Hammer and Crucible by Cameron Cooper (book recommendations for teens .TXT) 📕

reaching for me from my right. He had shifted to come at me from behind. All his attention was on Juliyana, for she held her standard issue serrated blade.

So I hooked my elbow around his ankle and yanked with all my might. It was delightful to feel the floor vibrate as he dropped.

Juliyana spun again. Her hair, still wet from the shower, sprayed droplets around her as she took on the third man.

I crept-walked my way out of the range of action, then carefully got to my feet. I didn’t need to watch the outcome of the bout. Juliyana was a trained Ranger.

By the time I turned to see how it was going, the third man also laid on the floor. A puddle of blood spread from beneath him. Juliyana sucked the tip of her finger, looking vexed. “He hurried me.”

I glanced up and down the corridor. Despite this being the most central and busiest corridor, the shut down station meant not a single other soul had been stirred by either my shouting, or the sounds of the fight. Although, like most knife fights, it had been eerily silent.

I tugged on Juliyana’s arm. “Put your knife away,” I ordered her. “Leave them.”

“We should report to the station authorities.” The good Ranger, following procedure.

“They’ll have paid off station security at least. No one came running,” I pointed out.

“Who paid off security, though?”

I pulled on her arm again. It barely moved her, because I was weak and shaking with adrenaline aftermath. I tugged again. This time she stirred and followed me along the corridor. After a few steps, she put the knife away.

Walking was the best thing I could have done. By the time we reached our rented room, my shaking had subsided and my brain was working things through.

Juliyana sat on the edge of her bunk, her hands on her knees, squeezing them. “What was that all about?” she asked, sounding deeply confused. “We haven’t been spending money here. You don’t dress rich. What did they want from you?”

“They didn’t want something from me. They wanted me.”

Juliyana put it together with an almost audible click. Her mouth dropped open. “Billy’s employers…”

I nodded. “Apparently, telling them no wasn’t enough.”

Juliyana’s face grew stormy. “I should have punctured his balls for him.”

“He’s just a go-between. He passed on my ‘no.’ and whoever they are decided negotiations were not quite done yet.”

“Could they do that? Abduct you, force you to take rejuvenation and make you work for them?”

Her naivete was understandable. Like me, she served in the combat battalions. I had no direct experience with civilian law enforcement, although I had a number of friends who had dedicated their Ranger careers to law enforcement. Some of the conversations around the table, late at night when they were relaxed, had been brow raising.

“These people have methods to force their recruits to behave themselves. The most popular one is the introduction of a drug tailored to their DNA, which makes the recruit dependent upon the father organization for their steady supply.” I drew a breath, let it out. “That’s what they were doing forty years ago. I’m sure they have far more creative ways to bind their soldiers to them, these days.”

Juliyana shuddered. “I’ve heard rumors, over the years. I’m combat, so I never saw any evidence of it. I figured it was exaggeration, at best.”

I glanced around the room. “We can’t stay here. We’ll need another room, under a different name.” Although how I was to manage that, I would have to figure out later. Getting around the serial number in one’s wrist required funds, time and some dubious connections.

Money did not have to be a problem anymore, though. I pulled the pad out from under the pillow and turned it on. The message glowed up at me.

“Danny?” Juliyana asked quietly, as if she thought she was interrupting me mid-thought.

She was interrupting, only I had been around and around this thought track more than once already. I looked up at her. “I can get us out of this, in a way that will let us follow Noam down his rabbit hole. But…”

“Do it,” Juliyana said, her voice flat.

“No questions?”

Juliyana slapped her damp hair back over her shoulder and straightened her back. “I know they were just paramilitary thugs, yet it feels like things are moving. We picked up a twig and prodded, and something stirred and hit back. So now, I really don’t care what it takes. I have to follow this to the end.” She raised her brow and looked at me. “You?”

I smoothed my thumb over the corner of the pad, feeling the softness and thinness of the skin on the ball, thinking.

I could return to my apartment on the family barge and wait for the next seizure which would kill me. Or I could follow this trail as far as it went and see where it led me.

I thought of Juliyana’s first reaction after the fight out there in the corridor. She had reached for procedure, for what was right.

“Like father, like daughter,” I murmured.

That was the crux of it, right there. The Noam I knew didn’t match with the Noam the rest of the world thought they knew. And now I had evidence that they were wrong, all of them. Every single person in the Empire.

Except for the two women sitting in this room. Oh, and whoever had goosed Juliyana into this chase in the first place. Somewhere along the line, I knew we would find who that was. I had been in such chases before and recognized the shape of the track forming ahead of us.

That was when I realized I had made up my mind. I was already forming strategies for moving ahead.

So I pressed my thumb with its thin skin over the glowing green button on the screen, entered my personal account information, then shut down the pad.

I looked at Juliyana. “Okay, then.”

7

Zillah’s World was too limited for what we had to do next,