Crux

35 LAST WORDS

Saturday October 27th

Sam crossed the courtyard to Jake, fell to her knees at his side. He was face down in the gravel. His mind was still there, but in pain, and fading. A red stain was spreading across his back. A puddle was forming under him. There was a hole in his shirt, in the flesh below, where the bullet had punched all the way through him.

“Jake, Jake,” she said. “Oh my God, Jake.”

He groaned in pain. “Sunee…” he said weakly. His mind was faltering, confused, weak from blood loss.

Sam put her hands on his shirt, ripped it open as gently as she could, tried to see the wound better.

It was bad. The bullet had punched through his lung, had sent an expanding cone of carnage through his chest cavity. There was blood everywhere. Something had nicked a major blood vessel.

“Sunee…” he groaned. He was reaching out for her with his mind, trying to feel her more. She could feel him fading, fading further.

She balled up the shirt, pressed it into the wound as best she could. The blood kept coming.

No doctor, she thought. No vehicle.

“Let me touch you…” he moaned. “Please.”

“You’re not going to die,” she told him.

His eyes were open. He was staring at her. He knew what was coming.

“Please…” he begged her.

Tears rolled down Sam’s face. A sob ripped its way out of her. She nodded. “Yes.”

Then she opened herself to him, opened herself as wide as she could, let him see who she was.

His eyes went wide as he drank her in, a confusion of images and memories and sensations. Above it all she sent her feelings for him, her admiration, her trust, her tenderness, the thing that might have been love.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them there were tears there too. A drop of blood from her cuts dripped from her face onto his. He looked at her, with those wide, amazed eyes, so surprised now to find out how right he’d been about her.

“Sam… Sam… Get them back. Get them back.”

She nodded, weeping. She would. She’d get them back.

He coughed, and blood came up, and she could feel his regret, his regret at not seeing the future, his regret that she’d never opened herself to him before.

“I wish I’d known you,” he whispered. And his mind was fluttering, faltering, on the edge of that sudden decoherence into darkness that she’d felt before.

“You did,” she pleaded with him. “You did know me. You did.”

But he was gone before the words left her lips.

She knelt there, next to Jake, weeping. She closed his still-staring eyes. Her blood and tears fell on his face to mix with his.

I wish I’d shown you, she told herself. I wish I’d trusted you. I wish I’d opened up to you.

I’m sorry, she sent him. I’m so so sorry.

But there was no one there to hear her.

A sound snapped her back to reality. She turned, and the soldier she’d disabled inside the house was there, yards away, a long length of metal pipe in his hand, running at her, swinging it like a baseball bat with lethal, superhuman force.

She was on her feet in an instant. Her left forearm shot up at blurring speed to block the swinging pipe. Pain ripped through her as her bullet-wounded muscles strained to heave her arm up. Then the whole arm went numb as it collided with the deadly pipe. But by then she was forward, inside his guard, and her right fist snapped out in a lightning-fast punch that crushed the man’s nose and snapped his head back in a violent whiplash motion.

The pipe dropped from the man’s hand, clattered on the gravel. It was bent thirty degrees where it had collided with her arm. The man tottered, took one step back, and then collapsed, semiconscious.

Sam stepped over him, patted him down. A search of his pockets brought up a phone, a wallet with cash, credit and ID, and a spare clip of ammo.

She reloaded the pistol, dismissed the ID as a fake, and shoved the rest in her own pockets.

He came to as she pocketed his things.

Good.

She stuck the barrel of the gun in his face, inches from his eyes.

“Who are you? Where did they take those kids?”

He clenched his jaw, shook his head from side to side. He’d die before he told her.

She couldn’t feel his mind at all, but she knew it was there, knew he was running Nexus. She pushed against him the way Kade had taught her – the way Shu had done it to Kade – forced his Nexus nodes to respond. His eyes went wild but she could feel him now. She threw her mind against his, tried to force him to open to her, to tell her where those children had gone.

He resisted, fought back with pure willpower and terror. He could see the gun in her hand but it wasn’t enough.

She wished she had Kade’s back door, so she could force this man’s mind open, take what she needed to know. Some part of her was sick at that thought, but the rest of her didn’t care. Her anger, her loss, her fear for the children overruled all else.

She had to break this man’s will so she could take what she needed to know. Fear wasn’t enough. Pain would have to do.

She rose to her feet, gun still trained on the man’s head, and kicked him in the side. Pain burst from his mind, a groan escaped from between his clenched teeth, and she pressed against him, pressed her thoughts against his and willed him to open up.

He resisted.

She kicked him again and again, pushing at his mind with hers as she did. He feebly tried to block and she broke his wrist for his trouble, pressed again with her thoughts.

Still he fought.

She spread his legs with her foot, and his eyes went wide and he tried weakly to turn away, to stop her, and then she rammed her foot home into his testicles and a scream burst out of his mouth as he curled up around himself into a fetal ball. The backwash of his pain struck her, muted by his stubborn clenching of his thoughts, but bad enough. She held her ground. His mind was teetering on the edge, his defenses letting go.

Sam dropped to her knees, grabbed the man’s head by his short hair, yanked it back, then drove the barrel of the gun into his mouth. She heard teeth break as she jammed it into his throat. She pushed against him with all her mental strength, and finally he cracked.

Then what he knew streamed into her. And she saw. An island. A research base. These children, molded into something else, into something monstrous, something posthuman. A new species that would rule them all. And behind them, one man, using them as his tools…

The knowledge flowed into her, horrifying her, transfixing her. She searched for every detail, every bit she’d need to know to get them back…

The gun went off in her hand. She felt it, heard it, and only then saw the soldier’s fingers around her own. He’d pulled the trigger.

He was still alive, but dying. The bullet had blown out the back of his throat, shattered his spine, sent bone shards through his brainstem. He was dying, all but decapitated by the blast. There was horror in his eyes, in his thoughts. He hadn’t planned to…

But something had. Something planted in his mind. Planted by his master. By the man who would soon have Sarai and Kit and Mali and Aroon and the other children she loved. The man who’d killed Jake.

Shiva Prasad.

She felt the soldier die below her. But she’d seen enough. She knew where to go.

And no one was going to stop her.