The Earth Dwellers

“Just do it quick.”

With everything I have, I pull her from the vehicle. Her mouth opens like she wants to cry out, but she doesn’t, just screws up her face. She slumps over when she’s free of the carnage. “Tristan,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Find my daughter.”

Adele

I could shoot—I could. But I’m not the best shot in the world, and if I miss or don’t kill Lecter with the first bullet, then I’ll be dead and so might the fire country natives. Tristan, too.

So I do it. I drop the gun, hating the dull thud it makes at my feet, and hoping I’ll get another opportunity to kill Lecter.

I want to ask Jocelyn why she’s doing this, but I don’t, because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t understand the answer anyway. Her head is all screwed up, brainwashed by the very person she hates and loves.

My mission has failed because of the very person who started everything when she paid an unexpected visit to my mother.

“Bravo,” Lecter says, clapping slowly. He walks across the room, which is full of screens with colored dots, and blinking lights on shining metal panels. The room where he controls the world he’s created, where tracks the implanted chips of his people. “I’m glad I don’t have to use this,” he adds, holding out a gun I didn’t even notice.

“Of course not, darling,” Jocelyn says, her eyes narrowed. “I told you I’d do it.”

“And you did,” Lecter says. “You’ve come so far from the skeptical, questioning person you were a few years ago. I’m most impressed.”

“You’re sick,” I say. “Both of you.”

Jocelyn gives me a surprised look. “Don’t you see, Adele? Borg has created everything that my former husband refused to. An equal world, where everyone gets the same amount of food, the same living conditions. There are no Realms. There is no poverty, no crime. It’s a perfect world…one that deserves to grow.”

“You’re delusional,” I say.

She shakes her head. “One day you’ll understand,” she says.

“No,” I say. “I’ll never understand either of you. Tristan would say the same thing.”

Hearing her son’s name, she jerks slightly, just in her face, her gun remaining firm against my temple. “You may be right,” she says. “But I’m willing to try to explain to him too. To teach him, like I always did.”

This woman can’t be reasoned with, can’t be talked out of the disease that’s consumed her. I can’t be a prisoner in this world. Even though it’ll only take the slightest squeeze of her finger to end me, I have to try to do what I came here to do.

I don’t tense my muscles in preparation. I can’t give any indication of what I’m about to do.

“You’re the crazed soldier,” Lecter says. “Why are you doing this? Who sent you? Was it Nailin?”

“Nailin is dead,” I say, trying to keep the conversation going, waiting for the perfect opportunity to make my move.

Lecter tries to cover his surprise, but I see it in his eyes. I’ve shocked him. “How?” he says.

“I killed him.”

More surprise. “But why?”

“Because he was evil, like you.”

“You’re an assassin.”

I’ve never been called that before, never thought of myself that way, but I guess it’s not that far from the truth. I shrug.

“Kill her,” Lecter says to Jocelyn.

I’m ru

Jocelyn grabs my wrist with her other hand just before I start to bring it up to attack. “Don’t,” she says. There’s something in her eyes, something different…

She pulls the gun from my head and aims it at Lecter, who doesn’t even have his own weapon raised. “Die,” she says and pulls the trigger.

A puff of red plumes above his scalp a split-second before he falls back, blood oozing from the hole in his forehead.

My eyes are bulging and my mouth is open in shock, but every instinct in my body is telling me to act, to seize the opportunity to gain control of the situation. I lash out, chop at Jocelyn’s arm to dislodge her weapon, but the gun is already slipping from her grasp, falling to the floor. She collapses on top of it.

I just stand there, gasping, my heart bouncing around wildly. What just happened?

Lecter’s not moving. There’s no way he could survive a direct headshot.

Below me, Jocelyn’s weeping, caved in, her knees to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. A broken woman. The savior of the world inside a damaged, abused shell of a person.

Kneeling down next to her, I rub her back with the palm of my hand. “It’s okay,” I murmur. “You did it. You’re okay now.”

It was all an act. Her words, her icy cold voice, the gun to my head. It was the only way she could make Lecter trust her, lower his guard, get him close enough to do what she had to do.

She fooled me and she obviously fooled him.

Beneath my hand, her body continues to shake with emotion.

“Tristan will be so proud.”

Only at the mention of her son does her trembling cease. She opens her moisture-filled eyes.

“Where?” she says.

“Outside the city,” I guess. “Attacking with the natives.”

She grabs my arm and I pull her up.

Chapter Forty-Two

Siena

Sadie’s alive, her horse too. She walks beside Gard and his son, Remy. Scant few Stormers survived the battle. Not that different’n the Tri-Tribes. Devastated by the Glassies.

There’re many more Soakers, on account of how late they arrived, but all that matters is that they came. None of us’d be standing here if not for ’em.

I’m still setting next to Circ when I see him. Huck. The Soaker boy who captured the attention of my younger sister, when she was a slave on one of his father’s ships.

I leap up, not ’cause I’m all excited to see him, though in some ways I am, but ’cause of Skye’s words earlier when she found out what he’d done to Jade, how he’d beaten her with a whip.

I’ll destroy him.

But I’m too slow, too late, ’cause Skye’s already spotted him and she’s ru

“Skye,” I say, grabbing her arm. “Don’t.”

She pulls away from me, her eyes boring into mine for a moment ’fore darting back to the Soakers.

“It’s okay,” Huck says to his guards. “Let her through.”

Although they don’t look like they want to, the guards step aside, creating a gap. Huck pushes a wave of blond hair off his forehead. “Skye, Siena,” he says.

But Skye’s already pushing through the gap, bumping the guards as she passes by. She don’t hesitate, just pulls her fist back and cracks Huck in the jaw, rocking him back. The guards are on her, but she elbows one in the face and kicks t’other in the midsection.

“That’s for hurting my sister,” she says to Huck.

On the ground, Huck’s massaging his jaw. Skye extends a hand and he looks at it for a second before taking it. She pulls him to his feet. He stares at her, his arms sort of extended in front of him, as if they could ever protect him from the force that is my big sister. But she doesn’t hit him again. Instead, to my surprise, she grabs him ’round the back and hugs him tightly.

“And that’s for saving her, for saving us,” Skye says.

Tristan

With no one left upright to stop them, the Tri-Realm army has managed to drive two trucks through the gates, parking one between each set of double doors, leaving an open path into the city. The toxic air is surely spilling through, but I’m hoping a few hours won’t do any lasting damage.

“President,” a soldier says at the gate. “What are your orders?” he asks. I realize then that he’s a general from the Moon Realm.