“We don’t—”
“Shh. Don’t lie. Tell them what I said and make sure they know thatanystretch of land outside the Hives is Raiders’ territory. If your people wish to travel, they can do so unarmed.”
“Sure we can, right before we jump off a cliff.”
“Jumping might be your safest choice.” He smiles broadly with confidence in his eyes. “A plague is coming, Caden, and you’d better keep your distance. Is my request clear?”
“Yes.” The assembly and General McCoy will never agree, but that’s the least of my problems right now. “I’ll let them know what you said.”
“Lovely. You’d best be going before it gets dark and scary.”
I don’t yet allow myself to feel relief. I turn around and take a step forward, but something pulls me back, wrapping itself around my torso and keeping my arms pinned to my body. It’s that fucking tail, and Hector stands right behind me, his chest pressing against my back. He rests his chin on my shoulder, and I stop myself from banging my head against his face.
He removes my rifle and throws it aside. “I forgot one more thing.”
I take a breath, though it’s hard with his tail pressing against my lungs. “And what’s that?”
“For you to let your leadership know I mean business.”
I catch movement in the tall grass where my squad is hiding, but before I can warn them, their screams of horror chill my blood. I can’t see what’s happening, but they don’t even get a chance to shoot with how quickly they’re overrun.
“Stop them!”
But Hector doesn’t give the command.
I try to bang my head back, but he grabs my hair and forces me to watch, though it’s too dark to see clearly. The air turns quiet within seconds, yet their screams echo in my ears. I’veheard those sounds before—too many times to count—but never when I was so helpless to do anything.
Dark shapes rise from the tall grass and walk forward. My brain struggles to digest what my eyes are seeing. For a second, I thought they were people, but they are human-sized lizards. Their skin is green and covered in scales, and their round eyes are massive. The blood smeared all over their skin isn’t theirs.
Hector sniffs my neck. “You’re sweating fear, Caden. It’s lovely.”
I shiver against him, too shocked to speak, then a sharp cut on my neck causes me to hiss in pain. The fucker cut me with his pointy tail, and even though it’s not deep, warm drops of blood slide down my neck.
“We bleed so easily, don’t we? Mutants and humans alike.” He withdraws his tail, and without his grip around me, I slump to my knees.
“Run along now, Captain of nothing. Run back to your Hive and let them know what is lurking beyond the safety of your mountain.”
Terrified he might change his mind, I run like hell between the corpses of those I swore to protect.
Chapter 2
Finn
“You’ll need to speak with him before the meeting tomorrow,” Dino says from across his desk. We’re sitting in his new office, not far from the Foreign Relations building where he used to work before he was elected president of Unity’s assembly. Old photographs of the Before Times hang on the walls, offering a glimpse of a world long gone.
“I’ll speak with him,” I say, “but last time we spoke, the ambassador from Blue Moon claimed they couldn’t give us better prices for their fertilizer.”
“Yet they still ask for better prices on our vegetables. Try to find out if there’s something more to it.”
“I will.”
“It might be related to the growing risks of transportation,” Timothy says. The black synthetic spider is standing with his eight legs on the nearby couch—each leg ending with a human palm. He has a dark, triangular body, and his face is white and smooth while faintly resembling the features of a young man, which Timothy used to be over a century ago. As a key member of the Enhancement Project in Kansas, he helped create the Semi-Humans so they could purify our air after the bombs fell.When his consciousness was transformed into this spider form, he remained in the underground lab as the sole caretaker of the Semi-Human babies. Decades later, he saved River by waking up his clone after he had died during the downfall of Las Vegas and the New-Humans.
We couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving Timothy alone in the lab once we got River back, so I invited him to join us at Unity, though I wasn’t sure whether he’d be granted entrance. But by then, Dino had already become the new president of the assembly, which made things easier.
“You think that the risk of transportation is behind this?” Dino asks Timothy.
“They did lose a shipment last month due to a Raiders’ attack.”
