Youngbloods, page 4
If these nanos can fell and strip huge trees, what can they do to people?
Spider looks down at me from his chair, a confident smile on his face. And suddenly I realize—he and his littlies will fight us. Not out of obedience to the warden AI, but to protect their home, their tribe.
Just like I protected my sister.
I flex my sore ankle, getting ready to move. If the Youngbloods come crashing in now, they’ll be running straight into a swarm of deadly nanos.
I can’t ping Shay without the AI noticing. But there must be another way to warn them …
I’m still wondering how when the lights go out.
8. RESCUE
Spider yells above the cries of confusion.
‘Hideaway? What’s going on?’
The minder answers in my father’s voice.
‘No power, no comms—clearly sabotage.’ A pause in the darkness. ‘We are under attack.’
The littlies’ singing has fallen apart, the sparkles in the air fading. But Spider yells from atop his chair, ‘Okay, everyone. Let’s get some lights on before—’
I roll from the stretcher and kick out the legs of his chair. Spider falls hard to the ground. His grunt of pain is followed by some spectacular swearing.
In my thermal vision, I spot two combat drones sliding into the room at ankle height. The AI minder intends to neutralize me first.
I fling off my ranger’s jacket and pull up my stealth hood, disappearing in the dark. Then I bring my knife to full pulse, let it carry me buzzing over the littlies’ heads, a giant insect. The fading nanos in the air hit my masked face, still stinging hot—definitely dangerous.
I fly up to a corner of the ceiling and perch on a storage shelf, sneak-suited and out of the way. With a flick of my wrist, my pulse knife skitters randomly across the ceiling. The combat drones fire a volley of knockout darts at it.
Perfect—these drones are designed to subdue rambunctious littlies, not Specials. Knockout juice barely affects me, even if those darts pierce my suit.
But I still have to worry about the nanos. Spider is back on his feet, wiping blood from his face. He’s trying to get the singing organized again. The room rings with a single vibrant tone as the littlies tune up.
I glance at the room’s big picture window—nothing but a glimmer of sunrise in the sky. Where are Shay and Croy?
The pulse knife flits back into my hand, and I throw it at the combat drones. It slices one in half, then sweeps around to take out the other.
Three more drones hurtle into the room. A needle hits my arm—I barely feel it through my sneak suit.
But the littlies are singing now, the tree-stripping nanos glowing around me again. In my thermal vision, the nanos are as bright as tiny suns—hot enough to cut through the trunks of old-growth trees.
More and more fill the air, pinning me against the ceiling.
I can’t use my pulse knife against children.
The glowing nanos light up my dark corner. Spider, standing on his chair again, spots me and points.
‘There she is—get her!’
The singing shifts in tone, and the galaxy of tiny suns converges on me. The air grows hot.
Then I see it—a huge open jar of hot peppers on the table below. They’re mostly eaten, only a last few jalapeños bobbing in liters of juice.
I squeeze my knife to full pulse, throw it down into the jar, and pull my mask up.
My knife instantly superheats the jalapeño juice, transforming it into steam. It billows out explosively, shattering the jar—the room fills with hot, lung-shredding smoke.
Even behind my rebreather mask, my eyes burn with tears.
The song is instantly silenced, all the littlies reduced to coughing. Their eyes clamped shut, they stumble in all directions.
A crash drowns out their cries—Croy on his hoverboard smashing through the picture window. The sudden rain of safety glass adds to the confusion and panic of the littlies.
My hoverboard is following Croy’s, on autopilot. I jump down from the shelf onto its riding surface.
Croy stares at me a moment, not sure what’s wrong—then starts coughing.
‘Mask!’ I yell.
He pulls his rebreather on.
‘What the hell?’ he asks, his eyes already bright red.
‘Had to stop them singing. They were going to chop us down like trees!’
‘So you gassed them?’
‘Where’s Shay?’ I ask.
‘Second floor, rounding up the youngest—they were asleep up there. Astrix is on the roof, taking out the comms. The boss and X are headed down.’
I nod. ‘So it’s all under control.’
Croy looks around at the coughing, blinded kids. The minder is still yelling at them to fight us, the combat drones still flinging knockout darts in our direction.
‘You have a weird idea of under control,’ he says.
‘It’s called improvising.’ I throw my pulse knife, taking out two more drones.
‘With a gas attack?’ He shakes his head. ‘Is this your first war crime?’
Croy is deadly serious.
He’s also right—the littlies look as if they can barely breathe. I hope none of them missed their asthma meds this morning.
They were going to cut me in half with logging nanos, I don’t say.
‘Go down and help them,’ Croy says. ‘I’ll clear the air.’
He angles his board over to the broken window and braces himself against the frame. His lifting fans fire up, and soon a gale of fresh air is spilling into the room.
I spot a bottle of milk on the refreshments table—that was always Col’s cure for too many hot peppers.
I drop down and grab the bottle, then look for Spider in the tumult. He’s huddled on his chair. Flying over on my board, I gently tip his head back and dribble milk into his eyes.
They open, red and weeping.
He pushes my hand aside. ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’
‘Yeah, sorry. Didn’t realize the peppers would work that well.’
‘Not that! The house minder can’t let us be discovered—you’re going to get us all killed!’
‘Relax. We know about the big bomb. My friends have already disarmed it.’
He stares up at me, tears still streaming from his eyes. ‘The bomb’s just to scare the littlies. The real fail-safe’s much worse.’
‘The real fail-safe?’ I ask, but Spider’s answer is lost in a fit of coughing.
The ice of my dead father’s hand runs down my spine. His plans never ended when you thought they would—there was always one more turn.
I listen to the chaos around me. Crying and coughing, damaged drones skittering on the floor, the shriek of Croy’s lifting fans as they clear the air.
But the AI’s voice is gone.
It’s given up on the littlies.
I hear something deeper, a grinding noise, stone against metal—a bigger version of Hideaway’s hidden front door. The air starts to rumble around me and Spider.
‘What’s coming?’ I ask.
He clears his throat. ‘I’ve never seen it. But an older kid said it’s sleeping in the rock. Like a person but much bigger. It’s called Titan.’
I hand him the bottle of milk. ‘Get everyone out of here.’
I jump back on my board and fly past Croy, through the picture window and into the open sky. The grinding sound is colossally loud out here.
Halfway up the valley’s rocky side, a door is opening.
9. TITAN
I pull my mask off for a breath of fresh air.
The door opening in the rock above me is two stories tall.
I break comm silence. ‘Youngbloods! There’s another fail-safe!’
Tally’s voice is in my ear. ‘A bomb?’
‘Some kind of war machine, big enough to wipe this place out.’ I fly higher, up toward the opening. ‘I’ll have eyes on it in a few …’
Something sparks in my thermal vision, a servomotor burning megawatts of power. It occurs to me that Titan means big.
A shape is stirring in the dark mouth of the cave.
‘Frey-la?’ Tally asks.
‘One second, Boss.’
A huge form lumbers into view, more creature than machine. It has arms and legs and a head with eyes glowing bright blue.
But it’s just a drone, I remind myself, not a monster.
‘Some kind of heavy walker, Boss. Eight meters tall, heavy armor.’
‘Firepower?’
‘Can’t tell yet. But it’s big enough to—’
The walker reaches out an arm toward me, something flaring to life in its palm. Two smoking streaks of light jump from the darkness toward me.
‘Seeker missiles!’ I cry, and cut my hoverboard’s power.
I drop to my knees, clinging to the board as it starts to tumble through the air.
In free fall, the night spins around me, stars and dark earth trading places again and again. I calmly calculate my rate of fall—I’ll hit the ground in three seconds.
The two missiles shoot past, so close that their exhaust burns my skin.
But they can’t see my board with its engines cut, and head off screaming into the night.
I twist in midair, spinning up my lifting fans. They shriek to life, straining to bring me to a halt before I hit the trees.
The black earth rushes up at me—slower, slower.
My board brushes the treetops, lifting fans churning out a spray of pine needles. But soon I’m regaining altitude.
‘I’ve got you, Frey-la,’ Astrix’s voice comes.
I start to ask what she means, but then I see the missiles.
They’ve arced back around, homing in on the heat of my lifting fans.
I jump off, kicking the board away from me. It slides along the treetops as I fall, grabbing for a branch. My arms wrap around wood, my head full of pine scent and panic. The branch bows under my weight, lowering me gently into the trees.
But my board is still too close. If those missiles airburst at this range, I’m dead.
Suddenly the shadows are dancing around me—a sparkling galaxy has appeared out over the river. Astrix’s recon drones have burst to life, burning all their energy at once.
The missiles veer away toward them.
Seconds later, two sharp explosions echo through the valley. Billows of deadly shrapnel spray out, riddling the river’s surface like rain.
‘Thanks, Astrix-la,’ I say.
‘Told you not to worry.’
My hoverboard drifts back to nudge my foot, and I step on.
A fresh rumbling noise comes from above. High on the valley wall, the Titan is skidding down the slope toward Hideaway.
‘Frey, is that thing army of Shreve?’ Tally asks. She and X are in view now, tiny on their boards above the Titan.
‘No, Boss. Shreve doesn’t use walkers.’
‘So who built it?’ X asks.
I have no answer. With its bulky armor, the Titan looks like something from my father’s arsenal. But he’d never let an AI control anything so powerful.
Could it be some kind of battle suit? With someone inside?
If so, they must be drunk. The machine looks clumsy and uncertain as it descends the broken terrain of the valley wall.
Spider’s words come back to me: It’s sleeping in the rock.
Has this thing just … woken up?
‘Whatever it is, kill it!’ comes Shay’s voice. ‘We aren’t evacuated yet. Somebody gassed these kids!’
Yeah, that was me.
I fly up for a better vantage—the littlies are streaming out of Hideaway, Croy and Shay corralling them.
The Titan will be there in another thirty seconds.
But I’ve got no weapons that can pierce heavy armor. I’d need a railgun to stop this thing.
Then I hear the sound of X’s pulse lance.
It rattles the air like my knife, but a dozen times louder. He’s diving down the valley wall, a surfer descending a wave of stone.
X sweeps past the Titan, the lance throwing out a shower of sparks from its ankle.
There’s no visible damage—the armor’s too thick. We have nothing that can damage this machine.
But when the walker plants its next step, its foot twists wrong, the ankle servos failing. The leg skids out from beneath the tons of metal.
The war machine lands on its backside and starts to slide down the valley wall. Pulverized rocks billow out behind it, like smoke from a spreading fire.
It looks like the walker will slide all the way down onto Hideaway. But one of its flailing hands grabs a gnarled tree growing out from the rock.
The massive shape skids to a precarious halt.
The dust cloud of its passage keeps rising up, turning blood-red with the rising sun.
It reaches its free hand toward Hideaway …
‘I’m out of drones!’ Astrix shouts.
I urge my board toward the littlies streaming from the fortress.
Croy may think I’m a war criminal, but I’m not going to let my father hurt these kids anymore.
X and Tally descend on the Titan, going for its eyes. But they can’t risk dislodging its hold on the tree, or its huge bulk will slide down onto the littlies.
And it won’t need eyes to use seeker missiles.
A light sparks in the Titan’s palm.
I bring my lifting fans to maximum, and my knife to full pulse. But I’m still not as hot as a hundred running children. The seeker missiles will head for them, not me.
There are flares on my belt, but they’re safety fireworks, cool and smoke-free.
What do I have that can burn?
Then I remember Shay’s speech before my first riding lesson as a Special:
This board isn’t like anything you’ve ridden before. It has no safety governors, no AI to stop you from killing yourself. It will do whatever you tell it—flying too high, burning out your engines, or running straight into a mountain.
So how do I get my board to flame out in the next ten seconds?
I see something beneath me—an old tree at the edge of the river, dead and leafless, its branches fallen.
I come to an air-skidding halt over it, shouting at my board, ‘Maintenance mode!’
Shay wasn’t kidding—even in midair, the hoverboard pops the grills from my lifting fans. Suddenly they’re a pair of exposed buzz saws, waiting for my feet to take one wrong step.
As the Titan fires its missiles, I drop my board onto the tree. My rear lifter shrieks, grinding the dense old-growth wood into a tornado of sawdust.
It’s like starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together at ten thousand RPMs. The heat burns my exposed face, the maelstrom of sparks and wood chips almost blinding.
Every meter on my board tips into the red.
In my thermal vision, I see the seeker missiles launch—
And immediately veer toward me.
10. DIVERSION
I lean forward, and my board leaps toward the river.
It’s unsteady beneath my feet now, the back lifter wobbly and screeching, the metal fan blades spinning out of true. Which means the board will stay blazing hot as it carries me over the river.
If I can keep from falling off.
As I push toward maximum speed, the board careens randomly, setting a serpentine course down the river. It spits out sparks and noises like a cat in a fight to the death.
The missiles are right behind me.
‘Keep running, everyone!’ I hear Shay shout in the open comm channel—the littlies still need to get clear.
By now they’re at least a kilometer behind me.
The missiles will reach me any second. I fly down toward the water, point the board up … and dive off the side.
My wounded hoverboard shoots into the sky, spiraling, smoking, out of control.
I’m slicing through the water, down into cool darkness. The sounds of battle fade above me.
The two explosions arrive almost together, squeezing the water around me like a massive, smothering fist. The pressure pushes against my ears and up into my sinuses. Tracers of shrapnel lance past through the water, and a hot sharpness bites my shoulder.
The pressure eases at last, pulsing a few times as the booms echo between the river’s banks.
I swim back up toward the surface, fueled by the caches of oxygen stored in my rib cage. When my head breaks through, I take calm, steady breaths.
A shaft of dawn shows blood billowing from my wound. But my sneak suit is already suturing itself, and the healing nanos I have left are buzzing on my skin.
In the sky, there’s nothing left of my hoverboard, just an expanding cloud carried downstream on the breeze.
‘We’re finally clear!’ comes Shay’s voice in my ear. ‘Somebody destroy that thing now.’
‘How?’ Astrix asks. ‘The armor’s too tough.’
Up on the valley wall, the walker is starting to stand, testing its wounded ankle. The glowing blue eyes have been cut away by X’s pulse lance, but it can still storm down the mountain and start stomping blindly.
I swim hard, but the near shore is a minute away.
Tally speaks up, her voice calm. ‘We’ve got this. Everyone stay clear.’
I can see her and X on their boards, tiny figures hovering a hundred meters in front of the Titan. They look like hummingbirds facing off with a gorilla.
The Titan stretches out its hand again—like it has enough of those missiles to track down every fleeing child.
‘Later, Titan-la,’ Tally murmurs.
The valley wall disintegrates.
The sound reaches me a few seconds later, huge and sovereign, the shock rippling across the water.
A wave of boulders hurtles down, devouring the Titan before it can fire again. The avalanche builds, sweeping over Hideaway, the larger rocks tumbling all the way to river.
Tally and X stay where they are, the clouds of dust swirling in lazy-eight patterns around their lifting fans.
When the smoke clears, nothing is visible of the Titan except its head. The rest of the machine has been swallowed by the rocks, like an ancient statue buried in the sand.
‘Boss?’ Shay says on the comms. ‘Thought you disarmed that bomb?’
Tally laughs. ‘X-la had a better idea. We made friends with it.’
Spider looks down at me from his chair, a confident smile on his face. And suddenly I realize—he and his littlies will fight us. Not out of obedience to the warden AI, but to protect their home, their tribe.
Just like I protected my sister.
I flex my sore ankle, getting ready to move. If the Youngbloods come crashing in now, they’ll be running straight into a swarm of deadly nanos.
I can’t ping Shay without the AI noticing. But there must be another way to warn them …
I’m still wondering how when the lights go out.
8. RESCUE
Spider yells above the cries of confusion.
‘Hideaway? What’s going on?’
The minder answers in my father’s voice.
‘No power, no comms—clearly sabotage.’ A pause in the darkness. ‘We are under attack.’
The littlies’ singing has fallen apart, the sparkles in the air fading. But Spider yells from atop his chair, ‘Okay, everyone. Let’s get some lights on before—’
I roll from the stretcher and kick out the legs of his chair. Spider falls hard to the ground. His grunt of pain is followed by some spectacular swearing.
In my thermal vision, I spot two combat drones sliding into the room at ankle height. The AI minder intends to neutralize me first.
I fling off my ranger’s jacket and pull up my stealth hood, disappearing in the dark. Then I bring my knife to full pulse, let it carry me buzzing over the littlies’ heads, a giant insect. The fading nanos in the air hit my masked face, still stinging hot—definitely dangerous.
I fly up to a corner of the ceiling and perch on a storage shelf, sneak-suited and out of the way. With a flick of my wrist, my pulse knife skitters randomly across the ceiling. The combat drones fire a volley of knockout darts at it.
Perfect—these drones are designed to subdue rambunctious littlies, not Specials. Knockout juice barely affects me, even if those darts pierce my suit.
But I still have to worry about the nanos. Spider is back on his feet, wiping blood from his face. He’s trying to get the singing organized again. The room rings with a single vibrant tone as the littlies tune up.
I glance at the room’s big picture window—nothing but a glimmer of sunrise in the sky. Where are Shay and Croy?
The pulse knife flits back into my hand, and I throw it at the combat drones. It slices one in half, then sweeps around to take out the other.
Three more drones hurtle into the room. A needle hits my arm—I barely feel it through my sneak suit.
But the littlies are singing now, the tree-stripping nanos glowing around me again. In my thermal vision, the nanos are as bright as tiny suns—hot enough to cut through the trunks of old-growth trees.
More and more fill the air, pinning me against the ceiling.
I can’t use my pulse knife against children.
The glowing nanos light up my dark corner. Spider, standing on his chair again, spots me and points.
‘There she is—get her!’
The singing shifts in tone, and the galaxy of tiny suns converges on me. The air grows hot.
Then I see it—a huge open jar of hot peppers on the table below. They’re mostly eaten, only a last few jalapeños bobbing in liters of juice.
I squeeze my knife to full pulse, throw it down into the jar, and pull my mask up.
My knife instantly superheats the jalapeño juice, transforming it into steam. It billows out explosively, shattering the jar—the room fills with hot, lung-shredding smoke.
Even behind my rebreather mask, my eyes burn with tears.
The song is instantly silenced, all the littlies reduced to coughing. Their eyes clamped shut, they stumble in all directions.
A crash drowns out their cries—Croy on his hoverboard smashing through the picture window. The sudden rain of safety glass adds to the confusion and panic of the littlies.
My hoverboard is following Croy’s, on autopilot. I jump down from the shelf onto its riding surface.
Croy stares at me a moment, not sure what’s wrong—then starts coughing.
‘Mask!’ I yell.
He pulls his rebreather on.
‘What the hell?’ he asks, his eyes already bright red.
‘Had to stop them singing. They were going to chop us down like trees!’
‘So you gassed them?’
‘Where’s Shay?’ I ask.
‘Second floor, rounding up the youngest—they were asleep up there. Astrix is on the roof, taking out the comms. The boss and X are headed down.’
I nod. ‘So it’s all under control.’
Croy looks around at the coughing, blinded kids. The minder is still yelling at them to fight us, the combat drones still flinging knockout darts in our direction.
‘You have a weird idea of under control,’ he says.
‘It’s called improvising.’ I throw my pulse knife, taking out two more drones.
‘With a gas attack?’ He shakes his head. ‘Is this your first war crime?’
Croy is deadly serious.
He’s also right—the littlies look as if they can barely breathe. I hope none of them missed their asthma meds this morning.
They were going to cut me in half with logging nanos, I don’t say.
‘Go down and help them,’ Croy says. ‘I’ll clear the air.’
He angles his board over to the broken window and braces himself against the frame. His lifting fans fire up, and soon a gale of fresh air is spilling into the room.
I spot a bottle of milk on the refreshments table—that was always Col’s cure for too many hot peppers.
I drop down and grab the bottle, then look for Spider in the tumult. He’s huddled on his chair. Flying over on my board, I gently tip his head back and dribble milk into his eyes.
They open, red and weeping.
He pushes my hand aside. ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’
‘Yeah, sorry. Didn’t realize the peppers would work that well.’
‘Not that! The house minder can’t let us be discovered—you’re going to get us all killed!’
‘Relax. We know about the big bomb. My friends have already disarmed it.’
He stares up at me, tears still streaming from his eyes. ‘The bomb’s just to scare the littlies. The real fail-safe’s much worse.’
‘The real fail-safe?’ I ask, but Spider’s answer is lost in a fit of coughing.
The ice of my dead father’s hand runs down my spine. His plans never ended when you thought they would—there was always one more turn.
I listen to the chaos around me. Crying and coughing, damaged drones skittering on the floor, the shriek of Croy’s lifting fans as they clear the air.
But the AI’s voice is gone.
It’s given up on the littlies.
I hear something deeper, a grinding noise, stone against metal—a bigger version of Hideaway’s hidden front door. The air starts to rumble around me and Spider.
‘What’s coming?’ I ask.
He clears his throat. ‘I’ve never seen it. But an older kid said it’s sleeping in the rock. Like a person but much bigger. It’s called Titan.’
I hand him the bottle of milk. ‘Get everyone out of here.’
I jump back on my board and fly past Croy, through the picture window and into the open sky. The grinding sound is colossally loud out here.
Halfway up the valley’s rocky side, a door is opening.
9. TITAN
I pull my mask off for a breath of fresh air.
The door opening in the rock above me is two stories tall.
I break comm silence. ‘Youngbloods! There’s another fail-safe!’
Tally’s voice is in my ear. ‘A bomb?’
‘Some kind of war machine, big enough to wipe this place out.’ I fly higher, up toward the opening. ‘I’ll have eyes on it in a few …’
Something sparks in my thermal vision, a servomotor burning megawatts of power. It occurs to me that Titan means big.
A shape is stirring in the dark mouth of the cave.
‘Frey-la?’ Tally asks.
‘One second, Boss.’
A huge form lumbers into view, more creature than machine. It has arms and legs and a head with eyes glowing bright blue.
But it’s just a drone, I remind myself, not a monster.
‘Some kind of heavy walker, Boss. Eight meters tall, heavy armor.’
‘Firepower?’
‘Can’t tell yet. But it’s big enough to—’
The walker reaches out an arm toward me, something flaring to life in its palm. Two smoking streaks of light jump from the darkness toward me.
‘Seeker missiles!’ I cry, and cut my hoverboard’s power.
I drop to my knees, clinging to the board as it starts to tumble through the air.
In free fall, the night spins around me, stars and dark earth trading places again and again. I calmly calculate my rate of fall—I’ll hit the ground in three seconds.
The two missiles shoot past, so close that their exhaust burns my skin.
But they can’t see my board with its engines cut, and head off screaming into the night.
I twist in midair, spinning up my lifting fans. They shriek to life, straining to bring me to a halt before I hit the trees.
The black earth rushes up at me—slower, slower.
My board brushes the treetops, lifting fans churning out a spray of pine needles. But soon I’m regaining altitude.
‘I’ve got you, Frey-la,’ Astrix’s voice comes.
I start to ask what she means, but then I see the missiles.
They’ve arced back around, homing in on the heat of my lifting fans.
I jump off, kicking the board away from me. It slides along the treetops as I fall, grabbing for a branch. My arms wrap around wood, my head full of pine scent and panic. The branch bows under my weight, lowering me gently into the trees.
But my board is still too close. If those missiles airburst at this range, I’m dead.
Suddenly the shadows are dancing around me—a sparkling galaxy has appeared out over the river. Astrix’s recon drones have burst to life, burning all their energy at once.
The missiles veer away toward them.
Seconds later, two sharp explosions echo through the valley. Billows of deadly shrapnel spray out, riddling the river’s surface like rain.
‘Thanks, Astrix-la,’ I say.
‘Told you not to worry.’
My hoverboard drifts back to nudge my foot, and I step on.
A fresh rumbling noise comes from above. High on the valley wall, the Titan is skidding down the slope toward Hideaway.
‘Frey, is that thing army of Shreve?’ Tally asks. She and X are in view now, tiny on their boards above the Titan.
‘No, Boss. Shreve doesn’t use walkers.’
‘So who built it?’ X asks.
I have no answer. With its bulky armor, the Titan looks like something from my father’s arsenal. But he’d never let an AI control anything so powerful.
Could it be some kind of battle suit? With someone inside?
If so, they must be drunk. The machine looks clumsy and uncertain as it descends the broken terrain of the valley wall.
Spider’s words come back to me: It’s sleeping in the rock.
Has this thing just … woken up?
‘Whatever it is, kill it!’ comes Shay’s voice. ‘We aren’t evacuated yet. Somebody gassed these kids!’
Yeah, that was me.
I fly up for a better vantage—the littlies are streaming out of Hideaway, Croy and Shay corralling them.
The Titan will be there in another thirty seconds.
But I’ve got no weapons that can pierce heavy armor. I’d need a railgun to stop this thing.
Then I hear the sound of X’s pulse lance.
It rattles the air like my knife, but a dozen times louder. He’s diving down the valley wall, a surfer descending a wave of stone.
X sweeps past the Titan, the lance throwing out a shower of sparks from its ankle.
There’s no visible damage—the armor’s too thick. We have nothing that can damage this machine.
But when the walker plants its next step, its foot twists wrong, the ankle servos failing. The leg skids out from beneath the tons of metal.
The war machine lands on its backside and starts to slide down the valley wall. Pulverized rocks billow out behind it, like smoke from a spreading fire.
It looks like the walker will slide all the way down onto Hideaway. But one of its flailing hands grabs a gnarled tree growing out from the rock.
The massive shape skids to a precarious halt.
The dust cloud of its passage keeps rising up, turning blood-red with the rising sun.
It reaches its free hand toward Hideaway …
‘I’m out of drones!’ Astrix shouts.
I urge my board toward the littlies streaming from the fortress.
Croy may think I’m a war criminal, but I’m not going to let my father hurt these kids anymore.
X and Tally descend on the Titan, going for its eyes. But they can’t risk dislodging its hold on the tree, or its huge bulk will slide down onto the littlies.
And it won’t need eyes to use seeker missiles.
A light sparks in the Titan’s palm.
I bring my lifting fans to maximum, and my knife to full pulse. But I’m still not as hot as a hundred running children. The seeker missiles will head for them, not me.
There are flares on my belt, but they’re safety fireworks, cool and smoke-free.
What do I have that can burn?
Then I remember Shay’s speech before my first riding lesson as a Special:
This board isn’t like anything you’ve ridden before. It has no safety governors, no AI to stop you from killing yourself. It will do whatever you tell it—flying too high, burning out your engines, or running straight into a mountain.
So how do I get my board to flame out in the next ten seconds?
I see something beneath me—an old tree at the edge of the river, dead and leafless, its branches fallen.
I come to an air-skidding halt over it, shouting at my board, ‘Maintenance mode!’
Shay wasn’t kidding—even in midair, the hoverboard pops the grills from my lifting fans. Suddenly they’re a pair of exposed buzz saws, waiting for my feet to take one wrong step.
As the Titan fires its missiles, I drop my board onto the tree. My rear lifter shrieks, grinding the dense old-growth wood into a tornado of sawdust.
It’s like starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together at ten thousand RPMs. The heat burns my exposed face, the maelstrom of sparks and wood chips almost blinding.
Every meter on my board tips into the red.
In my thermal vision, I see the seeker missiles launch—
And immediately veer toward me.
10. DIVERSION
I lean forward, and my board leaps toward the river.
It’s unsteady beneath my feet now, the back lifter wobbly and screeching, the metal fan blades spinning out of true. Which means the board will stay blazing hot as it carries me over the river.
If I can keep from falling off.
As I push toward maximum speed, the board careens randomly, setting a serpentine course down the river. It spits out sparks and noises like a cat in a fight to the death.
The missiles are right behind me.
‘Keep running, everyone!’ I hear Shay shout in the open comm channel—the littlies still need to get clear.
By now they’re at least a kilometer behind me.
The missiles will reach me any second. I fly down toward the water, point the board up … and dive off the side.
My wounded hoverboard shoots into the sky, spiraling, smoking, out of control.
I’m slicing through the water, down into cool darkness. The sounds of battle fade above me.
The two explosions arrive almost together, squeezing the water around me like a massive, smothering fist. The pressure pushes against my ears and up into my sinuses. Tracers of shrapnel lance past through the water, and a hot sharpness bites my shoulder.
The pressure eases at last, pulsing a few times as the booms echo between the river’s banks.
I swim back up toward the surface, fueled by the caches of oxygen stored in my rib cage. When my head breaks through, I take calm, steady breaths.
A shaft of dawn shows blood billowing from my wound. But my sneak suit is already suturing itself, and the healing nanos I have left are buzzing on my skin.
In the sky, there’s nothing left of my hoverboard, just an expanding cloud carried downstream on the breeze.
‘We’re finally clear!’ comes Shay’s voice in my ear. ‘Somebody destroy that thing now.’
‘How?’ Astrix asks. ‘The armor’s too tough.’
Up on the valley wall, the walker is starting to stand, testing its wounded ankle. The glowing blue eyes have been cut away by X’s pulse lance, but it can still storm down the mountain and start stomping blindly.
I swim hard, but the near shore is a minute away.
Tally speaks up, her voice calm. ‘We’ve got this. Everyone stay clear.’
I can see her and X on their boards, tiny figures hovering a hundred meters in front of the Titan. They look like hummingbirds facing off with a gorilla.
The Titan stretches out its hand again—like it has enough of those missiles to track down every fleeing child.
‘Later, Titan-la,’ Tally murmurs.
The valley wall disintegrates.
The sound reaches me a few seconds later, huge and sovereign, the shock rippling across the water.
A wave of boulders hurtles down, devouring the Titan before it can fire again. The avalanche builds, sweeping over Hideaway, the larger rocks tumbling all the way to river.
Tally and X stay where they are, the clouds of dust swirling in lazy-eight patterns around their lifting fans.
When the smoke clears, nothing is visible of the Titan except its head. The rest of the machine has been swallowed by the rocks, like an ancient statue buried in the sand.
‘Boss?’ Shay says on the comms. ‘Thought you disarmed that bomb?’
Tally laughs. ‘X-la had a better idea. We made friends with it.’
