Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (7 page)

He didn’t. He just aimed into the alley, unmoving while she struggled to catch her breath. After a minute, he lowered his pistol and glanced back at her. “Shoot what?”

She struggled to her feet but had to put her hands on her knees to ride out a coughing fit before she could respond. “Shoot…sir?”

Sam’s smile transformed his plain face, like always. It also made Nikki want to hug him, despite how much she imagined it would hurt right now. He had that effect on her. He had since the first time they’d met.

As she struggled to get her breathing back under control, Nikki moved closer to Sam so she could see up the alley. Aside from the harmless trash and whatnots, it was empty and dead silent.

Sam’s smile was gone. He was all business again as he scanned the alley. “What happened?”

Nikki opened her mouth but ended up closing it again after a wordless pause. She had no idea where to start. She couldn’t exactly tell him what she’d been doing or why. She was fairly sure he’d like her plan even less than Michael had, if such a thing was possible.
 

But that wasn't the real reason she wasn't blurting out what had happened. Staring into the empty alley, Nikki saw nothing but the doubt that had become way too common for her over the past few months. Having her dead brother in her head had her questioning more than just her emotions. It had her questioning reality itself. The line between delusion and reality was more than a little blurred for her these days. Believing she'd just seen Gideon tearing apart a Runner, when Gideon had been gone for months, was more than a bit of a stretch.
 

Sam holstered his pistol and looked over at her. He didn’t have the most expressive face in the world when he wasn’t smiling, but he knew she was wavering on a lie, that much she could tell.

“I picked a fight with Runners.” She opted for simple and true. Lying to Sam made her feel like crap, probably because he was always upfront with her. Instead of saying things like, “this is nothing” or “you’ll be fine,” he came right out with “internal bleeding,” “concussion,” and “you’re going to die.” They had a fun past.

“How many Runners?” he asked, looking her over, probably for obvious injuries.

She shrugged. “How many are there?”

He smiled a little, but when he met her gaze, all she saw was concern. “Are you hurt?”

“I’ll live. This is worst of it, I think.” She held out her busted left hand, which didn’t look nearly as bad as it felt. Her knuckles were just a little swollen and red behind her middle two fingers.

After a nod and eyebrow raise to ask for permission, Sam took her hand in both of his and started probing around with his strong fingers, which was fine for the most part, but when he got to those two knuckles she had to choke down a mouthful of curses. “Can you squeeze it?” he asked when he finally let go.

“Um, yeah, but you just did, so—”

He laughed quietly and shook his head. “I mean make a fist with it.”

Unlike most people, he got her jokes. What’s more, he thought they were funny. It was one of his best qualities. In fact, there’d been a time when she’d considered breaking every dating rule she had for Sam. There’d been a time when they could have become more than friends.

Turned out she could make a fist. It just hurt like crazy. “Son of a—dammit!”

“Good,” he said with a nod.

“Good? Do you know what 'dammit' means?”

“It’s not broken,” he said, that small smile lighting his dark face again. “Just a bone bruise, maybe a small crack—”

“You’re a small crack,” she mumbled.

“—Nothing that won’t heal on its own,” he finished, his lingering grin telling her he hadn’t missed her jab. “I agree. You’ll live.”

She was looking in his eyes when he said the last part, so she saw the shift. Even though he broke eye contact to look around the area, she saw his smile crumble. Whatever they might have been once upon a time, they weren't in the here and now. Something had changed between them.

“Let’s get back to base so you can ice that hand,” he said, already moving toward the skimmer he had parked nearby. He didn’t look at her again. He just straddled the skimmer and started checking its systems while she climbed on behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. Then he released the brake and guided the skimmer out over the water.

The change with Sam had occurred about the time everything else in her life went down the crapper. It all came back to Michael, to when he…

You can say it, Nikki
.
When I died
, Michael’s soft voice said in her head. He was barely louder than the quiet engine of the skimmer as it hummed over the waves of the Sound, but she heard every word as his voice faded.
You could also talk to Padre—Sam, I mean. You could ask him what changed. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to somebody besides me
.

Nikki wasn’t so sure. First off, she was terrible at talking to people about her feelings, or their feelings, or feelings in general. Empathizing wasn’t really in her bag of tricks. Second, she wasn’t sure Sam was the one who was different these days. Maybe it was all her. Her biggest reason for keeping to herself, after all, was her nagging fear that she was just flat-out crazy.

Nikki rested her head against Sam’s back and closed her eyes. The steady hum of the skimmer and the sound of the water below were working hard to lure her away from consciousness. As she drifted off, she imagined what Sam would say if she told him she’d been talking to Michael. She snorted a laugh and shifted to find a more comfortable spot on Sam’s back.
 

She knew what her reaction would be in his place. She’d get out the padded jacket and the rubber cutlery. That’s why she couldn’t talk to Sam, Elias, or anyone else about what was going on. She couldn’t ask anybody else to believe Michael was really inside her head when she wasn’t sure herself.

Gideon

When Gideon awoke, he knew he was back in his body. He also knew, even before he opened his eyes, that he was not where he'd fallen asleep.

He was in a shanty, by the looks of it. The slanted metal roof and thin walls let in slivers of morning light that did more to confuse his eyes than illuminate. The furnishings, what little he could make out of them, were strewn at random about the room with no sense of order, some clearly broken if the extreme angles of the shadowy outlines were any indication. And the smell…

Despite the thick odor, Gideon took a long breath to steel himself. The metallic tang underlying the room's general stench was unmistakable.
 

He stood and fumbled at the wall behind him, running his hands over the boards covering the window from the inside. He knew what he would see when he let in the light, but as much as he wanted to run from it, he didn't let that stop him from ripping away the half-rotted boards.

He turned away from the painful daylight and lifted his gaze to the carnage. Whatever he'd expected, this was worse.
 

Gideon spent several moments just breathing slowly, forcing a rational detachment his body didn't want to feel. The emotional barrier he'd gained when the Event fused him with the creature was there waiting for him. He could slip behind it, separate himself from his emotions the way he had so many times over the years. But he refused to do so.
 

He was afraid to do so.

He couldn't risk giving up control again. If his alien side was growing stronger, he couldn't give in to any part of it. He would protect his emotions himself, build his own walls. He started to do so slowly, brick by brick as he forced himself to look at what was left of the people in the small room.

When he dropped his gaze to his hands, to the blood covering them, his wall crumbled.

Worlds Apart

Elias

The afternoon sun on his back did little to warm Elias as he stared out over the wind-whipped waves below and the solitary grave on the bluff before him.
 

He hadn't come out here to visit the grave, not at first. But as usual, his feet had ended up bringing him here anyway.
 

He'd come outside to check the grounds, specifically the new sensor emplacements Gram and Padre had installed to enhance perimeter security. The sensors were installed correctly and placed to maximize their field of view while minimizing their sight profile. He'd known they would be. Gram was a talented engineer with a wealth of experience under his belt, and when it came to sight lines, concealment, and anticipating paths of approach, Elias would trust Padre's judgment over any man with twice his experience. Yet he still checked their work. Lately, he'd been double checking everything.

His eyes drifted down to Michael's headstone again, and Elias had to make a conscious effort to unclench his jaw.
 

He recognized his recent micro-managing as a coping mechanism. He was overcompensating, going above and beyond what was needed to make sure every task was carried out properly, to make sure there were no mistakes that might put a member of the team in jeopardy, that might get someone hurt. He'd lost a man for the first time in years, and he was doing everything in his power now to make sure that didn't happen again.

His overreaction made sense to him, so even though he knew he was overcompensating, and why, he held his course. If some part of him needed to micro-manage for a time in order to deal with the loss, to deal with the guilt a CO couldn't help but harbor after losing a soldier, then micro-manage he would. He knew fighting what his mind needed right now would be a losing battle. He'd been here before. Michael wasn't the first soldier he'd lost, and despite the doubled efforts, he most likely wouldn't be the last.

Movement drew his eye to the forested hills to the south. Roughly four hundred meters away, a blue-gray blur streaked across a clearing with increasing speed before disappearing into the trees edging the bluff.
 

Impact was hard at it again, either testing the new sensors or training. He'd been relentless since his run-in with Savior, pushing himself to the breaking point every day and then pushing that much harder the next. He was coping as well, in his own way. They all were.

Losing Michael had affected the whole team. No one could pretend otherwise. No one else’s pain could compare to Nikki's, Elias knew, but he also couldn't pretend what he was feeling was just CO guilt. He wouldn't pretend. Michael had been more than a soldier to Elias, or he should have been.
 

Elias had held back though. He hadn't told the twins where they'd really come from. He hadn't told them his role in Savior's experiment. He'd held back because he'd convinced himself Michael already knew. When he'd looked in the boy's eyes after Gideon told them how Savior created them, he'd seen something. In Michael's eyes he'd seen an understanding of the real reason Elias had betrayed his oath and taken them out of the facility. Michael had looked at him like he knew exactly where he and his sister had come from.

At the time, that had been enough for Elias. Michael already knew, and Nikki would rather not. So he'd told himself to wait. When Michael was ready, they'd talk about it, but not before. Michael was the cautious, careful twin, after all. He acted only after thinking everything through deliberately and weighing the consequences, unlike his sister. At least, that's what Elias remembered of them as children, and the bits and pieces of the twin's lives he'd viewed after finding them again convinced him those traits had grown stronger over the years.

Elias looked back down at the stone marking Michael's final resting place, his jaw tightening again. It hadn't been enough, not for either of them, and he'd known that deep down. He should have said more when he'd had the chance. Instead, he'd let fear and guilt hold him back. That regret was gnawing at him.

"There you are," a gruff voice barked from behind Elias.
 

He turned to see Gram hobbling his way toward him from the church, a tablet in hand.

"You hound me for this damn thing, then make me chase you all over God's green earth to turn it over," Gram grumbled around labored breaths. “Do you know how much fun spiral steps are on this hip?”

Elias suppressed a small smile as he watched the stocky engineer limp closer. He knew Gram was pushing seventy-five, but he also knew the man's attitude had been just as prickly when he was in his prime. Gram Simmons might very well have come out of the womb giving the doctor an earful for not warming up his hands.

"Apologies, Gram," he said with only a slight hesitation. His instinct to say Chief was still hard to overcome. Gram was as proud of being retired as he had been of his decorated enlisted service. Using rank was just about the worst mistake a man could make with Gram, second only to calling him "Sir."

Gram huffed as he held out the tablet. "Well, here it is. All i's and t's dotted. Pretty as you please."

Elias took the tablet and scanned down through the inventory report. Again, this wasn't something he had to check in detail, but, his coping mechanism notwithstanding, if Elias didn't give the report some attention after the effort Gram had put in, he was sure to get an earful. He was three screens in before Gram broke the silence.

"That kid makes me tired just looking at him."

Elias looked up and followed Gram's gaze to see Impact disappearing into the trees in the other direction.

"Whatever floats his boat, I guess. We all have our own ways to deal," Gram mumbled half to himself, his mind apparently traveling the same path Elias'sf had been following.

Elias skimmed through the rest of the report before he asked, "How's she doing?" He didn't have to say who "she" was.

"About like you'd expect," Gram replied after a pause, his gravelly voice making each word into a burbling growl.
 

Elias nodded but tightened his mouth. Gram clearly didn't think everything about his granddaughter's condition was as expected. No one did.
 

Kate had suffered what should have been a mortal head wound at the hands of one of Savior's soldiers. She should have died on the spot. She would have if not for Gideon and Michael. The energy they put into her healed the wound and left only a small scar to show for it, on the outside.