Warriors

TWENTY-ONE

Michael rose into the sky for the second time in as many days, but this time he was strapped to a hang glider. His black helium balloon rose above the triangle of aluminum struts and sailcloth.

The rig was awkward, but the weight wasn’t as bad as he had expected. Fortunately, he didn’t need to rise to twenty thousand feet. This search would be much lower, at only two or three thousand feet above the water. When he reached the proper altitude, he would let out most of the helium. Then, when he needed to regain altitude, he would dial the booster to add more helium. It was a brake system in a way, but it was also dangerous as hell.

As he rose toward the black clouds, he twisted in his harness for one last look at the capitol tower, still visible in the distance. Leaving Layla after the attack was the hardest it had ever been. The only consolation was that Dr. Huff had cleared her of major injuries, and the ultrasound showed Bray doing just fine. The kid was a fighter like his mom and dad.

But they had been lucky. A few feet closer to the elevator cage on the rooftop of the Hive, and they could have ended up like Cole and Bernie Mintel.

Michael tried not to think of the dead and focused on the living.

He checked his wrist monitor. The beacon representing Cricket was going in and out from the electrical interference. For a small drone, it had covered a lot of surface area, but it hadn’t detected anything beyond the barrier.

Where the hell are you bastards? Michael thought.

Horn and his skinwalker army were out there, waiting and scheming to strike again. He could feel it in his guts. But there was one thing Horn and his demon soldiers hadn’t planned for.

Hell Divers.

They would never see the hang gliders until it was too late.

Thunder boomed overhead, rattling the control frame. The wind pushed the sail deeper into the storm until the barrier around the islands swallowed him, blocking his view of the last rig.

Darkness enveloped him like a shell, only to be shattered by lightning strikes across the horizon. Wind pulled and tugged on the balloon, jerking his harness. He prepared to let out helium and start the hunt.

Lightning burst above him. In the residue of fading light, the clouds seemed to churn. He sailed higher into the void, trying to remain calm as thunder boomed like artillery going off.

A warning sensor beeped in his helmet, indicating he was nearing three thousand feet. A glance at his HUD confirmed the other divers had already let helium out of their balloons. They were picking up speed and swooping toward the surface.

Michael did the same thing, using his wrist monitor to start the slow and controlled release of helium. Once it reached 35 percent, a valve closed. The sails caught and propelled him forward. The rig picked up speed, whistling under the storm.

He embraced the wind as he did at the start of a dive. Using the control bars, he eased his glider all the way down to nine hundred feet. The sail carved through the air, over water flecked with whitecaps.

For the first few minutes, the rush of flight was more intense than he had anticipated. There was also more to manage than on a dive. He alternated his gaze from his HUD to the water, making sure he didn’t deviate from his assigned search grid.

Lightning reached down like a skeletal hand in front of him. He flinched and then weaved right. The balloon dragged slightly, and once his rig was level again, he tapped his wrist monitor to let out more helium.

Once it was released, he swooped two hundred feet lower to avoid other strikes, although there was no way to get below their range. Going lower just lessened the chance of being hit. The synthetic material installed around the aluminum bars would help, too, at least in theory.

At seven hundred feet, he had a great view of the surface. There was no sign of a warship or submarines amid the galaxy of whitecaps. He alternated from night vision to infrared, hoping to pick something up.

The minutes ticked by. By two in the morning, the other divers and Cricket had covered a combined hundred square miles. Michael feared they must expand their search even more if they didn’t find Raven’s Claw soon.

Or maybe they were wasting their time. Maybe his gut was wrong about the warship being close.

His mind wandered as he searched.

At three a.m., he struggled to stay awake. The longer he flew under the storms, the more fatigued he became. Part of that was the darkness. Spending so much time in the sunshine had changed him in some ways, making the real world feel more suffocating than ever before.

He drank through his straw, wishing he could splash water on his face.

Lightning sizzled across the horizon, and his HUD flickered off, on, then off.

The map on his display vanished. Worse, his night-vision optics went dark from the electrical interference.

A pocket of turbulence shook his glider violently. He held it steady, waiting for his systems to come back online.

For what felt like another hour, he flew in almost complete darkness, using the glow of lightning to scan the surface and make sure he didn’t go too low.

By the time his optics came back on ten minutes later, he was a mile off course. But seeing that the other divers were still alive helped him concentrate.

He took another drink, trying to break through the fatigue. There was always the stim pill in his vest, but he decided to save it. He had functioned on far less sleep before.

Better to save the precious pill for when he really needed it.

Leaning forward on the control bar, he spotted something on the surface during a flash of lightning. He blinked again, thinking it was an illusion. When he activated his night-vision optics, he saw the curved shape of an airship resting on the top of an oil rig.

Exhaustion had messed with his memory before, but this was no illusion.

The rig was real, and so was the airship.

Discovery had landed on top of the Cazador prison they called the Shark’s Cage. Dozens of boats were docked outside—ferries that had taken Samson and his small army of workers to repair the airship.

It was a dangerous place to do work, but it was the only rig on the Vanguard Islands that didn’t see sunshine—the one place the skinwalkers would probably not think to look.

Michael decided to check it out before veering back to his search grid.

He swooped down to about five hundred feet. Sparks glowed across the airship’s bow. The workers were busy patching up the exterior, but they still had much to do. A dozen mechanics and engineers stood on scaffolding around the exposed bridge. No one seemed to notice as he ghosted past.

He steered away from the airship and headed back out to hunt for skinwalkers. To pick up speed, he let out most of the remaining helium in his balloon.

That did the trick. The sail caught on a gust of wind to send him streaking beneath the clouds.

Arriving back at his search grid, he added some helium from his booster. The balloon both slowed and lifted his rig.

He went back to scanning the whitecaps for Raven’s Claw. But the longer he searched, the more his eyes started to play tricks on him, making waves look like ships. He drank more water and decided it was finally time to take a stim pill.

Fishing in his vest pocket, he retrieved the last one from his stash back at the islands. He flipped his face shield open, the cold wind buffeting his face as he popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed it.

By the time he closed the shield over his cold skin, he had a blip on his HUD. One of the beacons flickered, then vanished.

Michael’s heart sank when it didn’t come back online. They had lost a diver.

Terrified to look, he finally brought up his wrist computer and saw that it was Alberto, one of the new Cazador divers. Michael didn’t know him well, only that he had served in the military as a boat mechanic and had jumped at the chance to dive through the sky. And now he was dead.

“I’m sorry,” Michael whispered.

He flew for the next few minutes thinking of Alberto and all the other divers they had lost over the years. And as always, he did his best to push the grief aside and concentrate on the mission.

The stim pill was already kicking in, and the exhaustion seemed to wash away as the glider took him deeper into the storm beyond the barrier. With the stimulant working, his mind multitasked, focusing on the hunt but also on his worries, hopes, and dreams of the future.

One thing had become clear to him in the past year: life was even more precious than ever before. It could vanish in a blink, as it just had for Alberto.

Michael had struggled between duty to his people and duty to Layla, but out here, flying through the sky, he realized now what he must do, both for his people and for the only woman he had ever loved.

The gift of life growing inside her womb had to be protected at all costs. The very future of their people depended on children like Bray.

Lightning rickracked across his flight path, and he swooped lower. Rows of waves rolled across the black surface, stirred by the violent wind that drove his glider through the sky.

Another beacon winked on his HUD. But this wasn’t one of the divers—not a human one, anyway.

Cricket’s beacon flickered in and out, which could mean the robot had sustained damage or that the electrical disturbance was affecting the signal again. It appeared to be the latter, Michael realized when he brought up the drone’s location.

For some reason, Cricket had veered away from the search grid, heading farther away from the islands and into the darkness. Michael tapped his wrist computer to give it new orders, but the signal flickered off altogether. He waited a few seconds, hoping it would come back online, but the beacon had stopped transmitting. They had lost contact with the drone.

The loss hit Michael hard. In some ways, Cricket had become his friend. Not quite in the way Miles was to X, but so much more than a mere machine.

The loss of Alberto, and now Cricket, filled him with anger. He felt his prosthetic hand dent the aluminum of the control bar.

For the next hour, he searched the water. The only thing on his mind was finding the demons.

At five thirty in the morning, his HUD beeped again—this time, not for a lost diver. The alarm meant he needed to head back to the islands.

It wouldn’t be long now before the sun rose and all the divers had to be back and grounded to avoid being seen.

The search tonight had failed. And they had lost a diver and Cricket in the bargain. Michael’s jaw clenched in anger.

He let more helium out of the balloon and soared back toward the barrier. By the time he was nearing the border of the islands, all he could think of was Layla. She would be waiting for him in the gardens of the capitol tower.

The journey back took him through several patches of turbulent skies. He didn’t flinch at the lightning strikes, or in the rattle of the thunder. Michael was too focused to be fazed by them. He knew what he had to do now. It was all so clear.

He was so focused, he didn’t realize what had happened when his balloon popped. The glider dropped a hundred feet, picking up speed. The tube from the booster to the balloon whipped the sailcloth of the glider’s wing.

He fought to level out his descent, dropping another two hundred feet before he got his rig under control. Fortunately, he had climbed back up to eight hundred feet earlier, or he would be dangerously close to the water.

But with a mile to go to the barrier, and five miles to the capitol tower, he wouldn’t make it to the rooftop before splashing down. And he didn’t have anything that would help slow his descent now the balloon was flopping behind him like a deflated lung.

He was still losing altitude. Looking back, he saw why.

It wasn’t just his balloon that had been damaged. The tube connected to his booster had smacked the wing so hard, it tore the sailcloth.

Pulling the knife from his boot, he twisted around to cut the helium tube at the back of the rig. But the angle was too awkward, and he couldn’t get to the mounted booster.

So he unbuckled it. The wind sent the booster tumbling away, still connected to the deflated balloon.

He sheathed the knife and put both hands on the control bar. The glider was going down, and nothing he could do would stop it.

If he could just get to the barrier, there would be boats to pick him up after he hit the water—if a shark didn’t find him first.

He checked his HUD, seeing the last location of the boat that had dropped him off. The other divers were already breaking through the barrier on their way to the capitol tower, where they would put down. X was closest, but Michael couldn’t see him on the horizon.

At around four hundred feet, a crosswind slammed into the torn sail, pushing him sideways. He pulled back on the control bar to steady the rig, but it was too late.

Closing in on the barrier, he was on a crash course with the surface. He speared through the remaining clouds until they lightened, and he saw the oil rigs in the green hue of his optics.

He chinned the NVGs off as a thin line of molten gold lit the horizon.

The glider had sunk to three hundred feet above the water.

Michael searched for the closest vessel and finally spotted a boat bobbing in the water about a mile away. He sailed toward it, trying to maintain altitude.

Reaching down, he pulled out his flare gun and fired it at the boat.

At fifty feet above the water, Michael said a prayer to the ancient gods and braced for impact.

All he wanted to do was see Layla and their baby boy. Never in his life had he wanted anything more.

Please, he begged. Please don’t let this be the end.

The whitecaps rose up to meet him, and at the last minute, he unbuckled his harness so he wouldn’t be trapped in the glider. He dropped out and crashed into the water.

He skipped like a flat rock thrown across a pond, before a wave slammed into him. The impact knocked his visor open, and water filled his helmet.

All he could do was hold his breath and try to battle his way back up to the surface. But he was so disoriented, he didn’t know which way was up. The salty water stinging his eyes didn’t help. And everything was so dark.

He kicked and stroked, trying not to panic. Far away, a hint of light beckoned. He kicked toward it.

Layla was waiting for him in the capitol tower gardens, in the first rays of light. She had waited for him on so many missions, worrying, wondering whether he would come home.

He stroked upward, but the weight of his armor and prosthetic arm pulled down on him. Fire burned in his lungs.

The glow above him seemed just in reach, but red swarmed his vision. A vision entered his oxygen-deprived brain. It was just one memory, of the time he had nearly drowned in the Florida swamps.

He tried to kick again, but his legs and his arms failed him.

No! Not like this!

His robotic hand sank with him, the fingers the only thing he could still control. He moved them once more toward the surface before they, too, locked up.