Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) Page 6

  His overreaction made sense to him, so even though he knew he was overcompensating, and why, he held his course. If some part of him needed to micro-manage for a time in order to deal with the loss, to deal with the guilt a CO couldn't help but harbor after losing a soldier, then micro-manage he would. He knew fighting what his mind needed right now would be a losing battle. He'd been here before. Michael wasn't the first soldier he'd lost, and despite the doubled efforts, he most likely wouldn't be the last.

  Movement drew his eye to the forested hills to the south. Roughly four hundred meters away, a blue-gray blur streaked across a clearing with increasing speed before disappearing into the trees edging the bluff.

  Impact was hard at it again, either testing the new sensors or training. He'd been relentless since his run-in with Savior, pushing himself to the breaking point every day and then pushing that much harder the next. He was coping as well, in his own way. They all were.

  Losing Michael had affected the whole team. No one could pretend otherwise. No one else’s pain could compare to Nikki's, Elias knew, but he also couldn't pretend what he was feeling was just CO guilt. He wouldn't pretend. Michael had been more than a soldier to Elias, or he should have been.

  Elias had held back though. He hadn't told the twins where they'd really come from. He hadn't told them his role in Savior's experiment. He'd held back because he'd convinced himself Michael already knew. When he'd looked in the boy's eyes after Gideon told them how Savior created them, he'd seen something. In Michael's eyes he'd seen an understanding of the real reason Elias had betrayed his oath and taken them out of the facility. Michael had looked at him like he knew exactly where he and his sister had come from.

  At the time, that had been enough for Elias. Michael already knew, and Nikki would rather not. So he'd told himself to wait. When Michael was ready, they'd talk about it, but not before. Michael was the cautious, careful twin, after all. He acted only after thinking everything through deliberately and weighing the consequences, unlike his sister. At least, that's what Elias remembered of them as children, and the bits and pieces of the twin's lives he'd viewed after finding them again convinced him those traits had grown stronger over the years.

  Elias looked back down at the stone marking Michael's final resting place, his jaw tightening again. It hadn't been enough, not for either of them, and he'd known that deep down. He should have said more when he'd had the chance. Instead, he'd let fear and guilt hold him back. That regret was gnawing at him.

  "There you are," a gruff voice barked from behind Elias.

  He turned to see Gram hobbling his way toward him from the church, a tablet in hand.

  "You hound me for this damn thing, then make me chase you all over God's green earth to turn it over," Gram grumbled around labored breaths. “Do you know how much fun spiral steps are on this hip?”

  Elias suppressed a small smile as he watched the stocky engineer limp closer. He knew Gram was pushing seventy-five, but he also knew the man's attitude had been just as prickly when he was in his prime. Gram Simmons might very well have come out of the womb giving the doctor an earful for not warming up his hands.

  "Apologies, Gram," he said with only a slight hesitation. His instinct to say Chief was still hard to overcome. Gram was as proud of being retired as he had been of his decorated enlisted service. Using rank was just about the worst mistake a man could make with Gram, second only to calling him "Sir."

  Gram huffed as he held out the tablet. "Well, here it is. All i's and t's dotted. Pretty as you please."

  Elias took the tablet and scanned down through the inventory report. Again, this wasn't something he had to check in detail, but, his coping mechanism notwithstanding, if Elias didn't give the report some attention after the effort Gram had put in, he was sure to get an earful. He was three screens in before Gram broke the silence.

  "That kid makes me tired just looking at him."

  Elias looked up and followed Gram's gaze to see Impact disappearing into the trees in the other direction.

  "Whatever floats his boat, I guess. We all have our own ways to deal," Gram mumbled half to himself, his mind apparently traveling the same path Elias'sf had been following.

  Elias skimmed through the rest of the report before he asked, "How's she doing?" He didn't have to say who "she" was.

  "About like you'd expect," Gram replied after a pause, his gravelly voice making each word into a burbling growl.

  Elias nodded but tightened his mouth. Gram clearly didn't think everything about his granddaughter's condition was as expected. No one did.

  Kate had suffered what should have been a mortal head wound at the hands of one of Savior's soldiers. She should have died on the spot. She would have if not for Gideon and Michael. The energy they put into her healed the wound and left only a small scar to show for it, on the outside.

  In terms of physical health, Kate could have been back on her feet hours after the attack. Her mental health was another issue entirely. Psychologically, her recovery was still a work in progress.

  “Some days are better than others,” was all Gram said. He was a man of few words when it came to personal matters. For him to say even that much told Elias everything he needed to know.

  In truth, Elias didn’t need to ask to know how Kate was doing. He checked on her every day himself, as Gram knew. What he’d really been asking was how Gram was holding up, which was exactly the question the old engineer answered.

  Elias clicked off the tablet and lowered it to his side. Gram was watching the southern hills in a silence Elias was content not to break. He let his own gaze wander over the hills, the church grounds, and the bluff, and he tried to enjoy a moment's peace in the afternoon breeze. He had a dozen tasks on his to-do list but none of them were urgent, and, like double checking the sensors and inventory, several weren't even necessary.

  He didn't realize his eyes had gravitated back to Michael's headstone until Gram spoke.

  "Mind a little advice?"

  "Not at all," Elias replied. He turned his back to the bluff to give Gram his full attention. He had a pretty good idea what the older man was going to say. The people he'd been smothering were sharp. He knew it was only a matter of time until one of them called him on his behavior, and he wasn't surprised that Gram was the first to speak up. After all, the chain of command he and the others clung to was little more than a ghost of their past. They were more a family now than a fighting unit. The only real authority he had was what the others chose to give him. No one understood that better than Gram.

  "Talk to the girl," Gram said, fixing Elias with a firm gaze through his bushy gray brows.

  Elias studied Gram in silence for a minute. This was not the conversation he'd expected. At first he thought Gram meant Kate, but something in the man's eyes told him otherwise. No one on the team knew about Elias's connection to the twins, no one except Gideon. Even so, Gram was looking at him like he knew all that and more.

  "The boy died on your watch," Gram bulled on. "Sucks for you. Sucks for all of us. We're all hurting in one way or another. Difference is, we all have somebody left to hold on to and lean on. That girl doesn't."

  Part of Elias wanted to argue, but the wiser part of him, the part of him that recognized the concern behind Gram's rough tone, made him hold his tongue.

  "I'm not one to tell a man how to run his house," Gram said, the challenge in his eyes softening in the face of Elias's silence, "but that girl's begging for attention, and God knows some discipline."

  "I'm nothing to Nikki but an authority figure, and a stranger," Elias replied, feeling a twinge at the truth of his words. "From what I've seen, she doesn't respond well to either. And I have no idea how to be—" a father "—anything other than an old soldier."

  "Who told you to be?" Gram barked. "You've been a CO most of your life. You expect me to believe you don't know how to help a struggling soldier?"

  Elias held the older man's gaze for a second before breathing a soft laugh
through his nose and shaking his head. "Maybe you're right."

  "Course I am." Gram turned away with a gravelly laugh and started back toward the church. Two hobbling steps later he looked back. "Hell, while I'm on a roll, let me give you another nugget."

  "By all means." Elias allowed the small smile to show this time. He had a feeling the rebuke he'd expected earlier was about to drop, but one look at Gram's eyes told him whatever he was about to hear was no rant about micro-managing.

  "Keep your eyes front, Major," Gram said, his voice almost growl free. "Losing that boy wasn't your fault. You couldn't have seen that coming. Nobody could. Let that weight go and focus on those that need you."

  Gram turned away again without waiting for a response and headed back inside.

  Elias stayed at the grave for a while, Gram's words cycling through his mind. After a time, he made his peace and offered one last promise to the boy he'd hardly known. Then he made his way to the church.

  He stepped inside the old wooden church and eased the door closed behind him. As he walked past the long dining table through the red-orange light streaming through the stained-glass windows, Elias couldn't help focusing on the one thing Gram had gotten wrong.

  One person could have seen Michael's death coming. In fact, Elias was convinced that person had known all along what would happen, and he'd not only let events unfold the way they had, he'd helped them along.

  Gideon and Elias hadn't spoken much lately. They'd stayed out of each other’s way in the days that followed Michael's death, and then Gideon started disappearing for weeks at a time. As of today, Elias hadn't seen him in over two months.

  Gideon would be back, of that Elias was sure. He'd never met a man more driven and focused on a goal than Gideon. He was obsessed with preventing the coming apocalypse, and in that Elias had and would continue to support him, to a point.

  The few times he'd seen Gideon over the last four months, the regret in the man's eyes had been obvious. The guilt Elias could see made him want to believe Gideon hadn't known what would happen, but deep down he just didn't believe that was the case. The one thing that kept him from making amends and trusting Gideon again was his persistent suspicion that the man's regret was not that he'd allowed one of the twins to die, but that he'd picked the wrong one.

  Elias shifted one of the chairs back into place under the table as he passed and stepped up into the sanctuary toward the open hatch leading below. He was distracted by his thoughts, but not so much that he ignored the sudden feeling that he wasn't alone. He turned his head just in time to see the shadows move in the deep alcove beside the old pulpit.

  Elias spun and drew his pistol in one motion, flicking off the safety as he pulled a sight picture on the figure stepping toward him. When he got a good look at who it was, he almost shifted his finger to the trigger.

  Gideon met Elias's stare, his one human eye filled with a tangle of emotions Elias couldn't begin to interpret.

  "Elias," Gideon breathed, his voice so plaintive Elias almost relaxed. "I need you to lock me up."

  Chapter 6

  Nikki

  Nikki was becoming something of an expert at recognizing dreams. Controlling them or preventing them, not so much, but recognizing they weren't reality she could do pretty much without fail these days.

  This dream, for instance, had two obvious tells. For one, she was sitting in the back row of a classroom. She'd never been in, nor did she ever plan to walk into, any kind of classroom, ever. But dead giveaway that it was, the classroom wasn't screaming "dream" as loudly as the other tell: Michael was sitting in the front row.

  Nikki's breath caught. Her heart stuttered and a wave of longing pulsed from her chest through her whole body and back in an instant. She curled in on herself as much as the awkward desk would allow and swallowed the tears she knew were coming. Talking to Michael every day in her head was one thing. Seeing him in the flesh again was so much more.

  He was staring at the oversized display screen in the front of the room, completely engrossed in everything the teacher was putting up there. His hair was a little longer, curling in a half dozen directions on the back of his neck and up around his ears the way it did when he let it grow. It was also the same red brown he'd dyed it when they fled Sky City.

  The red hair made Nikki wonder if maybe Michael was the one driving this dream, as he had a time or two since he'd moved into her head. She liked the red OK, but it wasn't the way she pictured him. When she heard his voice these days, she pictured him with the same short, wavy platinum hair he'd always sported. Unlike Nikki, Michael had not once experimented with his hair color before Sky City. He'd had the same boring uber-blonde locks their whole life. She just couldn't picture him otherwise, not even in a dream.

  The school setting made a lot more sense now. It figured Michael would dream about doing the one thing he'd always wanted to do but never could—waste his time in a classroom. It also figured he'd dream up a classroom with absolutely nothing to distract from the lesson. As if learning wasn't bad enough.

  The room was irregularly shaped with a curved inner wall meeting a curved window wall to make the only two corners. That was interesting enough, but the only furnishings were the orderly rows of desks facing the suspended display screen, and the screen itself. That was it. No other furniture or décor of any kind. No shelves. No posters. Nothing.

  Not even the other students were interesting. Most of them had the same straight black hair in various short styles and similar drab clothes. They were also all facing forward, quiet as the dead, giving the teacher their full attention. Creepy.

  The one element of his dream that stood out, besides Michael, was the girl leaning back against the window wall instead of sitting down. Nikki pulled a double take before she realized who it was.

  Kate didn't look like herself, not exactly. She had the same light brown hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail, the same thick-framed glasses, the same understated but somehow still fashionable clothes on her slight frame. But her features weren't quite right. Somehow she just looked a little…blah.

  If this was how Michael saw Kate, Nikki was surprised he'd spent so much time mooning after her. Maybe the attraction had been all from Kate's side after all. The unshakable hungry stare she had locked on Michael sure looked stalker-worthy.

  Michael didn't notice though. He had eyes only for the teacher, a middle-aged Chinese man in an unfortunate suit.

  "What is the author saying through Hatoshi regarding duty and honor?" He made the question more of a statement and continued on without waiting for a response. "The answer is in Hatoshi's responses to the officer's queries, yes, but his actions are more telling."

  Nikki squirmed free of her desk and walked around the block of oblivious students toward the window. The teacher's voice droned on like he didn't notice her. In fact, Kate didn't glance at her either, even when Nikki stopped right beside her to stare out the windows.

  Maybe I'm invisible in his dreams, she thought as she leaned over to look out. They were pretty high up, maybe twenty stories or so, in the biggest city Nikki had ever seen in person. Everywhere she looked from her impressive vantage she saw buildings, buildings, and more buildings, each one trying to reach higher than the last. On the higher stories, the nearest skyscrapers looked sterile and cold, a collection of bland tan and gray concrete and glass. But lower down, brightly lit signs and hanzi-crowded billboards in a thousand shades and sizes sprouted from the sleek walls in growing numbers. The signs were so dense at street level that Nikki could barely make out the people crowding the streets, moving in every direction on foot, on bikes, and in expensive looking hover cars.

  "He would have been so happy here," Kate said from beside her, drawing Nikki's gaze from the urban chaos back to the classroom. Kate was still staring at Michael, barely aware of Nikki's presence, if at all. Nikki wanted to ask where here was, exactly, but she didn't see why Kate would know. This was Michael's dream, after all. Why should Kate know any more than
she?

  Nikki laughed at herself as the obvious answer occurred to her. Of course Kate would know more. Kate was Michael. Except for Nikki, everything in this dream was Michael, or cooked up by his memory and imagination, at least. Imagination for sure as far as the city went. She'd been everywhere Michael had ever been, and she'd never been here.

  Kate spoke again, just as softly, but clearly not just to herself. "So many people here take education for granted, Nikki. Even I did, at the time. They—we, I guess—don't bother to think about the people out there who still don't have this chance."

  "Yeah, well, don't beat yourself up," Nikki answered. "Some of us are just as happy without all this." Even as she said it though, she knew it wasn't necessarily true. She was dead set against schooling, for sure, but she knew there were more Michaels than Nikkis in the free zones, more people who saw education as a their ticket into the cities proper and off the streets so improper. Speaking of streets—

  "Hey, where are we any…" Nikki trailed off as she glanced from Kate back to the window. The wall had changed from one big curved expanse of solid glass to flat, weathered wood with regularly spaced windows of tall, arched stained glass that filtered the incoming light into a half dozen shades to give the room a warm, orangey cast.

  Nikki turned around to see a room she knew well. In place of the long, thick dining table Nikki was used to walking past on her way out of the old church, the desks from the classroom were lined up facing the narthex, only they'd changed from smooth composite to rough wood to match their new setting, and all of them were empty except the one where Michael still sat staring at the board. Board it was, too. The display had gone from holographic to a solid white board on which the teacher was writing with a marker.

  The teacher wasn't the droning man anymore either. It was Gideon, and the words he was writing weren't words at all. Or if they were, they were in a language Nikki had never seen. She recognized some of the letters, but not most of the other symbols in brackets and separated from the letters by lines and squiggles. As a whole though, it looked kind of familiar, like something she'd seen Michael studying in Kate's old school book—before she'd smashed it.