The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (35 page)

"Yes. Anything."

I winced as Tyrell injected me with something that my body didn't actually need. I was already well on the way to being back to one hundred percent, which meant that absent the special chemical marker used back in the Society, my nanites were going to assume the painkillers were an unwanted foreign substance and break down the morphine before it could affect me much. All Tyrell was doing was wasting good painkillers, but I couldn't tell him that.

Instead I focused on what Brennan had just said. "Does that include your generator? If I asked you to stop working on it and destroy all of your notes would you do that?"

Brennan frowned. I expected him to refuse, or to at least ask why I wanted him to abandon his life's work, but he didn't do either of those things.

"I stand by my word, Skye. Once you've recovered and I'm sure that you've had a chance to really think about what it is you want, we can talk again. If your answer is unchanged, I'll destroy that generator and count it a small price to pay for you having saved me not just once, but twice."

I suspected that he thought I was still too drugged up to realize what it was I was asking, but it was a start. I felt guilty about deceiving him like that, but it was the only way I knew of to save his life. I let more sleepiness into my voice, distorting my words nearly to the point of being unintelligible.

"Thanks, Brennan."

"No, Skye, thank you. I'm going to be here when you wake up—I'm not going anywhere."

Tyrell cleared his throat. "There really are a number of things that you should be seeing to right now, Brennan. I know it's hard, but…"

I smiled faintly, eyes closed. "It's okay. I'll be here when you get back."

Brennan stood, but I didn't realize what he was planning until his lips brushed my forehead. It was like he'd just run an electrical current through me. We'd held hands before now, but that had strictly been to misdirect people into thinking that I wasn't a real guard. This was something else entirely, and it took me so much by surprise that I nearly sat up and ruined the illusion I'd been trying to create.

"Duty calls, but I won't be gone long. I'll see you in a few minutes, Skye."

I listened as the two of them walked to the door and let themselves out. Lying there, eyes closed and motionless, for the next fifteen minutes was one of the harder things I'd ever forced myself to do, but I couldn't afford to have them come back in and find me up walking around.

Once I was confident that they weren't returning, I sat up and looked around my room. Things looked much like I remembered with a couple of new additions. A rifle was once again sitting prominently on the shelf designated for it and I had a full set of new magazines and several boxes of ammunition. It was a pretty compelling sign that Brennan, Tyrell, and Jax trusted me again.

That wasn't unexpected given that my rescue mission had been successful. In truth I was much more surprised to find a new dark, wide-brimmed hat to replace the one I'd lost while fighting my way into the heart of Piter's territory.

There was a note from Lexis pinned to it.

Every time I think that I've nearly balanced the ledger between us, you go off and do something crazy that puts all of us further in your debt.

I quickly dressed in my guard uniform, being careful to do up all the straps on my vest so that my uniform was closer to regulation than the way that Lexis had envisioned it. I considered the hat for several seconds before pulling the note off of it and setting it on my head. The hat was very similar to the one I'd lost, but there were subtle differences in the way it fit that all of the guards had been trained to recognize. Hats like this one were part of the uniform for a special subset of Jax's people. The regular bodyguards didn't wear them, but the special forces group that had no doubt been right at the tip of the spear last night in the assault on the Muertos did, so I put the hat on in the hopes that it would help make people think I was someone other than myself.

It was a long shot, but once again, I didn't have any other choice. I'd spent days worried about how I was going to reconcile my duty to the Society against my growing loyalty to Brennan, and I wasn't going to just sit passively in my room when I finally had a chance to make everything right. I would just have to hope that we were even more thinly stretched now than we'd been before I'd led the attack on Piter's territory.

I'd been listening carefully as Brennan and Tyrell left in an attempt to determine whether or not Brennan had posted guards outside of my room. Given the commitments Brennan had on his limited pool of trained personnel, it didn't make a lot of sense for him to station anyone outside my door, but I wasn't positive that I was going to be able to leave until I opened the door and saw with relief that the hall was empty.

I made it all of the way up to the door outside without running into anybody else, which was a marvelous stroke of luck, but that was nothing compared to the surprise awaiting me at the top of the stairs. Rather than the two guards I was accustomed to seeing, today there was only a single uniformed figure awaiting me, and he looked like he couldn't have been a day over sixteen.

Rather than avoiding eye contact as I'd originally planned, I met his gaze squarely and gave him a crisp salute as I walked past. He didn't even seem to register my face—the simple fact that I was in uniform, the uniform of the special forces group no less, was enough to convince him that I had every right to be going in and out of the secure areas of the building.

The journey to the bore and then on down to the location where I'd left my transmitter was equally uneventful and only minutes after leaving my room I was pressing the transmit button.

"This is Skinwalker to Home Base, come in, Home Base."

"This is Home Base; I've been receiving disturbing reports recently, Skinwalker."

My heart dropped in my chest—I recognized that voice. The low-level analyst I'd been expecting had been replaced by the Citizen-President himself.

"I'm very sorry, sir. I would like to explain, but I'm not sure that would be a good idea on an unsecured channel. The important thing is that I've completed my mission. I've become Brennan's confidant and he's promised to stop development on his generator. You can call off whatever strike you've been planning, there's no longer any need."

The Citizen-President sighed. "I'm afraid, that's not going to be possible, child. The situation is changing. It's no longer going to be enough for us to simply ensure the destruction of the device. Within the next few hours I'm going to authorize a strike by our military forces. Our brave men and women will be going into the city to capture and extract the device."

"That's never going to work, sir. I know that the…grubbers…can't possibly match our technological superiority, but their numbers are nothing short of incredible. Even if every single spare military unit was mobilized to come into the city I don't believe we could hold a perimeter around the compound for long enough to secure the device. Not against every warlord and gang leader in the entire city."

"You're absolutely correct, which is why we'll begin the attack with an extensive, prolonged series of high-altitude strikes designed to lay waste to everything outside of the compound where you're currently located. That will ensure that we won't have to face any opposition from the rest of the city. Our ground forces should then prove more than sufficient to mop up inside of the compound and secure the device."

My mind was whirling. The news that the Citizen-President was authorizing strikes meant that Brennan was in extreme danger, but that couldn't be the only reason I was having such a hard time processing what I was hearing. I'd known from the moment I'd seen the mobile command centers that everyone inside of the city was in danger, so being informed that everyone was still in danger shouldn't have come as such a shock.

Then it hit me. "Sir, the destruction of the city and all its inhabitants goes directly against the precepts. I understand your concern about the device, but life inside of this compound is changing in incredible ways—in good ways. We've been hoping for more than a century that the grubbers would redevelop civilization on their own, but this is the first time that we've seen it actually start to happen. We need to find a way to protect our Society without destroying the seeds of civilization that are starting to grow here."

"I understand your hesitancy, Skinwalker—to be honest I have similar feelings—but that doesn't change the fact that this is what must happen. There are things you don't know yet, important things. Once you're back here safely behind the barrier, I will bring you up to speed, but that's simply not possible right now. Given all of that, I have to ask. Are you prepared to do your duty to our great Society? I know you said that you were one of Brennan's confidantes, but I need to know that you're not going to let that relationship affect your judgment."

"Yes, sir. I am prepared to do the right thing. I would ask, however, that you give me two days in which to make arrangements down here. I believe that I can lure the vast bulk of the guards into one place so that they can be destroyed with a single high-altitude strike."

The silence as my proposal was considered was torturous. With each second that passed I could feel my nerves winding tighter and tighter, but eventually he cleared his throat. "I can't give you two days, but I can give you twenty-four hours. That only works, however, if you get back to us twenty hours from now with the coordinates of where those guards are going to be located."

"Yes, sir. Consider it done."

"I'm putting a lot of trust in you, Skye. Don't let me down."

"No, sir. I won't."

I turned off the transmitter and stumbled back up towards the surface. Nothing made sense to me anymore. I'd always understood the necessity of keeping the cities from uniting against us. It was a distasteful job, but one which was unavoidable, which was why we used firebombing to destroy the ringleaders while leaving as many people and as much of the infrastructure as unharmed as possible.

The use of the mobile command centers was supposed to require the approval of every single franchised citizen. They'd been built and deployed more than forty years ago under the agreement that they would never come within less than a hundred miles of any grubber city without a Society-wide vote, but the Citizen-President hadn't said anything about a vote.

My world was turning upside down, but I was sure of only one thing. If Brennan had been in the Citizen-President's shoes, possessed of complete technological superiority and the ability to destroy an entire city from tens of thousands of feet up, he wouldn't have chosen to exercise it without at least trying to talk to the people he was about to kill.

I had to talk to him—had to warn him about what was going to happen. I knew it was going to ruin any chance of something happening between the two of us, but I also knew that I couldn't live with myself if I didn't come clean and tell Brennan everything.

I popped the top buckle on my vest open and pulled off my hat as I approached the secure entrance to the headquarters building. Every moment counted, and it didn't matter how young the guard at the door was, he wasn't going to tell just anyone who asked where they could find Brennan. I needed to look like myself.

"Has Brennan left the building since you came on duty?"

"I'm not sure that I should be sharing that information, ma'am. I mean, that's classif—"

"Do you know who I am?"

"I…ah, no, ma'am."

"My name is Skye, and I'm on Brennan's personal guard detachment. I wouldn't be asking about him if it wasn't important."

"I thought you were injured in the fighting."

"Do I look injured?"

"Well, no, but the scuttlebutt said—"

"I don't have time for this, soldier. You have exactly five seconds to tell me how long you've been on duty and whether you've seen Brennan leave the building or I will see you busted down to cleaning latrines for the next six months."

"Two hours, ma'am! I have not seen him leave, ma'am!"

I nodded and brushed past him, sticking my head in operations on my way down the stairs for just long enough to verify he wasn't there. I checked the cafeteria, and then headed directly to his bedroom, but he wasn't there either. If it would've been anything less important I probably would've given up at that point. I felt like I'd checked everywhere, and then I realized where he had to be.

The drawdown of the guards who otherwise would have been posted inside the building meant that I made it all the way to the door just in front of the stairs that led down to Brennan's workshop before I encountered anyone, but that wasn't as surprising as the fact that it was Tyrell who I practically ran into as I entered the small guard room.

"Skye, what are you doing here? How are you even up and walking?"

"Tyrell, I'm sorry I can't explain right now, but it will all make sense once I've had a chance to tell Brennan what's going on. Is he down there? I have to see him."

"He's down there, but I'm not letting you past without more explanation than that."

I'd never been this desperate about anything before. My drive to rescue Brennan from Piter had come close, but even that need hadn't been as powerful as this. I'd grabbed my rifle on the way out of my room because a guard without a weapon attracted far more attention than one with. Tyrell was unarmed, which meant I had him even more outclassed than normal, but it never even crossed my mind to shoot him.

My desperation meant that there was plenty of adrenaline flowing through my system. I streaked forward intending on disabling Tyrell without doing any permanent damage to him, but he sidestepped me and slammed his fist into my side just above my short ribs in one smooth motion.

The crack of breaking ribs was shocking, but it had nothing on the sheer surprise of seeing Tyrell move that quickly or the impossibility of any normal human breaking my nanite-reinforced ribs so easily with nothing more than their bare hands. Still reacting out of reflex and training, I spun around and tried to land a blow to Tyrell's neck, but he checked my attack with a punch that left my arm numb and useless and then swept my feet out from underneath me.