Shadowmark (The Shadowmark Trilogy Book 1) (33 page)

Rage boiled through her body that a hybrid could commit such a daring act of treason. She wanted to rip apart the rogue responsible. Calla gritted her teeth and pushed the blade harder against her skin, drawing blood.
 

No. She gasped and flung the knife away. It stuck, quivering, in a tree nearby. Calla would find the murderer, and only then would she offer herself up to the Condarri for punishment. They could oversee her execution if they deemed fit.
 

And she would not accept Dar Ceylin’s silence. She reached out again into the night, summoning him with her adarre. One last time.

When she had calmed herself, Calla waited for the Condarri to leave and checked the area herself. The three male hybrids hung back, waiting on her command. Boot prints littered the ground. Half-prints and prints trampled by the dying Condarri. Her inspection revealed two distinct patterns. One print belonged to a small hiking shoe, and one to a large boot similar to the one she wore. She recognized them. They had surrounded Williams’s body as well. She stiffened as realization dawned, her face burning red. Another wave of shame blurred her vision. The same hybrid who had killed Williams had killed the Condarri.

Calla found one more item at the edge of a pool—a backpack. It stank of humans. Calla searched it but found nothing of consequence. She sniffed it one last time, memorizing the scent, then flung it away into the trees. She looked upward. The roaring of the waterfalls above should have hushed out of respect for the Dead One. Unable to command the water to stop, Calla motioned to her three and raced through the trees, looking for the rogue’s trail.

“Where are we going?” asked Mina later that morning. She stumbled along next to Doyle, her legs wobbly after their night of hiking.

“Not much farther. I’m just looking for the right spot for the Nomad.” Doyle still held her hand even though the sun was shining and Mina could see perfectly.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see.” Doyle refused to say anything more until they found a small mountain meadow. He sank down and pulled her with him into the tall grass. Mina lay back and closed her eyes, not caring why they had stopped now. She dozed off in seconds.
 

When she woke, the sun was setting on the other side of the valley. Doyle still sat beside her with his knees propped up and his arms resting on top of them. His eyes brightened as she sat up.

“Feel better?”

“Yes,” she said groggily. “What are we waiting for?”

“Nightfall.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see,” he repeated.

“Would it kill you to answer a question directly once in a while?”

“Yes.”

Mina reached around and pressed a hand to her ribs. They didn’t hurt at all.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yes. I almost don’t believe it.”

“Pretty good, huh? I’ve used those machines a few times myself.”

“What do they do?”

“Just about everything.”

Mina examined Doyle’s appearance closely. His t-shirt didn’t do much to hide the fresh scrapes and bruises covering his arms and neck. Mina touched his arm, careful not to rake her fingers over open skin. “Thank you for coming back for me.”

The corner of Doyle’s mouth played upward in a half smile, and he covered her hand with his own in acknowledgement.

They waited until the sky darkened completely and stars shone brilliantly above them. A shadow passed over them, momentarily blotting them out. Mina stiffened. A small ship flew directly toward them, completely silent. Feeling exposed, she looked into the trees for a hiding place, but Doyle grabbed her hand and held her to her spot.

He pulled her back while the ship hovered over them. With its lack of wings and dark polished hull, the metal vessel looked like a miniature version of the enormous invader ships. On the underside, a door opened soundlessly. A stairway glided down to the ground, casting a faint blue light on the mountain grass. Doyle led her to it. Up close, what Mina had taken for a metal hull looked more like stone, smoothed and shaped as if by water.

Doyle led her up the stairway into a cool, dark room with dark walls. A gurgling noise echoed throughout the chamber, and Mina turned to see the stairway folding up into the ship. The door closed behind them.

“This is your ship?”

“Yes. It’s named the Nomad.”

“There’s nothing here.”

“We’re in the hold. This way.” He led her through several doors that all led into similar-looking rooms. Lights turned on as they entered each one, but Mina could not see anything but the walls. The gurgling noise continued. A door opened for them, revealing a spiral staircase that pulsed with a soft red light. Doyle led her up, passing several closed doors. At the top, another door hissed open. Mina stepped into a room with six bunks floating on the opposite wall, stacked three high. Each bunk had a pillow and a blanket neatly tucked under the edges of the mattress. In front of the bunks, six contoured metal seats faced away from the door under a row of three portholes in the left wall of the room. The room was stark, plain.

“Do others use this ship?”

“I have transported other hybrids, but the ship is mine.”

“So not all the hybrids have ships?”

“No.”

“Why you?”

“It came with the title.”

They walked through the open room, and the lights faded as they passed into a corridor along the starboard side of the ship—four closed doors on the left and portholes on the right. Doyle ignored the doors, walking all the way to the end and into the cockpit. At the front, a large curved window stretched from floor to ceiling. The back wall of the room glowed with a faint yellow light that flooded the space. Doyle sat down in the large captain’s chair centered in the ship’s jagged nose, where he was seemingly on thin air, able to see the ground below and the stars above. The cockpit had no console or controls of any kind, only two more seats situated on either side and slightly behind the captain’s chair. Mina tentatively sat in the one to the right, expecting hard metal, but it turned out to be more comfortable than an airplane seat.
 

“There’s no light on the trees,” she observed.

“The light can enter, but not shine out. The Nomad was built for secrecy.”

The bubbling sound filled the cockpit, and the ship hummed quietly as it lifted above the trees. Mina expected to feel the drag of acceleration as the pod shot up into the air and cleared the mountains, but the cabin felt solid and still, as if it were resting on the ground.

“How are you flying this?” Mina asked. Doyle had not touched anything since sitting down.

“The ship takes orders from me through my adarre. The Nomad really doesn’t need a pilot, just someone to tell it where to go.” He swiveled around in his chair to watch Mina while she looked out the window. Darkness covered everything below, and she admired the unobstructed view of the stars, avoiding Doyle’s gaze. Everything he had revealed to her suddenly felt very real.

“You look terrible,” he said.

Mina looked down at her filthy clothes and ran a hand through her tangled hair. She silently agreed, but his comment rankled her nonetheless. “You don’t look so great yourself covered in whatever that stuff is that came out of the Glyph.”

“Blood,” he stood, and motioned for her to follow him out of the cockpit. The first door in the corridor opened for him, and they walked into a small chamber. Stars twinkled opposite the door on a sea of black in a translucent floor-to-ceiling window that took up the entire outside wall. Compelled forward, Mina’s heart skipped as she encountered the odd, electrifying feeling of stepping to the edge of a cliff. She touched the window for reassurance.
 

The ceiling suddenly glowed with the same warm yellow light that filled the cockpit, and Mina turned away from the window. To her left, a bunk lined the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the bedroom, one end flush with the window, the other separated from the rest of the room by a metal partition. A narrow door stood on the wall opposite the bunk, a small metal table and chair next to it. The dark grey metal bulkheads looked like stone here, too, and contrasted strangely with the metal bunk and table. Doyle walked over to the smooth blank wall by the door and touched it. A drawer opened into the room, revealing neatly folded clothing.

“I don’t know what will fit you, but you’re welcome to anything in here. Through that door on the left, you’ll find a bathroom where you can take a hot shower.” Leaving the drawer open, he turned to leave.

“Doyle,” said Mina.

He turned to her.

“You have a shower.”

“Yes.”

“Forgetting for a moment that we’re on an alien spacecraft and I didn’t even know aliens needed bathrooms . . . you mean all this time we ran around in the mountains covered in mud, with only cold streams to wash in, and you had a beautiful hot shower ready to swoop out of the sky whenever you summoned it.”

“So?” He shrugged.

“Why?”

“Why what?”
 

“Why are you just now showing me this ship?”
 

Doyle laughed. “If I had known I could convince you to get on a spaceship just by bribing you with a hot shower, I would have told you ages ago.” He left the room, and the door hissed shut behind him.
 

The open drawer contained several pairs of khakis and other sturdy items of clothing, all too big for Mina. The only things she found that would fit were a t-shirt and a pair of drawstring sweatpants. She pulled them out. When she touched the outside of the drawer, it slid silently back into the wall.

In the bathroom, Mina walked past the tiny mirror and stepped right into the open metal shower. Except cold metal didn’t greet her bare feet, but solid stone. The space didn’t contain a shower head, only a button on the wall. She pushed it, and hot water cascaded over her from above. She reveled in the heat, almost falling asleep as water and steam relaxed her tight muscles and rinsed the grime from her body. When she pushed the button again, a blast of warm air filled the room, drying her almost instantly.

Mina stepped out and finally looked at herself in the mirror. A strange woman stared back at her—sunken cheeks, skin pale despite so much time outdoors. Although she’d always taken good care of her body, it had transformed too, into something leaner yet more muscular, more angular. Small wonder since she’d literally been living on rabbit food and birdseed. A faint pink scar two inches long ran across her ribcage under her right arm, presumably where the “machine” had fixed her ribs. Mina ran her fingers over it, still marveling that she felt no pain at all from the procedure and it had already healed.

When Mina left the bathroom, dressed in the clean sweats and t-shirt, she found the bedroom filled with the scent of freshly brewed coffee. A mug sat on the small desk. She took a sip of the strong drink. It burned her tongue a little as it went down. She’d never tasted anything so wonderful in her life.
 

After a brief knock the door slid open, and Doyle walked in. He had showered and changed into fresh jeans and a t-shirt. He had even buzzed his hair short and shaved, giving him a clean, fresh look. The scratches and bruises on his arms were already fading.

“Why do you have coffee?” asked Mina.

“I like it. I’m half human, remember? And I’ve lived as a human for years.”

Mina took another sip. “Where are we going?”

Doyle shrugged. “North. I thought we might take a couple of days to rest and decide what to do next.”

“Won’t they know how to find you?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “but they don’t know they need to look for me. Once they find the dead Condarri, they will know a hybrid probably did it. But they won’t know which. And now that Earth is not offering much resistance, more hybrids are scattering, freeing themselves from the Condarri.”

“You weren’t free before?”

“Not exactly.” He gestured for her to sit in the chair while he sat on the edge of the bunk. “The Condarri are a proud race, and cruel. They don’t think twice about annihilating an alien culture or manipulating its DNA to create a new race. But just because I have Condarri grace flowing through me does not place me on equal footing with them. I am inferior, no better than scum, because the Condarri view me as having sullied their own bloodline, even though it was their own science that created me.”

Mina shook her head. “Why?”

“Humans would feel the same way if they knew. And if they found out about us, they would probably start a witch hunt. I wouldn’t blame them—we helped overthrow the human race, after all. They cannot easily overcome the Condarri, but they could overpower the hybrids.”
 

Mina shifted in her seat. “I wouldn’t want to.”

He looked at her quietly for a minute, then said, “You don’t want revenge for all that’s happened? All those people who died? For your brother? What if I told you I was responsible for deciding which cities and sites to attack first? I can tell you everything, down to the smallest detail. We placed the ships early to lure in the military, then used them to create an EMP so powerful practically nothing could survive it. After that, cities and armies were easy for the Condarri to burn—you saw for yourself, I think. With infrastructure gone, the ships moved from one place to another, destroying as they went. They met very little resistance.”

Doyle leaned forward. “And that’s not everything. I spent time in military installations all over Earth as a spy, gathering intelligence, learning tactical maneuvers, even gleaning from them the best techniques for hand-to-hand combat. And we planted hybrid spies in key military installations to infect secured networks with computer viruses and disable nuclear facilities, just to make sure the Condarri didn’t meet any opposition. Can you truthfully say that if you had the chance to stop it, to destroy the Condarri and the hybrids with them, you wouldn’t take it?”

Yes, she wanted the Condarri gone. She looked at Doyle, waiting for the anger to rise up inside her. But it didn’t. She had watched him kill a human, a hybrid, and a Glyph. Out of those, the human was the only one he had shown mercy. Mina withheld her thoughts, however, and changed the subject.