Shards of Hope

Chapter 5

ADEN SENSED ZAIRA fall into a deep sleep, her breathing even. Her skin, when he checked it after about what must’ve been an hour, was no longer as clammy. Though they were in a cold climate, which the rising wind was turning even more bitter, they were well clothed and had enough food to last another day. After that, they’d be in trouble, and Zaira was already dangerously weak as a result of blood loss.

Making sure the hood of her jacket covered her head, he curled his body around hers in an effort to keep her warm, his mind alert. However, that mind was bound in chains he had to force himself not to test. It went against his instincts, but he couldn’t afford to do any damage that might debilitate him—his knowledge as a medic told him that whatever implant they had in their heads, it was unstable.

Technology this advanced could be created underground, but the Arrows worked in the shadows, worked in that underground. They would’ve picked up hints if this had been a long-term project. No, what he suspected was that the implant was some nightmare combination of the Human Alliance implant that shielded against psychic intrusion and the “hive-mind” implant developed by Ashaya Aleine while she’d been under the control of the Council.

Her research had been destroyed, a large part of it by Aleine herself, but it was possible that someone had smuggled out a prototype or had siphoned off enough of her research before she pushed the destruct button, to reverse engineer her creation and fiddle with it in concert with the Alliance implant to achieve this psychic-blinding effect.

If his hypothesis was true, the implant in his skull and in Zaira’s couldn’t be as well constructed as either of the originals—Aden had cause to know that Ashaya Aleine had helped the Alliance develop their implant, too. She was a genius on a level rarely found, and she worked in tandem with her sometimes psychotic but always brilliant twin. It’d be difficult for any lab in the world to procure a team that could match their combined abilities.

There remained a slim chance that he was wrong, that this was an independent creation, but if he was right, these implants could well have a remote self-destruct built in, as with the original Alliance implants. Their abductors could kill them from a distance. If so¸ the only reason he was alive was likely because they wanted to interrogate him about classified data.

Zaira, however . . .

He sat up, staring down at her. She’d been taken because whoever had been watching him believed she was a weakness in his armor. That fact had kept her alive up until now, but it wouldn’t last. Their captors might think Zaira was already dead, but if they didn’t find her body they’d push the detonation key in order to make certain. She’d die in a matter of seconds unless she was out of range. The same applied to him. They wanted him alive, but only to a certain point.

No one was stupid enough to hurt an Arrow, then set him free to come back with retribution on his mind.

“Zaira.”

She woke silently and with Arrow swiftness. “Yes?”

“We need to move.” He explained why as she sat up, a slight catch in her breath the only indication of pain.

It was an hour later, when she stumbled while they were crossing an exposed, treeless area that had only a thin covering of some kind of foot-high shrub or grass with tiny white flowers, that he realized something was seriously wrong. “Your wound?”

She halted in among the grasses. “Significant pain, some light-headedness.” Chest heaving in shallow breaths, the softness of her lips bracketed by white lines, she held his gaze. “I’m not going to last much longer.”

He knew what she was telling him—to do what Arrows were trained to do and make the rational, logical decision: leave her behind. Gripping her chin, he said, “We are not that anymore. We are not only assassins trained to die and to kill. We do not abandon the weak or the hurt. And we never, ever leave our own behind.” That, he decided at that instant, would be the new motto of the squad, be what all trainee Arrows were taught. No Arrow is disposable. No Arrow is to be left behind.

Zaira’s eyes held his for a long moment, the thickness of her lashes throwing shadows over the rich black of her eyes. “You’ve changed,” she said. “You were never Silent, but now you’re . . . different.”

Aden didn’t disagree because she was right. Touching Vasic’s bond with Ivy had altered him on a fundamental level. His fellow Arrow and closest friend guarded that bond with intense protectiveness, but Vasic had permitted Aden within his shields, permitted Aden to see the shimmering power of the translucent yet unbreakable strands that bound Vasic to his empath. Not only that, but he’d permitted Aden to touch one of the strands, feel the power of the emotions that locked him and Ivy to one another in an intricate, intimate tapestry.

Aden didn’t know if it was because he’d been permitted so close, or if it was because Vasic was his blood brother and Ivy an empath, but when he’d touched their bond, he’d felt a sharp stab of emotion that was as painful as it was beautiful. A knife blade that slid in through muscle and bone and heart to make him bleed. “Vasic allowed me through his shields,” he told Zaira. “After his bonding.”

She went motionless. “What was it like?” A whispered question.

“I don’t have the words.” A slumbering part of him had awakened at the contact and that part craved the feeling of belonging that he’d sensed from Vasic. As if the world could fall, but Vasic knew Ivy would always be there, no matter what. Aden wanted the same. Not yet, not when so many of his Arrows needed him to remain their leader, alone and strong, but one day in the future, he wanted that intimate, absolute connection with another being. “Even before that experience, I wouldn’t have left you behind. You know that.”

“You have to go ahead,” Zaira said, pressing her hand over his mouth when he would’ve spoken again. “Listen to me. If you go ahead, there’s a chance you can find help, bring it back. We won’t get half as far with me slowing you down.”

Waiting until she removed her hand, he wrapped his arm around her waist and began walking. She came rather than hold him back. “Aden.”

“Do you think,” he said, “that I could continue on as I’ve been doing knowing I’d left you to die alone in the cold dark?”

Zaira’s arm came around his waist; the sign of capitulation had his muscles tensing. Because it meant she was far worse off than she’d let on. Zaira never held on to anyone, never accepted help except in extreme circumstances.

Seeing movement a bare half minute afterward, he froze, his eyes tracking the lumbering shape until it resolved itself into the form of a black bear. The creature wasn’t interested in them, disappearing off to the left while Aden and Zaira went forward.

“We need to get the implants out,” he said, realizing she was right in one sense—they were too slow to outrun a chopper and if their captors had any intelligence they’d eventually do a low sweep over the entire possible search area while transmitting the command that would cause their brains to implode. “It’s possible I’m wrong and there might not be a fail-safe switch, but we can’t take that risk.”

“Agreed.” Zaira’s response was immediate, her voice rough. “If we remove them, we might regain our abilities, be able to contact the squad.”

Scanning the unforgiving landscape around them, he found a thick grove of trees that would provide cover and a shield against the wind. When Zaira stumbled, he picked her up and carried her there. Pain shot down his left leg from where he’d been injured in the fight outside the bunker, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle.

Placing Zaira on the ground, her back against what looked like it might be a young chestnut tree, he found the medical kit and started to go through the supplies. “Two disposable lasers left.” One for each of them. “Power grade means it should be strong enough to cut through the skull since the area is already weakened, but it might not be enough to fully seal the wound.”

Zaira took one laser. “I should do you first. Talk me through it before I lose consciousness.”

It was a smart request but impossible. “I need to figure out how to get it out without paralyzing or killing us.” If the implants had integrated into their brains and/or had filaments woven into their spinal columns, both were very real possibilities.

“What are the chances they’ve put it in a part of the brain you can’t reach?”

“I won’t know until I remove the bone. Our only advantage is that the surgery was clearly done recently and in a hurry—there’s a high probability the implants won’t have fully integrated.” Fewer connections meant less chance of a fatal mistake.

Zaira handed back the laser. “My head’s swimming. If you operate first, I might not remain conscious long enough to remove your implant.”

“I have a longer window of life—they want to break me. Execution is a last resort.” He looked up at the sky as he felt a spit of rain on the back of his hand. “Now, before the clouds open up. Angle your entire body to the left.”

When she did, he dug out a penlight he’d taken from a guard. The beam was too thin to be useful anywhere but in close quarters, but it was bright enough at that range. Holding it between his teeth, he gathered up Zaira’s barely shoulder-length hair and used a rubber band from the med kit to tie it up off her neck, exposing her nape and the area immediately above. Then he tucked a bandage between her collar and her spine to soak up the blood.

That done, he snapped on a pair of disposable surgical gloves. “This will hurt.”

She reached out to grip one of the tree roots that had curled out over the earth before flowing back in. “Go.”

Thin beam of light shining on the reddened and jaggedly sealed flesh low on her scalp where a rough square of her hair had been shaved off, he frowned. “Damn it, it’s infected.” Whatever their captors had shoved in there, Zaira’s body was rejecting it. Grabbing the disinfectant, he wiped the area and knew he’d have to hurt her again later by washing out the wound.

His muscles threatened to tense, but he couldn’t allow that to happen. Not now, not when he needed to have rock-steady hands and iron focus. Thinking back to the lessons on the brain he’d had as part of his training, and of everything he’d learned as a result of his attempt to find a fix for Vasic’s gauntlet, he put one hand on the back of Zaira’s head to hold her in position, and very carefully made four incisions along the lines of the scar to cut through the skin and muscle and into bone.

She bled and it was a clean red, no sign of deep infection. Good.

Wiping away the blood with a swab he’d dampened with disinfectant, he put down the laser and disinfected a disposable scalpel, then used the tip to gently check if he could lift out the tiny piece of bone. No. He had to go deeper. Squeezing Zaira’s shoulder to warn her, he used the laser again. It took three careful series of cuts to get the bone out. Zaira’s breathing was beyond shallow by that point, but she was holding on to consciousness.

“There’s a rough suture in the membrane that protects the brain,” he told her. “I’m using the lowest setting on the laser to cut through it.”

Relief punched through him as soon as he opened the suture. “I can see it. It’s as if they literally just shoved it in.”

“Wrong part of brain,” Zaira managed to say as he replaced the blood-soaked bandage he’d thrust below her skull.

“Yes. So it must somehow be able to send signals to the right sections.” There hadn’t been enough time for filaments to weave their way through the neural matter.

Using the penlight to examine the implant, he said, “It has six very thin arms that are clasped around a part of the cerebellum.” Like a spider gripping its prey. “I think the arms are meant to hold it in place until the final biological connections are made.”

A crackle of blue-white light in the implant, powered either by Zaira’s body or by a tiny battery within the implant itself. “It looks like it might work via electrical impulses.”

Zaira took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “Is that good?”

“Yes. It lowers the risk of dangerous neural connections.” He tried to look very carefully under the implant to confirm, but he didn’t have the right tools.

“If I’m wrong, I’ll kill you.” One more death on his conscience. And this time, it would be this woman he’d known almost as long as he’d known Vasic. Tortured and bruised black-and-blue, skinny and suspicious, she’d glared at him during that first meeting, then lied to his face, and he’d known he had to make sure she survived.

The squad needed her fire, her relentless spirit.

He wasn’t sure he’d succeeded—Zaira lived, but that fire of the soul had gone into deep hibernation. The disobedient, wild, dangerous girl he’d met had become the perfect Arrow . . . who continued to argue with his decisions fifty percent of the time and who’d once shot him in order to make a point about a threat assessment.

What were you saying about the angle being impossible?

It had been a measured, glancing hit to his upper right arm that had barely taken off a layer of skin, but the memory gave him hope that the fire wasn’t hidden so deep that there was no hope of its return.

Because it wasn’t just the squad that needed it. Aden needed it most of all.

He’d been trying to provoke her since the fall of Silence in an effort to reawaken that part of her nature. Now he might be the one to end it all, to forever stifle the flame. “The risk of death is significant.”

“I’m dying anyway,” she said as rain hit his back, the canopy above not enough to totally shield them, though he angled his body to give Zaira as much protection as possible. “I’d rather go honestly, trying to fight this thing, than have my brain explode because I did nothing.” A shuddering breath. “You’d make the same choice.”

It was still the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

Holding the penlight clamped between his teeth again, he used the laser at the lowest possible setting to burn the “legs” off the implant. When the tiny metallic square didn’t fall away after all the legs were gone, he used the tip of the scalpel to lift it off. It stuck for a stubborn second and he held his breath at what could be a sign of further connections beneath, but then it was falling into his hand.

And Zaira was bleeding again.

Dropping the implant in the medkit, he said, “Disinfectant.” It was the only warning he could give her before he washed the blood out with the burning liquid—the brain might not technically feel pain, but the skin and muscle at the incision site would. He would’ve never done this had he been in an infirmary, but out here, the risk of a fatal infection through the open wound was too high.

He had to take the chance the disinfectant wouldn’t do further damage.

Her spine went stiff before her body slumped. Catching her, he leaned her against the chestnut tree on her side and, repairing the membrane, lasered the piece of bone back into her skull, hoping to hell he hadn’t done permanent harm. The wound finally closed, if raggedly so, he put a small bandage over it, then got rid of the blood-soaked bandage below her neck by placing it, his gloves, and any other detritus in a small disposal bag and putting that in an unused pocket of the daypack.

If their pursuers brought in tracking dogs, he wouldn’t leave such a rich blood supply for them to scent. At least he and Zaira had the rain on their side—it would wipe away any tracks, wash away scents. The rising wind might also ground the chopper, which would take any heat-sensing technology out of the running; even if the chopper stayed up, the presence of bears in the area would bring up false hits their pursuers would have to investigate.

He didn’t immediately have to move Zaira.

Decision made, he slid the implant into a small plas bag that had held pain relief pills before he emptied the pills into the medkit. He placed the bag in the bottom of the medkit to protect it from the elements, weighing the bag down with the burned-out laser and putting all the remaining supplies on top before he shut the kit. That done, he used fallen leaves to line the floor of another small hide under the thickest part of the canopy and carried Zaira’s unconscious body to lie on it, building a tent around her using low-hanging branches he snapped off from the trees around them. It would make them invisible from the air and provide protection from the elements.

By the time he finished, the rain was hard pellets whipped into a harsh slant by the wind, but the canopy was holding off most of it. He checked the hide, gathered three more heavily leafed branches to cover the spots where water might get in, then slid inside himself. He’d stay awake, maintain a watch, but he needed to be close to Zaira.

Her breathing was too faint, her pulse sluggish.

No.

Turning her over carefully onto her back, he unzipped her jackets, pushed up her sweater, and found her Arrow uniform once more sticky with blood. When he peeled it up and examined the bullet wound, he saw it was bleeding steadily. Grabbing the last disposable laser, he gripped the penlight again and sealed multiple torn veins. By the time the laser flickered, she wasn’t leaking fresh blood.

He had to fight himself not to try to use his M ability to reach the internal wounds he couldn’t see. Given the viciousness of the pain feedback to any attempt at using psychic abilities, she could wake to find him burned out, unconscious. And much as Zaira liked to tell him to leave her behind, he knew damn well she’d never leave him behind. She saw him as critical to the survival of the squad—he’d never been able to make her understand that she was as important. So if he went down, she’d stay, guard his back. Die.

That fact and all the others weighed against testing the padlock on his ability.

That didn’t mean it was an easy decision.

Bandaging the wound, he found another one of the small, nutrient-rich drinks in the medkit and, lifting up her head, coaxed it down her throat, drop by tiny drop. Afterward, he placed her head on his thigh and kept his finger on the pulse in her neck, under the hood he’d tugged up over her head so she wouldn’t lose heat through her skull. The fact that the top of her head was tucked up against his abdomen should also help her maintain her body temperature.

“Stay with me,” he said as her pulse refused to grow stronger.

Zaira had survived a childhood so hellish, she should be insane or broken or a monster. Instead, she was one of the strongest Arrows he knew; she’d protected their most wounded, most broken for over five years. That many long years she’d stayed dead to the world, stayed in a tiny network that he knew must’ve felt like a prison to a woman who’d grown up in a barren locked room.

And still she’d gone because he’d asked her.

He would not allow her to die now, when, for the first time, she had a chance at a real life. This desolate landscape would not claim her fire. It had no right. “You will stay,” he ordered, his lips against her ear. “You promised me.” That promise had been made nearly twenty-one years ago, but he’d never forgotten, never would forget.

Even after months of sufficient food and daily outdoor exercise, she’d still been so skinny and small and with such anger inside her. Barely four feet tall back then, at least a foot shorter than him, and yet she’d said, “I won’t run anymore. I won’t try to leave. I’ve decided to stay and protect you.”

“Why?”

Midnight black eyes afire in a sun-browned face that was all sharp bones. “Because you don’t have a monster inside you.”

“Keep your promise,” he said now. “Don’t leave. Stay with me. Stay.”

His only answer was a pulse so faint, he could barely feel it.