Traitor Born (Secondborn #2)(90)
The airship door closes, sealing us in. My throat tightens. Dim lights come on, but it’s still dark. The Zeros’ eyes glow like small moons in the night sky. Gore mottles their mouths, their clothes, and their fingers. The steel claws seem to have retracted into their fingertips, but I know they’re there.
The airship rumbles and lurches upward. The Zeros don’t move. They don’t talk. They gaze straight ahead. They seem barely alive. Hawthorne sits across from me and several bodies away. He isn’t smeared in carnage like the others. I don’t think he was in the fight at the Silver Halo, which means Agent Crow wants to use Hawthorne some other way. More than likely against me.
My wrists tremble on my knees—or maybe it’s my knees trembling—or maybe it’s both. I thread my fingers together, but it doesn’t stop. Panic seizes me. It’s hard to breathe. I feel dizzy. Sweat soaks the back of my white sparring outfit. Wisps of damp hair cling to my cheek.
I have to wait for several minutes in the grip of the attack. When my panic finally subsides and my breath isn’t coming out in hacking pants, I try to get up, and all the creatures look at me at once. It makes me want to vomit. I press myself against the wall and rise. Carefully, I walk between the Zeros until I’m across from the ghoulish Hawthorne.
I kneel in front of him. He stares, but it’s as if he isn’t really seeing me. “Hawthorne.” I try a normal tone, but it comes out in a breathless whisper. “Remember when we first met? It was in Swords, when the airships fell from of the sky. Remember?” My voice quivers. Tears spill down my cheeks. “You tried to help me, and I hit you in the nose?”
He doesn’t even blink.
I sit down and cross my legs. “You rescued me when I was Crow’s prisoner in Census. You were so brave. Nobody else lifted a finger. It was you. Just you.” I touch his hand, wanting so badly for him to hold me.
Suddenly his eyes focus. His hand pounces, wraps around my throat, and squeezes. My face flushes. My windpipe feels crushed. I hold up my hands to him, palms out, in surrender. He lets go.
I cough and sputter, gulping breaths. “Okay, so no touching,” I gasp when I finally get my voice back. I wipe my tears from my cheeks with my sleeve. I touch my ravaged neck. “I know you’re in there somewhere, Hawthorne. We’re a half-written poem, you and me. Wherever you are—whatever basement in your mind they’ve got you trapped in—I’ll find you. I won’t leave you down there alone.”
I talk as if we’re alone, reminding Hawthorne of everything we’ve shared together. Every stolen moment when we were secondborns. Every kiss. Every touch. My throat aches, but still I talk.
Hawthorne stares straight ahead. No reaction. No indication that he hears me or understands me. Hours pass with no sign of recognition from him. The pain of it is too much. It’s too real. It threatens to bury me. I hold my head in my hands and give in, sobbing quietly.
The cargo ship begins to descend. The touchdown is smooth. I try to pull myself together, wiping my face with the back of my sleeve. The tail opens. Humid air rushes in. The sky is still dark, but tall lights loom above us, like those that line the secondborn military Bases in Swords, throwing stark white light on everything.
Hawthorne stands in unison with the other mind-controlled monsters. He grabs my arm and roughly hauls me out of the hold. Agent Crow waits on the hoverpad. The black beacon on the side of his forehead blinks blue. Around us, palm trees sway in a salty breeze. Balmy air blows loose strands of my hair.
“Pleasant trip?” Agent Crow asks. He smiles, baring his wretched steel teeth.
Normally I try to have something scathingly ironic to say back to him, just so that he remembers he hasn’t beaten me. This time I don’t. This time he has destroyed me, reached inside me and torn my heart out, and I know this is only the beginning.
“Where are we?” My voice is gravelly.
“A little place we call The Apiary,” Agent Crow replies. “It’s a small island near the Fate of Seas, one of the first military Bases to have Trees. It’s been decommissioned, as far as most people are concerned. Not a lot of people outside of Census know of its existence.”
I can just make out the ocean in the distance. All around lie the relicts of a decrepit military Base. Ancient airships that I’ve only seen in holographic history files rust out in the open. Everything is at least a few hundred years old. The only lights shine from the Base’s Trees and infrastructure. Nothing but water lies beyond the Base from what I can tell. Behind us, rough tree-lined, rocky crags dapple the horizon. No other signs of civilization.
Viable airships hang from the Tree’s branches, but they’re not current models. I wouldn’t know if I could fly one unless I got inside the cockpit. Behind me, the cyborgs form two lines. Each of them is spaced the same distance apart. Efficient. Mindless. Controlled and manipulated by a psychopathic Census agent.
Agent Crow strides ahead of me into the Tree’s trunk. I’m prodded to follow. A familiar dimness greets me inside the Tree, but the smell isn’t the same as the military Trees I inhabited as a soldier. This structure has been resurrected to fit the needs of madmen. We enter a warehouse for hundreds of thousands of adult-size vials—cylindrical tanks filled with fluid. Blue neon light glows from the tops and bottoms of the transparent cylinders. Inside each is a person, curled in a fetal position, floating. Some resemble modern Homo sapiens. Others don’t. Some are amalgamations of different species. Others are unifications of human and machine. Above us are levels of vials as far as I can see, arranged in concentric rings like the cross section of a real tree.