Chapter 63

Chapter Sixty-Three

Heat burned away sweat and sapped Connor’s will to live. Every millimeter of his body was sore and tired—impossibly tired. His stomach rumbled in protest, and his breath stank worse than the jungle rot. They were out of water, now nothing more than a white film along the inner rim of their canteens.

And, of course, there was the memory of its wet, sweet coolness.

His boots crunched against the dry, gray-green moss covering the forest floor wherever there weren’t trees. It sounded more crackly and dry in the brutal sunlight.

That was the only sound now—the team’s boots stomping across the moss as they ran. That and their desperate breathing.

No lizard clicks and chittering. No heavy flapping of bug wings.

The team was broken, barely keeping itself together. Even the best had limits, and Selen’s Devils had reached theirs.

When someone spoke over the radio, it was invariably a question.

Did the lizards give up?

Are we out of their territory?

Did the bugs scare them?

Will the bugs come back in the sunlight?

It was all hopeful speculation, the sort of thing Connor couldn’t indulge in right now. What mattered was that neither the bugs nor the lizards were harassing them right now.

So he pushed the team, the way Rudy would have.

“Vicente, stay with the main body.”

“Lem, eyes sharp.”

“Kalpana, don’t extend too far ahead.”

That pleased Selen, who gave an approving nod each time.

But Connor wasn’t trying to please her. He was trying to keep the team alive.

Realization came slowly: The trees were thinning. He might go ten, maybe even fifteen steps without coming near a rough trunk. And after a bit, it was closer to twenty, then thirty strides.

They were getting closer to the clearing that separated the woods from the shallow butte where the Lucky Sevens waited for them.

Get inside the ship, seal it up, and fly.

Just go. Don’t worry about the landing gear. Wherever they ended up, set down in the water or on sand. Get a loan and rebuild the ship.

But they had to get to that butte first.

His radio scratched and hissed, then Kalpana was in his ear. “Lieutenant?”

That was new. He checked to make sure it was just the two of them connected. “What’s up?”

“Might want to halt the team.”

Connor flipped to the open channel. “Go to cover.”

Everyone drifted off in pairs, squatting behind trees, weapons now at the ready.

Then he flipped back to Kalpana. “Safe to come to you?”

“Just you.”

He found Selen, signaled that he was moving forward, and hunched low. Now the moss sounded like plastic sheeting crinkling and popping, the noise being fed through an amplifier and huge speakers.

The scout was on her belly, her left shoulder pressed against a low rock and rifle raised to scan across the area ahead.

Connor realized as he approached that it was the clearing.

They’d reached the clearing!

He dropped beside her, tapping her left shoulder. “What is it?”

She rolled over, looking him up and down through narrowed eyes, then handed him her rifle.

The system guided him as before, but he felt her weight on his back and her breath against his ear. “Let the scope do its work.”

He didn’t flinch as she wrapped her arms around his.

Then the rifle drifted, and he caught what it was targeting in the scope.

One of the lizard things—blue-green where the sun caught its skin fully—dashed from a bend at the base of the butte, came into sight, then darted back from sight.

The rifle drifted again, and another of the lizards filled the scope as it scampered several meters up the rock wall not far from the first.

Connor hissed. “They came out of the woods?”

“Uh-huh.” Kalpana was on top of him now. She couldn’t pretend it was professional or necessary. “Maybe fifty of them.” Her voice shook.

“I can’t concentrate with you rubbing against me.”

“Rubbing—?” She froze, then rolled off. “Sorry.”

Some other time, maybe his curiosity would have been piqued. Now? Something was in her head, the same as he’d seen with others. “We can’t make a run for the ascent, not with those things everywhere.”

The scout took her rifle and scooted away, not meeting his eyes. “No.”

From where he was at, Connor had a good look at the side of the butte with the steepest incline, where the rear of the ship was pointed and the cargo bay airlock waited. The gentler slope was almost exactly opposite.

To his left, the tree line curled slightly toward the base of the butte. It did that all the way around, always staying a similar distance out from the rocks.

He glanced back, then switched to the open channel. “Move up. Five meter gap. Use cover, and stay quiet.”

Connor pulled out his binoculars and scanned the butte.

There weren’t any lizards or bugs along the edge. A few lizards crawled up the rock wall but dropped back down.

They weren’t trying to get to the top so much as…

Selen dropped down close on Connor’s left. “What’s going on?”

He handed her the binoculars. “They quit pacing us because they figured out where we were going.”

She squinted, then took the device from him and did the same thing he’d done a minute before: scanning along the top, dropping down to the sides.

After a bit, she handed them back. “We draw them to us and kill them.”

“We’re too beat up. Kalpana spotted at least fifty.”

The scout nodded.

Connor swallowed. “Anyway, the second you open fire, they’ll go to cover. They can wait us out.”

Selen snorted. “They’re stupid animals.”

“And they just so happened to figure out where we were headed?”

“They could smell our trail.”

“Sure. And they abandoned chasing us because our trail smelled stronger than it does right here? You get a whiff of us?”

Muscles bunched on Selen’s jaw. “Then what?”

Connor shrugged off his backpack and set the Asp light machine-gun on the mossy ground. “We need a distraction.”

“What?”

He rubbed the amulet pulsing beneath his armored chest plate. “Wait here. I’ll signal.”

Before Selen could protest, he crawled over her, heading to where he thought the woods might get him a straight line to the steepest slope.

And to what would be certain death.