The Exodus Towers #1

“The greatest treasure in all of Belém,” Skyler said with a mock bow.

Ana peered inside the building with a skeptical frown.

“I’ll show you,” he added, and wiggled through the security gate he’d torn open a month earlier with a crowbar. A gate that had, for years, saved the store and its contents from looters.

The dusty beam of his flashlight swept across a large banner hung on the back wall. AVENTURA NA AMAZ?NIA, it read. And below, SUPRIMENTOS DE SOBREVIVêNCIA.

Row upon row, rack after rack, of high-end quality camping and survival gear lay before them.

Ana whistled, her eyes wide. Exactly how I felt, Skyler thought. He’d found the building ten days after initial landfall. Windows boarded, doors chained. Pristine, if a bit musty.

The girl crept inside and strolled slowly down the nearest aisle, past rolled sleeping bags, air mattresses still in boxes, tents of every size and color, and bundled blankets. She ran her hand along an entire wall of hiking boots, and picked up a bundle of climbing rope, price tag still attached. Skyler left her to wander, grabbed a fresh duffel bag from one shelf, and set about finding the items his plan required.

When Ana returned to him she sported a new vest, a pair of sunglasses, and a water bottle with filtration built into the cap. A confused smirk grew on her lips as she watched Skyler strip two mannequins of their fashionable survival gear.

“You want us looking good when we attack?” she asked.

In answer he disassembled the mannequins and stuffed their torsos and heads inside his bag. Her smirk turned to a knowing smile when she saw the rest of the duffel’s contents.

“Let’s go,” Skyler said. “Plenty of time to ransack this place later.”

“Just a second,” Ana replied. She went to a rack near the cash registers and selected two more items: a pair of thin, tight leather gloves and a wide-brimmed olive-green hat.

“My hands get sweaty,” she explained. “When I hold a gun, I mean. And now that the rains have gone, the sun makes me squint.”

She put the hat on and stuffed the black gloves into the new vest she’d pilfered, a journalist’s vest in desert tan. When she realized Skyler was watching her, she flashed him a thumbs-up and winked. In that moment she looked markedly younger than her twenty-two years, so much so that Skyler toyed with the idea of leaving her here, safe and out of harm’s way. Hadn’t she earned the right to that foolish abandon only young people can get away with? Those years had been robbed from her, after all. The battle to come was too much to ask of someone who’d lost what she had. Her parents, her world. Her youth. And even if they succeeded it would only be to face the thing that loomed in the rainforest. The cave. The black-clad subhuman with glowing red eyes.

But when her smile vanished, Skyler saw only Ana the survivor. She became a woman of startling maturity, a woman who’d been through unimaginable terrors over the last five years. That a fire of youthful recklessness still burned in there filled Skyler with a sudden sadness that he couldn’t explain. The world he knew had no room for innocence anymore. Maybe that’s why he’d never had similar thoughts concerning Samantha. All the innocence had long since been bled out of her. Somehow Ana still clung to it with a white-knuckled grip.

For the next few hours he led her on a winding path through Belém’s ruined streets. Rain, the mortal enemy of asphalt, had turned the avenues and alleys into a moonscape of potholes and cracks. Littered on top were derelict vehicles of every size and shape. Trucks, cars, and buses. Many flipped on their side, or impaled into the side of a building. Some had skeletons inside, and more littered the road.

Skyler shook his head. Much of the carnage that occurred in those first days of the disease was due to panic and mass hysteria. A few infections in a city like this, even just the rumor of such, would have spurred the entire population into a desperate race to flee, riot, or hide. He’d mused, in nightly debates with Skadz during their own surreal journey to Darwin, that the disease’s reputation had been just as deadly as the brain-crushing infection it carried. Skadz, the first immune Skyler met after discovering his own invulnerability to the disease, had a knack for stating things plainly. “We humans are a skittish bunch, that’s a fact,” the Melville’s original captain had said.

Soon they reached the city’s border, where urban press met the imposing green wall of the rainforest, like two armies frozen in the initial clash of their front lines. Buildings and shanty homes gave way to a wall of emerald trees that fronted the dark, endless forest.

He paused there and glanced up at the zenith of the sky. Ana, at his shoulder, did the same.

A few meager clouds dotted the vast blue expanse, but above the view was clear. He thought he could see the Elevator cord, or hints of it. The hair-thin cable was hard to detect when no traffic marked its path, and his eyes often played tricks on him when he sought it. Being so close to the equator, Belém’s cord didn’t slope nearly as much as Darwin’s did, but that didn’t make the task much easier. Straight up still wasn’t quite the right place to look. He scanned the sky for a moment just to be sure. There were no climbers yet visible. Tania, if she was indeed coming, was still hours away.

“Plenty of time,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”

Skyler followed a deliberately wide route toward their destination, always with a wary eye on the cloud that clung to the forest canopy a few kilometers south. The white haze loomed well off to their right, visible through the occasional break in foliage. If Ana saw the strange fog, she didn’t mention it.

That place should be our focus, he thought. If Gabriel had brought a thousand trained killers down on the base camp, it wouldn’t fill Skyler with the same dread as the subhuman he’d seen inside the cave. But he knew the colony must be liberated first if they were to have any hope of finding out the nature of that creature, and the ship from which it came.

The sun shimmered low on the horizon when their path brought them to the shore of the Guamá. With wet season gone, and the worst of the rains with it, the river’s angry brown churn had given way to a more tranquil surface that reflected some of the sky above.

He glanced up again. At the sky’s zenith, a small dark object seemed to hang in the sky, like the opposite of a star. “There they are,” he whispered.

Ana put her hand on his back. “How long do we have?”

“Two hours. Maybe three.”

They took a ten-minute break from their hike. Ana produced two granola bars from her backpack and handed Skyler one. They ate in silence, both watching the climber above. After he finished the tasteless snack, Skyler swallowed a few gulps of cool water from his canteen, and Ana copied him.

He turned off the dirt road when he found a game trail through the dense foliage near the shore. Thick vines and roots lined the ground like veins, and branches spanned the narrow trail every few meters. Their pace slowed to a crawl, but Skyler wasn’t worried.

An hour later he spotted the smuggler’s boathouse. He led Ana inside and instructed her to be silent for a moment. For five long minutes he sat perfectly still, crouched in the doorway of the tiny shed, listening. Birds, whispering branches, and the gentle lapping of the river against the shore were all he heard.

“Let’s get to work,” he said, and closed the door.
Belém, Brazil

6.MAY.2283

AN HOUR LATER, the inflatable raft slipped out from the boathouse and into the river’s current.

The two occupants sat side by side, facing the northern shore. One hunched over a hunting rifle, the other at the sniper’s shoulder, a pair of binoculars pressed to a hooded face.

Skyler and Ana watched the boat drift away. In the waning sun, the mannequins looked a bit silly to his eye. He could only hope that the craft would drift out from the shore far enough that the ruse would work. If it bought them ten seconds of confusion, he’d consider the effort worthwhile.

“It’s moving fast,” Ana noted, an urgency in her voice.

And she was right. The current picked up pace a few meters from the shore, and in no time the boat began to bounce along nearly twice as fast as the leaf Skyler had used as a test run. If the craft beat them to base camp, and the diversion worked, it would be wholly wasted.

Skyler ran. He swept aside vines and ducked under branches, tripped twice on roots. Ana, right on his heels, helped him up the first time, and toppled onto him the second. She giggled as they untangled themselves.

Soon the game trail turned north, and Skyler had no choice but to push into the dense foliage that stood between them and base camp. He shot alternating glances at the tiny raft, which drifted along thirty meters ahead of them, and the climber car that ambled down the Elevator cord straight ahead. The vehicle was only a few hundred meters from the ground now and seemed to be racing the sun to the horizon. The sky blazed crimson, putting the climber in stark silhouette.

Skyler turned to Ana and raised a finger to his lips. A few steps later they came upon the stream that bordered the colony on its eastern edge. Skyler did not stop to look at the camp, tempting though it was to study the enemy’s positions. He turned sideways and jogged down the embankment, one hand trailing the sloped mud wall for balance. Ana stopped at the top, her eyes wide as she took in the tent city on the other side of the stream, but her senses returned soon enough and she bounded down the slope. Skyler waited at the bottom for her to break her momentum, lest she splash into the meter-deep rivulet and give their approach away.

At the bottom of the ditch, Skyler unslung his rifle and made sure it was loaded, half his attention on Ana as she did the same. In the dwindling light, her expression showed no fear. He even saw a hint of a smirk on the corners of her mouth. When she flashed him the a-okay, her eyes sparkled.

He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and impress on her the danger they were about to walk into. He wanted to tell her this all wasn’t some game. And he wanted to kiss her, he realized, a desire he quickly banished to the farthest corner of his mind.

Skyler shambled up the other side of the sloped ditch on his hands and knees, using his fists to keep dirt and debris from clumping on his palms and fingers. He crawled the last meter until his head just poked above the slope and the camp came into view.

The colonists all sat on the ground on the southern edge of camp, near the river. Skyler counted three armed guards circling them, weapons held at the ready. One of Gabriel’s APC’s was parked near the prisoners, its bright headlights trained on them. Most of the captives sat facing away from the blinding beams, which left their faces in shadow. Even from here, two hundred meters away, Skyler could tell they sat on their hands. He wondered if they were bound, but he thought it unlikely.

Behind the glow of the vehicle’s lights, he thought he could see the outline of one more guard, sitting atop the vehicle.

And beyond that, he saw the barricaded pen that housed the aura towers. The alien devices were crowded together. Too many of them, Skyler thought. Gabriel and his people must have gathered as many as they could, taken down Mercy Road and Water Road in an effort to give their prisoners nowhere to run.

At the center of the camp stood perhaps ten of the immunes, black-clad and armed. They arrayed themselves in a loose circle, centered on the base of the Elevator—the black alien disk that resembled a gear laid on its side. Portions of the intruders’ circle were obscured by the large tents and modified cargo containers that ringed the Elevator’s connection point.

Around the northern edge of the colony, the bulk of Gabriel’s vehicles were still parked in a wide half circle, only now they faced outward. Their headlights were off, and in the half-light of the setting sun Skyler couldn’t tell how many guards patrolled there. At least as many as in the circle around the Elevator, perhaps more. A handful of aura towers were interspersed between them, giving the border an odd similarity to a castle wall.

“Do you see Gabriel?” he whispered to Ana.

“Not yet,” came her reply. “Wait, there, near the—”

A shout went up. Skyler almost leapt out of his skin at the sudden noise.

The yell came from the southern edge of camp, near where the prisoners sat. He glanced there and motion in the river caught his eye. A raft.

The raft! He’d almost forgotten. The inflatable boat ambled along, fifty meters offshore. In the near darkness the ruse couldn’t look more perfect. Two shadows, and just the hint of a rifle poking out from one. A BB gun, in truth. Skyler smiled.

The guards near the prisoners shouted and pointed, and those near the center of camp yelled back. A few broke from the circle to run in that direction.

“Get ready,” Skyler said.

“Oh, no,” Ana whispered.

He was about to ask her what she meant when the rocket launched.

It came from the vehicle that stood sentry over the prisoners. Or, rather, from the guard who sat atop. A deep WHUMP preceded the launch, a sound Skyler knew well from the Purge. Then blinding light from the projectile’s tail put the entire camp in daylight for a scant second. A single second was all the time it took for the weapon to knife through the air, hissing as it flew, leaving a straight line of smoke in its wake.

The raft erupted in a fireball that roiled up into the sky, reflected in the water below. Bits of raft and debris rained down into the river and onto shore.

Then the shooting started.

Gunfire rattled from the southwest, toward the docks. Davi, Pablo, and Elias, too far away to see, had started their attack early.

Skyler glanced northwest. “C’mon, Wilson. Where are you?”

He saw nothing there, heard nothing. As with any battle plan, Skyler recognized the moment when it all went out the window. “Time to improvise,” he muttered, and came to a crouch. “Cover me.”

In answer Ana settled onto the slope, her rifle at the ready. Inside its grenade launcher were the last three rounds they had, and her role would require the use of each.

Skyler ran at a crouch to the nearest tent, aware that the camp now flirted with chaos, exactly as he’d hoped. Gabriel’s people were in disarray. Some held their circle near the camp’s center, some ran for the river, others for the docks where gunfire still raged.

When he reached the tent, Skyler went to a knee and glanced back, ready for Ana to unleash her first grenade.

She wasn’t there. He scanned the embankment in both directions and saw no sign of her.

“Shit, shit,” he muttered. Where the hell was she? He felt trapped, caught between the urge to go back and find her, and the desire to press on. He knew she wouldn’t have spooked and retreated. More likely, she’d run headlong into the northern portion of the camp, the recklessness Davi had warned about on full display. Maybe it had been a mistake to ask her to sit on the periphery and attack from afar.

A horrific sound whipped Skyler’s attention around. The smash of metal and breaking glass, followed by a wrenching grind so loud it made his teeth hurt.

For a split second he thought the climber had fallen to the ground, and his heart skipped a beat at the idea of Tania inside, falling to her death. But when he glanced up he saw the vehicle above, still dawdling downward, now just thirty meters from the ground.

It would make landfall in less than a minute.

One of Ana’s grenades, then. Perhaps she’d stayed put, after all, and he’d just lost track of her. According to the plan she was to put her explosive rounds into three of the trucks that guarded the northern edge of camp, forcing Gabriel and his people to devote precious resources to defending that angle.

Somewhere west of him he heard screams of pain, and more shooting.

A guard ran past, just meters away, heading toward the river. He saw Skyler and tripped in surprise, fumbling a handgun into the dirt as he went down. Instinct took over and Skyler fired, twice, into the man’s torso. His position would be known now, so he ran.

From tent to cargo container to tent, Skyler weaved an erratic path that brought him closer to the center of camp. Fighting raged on the opposite side of camp, where Davi and the other two men were tasked with spearheading the attack.

People were shouting all around now.

Skyler ducked inside an empty tent and knelt to catch his breath. He would assume for now that Ana had simply moved to get a better angle for her part of the plan. That meant only Wilson and Vanessa were unaccounted for. Their task, to crash the captured enemy APC into a building a few hundred meters from camp, in hopes of drawing Gabriel’s people out to investigate, should have started the overall attack. Perhaps the inflatable raft’s arrival had preempted that, and so one ruse had caused the other to go ignored.

He could only hope they were okay. The two were supposed to crash the vehicle, then retreat to a safe distance, avoiding combat unless absolutely necessary.

Another explosion rocked the ground beneath him, sent him to one hand. Ana. Good work, girl.

Outside the tent the air smelled of smoke. A chorus of angry voices could be heard from the south side of the camp where the prisoners were being held. He hoped they’d joined the fight, but he had no way to know just now.

The climber car loomed just ten meters from the ground now, and Skyler surged forward. If Gabriel and his closest lieutenants held the base, at best Tania would become a hostage, at worst a casualty. He couldn’t let either happen.

The vehicle slipped behind a cargo container and out of view. Skyler pumped his legs, throwing caution aside.

A third explosion tilted the ground beneath him.

He staggered, found his footing, and raced on. A woman in black combat gear appeared in front of him, her face hard and sly. He didn’t hesitate, firing at her in a wild yet effective burst. The woman dove aside, a bullet ripping through her leg. Her own salvo missed, a line of dirt eruptions in the ground between them.

Skyler fired again, intent to put her out of the fight for good. He saw the other attacker too late.

The butt of a rifle caught Skyler in the stomach. Air rushed from his lungs and he could do nothing but curl into a ball as the sounds of battle raged around him.

As he fought for breath he felt himself being dragged through the dirt. His mind screamed to fight, to escape from whoever pulled him through the muck, but his body refused to do anything but breathe. Everything else seemed to fall away.

Suddenly he saw Tania in front of him. She knelt on the alien surface at the Elevator’s base, the open hatch of the climber behind her. Tears lined her cheeks.

Skyler tried to reach for her, but his arms wouldn’t cooperate. They were being held, gripped so tight he could feel his hands going numb. His legs lay in the dirt, but something or someone held his torso from the ground. The position bent his back in a growing agony. He glanced left and felt a lance of pain from his skull. Blood trickled into his eye, stung, and he blinked hard with little effect. He shut the eye and looked right instead. There he saw the boot and pant leg of one of Gabriel’s immunes, a carbon combat knife sheathed in leather strapped to the thigh. The man held Skyler by the armpit, his grip like a vise, and Skyler realized another most be holding his left arm. It occurred to him then that some time had passed. Ten seconds or a minute? An hour? He had no idea how long the crack to his skull had knocked him out, but there was still the sound of gunfire in the distance.

Someone knelt in front of Skyler, boots crunching the dirt beneath. He turned and saw Gabriel’s face, eye level with his. The man tilted his head, studying his captive. “Can you talk?” the immune asked.

Skyler spat in his face. He heard Tania gasp in shock.

The leader of the band of immunes made no effort to wipe the spittle away. He just frowned. “I’m not sure how I’ve wronged you, friend, but your actions are uncalled for. Call off your fighters, please, and we’ll sort this mess out.”

One eye closed tight, Skyler did his best to meet the man’s intense stare. “Sergeant Zagallo,” he said. He laughed at the confused expression on Gabriel’s face, a chuckle that came out more as a gravelly cough. “Go f*ck yourself, monster.”

Realization dawned on Gabriel’s face. His frown deepened, and he rose to his feet. As Skyler watched, Gabriel stepped to one side, bringing Tania into view. There were others behind her, cramped inside the climber.

Gabriel raised a handgun and pointed it at Tania’s temple. She whimpered, her eyes closed now. “Call them off, or this one dies first.”

“No need,” someone said from outside the circle. Another group of guards arrived. One prodded Pablo forward, and the tall man stumbled into view. His hands were bound in front of him, and Skyler could see a trickle of blood running down his arm. Elias? Davi?

“Is it over?” Gabriel asked.

The guard in charge of Pablo nodded. “More from the ranch were with him. They’re all dead.”

Ana. Skyler felt a rage boil within him. He squirmed, only to incur tighter grips on both his arms. He tried to kick, and found his legs had been bound.

“Good, that’s … good,” Gabriel said, lowering his gun. He looked at someone behind Skyler. “You can silence him,” he said.

Skyler closed his eyes and waited for the bullet that would end his life. Instead he heard the telltale sound of duct tape being unrolled and torn. The strip came over his head and was pulled across his mouth, then smacked hard for good measure.

Tania finally spoke. “What are you going to do with him?”

“That’s a decision for tomorrow,” Gabriel replied. “Right now we’ve got a little test to perform and I think we’ll start with you.”

Tania began to protest when another of the immunes grabbed her by the upper arm. She winced and tried to pull away, to no effect.

“Take her beyond this ‘aura,’ ” Gabriel said. “Diego, bind the ones inside this sardine can and bring them next. After that, the ones down by the river, ten at a time.”

Skyler tried in vain to free his arms again. When he looked up, Gabriel was kneeling in front of him once more.

“With any luck,” he said, “we’ll be done by morning. And then I’ll decide what to do with you.”

A sound caught the man’s attention. The other guards came alert, too.

The whine of an electric motor, running at full power. Heavy wheels crunching over dirt and rubble.

Skyler heard a distant shout, from the northwest, the direction in which they’d begun to march Tania.

The man holding Tania by the arm cried in alarm, and then came a horrific sound. A deafening smash, metal grinding against metal, glass shattering. It came from the edge of camp, Skyler judged, and though he could only see darkness there, he knew with a certainty what made the noise.

Wilson and Vanessa. Late to the party, they must have ditched the plan of crashing their vehicle a few hundred meters down the road. Such a diversion would achieve little now, so they must have aimed the vehicle straight at the camp. Risky as hell, Skyler thought, and something he would have done himself.

Everyone in the circle, even Gabriel, hunched down instinctively at the gut-wrenching sound of the crash. Skyler guessed the runaway truck had collided with one of Gabriel’s own vehicles, and so the diversion had ended before it even really began.

But then he heard another WHUMP from the south, and the center of camp lit up as a rocket flare hissed just over their heads. Shadows swept across everything in opposition to the blinding light that whooshed across the camp.

The two guards who held Skyler ducked on instinct. He felt their grips loosen in tandem, and he should have run, but he couldn’t help himself in following the rocket as it sped to its target.

Everything seemed to slow to a crawl.

Skyler watched in numb horror as the plume from the rocket lit the scene. The projectile flew wide, too high and too far left of the crashed APC.

Its path took it straight into the side of an aura tower.

“No!” someone screamed.

Skyler winced as the rocket exploded against the alien monument. Fire and smoke roiled across and around the device, and the entire mass moved backward a meter from the impact.

A half second of shocked silence fell across the camp. Skyler’s guards momentarily forgot their task to hold him. He gripped the tape across his mouth and was about to tear it away when a horrifying sound began.

A deep, mechanical moan, so low it came more as a vibration felt in the gut than in the ear. He’d never heard a sound so ominous, so sinister, before.

It only grew worse. Louder. Deeper, impossibly deep.

He had no doubt it came from the tower that still smoked from the rocket’s explosion. If the projectile had done any damage at all, Skyler couldn’t see it, as darkness once again enveloped that side of camp.

When the other towers began to echo the anguished noise, Skyler felt a terror so deep he wanted to run. Some did, and panic began to take hold. He saw Tania, just meters away from him, her hands clasped over her ears. Gabriel stood next to her, mirroring her stance, though in one hand he still held a pistol.

And still the sound grew. Louder, deeper.

The ground began to shake. Dirt and dust loosened from the walls of the cargo containers.

Someone near Skyler fell to their knees and vomited. Two others tried frantically to flee, their hands against their ears, only to collide with each other.

Still the sound grew.

And then the camp began to glow. Red, green, and yellow, from different directions. Purple, brightest of all, from the south. Skyler looked at the towers arrayed along the northern perimeter of the camp and saw their black surfaces laced with glowing lines.

“What’s happening?!” someone shouted. Gabriel, Skyler thought. The voice could barely be heard, and no one answered.

Skyler risked his sense of hearing to yank the tape from his mouth, wincing as it tore stubble from his young beard and skin from his chapped lips. The vibration from the noise shook his knees, and he stumbled to one side, into a guard. The man hardly noticed, and Skyler saw a handgun holstered at the man’s hip.

He wrapped his fingers around the grip, pushed down and forward to release the gun from the holster, and pulled it free. The guard finally realized what was happening and gripped Skyler’s wrist.

Only then did Skyler notice the fog.

The cloud enveloped the camp with astonishing speed. Within seconds Skyler could see almost nothing. The man he grappled with, and nothing else.

People were shouting, screaming. He couldn’t hear anything except the tortured, steady moan the aura towers gave off.

The sound began to change. The deep groan remained, but a new voice emerged, higher and yet somehow more terrifying. A second later, a third voice joined. Then a fourth.

Skyler used his free hand to chop the guard across the throat, and when his shooting hand came free he pressed the pistol against the man’s temple and fired. The bark from the weapon sounded dull and distant in the press of the towers’ noise.

His legs still bound, Skyler dropped to the ground. The motion made him dizzy, his head pounded. They’d wrapped duct tape around his ankles and knees. Without a knife, the quickest way to freedom was to simply unwind the gray binding. He set the pistol in the dirt at his side and worked at the tape with his fingertips. The fog draped his world so completely now that he could not see his own hands working at his bound knees.

“Skyler!” he heard someone shout. Tania? Ana?

He dare not reply, not until his legs were free. His fingertips shook with fear and adrenaline. They groped along the slick tape and found no edge to pry. He wanted to scream in frustration.

Skyler remembered something. He rolled in the dirt to his right until he collided with the slain guard. He slid his hands along the man’s limp leg until they brushed the combat knife. Skyler drew it free and sawed through the tape that bound his legs.

He bounced to his feet, coiled in a low crouch. The fog left him with only a meter of visibility, if that. Every direction looked the same.

The pistol. He dropped to his knees again and patted the ground. Someone ran past him and stepped on his fingers. Skyler yelped and pulled his hand back, shaking away the pain. He felt like a fool.

A shape emerged from the fog in front of him. A person.

Gabriel. Their eyes met and Skyler lashed out with the knife, but Gabriel moved quicker. The man lunged forward and tackled Skyler to the ground.

He was fast, relentless. Skyler scarcely hit the dirt when the first punch landed on his jaw. It rattled his skull, and the second blow was worse. A fist caught him above his eye, splitting skin.

Skyler felt the world slipping away as the third blow landed. He tried to raise an arm to block his face, but Gabriel smacked it aside. He straddled Skyler now, his fists up before his face as if they were in a boxing match. Three more punches landed in rapid succession, and Skyler’s entire head felt like one massive bruise.

He heard something odd, a new sound above all the others, like a bulldozer rushing headlong through a pile of debris. The noise grew and grew, and beneath it he could hear shouts of alarm, screams of pain.

Gabriel stopped his assault and glanced around. Then a person loomed up behind him. Tania, and she held something in her hand. A length of pipe or a—

She swung viciously and the metal smacked into Gabriel’s neck just below the ear. He grunted through clenched teeth, his eyes unfocused. The impact wrenched the bar from Tania’s hands, and she took a step back, suddenly frightened as Gabriel turned to see her. He thrust an arm out to try to grab her, his fingertips brushing the fabric of her pant leg.

Run! Skyler thought, and miraculously she did.

The opening might be Skyler’s last, and he took it. The knife was still in his hand, and he flipped it around and plunged it into Gabriel’s side, just above the waist. The man wore a thick police-style vest, though, and the blade’s tip failed to push through.

“Motherf*cker,” Gabriel said as his attention swung back.

Skyler stabbed again. This time he aimed for the leg, and felt grim satisfaction as the blade buried itself up to the hilt in Gabriel’s thigh. He felt it slide through muscle and then the sickening scrape as it slid off bone.

Gabriel grunted, winced, and then Skyler twisted the knife.

“EIIAAHHHHHH!” the man bellowed, so loud everyone in the camp might have heard it, if not for the cacophony of grinding metal and destruction that grew ever louder.

Head swimming, Skyler had just enough focus to lurch his knee upward. The move toppled Gabriel into the dirt, and the man barked in pain, the knife wrenching again as he rolled on top of it.

Skyler staggered to two feet. He knew he could not fight anymore. He could barely compel his limbs to move.

A pillar of brilliant purple glow emerged from the fog. An aura tower, alive with lines of light traced along its surface. A tent, poles and ropes and all, draped across the obelisk’s base, along with various other debris.

Skyler held a hand out to push back on the tower, a technique he’d mastered in the last few months.

The tower kept coming. It bathed him and everything around him in a surreal, purple glow. It pushed him back and he stumbled over Gabriel, who had been attempting to crawl away. Skyler fell backward and just managed to break his fall with an elbow. A stinging sensation raced up and down his arm.

The tower did not pause. It continued to drift forward, and pushed Gabriel aside like a toy. The man cried out again, a noise that brought sudden focus to Skyler’s mind. Despite the chaos around him, Skyler crawled around the gliding aura tower and over to Gabriel. He ripped the knife out of the man’s thigh and gripped it with both hands.

Gabriel sensed the blow about to fall and raised one arm. “Not like this,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Skyler said, plunging the blade into the man’s neck. “Exactly, like this.”

The dying man pawed at the hilt of the knife weakly for a brief second, then slumped to the dirt, lifeless.

From Skyler’s left came the sound of wrenching metal, and he saw the hint of another tower there, or rather the shimmer of emerald-green light on its surface. The alien object moved in unison with the one Skyler had just crawled away from. It collided with one of the cargo containers near the camp’s center, and shoved the massive metal box aside as if it had been made of cardboard.

More of the alien objects came drifting into view.

All Skyler could do was to curl into a fetal ball and wait for the towers to pass him by. The fog began to thin a little then, and he saw many towers alive with emerald light disappear into the distance. Confused, Skyler came to his knees and glanced around. He saw another large group of towers, this one shimmering with yellow lines. They moved off at a slightly different angle to the first set.

As the fog receded, so did the sounds of battle, leaving behind a haunting mixture of screams, shouts for help, and sporadic coughing. Some of that would be from people suddenly outside the protective auras, the towers once protecting them now gone.

He knelt for a minute in the center of camp, near the Elevator, unsure what to do. Debris littered the ground. Bodies lay everywhere, some limp, some moving. A woman wandered in a daze. He smelled smoke, and blood, and churned earth. A voice in his head screamed at him to get up, to take action, but his legs wouldn’t move. His hands shook uncontrollably. He looked down at them and watched, as if they belonged to someone else. Then he curled his fingers in, made fists tight enough that his fingernails drew blood, and willed calm. He closed his eyes, tried to focus on his breathing and ignore all the injuries he’d suffered.

When he cracked his eyelids again, he saw things with a bit more clarity. Ana, he thought. A pang of guilt hit him for thinking of her first. Tania, he corrected himself. She’d saved him. She’d come after Gabriel with a pipe and given him his chance. “Tania!”

“Here!” A weak voice, somewhere to his right. A cough followed the words, and for a split second he wondered if the Elevator’s aura had failed as well.

He stumbled in the direction of her voice, calling her name one more time. The fog had all but vanished, and he finally saw her, hunkered down just inside the climber car. The climber itself, an eight-pronged scaffold built to lift cargo to orbit, had come down with only one car attached, the one Tania rode. The other arms of the vehicle were empty, and three were now badly bent.

The personnel car itself was tilted to one side and bore a long scrape across its surface.

Skyler came to the door. Tania reached out for him and he took her hand.

“The towers,” he said sharply. “Tell me how you feel. Headache? Strange thoughts?”

“My God,” she whispered, “your face.”

“That handsome, eh?” he sputtered more than said. She was okay. Despite the towers’ abrupt departure, the aura provided by the Elevator still held.

Tania laughed in relief, a pained sound. Tears were on her cheeks.

“Are you okay? Can you walk?” he asked her. More people were behind her, crowded within the dark space. “We should survey the camp.”

Tania grimaced and shook her head. “Twisted my ankle, I think, when he tried to grab me. What’s happening, Skyler? Did we lose them all?”

“I don’t know yet. Most, I think. Some colonists were surely left outside the aura. Stay here. I’ll come back.”

“Don’t go—”

“I have to,” he said, too stern. Tania nodded, a grave look on her face.

He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze and walked away to survey the camp.
Belém, Brazil

6.MAY.2283

SKYLER CUPPED HIS hands over his mouth and roared, “Everyone to the Elevator! Now!”

He made his way south, where most of the towers had been, and where part of the colony extended past the aura provided by the Elevator. The survivors he passed, though dazed or injured, seemed free of the disease. At least, then, the Elevator still provided protection.

Ahead someone screamed. Others cried out in alarm. Skyler began to sprint, ignoring every ache and injury on his body.

When he rounded a half-fallen tent the tower yard came into view. Skyler froze in his tracks. “Oh hell,” he whispered.

Well over one hundred towers had been there before, the rest employed along Water Road and Mercy Road.

Now he counted only twelve. They stood in a tight bunch, like some kind of tribute to Stonehenge. “Spread the towers out!” he shouted.

A number of colonists were in the area, but none of them heeded his order. They were all focused on something off to Skyler’s left. He glanced that way and saw a colonist near the river. A man he thought, though it was too dark to tell for sure. The person staggered in erratic directions, hands clasped over his ears, moaning from abject torment.

Skyler had seen this many times before, most recently with Karl on that first trip down to Belém. He went to raise his rifle, only to realize he’d neglected to pick it up. And the knife—he’d left the knife buried in Gabriel’s neck.

As the man near the river screamed in sheer agony, Skyler turned and searched the partially collapsed tent nearby. He found no weapon but did find a thick, polished walking stick made of hard wood. Good enough, he decided, and grabbed it.

Skyler strode toward the infected man with calm resolve. He knew it was too late for the poor bastard. Already the man acted more like a creature than a person. He still wailed from the pain between his ears, but he crouched now, and in his few fleeting moments of near-human clarity his eyes remained wild.

“Everyone get to the Elevator,” Skyler said as he passed a few colonists standing slack-jawed nearby. “Or look away, at least. You don’t want to see this.”

Skyler walked right up to the subhuman, wound up, and swung. The walking stick hit the creature full in the face in a sickening, meaty thud. The sound of the impact was wet and marked with the crunch of bone and broken teeth. Skyler knew better than to pull punches when it came to subs, so he’d swung as hard as his aching limbs would allow. Hard enough, it turned out, to lift the man from his feet and send him sprawling into the water of the river, limp as a rag doll.

The current tugged at the body, gradually pulling it in until the corpse floated away from shore.

Somewhere behind Skyler one of the colonists broke into sobs. Someone who’d known the man, Skyler guessed. He threw the walking stick on the ground at his feet and stared numbly at the rippling water. Nothing could be done about it now.

The colonists behind him took the hint, finally, and backed off to a safe distance from the Elevator base, no longer trusting the few remaining towers. Skyler wandered back toward the center of camp, listening and looking for more subhumans. He found none, and for that he felt an immense relief.

An hour passed and he still hadn’t pieced together exactly what had happened. Every person he spoke with, those who weren’t tending to the wounded or in some state of shock, told only bits of the story, often conflicting with what others said.

Of his immunes, Vanessa found him first. Skyler’s knees buckled at the sight of her, partly from simple relief and partly because it gave him hope that Gabriel’s henchman had lied and more were alive. Vanessa had one forearm wrapped in gauze. Her account of the battle, seen from afar, filled in the most blanks.

The plan called for their diversion to happen first, in hopes it would draw away some of the enemy when the attack started, but they found their path through the city fraught with blockages and arrived late. When she and Wilson heard the raft explode, they rushed their attempt to crash the APC a few hundred meters outside camp. It missed the intended building and continued on down a Belém street for five blocks before smashing into a one-room home. The two of them spent the next ten minutes just reversing the damn thing, and by then Camp Exodus was in chaos.

Wilson had argued they should just hide and wait out the fighting. But Vanessa shamed him into action, and together they set the vehicle on a collision course with the camp itself, jumped out, and watched it go. “Stupid and reckless, I realize now,” she said, her head down.

Skyler assured her the action might have saved the whole enterprise.

When the vehicle crashed into one of Gabriel’s idle trucks, Wilson and Vanessa were already racing toward the camp, intent on joining the fight as best they could. Then the enemy’s rocket had knifed across camp, missed the diversionary APC, and slammed into an alien tower.

The pair had watched the rest from a distance, baffled and awestruck. They heard the deep groan from the towers and saw the blanket of fog that enveloped the camp in less than ten seconds. Vanessa swore the fog seemed to come out of the air itself, but Skyler knew the towers had somehow created it. A defense mechanism, maybe, after one was “attacked.”

“Where’s Wilson now?” Skyler asked her.

Her lip quivered. “He’s gone, Skyler. One of those towers hit him and just kept going. He went underneath. I’ve never … It was …” She covered her mouth and nose with both hands, her voice muffled when she spoke. “He deserved better.”

Unsure what else to do, Skyler embraced her and let her sob against his chest. “Maybe you should lie down,” he said, feeling helpless. Wilson he’d known for only a few days. A nice enough fellow, and an immune for all that meant. Skyler had seen the way the Canadian looked at Vanessa, but he’d also seen how she’d pointedly ignored the attention. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, assuming she was doing just that.

Her sobs dwindled until she suddenly pulled away and wiped her face with one sleeve. “This isn’t like me,” she said. “I need to do something useful. I’m going to help with the wounded.” Without another word she walked away.

Skyler had turned, intending to join her, when he spotted Ana a few dozen meters away. The girl stumbled toward them, her shoulders slumped and feet dragging. Smears of dried blood marred her face and neck.

Ana’s gaze was on the ground in front of her, but every few steps she would glance up, as if gauging Skyler’s temper. He waited, frozen in place by the sight of her exhausted, wounded form.

She stopped a few meters from him and started to say something. Her knees buckled, and Skyler closed the distance between them in two steps, catching her before she fell. Her arms wrapped around him and she began to sob.

“It’s okay now,” he whispered. “They’re gone.”

Between sharply drawn breaths she said, “I lost sight of you in the shadows, and moved. But I still couldn’t see you, and then the raft blew up and I just panicked. I ran.…”

“Doesn’t matter,” Skyler told her. “You did good.”

“I ran,” she repeated. “I fled.”

He held her tight, and when the sobs began to fade he checked her for wounds.

“The blood is someone else’s,” she said.

A short distance away Skyler spotted a cot tipped onto its side. He led Ana to it, righted the portable bed, and eased her down to a seat. When he offered her his canteen, she took a mouthful, swished, and then spat the liquid onto the ground beside her. Then she poured some water on her hand and began to wipe the blood from her face. Her effort only smeared the gore.

Skyler knelt before her, took out a fresh white handkerchief from a pocket on his pant leg, and eased her hand down. Ana closed her eyes and sat motionless as he cleaned blood, sweat, and tears from her cheeks and brow.

“My face,” she said, “feels like yours looks.”

It hurt to laugh, but he laughed anyway. “Now we’re twins, eh?”

He heard footsteps behind him.

“Skyler, when you have a moment?” Karl’s voice. The man sounded so haggard Skyler almost didn’t recognize it.

Ana opened her eyes and gave Skyler a nod. “I’m just going to sit here a while,” she whispered. “Then I’ll find Davi and the others.”

He brushed a stray strand of auburn hair from her face, offered the best smile he could, and went to Karl.

The man had two black eyes, and the rest of his face hid under a mess of bruises, cuts, and scrapes. “You look like hell,” Skyler said as they embraced like soldiers.

“I always do. And anyway, speak for yourself,” the man replied. He sounded as if his mouth were full of marbles. “Tania wants you at the climber, so we can start to sort out this mess.”

“Later,” Skyler said. “There’s injured, dead. People missing.”

Karl took the rejection in stride. “All but twelve towers are gone,” he said. “Looks like even those deployed as roads moved out.”

“Already with the bloody towers? Secure the colony, treat the wounded. F*ck the towers, we’ll find them later.”

The battered man held up his hands in surrender. “Calm down. Everyone’s pitching in. We need to think about what happens at dawn.”

“What happens at dawn?”

“The camp just got a lot smaller, Skyler, and our plans for water and medical access are shot. We need a new strategy.”

Skyler had plenty of opinions but decided to wait until Tania was with them. He swept his arm toward the climber and followed Karl to the center of Camp Exodus in silence.

With the air now clear, the full extent of the devastation became apparent. The exodus of aura towers had moved through the camp with total abandon, leaving trails of broken tents, overturned supplies, and broken bodies. They had pushed vehicles and heavy steel cargo containers aside like they were toys.

Skyler asked Karl to halt near a cargo container flipped on its side. The gruff man waited as Skyler shimmied his way onto the roof, or what had become the roof.

From the top, he could see beyond the crowded camp.

Four paths stretched out from the aura’s edge. Paths of devastation. The towers seemed to have moved off in tight formations, and in the distance Skyler could still see two of the groups working their way through Belém. One, lit in emerald green, moved north by northwest. The other ran northeast. The towers in that group shimmered with a milky purple light.

Both demolished every structure they came in contact with, instead of just stalling as a tower pushed by human hands would do. Belém consisted largely of shanty hovels built from plywood and laminate, and these fell before the towers as if they’d been made from playing cards and toothpicks.

The emerald group looked to be on a path that would take it through downtown, and Skyler wondered if the skyscrapers there would provide enough resistance to halt the alien objects’ progress.

He turned toward the east. The remaining two groups were hidden by the rainforest. He saw their trails—swaths where no trees now stood. Yet even with such destruction in their wake, the forest had consumed them from view. The only hint was the glow they emitted, which lit the trees from beneath.

One moved east, colored with a yellow so brilliant it looked like sunlight.

The last went northeast. The scar it left through the forest left little doubt in his mind where it had gone. Even from here, he could see the cloud that perpetually clung to an area of the forest past the reservoir. The cloud now glowed red.

“Karl,” Skyler said.

The man looked up at him. “Yeah?”

“Bring Tania and the others here instead. There’s something they need to see.”

By the time Tania reached the container upon which Skyler stood, a ladder had been found and placed against the giant metal box. She took the steps slowly while Karl held the base of it.

When she reached the top, Skyler offered her a hand and helped her off the ladder.

He was filthy, bruised, and smelled of dirt and sweat.

“Thanks,” she said, brushing dust from her hands.

Karl joined them a moment later. Tania had urged him to seek out one of the few doctors in camp, but he’d just shaken his head. He looked like he had one foot in the grave already, his face bruised so. “I can’t decide which of you looks worse,” Tania said.

“Skyler,” Karl said.

“Karl,” Skyler said at the same time. “Where’s Zane? Tim?”

“I left them in orbit,” she replied. “In case this was all some trap.”

Skyler regarded her for a moment. “That was smart.”

She doubted anything she’d done recently could be called smart. Brushing aside the compliment, she looked out across the camp. Colonists already worked to re-stake the tents, and toward the river she saw a group of twenty or so people all huddled together, their arms stretched in unison as they pushed a cargo container onto its side. The sight of teamwork gave her a sudden pang of hope, until she saw the body that lay beneath the metal structure. Man or woman she couldn’t tell; the body had been crushed and pressed halfway into the mud. Tania covered her mouth with one hand and forced herself not to turn away.

At least, not until Skyler nudged her. He pointed north, and for the first time she set her attention beyond the camp’s perimeter.

Trails of devastation marked the paths the aura towers followed. As she watched, one group moved through the slums of Belém, half-hidden by night and the dust thrown into the air as buildings collapsed in its wake. The towers there rippled with murky purple light.

“They started moving the instant that RPG hit one,” Skyler said.

“Four groups,” Karl noted. “Why four? And why didn’t they all go?”

“And where will they stop?” Tania added. “At least they’ll be easy to track.”

Skyler gestured east. “Those two groups crossed water already, so that answers one question. It would seem they don’t sink.”

“Oh hell,” Karl said. “That means—”

“When they hit the Pará, or even the ocean, they may just keep going.”

The words left both men silent. Tania looked at each path in turn, trying to form a hypothesis as to where the towers might be traveling, and why. Four groups, each at least forty towers in number, gone without any concern or care for what lay in their path. Was the movement some kind of programmed self-preservation? The fog and noise some kind of defense mechanism? One gets attacked and the rest instantly scatter to the four winds, in groups, on different paths?

She wondered if they would stop somewhere, or just keep going, eventually circumnavigating the globe and returning right back here. That didn’t make much sense to her, but when it came to the Builders nothing seemed to make sense.

“Well,” Karl said for everyone’s benefit. “Who wants to talk first?”

Tania decided to take the opening. “I will. For what it’s worth, four days ago we sent an aircraft down to try to secure the camp. Or at least help us figure out why we’d lost contact.”

“What aircraft?”

She told them of the plane, and the fighters aboard it. “They never made it here,” she whispered. For the moment she thought it best to leave out the price she’d paid for it, and for the air and water she’d acquired from Russell Blackfield.

“Gabriel’s people must have spotted them, and set up an ambush,” Karl said.

“Maybe,” Skyler said. “Maybe not. Tania, where did they land?”

“On Water Road, about a kilometer from camp.”

Skyler glanced in that direction, his eyes two narrow slits, his bloodied face grim and full of disapproval.

“We had no other options,” Tania said, “and no information. After that failure, our only choice was to listen to Gabriel’s demands.”

If Skyler heard her he didn’t show it. His focus remained on the northeast.

“And those demands were …?” Karl asked. “I think I know, but I’d like to hear your version.”

Tania started to speak but caught herself. How much to say? “Gabriel wanted to test each of us for immunity from the disease. He held some delusion that he was supposed to gather all immunes together to form some new society.”

Karl nodded slowly. “He must’ve asked me a hundred times where Skyler was. I said nothing, because I knew nothing, not really. Didn’t stop them from giving me a bruise or three. As if this constant goddamn subhuman headache wasn’t bad enough. Remind me not to go without pills like that again.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Skyler told him. “And, for what it’s worth, I’m grateful that you didn’t cooperate.”

“I might have,” Karl admitted, “if I had known anything. Where the hell were you, anyway?”

Skyler told them of two immunes, twins in fact, whom he’d met in Belém. Escapees from Gabriel’s flock. “They told me of more like them, ones who didn’t want to be part of Gabriel’s new world order. The dissenters were being held at a ranch house, in a valley west of here. So I made them a deal. I’d help free their friends, if they in turn helped me oust Gabriel from the camp.”

“Your timing was impeccable,” Karl said. He smiled then, and winced for the effort. With one finger he gently probed a cut on his lip.

“Not really,” Skyler said.

“No?”