Waybound (33 page)

For uneasy hours, they navigated the metal slot canyons. Occasionally, the kids could spy the rim of a black CHAR cloud through a cleft in the sheet metal walls. The blights were all around them now.

As the suns began to fuse, their progress slowed substantially. Phoebe found herself dragging her feet.

“Can we take a break?” she said at last, shuffling to a stop.

Micah blew out a breath. “Thought you'd never ask.”

They collapsed against the coarse, curved wall of the Furrow. Micah opened his hard-shell pack and dug out the SCM case. While he chugged from the water bottle, Phoebe scattered some kernels for their guide. The ring bird twirled down, deflated, and pecked at the morsels.

The kids dug in to their rations.

“Only five meals left,” Micah noted, examining the case.

Phoebe didn't want to think about the prospect of running out of food. She only wanted to think about finding the Occulyth.

“I guess the best thing to do is…” Micah sneezed, then wiped his nose with a sleeve. “You got a tissue or somethin'?”

She reached into her pocket to look, and her fingers grazed a folded piece of paper. At first, Phoebe thought it was trash, but when she pulled it out, she wasn't so sure. It was the inner paper lining of a Wackers bar, creased and folded deliberately, as if someone had tried to sculpt it into…something. Though what it was meant to be, she hadn't the faintest clue.

“Gotcha!” Micah said with a grin.

Now Phoebe was confused, but she smiled at him anyway, inspecting the wrapper and turning it around in her hands.

“What is it?” she asked at last.

He snatched the wrapper, smoothed the wrinkles, fixed some angles, then gave it back. Phoebe still didn't get it.

“It's a loon,” Micah said at last, a little annoyed.

She looked at it again. Now she could sort of make out a neck and wings, patterned with the flashy Wackers logo.

“Like the bird?” she wondered.

“Yeah, like a loon! Cause you're, you know…nuts.”

“Oh…” Phoebe sort of smiled. “Thanks?”

With an irritable whistle and a whisper of feathers, the ring bird zipped out of sight.

“Tough crowd,” Micah grumbled, looking between Phoebe and their departing guide. “Back home, I was gonna steal a coupla live ones from the zoo and let 'em loose in your room. But since that ain't happenin', this was the best I could do gift-wise.”

“What do you mean,
gift-wise
?”

Now it was Micah's turn to be confused.

“Duh. It's your birthday, dummy.”

The word could not have been more befuddling if it had been in Rattletrap. But counting backward, thinking over the time they had been in Mehk, she realized he was right. They had been away from Albright City for almost ten days. Which meant today was the twenty-second—her birthday.

“Seriously?” he asked, continuing to eat. “You totally forgot?”

She nodded absently.

“Well, I guess you've kinda had some other stuff on your mind,” he said with a shrug. “That's whatcha got me for, right? Not like it's a big deal or anything. I mean, you're only thirteen.”

Another whammy. Her mouth fell open, which caused Micah to snort with laughter. She hadn't forgotten her age, but hearing the number spoken aloud made it sound ludicrous. How many times had she longed for the day when she would finally be a teenager? Now, for the life of her, she couldn't recall what “thirteen” was supposed to mean. Becoming a woman or something? More freedom? It meant…

It meant nothing.

That's not what she was supposed to be thinking. Girls back home were wearing makeup and staying out late. But here Phoebe was, putting her life on the line. Her classmates were thinking about how to act around boys, not how to act around zealous warriors who treated them like a saint.

“HELL-O-O-O?” Micah was waving in her face.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I was just thinking.”

“I'll say,” he considered. “You all right?”

She nodded and caressed the paper loon in her hands. “Thank you,” Phoebe said. “This means a lot to me.”

“Yeah, right,” he snorted and ate some more.

“It does,” she said. “You remembered.”

Their eyes got tangled, his hazel snared by her golden brown.

“I…You're welcome,” he managed.

For a moment, he was barely able to swallow his food.

The ring bird released a harsh trill.

Phoebe and Micah kept staring at each other in silence.

Again, their guide screeched, this time more urgently.

“Give it a rest, would ya?” Micah snapped.

But it didn't stop. The mehkan bird's cries were insistent. Phoebe stood up and pocketed the Wackers loon.

A golden blur whizzed past overhead, then a black one. The two shapes clashed, a ring and an X.

Phoebe and Micah recognized it at once.

She ran. He shouldered his pack and rifle, and bolted after her, leaving their rations behind.

A Foundry drone had spotted them.

Dollop was trying his best to keep up with Overguard Treth.

After a long haul, their salathyl had arrived at an underground Covenant bunker, a hidden staging area dug beneath the ore. The air rang with barked orders and clanging metal as mehkans readied their weapons and assembled to be blessed by axials. Armored salathyls sat in trenches, their tentacles primed to drill. Heaving siege-engine beasts were idling on a series of ramps that led up to the ceiling.

Hundreds of warriors were assembled into battalions—burly gohrs for the front lines, lightning fast aios for stealth, and hunchbacked freylani with their explosive cyndrl. It looked as if all the Covenant camps throughout Mehk had joined forces.

But there should have been more. Word had trickled in from Ahm'ral and Sen Ta'rine telling of terrible slaughter. No one knew how many brave Covenant warriors had gone to rust there.

Overguard Treth worked his way through the troops and climbed a ladder to a high platform. It was peppered with sunlight that streaked in through lookout holes punched in the ceiling. Dollop scrambled after him.

“Two-point-seven clicks late,” came a familiar flutter.

“Good to see you too,” chuckled Treth.

“Or-Orei!” Dollop cried. He ran up and tried to hug the Overguard from behind, but she detected his approach with her shifting apparatus and held him at bay. Dollop remembered his place and held a fist over his dynamo. “So-sorry, Overguard! I—I never thought I'd see you ag-again, is all.”

“You have failed,” she said flatly. “Loaii lost.”

Dollop gave a somber nod. He realized that there were others on the platform with Orei, a stern group bearing the gold mantle of Covenant Command on their shoulders. He bowed, but they paid him no mind, focusing their attention on the lookout holes.

“Again the Everseer has spared you,” Orei said to Dollop. “I do not know why. But it is time to redeem yourself.”

“I—I will, Overguard…Bu-but how?”

“You fight.”

Dollop's bulbous eyes went wide.

“It comes!” declared Overguard Treth.

The announcement rippled through the ranks until their murmurs and clanging came to a halt. Orei joined Treth and the Covenant Command at the lookout holes. Dollop reassembled himself to be taller so he could see out as well.

Squinting through the daylight, he observed a craggy red plain with slanted mesas on the horizon and the imposing walls of the Foundry Depot rising in the distance. Something glinted as it approached the fortress. A train was just arriving.

The purple coils went dark as the outer gates opened.

“Power is down!” Treth announced to the Covenant.

Orei held a hand up—a timer in her palm started to tick.

“Ready!” Treth boomed.

The Covenant crouched in their positions, bodies tense, waiting for the command to attack. Dollop heard a soft rattle and realized that his loose parts were shaking. Was it from fear or fervor? It did not matter. He was whole. Makina was with him, and he was a warrior of the Covenant.

If this was to be the end of his span, then so be it.

“Mother,”
Orei spoke.
“Some of Your most beloved Children are about to return. They give themselves willingly, sacrifice their embers to gain us the advantage—so we may crush those who stand against You.”
She held a fist over her dynamo, and the rest of the Covenant did the same.
“Welcome home your martyrs.”

The dial on her hand stopped ticking.

A blast of blue-white light. A deafening boom. The train, halfway into the Depot, exploded in a nova of flame.

“Blaze the Way!” Treth roared.

The Covenant repeated the words, a rousing war cry.

Dollop was overcome.

“Blaze the Way!” he screamed.

Salathyls bored into ore. Mehkans marched. Ferocious siege engines charged up the ramps. Overguards Treth and Orei leapt onto one of the mehkan beast contraptions as it tore past. Dollop pounced after them and barely hung on.

They erupted through the ore. Dust and sunlight blanketed them. All around, war machines and salathyls exploded into view. Sirens wailed in the Depot. The Foundry's cannons opened fire, but their magnetic defenses were down.

The Covenant charged to meet their glory.

Dollop closed his eyes in exultation.

G
oodwin sat on the edge of his seat in the luxury Gyrojet, face illuminated by console lights. His removable silver earpiece—and the Board's words—sat ignored on the armrest. He could barely suppress his smile, but it was too soon to celebrate.

Not until the Plumm girl was in custody.

Engineer Flores had reported that the children were headed for “the blights at the foot of the Shroud.” That could only mean the restricted CHAR zone in the eastern sector. So in the middle of the night, Goodwin had assembled a search team and set out with them to ensure success. After landing in the Ephrian Mountains, he had deployed his team and waited.

And waited.

For hours, Goodwin had tried to focus on other urgent matters. There was the fallout from Saltern's speech to deal with. And there was the battle in the mehkan city of Ahm'ral, which had required more resources than anticipated. Still, the Foundry had successfully routed the Covenant's forces.

The suns had risen, and still no sign of the children. But Goodwin was a patient man, and though the day was long, his moment had arrived at last. A Shadowskimmer drone had just detected the targets.

Now the Gyrojet was in pursuit. Below him, the Coiling Furrows extended in all directions like the convolutions of a titanic gray brain. The children were down there somewhere, running through labyrinthine paths full of dead ends and baffling contortions. The Foundry had lost many assets attempting to map it over the years without success. It was nearly as uncharted as the poisonous Shroud, which caused their instruments to malfunction whenever they attempted to study it.

The children wouldn't last long out here on their own.

The Gyrojet ascended higher. The reason for the pilot's caution was plain—CHAR clouds were everywhere, and flying too close was suicide. Four centuries ago, the Foundry's entire payload of the insidious chemical had been detonated here, when Creighton Albright had devastated the leadership of Mehk.

According to Flores, the children were helping the Covenant retrieve something from the Furrows, attempting to find the resting place of their old ruler, the fabled Ona. But it made no sense. The Foundry had scoured these blights long ago and found nothing. It was a wasteland—a tragic result of Albright's ignorance of the permanence and profundity of CHAR's effects.

What could the Plumm girl possibly expect to find?