Waybound (35 page)

The moment stretched out—just her and him, bathed in light. Time was stuck. What the hell was going on? His stomach flopped like a fish. He felt sick. Had the CHAR gotten to him?

Micah licked his lips.

They had done it. They had won.

A horrible thought slapped his brain, as if it wasn't his own.

He should kiss her. Right now. It's what Maddox, hero of his absolute favorite Televiewer show ever, would do.

Micah leaned closer to her.

No, don't be such an idiot!

He hesitated.

A flashlight glinted in the haze.

“Run,” Micah barked. He pointed to the fading footprints that the two of them had made. “Follow those back to the Aegis.”

“What about you?” she said.

He realized that he had already made a decision. His words came out certain and strong. “Can't run without shoes. I'll hold 'em off. Get that thing to the Ona!”

“But what about you?” she repeated.

A thousand emotions collided in the worlds of her eyes.

“I dunno,” Micah admitted.

“We'll come back for you, I swear.”

His lips quivered, mind on fire.

Kiss her!

Don't kiss her!

“Run,” he croaked.

Phoebe held his eyes for a split second.

Then she fled, clutching the wrapped Occulyth tight, shielding it to hide the light. He watched her receding, climbing through the blight, her shape disappearing into the dark.

“Run!” He screamed it in the opposite direction, hoping his voice would penetrate the muffling CHAR haze and draw the pursuers away from Phoebe. “RUN! RUN!” He jumped up and down, making as much of a racket as he could.

The flashlights found him. Foggy silhouettes appeared, racing men in crinkly, protective suits.

Now it was his turn to flee.

Every step hurt, but he didn't care. He had to save her.

“Phoebe! RUN!” Again, he shouted in the wrong direction. He glanced back—they were falling for it! Some of them branched off on a wild goose chase. More flashlights glimmered.

His feet were screaming agony.

Micah knew he couldn't outrun them, but he pushed on anyway. Every second they worried about him was one more second of head start for Phoebe.

Steps crunched up behind him.

He pivoted, tried to zigzag.

Tackled.

A masked Foundry man in a jumpsuit hurled him to the ground. Micah squirmed, kicked.
Crack!
His bare foot connected with a jaw, knocking the mask aside.

The man's face was exposed. His eyes blazed.

Three other suited Foundry soldiers closed in. Strong hands seized Micah's ankles and pulled him. He dug his fingers into the ground, trying to slow himself.

“Get off!” he screamed.

The Foundry man flipped him onto his back. Micah was momentarily blinded by a flashlight, encased in a sleeve of glass to protect it from the CHAR.

Then his fingers grazed something half-buried in the ground.

A stick.

He seized it, swung with all his might. The blow caught the Foundry man solidly in the face. His nose gushed blood. The man cursed and drove his fist into Micah's belly.

Air whooshed from his body. Vision dimmed.

But not before he glimpsed the stick slipping from his grip.

Its thin, white shape was unmistakable.

Made no sense. Didn't belong here.

Something was wrong.

A human bone.

M
r. Pynch awoke in a place he didn't recognize, and yet it fit his mental state—dank, rotten, and falling to pieces. The walls were coated in moldy gobs of flux scum like congealed fat. Knurlers and pinpods clung to the surface, feasting on the corrosion. Feeble light wavered in from a jagged hatch.

He started to get up, but immediately shriveled back down. At first, he thought it was just too much viscollia, but then a faint memory of getting thumped resurfaced. He felt the back of his bushel of quill hair—yep, matted with his own dried ichor.

That's when he noticed his arms were bound in hoistvyne.

Mr. Pynch tugged on the chain. It was taut and secure.

Footsteps pounded toward his cell. With an unbearable, rusty shriek, the hatch opened to reveal a hulking silhouette.

“Wakey, wakey!” a familiar voice shouted. It was his gohr drinking buddy from the Rathskellar. The brute yanked on his chain, dragging Mr. Pynch across the cell. “Up, scrap!”

Mr. Pynch staggered to his feet while his captor unhooked the hoistvyne and hauled Mr. Pynch out into a cramped hallway.

A rhythmic boom shook the greasy, flux-worn walls.

“Look here, me good mehkie,” Mr. Pynch offered. “What do you say you and me arbitrate some manner of agreement? Perchance we could—”

The gohr unleashed a spittle-flecked roar. With a massive, six-clawed clamp hand, he clubbed Mr. Pynch in the back of the head. A fireball of pain blinded him, dropped him to the floor. With another rip of the chain, the gohr had Mr. Pynch on his feet again, sluggishly plodding up a steep stairwell.

Up they went, step after agonizing step.

The booming noise grew louder as Mr. Pynch was pulled through another hatch. What he saw deflated him entirely.

It was a long compartment blazing with humid heat. Rows of gasping mehkans were crowded in the dark, chained together and toiling at crooked axles that ran across the width of the space. They shoved and heaved at giant cranks in unison, the source of that deep, rhythmic sound.

These cranks were attached by slime-coated ducts to a grisly contraption at the far end of the compartment. It was a mound of exposed viscera, half-submerged in the floor, augmented with rusted rotors and clusters of giant pistons.

A sickening realization dawned on Mr. Pynch. He looked out the oblong windows, hoping that he was wrong.

But he wasn't. Through the translucent membranes of the portholes was churning silver flux. He thought he could make out the dim shadow of a qintriton swimming past.

Although he had never seen one from the inside, he knew with crushing certainty where he was. He was trapped in a submersible vessel on the back of a deep-sea wryl. The rows of laborers were powering this grotesque contraption, which controlled the mind of the massive tusked beast.

And Mr. Pynch knew who commanded such monstrosities.

Marauders—thieves and slayers of the sea.

The gohr led Mr. Pynch through the heaving crowd to a spot between two skeletal jaislids. He chained Mr. Pynch to the floor, grabbed his hands, and slapped them onto the axle handle.

“There must be some mistakement,” Mr. Pynch stammered, panicked. “This be unjust. I don't belong here!”

“Oh, but you do,” growled a sinister voice.

The gohr stepped aside as a gaunt figure approached. He was mottled brown and red, and though he stood upright on two sinewy legs, his serrated arms were long enough to stab at the ground. The mehkan's head was sickly copper with two pus-white eyes. A ring of oozing snouts and acidic mouthparts dangled beneath his face and down his back.

It was a hiveling—one of the most uncommon and utterly despised races in all of Mehk. And not just any hiveling.

“Tchiock?” Mr. Pynch asked in shock.

“So the fog has lifted,” the mehkan spat. “I was so very disappointed when you didn't recognize me in Ghalteiga.”

“What be the meaning of this?” Mr. Pynch asked.

“You stole from me, Pynch,” Tchiock drooled, snouts twittering. “In Kholgit. An entire shipment of viscollia—gone.”

Mr. Pynch attempted a jolly laugh.

“Be that the reason for this whole conflagration?” he chuckled. “Not ‘stole,' dear Tchi. A misunderstandimation. I will gladly reimburse any damages me associate and I may have—”

In a flash, Tchiock's saw-toothed arm pierced the front of Mr. Pynch's chusk overcoat and yanked him near.

“You will pay,” Tchiock gurgled. He held up a scourge of barbed ivy and dangled it in Mr. Pynch's face. “I will work you. I will starve you. I will make your every cycle a prison of misery until you beg me to end your worthless span. And then…” The hiveling's noxious mouth tubes leaked acidic saliva on his lapel. “Once I know you are sincere, I will grant your wish myself.”

Tchiock raised his scourge.

“Now pump!” the hiveling bellowed. The whip slashed across Mr. Pynch's shoulders. “Pump!”

Down the barbs came. Again and again.

Whimpering, Mr. Pynch grabbed onto the axle handle and did as he was told. He stared down as he toiled. His green, striped necktie was shredded and splotched with acid. The mismatched stitches that Phoebe had sewn were in ruins.

Selling the poor bleeders at the Gauge Pit had been his idea. It was his fault they had lost all their earnings in a bad toss. His fault that he and his associate had become fugitives of the Foundry, then abducted and used by the Covenant.

His fault that the Marquis was dead.

Oily tears spilled from his swollen eye sacs.

Mr. Pynch had earned this fate. So he pumped and he pumped, knowing that he was cursed to live out his cycles here.

A slave.

The Titan spotted Dollop.

Its battery of cannons lit up in a kaleidoscope of flame. Dollop leapt behind the wreckage of a siege engine as fire rained down.

A fearsome howl drowned out the barrage.

Dollop braved a look.

A team of Covenant warriors was taking advantage of the distraction Dollop had caused. A gohr fended off the Titan's heavy fire with a shield of scavenged debris while a tiulu used his buzzing, bladed forelimbs to hack at the giant's legs. Then an aio dropped down on the machine and enveloped its head with pitch-black folds, stabbing with javelin legs.

The array of lights on the machine flickered. It toppled to the ground with a crunch. The last of the Titans was gone.

But there was no shout of victory. The Covenant had been decimated trying to keep the Titans at bay. Their fleet of salathyls had been wiped out, and so many of Her Children had been lost. Mehkans were scattered across the Depot, taking cover from the screaming turrets and advancing squadrons.

The Foundry was just too big. Too powerful.

The air was choked with so much smoke and fire that Dollop could not see the train tunnel in the distance. That was supposed to be their target. If only they could bring it down.

But it was impossible. This was suicide.

And still, the enemy kept coming. He saw a team of heavily armored Watchmen race into view, each outfitted with a round case on its back, connected by pipes to something bulky in its hands. The way they glided was unnatural. Dollop squinted into the gloom. The Watchmen each stood on a hovering circular platform that emitted that familiar magnetic glow.

Thoom, thoom, thoom
—their weapons discharged in rapid succession. There was a swarm of streaking lights like a flock of electric purple birds. The projectiles curved in midair, hooking around barricades, seeking mehkan targets.

BOOM.
Death lit up the Depot.

“Retreat!” roared Treth's voice. “All units retreat!”

Dollop and the Covenant ran. Watchman bombers rocketed into the fray. Fist-sized magnetic missiles sought out fleeing warriors and stuck to them. The mehkans flailed to remove the devices, only to detonate in white-hot blasts.

The turrets on the outer walls wailed, shredding the Covenant. So many bodies. Dollop tried not to look as he ran, but his path was paved with blank eyes and broken bodies. So many faces he knew, so many brothers and sisters.

A grenade thumped into place right beside him.

He felt an impact and was driven to the ground.

But it wasn't the explosive.

Treth had tackled him, knocking him to safety behind a dead salathyl. The ground tremored as the missile erupted. The burly gohr picked Dollop up, and together they peered from behind their cover. The explosions had cleared away the train debris from the front gates—the way out. They made a break for it.

Dollop heard a resonant
thunk
. Treth stumbled forward.