Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

I couldn’t resist listening, but I didn’t believe I would ever understand what she’d just said.

Naoto took her hand. “Come on. We still need to find a ride out of here.”

The more I studied Danae, the stranger I felt. I should have been paying attention to everyone else but her; should have kept busy identifying firing positions, tracking each face in the crowd in the corner of my eye, staying vigilant for other killers like me. Instead I watched the way she fixated on one relic or another—and for fleeting moments, there was something eerily familiar about her.

She stopped suddenly. Her body stiffened. Her gaze focused on the exit, or the street beyond, full of dust and searing light.

“They’re here,” she said. “The Keepers.”

I braced myself. Instinctively I grabbed both of my clients and pulled them down behind the curtain of a vacant stall.

“Where?” Naoto hissed. “Where did you see them? Danae? Hello?”

She blinked and looked at us like she didn’t understand why we were so tense. Her eyes were dilated, almost freakishly. “I don’t mean I actually see them. I mean, the Keepers have a post here. A mission. In Crossroads Station.”

“You could have mentioned this earlier,” I said.

“Well, I’m not exactly in my right mind,” she said dismissively. “Am I paranoid? Or am I paranoid that I’m paranoid? Para-para-paranoia.” She started to lean out of the curtain.

Naoto pulled her back. “Damnit, we have to run!”

“No,” she said. Her expression abruptly hardened. “Five years now I’ve cowered in fear of them. Hiding in Bloom. Letting fear eat me alive. I need to know, and there’s only one way to find out. We have an opportunity. We have a man with a gun.” She looked up at me. “I want you to go look. It’s in the church just down that street. Go . . . do reconnaissance. That’s something people like you do, isn’t it?”

I started to reject her idea.

A calm came over me. I’d squandered my first chance to die, back on the train. Now I was being given a second.

“That seems like a bad idea,” Naoto told her.

“No,” I interrupted. “It’s smart. You two . . . stay here. If I don’t return in five minutes, you should assume I’m not coming back.”

Naoto gaped at me. Danae nodded.

“Wait,” she said. “What are you going to do if you find them?”

A nervous pause passed between us.

“Reconnaissance,” I said.

Without another word I slid back through the curtain. I cleared my mind, slid my goggles back over my eyes, and walked out into the burning light.

Only a hundred meters ahead, I saw it. The shadow of a cross loomed, ebbing and flowing through waves of smoke and dust as I approached. Now I could make out the front of the building clearly enough to note the ideal sniper positions on the roof, the small windows above the double doors. The entry was a perfect kill zone. I turned off my armor and brandished my wave rifle as visibly as I could, so that anyone in that building would see it—so they wouldn’t wait to find out who I was before they opened fire.

For a few steps, I closed my eyes and just breathed. I had a thought that it was good to die on the steps of a church. It wasn’t suicide. It wasn’t the Major’s version of cowardice. I was turning myself in for my crimes.

I felt the concrete steps under my feet and stopped.

Nothing moved but the sand on the wind.

I opened my eyes. Through a break in the dust the windows stared down on me, empty as a skull’s sockets.

I went inside and had a look around. The interior was unusually intact: one of those unusually overbuilt or just lucky land structures that had survived multiple storm seasons. What made no sense was that it had clearly been abandoned for years, but there was no trash inside, no bedrolls, no graffiti, no fires. It was the perfect place to take shelter, surrounded by refugees in desperate need, but no one had sheltered here for a long time.

As I was about to leave, I saw something on the floor by the entrance, covered in dust. I lifted it and shook it off, and it fell apart in my hands, but what was left of the black and gold cloth banner still legibly read: WE ARE THE KEEPERS OF THE

They existed. They’d been here. Whoever or whatever they were.

I put away my rifle and stepped back outside. A young woman was standing erect in the middle of the street, staring hard at me, her face hidden under her goggles and shemagh.

I waved and shouted over the wind howling through the ruins, “Hey, do you know what happened here? ¿Que pasó aquí? Nani ga okotta?”

She said something then, but the wind carried her voice away.

“What did you say?” I yelled.

She repeated herself once and then broke into a run and disappeared amid the dust. All I’d been able to make out was the word ‘cursed.’

There was still a shake in my hands when I returned to the market. I composed myself as well as I could and told my clients what I’d found. Danae knitted her brow and bit nervously at her knuckles.

“That’s all wrong,” she said. “No. That can’t be right. They wouldn’t leave. They knew I was in Bloom. They made me their mission. They said I was an abomination, and they’d hunt me to the edges of the Earth.”

Naoto held her, and she clung to him. Her fingers dug in to his arms hard enough to bruise.

“We know someone is hunting you,” I said. “Whether it’s these ‘Keepers’ or another entity, our objective is the same. We need to get to the truck depot and try to negotiate transport to Phoenix.”

“Yes,” Naoto said. “Please. Let’s just keep moving.”

“Yeah,” she said—but we only made it a few steps farther toward the depot before she stopped.

She was staring in delight at