The Exodus Towers (27 page)

Ana raised a hand and Skyler nodded to her. “What’s this test? And what happens after?”

He sat on an overturned plastic box they’d salvaged as a chair. “Gabriel means to march each of them beyond the aura, see who is affected, and who isn’t.”

A bleak silence settled on the group. Wilson spoke up. “Won’t most of them get infected that way?”

Skyler nodded. “Not as bad as it sounds, though. The initial infection brings on a devastating headache, but if they can get back inside the aura quick enough, the virus goes into stasis, and the headache along with it. They’ll still carry that initial infection, yes, but as long as they remain in the aura, they’ll be fine.”

Davi’s brow wrinkled. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Maybe not,” Skyler said. “We’re assuming Gabriel and his people will let them back inside fast enough. They might suspect a true immune is faking the headache. It wouldn’t be that hard. And some are so overcome by the pain that they collapse, unable to return to safety. Will someone be allowed to help them?”

“Knowing Gabriel,” Pablo muttered, “no.”

This earned frowns from the group.

“I thought not,” Skyler said. “He offered an interesting alternative. Gabriel claims there’s a medical test for the immunity, and that the kits to perform it are at ‘a nearby ranch.’ I assume he means where you all were staying.”

“I never saw anything like that,” Wilson said. The others nodded.

“So I guessed,” Skyler said. “Gabriel probably intends to hold them there, as he held you. I don’t think he knows what happened, that you’re free. That’s good news.”

“Why wait?” Ana asked. “Why not attack now, before the people come down?”

Skyler made a point to wait a few seconds before answering. The eagerness in Ana’s voice, and her brash actions during the assault on the ranch house, spelled trouble, he thought. If even a brief pause took some of the push out of her, he’d count it as progress.

“When the Orbitals arrive,” Skyler said, feeling a twinge of bitter nostalgia at the slang term. “When their climber reaches the ground, Gabriel’s people will have their hands full. Lots of colonists to watch, and that moment of heightened alert when the climber doors open. All eyes will be on it. We’ll use this to our advantage.”

“You have a plan, then, Skyler?” Davi asked.

He nodded, and told them.

Wilson and Vanessa had the least experience in handling firearms. The group balked when Skyler announced he would pair the two, but when he explained their role in the attack the murmuring stopped. This was not the time, Skyler argued, for weapons training, and he felt it best that the group’s strengths be used to full effect.

For his part, Wilson didn’t seem to mind at all. He had a pacifist’s demeanor, and from the way he stole glances at Vanessa, Skyler guessed the kid was already romanticizing the mission to come.

Vanessa just shrugged. “Twenty years of jujitsu,” she said with a laugh. “A lot of good that’s done me.”

He gave the two of them their marching orders and turned to the rest of the group.

Davi, Elias, and Pablo would team together, he explained.

“What about Ana?” Davi asked.

“She’s with me,” Skyler said. He fixed Davi with a hard stare that he hoped conveyed the reason. Davi would be too distracted with protecting his reckless sister, and Skyler wanted none of that. Young as he was, Davi had proved himself in combat, and all of that skill would be needed.

Whether the young man understood or not, Skyler couldn’t tell. Davi looked to Ana, studied her, then turned back to Skyler and gave a grudging nod.

“You three,” Skyler said, “will come in from the west. Ana and I, from the east. We move when Wilson and Vanessa’s distraction is in full swing.”

“And when do we start?” Wilson asked.

Skyler glanced upward. “When you see the first vehicle from space about to reach the bottom. Say, twenty meters from the ground. We’ll give Gabriel and his people as many problems to juggle as possible, and use their confusion to our advantage.”

The finer points of the plan were laid out, debated, refined. Elias commented twice that it would be better if everyone stayed together, but the rest of the group liked Skyler’s plan. Come from every side, split up and confuse the enemy, get the colonists to join the fight from within.

An hour later, Skyler and Ana set out. Their trek was the longest, and Skyler had a few things he wanted to scavenge along the way. No goodbyes were said when they left, just some quiet well-wishes. Ana gave her brother a peck on each cheek, and tousled his hair when his frown didn’t vanish.

“Be safe,” Davi said to her, but his eyes were on Skyler.

“The greatest treasure in all of Belém,” Skyler said with a mock bow.

Ana peered inside the building with a skeptical frown.

“I’ll show you,” he added, and wiggled through the security gate he’d torn open a month earlier with a crowbar. A gate that had, for years, saved the store and its contents from looters.

The dusty beam of his flashlight swept across a large banner hung on the back wall.
AVENTURA NA AMAZÔNIA
, it read. And below,
SUPRIMENTOS DE SOBREVIVÊNCIA
.

Row upon row, rack after rack, of high-end quality camping and survival gear lay before them.

Ana whistled, her eyes wide.
Exactly how I felt
, Skyler thought. He’d found the building ten days after initial landfall. Windows boarded, doors chained. Pristine, if a bit musty.

The girl crept inside and strolled slowly down the nearest aisle, past rolled sleeping bags, air mattresses still in boxes, tents of every size and color, and bundled blankets. She ran her hand along an entire wall of hiking boots, and picked up a bundle of climbing rope, price tag still attached. Skyler left her to wander, grabbed a fresh duffel bag from one shelf, and set about finding the items his plan required.

When Ana returned to him she sported a new vest, a pair of sunglasses, and a water bottle with filtration built into the cap. A confused smirk grew on her lips as she watched Skyler strip two mannequins of their fashionable survival gear.

“You want us looking good when we attack?” she asked.

In answer he disassembled the mannequins and stuffed their torsos and heads inside his bag. Her smirk turned to a knowing smile when she saw the rest of the duffel’s contents.

“Let’s go,” Skyler said. “Plenty of time to ransack this place later.”

“Just a second,” Ana replied. She went to a rack near the cash registers and selected two more items: a pair of thin, tight leather gloves and a wide-brimmed olive-green hat.

“My hands get sweaty,” she explained. “When I hold a gun,
I mean. And now that the rains have gone, the sun makes me squint.”

She put the hat on and stuffed the black gloves into the new vest she’d pilfered, a journalist’s vest in desert tan. When she realized Skyler was watching her, she flashed him a thumbs-up and winked. In that moment she looked markedly younger than her twenty-two years, so much so that Skyler toyed with the idea of leaving her here, safe and out of harm’s way. Hadn’t she earned the right to that foolish abandon only young people can get away with? Those years had been robbed from her, after all. The battle to come was too much to ask of someone who’d lost what she had. Her parents, her world. Her youth. And even if they succeeded it would only be to face the thing that loomed in the rainforest. The cave. The black-clad subhuman with glowing red eyes.

But when her smile vanished, Skyler saw only Ana the survivor. She became a woman of startling maturity, a woman who’d been through unimaginable terrors over the last five years. That a fire of youthful recklessness still burned in there filled Skyler with a sudden sadness that he couldn’t explain. The world he knew had no room for innocence anymore. Maybe that’s why he’d never had similar thoughts concerning Samantha. All the innocence had long since been bled out of her. Somehow Ana still clung to it with a white-knuckled grip.

For the next few hours he led her on a winding path through Belém’s ruined streets. Rain, the mortal enemy of asphalt, had turned the avenues and alleys into a moonscape of potholes and cracks. Littered on top were derelict vehicles of every size and shape. Trucks, cars, and buses. Many flipped on their side, or impaled into the side of a building. Some had skeletons inside, and more littered the road.

Skyler shook his head. Much of the carnage that occurred in those first days of the disease was due to panic and mass hysteria. A few infections in a city like this, even just the rumor of such, would have spurred the entire population into a desperate race to flee, riot, or hide. He’d mused, in nightly debates with Skadz during their own surreal journey to Darwin, that the disease’s reputation had been just as
deadly as the brain-crushing infection it carried. Skadz, the first immune Skyler met after discovering his own invulnerability to the disease, had a knack for stating things plainly. “We humans are a skittish bunch, that’s a fact,” the
Melville
’s original captain had said.

Soon they reached the city’s border, where urban press met the imposing green wall of the rainforest, like two armies frozen in the initial clash of their front lines. Buildings and shanty homes gave way to a wall of emerald trees that fronted the dark, endless forest.

He paused there and glanced up at the zenith of the sky. Ana, at his shoulder, did the same.

A few meager clouds dotted the vast blue expanse, but above the view was clear. He thought he could see the Elevator cord, or hints of it. The hair-thin cable was hard to detect when no traffic marked its path, and his eyes often played tricks on him when he sought it. Being so close to the equator, Belém’s cord didn’t slope nearly as much as Darwin’s did, but that didn’t make the task much easier. Straight up still wasn’t quite the right place to look. He scanned the sky for a moment just to be sure. There were no climbers yet visible. Tania, if she was indeed coming, was still hours away.

“Plenty of time,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”

Skyler followed a deliberately wide route toward their destination, always with a wary eye on the cloud that clung to the forest canopy a few kilometers south. The white haze loomed well off to their right, visible through the occasional break in foliage. If Ana saw the strange fog, she didn’t mention it.

That place should be our focus
, he thought. If Gabriel had brought a thousand trained killers down on the base camp, it wouldn’t fill Skyler with the same dread as the subhuman he’d seen inside the cave. But he knew the colony must be liberated first if they were to have any hope of finding out the nature of that creature, and the ship from which it came.

The sun shimmered low on the horizon when their path brought them to the shore of the Guamá. With wet season gone, and the worst of the rains with it, the river’s angry
brown churn had given way to a more tranquil surface that reflected some of the sky above.

He glanced up again. At the sky’s zenith, a small dark object seemed to hang in the sky, like the opposite of a star. “There they are,” he whispered.

Ana put her hand on his back. “How long do we have?”

“Two hours. Maybe three.”

They took a ten-minute break from their hike. Ana produced two granola bars from her backpack and handed Skyler one. They ate in silence, both watching the climber above. After he finished the tasteless snack, Skyler swallowed a few gulps of cool water from his canteen, and Ana copied him.

He turned off the dirt road when he found a game trail through the dense foliage near the shore. Thick vines and roots lined the ground like veins, and branches spanned the narrow trail every few meters. Their pace slowed to a crawl, but Skyler wasn’t worried.

An hour later he spotted the smuggler’s boathouse. He led Ana inside and instructed her to be silent for a moment. For five long minutes he sat perfectly still, crouched in the doorway of the tiny shed, listening. Birds, whispering branches, and the gentle lapping of the river against the shore were all he heard.

“Let’s get to work,” he said, and closed the door.

Belém, Brazil