Hero (Gone 9)

It was irritating. And Shade had other worries. Pain. Confusion. Blindness.

De-morph, de-morph. Shade, de-morph now!

Okay, if it will shut you up.

Watchers in her head. Was it them yelling?

Her mind was on the very edge of a cliff, a cliff a thousand feet high over jagged rocks, and if she slipped . . .

De-morph, goddammit, Shade!

Malik?

Shade formed a thought, a tenuous, slick, impossible-to-hold-on-to thought . . . and slipped over the edge of the cliff and fell and fell and fell.

CHAPTER 40

A Lair of Their Own

FORTY-TWO PEOPLE, INCLUDING seven children, were on the train. Twenty-six died instantly on impact. The rest died from nerve gas, their bodies racked by violent spasms.

There were no survivors.

As ambulances and police cars swarmed the crash site, helpless to penetrate the dome, the helicopter flew the short distance to the Pentagon, the massive, five-sided, seven-story headquarters of the American military in Virginia, just outside of the District of Columbia. It landed on the helipad on the north side of the building and was met by the inevitable dark SUVs, three of them.

As the turbines powered down and the rotors slowed, Malik saw a sort of honor guard waiting, a half dozen older, bemedaled soldiers and dark-suited civilians.

There were also two ambulances parked at a discreet distance, awaiting the badly injured members of the Rockborn Gang. A group that did not include Shade Darby.

Shade had de-morphed, returned to her human form, alive and uninjured—harm suffered in morph was repaired by de-morphing, so long as the human form had not been injured. Malik did not like the look of shock on her face, the closed-down, unresponsive, Shade-running-in-safe-mode expression on her face. Malik knew her near-death experience would leave deep scars on her mind. He’d been there.

We all have scars. Some will be mended with stitches. Others will never be healed.

“There’s a welcome committee,” Dekka observed with a bit of an eye roll.

“At least it’s not a firing squad,” Simone muttered. She stood beside Dekka, and Malik sensed that something had changed between the two women. A connection had been made, perhaps nothing more than the fact that Simone had now become a full member of their strange little tribe.

Simone had lost her father. At least they all hoped she had lost her father, which was a terribly complicated set of emotions to make sense of. They all liked Simone well enough not to wish her the pain of losing a parent. But to Simone, Malik imagined, her father’s death had occurred days earlier when Vector was born.

More business for some future therapist.

Francis would be going straight to the ambulance. She was in pain, her face a bleached white, hair matted with sweat. Francis, without whom their victory, if you could call it that, would not have been possible. Malik leaned forward, put his hand on her shoulder, and said, “You did good, Francis. You’re a hero.”

Armo had de-morphed and—astonishingly—had to be wakened from a nap when they landed, having managed to actually fall asleep on the flight from the train wreck to the Pentagon. Cruz, herself once more, was beside him. Malik was certain something was going on that was not strictly to do with battles or morphs or n-dimensional universes.

Malik felt almost sorry for the big dude. Everyone liked Armo, but at the same time, everyone had the same thought: If you break Cruz’s heart, we will make your life miserable. Any normal person might have been intimidated at having the likes of Dekka, Shade, and Malik watching them like a hawk, but then, Malik admitted with a private smile, Armo was not normal.

Malik was most interested by Sam Temple, about whom he knew the least. Sam had come with a reputation. He’d been called everything from the Winston Churchill of the FAYZ to the Ulysses S. Grant of the FAYZ. But Malik had found him humble and devoid of ego. Sam had managed to remain immune to the lavish praise as well as the uninformed criticisms.

Now Sam sat among the shell-shocked Rockborn Gang, waiting for the door to be opened, drawn into himself, contemplative, and, Malik thought, sad. Sam, Malik suspected, would torture himself over the people on the train, the same way Malik tortured himself over the things he’d done at the Ranch.

You carry a heavy load on your shoulders, surfer dude.

A soldier slid the helicopter door open. Dekka was the first one off, followed by Shade. Armo gently lifted Francis in his arms and climbed down carefully. A gurney appeared, and Armo laid her on it, patted her on the head, and whispered something that earned a weak smile from Francis.

Malik was the last off the chopper, lingering behind for just a moment to collect his thoughts. The others were all de-morphed. He alone remained trapped in the world of the Watchers.

Did you enjoy that, Watchers? Was it all entertaining enough for you?