Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

“Thank you for helping us, Standard.”

I was slow to respond. No client had ever tried to shake my hand. The awkwardness of pressing our bodies together in this space was a simple survival necessity, but this voluntary contact was something else. I stuffed down my discomfort and shook her hand briefly.

She paused in thought. “Is that your last name?”

I nodded.

“What’s your first?”

The console somewhere beneath us mercifully chose that time to declare that the pressure had equalized. Ignoring the bright pain in my joints and the groans of the two people beneath me, I leaned up and pushed the hatch open. The air felt shockingly cold and clean on my face. My hands were shriveled and clammy in my gloves as I hauled myself up and out.

I called back down, “We should move quickly, before what’s happening in Bloom spreads any farther. Assuming you still intend to travel inland.”

“Yes,” Danae murmured. “Inland.” She avoided my eyes to stare at the rifle at my side with a look of sickened fascination—as if she thought she could read its history, count its killing shots. She squinted at the initials carved into the cedar grip: M.S. I hung it over my shoulder and reached a hand down to help her up.

Naoto kept his eyes fixed in mine. He looked like he couldn’t decide whether I was his savior or his enemy.

“What’s your destination?” I asked.

Danae heaved herself up over the lip of the hatch. I was only half surprised to hear her respond, “I can’t tell you that. Not now. I’ll say more once we’re out of Epak’s sphere of influence.”

“You hired me as a guide and as a guard. I can’t be effective in either role if I don’t know your destination. I also need to know more about the threats you anticipate, besides Medusa Clan. I didn’t understand your comment earlier about ‘evangelists.’”

“Some people want me dead,” she said. “Me and . . . anyone like me.”

“Like you in what way?”

Naoto shot me a warning glare as he handed his backpack up to me. Something big and square-edged jutted through the fabric. Danae only rubbed the salt out of her eyes and stared away into the surf.

The way they both kept blinking at all that white sky and flat water, looking so shell-shocked, made me wonder how long it had been since either of them had seen the surface. Maybe they never had. Maybe that was why I couldn’t wring any straight answers out of them.

“I’m not trying to be invasive, but I will be useless to you unless you give me more information.” That was what really scared me, I realized. Right now I could stand the thought of death much better than the thought of uselessness.

“So ask,” Danae muttered.

I wanted to ask whether the object embedded in her cerebrum was, as the scanner had indicated, a nanoweapon that could spread and begin to eat us all from the inside out at any moment. Instead I settled for, “The people you say want you dead. How well-equipped are they? How can I recognize them? What sort of methods will they use? Do they have some way of tracking you?”

“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I wish I could tell you more. It’s . . . it’s hard for me to talk about. They’re a radical religious sect. They’re nomadic wastelanders, but unusually resourceful and determined for that. They will use any method: guns, sabotage, suicide bombs. They don’t care about collateral damage. They’re also fond of torture and ritual execution and may try to take me alive to that end. They could be anyone, anywhere. The last time I saw them, five years ago, they vowed that they would stop at nothing to exterminate me.”

‘Exterminate’ struck me as a strange verb for the murder of a single person, but I asked the more pressing question: “If you haven’t encountered them in five years, are you sure they’re still hunting you? I would think nomadic wastelanders would have moved on by now.”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure of anything.”

“Do they have a name?”

She looked at me briefly. “Keepers. They call themselves the Keepers.”

I climbed back down into the cockpit to grab the last of the medkit supplies, but I stopped. Milky waves sloshed along the bubble around me, and I could only sit and try to get it through my head that if I’d been looking for a worthy death, this was the last job I should have taken. I wasn’t headed for any front lines. I was an armed babysitter, guarding against the specter of an enemy that might not even be there anymore.

The escape from Bloom had given me exactly what I needed for as long as it had lasted. I’d been able to forget about Antarka, focus on the present, fix my mind completely on all the analytical and technical details of escape and survival. I’d been at peace for the exact length of my dead drop in elevator shaft, but now it was all seeping back, faster the safer I felt. My trigger finger twitched.

Desertion, the Major’s voice echoed in my head. Of the most unforgivable kind.

“You’re right,” Danae called down, shaking me from my thoughts. “We should go.”

I held my waver above my head as we stumbled for the shore in the neck-high sloshing tide. We clambered up the sand and rocks and arrived, newly shivering and dripping with the foamy spume of Bloom's industry, to empty the water from our boots. The old buildings here had all been ground down to their foundations by the storms and quakes and the sea.

“Hard to breathe up here,” Naoto wheezed.

“Your lungs might need a couple of weeks to adjust,” Danae told him apologetically. “It’s not just the pressure change. You’re also getting over a thousand parts per million of carbon dioxide in every breath now.”

When we reached the road, my clients and I started in opposite directions.