Unity (13 page)

“Him, who?” I ask. “Quinlan?”

He turns around, heading for the jungle. “You can hang around and find out for yourself.” He glances back. “But I think Gwen would prefer it if you came with me.”

The first thirty minutes of our hike pass in hurried silence, each person following this Vegas guy through the jungle toward a glimmer of hope. But for all I know, he’s got Gwen rotating over a spit and is going to lock us up in whatever cannibals use for a pantry. That’s not the vibe I get from him, though. If it was, I’d shoot him—or try to. Still, I’m not about to let my guard down.

Problem is, my body is not complying with the wishes of my mind. The wound in my left side has stayed together. Hutch did a good job sewing it up. But the meat and muscle inside is still shredded and swollen. Hutch has tried to support my weight a few times, but I’ve shrugged him off. At first I’m not sure why, because I could really use the help. When Vegas looks back at us, waiting for us to catch up, and I stiffen and put on a brave face, then move a little faster, I realize I’m trying to impress him.

Maybe because he’s a bona fide alpha male stud.

Maybe because he’s a seasoned Point and I’m a newbie.

Either way, the realization makes me a little disgusted.

I don’t need to impress you,
I think at Vegas’s back, but I also don’t ask Hutch for help. I’m starting to hobble like an old crone. The kind that lives in a gingerbread house, or gives poisoned apples to pretty people.

Sig stops and waits for me, falling in line beside me when I catch up. Hutch brings up the rear of our little parade. The few times I’ve looked back at him, I’ve expected him to be watching me. Maybe even checking me out. But his eyes are on the jungle. Watching. Protecting. Always thinking of others. And here I am, dwelling on the woes of my physical pain, and the stranger who might eat us.

Sig looks me up and down and says, “You’ve changed.”

“Getting shot does that.”

“You killed that man,” she says, not talking about my physical appearance.

The image of Bear collapsing, his life stolen by my hand, flashes through my thoughts. I squeeze my eyes, like it will help, and I focus on Sig, alive, well and judgmental. “I’ve killed two men.”

We walk in silence for a moment, and then, “Why?”

“The first man...” I look back at Hutch. He’s a good fifteen feet back, gun in hand, walking backward as he watches the jungle for danger. I lower my voice. “The first man killed Mandi and tried to kill me.” I don’t mention the dog. For some reason, I think she’d think even less of me for killing a dog, even if it was a hellhound intent on gnawing my bones to dust.

“Oh...” The news strikes a chord.

She doesn’t ask about Bear, but I feel like I owe her an explanation. “The second man, I needed them to believe I would do it. That I would kill them if they didn’t let you go.”

“You would, right?” She looks up at me with her big green eyes. Sig was born in the United States, but her parents are Armenian immigrants. She has the slightest of accents, olive skin and a delicate face, but it’s those innocent eyes that really set her apart. “Kill them to save me?”

“I would,” I say.

She takes my hand and squeezes. “Thanks.”

Her affection nearly breaks through my emotional defenses, but then I see Vegas waiting. He motions for the American Indian girl, who has yet to speak a word, and Sean—aka: Freckles—the Support who’s doing a good job keeping the American Indian girl moving, to keep going. As they pass, he snaps his fingers and points to Hutch at the back. “Take the lead. Straight up the hill.”

Hutch says nothing, but looks at me. I give the slightest of nods, thinking,
you don’t need my permission, dude
. If codependence is part of the Point/Support relationship, we are definitely going to make some changes to the program.

Vegas looks at Sig and motions his head toward the others. “You, too.”

“There are no secrets between us,” Sig argues. Her defiance surprises me. Makes me proud. I’m not the only one who has changed.

“That’s good,” Vegas says, and I’m pretty sure he means it, “but you still need to go.”

“She’s just going to tell me what you say when you’re done,” Sig says.

There is a trace of impatience in Vegas’s voice, but he’s keeping his cool for a savage. “As expected.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Go ahead.”

Sig sighs, but trudges ahead. She has short legs and a shorter stride. I normally have to walk slow so she can keep up. But she has no trouble pulling ahead of my hobbling gait.

Suddenly uncomfortable at being alone with this strange man, I fill the momentary silence with a question. “So... Bear. Duff. Mack. Berg. That’s a lot of four letter nicknames. Vegas is one letter too long.”

“It’s also not a nickname,” he says, sounding conversational. I was expecting a grunt. “My parents got married in Vegas and conceived me that same night. My father was from Los Angeles, my mother was from—”

“Puerto Rico?” I guess, still seeing hints of my own father in him.

Now he grunts. “Everyone says that. My mother was
Mexican
.” He eyes me. “But
you’re
Puerto Rican.”

“Half,” I say. “I’m a mutt, like you.”

“Mutt would be a good four-letter nickname.”

I can’t hide my hint of a smile. “I already have a nickname.”

He waits for me to reveal it, but I say nothing. Then he holds his hand in front of me, unfurling his fingers to reveal two white pills. “I’ve been saving them. Looks like you could use them.” When he sees my suspicious eyes, he adds. “Painkillers. They’ll last twelve hours and won’t make you loopy.”

I take the pills and swallow them dry.

He smiles and holds up a canteen, sloshing it around. “You don’t need to play the action hero all the time.”

I take the canteen, drink until my expanding stomach flexes against the bullet wound. Had the bullet been two inches further to the side, the water would be leaking right out of my stomach.

When I hand the canteen back, he says, “Still getting used to this?”

“You mean surviving on a deserted island with cannibals?”

“No one is going to eat you,” he says. “Not even Los Diablos.”

The Devils.
“You come up with that name?”

“And Los Perseverantes. Reminds me of home.” He holds aside a low hanging branch, letting me pass. “I was talking about being a Point.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“You’re what, sixteen?”

Good guess. “And you’re like twenty-five, right?”

He smiles and his teeth are too perfect for a caveman. “Eighteen. Was seventeen when we got here.”

So they’ve been here for a year. Just twelve months and they’ve already gone
Lord of the Flies
? Seems kind of fast.

“Any military training?”

“No.”

He shakes his head. “No offense, but why is a sixteen-year-old girl with no military training and hair bright enough to attract the enemy from miles away, a Point?”

“That’s a question I think we’d both like answered.” I glance at his muscular arm. The black tattoo on his shoulder is a winged skull over a combat knife with the words,
Death Before Dishonor
. “So you were in the military?”

“Unofficially,” he says. “My father, a general, nominated me. Unity accepted me when I was fourteen. Completed Army Ranger training three months before being dropped off here. They wanted us young and elite. They made us killers and then left us.” He shakes his head. “What did they think was going to happen?”

The question is clearly rhetorical, which I’m not a fan of, so I make it a legit question. “What
did
happen?”

“Quinlan,” he says. “He believed we were being used. That we were brainwashed slaves. Part of a military cult. He was paranoid, but he was also charismatic and convincing. We fell in line. Erased ourselves. Lived underground. Destroyed the cameras, during storms, so it looked natural. Masked our bodies from the infra-red sensors. When Unity came back a month later, there wasn’t even a footprint to reveal our presence. They searched for a week and then left. I can only assume they believed we all died, which was our intent.”

“But that’s not where he stopped,” I guess.

“Not even close.” Vegas waits for me to stumble my way through a maze of roots. He doesn’t offer any help, and for a moment, I wish he was Hutch or Gwen. “Paranoia feeds on itself. Inside a month he was convinced that some of us were still working for Unity. Still in communication. When he killed a Base, my friend, the group split. Eighteen with him. Twelve with me.”

“The Devils and The Persevering.”
Like gang names.

“Yeah.” He pauses for a moment, cocking his head to the side, listening, sniffing the air. Then he’s back to normal. “Unity left us on the island with four ExoFrames. Not the kind available to the public, or even used by the military. We’d never seen anything like them, but we figured them out pretty quick. They make the wearer stronger, faster, far more deadly and virtually impervious to harm. Before we could arm ourselves, Quinlan used an ExoFrame to destroy the others and take most of the weapons. On that first day, he killed eight of us.”

“There are only four of you left?” Not much of a gang.

“Three,” he says, but then he adds, “Well, now eleven. Like it or not, your people are either with us, or dead. And there’s a good chance you being with us isn’t going to help anyway, since you’re all...” He hesitates, looking at me.

I can see him wondering if I’m going to be offended, but I already know what he’s going to say, and I agree with him. “Kids.”

“Exactly.”

“I think,” I say, forming this opinion even as I speak, “that when all of you G.I. Joes failed, Unity decided to take a different approach.” I motion to the four kids trudging uphill in front of us. “They’re not just kids. They’re brilliant. They might not be the toughest, or brave, or even capable of violence, but their strength is up here.” I tap my head. Then my chest over my heart. “And in here.”

“And what about you?” he asks. “Are you like them?”

“I’m...something else.”

“I noticed,” he says with a smile. His attention makes my hands sweat. I wipe them on my hips. “But it still doesn’t make sense...”

I stop in my tracks. “Wait, you know why they’re doing this, don’t you? What all of this is for? That guy, Mack, knew, too.”

His eyebrows raise. “You met Mack? And you’re still alive?”

“I am. He’s not. Now tell me, what is all of this about? Unity. The testing. The training. Point, Support, Base.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I’ve been with the program for three weeks.”

He actually flinches at this news. “Three weeks.” He motions to the others. “And them?”

“Some as long. Some longer. A year at the most.”

His head is shaking like a perpetual motion machine. No sign of slowing down.

He stops when I say, “But Gwen already told you most of this, didn’t she?”

His facial expression flattens. Busted. “I had to make sure she was telling the truth. Again, no offense, but you all being here, and Unity thinking a bunch of smart kids can replace us—”

“The people who went native and killed each other?” I interject.

“Fair point. But it doesn’t add up. They’re not fighters.”

They’re.
He left me out of the observation, and I take it as a compliment.

“So what are they training us to fight?” I ask.

He looks me in the eyes, and for a moment, I see hidden depths. Then he turns his head up, looking at the sky. “Them.”

I look up, expecting to see attack helicopters, or parachuting commandos or even pterodactyls. “All I see is blue sky.”

“Higher,” Vegas says.

I can only see a small portion of the sky, through a wavering window of thick leaves, but there is nothing visible between me and...oh, hell. “Military training
and
a sense of humor.”

When he says nothing, I turn toward him. He’s not smiling.

Not
joking.

I look back up at the sky. “Huh.”

“Huh?” he says. “Really? That’s it?”

“I’ve got a few choice words locked and loaded, but I’m trying to cut back.” I notice that the others are getting too far ahead, and I start moving again. I don’t need a view of the blue sky to imagine the impossible. And instead of getting colorful, I find myself getting scientific. “The Drake Equation, written in 1961, which estimates the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations that exist in our galaxy based on known data, predicts that, at
best
, there are a hundred and fifty alien species out there as smart, or smarter, than us. At worst, there are zero. Let’s meet in the middle and say there are seventy five intelligent species in our galaxy.”

“Okay,” he says, listening carefully while walking beside me.

“The nearest star to us is Alpha Centauri. It’s four point three seven light years away. That’s twenty-five point eight
trillion
miles. That’s a lot of empty space. Most of them would still be trapped within the confines of their own solar system. Like us. And to achieve some kind of interstellar travel—light speed, wormholes, whatever—a species would have to be incredibly advanced. I mean thousands of years ahead of us. Probably hundreds of thousands of years. Even if they could send some kind of craft to Earth, there is no way for anything biological to survive a light-speed journey. And anything slower than that would require countless generations of travel, without accident, upheaval or evolution, all with a single-minded ambition to reach a planet whose resources are abundant in the universe.”

“But not in the unique combination that makes a planet habitable.”

“We’ve now discovered nearly two thousand Earth-like planets,” I say.

“What happened to seventy five?”

“That’s intelligent civilizations, and the odds of life beginning at all, even on Earth, are effectively zero. Point is, life is rare. Maybe even one-of-a-kind rare. And interstellar travel is all but impossible.”

“And yet people like Stephen Hawking said that if we encountered alien life, it would likely be hostile.”

I slow to look at him. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

“And you’re a lot more like them—” He motions to the others. “—than you’d like to admit.”

Thank you, Captain Intuitive.

He smiles again—smiles too often for someone who has been living here for a year. Then he gets serious. “If life is as rare as you say, you could also argue that it is valuable.”

There’s no fault in his logic. “You could say that.”

“And if other natural elements are as common as you say, they would be less valuable. So life might be the most valuable thing in the universe, which makes Earth a good place to visit.”

“Assuming that a civilization is advanced enough—” I hold up an index finger. “—to detect us. And don’t say radio waves, because they degrade over distance and become indistinguishable from background noise after a few light years.”

“So alien civilizations at Alpha Centauri aren’t watching Hitler at the Olympics?”

I smile, not because of the Hitler reference, but because it’s nice to meet someone who knows something about history.

“Let’s put it this way,” he says, “if the human race were
hypothetically
capable of interstellar travel and we discovered life on another planet, what would we do?”

I hate hypothetical questions. You might as well start with, ‘This will never happen, but...’

The answer to the question is easy, though, and it has nothing to do with technology or physics. “We would go there and conquer it. Two points for Stephen Hawking.”

“What do you know about the Mars colony?” he asks.

“A lot,” I say, “So why don’t you jump to the point.” I wasn’t always interested in space. I have Sig to thank for that. But I’ve spent the last two years dreaming of other worlds, to escape my own. The escape was always a fantasy, though. The human race will be extinct long before the solar system makes one complete revolution around the Milky Way, never mind developing the technology that would allow us to leave it.

“Give me the basics,” he says.

“In 2023, the Genesis colony landed on Mars, in the basin of the Jezero crater. It was a one-way trip, so no one expected to ever see them again, but no one ever thought we’d lose contact after a month. The Genesis rover transmitted data about soil composition and water content. It looked for evidence of microbial life for a few days after the colony went silent, but then a malfunction shut it—”

“Wrong.”

His sudden intrusion jolts me, and I have to fight the urge to slug him. Few things annoy me more than being interrupted. “Which part?”

“The Genesis rover is still operational.” He says this with such a serious tone that I know he’s not joking. And he believes what he’s saying. “Always has been. They just don’t want anyone to know what it found.”

“And the colonists?”

“Dead. There were redundancies on top of redundancies for communication, including the rover itself. If they were alive, we’d have heard from them, just like we still are from the rover.”

“And you know this how?”

“My father.”

The general.
Riiight.

“So what did they find?”

He shrugs. “No idea. But Unity was formed a month later.”

“By a group of wealthy—”

“Governments,” he says, interrupting again. “The U.S. Japan. The EU. Even Russia and China. My father signed me up. We were the first recruits. Training started normal enough. Basic. Hand-to-hand combat. Weapons. Firearms. Then it got advanced. Points trained with ExoFrames. The advanced kind, with psy-controls. They’re—”

“I know what they are,” I say.

“Then you also know that not even active military units use them yet.” He takes hold of a dead branch in our path, snaps it, and waits for me to go through. “Supports learned how to pilot. Again, with psy-controls. And Bases... I don’t understand even half of what Duff told me.”

“You realize that it’s hard to take someone nicknamed Duff seriously, right?”

“It’s an ironic nickname,” he says. “He’s at least as smart as you, so maybe you have a point.”

When I laugh, my humor is quickly squelched by mental self-flagellation.
This isn’t high school
, I tell myself. Even in high school, I didn’t react to guys the way I am to Vegas. Of course, guys in Brook Meadow weren’t shirtless beefcakes, either.

“Try not to judge them all too harshly,” he says. “Fear can even make strong men like Berg do things they don’t want to. A handful of them, like Mack, are hardliners. They thrive off the conflict. Will probably turn on each other if they get to us. But the rest will fall in line the moment Quinlan is dead.”

Was Bear one of the nice bad guys, or a hardliner?
I wonder, but don’t ask. I don’t want to know. After clearing my mind, I remember Gwen’s question about flight simulator training, and Daniel’s comment about psy-controls. In my three weeks, I never saw a hint of these things, but Gwen and Daniel have already confirmed what he’s telling me.

“So how does this conspiracy theory end?” I ask.

“I think you know,” he says. “Unity was formed as the first stage in creating some kind of—”

“Earth Defense Force?” I say, laying on the sarcasm.
It’s not nice being interrupted, is it?

But he doesn’t seem to notice. “I was going to say, Space Marine Corps, but that works, too.”

“Both are horrible,” I point out.

“Which is why they named it Unity,” he says. “No one would suspect its true purpose was to fight aliens.” Another smile. “There really is no way to say that without sounding nuts, is there?”

“Nope.”

“Look,” he says, “I can tell you think I’m yanking your chain, so I’ll just ask one more question.”

“Shoot.”

“Have you not seen the sky for the past two nights?”

The words sink through me, heavy and uncomfortable. Of course I saw what happened in the sky. How could I miss it? “The EMP nearly killed us,” I say. “Do you know what it was?”

“All I know is that something fell, slowly, from the sky. From
above
the sky. And what we saw last night...”

“The satellites.”

“There aren’t that many satellites in orbit,” he says, and I realize he’s right. We hadn’t considered anything else, because what else could it be?

“When I joined Unity, there were thousands of recruits around the world. They would be on active duty by now. We would have been, too, if we hadn’t hidden. If not for Quinlan.” I hear a tinge of shame in his voice. He looks up at the sliver of sky above us. “I think that was them up there. The other recruits. I think they were fighting a war. I think they shot down whatever it was that crashed in the ocean. I think Stephen Hawking was right, and if you’re right about the technological advancement required to travel to Earth from somewhere else, I think we’re probably screwed.” He stops and looks at me. “How’s the pain?”

The sudden shift in conversation confounds me. What is he talking about? What pain? And I nearly ask the question aloud before remembering that just a few minutes ago, I was moving with all the grace and speed of someone’s great grandmother. And now, I feel... “Better.”

Then I get angry. “Wait, this whole conversation was just to distract me from the pain?”

His answer is cut short by a warbling bird call. His whole body goes tense. The bow is off his shoulder, and an arrow is out of the quiver hanging from his hip faster than I can sneeze. He hasn’t said a word, but tension floods the jungle with enough force to stop the others, now thirty feet ahead of us. Hutch looks back, slowly drawing his pistol. I do the same.

Then Vegas cups his hand to his mouth and lets out a bird call reply.

The third call is followed by a rapid shuffling of leaves. A young man emerges, camouflaged with jungle detritus that blends in with his dark skin. He’s out of breath, heaving for air as he stops in front of Vegas, who has lowered the bow.

“Slow down, Ghost,” Vegas says. He sounds calm, but his body is still tense, ready to spring into action. “What’s happening?”

“He’s coming.” Ghost takes another deep breath. “Twenty minutes, tops.” His accent is subtle, but South African, I think.

“Is he alone?”

Ghost shakes his head.

“
Who
is coming?” I ask, and Ghost’s eyes, which are nearly the only part of him that are identifiable as something other than jungle, whip toward me, like he’s seeing me for the first time. “Los Diablos.”

“Quinlan,” Vegas says, and he takes my arm. He shoves me toward the others and shouts, “Move! We don’t have much time to get ready.”

“Ready for what?” Hutch asks.

“Odds are,” Vegas says, and proves that he still follows Unity’s rule of total transparency with your team, which doesn’t make me feel any better about the conversation we just finished, “Ready to die.”