The Children of the Sun (44 page)

“Also, she’s missing,” Vanessa said.

“I am aware of that. We’re scouring the base, but she may have slipped out.”

“Where do you suppose she would go?” Vanessa asked.

“Maybe she wanted a steak and a beer,” Miller said. “How the hell would I know? That woman’s impossible to get a handle on.”

No argument here,
Vanessa thought. Out loud she said, “What if she’s dead? They could be assassins. Maybe they already accomplished their objective.”

“If she’s dead, then she’s dead. There’s nobody here who can bring her back to life, and frankly she’s not my most pressing concern at the moment.”

“But we need to know how we were compromised … we need—”’

“Harper, I have an evacuation to plan. In six hours, we need every man and woman among us out of this building. We’re erasing all of our local data, napalming the hardware, and collapsing the entire place in on itself. On top of that, I have to figure out how to go tell all of this to the Emperor, who hasn’t spoken to any of us since Charles died. If we have to, we’ll bring the bats to the Colorado outpost and interrogate them there.”

“I can have my squad ready to go in four hours, tops,” Vanessa said. “That includes time for Park to do backups and wipe his local data.””

“Good for you.”

“Well … that gives me plenty of time to try and interrogate the bats. I want another stab at that blonde chick. She got away from me before and I’ve got some serious questions.”

The colonel sighed, rubbing his face with his hands. He was nearing the end of his shift, and Vanessa thought he would be glad to turn the CC over to Davis or Palowski and let them finish the evacuation.

“I’ll give you one hour,” he said at last. “Your primary mission is to find out why they’re here and how the hell they figured out our location. You want to ask questions about Captain Perrault’s little episode afterward, you be my guest, but get those two answers first. Do you understand?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Vanessa said, unable to suppress a triumphant grin.

Miller nodded and gave her a grim half smile in return. He turned and glanced at one of his aides. “Call down to cellblock and let them know she’s coming.”

“Yes, sir,” the man replied, and he picked up a nearby phone.

“You’re a royal pain in the ass,” Miller told Vanessa.

“Yes I am, sir,” she replied. “It’s one of my best qualities.”

“If your people take so much as one minute more than four hours to get ready, prepare for a month of shit assignments. I’m talking stuff that will make latrine duty seem like a fucking stroll through the park in spring, get me?”

“Won’t happen, sir.”

“Of course not.”

The colonel looked at her for a moment longer, his gaze hard and appraising, and she wondered if he knew; had Charles told them what she was to become, or had he kept it to himself? Was Miller wondering whether, in another month, he would be taking orders from her instead of the other way around? Was that why he had relented?

She couldn’t ask these questions and so she settled for returning his gaze, not willing to look away. Finally, Miller smiled as if at some inner joke and opened his mouth to say something. Before he had a chance to speak, the aide on the phone turned to them.

“No one’s answering at cellblock, sir,” he said, and Miller’s brow furrowed. He glanced over that the bank of monitors that took up most of the left wall, each of them cycling through several camera views. It occurred to Vanessa only at this moment to wonder how the bats had ever made it so deep without being caught on a single closed-circuit feed. Despite popular myth, they very definitely showed up in mirrors, photographs, and videos.

“Well, they’re right fucking there,” Miller said, stabbing a finger at the screen. One of the other aides, this one a lieutenant, stepped over for a closer look.

“Wait a sec …” he murmured, and stuck his nose right up within inches of the screen. “That’s Mike Timlaine.”

“So what?” the colonel asked.

“Mike’s a friend of mine, sir … he was on shift
last
night. Today’s his day off.”

“What the hell is he doing down there, then?”

“Is that … it’s Trisha with him. She’s not on tonight, either. Sir, something’s FUBAR here.”

“It’s playing last night’s video feed,” Vanessa said, and a sudden chill ran its way through the entire length of her body. “They all are. Colonel, we have to get down to cellblock right fucking n—”

She was cut off by a sudden, long whistle from one of the workstations. An aide bent over it, tapped a few keys, and the alarm stopped. Then he looked up at them, his eyes wide.

“What’s the situation?” Miller barked, and the boy started, stammering.

“Ah … it’s ah … it’s the loading bays, sir. Someone’s opened them.”

“Which ones?”

“A—all eight of them, sir.”

“Oh, Christ,” Miller said, and then the building’s alarm system went off. Claxons screamed overhead and the orange emergency lights began to flash. Vanessa didn’t have to ask the colonel what it meant, though she had never been told. For the first time in her history with the Children, they were under attack.

Chapter 21
Unexpected Encounters

The man who had identified himself as Colonel Miller had spent two hours snarling questions at them, in between bouts of physical violence that had left both her and Theroen bruised and bloodied. Two had alternated between silence, taunting, and spitting out patently false information. At one point she had told him her name was Marie Curie. At another, that she had learned about the Children’s location from the Illinois Office of Tourism. She’d thought this tremendously amusing.

The colonel hadn’t shared her sense of humor, and when at last she’d seen him coming dangerously close to losing his control altogether, Two had stopped throwing barbs at him and stuck to silence. He had hit her then, three times in the face and once in the side. Theroen’s anguish had been visible on his face from across the room, and Two had been proud of him for keeping his mouth shut.

“I have things to do,” the colonel had told them at last. “You two rest up, and we’ll continue our little chat once I’m off duty. I’m going to bring a friend, and he’s going to bring his collection of knives, and we’ll see how many pieces of each of you we have to remove before you decide to talk.”

He had instructed four soldiers, each armed with an assault rifle, to take them to the third cell and toss them in with someone he called only ‘the traitor.’ Now they were walking down the hall, hands shackled behind their backs in metal cuffs. Two could feel a stabbing pain every time she breathed, and she hoped to have the chance to return the favor to the colonel.

They arrived at a heavy steel door with a tiny, reinforced window. One of the guards stepped forward, produced a plastic card, and held it up to a pad next to the door. There was a buzzing noise and Two heard heavy-sounding bolts moving. The guard swung the door open.

“Get in,” the man directly behind her snarled, and he shoved her in the back. Two stumbled and slammed into the concrete wall with her left shoulder, but she managed to use it to keep from falling face first into the cell. She stepped into the room and heard Theroen walking in behind her.

The room was larger than she had expected, probably twenty feet square, with high ceilings and a plain concrete floor. There weren’t any windows and the lights were turned very low, but her eyes had no difficulty coping. There was a small metal toilet and a single rickety cot. The room was otherwise bereft of furnishings, and there was a man sitting on the floor in the corner, arms crossed over his knees, head down. He did not look up at their entry.

“You gonna take these fucking handcuffs off?” Two asked one of the guards as he stepped into the room. “Or are you too scared?”

“Shut up, bat,” the man growled, and he pointed. “Go stand in the corner, face the wall, and look straight ahead.”

Two did what she was told and heard them telling Theroen to do the same, only with the opposite corner. Their cellmate, who still hadn’t moved, was in the corner between them, the one furthest away from the door.

Two felt something cold and metal slip around her ankle, and understood she was being chained to the wall. The guard who was kneeling behind her stood up and said, “When I take these cuffs off, think real hard about the two rifles pointed at your fucking head. If you even try and turn, you’re going to die. You can move when you hear the door close.”

“So, this is how you treat
all
your dates, right?” Two said, but she kept herself still.

“Keep up the jokes, bitch,” the soldier said. “Keep ‘em right up. The colonel
loves
jokes.”

There was a click and Two felt first one cuff and then another being taken from her wrists. She resisted the urge to flex her arms or make any other motions that might earn her a hail of bullets to the back of the head. She heard the guard going through the same set of commands with Theroen, and in a moment more they were alone with their cellmate. The door clanged closed, the bolts latched, and Two took a deep breath, ignoring the pain in her side. She glanced down and confirmed that she was attached to the wall by an eight-foot chain.

“This is going to be a long night,” Theroen said.

“No shit,” Two replied, turning around. Theroen was leaning against the wall, holding his arms out in front of him and flexing them.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Been better. I think that motherfucker might’ve cracked a rib. How about you?”

“Some bruises. Nothing terrible yet. I am not looking forward to his return.”

“Me neither,” Two replied. She glanced over at their cellmate. He was sitting in the darkest part of the room, head still down, and the only attribute she could discern was that his skin was a dark brown. “Hey, buddy … you still alive over there? Hello? Mister traitor-man?”

He looked up at last, and Two felt a bolt of recognition run through her when she saw his face. “Jesus Christ … Thomas?!”

He managed a weak grin at the shock that was evident in her voice. “That’s me. Still alive, Two, but I’ve seen better days. Sorry about your rib.”

“You’re the traitor?”

“That’s what they keep calling me.”

“Wow. We thought … I mean, when you left
L’Obscurité
, Naomi just assumed the Children had called you back.”

Thomas smiled, shaking his head. “I told them she knew about me. Told them, but do they listen? No, they never do. They were so sure she had no idea. I
was
called back, but they gave me something to do before I left. That was the problem.”

“What did they want you to do?”

Thomas sighed. He stood up, and Two could see that he had lost a substantial amount of weight. He had not yet lost all of his muscular build, but he looked thinner, and his smooth, dark skin seemed to hang off of him. Where his head had always been clean-shaven before, he now had a few weeks’ growth of curly black hair, and he had grown a rough beard.

It didn’t look like they were treating him well. His eyes were sunken, and Two could see that at least one of them had been blackened in the not-so-distant past. She supposed he had spent weeks alternating between the cot, the toilet, and his spot on the floor.

“They told me to kill her,” Thomas said.

“You refused,” Theroen asked, and Thomas glanced over at him.

“Not exactly, my man. I told them I’d do it. That’s what I was there for, right? Five fuckin’ years of watching that girl, learning everything I could about her. It would’ve been crazy to bring me back without having me give it a shot. I knew where she lived and how to get into the building …”

“When did you decide not to do it?” Two asked, and Thomas gave a small laugh.

“Well, it’s crazy … I broke into her place one morning, all set to do it nice and quiet. Needle full of toxins, stuff to rig a fire, all that. So I go into her bedroom, and she’s lying there next to three empty bottles of wine and an open bottle of pills. Looked to me like she was trying to do my job for me.”

Two felt something then, at the back of her mind – a suspicion that had been there for some time, but also something more tangible. There was another consciousness touching hers, and after a moment she turned to Theroen.

“You knew,” she said. “You’re not surprised … because you already knew.”

Theroen looked back at her, his expression unreadable, always so goddamned calm. “No, I am not surprised. She told me about it the night of the attack on the council.”

“And you kept it from me? Theroen, what the fuck?!”

“She asked me to keep it in confidence.”

“Yeah, but … she’s my friend! She needs help.”

“Two, she is my friend as well. I know that she needs help, and should we survive this night, I am prepared to give her anything that she asks of me.”

“You should have told me.”

“If she had asked you, as a friend, to keep her secret, would you have told me?” Theroen asked. There was no smarminess or self-satisfaction in his voice; he seemed genuinely interested in her answer, and it was this more than anything that helped Two calm herself. She thought about it and shook her head.