Secret Worlds (478 page)

It would be a tight fit for three, but Lena was small and they’d make it work. Alex settled in next to her behind the juncture of the trees. Their bodies were hidden behind the earth. He reached back for his binoculars, rare and prized, and held them to his eyes.

“Normal guard movement, focused in and not out,” he breathed. “Nothing else stirring. We’re good.” He glanced back at Jackson, who nodded acknowledgment. Alex turned to the activity report he’d been handed as the other agents scooted away. It said much the same. He folded it up and tucked it away until he needed to scrawl his own update on it for the team who’d relieve them.

She pulled her legs up and tucked her arms in between them and her body. She appeared content to wait out the dawn, and with it, the promised camp activity, in silence.

Dawn came more quickly to the prison at the edge of the plain than it did to them. Their position on the near side of the butte guaranteed them several more hours in the shadows. As the first fingers of light crept over the buildings below, activity began to stir.

Alex peered through the binoculars, first at the river, where he noted the paddleboat still hadn’t appeared, and then at the prison. “Shift’s changing,” he told them in an undertone, “won’t be long now before the first crews are sent out.”

He was right. Not even a full hour later, double doors opened up onto the yard and prisoners filed out. They formed into double rows. As the first of them headed out, turning to the left and heading out to the plains and the farms, more exited to shuffle into the center of the yard and form into lines.

Alex looked again, scanning over the men, trying to decide which provided the best angle.

“Let me look.” Lena said, her voice less than a whisper, muted by concern of discovery and by the numbers of the men below.

He glanced at her, nodded, and passed the binoculars over, pantomiming what each of the knobs on top did to sharpen her view and vary the amount of light, although the amplification was almost unnecessary now in the strengthening light.

As she put them to her eyes, he leaned in and spoke into her ear. “The best, closest angle to get a look at the collars they use to keep them from Sparking is along the edge of the butte, right before they cross out of view behind it.”

She nodded without commenting. She did focus down at the base of the butte as he suggested. He noted her heavy swallow and the thinning of her lips. She had not been collared in the room back at Azcon. Her experience had been traumatic but brief. They had to live with the current every hour of every day. After a moment, she slowly scanned to the side and up, returning her view to the prison. She was silent, but the anger radiated off of her in physical heat that Alex, sitting so close, could feel.

Lena stiffened. She sucked her breath in and her hands clutched around the glasses. She leaned in, as if getting those few inches closer to the scene far below would make what she watched clearer. Alex turned back to the prison. He didn’t see anything amiss—or not any more amiss than so many men like them being tortured, criminals or not. A smaller group of eight, not the usual twelve, caught his attention. They were smaller than the others, as well, and more rag-tag. Had the Council brought in boys?

“There are girls down there.” She kept her words low, but furious. She lowered the binoculars and passed them to him. Her face was pinched and mottled with rage. “In the yard. There are girls. Wearing those collars. I highly doubt they’re criminals.”

Alex looked at the rag-tag little group he’d marked as different. It had to be them. The view through the glasses arrowed him down the hillside as if he were standing right outside the yard.

The girls stood still, some of them shivering in waves in the peculiar way Lena had when she’d had the current flowing through her on the table. They weren’t cold. They were fighting a constant flow of electricity.

One of them, the tallest, seemed Lena’s age. Her long, dark blond hair hung lank around her shoulders. Her pale eyes burned with the same fury Lena’s did. The bright uniform was too snug across her full chest and hips and too short at the wrists and ankles. The collar snugged against her neck had a small chain of lights flowing one to the next in a constant stream of light, like a macabre red slash across her throat. He shifted his view to look at the others.

The rest were girls: two teenagers, thin and awkward; a couple of pre-teens; and three smaller girls. The youngest was no more than five or six. Beyond a doubt, if she’d been a boy, she’d have been sent to the Ward School. They all would have. But they were girls. When their parents had taken them for testing, they’d have been powerful, unpredictable, and marked as capable of producing dangerous and uncontrollable children and sent here. How long had this been going on? How had Fort Nevada’s spies missed this?

The littlest girl had enormous brown eyes, almond-shaped, with dark smudges of exhaustion and fear hollowed out beneath them. Her black hair was unkempt. Her collar, clearly improvised and too big for her thin neck, held her small chin up in an unnatural position. The lights running across her throat moved through their pattern slower than on the woman, but her body shivered constantly nonetheless. Alex swallowed bile.

“We’re not leaving them here.” Lena’s voice brooked no arguments.

He lowered the binoculars and returned her gaze. Her face was serene and terrible.

“No,” he agreed, “we’re not.” The words came before he’d even thought them through, but they were true. It didn’t matter how much they complicated things. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and passed the binoculars to Jackson. His soft exclamation told them when he’d found the girls.

Jackson leaned over, careful not to jar the lip of the hole they hid inside. He started to speak, hesitated as he looked at Lena, and then plunged ahead, voice no less emphatic for being barely audible. “Sir. We’re supposed to—”

“I know what our objective was, Ward. It’s changed.”

“We were to keep her safe at all costs, sir. Has that changed?” Though his voice never rose above a whisper, Jackson challenged Alex.

Lena made a noise of disgust.

“No. You’ll be leading Lena back to Herrons and then returning here—”

“The hell he will!” Her exclamation was a strangled hiss.

“Lena, listen.”

“No. You listen.” She remembered to breathe the words in spite of her fury. “Those girls are me. If I hadn’t blown up that building, I’d be down there with them. This is
my
fight. Tell me different!”

Alex sighed.

It was all the answer she needed. Determination set her face. “I’m not leaving them. I’m not going back. I can remove the collars. And I’m more dangerous than either of you.” The last she whispered with absolute certainty.

He stared at her.

She stared back, refusing to give way.

Jackson sighed, leaning away again.

Alex finally turned back to study the rag-tag group who were heading out between the gates now with a guard on every side of them. There were four men to watch over eight girls, two more than went with each larger group of men. It seemed the Council was afraid of them.

Instead of following the dirt road winding away to the plains, the girls were led toward the reinforced canyon mouth. They followed the first guard up a rough path over the berm, and then continued down the other side into the canyon.

Lena reached out and gripped Alex’s arm.

He nodded. This movement and the distant sound of the paddle-wheel moving down the river were likely no coincidence. These girls were the big transfer. They were being moved. Without a means to follow, he would get one shot at planning their rescue.

Jackson looked through the glasses. “Four sniper rifles, four side arms, four Tasers,” he whispered. He turned back to them. “It doesn’t matter how dangerous you are, a bullet in your head will kill you as fast as anyone else. The guards are Sparks, Lena, and they mean business.”

“So did the team of men that moved in with Alex trying to grab me at home. So did Alex, for that matter.”

He told Jackson to stand down with a gesture. She was right. Not invincible, but right.

She leaned in. Alex could read the eagerness and fury in the motion.

“Too close to the prison,” Alex murmured. “We’ll wait for them to get past us and then follow at a distance. When I have more of a plan, I’ll let you know.”

The group of girls and guards made their way along the narrow path at the bottom of the canyon. Their glazed eyes and the mechanical movements of the too-thin bodies coursing with the electricity keeping them docile infuriated him. He couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Lena.

Lena remained focused on the girls, except to occasionally arrow her gaze to each of the guards, marking them. She was making plans of her own. He hoped Jackson would be ready to roll with whatever she improvised. He had little doubt that when he finally said, “Go,” she would do whatever she deemed necessary to get those girls free.

Once the group made their way past, he leaned in. “When we finally act, we need to disarm first. We will have a much greater chance of making it back to the train if they don’t fire a shot. No shots. No alarm. No pursuit. Got it?”

“I want to turn off the damn collars first.”

He shook his head. “They rely on the collars. They’re focused on them. The guards have to be dealt with first.” He imagined the fists she clenched in frustration were a reluctant agreement. He leaned closer. “With four of them, paralysis is our best bet. Can you manage all of them at once? We’ll finish them.”

She nodded once, hard.

He leaned back and turned to Jackson.

The Ward gave him a silent thumbs-up, but his worried gaze fell on Lena.

The group moved into the far mouth of the canyon and off to the left in a diagonal line toward the river’s edge, below the elevated path Alex had led them in on. He was willing to bet on his hunch now. The girls were being removed from the prison for parts unknown. He hated that he wouldn’t be able to follow. They’d be rescuing this group, but losing the opportunity to discover any others at the paddleboat’s final destination.

Alex checked back along the path for any rear guards. Satisfied, he put the binoculars in their case and secured them in the pocket of his pack. He didn’t want them damaged in what was to come. With no further movement along the pathway, he eased into a crouch and gestured for the others to follow him out of their hole.

They worked their way along the hillside and moved down to the path at the bottom of the canyon where they had more freedom to move. When they reached the mouth, Alex headed for the wall of the canyon. He eased out, checking along the river and down the shore.

The humming of the riverboat’s engines drew closer, but it still wasn’t visible around the curve of the river and the tall butte to the right. The guards had moved the girls further up to sit on the rocky shore, but not far enough to guarantee a gunshot wouldn’t echo up the canyon to the prison. The guards, clearly bored, stood over the girls. They were waiting for the steam barge and its shore boats to collect their human cargo.

He was marking the position of each guard in relation to the girls when he felt more than heard a pressure shift behind him. He’d made it clear to Lena and Jackson they should hang back. He turned, brow furrowed.

Alex froze. A neo-barb crossbow hovered in front of his face, held in an unwavering grip that kept the head of the bolt pointed at his right eye socket. Alex tracked back along the crossbow pointed at his face to meet the implacable blue eyes of the long-haired blond man holding it. Alex was aware of the scene behind the man—Lena restrained by a neo-barb behind her with a hand across her mouth, Jackson with a pair of crossbows keeping him in place. Four more men ranged at varying distances around them, and a fifth crouched behind the brush at the opposite canyon wall, focused on the guards and the girls up the river shore.

The neo-barb hunting party had moved around the buttes and circled back while Alex had dismissed them.

He knew better than to focus all of his attention on the target. It left you open to movement from the rear and sides. He’d made a rookie mistake that might get them all killed.

The man in front of Alex allowed his lips to curve up in a smile. He eased a foot back, cocking one finger along the side of the crossbow in a beckoning motion for Alex to walk with him back into the canyon.

Alex cursed himself for a fool.

Lena remained still and loose. She’d rather the man behind her, with his big hand wrapped tight across the lower half of her face, believe she posed no threat. She hoped Alex understood why she hadn’t dropped them immediately. They were all too close to the group of guards. They couldn’t afford sounds or movements that risked the girls. She would be taking those girls to safety today. She’d made a solemn vow on her parents’ souls the moment before she’d told Alex the same.

The men holding them had the same general look and coloring. Their leader had lank, dirty blond hair hanging past his shoulders, pale eyes, and a nose that had been broken more than once. His clothes were a none-too-clean, hand-made combination of tanned skin and wool. He probably smelled as ripe as the one holding her.

Alex and the man backed away into the relative safety of the canyon. The two with bows on Jackson gestured for him to move, too, and all of the others but the man crouched against the far wall watching the guards and the girls moved back with them. She was ready when the one holding her unceremoniously wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted.

When the man with the bow trained on Alex deemed they’d gone far enough, he stopped. The others followed suit.

Lena stared at him, waiting. What did they want? Why were they interfering?

The man in charge allowed a ghost of a smile to cross over his face again, before he asked in a voice so quiet it was less than a whisper, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same,” Alex answered, his own words as soft.

“Except I’ve got the weapon.” The man waited.