Dangerous Minds (Knight and Moon #2)(72)

Under other circumstances Riley might think this was a ridiculous display of machismo. Problem was she’d seen Tin Man’s hatchet work firsthand, and now the sight of the short axes evoked visceral fear.

Riley and Emerson backed off the porch, and Tin Man and Bart Young followed them out of the house.

“The entire ranch is surrounded by my soldiers,” Bart Young said. “There’s really no place to run. Just give me the Penning traps and we’ll be on our way.”

Emerson shook his head. “I’m holding all the cards. I’ve got the strange matter, so I’m thinking I call the shots. I have my own army on its way, and it’s bigger and more powerful than your army. If you leave now you might escape. Run as fast as you can and get out of the country. Maybe open a bakery in Argentina.”

“Here’s the flaw,” Bart Young said. “You’re basically a good person. You don’t especially want to kill us, and you don’t want to turn the earth into a tiny ball of death that will get spit out of the solar system.”

“I’m not that good,” Emerson said. “I have my moments.”

“Yeah, and I have a lot of moments,” Riley said. “I would actually like to kill you.”

Okay, so this had an element of bravado to it, but there was also some truth there. Not that she really wanted to kill anyone, but these men were monsters.

“I understand you’re a businessman,” Bart Young said to Emerson. “Perhaps we can make a deal. I can use someone like you and Ms. Moon in my regime. How does it sound if I give you France?”

“I thought you promised France to Berta,” Riley said.

“She won’t be needing France anymore,” Bart Young said.

Tin Man smiled. “We found her tied to an ohia tree in Ola’a Forest. She resigned her commission.”

“Well?” Bart Young asked Emerson.

“I’m thinking,” Emerson said. “Before I decide, I’d like to know what happened to my friend’s island.”

“Destroyed,” Bart Young said. “I saw it all from the air. It collapsed into a little ball of strange matter and disappeared into the sea.”

“It was inspiring,” Tin Man said.

“But why?” Riley said.

“It wasn’t by design,” Bart Young said, “although it did convince me we needed to conduct some field experiments to test the strange matter’s destructive potential. Samoa, and particularly the deserted island your friend was living on, sits over a mantle plume. We’d had a secret collection facility there for years. We found the little monk on one of our security sweeps of the island and evicted him. If I’d known then that he’d make so much trouble I would have just had him killed.”

“But how was the island destroyed?” Riley asked.

“There was an earthquake almost immediately after the monk left. We accidentally lost the magnetic field, and some of the strange matter was released. I managed to escape with Tin Man.”

Emerson had raised eyebrows. “And everyone else working there?”

Bart Young shrugged. “Casualties of war. If you want to make an omelette, you have to be prepared to break a few eggs.”

“Enough talking,” Tin Man said. “They’re just stalling until their army arrives . . . if there even is an army. This is obviously an impasse, so maybe I should just put a hatchet in the Penning trap he’s holding and get on with it.”

“You’re an idiot,” Bart Young said to Tin Man. “You’re a psychopathic imbecile. Let me handle this.”

Tin Man swung his hatchet and in one fluid movement he sliced Bart Young’s head from his neck. The head fell to the ground and lay there with its eyes still open. The rest of the body went over like rigor had already set in. Crash.

“I’m not an imbecile,” Tin Man said. “Nobody calls me names like that and lives.”

“He was a bit of a bully,” Emerson said, holding tight to the Penning trap, “but decapitation seems extreme.”

“He was the imbecile,” Tin Man said. “He had small goals, motivated by greed. I have no interest in anything as profane and temporal as power and wealth.”

“What then?” Emerson asked.

“Armageddon. The end of the world. Rulers and conquerors come and go with the passage of time. Some are remembered. Most are forgotten. There is only one way to truly be eternal and omnipotent. Destroy that which God created, and you become as a god yourself.”

This isn’t good, Riley thought. He wasn’t just evil. He was insane. And evil and insanity was a bad combination.

“I’ll give you a choice,” Tin Man said. “I’ll allow you to die as a gift to the strange matter. Or I can bury my hatchet in you.”

“I can’t let you do either of those things,” Emerson said, carefully inching away from Tin Man.

“You can’t escape me,” Tin Man said. “I have an army. They’re watching. They’ll advance if I give the signal. You have no way out. My army controls your access to the road, and to the west there’s nothing but ocean.”

Emerson was moving in the direction of the ocean. He was backing up across the meadow behind the house, keeping his eyes on Tin Man.

Riley was following, walking parallel to Tin Man.