She was miserable on this stupid little planet. Damn Darius and his ill-begotten agendas. Why must he keep agreeing to Maven’s ill-conceived and poorly thought out plans?
“Once Darius sees how useless this place is,” she muttered, “he’ll have no choice but to shut it down.”
It had seemed like a good plan to discredit her sister. Maven had taken the academy as a pet project, wanting to train loyal soldiers with skills. Saboteurs, survivalists. Self-contained anarchists they could drop off on a planet for one purpose: terror.
Maven had staked a lot of her credibility on how well this Academy functioned.
But she wasn’t half as angry at Maven as she was her pilot. She’d ordered the useless bastard to drop her off at the Silvent Academy early in the morning. That was when she first arrived. He’d refused, stating that it would be both illegal and dangerous to attempt such an endeavor. The arrogant man had refused her.
And why? Because the Academy refused to allow any flights to pass through their airspace, and they had ground-mounted cannons to back it up. Her pilot warned her that violating airspace restrictions would give the Academy authority to fire on her vessel and, no, it didn’t matter who she was.
Which meant that the only way she could reach the Academy was to walk or ride the train; a train for which no trips were scheduled for over a week. Alyssa had wasted most of the day finding an engineer.
Suddenly the lights flickered out in the cabin, casting Alyssa into complete darkness. She could feel the train thrumming beneath her, but she couldn’t see anything. “Damn it,” she growled in frustration. Seemingly in response, the lights came back on.
They’d been doing that since the ride started. Every few minutes, it lost power. The engineer explained that the train’s electrical connections were faulty. He’d been planning on fixing them before making his next trip…but that wasn’t for several days.
So, she was forced to tolerate spotty lighting. It hadn’t bothered her at first, but after a few hours, she was getting more than a little annoyed.
The engineer had been in a bar called the Flying Duck drinking with friends when she finally tracked him down (which infuriated her). He was also ugly and short and bald (which also infuriated her) and he even tried to refuse her passage to the Academy (which really, really infuriated her).
He explained that she needed a formal invitation from the Academy Master to visit. They were undergoing some sort of trial for new recruits, and there were to be no interruptions.
What would the point be, she argued, of an unscheduled audit if she had to schedule it? She considered, in her angry state of mind, just knocking the engineer unconscious and taking the train on her own. She would have if she had any idea how to operate it.
So, Alyssa did the next best thing for venting off some steam: She dominated the engineer’s mind. She’d cast out through her implant and taken control of him. Then she forced him to do what she wanted. He’d fought back, of course, which just made her utter control of him all the sweeter.
She’d cooled off since then. Now she was just tired as hell and angry.
There was a beeping on her communicator. She drew it out of her purse and flicked it on, a smile spreading her lips.
“Maven, it’s good to hear from you,” she said to her sister on the other end of the connection.
Maven looked hideous. She was wearing her stupid overly-dramatic self-conscious outfit: a black cloak sagged low to hide her face and a plastic breathing mask, fogging gently each time she took a breath. She didn’t like to let people see her face and hadn’t since she was a child. Since the accident.
Her sister had always been rather theatrical.
“Alyssa…” Maven said, her voice lilting in disdain. “What do you think you are doing?”
“Serving the Council, dear sister,” she said. “Performing an audit to ensure our funds are being spent wisely.”
“At my Academy?”
“It was quite the investment.”
“It isn’t ready yet,” Maven said. “You shouldn’t be there.”
“I just want to help.”
Maven laughed and shook her head. “I know exactly what you want.”
“Little sister, why do you insist on treating me like an enemy? I want to help you and be there for you. I’ve never done anything to hurt you.”
“Sure,” Maven said with a noncommittal shrug. “But I’m telling you, you shouldn’t be there.”
“And why not?”
“Because my students are undergoing a training exercise,” Maven said. “It could be dangerous.”
Alyssa laughed, holding her stomach. “Oh,” she said through gasps, “that’s rich.”
Maven didn’t respond. Alyssa couldn’t see her face, but she knew her sister was angry. She could tell by the precisely controlled breaths through the breathing mask. She had the look of a wounded animal, weak and pathetic.
“You didn’t ask,” Maven said.
Alyssa smiled at her sister. “Easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, dear sister.”
Maven shook her head. “Alyssa, please just turn around and head back—”
Alyssa closed the communicator, ending the connection. She couldn’t help but giggle a little. Her sister was such a stuck up little cow sometimes. It was nice to put her in her place.
Once she’d managed to embarrass Maven’s Academy with the Council, they would have no choice but to close it down and withdraw support.
Alyssa’s headache began to recede. The call perked up her spirits. After a while, she relaxed in her chair and closed her eyes. She was confident that the engineer wouldn’t step out of line for the duration of this trip, so there wasn’t anything to worry about.
“It’ll all be worth it,” she reminded herself, “when I can close Maven’s Academy for good.”
3
Jayson waited on the tracks, tree limb dangling in his left hand and heart beating like a drum. He stood in a loose stance, ready to move if the train didn’t slow. If the engineer was paying attention, he might even bring the train to a stop. That would make the job easy.
But as the train drew closer, it also grew larger. He started to rethink his plan. It wasn’t traveling quickly, but it wouldn’t take much speed to be faster than him. He felt like an ant standing before a charging behemoth.
He bit back nerves and anxiety and focused on the task at hand. His objective was to get to the engineer, subdue him, and bring the train to a halt. If he was lucky, the man would think he was a hapless stranger and help. That would make Jayson’s part in the plan easy.
Tricia’s job was to make sure the train was empty and locate medical supplies. Once they had things under control, they would patch Richard up and have the train continue on its way, delivering them to the Academy.
It sounded easy. But he had to admit there were certain things he’d overlooked. What if the engineer didn’t give up easily? What if the engineer was armed? Reasonably, why wouldn’t he be armed? They were in the middle of the forest at night. What were the chances the guy would want to help them?
Jayson would have done just about anything for a real weapon. But wishing he was armed with more than a wooden stump wouldn’t do him any good.
“Who the hell hijacks a train,” Jayson said to himself as the train pounded closer, “with a stick?”
Twenty meters away, it became apparent that the train wasn’t going to stop. The engineer either didn’t see him or planned on running him down. That was okay, Jayson supposed. If the engineer didn’t know he was there, all the better.
It was moving at about eighteen kilometers per hour, he guessed. He could sprint and keep up with it for a few seconds at least.
Jayson stepped off the tracks to his right letting it approach. It would breeze right past him only a few feet away. The cab had five steps with handrails along the sides. It was built like trains he’d seen on Eldun, so he guessed the rails would be sturdy. His plan required that he catch hold of those rails and pull himself on.
A second flitted past.
The train’s floodlights almost blinded him as the train barreled closer. He heard a shout as the engineer finally spotted him, but it was already too late. The train suddenly sounded louder as the engineer cranked up the speed. But it would take too long to build enough to outrun Jayson.
Jayson’s body kicked into high gear as adrenaline coursed into his veins. The world seemed to slow down around him. It always shocked him, at times like this, just how fast the human mind could work. He could see, hear, and process information at a much higher level of functioning than normal.
Another second slipped past.
Jayson forced himself to breathe in deep steady breaths. He turned with the train still a ways off and began sprinting along the tracks, his pace slightly under that of the train’s. It reached him and flowed right past, thunder filling his ears.
He reached out with his right hand and caught the closest handrail. It was smooth and ice cold to the touch. He clenched down on it, increasing his pace to fall into step with the train.
But he was too slow. The train was traveling faster than expected, and he missed a step. As a result, he tripped and banged against the side of the engine. His knee hit hard and exploded in pain, but he bit it back and focused on what he was doing. He dropped the stick and used his left hand to keep himself off the ground.
He barely kept hold of the rail with his right hand but managed to lift himself off the ground. After a few seconds, he caught the other handrail with his left hand and leveraged his body onto the step. His knee throbbed, but he didn’t think he’d done any permanent damage.
The engine door flew open, nearly knocking him off his perch on the steps. A short man in grease-covered overalls and a brown hat glared down at him. “What the hell?”
Jayson didn’t answer. He forced himself forward, half-crawling up the steps, and hit the man about the waist with a tackle.
“Hey!” the man shouted, hitting his back hard against the panel inside the engine. He launched a punch at Jayson, but it was slow and off target. Jayson caught the man’s wrist and leveraged down, forcing him to sit. The engineer collapsed into the chair, raising his hands defensively with a look of horror on his face.
“How do you stop this thing?”
The guy stared at him like he was crazy. Jayson raised his fist and the man cowered. Then he nodded toward a double lever on the front control board. Overtop it was a plaque with the word ‘brake’ on it.
“Oh,” Jayson said.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble,” the guy said.
“I know,” Jayson said with a shrug. “It’s nothing personal.”
Then he slammed the engineer’s head against a flat panel beside the controls.
4
Alyssa was on her feet as soon as the train began slowing down.
“What the hell?”
They were already moving at an abysmal pace, so why the hell was the engineer stopping? She didn’t know where they were—the entire forest looked the same—but she was certain they weren’t at the Academy. It was supposedly all the way up in the damn mountains.
And she’d given orders to the engineer not to stop until they were there. Something must have gone wrong. Or at least, something better have gone wrong. If she found out the engineer was willfully disobeying …
A second later, the lights buzzed in the cabin, flickered, and went out.
“Oh, for crying out loud!”
She headed for the exit, determined to punish the short man for his insolence. There was only light from the stars above, so moving wasn’t easy.
A few steps away from the door, it suddenly slid open.
“You’d better have a damned good reason—”
A tall black woman rushed inside the open doorway. She had a long face, large lips, and curly black hair. She looked haggard, and her clothes were stained and shredded.
She also looked strong and intelligent with narrow eyes and a strong jaw. Alyssa was wholly unprepared. She cursed and stumbled back, grabbing for the holdout pistol in her boot. The woman pursued.
Alyssa ducked out of range. The gun came loose from her boot, but she didn’t have time to draw and fire. She dodged a punch and kicked out with her right foot. She didn’t hit anything, but that wasn’t the objective. She was aiming for the woman’s ankle, forcing her to give ground or suffer a debilitating injury.
She raised the pistol, trying to draw a bead, but the woman didn’t hesitate. She stepped inside Alyssa’s defenses and launched a kick at her stomach.
Alyssa managed to avoid the brunt of the attack, but it still clipped her side. The hit rocked her and sent stars shooting across her vision. “Bitch…” she moaned, sucking in a breath.
Alyssa twisted her hips and swiped with her leg, tripping her opponent and forcing extra distance between them.
It bought some time, but not enough. Alyssa knew she was in trouble. She drew a short-ragged breath of cold air into her lungs, but she could feel her body crying out for lack of oxygen.
The woman braced herself against one of the seats and bounded back into the fray. She caught Alyssa’s hair and punched Alyssa on the wrist holding the gun with two sudden jabs. Hard. The gun fell, bouncing down the aisle to come to a rest near the open door.
That attack was followed by two more rapid strikes. The woman was fast and a lot better trained than Alyssa, and without her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she was doubly at a disadvantage.
The first attack hit her on the jaw. She took that one in stride, still in the fight. The second clipped her nose, sending an explosion of red through her vision. The cabin swam and she cried out in pain, stumbling back and furious.
Alyssa felt more than saw her opponent moving, heading for her gun. She was angry, as angry as she’d ever been. She channeled her emotions into focused determination, gathering it as energy in her implant. She knew the woman had picked up her gun and that she would use it without a moment’s hesitation.
But Alyssa had no intention of letting that happen.
“Drop it,” Alyssa growled, throwing her power behind the command. The words barely came out with so little air in her lungs, but they were just a pattern for her thoughts. What mattered was the mental bridge she’d built.
The woman tried to resist, but Alyssa batted her mental defenses away as though they were a child’s sand castle. This woman had never practiced mental defense. She’d doubtless never known how dangerous it could be to enter a battle of wills against someone like Alyssa. As a result, she was unprepared.
Most people were.
The gun clattered to the floor with a soft thud.
The cabin fell quiet. The only sounds were ragged inhalations as the two women struggled to breathe.
A rush of pride surged through Alyssa as she felt the woman mentally cower from her. Such utter domination of another human being was savagely empowering. Whenever she cast power through the implant, it was a lustful, sinful experience. She loved every second.
“Walk to me,” Alyssa purred, tasting blood on her lips. The woman did, only the slightest tremor in her steps. “Good girl.”
As she grew closer, Alyssa could see her eyes. They were wide with terror. The woman knew everything that was happening, but she could only watch. She had no control over her own body. The best part wasn’t turning the woman into a mindless puppet; it was that the woman knew who was doing it to her.
“Kneel.”
Slowly, the woman lowered herself to her knees, lips shaking.
Alyssa hauled her arm back and slapped the woman across the face, open handed. It stung her palm and a few fingers went numb, but she felt another surge of primal pleasure. She did it again. And again, this time with the back of her hand.
“You stupid hussy,” she growled, hitting the woman one more time. She walked past the woman to her gun, swaying her hips. She was back in control, and it felt good.
She scooped the gun up, feeling its comfortable weight, and strode back toward the kneeling woman. She was screaming in her mind, thrashing to regain control over her body. But it meant nothing. She wasn’t strong enough, and Alyssa held her mind in a vice grip.
“You picked the wrong fucking train, bitch.”
She leveled the weapon at the back of the woman’s head, savoring the moment.
Which turned out to be a bad idea.
She was so focused on killing the woman who’d hurt her that she didn’t notice anything else. She never heard anyone else slip into the cabin. Never saw the figure come up behind her.
“Step off, whore,” a man said. She cursed and spun, raising the gun and lashing out through her implant, but too slowly. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him standing there. He had sunken brown eyes and a beard and was wearing dirt-and-blood-covered clothing. He looked to be on death’s door.
He was also swinging what looked to be a very large tree limb...
…at the back of her head.
It was a wrecking ball against her skull. She heard something snap.
Suddenly she was on the ground. The world was spinning.
And everything went black.
5
Jayson heard a resounding crack from inside the passenger car as he dragged the unconscious engineer to the car. He cursed and dropped the man unceremoniously to the ground, rushing toward the sound.
The door was still open and there was a trail of blood on the ground that he followed inside. The lights were dim and flickering, but he could see well enough. Richard was lying near the aisle at the end of the trail of blood, groaning in pain and clutching a broken tree limb. Tricia was holding his head in her lap, crying.
Next to them on the floor was a woman he’d never seen before wearing a miniskirt. Her face was covered in blood. She looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place her from memory. She was attractive, minus the matted hair and blood staining her face and neck.
“Are you okay?” Jayson asked, kneeling next to Tricia. She didn’t respond. “Tricia! What the hell happened?”
Still nothing. She opened her eyes, but they didn’t focus on anything. Jayson glanced around and spotted a white-and-red medical kit on the wall. He hurried to it and jerked it down. It was heavy, which was good. That meant it was stocked. He unsnapped the sides and opened it.
He sighed in relief to see the clean supplies and set the kit on the ground next to Tricia. “Hold him. This is going to hurt.”
She still didn’t reply, but she did reach down and grab hold of Richard’s hands. Jayson cut his bandages loose, revealing Richard’s wound. Somehow—probably when he boarded the train—he’d managed to tear the wound open even farther. What the hell was he thinking, climbing on the train like that?
The cut was dirty and ugly with faint red lines tinting the edges. Infection, but only just begun. With luck, it wouldn’t do any permanent damage.
Jayson coated a towel from the kit in alcohol and set to scrubbing the wound clean. With how bad off Richard was, he barely moaned.
Once he was satisfied the wound was clean, Jayson set about closing it up with clean supplies. He found staples and sealed it closed and cleaned the outside with a foaming disinfectant. He wrapped Richard’s entire side with gauze.
He found some antibiotics in the kit and after a little struggle managed to get Richard to swallow them. There were also a few vials of painkillers, so he injected a low dose and laid him out on the floor at the front of the cabin. His eyes were closed, but the grimace on his face loosened up as the medicine took hold.
Throughout all of it, Tricia barely moved. She was rocking gently and paying no attention to the outside world. Her eyes looked more haunted than normal, and he wondered what had happened to her. What could have happened to her in those few moments to be so devastating on her psyche?
“Take care of him,” he said to her. “We need to get moving.”
She still didn’t respond. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Tricia! We don’t have a lot of time. Get yourself under control.”
Tricia looked at him, crying and distant. “She…she took me…I couldn’t…”
“Richard is going to die,” Jayson said. “Unless we help him. We need more antibiotics to fight his infection, and we aren’t getting them here.”
Her eyes focused a little bit, and she looked down at Richard. He was breathing peacefully now, but shallowly. “He saved my life.”
“Then don’t let him die.”
She looked up, unconvinced, but she did nod.
Jayson found another roll of tape in the kit and set about tying up the woman and the engineer. He did take a few moments to bandage the wound on the back of the brunette’s head, just to make sure it wasn’t too bad. He didn’t know who she was, and Tricia didn’t seem able or willing to tell him. Best not to let someone he didn’t know die. At least not yet.
“Watch them,” he said. Tricia didn’t look at him, but she did nod again.
Then he headed back up to the engine. He took a few minutes to familiarize himself with the controls. There were a lot of knobs and dials, but after a few minutes of trial and error, he managed to get the engine up and running.
It shuddered to life and started grinding forward once more.
Jayson sat in the chair.
All at once, the exhaustion hit him. The adrenaline poured out of his body, leaving him a weak and lifeless husk. He was starving, weak, and sore throughout every muscle.
But he still didn’t have time to rest. He slowly brought the train up to speed, peering forward and watching the tracks ahead. The lights didn’t go very far, and he couldn’t see more than a few dozen meters.
“It’s no wonder the engineer couldn’t see me,” he muttered.
A few minutes passed. He watched the tracks, but every few seconds, he felt his eyes slip closed. They simply did not want to stay open. He felt miserably exhausted, past the point of caring where he fell asleep. All his mind cared about was that it could shut down.
“No,” he muttered. “Can’t fall asleep.”
He fought for another minute or two, determined to stay awake until the train reached the Academy.
Naturally, he fell asleep mid-thought.
6
Jayson awoke with a start, disoriented and afraid. It was painfully cold and he was leaning sideways against a metal frame, almost lying flat. The world was tilted…or something…but he couldn’t quite tell why. Whatever had happened was in his semi-conscious memory. All he knew was that something felt wrong, but he couldn’t tell what it was.
A second later, he could.
The left wheels of the engine thudded back down on the rails as the train flew around a turn. The motion jolted him to full awareness, almost throwing him out of the engineer’s chair, and he cursed in fear and frustration.
It was light out, early morning, and the train was thundering down the tracks. What had seemed slow in the trees was now dangerously fast on the curves. They were up the mountain on switchbacks. A light snow had begun to fall, and the landscape was drastically different from where they’d just left.
Tight switchbacks, Jayson remembered suddenly, and getting tighter. They’d slowed down a lot before reaching this point on his first trip up the mountain. It was sheer luck, he realized, that the train hadn’t derailed during that last turn.
He fought down rising panic, wracked his brain, and remembered the control scheme of the dashboard. He skimmed it over, picked a lever at random, and yanked back on it. The engine started shuddering on the rails, but they didn’t slow down.
“Damn it,” he said, glancing around. He quickly pushed that one back into position and picked another one. They were coming up to the next switchback, and this was far worse than the last one. They would derail if they reached it at this speed.
He grabbed hold of the next lever and yanked it back. There was a loud screeching sound as the brakes engaged.
The train slowed to a crawl. They edged up to the next turn at a fraction of the pace. The next curve they passed went much smoother. The wheels stayed firmly on the tracks.
Jayson breathed a sigh of relief. He set the speed on the lowest setting and relaxed back into the chair, rubbing his hands and blowing on them. It was cold now, a lot colder than it had been the first time they rode up to the Academy, and he wondered how cold it got later in the season.
It took only a minute to realize he needed something to cover up with: a coat or blanket. He climbed out of the cab, dropped to the ground, and waited for the passenger cars to catch up.
At the slow speed, it was easy to keep pace. He walked up, pulled the door open, and slipped inside the car.
Not a lot had changed. Tricia was still sitting on the floor with Richard’s head in her lap. She had stopped crying and was idly twirling his curly hair. She looked exhausted and hurt, eyes haunted.
The other woman, the one he’d tied up, was still in her seat. Though now she also had a bag over her head. Jayson looked at it curiously and then at Tricia.
Tricia shrugged in reply. “I’m not sure if the bag helps,” she said, “but it can’t hurt.”
“I see,” he said.
Jayson went over to the med kit and dug inside. He checked over Tricia’s previous head injury. It looked well healed from their time spent in the forest, so he checked his own leg. The wound was scabbed over and rough, so he spent a few minutes cleaning it and re-bandaging it. Then he popped some painkillers.
The numb feeling spread through his body in only seconds. It was like heaven.
She shivered. “It got cold.”
“I know what you mean,” Jayson said sleepily. “I wonder if there are any blankets in here.”
“There aren’t. I checked.”
Jayson nodded. Then he hesitated before asking, “What happened, Tricia? Why are you…?”
She was silent for a long second, then she shivered again. This time, it had nothing to do with the weather. “She was in my mind.”
“What?”
“She was in my mind,” she repeated.
Jayson shook his head. “I don’t understand. What do you mean ‘in your mind’?”
“I mean she was inside my goddamned mind,” Tricia said angrily, tears streaking down her cheeks. The emotion was sudden, startling Jayson. “Controlling me. I wanted to move, but she wouldn’t let me. I could feel her in there, playing around like I was some toy, but I could only watch as she…”
Jayson sat on the floor next to her. He reached out and put a hand on her arm. “That seems…”
“Impossible,” Tricia finished, grabbing his hand and squeezing. “But it’s true.”
“She’s one of them,” a voice said groggily. A gun appeared in Tricia’s hand from nowhere, aiming at the engineer as he woke up.
Her hand was shaking.
“Easy,” Jayson said, gently taking the gun, “it’s the engineer. And he’s tied up.”
Tricia let out a deep breath and relaxed. “Sorry, I’m just…”
“It’s okay,” he said. He turned to the engineer. In better lighting Jayson saw that he was a plain-looking little man, balding and fat. His face was very round and his eyes too close together.
Right now, he was staring intently at the woman with a bag on her head, fear evident in his eyes.
“What do you mean?” Jayson asked. “What do you mean she’s one of them?”
“What she did to your friend, she did to me too,” the man said quietly. “You should kill her, now, while you have the chance.”
“You mean she controlled your mind?”
The man winced and nodded. “Just for the fun of it, I think. But her sister is worse. Way worse.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Jayson said. “What you’re talking about just isn’t possible.”
“I thought the same thing until about a year ago. Then that bitch Maven showed up. And she…she killed…”
Jayson had heard the name before. She was all over the news, one of the twin sisters that came with Darius Gray when he rebelled. She was on his new Council, one of his Generals. Together, the newscasters proclaimed, they would help build a new world with fairness for all.
Darius was at the head of the new Union.
So, this must be…
“Shit,” Jayson said, dropping his face into his hands. “You mean the sisters? This is one of them?”
“‘Devils’ is more appropriate,” the engineer said with a shudder. He glanced over at Jayson. “They serve Darius. They have…powers. Alyssa can control minds. And Maven…Maven used her mind to grab me and squeeze.”
“Squeeze?”
“Imagine being caught in a vice grip that’s slowly tightening.”
“Telekinesis?”
The man shrugged. “Call it what you want. I call it scary.”
“Is Maven here?”
“No, Thank God. Alyssa is bad. Cruel. The other one, she’s crazy.”
“A crazy woman with special powers,” Jayson said skeptically. “Forgive me if I have trouble believing you.”
The engineer nodded grimly at Tricia. “Just look at your friend.”
Jayson was still skeptical, but he had to admit it made a sort of logical sense. Tricia was rock solid in her demeanor, but she clearly believed that such a thing happened. Jayson didn’t want to believe, but mostly because if he admitted something like that was possible…
“Does the Ministry know?” he asked.
“They’d have to,” the man said with a sharp nod. “But here’s the scarier question: did the Ministry do this to them?”
Jayson wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
7
“When I moved here, the Silvent Academy had thirty trainers,” the engineer explained a while later. Jayson was sitting in one of the seats watching the snow fall. It wasn’t clinging to the ground yet, so it was still early in the season. “And about two hundred students. They were the Hammers. Greatest soldiers you would ever see. I was proud to work here.”
“I’ve heard the Hammers were genetically engineered,” Jayson said.
The man shrugged. “Could be possible, sure.”
“Genetic engineering is illegal.”
“So is murder. It’s unethical, and we can leave it at that. I won’t make judgments one way or the other. I will say that these men and women were huge. Especially in those suits of armor. Looked like something out of a movie. Outside the suits, they were like normal men. Inside…”
“They were trained here?” Jayson asked. “But not anymore?”
“Their training facilities were moved to the Core. Closer to Axis. That was twenty-some years ago. After that, things out here died out. People left, the city fell apart. A few stayed on. Alexander Robertson was headmaster. He bought the land for pennies and kept the place open, but there weren’t any students. I stayed on because I’ve got nowhere else to go.
“Then about a year ago, Maven showed up. Alexander told me she was scarred as a little girl. The Ministry threw acid in her face to punish her for disobeying. Nearly killed her.”
“That’s horrible,” Tricia muttered.
“If you met her,” said the engineer, “you’d wish they finished the job.”
“So, she came to the Academy?”
The engineer nodded. “On behalf of Darius Gray. Said she wanted the place reopened. We said there were no students, so she told us she’d find some. Send them here. Alexander would train them and Darius would pay. It would be just like when he trained the Hammers.”
“By dumping them into the middle of the forest?”
The man chuckled sardonically. “Hell no. I think Robertson figured out that he’d signed a deal with the devil shortly after. Maven told him how he would modify the training. This was all Maven’s plan. She insisted on it. Said any training should be like the real thing. If all of you died, she’d just get a new batch of students. Sink or swim.”
“If they don’t teach us anything, then it’s not really training,” Jayson said.
“Didn’t I tell you she was crazy?” the engineer asked. “I don’t know what the Ministry did to that little girl, but she’s turned into a terrifying young woman.” He glanced out the window, furrowing his brows. “We’re almost to the Academy. Who’s up front?”
“No one,” Jayson said. “It’s cold as hell out there.”
“Well, you’re going to want to get up there soon. The tracks end after the Academy, and we’ll end up in a pond if we don’t get stopped in time. Make sure to throttle down to four before making the final turn and check the ELM gauge to make sure—”
“You do it,” Jayson said, standing up and walking over. He cut the tape on the engineer’s wrists. The short man rubbed them gratefully. “You aren’t going to screw us, right?”
“Not a chance,” the man said. Then he hesitated. “But I will give you a heads-up: She’s important. Like, major big league. And I’m pretty sure you pissed her off.”
Jayson exchanged a glance with Tricia. “Do you think we should turn around? Head to the city instead?” he asked.
The engineer laughed. “Trust me, your best bet is to hold your head high and pretend you did nothing wrong. She isn’t dead, just a little bruised. And you hit her in the head. If you get lucky, she won’t even remember what happened.”
“Encouraging,” Jayson mumbled.
The engineer slid the door open. A cool rush of air flowed inside along with swirling flecks of snow. The man paused. “Whatever you do now, though,” he said, “don’t take that bag off her head.”
Then he jumped out and ran toward the front cab. Jayson slid the door shut behind him. He leaned against the door and let out a long sigh.
“This,” he said to Tricia as he sat back down, “is turning out to be the worst two weeks of my life.”
