Natesa strode into the cavern, exuding confidence and purpose. She stopped just inside the chamber and her silhouette was framed by the arch of the tunnel as she stood there, hands on hips, looking like she’d just walked on stage and expected everyone to applaud. On her heels were two men armed with rifles and spurs. Not milits, but hired mercs. Proof that this trip wasn’t authorized by the Crib.
Natesa glared at Edie as she made her approach, but even she couldn’t help being distracted by the sights. She looked around quickly, in awe. Her mercs held back, ignoring the scenery. Their focus was on the woman who’d hired them to protect her.
Natesa noticed the children, partially hidden by the growths filling the cavern. She picked her way toward them, forcing Edie to back up farther, only to stop again when she saw what they were doing.
“What’s going on?”
“They’re communicating with the biocyph.” Edie’s gaze swept over Natesa’s tailored jacket and flight suit, searching for the detonator that would kill Finn. “Just as you taught them to do,” she added sarcastically.
The children remained in their huddled group. The girls’ attention was now on Natesa. Galeon moved away, gravitating toward Finn’s chamber. He sought to protect his friend.
Natesa followed him and peered up at the cocoon where Finn’s body was nestled a few meters off the ground. “So, there he is. Is he dead?”
Galeon bravely strode up to Natesa and stopped a few paces in front of her, hands on his hips. “He’s not dead. We helped him. You leave him alone!”
“Pris,” Natesa said, stepping back and raising her voice. “You’re coming with me. It’s time to go.”
Pris didn’t move. Galeon looked over his shoulder at her, then back to Natesa. “She doesn’t want to go with you.”
“She’s my daughter. She’s coming with me.’
“She told us you want to kill Finn, and he’s our friend.”
“Wretched child,” Natesa mumbled, and turned her glare on Edie, who had edged closer. Natesa held up one hand to reveal a small device in her palm. “He’s quite correct, however. This detonator is linked to the bomb in your lag’s head.”
“Don’t hurt him!” Galeon rushed Natesa, his arms outstretched. Edie lunged after him and grabbed him around the waist just before he reached her.
Natesa snatched back her hand, her eyes gleaming. “All I want is Pris. My men will enforce my wishes, but I’d rather things went smoothly.”
“What about the other children?” Edie said. “Who’s coming for them?”
“I understand there’s a fleet of Crib ships on the way. The children will be quite safe in that habitat outside until then. They will be taken back to work, and you will be arrested and shipped off to the nastiest prison camp I can find.”
While Natesa talked, Edie surreptitiously linked to the biocyph commlink on her belt and silently questioned Haller.
“How much longer do you need?”
—Almost done. The children’s work is complete. Is that Natesa?
With her e-shield on, Natesa was indistinguishable to Haller from any other human. And he had no ears to hear their conversation.
“Yes, and she has the detonator. Don’t do anything to alarm her.”
—Very well. But if anyone starts shooting in here, I have little control over the instinctive retaliation that will follow.
“Pris,” Natesa called sweetly. “Come, my darling. I’m here to take you home.”
Pris pushed herself to her feet, a little unsteadily. “Where? The Learo Dochais?”
“No, we don’t work there anymore. I’ll find us a new home, somewhere just as nice.”
“But it wasn’t very nice. No house, no river, no dogs or trees.”
“Trees?” Natesa turned a quizzical look on Edie. “What have you told her?”
“They just want to be kids, Natesa.”
“What would you know?”
Edie’s anger rose in a heated rush of blood. “How can you ask that? I know exactly how they feel. I understand the lure of the datastream. I know why they’ve submitted to you and want to please you. I understand the feeling of being used. I know why, in the end, they will rebel against you. Asking one of them to call you Mother won’t change that. She sees through you, as I did.”
Edie stopped, terrified she’d pushed Natesa too far. The woman was shaking. The children watched, wide-eyed.
Edie fumbled for her link to Haller, but Natesa saw the movement.
“Don’t!” Natesa said, waving the detonator about.
Edie froze.
“Mother, no!”
Pris’s plaintive cry was the only thing that could reach Natesa. Her eyes flicked to her would-be daughter and she hesitated. She gave a quick signal to the mercs, and they approached Edie, moving awkwardly through the resin.
“Take that from her,” Natesa ordered.
The mercs descended on Edie. One captured her arms while the other yanked the device off her belt and handed it to Natesa.
“What’s this?” She recognized the biocyph component. “Do you use this to control the so-called intelligence on this planet?”
“I’ve no control over the planet.” Edie struggled against the merc, who was immovable.
“Well, something is controlling it,” Natesa said. “We arrived in the system to find a dead commsat, two crashed ships on the surface, a mere handful of survivors. It looks like Theron’s grand project has ended the same way as mine. Except that I survived.”
She tossed the commlink aside, flicking her wrist sharply to eject it through her e-shield barrier. Then she gave a quick signal to the merc holding Edie to release her.
“Take Pris back to the ship,” Natesa told him.
“Let them all leave,” Edie said. “If you care about them at all, don’t let them see this.”
Natesa considered for a moment. “Very well. Take them.”
The merc looked from one child to another, as if deciding how best to round them up. He assessed Galeon as the difficult one and went for him. Galeon was having none of it. He dodged the merc with a furious squall, but there was nowhere to run. The merc captured him easily.
“Galeon, it’s okay. Go with him,” Edie said, trying to sound reassuring. “All of you.”
“We don’t want to leave Macky,” Pris said. “We just fixed everything and now we have to go?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. But it’s not safe in here.”
The younger girls traipsed out ahead of the merc, who carried a struggling Galeon, defiant to the last. Pris went along, too. Miserably.
Edie faced Natesa across the chamber, hope drained. “Why all the drama? You could’ve killed Finn an hour ago from orbit.”
“I wanted the satisfaction of watching him die. As far as I’m concerned, he should’ve been executed as a traitor when he was first captured. He’s been on borrowed time for five years, and in that time he’s caused immeasurable damage. He’s turned you against me, against everything I taught you. If I dig deep enough, I’m sure I’ll find his hand guiding you to sabotage Prisca using that module you hijacked.”
She was wrong in every respect. Edie had started turning away long before she met Finn, and it was she who’d persuaded him to join her cause and help the Fringers. But Edie couldn’t explain that now, didn’t know what she could say to calm Natesa down and save Finn when the woman was so determined to carry out the sentence she thought he deserved.
Edie’s gaze was glued to the detonator in Natesa’s hand, the hand that she raised higher with each irate word, as if building to a climax. Edie watched helplessly, every instinct telling her to pounce.
“You disappoint me.” Natesa’s voice shook with emotion. “You threw away everything, and I will never understand why.”
Edie gave in to her instinct, her last remaining hope for Finn. She launched herself at Natesa, fixated on Natesa’s left hand. A sharp pain lanced through her injured forearm. The force of her attack knocked Natesa backward. Her hands closed around Natesa’s wrist, slippery and staticky because of the e-shield. She slammed Natesa’s arm on the ground as they both fell, flinging the detonator from her hand. It skittered away a few meters.
Edie scampered after it on hands and knees, kicking out at Natesa’s attempt to grab her legs. Something was wrong with her arm. It buckled beneath her, spurting blood. Her mind backtracked a few seconds and she realized she’d heard a shot. She glanced back to see the remaining merc pointing a spur at her, a deadly rifle held in his other hand. He had aimed to wound, not to kill.
But now he would pay for firing his weapon. A tremor swept through the cavern, and the curtains of sap quivered. The ground vibrated and ruptured, and thick leathery stalks studded with bulbous nodules rose up from the crevices. Edie was thrown onto her back. Her arm throbbed with pain.
The shimmying, swaying stalactites broke apart in places to send flailing braids through the air. The merc fired repeatedly into the gummy resin, his explosive rifle bullets splattering it everywhere. The subterranean stalks snaked toward him, the fronds at their tips curling into speckled fingers. The stalks, riddled with nodules, had glowing veins that supported and moved them. Now black fluid pumped through the veins and the nodules erupted into serrated spikes.
Natesa was yelling something but the merc’s screams and weaponsfire drowned her out. The coiled, grasping fingers tangled around the merc’s legs and pulled him down, twisting his body into grotesque postures as he struggled. With a hiss, his e-shield was knocked out.
The spikes buried themselves in exposed flesh and spurted milky sap that mingled with blood in pink streaks. The merc spasmed, gasping for breath as the spikes plunged into his body. Neuroxin…those spikes were poisoning him. Encased and immobilized, the merc was swallowed up by the ground.
To Edie’s horror, in the chaos, the column of vines holding Finn started to wilt and collapse.
Pain from her reopened wound overwhelmed her and she feared blacking out. She struggled to her knees, only to be thrown onto her belly as shuddering waves rocked the cavern. She focused on the detonator. A hand reached to grab it—it took her another second to realize it wasn’t her hand. Natesa had got there first.
But Natesa could not escape the reaction rippling across the floor. The gashes that cracked open the ground spread toward her, and more prehensile stalks unfolded from within. Natesa held up the detonator in what might have been a triumphant gesture, but from the look on her face she knew the merc’s fate would soon be hers.
Edie expected a threat. Instead, she got a plea.
“Save me. Tell it to stop.”
Edie managed to get to her knees, one hand clutching her forearm to stem the flow of blood. She couldn’t make it stop, but she had to make Natesa stop.
“Throw me the detonator and I’ll try,” she bluffed.
Sticky claws clamped around Natesa’s boots and slithered up her legs. The e-shield, for as long as it lasted, would prevent her from feeling much, but seeing herself being devoured was quite enough to terrify her.
Edie held her breath, hoping beyond reason that Natesa would show Finn mercy in her final moments.
Natesa pressed the trigger.
At the sound of the muffled explosion, Edie whirled around, her eyes seeking out Finn in the tangled nest of vines that had collapsed into a mushy heap. The few remaining vines encasing him unraveled and spilled him out in a puddle of milky fluid. He lay curled up on the ground, fine tendrils still buried in his flesh. A bloody patch extended from his temple all the way around one side of his scalp.
Edie ran to him and fell to her knees beside his body, pressed her palms to his chest, refusing to believe, numb to the truth. She heard Natesa’s strangled gasps, smelled the sharp earthy scent from the crushed vines, felt the stinging fire in her arm…
Finn’s heart thumped under her hands.
Edie opened her senses to hope. To the singe of burned vegetation amid the ruined vines where the bomb had exploded, the living tendrils pulsing under Finn’s flesh, and, finally, the slow rise and fall of his chest. Haller had removed the bomb in time and it had detonated nearby. She pressed her ear to Finn’s chest to reassure herself of his heartbeat. It was slow but steady. His skin was cool and damp and smeared with sap.
The thrashing and churning calmed down. The fissures in the ground pressed together. Natesa was gone.
Edie retrieved the biocyph commlink, clipped it to her belt, and jacked in.
—He will live.
“Thank you.”
—The children taught me a great deal.
“Such as?”
—The way they work together, that diamond formation that funnels and controls the datastream…I have never seen anything so elegant and powerful, and so I copied its structure. Imagine how I might multiply my processing power by joining with other worlds using this formation!
Edie didn’t want to ask why he would want to multiply his processing power. As she wiped blood from Finn’s face, the tips of the tendrils withdrew from his skin with popping noises. He stirred, barely conscious.
“Haller, I’m going to help Finn out of here and then I’ll come back and merge with you, like I promised. Don’t send out that blast until I get back.”
—Hurry. I can’t wait long.
She added impatience to the growing list of Haller’s personality flaws. This was not the kind of all-powerful entity that humanity could count on. With no possibility of destroying the commsat any time soon, merging with Haller in order to destroy him was Edie’s only option.
Her mind focused only on the immediate task—get Finn to safety—so she wouldn’t have to think about what was to come afterward.
She leaned over Finn again and gently shook his shoulders. “Wake up. We’re leaving.”
His eyes flickered open and he groaned.
“You’re alive, Finn. You’re free.”