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CHAPTER NINE

Jei

Hot wind surged across my face as I leaned forward, shoving my hands against the windshield of my air-rider to urge it on through the Luna-Guetala jungle. Sergeant Strong said we attack first, while they’re down—something along those lines, right?

Well then, they could call this taking initiative.

I leaned into the heat as I ducked under a series of thick vines and burst through the humid canopy to soar above the treetops. The closest Growen Transport Center was just another mile ahead, the perfect way to draw Diebol out. His Alpino Command Center might be the brain of the operation, but the Luna-Guetala Transport Centers were its lifeblood, and with the siege lifted and nearby ground forces decimated, I now had a straight shot to cutting an artery.

Landing pads, food-ships, armor-depots … crush them, starve them all. It was as if the transport center itself had stolen Lem.

I didn’t actually think I’d find her there. She might have passed through here, maybe, if they retreated some of their forces to the neighboring planet, my home Alpino. That wasn’t the point. She was dead, and this was my funeral pyre.

I dove back under the treetops. Leaves beat my face as if the forest wanted me to turn back. Something in the back of my mind told me this wasn’t me.

But I didn’t care. We’d done the impossible before, the two of us, so often, that now I needed to know the impossible could still happen.

I needed to prove Njande was still with me even when she wasn’t.

I whispered his name. My shoulders lifted as if I had wings. I raised my hands: thirteen other air-riders in the jungle below me sped up as the weights I’d rigged against their screens pushed them forward. I still couldn’t see them, even here, above the thick jade leaves—I trusted the soft pull I felt, from each one, on my wrists, on my fingers, as if the electromagnetic field I controlled was a series of silver threads. I bounced my palms in the air, testing the weight of the crude explosives I’d rigged to each bike’s engine. I wove the bikes through the trees like needles through thread, as easily as tracing my fingers along the trails on the map I’d memorized beforehand.

“Njandejara,” I said, aloud. Anger drained from my body with every letter of his name, leaving me only with grief, pure and liquid, sparkling through me across dimensions into the Invisible Man, and then, through him, over a thin green thread of memory to someone else at another time. I was connected to the whole world on a crystal stream.

“Njandejara!” I roared, raising my hands as the blue-gray bubble protecting the Growen Transport Center appeared. I didn’t know the code to get in. It didn’t matter. I’d read the blueprints; the layout of the little fort was open, bare to my mind. I barreled toward the blue EMP bubble amidst screams and gunshots from sentries I barely noticed; from my chest I felt a pull as my neurons rearranged their polarities, and I redirected this magnetic em-pull with all my will through the bubble wall to pierce it with a brief, felt pop of charge. I couldn’t fit through the bubble, but an atom-thin needle could, and like an invisible finger, my concentrated plume of power wove through the shield, past the buildings, the people, through this and that polymerwall as I closed my eyes. It was like feeling through a bag I’d packed myself, only the bag was a city, and in a second I found that room, in that security office, and that computer that controlled the wall I was hurtling toward.

Yank! I em-pulled the switch—the shield protecting the camp flickered off just before I hit it.

Suddenly the transport center was all around me. I gasped for air like I’d just come out of the water—wow. Wow, I was in.

Growen blitzers spilled out of the buildings in waves as I arrived with my thirteen explosive air-riders. Shots flew past me, got caught in my magnetic field, and fell momentum-less to the ground. “This isn’t me” flitted through my mind as the concentration, the spirit within me covered me, and I was “underwater” again. I ignored the blitzers, brushing them away like toy soldiers with a wave of my hand as I rode my air-rider above them; they tumbled to the side before my invisible em-push. I twirled my left wrist and pointed—boom! An explosive air-rider hit the supply depot. I hurled with my right hand, like throwing a grenade—crash! The armory went up in colorful flames. Clap! Security center exploded as another bomb found its mark.

I reached forward, clawing, and dragged a handful of kicking and screaming blitzers through the air, out of their barracks, saving their lives before flattening that building, too. No deaths today. Yesterday was another day, but today, everyone would live to see me build Lem’s pyre.

When the buildings were all burning, when I had no more bike-bombs, I went for their ships. The air molecules around me practically sizzled as I lashed out for their largest transport, the one as big as a whale. It became my club—I hurled it up into the air, closing both fists as if actually holding the thing like a bat from a distance, and—crack! I swung my arms and the transport-turned-club crashed into the fleet of smaller transports on the landing pad. I lifted the gargantuan ship to see metallic debris raining down on the broken vehicles underneath it. I swung again. Again. The groan and squelch of titanic, protesting metal ground in unholy symphony for my funeral march.

This wasn’t me. This wasn’t me at all. My grief was the cord connecting me to a remote control, or some stealth program aching within my DNA, and—

And I accepted that it wasn’t me. I’m a killer, just a soldier, but keeping them alive, that was Njande, and he was something else. He was sad, and his grief outweighed mine. It wasn’t just this loss. It was all the losses. He felt their bereavement, too, Growen and Frelsi ache alike, and through him I felt the weight of the sorrow of the entire war on me—so no deaths today. My fists could clench to crush their bones, but sharp pain in my fingers would stop me; burns in my palms screamed, pull that man away from the fire, save him! He wasn’t going to die today.

I leapt from my air-rider and let it crash as I knelt to slam my palms against the dust. The last buildings flattened, and it was over.

I rose, and breathed.

Men cowered away from me in the smoldering ruins; no one tried to shoot me, even though now they probably could. The heavy, low scents of roasted rubber and melting plastic filled the air; no one said anything, but the constant crackling of ongoing fire was punctuated with moans.

Something like a thick, invisible cloak, something heavy and covering, fell from my shoulders, and I was just me again: just a grumpy teenager, sore all over, spent, hot in the face, sweaty as a frog in a crockpot and miles away from home without a ride.

I sighed as I rolled my head to stretch out my neck, and with slouched shoulders trudged into the jungle for the long walk home.

“Wish you’d kept me from destroying my own air-rider,” I muttered to Njande. I guess that was asking a little much, after what we’d just done. You get a miracle or common sense, not both.

Presently, after about ten minutes of picking my way over fallen logs and climbing mossy rocks, Frelsi ground forces zoomed up on air-riders. I wasn’t surprised to see them—the explosions had to have set off alarms on all frequencies.

Sergeant Strong barked and raised his fist. The Frelsi halted behind him. Everyone stared behind me at the smoldering debris of where the transport center wasn’t. They could see the destruction, and see me walking away, and no one could say anything.

I didn’t feel like explaining.

“Good morning, Sergeant. Fellas,” I nodded my greeting and walked right on through their floating herd.

“Dang, son, that’s some work, alright,” Sergeant Strong muttered.

“Looks like your partner needs to go AWOL more often,” I heard Seria chuckle.

I stepped back, twirled her off the air-rider, whirled her into my arms like I was about to kiss her, and held her there for a second as she panted, shocked—and then I smirked, dropped her on the ground, leapt onto her air-rider, and took off back toward Fort Jehu.


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