Unity (16 page)

When Hutch hits the ground, I do as he asked. I run. Out of fear? Sure. No one wants to be pancaked by a guy in a robot suit. But also because sticking around means making Hutch a target. If there is any chance he’ll survive this now, it’s not hiding beneath that shield with me—it’s far away from me.

The trouble with the new plan, which really just involves me putting one foot in front of the other a bit faster than usual, is that a jolt of pain radiates from my side with each step. I’ve seen wounded animals run. On TV. Whether they’ve been hit by a vehicle, shot by a hunter or wounded by a predator, they all have the same kind of awkward gait. It doesn’t always slow them down. Not at first. Not until they’re overcome by the wound and drop down dead. But they all look a certain kind of ridiculous. Pitiful.

And I’m pretty sure that right now, as I look back over my shoulder, legs moving fast and uneven, arms flailing to stay upright, that I look worthy of pity.

But not to a man like Quinlan.

His roboticized voice laughs at me. Mocks me.

Without saying a word, he says,
I’m going to catch you and squash you, and all your frantic running is good for, is making me laugh.
The real problem with all of that is that he’s not chasing me.

Because there is no getting away. Even if he stays put long enough to kill the others, even if Vegas manages to put up a fight, he’ll still catch me. And when he does, there won’t be anyone left to fight back or help.

They need time. To regroup. To escape through the hatch. Whatever. They won’t be able to do any of it if Quinlan sticks around.

So I appeal to his brutish nature by stopping, turning around and laughing right back at him. “Are you seriously afraid of me?”

With his attention on me, he doesn’t see Vegas creeping up behind him. But Vegas sees me, and when I give him a subtle shake of my head, he stops. He can’t win that fight. We both know it. Their only hope is that Quinlan doesn’t see through my astonishing ruse.

I back-pedal, keeping a steady pace, trying to hide my pain.

“I’m not sure why everyone is so afraid of you. I mean, yeah, the suit is kind of an unfair advantage, but you’re obviously kind of a Nancy without it.” Yeah, I know, calling boys a girl as an insult is kind of an insult to girls everywhere, but here’s the thing: boys still hate it. Especially boys who are men with big muscles, rabid eyes and giant, robot, killing machines under their control.

I can feel his eyes glaring at me through the single red slit. My own personal Cyclops. If only I were a Greek hero with a giant sharpened stick... Not that a sharp stick is going to stop an ExoFrame. I’m pretty sure even the Cyclops wouldn’t stand a chance.

When Quinlan bends his legs to leap, I turn and bolt. I hear the whir of his mechanical legs spring out, combined with a familiar hum—repulse engines.
If that thing has repulse discs in its feet, it can do a lot more than outrun me.

A shadow slips past me, drawing my eyes up. The ExoFrame sails past overhead. He’s going to land right in front of me and greet me with a hug. Maybe pop my head between his hands.

I cut hard to the left, heading deeper into the maze of huts.

I don’t see him land, but I feel the ground shake.

I turn right, around a hut, hoping to stay out of his line of sight. I can’t fight him or outrun him, but maybe I can hide from him.

As I peel away from the hut, which is built around the trunk of a tall palm tree, the whole structure explodes. Wooden shrapnel peppers my back. The air fills with wisps of dry leaves. And the palm tree, severed near the base, topples over, crushing a second hut and sending a fresh beam of light down on the ExoFrame’s body.

I nearly stop to call him an attention hog, but he lifts the palm tree up and hurls it at me. Strong as he is, his aim isn’t great. While I round another hut, the tree punches through it, the top rushing past me. But the rest of the ruined hut pelts me, slapping my abused body. I’m forced to leap over the trunk, which slows me down, but I’ve got a solid lead.

Then I hear the hum of repulse discs again, and I look up in time to see him punch his way up through the canopy. A third beam of sunlight strikes the forest floor, filled with leafy confetti. He’s coming my way, but I can’t see him now.

I turn hard right, hoping he won’t guess which direction I’m heading.

The canopy behind me shatters. Quinlan lands where I had been standing, punching the ground with enough force to stumble me.

But he’s missed again, and it’s making him angry. He pummels the ground, and for a moment, I imagine what that fist would do to me. It’s not pretty, and it fuels my flight.

But this time, my maneuvers have brought me to a wall of stone. Rusty debris is piled against the volcanic rock. I see old ExoFrame parts and newer transport parts mixed in with bits of history. Pieces of World War II bunkers. Ladders. Support beams. Assorted chunks of unidentifiable metal. It’s a real mess, and a nightmare for anyone with a fear of tetanus.

I stop in front of the debris-covered wall. I’m out of hiding places, out of room and out of breath. With no place to go, I turn to face Quinlan, who is standing back up to his full height, which in the suit is about seven feet.

There’s nothing snarky to say. He doesn’t need to be egged on. He’s going to kill me. There’s no way around that. The best I can hope for is that he will be quick about it.

But then he stalks toward me, like he knows I’m trapped, like he might be rethinking the whole ‘crush her like a bug’ strategy. I lean away from him, my back leaning against the wall, my hand landing on a rough metal surface. I glance down at it, and then back at Quinlan.

And then I get it. This is why I’m a Point. This is what makes me different. This is the gift given me by a life of hardship. I can look at my own death and not feel fear, but anger. I can stare down a killing machine stalking toward me and say, “I have faced a good number of bullies in my short time on Earth, Quinlan, but you are, without a doubt, the most chicken-shit of them all.”

Yeah, I broke my rule, but it seemed appropriate, and it works.

Quinlan breaks into a jog, which becomes a run, and then, just to make sure that every last bit of me is turned into juice, he kicks in those repulse discs in his feet, and he glides over the ground. Freed from gravity, he accelerates to an easy fifty miles per hour in just under three seconds, which is about the time it takes him to close the distance between us, and for me to lift up the six-foot length of rebar leaning against the wall behind me.

In my fragile state, I don’t think I could hold the metal bar up for more than a few seconds, but I don’t have to. Quinlan must see it, because instead of punching, he flails back, twisting his body as he tries to stop. His quick reflexes keep the bar from striking him dead center, but the rebar slides across the chest and finds the shoulder seam. With the metal braced against the stone wall, it punches straight through the weak point, and out the ExoFrame’s back.

I can’t tell if the bar has hit Quinlan inside the suit, or just the ExoFrame itself, but he screams like he’s been hurt. Or at least like he’s very, very angry. While he tries to tug himself free of the rebar, which has also become embedded in the stone, I duck down and crawl out between his legs.

Running feels almost impossible now. My side is warm and wet. The gunshot wound has opened up. My body feels ready to fall apart.

But Quinlan still hasn’t freed himself.

Maybe I can get away.

Just push through it
, I tell myself.
Hurt when you’re safe.

I flinch to a painful stop when Gwen and Vegas round a hut, armed with machetes and spears. The looks on their faces when they see Quinlan trying to pull himself free from the wall makes me wish I had a Featherlight to take their photo. But even if I did, there isn’t time. Quinlan lets out a scream as he braces one foot against the wall and pulls.

“Let’s go!” Vegas says, and the two of them help take my weight, leading me through the campsite and back to a winding valley of stone. The four foot gap of eroded stone would be hard for Quinlan to move through, but not impossible. And if it ends at a closed hatch...

We round a final bend and my heart sinks. The hatch is closed, and everyone is bunched together in an easy-to-slice package. One swipe of Quinlan’s blade and everyone here is done. Only Hutch and Doli, who are sitting on the ground looking dazed, but happy to see me alive, would survive that first swing. Daniel, Gizmo and Sig are gathered by a digital lock beside a large metal door. Gizmo, Daniel and Duff are locked in a heated, high-pitched argument about how to unlock it. Sig is working the keypad, trying endless sequences of combinations.

She looks back at me and says, “There are too many variables. Too many numbers. It could be anything.”

“Sometimes it’s not about the numbers,” I tell her, and then I turn to face the tunnel entrance, hiding a wince and ignoring the warm blood oozing from the reopened wound on my side and running down my leg. I can feel Quinlan’s running feet shaking the ground. Vegas, Gwen, Ghost, Whitey and Berg join me. I glance at Berg, and he hands me one of his machetes. “We do what we have to, to survive.”

“Sometimes it’s better to die doing what’s right,” I tell him.

“Looks like we’ll find out together,” he says.

“Wait!” It’s Sig. She’s standing on her tip toes, reaching her hand up to what looks like one of three security cameras mounted into the metal frame above the lock. But she’s not quite tall enough to reach the lowest of the three vertically spaced circles.

“The cameras are an extra layer of security,” Daniel grumbles. “If someone were inside, they could keep the door locked even if the right code was entered.”

“If there were anyone from Unity inside, they would have opened the door.”

I’m not so sure, since those same people dropped us on an island populated by psychos, but I keep it to myself.

Daniel shakes his head. “But the keypad—”

“—is a decoy.” Sig taps Daniel’s forehead three times while she talks. “We have to assume this door was here for us to find. A keypad could take a century to crack.” She looks at Gizmo. “And there is no way to access the insides and hack its hardware.”

The small boy nods.

“So there would be a way for us to open it, even if—”

Hutch gets to his feet. Lifting her up in one arm. “Effie. Trust your Base.”

He’s telling
me
to trust Sig, who is pretty much the only person I trust? Then again, I am still standing here, waiting to be squashed. I push past Daniel and stand with them.

Base, Support, Point.

Unity.

Sig lifts her brand up in front of the lowest camera.

Hutch places his in front of the middle.

And I put mine at the top.

“See!” Daniel says when nothing happens. “I told you. The—”

A line of blue light traces our brands, flicking down and then back up.

“Effie,” Gwen says, sounding nervous. I can hear the pounding of Quinlan’s legs and grinding stone as he moves through the winding tunnel.

The blue light blinks, and with a clunk, the door unlocks and slides open.

“Inside!” I shout as Quinlan’s shadow shifts just around the bend. His hand snaps out, reaching into our small hiding place and catching Whitey’s head. There’s a muffled scream. A crunch. And then Whitey goes limp.

“
Inside, now!
”

After just a few days on the island, I feel like a Neanderthal who’s been abducted by aliens and set loose inside a UFO. The modern, white hallway, pristine in a just-built way, is another world. Like a dream. A nearly forgotten place. For a fraction of a moment, I’m stunned by the well-lit hall and its perfectly octagonal shape, and the shiny floor, all lit by twin streaks of light emanating from within the angled portion of the wall. It’s like the tunnel people talk about seeing when they die.

I’m shoved from behind, someone urging me inward, away from the ExoFrame grinding its way past the narrow rocky bend, just fifteen feet from the door. The rebar is missing from the shoulder, but the arm hangs like a dead weight, and blood trickles from the hole.

I pivot out of the way, waving the others past me. “Go, go, go!”

The simple act of waving my arm hurts. As much as I would like to distance myself from Quinlan, I’m not going anywhere fast. The trouble is, they’re all overachievers. While Doli, Duff, Gizmo and Daniel retreat down the hall, Vegas, Gwen, Hutch, Sig and Ghost stop. Like they can help.

“Go!” I shout at Vegas. “Keep them safe. If there is something that can help us here, they’ll find it.”

To my surprise, he taps Ghost’s shoulder, and the two of them chase after the four retreating Bases.

Gwen throws herself at the large metal door, trying to yank it closed, but it’s not budging.

Outside, Quinlan pounds at the stone wall holding him back, turning it to powder and pushing himself slowly, but inexorably, through. He sees us watching from inside the hall, his prey nearly safe in the den. He roars at us, crumbling stone, nearly through.

“Effie!” Sig says. She and Hutch already have their hands positioned over three vertically spaced Unity brand sensors—not cameras. They mirror the three outside.

I place my hand above theirs, and will the blue light to scan them faster.

Gwen backs away from the door. “Guys...”

The blue light flickers.

Gwen leaps back with a shout.

The door slides shut, like a sideways guillotine.

Quinlan collides with the far side. I can hear the resounding impact, but can’t feel it. This place was built to take a beating, even from something as powerful as an ExoFrame. He pounds on the door just three more times, venting his frustration. He knows he can’t get through. Not without a Base and a Support. And what’s left of the Diablos and Perseverantes are in here with us.

The moment I feel safe, my legs start to wobble. My vision blurs, as a kind of pressure moves from my head and down into my chest. For a moment, I’m lost in an unthinking void, and then I’m back and somehow still upright.

But not walking.

My arms are over Gwen’s and Hutch’s backs, and theirs are wrapped around mine. They’re carrying me, my toes dragging over the floor. Sig is ahead of us, her tiny frame confidently leading the way.

We pass closed doors and branching hallways, but we stay on course, straight ahead. The walls are labeled in spots, revealing where we are in this subterranean Unity base. ‘Mess.’ ‘Quarters.’ ‘Engineering.’ ‘Labs.’ ‘Gym.’ We pass them all—including a door labeled ‘Medical,’ which given the tacky warmth now covering my leg and my side beneath the black T-shirt, I’m going to need to visit, and soon. But we pass without stopping, heading toward the sound of voices, loud and excited—mostly Daniel.

“What is this place?” Gwen asks.

“I think we’re about to find out,” Hutch says. “But I’m pretty sure we’re not going to like it.”

The first open door we come across is labeled ‘Armory.’ But Sig doesn’t slow her pace, and I get only a glimpse of what’s inside. There are racks of guns, and armor, and other things I don’t recognize. And there is also Doli, standing there by herself, taking it all in. As a Base, I can’t imagine her being a gun lover, so I assume she’s making some kind of mental inventory, filling her head with information that could come in useful later on. Not that I really know anything about her. She’s been near catatonic since the moment I saw her.

Who can blame her? Especially now, after seeing what happened to Freckles. The rest of us are still mobile, still fighting and surviving, but sooner or later, the shell shock is going to hit. When the stillness of night and the darkness it brings returns, I doubt I’ll be able to sleep. The horrors of the past days are going to replay through my mind’s eye like a movie stuck on repeat.

As we approach the hallway’s end, I find my feet again, taking some of the weight off Gwen and Hutch. But they don’t let me go, and I don’t want them to. The old me would have walked this hall alone, bound and determined to not show a hint of weakness. But I’m not that person anymore. Gwen and Hutch can carry me pretty much whenever they want, and I will never complain.

I’ve learned that depending on others isn’t a sign of individual weakness, but of communal strength. And I really don’t want to admit it, but I don’t think I could have ever learned that lesson anywhere other than on this island. I’m not sure I would have even learned the lesson had we not crashed and been attacked by Los Diablos.

Would I change all that if I could? Absolutely. But I’d be a weaker person for it.

The hallway leads to an open space. The door, which looks like two thick metal plates, has retracted fully into either side of the hall. The wall to our right has two labels: ‘Operations,’ and beneath that, ‘Hangar.’ Sig glances at the words and then picks up the pace, nearly jogging through the opening.

The room on the far side is massive, and it reminds me of history-book photos of the old NASA control rooms. Three sets of computer terminals are arranged in an arc. Each station has a curved, touch-screen display, keyboard and some kind of headset that looks more like a rubbery mesh helmet than headphones. At the front of the room is a patchwork of large screens, all surrounding one massive display the size of a movie screen. The room has power, but the screens are dark. Nothing has been started up.

I have a hard time believing that Daniel and Gizmo wouldn’t have already gotten everything up and running and made contact with the outside world, but they’re gathered at the front of the room with everyone else, standing in front of a long row of windows positioned beneath the array of screens. From my point, higher up in the theater-style space, I can’t see much through the windows, but the space beyond is vast.

“I have her,” Hutch says, and Gwen releases me, heading down a curved staircase with Sig.

Sig gives me a look that asks, ‘Are you okay?’ and I give her a weary thumbs-up before she continues on her way.

“You’re going straight to Medical after we see what’s up,” Hutch says.

“No argument here,” I say, and I grunt as we clumsily move down the stairs. I glance at his face, so close to mine, and see a welt on his forehead. That’s where the shield hit him. When he put himself between me and a giant robot fist. I’m not the only one who needs medical attention. I’m pretty sure almost all of us do. But it’s nice that he seems most concerned about me. But is that because it’s his job? Or something more?

“Thanks,” I say.

He turns to me, our noses just inches apart. He doesn’t ask, ‘For what?’ He’s smart. He knows what he did and why I’d be grateful. He just says, “Any time.”

And then he lingers there for a moment. Neither of us moving. Just looking at each other. Trusting each other. Sig earned my complete trust two years ago, but I have partially trusted other women. Teachers. My most recent foster-mother. But I have never, not once and to any degree, trusted a man or boy, until now.

Gwen and Sig gasp in unison, pulling Hutch’s attention a moment before mine. They’ve reached the windows, surprised by whatever they’re seeing, but I don’t become insatiably curious until I see them both lean to the side and look up.

Gwen actually smiles and says, “Holy geez.”

“C’mon,” Hutch says, and he helps me move down the staircase a bit faster. When we reach the window, I’m greeted by more than one smile. Even Vegas looks something near excited.

What in the world...

And then I see it.

The hangar.

And what’s inside it.

The vast space beyond the window is circular and at least a half mile across. The size is dizzying, but I hardly notice it, because the five things standing inside the hangar are far more impressive. And like the others, I have to lean to the side and look up to the right to see the closest of them.

Standing at least four hundred feet tall is a sleek-looking robot, whose limbs don’t seem thick enough to support its undoubtedly massive weight. It has the build, that in human terms, hasn’t been seen since Bruce Lee. And it somehow carries that same lethal look, like it could strike in a blur, despite its size. The five robots have varying styles and paint jobs. The one closest to me has a body composed of stylish white armor with black joints. Red stripes run down the arms and legs, converging at a Unity triangle over its chest. The armor is covered in nearly imperceptible octagonal cells, like the ExoFrame. In fact, a lot of what I’m seeing is similar to the ExoFrame, but a
lot
bigger. Its head has a nobility about it, somehow also looking dangerous and wise. A facemask covers the lower half of its head, and above it, the two light green eyes are large enough to be windows. But I suspect they’re actually filled with sensors. Something like this has to be a drone, controlled from here.

Hutch taps my hand with his, and then points to the robot’s hand. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. It’s easy to recognize the massive hand we found in the cave. One of these things must have blown apart at some time, the hand crashing into the cave, or creating it with the force of its landing. Must have been one hell of an explosion.

Between each of the robots is some kind of vehicle. They’re triangular in shape, but lack what I would call wings. Not that flying craft need them anymore, and it looks like there are at least six repulse engines on the bottom. The featureless curved hull gives no indication as to their purpose, but the symbol at the center of it gives a clue: Support.

“What
are
they?” Gizmo asks. I’ve seen commercials where kids open Christmas presents, warm by the fire, smiling parents nearby. The kids exclaim over the year’s hot new plastic device. Gizmo sounds like that, like he can’t wait to run out there and play with these monstrous toys.

I turn to Vegas. He’s already looking at me. He raises his eyebrows, glances into the hangar, and mouths the word, “See?”

Right.

Aliens.

Unity defending the world from invasion.

I still think he’s living in a twisted fantasy, but this does fit his conspiracy theory.

Flight simulator.

I look back at the mesh helmets around the room.
Psy-controls.

“You can operate those...whatever they are...planes, can’t you?” I whisper to Hutch. He and Gwen both turn to me, the surprised look on their faces is answer enough. Yes. They both can.

“Seriously,” Gizmo says. He’s beaming. “Who knows what these are?”

“Shugoten,” Daniel says. He’s at the far end of the line, forehead and hands pressed against the glass.

“Sho-what now?” Gizmo says.

Daniel makes eye contact with each one of us. Unlike Gizmo, and contrary to his typical personality, he looks almost sick. “Shugoten. It’s short for Shugo Tenshi. Means Guardian Angels.”

“How do you know?” Sig asks.

“Because I named them.” He looks back out to the hangar, the first hint of a smile emerging. “I invented them.”