“He’s not a madman.” Kimba sorts through the data we brought back with Andrea, seemingly disinterested in the rest of us. “He’s brilliant and cruel. It’s a shitty combination, but he’s not mad.”
She looks up at Drift. “You can tell Breaker, Ward, and Fault their outposts don’t have any marked hidden rooms. I’ve already sent Surge, Echo and Ion their floor plans.”
Shock and Risk let me stand so I can go to the overlaid map. “I’ve been looking at the wrong side of the Zone this whole time?”
“That’s why you do laps?” Richter interjects. “Why didn’t you ask for help?”
“Because he was dead and none of you needed to join me in my paranoia.”
“Apparently we did.” Drift nods at the others. “It seems like this outpost is safe. Bondmates and weeuns should stay here until we’ve cleared these labs.”
I’m already out the door and I know Risk and Shock are right behind me.
When I get in the driver’s seat, reversing out of the garage as Shock closes the car and the others get to their vehicles, I say, “At least if you’re wrong, I won’t have to kill you.” We’ll all be dead.
CHRYS
The room is cold, a cave by any other measure. Carved from the same kind of rock as the outpost, but with none of the finesse or consideration for life’s comforts. It feels like an afterthought.
I half expect him to throw me to the floor, but he doesn’t. He puts me in a cage built into a carved-out piece of the wall, and I grip the bars when he locks me in.
The Maker doesn’t say a word, moving around the space as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. Except that he glances at me every few seconds, suspiciously. He expected me to fight him, to kick and scream…
Maybe my quiet watchfulness actually scares him.
He doesn’t plan on letting me leave alive. I can’t imagine true crime podcasts would fail me on this planet either…. If he was going to let me go, he wouldn’t have let me see where we were going.
The ride here was a sharp, windswept flight across the open snow between the outer and inner calderas.
His helicopter looked like just another of the many that have landed to start hauling out the crash site.
I suppose I should be grateful that we flew instead of being forced to endure the sharp and biting wind on the back of a bike instead.
The entrance to his lair was a crack in the side of a glacier beneath the ruins of an outpost that looks like it was firebombed.Where Arc thought he’d killed the Maker.
We are on the inside of the caldera, and I know what that place was, what it used to be a part of. Arc had every reason to search for him.
The cage he’s placed me in is furnished… with oddly nice furniture.
There’s a bed that doesn’t resemble a cot and a chair that actually has cushions. I expected something different from a slapdash prison cell…
It’s not great, by any means, but I’m notafraidto sit down.
There are dozens of cavrinskh wandering outside my cell. None of them seem hostile, more than half of them are asleep between random pieces of equipment I don’t like the look of.
One walks up to Atker as he stands at a console, and he pets it absentmindedly as he reads out data and taps things into the screen.
It’s too quiet.
“Are you going to tell me your diabolical plan? Or what?” I ask.
He turns back to me, eyes narrowed. “Why would I do that?”
“When I decided to come with you, it was kind of expected. I am, as you say, acaptiveaudience.” Literally.
“You decided?” He laughs and the sound makes my skin crawl. “Nothing that has happened to you since you were taken from Earth was your choice.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the one who picked out these gloves.” I look at them and wiggle my striped fingers. “You don’t seem like a pink and yellow kinda guy.”
