His smile returned, and he passed his spear to the nearest soldier, leaving his hand free. He drew a sword from the scabbard on his hip with a shriek of sharpened metal. He raised the weapon, one-handed, the blade poised to land just below Layla’s shoulder.

  “Now you will know the pain you have inflicted!”

  Etigor translated again.

  Layla cringed, realizing that she was about to lose her arm, and that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. Would she even survive such an injury? She could bleed out. And what would the shock do to her baby? She could suffer a miscarriage. Her mind was screaming for her to find a way out. The major had said something about buying time for air support.

  “Wait!” Layla cried, speaking in Jakar.

  Their leader sneered at her. “Yes?”

  Layla strained her ears, listening hopefully for the whirring roar of an aircraft approaching. She heard nothing but the wind and the distant, moaning bellows of large dinosaurs calling in the night.

  “Please, don’t,” was all Layla could think to say.

  “Take my arm instead!” Tom said, and extended his right arm above hers.

  The Jakar leader’s eyes flashed. “I’ll take your head!” he screamed, his voice shrill with outrage. “Hold him down!”

  Two warriors grabbed Tom and pushed him to the deck between a pair of dead prisoners. The black-bearded one with the whip stood on Tom’s back with the point of a spear aimed between his shoulder blades.

  “Leave him alone!” Layla screamed. “I’m the one you want, remember?”

  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten about you, my sweet. I will mount your arm on the wall of my bedchambers!” The Jakar leader took a long step sideways to line up his sword with Tom’s neck.

  Tom struggled, but the spear point dug into his back, drawing a glistening puddle of blood, and he lay still, realizing that he was only going to get himself executed faster if he kept struggling.

  Layla bit her lip, hard, and tasted blood. She had to find some way to stall them.

  “Please don’t do this,” she said. “I’m begging you.”

  The one-armed man laughed. “What do you think?” he asked, turning the question to his men. “Should we listen to the witch?”

  They laughed with him. Others offered helpful suggestions about how they should make her suffer.

  Axel nudged her in the ribs. “You’re a minder, Layla. My implant was partially disabled when the Architects revoked my authority, but yours wasn’t. You weren’t even here when that happened.”

  “What?” Layla blinked and slowly shook her head.

  “You can control him,” Axel said, just as the Jakar’s one-armed leader raised his sword high above his head.

  “How?”

  “Shut your eyes,” Axel said. “Imagine yourself standing where he is. Your hand is clutching the sword. Your other arm is missing. You can feel the phantom echoes of pain sparking down from your shoulder where it used to be.”

  Layla followed along with Axel’s guided imagery, not really expecting anything to happen. But she remembered that Adama had told her the same thing, that she and Axel were special because they could project their consciousness into other beings who had the Watchers’ implants.

  “It’s not working!” Layla screamed.

  But the voice that emerged wasn’t hers. It was deep and grating, a man’s voice. She opened her eyes, and found herself standing over Tom with a gleaming sword in her hand. Her jaw dropped in astonishment—along with the sword.

  Tom flinched as the blade clattered beside his head, bouncing harmlessly beside his cheek.

  The Jakar warriors stared at her in confusion.

  “What is wrong, Lakobus?” asked the big, black-bearded man with the leather whip dangling from his belt. Layla was surprised to find that she knew his name. He was Guthor, the Chieftain of Hagroth.

  Before Layla could say anything to him, a whirring roar interrupted. She looked up and saw a gleaming aircraft hovering directly above them. A cannon swiveled down and golden fire spat out in precision bursts. One burst shattered Layla’s chest with a fiery flash of agony.

  She felt herself falling, her whole body suddenly cold and numb all over. Her eyes grew dim as darkness closed in.

  And then someone was shaking her, and screaming for her to wake up. Layla’s eyes snapped open, and she was back in her own body. Tom and Axel were crouching on either side of her.

  “Are you okay?” Tom asked, screaming to be heard above the roar of gunfire slicing through the air. Jakar warriors were falling left and right, while others were scrambling to jump back across to their sailboats. A few of the wounded captives lying on the raft snatched at their ankles, causing them to trip and fall into the water with loud splashes. They swam desperately to their boats, but the roaring bursts of canon fire from the eVTOL followed them and ended their struggles.

  It was over in less than a minute. The Jakar were all dead, sprawled out in their boats, on the raft, and floating facedown in the river.

  “Thanks for the assist,” Major White said, speaking into his comms.

  Layla looked around, blinking in shock at the carnage, taking stock of the wounded. Almost everyone seemed to have arrows sticking out of them—except for her, Tom, Axel, Alice and her husband and son.

  Preston was out cold with an arrow sticking from his thigh. Layla looked to the fore, where the other two rafts had drifted on ahead of theirs, unfettered by the Jakar. At least all of those people were still standing.

  “We need to help the wounded,” Axel said.

  “How?” Layla demanded.

  “The river. The water, remember?”

  Layla nodded shakily.

  Tom and Major White each found and grabbed one of the long wooden oars and began using them to push and row the raft to the edge of the river.

  It was a laborious process. Layla passed the time conducting triage with Alice and Axel, ministering to the wounded by splashing water over them, and rolling the dead overboard. Alice seemed to take particular delight in rolling the body of the Jakar’s old, wizened translator over the edge of the raft.

  But Layla wasn’t happy about any of dead, and it seemed horribly callous not to give any of these people a proper burial. The truth of it was they didn’t have time, and there was no telling if or when more Jakar might sally out from the city.

  Major White explained that their aircraft wouldn’t be able to stay in the air forever, but that at least it would stick around long enough for his other reinforcements to arrive.

  The eVTOL followed them to the shore and landed briefly. Another soldier that Major White acknowledged as First Sergeant Wood came out to reinforce them. He distributed fresh magazines for their rifles.

  After reloading the weapons, they were passed around to whoever wasn’t injured and had at least a passing experience with firearms. Liam got one. Layla another. Alice and Axel each wound up with a rifle as well. The sidearms that Liam and Axel had been using were given to Bruce and the wounded soldier, Corporal Garcia.

  The soldiers began administering to the wounded, pulling out arrows, and pouring river water over their injuries at Axel’s insistence. Exclamations of shock followed. Even Layla was surprised by how quickly people recovered, and she’d already witnessed the effects several times before.

  Some of the wounded prisoners didn’t bother to wait, especially the locals, as they must have already known what the water could do. They waded into the river to heal themselves.

  Within minutes, all of them were on their feet and recovered from their injuries.

  Layla counted just thirteen survivors, including herself, from their raft. Those still among the living were the Major and Corporal Garcia, Axel, Tom, Bruce, Preston, and Alice and her family. Only three others had survived—the burly Jakar man they’d met in the caves, and two women wearing contemporary jeans, shirts, jackets and sweaters that were shredded and bloodied almost beyond recognition.

  Fortunately, there was still no sign of Jakar reinforcements coming from the distant walls of Hagroth, but Layla wasn’t sure they should count on that luck to hold.

  “Are we just going to let them sail away into the ocean?” Bruce asked, pointing to the other two rafts, which had now dwindled to specks.

  “We’ll catch up with them in a minute,” Major White replied.

  “We should at least get back on our raft,” Bruce suggested. “Put some more distance between us and the city.”

  Major White agreed and he herded everyone back onto the grounded wooden platform with First Sergeant Wood and Corporal Garcia. The eVTOL took to the sky once more and hovered overhead with its cannon aimed upriver at Hagroth. The soldiers pushed them off the pebbled shore and used the oars to guide them to the center of the stream once more.

  Layla shouldered her rifle and went to sit cross-legged on the back end of the raft so that she could keep watch for signs of hostile activity. Everyone else gathered in the center of the raft, probably reassured by the fact that they still had that aircraft covering them from above. Tom came over and sat beside her. “What are you doing over here all by yourself?” he asked.

  Layla flashed a grateful smile at him. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For stopping them from cutting off my arm.”

  “Oh, that. Anyone else would have done the same.”

  “Then why didn’t they?” Layla challenged.

  Tom shrugged. “I guess I was just faster.” He looked away, as if suddenly embarrassed by the attention his heroics had earned him.

  But Layla wasn’t ready to drop the subject yet. “You almost died because of me,” she pressed.

  He nodded absently, his gaze fixed on Hagroth. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

  Layla reached for his hand and laced her fingers through his. He flinched at her touch, but then seemed to relax. Tom looked back to her, and Layla smiled wanly. He smiled back.

  “I’m sorry I misjudged you,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “You know that I did.”

  Tom shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first. Everyone thinks I did it.”

  He was talking about the double murder conviction that had landed him in prison. His wife and the man she’d been cheating with.

  “Well, I don’t,” Layla said, shaking her head. “Not anymore.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot.”

  Layla nodded and leaned her head on Tom’s shoulder, her other hand resting on her belly.

  She realized after a few seconds that he was staring in shock at her baby bump.

  “You’re ... pregnant? How?”

  “It’s a long story,” Layla sighed.

  “We have time,” Tom said.

  So Layla told him all about what she’d been through. Before she was even halfway through her explanations, the others gathered around to listen, and she had to repeat a few things for their benefit.

  “So Earth is overrun by the Watchers?” Major White asked, proving that he’d been listening in as well.

  “Yes,” Layla said.

  “And this Adama guy, the Jakar’s deity, he’s on our side?”

  “I think so,” Layla said, not sure why she didn’t fully believe it. Maybe because he’d refused to join them on the rafts.

  Bruce snorted. “You’re saying that human flashlight was Adam, the biblical one, now over six-thousand years old, and also supposedly the original minder of Planet B?”

  Layla nodded uncertainly. “That’s what he told me, anyway.”

  “I smell bullshit,” Major White said.

  “If it sounds like it, looks like it, and smells like it, you know what it is!” First Sergeant Wood added.

  Layla heard Major White speaking over his comms in low tones to someone else. A moment later, he called out for everyone to hear, “ETA ten minutes for our reinforcements! Looks like they’re arriving early.”

  “Yeah ...” Bruce was busy scanning the sky. “Assuming harvesters don’t come raining hellfire on us from above.”

  “Why didn’t they?” Alice asked.

  Everyone looked to Axel for the answer.

  He seemed to squirm under the weight of their collective gazes. “What? How the hell should I know?”

  “Layla killed one of them,” Tom added. “I saw her do it, so why haven’t they come after us for that? Or is killing Architects not against their rules?”

  Axel frowned. “You didn’t kill an Architect.”

  Layla’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about? I was there for the invasion. I saw their ships. I watched on the news as one of them landed in Central Park and delivered their ultimatums.”

  “Those aren’t the Architects,” Axel insisted. “The Architects are the ones who built the Menagerie System. They’re the ones that the Watchers are running from. When the Architects find them on Earth, they’re going to turn the entire planet into a war zone. Billions of people will die as Watchers jump from one human body to the next to hide.”

  Everyone was staring at Axel in shock.

  “I told you that I brought you here to save you,” Axel added. “I wasn’t lying about that.”

  “No, you were just lying about everything else!” Bruce roared.

  Layla withdrew her hand from Tom’s to wrap her arms around her shoulders in an attempt to fight off an encroaching chill. The sun was dawning now, splashing the sky a muddy brown and rusty umber. The sound of men shouting and of stampeding feet drew their attention to the riverbank where at least thirty soldiers were just now running across a grassy field.

  “Destiny Company has arrived!” Major White announced.

  Chapter 45

  5:11 AM, September 29, 2069

  Layla watched as Major White and Sergeant Wood guided the raft back to the shore to the muted cheers of their men. Protein bars and canteens of water were passed around and then everyone was forced to run to catch up with the other two rafts. It took some coaxing to get them to come ashore, but the contemporary abductees among their number convinced them that the soldiers were friendly and that sticking with them was their best bet for survival.

  Since those soldiers had been running for almost two hours straight with heavy packs and other gear, they made a temporary camp on the shore of the river, pitching tents and unfurling bedrolls, while others built big bonfires and lit them to roaring splendor.

  The eVTOL whirred away, having expended as much of its battery as it could afford before returning to base.

  Layla and Tom sat around one of the fires with her friends and a few of the other civilians. The Russian survivors and Fango Morales had all been zip-tied after Tom told Major White about their individual offenses. He’d wanted to tie up Tom, too, but Layla had vouched for him and reminded the major that he’d almost given up his life for hers.

  “We need more people like Tom on our side,” she’d said.

  Major White had grudgingly agreed and dropped the topic.

  Now, sitting together around a bonfire on the edge of the river, Layla studied her friends’ weary faces, smeared with blood and dirt. Their eyes were glazed and staring into the fire. Shock was setting in, but not just the shock of the battle. It was also the shock of realizing that they would probably never be able to go home.

  As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Layla knew it was true. Earth was a write-off. She’d overheard Major White and First Sergeant Wood arguing. Major White wanted to get back to Earth and use the gate in Hagroth to do it, but Wood said they still hadn’t made contact with anyone on Earth, a fact which he seemed to think lent credence to what Layla had told them about the invasion.

  Layla strained her ears to hear what they were saying now. Something about their food supply and the logistics of establishing a colony.

  Tom’s big hand slid into Layla’s and gave it a squeeze, bringing her attention back to him. “Have you thought of a name yet?”

  “A name?” Layla asked, blinking stupidly at him.

  “For your daughter.”

  Alice smiled and leaned conspiratorially close. “Yes! Do tell.”

  Layla frowned at their enthusiasm—as if this were a normal pregnancy, and her daughter wasn’t some science experiment whose alleged purpose was to defeat the Watchers. Layla hadn’t told any of them about that last part, only that her child had been implanted by Agama as a part of an experimental program that he’d been conducting over several generations at least.

  After the disturbing experience of using her mind to take control of the Jakar’s leader, Layla was actually beginning to believe that Agama was telling the truth about her daughter being special. She wanted to ask Axel if he knew anything about it, but she didn’t want to risk talking about it now with so many other people around to hear. It could be dangerous for the others to find out, especially the locals that they had freed from Hagroth.

  “So?” Tom prompted. “You look like you’re pretty far along. You’re telling me you don’t have a name figured out yet?”

  Layla remembered checking her fundal height and finding that she was at least twenty weeks pregnant. Five months. The fetus was growing twice as fast as it should be. It made her head spin just to think about that. How long did she have before the baby would be born? At this rate, maybe only eight more weeks.

  “I don’t know,” Layla said slowly. Tom was forcing her to give the matter some thought for the first time. What would she call her baby?

  “How about Christina? Or Emma?” Alice suggested, seemingly throwing out names at random.

  But Layla realized that she already knew exactly what to name her. “Jessica,” she said quietly. “I’m going to call her Jessica.”

  Alice smiled tightly, and a hint of moisture crept into her eyes. “It’s perfect.”

  Layla smiled back, and Axel nodded.

  Bruce sighed and glanced about, as if suddenly bored by the conversation.

  Tom leaned his head against hers. “Wherever she is now, I’m sure she forgives you.”

 

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