Page 60 of Reformation
Agnieszka followed the dazed pirate to the ground and hit him in the head over and over again with the butt of the flashlight until his swearing turned to groans, then gasps, and finally nothing at all.
Jonah finally pulled himself together enough to reach out to her and lay a hand on her arm, now covered in gore.
“Hey,” he said hoarsely. “Lieutenant, it’s okay. You can stop now, he’s dead. He’sdead, Agnieszka, he can’t hurt either of us now.”
“He deserves it!”
“I know.” Her arm trembled in Jonah’s loose grip, but she’d stopped striking.
“He would have doneallof that to us, he would have done worse!” she insisted with a shaky voice. “You didn’t see them up there, the way they fought. They targeted pods, cadets trying to get away from the battle. Iknowthese people are bastards, they killed—they killed my friends, so many of my friends, they’re dead now, and I—I can’t—”
“You’re alive,” Jonah said gently. “We both are. We should try to stay that way, huh? Let’s leave him here.”
Agnieszka looked at him, her eyes huge and bright in the flashlight’s wavering beam. “Where will we go?”
Jonah smiled, distantly noting how much the motion hurt his mouth. Split lip for sure. “I’ve got a safe place.”
***
Berengaria had never been brilliant, like so many members of her family. She hadn’t inherited her father’s magnificent sparkof charisma or ended up with her brother’s patient, insightful ability to manipulate. For so much of her life, she had simplybeen, had existed and been maneuvered like the pawn she was.
Her earliest dreams of a life of ease and beauty had been dashed with the murder of her father, and as her own opportunities had quickly become circumscribed, she had withdrawn deeply into her shell. She’d created a false beauty around herself, a fake paradise that was as ephemeral and dreamlike as her thoughts of independence, of fighting back. She’d tried, here and there, but most of her efforts had been blocked by her brother before they’d even manifested in the slightest bit of change.
Brilliance, she’d decided a few years ago, was overrated. She was never going to be a genius, but some of the greatest creations in the universe were the result of persistence, not inspired flights of fancy. So Berengaria packed away her hopes and dreams once and for all and settled into the banality of layering her actions so deeply that it would take her own brother weeks to sift through them all.
Boring, dull, basic as could be—therein lay her camouflage. And at the very center of it, she employed a very simple trick.
It had taken a long time and some help from Garrett and others, but at long last, Berengaria had laid out her own, private surveillance web. A combination of biological, mechanical, and combination trackers, most of them so small they could barely be detected from her space-side prison, had been placed on each of her brother’s personal transports. The military ones were swept too frequently for bugs to stick, but Raymond was more arrogant about his personal conveyances.
It had taken some of her bugs literalmonthsto crawl their way into his life, but they were there now. She knew when they moved and had metrics on how often, and where, and whether or not he was on board. That was the reason the biologicalones were so important—they carried a little bit of her DNA and pinged a match to her when Raymond was in range.
And now he was moving. Fleeing. And he was on the right side of the planet for Berengaria to do something about it.
Perfect.
She wasn’t the smartest member of her family, and she wasn’t the most persistent either. But, she thought to herself as she started removing the fail-safes on her little island’s directional controls, she might very well be the best at vengeance. Because if she only had one chance at taking out her brother, she wasn’t going to fuck it up.
See if he could dodge her entire space station when she dropped it on him before he finished clearing Olympus’s atmosphere.
Chapter thirty-five
Cody
Cody didn’t shut his eyes during their descent.
He probably should have. As good as the shielding was around the bike, it wasn’t tinted, and his eyes didn’t naturally protect themselves against brightness like a normal’s did. He was going to be seeing spots when the fire finally burned itself out, but for now he couldn’t bear to look away. It was all he could do to keep breathing, calm and steady, for Ten’s sake when he really wanted to scream with sheer exhilaration.
This,thiswas what he wanted in life. Not to be coddled or gentled or taken care of although sometimes those things were nice too. But Cody wasn’t built for that, and he didn’t know where the urge came from—both his biological fathers were pretty conservative about risks—but he wanted to push himself right to the edge and stand there, toes hanging over it, take a deep breath, and then think about falling right off.
And now hewasfalling, plummeting through the sky like a meteor, so shrouded in flames it seemed like it must have consumed him, it must have, because how could anyone live through something like this? Something so beautiful and so impossible?
Superior engineering, you idiot,he heard Ten say in his mind, and Cody let himself blink for just a second, patted the back of Ten’s trembling arms around his chest, and reminded himself that he was still alive, this wasn’t a dream, and he’d better be prepared to handle their landing because it was clear that Ten wasn’t in any condition to help with it.
He watched the numbers fly by on the altimeter, and as the flames finally began to give way to dark night skies, Cody punched the activation for the antigrav drive. It sputtered, electronics probably confused by the journey from extreme cold to extreme heat, and it didn’t light up. Cody punched it again. Glanced at the altimeter. Did it again. Primed it with oil direct from the engine, dangerous to do, but they were under five thousand meters now, then punched itagain.
This time the power caught and held. The bike slowed and finally came to a trembling stop a thousand meters above the roiling sea, its batteries hovering at around—oh, five percent. Not good. The shields had drained them more than Ten had anticipated they would.
Cody squinted—yep, still seeing stars—and pulled up a map of the surrounding terrain with his implant. Their calculations should have brought them down near the coastline, less than twenty miles away from Pandora City …
