Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (56 page)

"Agreed," Gideon said quickly. "I'll bring him in the shuttle. Just the two of us."

"And once we get there," Elias went on, "he doesn't spend a second with her without one of us standing between them." He didn't need to say who "he" was. His tone left no room for doubt. "Not one second. Understood?"

"Understood," Gideon agreed, again without pause. He didn't blink at the commands. Clearly he remembered their deal. Even if not, he had to see Elias was close to the breaking point.
 

At the edge of the clearing closest to the facility, Savior stepped from the trees and started toward them, looking calm, completely at ease, perfectly pleased with himself.
 

Gideon gave Elias a final nod and moved to head Savior off.
 

Elias watched the two of them engage in a low discussion. He watched Savior cast a look back at the transport as they walked to the shuttle, his expression controlled but almost amused. Elias continued to watch them until they climbed into the four-seater. Despite the distance and the darkness, he thought he saw a smile on Savior's lips before the shuttle door swung down.
 

No,
he thought.
Not again. Not this time.

He'd marched one child right into Savior's hands. Then he'd buried that child with his own hands. Not again. He wouldn't let Savior take the other—not while he had breath.
 

Elias pulled his gaze from the rising shuttle and headed for the transport's ramp, one thought steady in his mind.

He would keep Nikki safe.
 

No matter what it took.

Choices

Nikki

Nikki tightened her hands on the front of the copilot seat between her legs and leaned closer to the windshield. On the camera feed superimposed before her, Elias and Coop breached the building under the dome, moving into the darkness with weapons at the ready. Somewhere on the other side where she couldn't see, Ace and Sam were doing the same.

Breached was the wrong word. They didn't have to work to get in. The doors were lying in twisted heaps on the crater floor—not the team's doing. Whatever was hidden under the fabric and wire dome was in no way secure. Not anymore.

That didn't do anything to ease Nikki's tension though. Any number of those creatures could be in there, waiting to pounce on people she cared about, people she was finally willing to admit she cared about.

They weren't just creatures though, she knew. They were…descendants. They were people. Or what people would become, in a timeline that may or may not have anything to do with hers, maybe.

"Aaagh. Makes my brain hurt," she mumbled.
 

"What was that, love?" Corso asked from the pilot seat.

"Nothing. Just…" She trailed off into a shrug.

He nodded and rolled his eyes into a twisted smile. He got it. Some things just weren't worth thinking too much about. Others…

Nikki let her eyes focus past the feed and through the windshield, on the four-seater parked in front of them. Per Elias's order, Corso had parked the transport with its back to the dome to provide quick egress if the team needed it. The fact that this position let them keep a naked eye on the shuttle holding Gideon and Savior might have had a little something to do with the order.
 

She couldn't make out more than general silhouettes in the smaller shuttle, which was probably a good thing. Nikki didn't want to see him staring back at her with that knowing look in his eyes. She didn't want to see him acknowledge the hunger she knew was in her eyes.

She wanted to go to that shuttle. She wanted to go to him, and she hated herself for it. She was keeping her emotions in check though, hard as it was at the moment. She didn't want to get too upset and draw Michael out. Her self-disgust was bad enough. Having him feel her temptation would be more than she could bear right now.

"Clear," Elias said over the com. "Gideon, you need to see this."

Nikki stared at the transport's com as the doors of the four-seater swung open in the distance, mainly to keep her eyes off the man getting out to go inside with Gideon.

"That's it?" She gave the com an eyebrow raise, but it stayed silent. "What about us?"
 

"Us" was just the two of them. Impact and Cole had gotten the job of checking the area around the dome as soon as they landed, while Nikki and Corso got the job of sitting and waiting.
 

"Come now, love. Is the company so bad?" Corso asked.
 

Nikki ignored him.
 

She knew what Elias was doing. He was trying to keep Impact, Cole, and her away from Savior. Impact because he'd probably try to attack Savior, despite or because of the whole father situation. Cole—probably the same concern, minus the father part. Nikki—she had no idea what Elias thought she was going to do. How could she when she hadn't figured it out for herself?

On the camera feed, Gideon and Savior disappeared into the darkness under the dome.

"Well, I'm not just going to sit here," she snapped, pushing out of the seat. Corso made some argument, but Nikki didn't register it. She'd already hit the hatch release and started down the steps.

It occurred to her when she stepped off the ramp onto the dry, rocky ground, that this was her first trip inside the crater. She and Michael had made a couple of forays deep into the Wasteland, of course, when they were younger. That was the thing to do for most teens, a right of passage, of sorts. Not all of them came back though. The place was essentially a barren desert with no help to speak of if you ran out of supplies. She and Michael had gotten lucky both times.
 

Once they even made it all the way to the edge of the crater, close enough to read the "restricted area" signs and the radiation warnings. Nikki had wanted to press on—Michael hadn't. He won the argument that day. That was before she figured out his tells in paper-rock-scissors.

From the outside, the edge of the crater was pretty dramatic—a sharp ridge line curving into the distance as far as the eye could see in either direction. From the middle, where Nikki was walking now, it looked just like the rest of the Wasteland, if a little more stark. She couldn't tell she was in the center of a crater at all. It was too big to see when you were in the middle of it.

Made sense. Problems were the same way, which was why people paid attention to little problems rather than the big stuff.

Your food stash gets low, you make a trade to get more. A rock gets thrown through your window at night, you make a trade to get it patched up. Your kid gets hassled by burn pushers, you make a trade to have them run off. All little stuff you can see the whole of. But the fact that rival gangs running your section of the free zone are causing all that stuff to happen—you can't see the whole of that problem when you're in the middle of it. It's too big, so you ignore it.

The bottom of the dome arched up several meters off the ground in front of Nikki, yawning around the open doorway of the building underneath. The darkness beyond slowed her steps, but she wasn't about to back down now that she'd started moving. Getting left out of the loop was a little problem, after all, one she could see.

She stepped through the open doorway into an airlock, the modular kind. She'd seen plenty of these in the free zones. When flu outbreaks got bad enough to start jumping into the cities proper, the government assembled emergency quarantine centers made up of modular containers.
 

Airlock modules, like this one, had the latest scanners and seals to control who came in, and to make sure nothing gross got out. At least, that was the idea. This one was lit only by the reflected sunlight coming through the gaping hole Nikki stepped through. At the other end, the security panel stared at the floor with blind eyes, the doors it was supposed to seal buckled and pushed inward, letting the dusty wind whistle freely through.
 

Nikki eyed the doors as she walked across the empty airlock, her boots grinding crater grit into the floor plating. The tops of both doors were scored and torn with what had to be claw marks on the other side where something had forced its way through.
 

"Here's hoping we've already dealt with you," she whispered, pulling her gaze away as she turned sideways to shimmy through the gap.

The open area on the other side was bigger than she'd imagined, and even less secure. A handful of the modular rooms, including the busted airlock, were spaced evenly around the edge of the wide dome. Prefab wall panels connected the rooms to form an open-topped corral covered only by the dome's camo fabric, which had a number of small holes, plus the big one they'd seen from the satellite.
 

"Why'd they bother with an airlock?" Nikki said to herself, softly. Nobody had noticed her yet, and she was happy to keep it that way.

At least, she didn't think they'd noticed. Her eyes were still adjusting to the dim, fabric-filtered light. No lights were running under the dome. Nothing was running, actually, despite what looked—and probably walked and quacked—like the mightiest generator in the world.

On the other side of the generator, Gideon and Elias were in deep discussion next to an open-sided control module filled with dark equipment. By the looks of them, they wouldn't have noticed if Nikki had come in screaming.
 

Neither would Savior. He was transfixed by the centerpiece of the corral. Centered under the middle of the dome, standing on a big open dance floor of deck plating, was the mother of all Gateways.

The Gateway Gideon had first described, the original, had been barely more than door-sized, Nikki was
almost
sure. The copy Savior had built in his torture lab had been the same. The one he was staring at now was easily big enough to drive the four-seater through, maybe even the bigger transport.

"Solid thinking," she mumbled, nodding to herself. "If one the size of a door jacked up half the country, make the next one three times as big. That's education at work."

"You know what you're
not
good at?" Ace asked from nearby, making Nikki jump.
 

Nikki looked behind her to see the older woman standing next to two dark cabinets beside the airlock. The look in her eyes was more amused than Nikki expected—still plenty disapproving, but almost fondly so.

"Being bored?" Nikki tried.

"Close," Ace replied. "I was going to say following orders."

"Isn't that what I said?"

Ace nodded and glanced briefly at the debate near the dance floor. "I'm afraid you think so." She looked back at Nikki. "Well, if you're here, you're helping."
 

"What am I…" Nikki let the words die as she followed Ace's gaze to the body wedged between the cabinets—what was left of it.
 

It was a man, or had been. He'd been dead for a while though. Centuries, it seemed. He looked like a mummy in a jumpsuit.

Ace finished shaking out the body bag in her hands and laid it on the ground. Nikki didn't move until Ace prodded her, twice. "Come on, kiddo. No one deserves to be left like this."

Nikki nodded and moved to help. She tried to harden herself as she knelt beside Ace and took the offered gloves. She tried to ignore the tide of despair trying to well up inside her. It was a memory of pain, not the real thing. She knew that. She just had to remind herself it wasn't Michael under this torn and slashed jumpsuit.
 

It's just a person,
she started repeating to herself as they carefully extracted the shriveled man from where he'd tried to hide himself.
You don't know him.

Her mantra didn't help.
 

She felt Michael show up as the tide grew, but he didn't say anything. He was just…there, which helped more than any mantra could.

She and Ace maneuvered the body into the bag and sealed it. Then they lifted him together and started toward the back of the room.

"Then we set charges and level it," Elias was saying as Nikki and Ace passed. "All of it."
 

"We need to understand what happened here before we take that step," Gideon countered. "This equipment has been idle for weeks."

"Agreed," Savior said, strolling back toward them from the Gateway.
 

Nikki was glad Ace led them around the generator, temporarily cutting off their view of the debate. The look on Elias's face when Savior spoke was more unsettling than her current task.
 

When they got to the back of the dome, they headed to a storage module where Coop was shuffling boxes to make room. He had an identical bag at his feet, and Sam was approaching from the other side with a third draped over his shoulder.

How many people have these things killed?

Too many,
Michael answered.
The question is how many more will die before this ends.

From the sound of his voice and the surge of emotion she knew to be his, Nikki didn't think Michael was referring to just the creatures.

"What are we doing with them?" Nikki asked aloud.

"This storage is still airtight," Ace said. "What's left of them will keep longer in here."

"Like it's gonna matter," Coop said.

"Keep working, Corporal," Ace said evenly.
 

"You know I'm right, Ace." Like he hadn't picked up on the tone, Coop settled back on his heels instead of lifting the box under his hands. "This is a black site. Nobody's coming for these people, at least not to bury and grieve. I'm surprised they haven't sent a cleaning crew already. Isn't that what we're gonna to do? We came her to burn this thing down, right?"

Sam eased his bag down and met Nikki's eyes briefly. He gave Coop a hard glance but avoided looking at Ace. He didn't agree with Coop's decision to argue, but he knew Disney was right.
 

Judging by the look in Ace's eyes, she knew it too.

"What we're doing is still under discussion," Ace said with another glance back at the control module. "Until we have another, this is our plan. Understood?"