Chapter Three
Seb pushed off from the side of the piece-of-crap shuttle as Jenna jogged away, not bothering to check if he was following. She probably didn’t give a damn either way.
Although this wasn’t how things had meant to play out—he should have been dodging that air patrol in the POS shuttle and heading back to the Knox by now—going with her to avoid the incoming enemy was his best bet. Not like he had anything better to do. The ship wasn’t going anywhere without a pimped-out overhaul, and it wasn’t like he could call in a rescue party to the ass-end of Ilari where announcing he was with United Earth Force was akin to insulting one’s mother.
With a heavy sigh, he leaned down to rip the UEF patches off his flight pants, but damned if they still didn’t look like target practice for the CS Soldiers. Right, well they’d have to go as soon as he could find something to change them for.
“Thanks for nearly killing me, rust bucket.”
He thumped a fist on the side of the shuttle and then set off at a fast jog to catch up with the agent, who apparently could have run marathons in her spare time. Her smooth, long legged gait was impressive. By the time he caught up with her, he was puffing, but she was barely breathing fast.
They went over a wooden fence and a few steps later, entered the dappled light of the forest. Another fifty or so feet in, a river cut through the trees, gabbling nosily over rocks. But the sound was drowned out by the rumble of ships streaking overhead. As they reached the riverbank and Jenna was about to plunge into the shallow water, something high in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and he grabbed her shoulder to stop her.
“Look.” He pointed upward, where the worn wooden walls of a tree house was just visible through a tangle of vines.
“Good catch. Let’s hope its stable.” She switched directions, not pausing as she reached the thick base of the tree trunk and vaulted onto a head-high branch like a damned circus acrobat. The ease and natural, graceful twist of her body had been almost hypnotizing.
He stopped at the bottom, planting his hands on his hips and snatching in a few quick breaths as she nimbly clambered upward, giving him an interesting view of her trim legs and ass. Not that he was taking notice. When she reached the outer platform, she tested the boards carefully with her weight, not releasing the nearby branch until she’d given the planks a few good stamps.
“Looks sturdy. But step carefully when you come up.” She ducked her head and disappeared inside.
“Right. When I come up,” he muttered, taking another second to get some oxygen back and trying to work out exactly how he was going to climb without breaking his fool neck.
He gripped the same head-high branch Jenna had used, hauling himself up, glad she wasn’t standing around watching this effort. Though he had pretty standard upper body strength for a fighter pilot, climbing trees required balance and agility he’d hadn’t possessed since about eight years old.
With a few stops and starts, he finally reached the platform. He took a second to repeat her stamping test with his greater body weight, but whoever had built the tree house knew their stuff. While it didn’t look like anyone had been up here in about a decade, the boards were thick cut, sturdy, and standing up against the weather. In fact, the construction looked like it could easily last another hundred years.
He ducked inside, eyes taking a second to adjust to the dimness. Jenna sat by the single window, which looked out toward their crash site. Though there were several trees blocking some of the view, the agent still had a scope balanced on the edge of the sill and scanning the area.
He shifted forward, sitting with his back against the wall adjacent to her, brushing a cobweb off his shoulder. By the time he stretched his legs out in the small space, they were alongside hers, boot propped against the boards below the window, which didn’t leave much in the way of space. In the opposite corner, an abandoned bird’s nest gave the small room its only decoration.
“Can you see anything?” The noise of the overhead ships had dropped to just one, which probably meant the others had landed, soldiers disembarking to investigate.
“Hostiles on the ground,” she confirmed. “Can’t get an exact number, but at least five.”
She pulled back from the window and handed him the scope. “Keep an eye on them, try to get a tally, and let me know if they’re coming this way.”
“What are you going to do?” She clambered over his legs, and they circled around each other in the enclosed space, leaving him next to the window and her heading for the door. She paused, pulling a device from inside her ragged coat and then attaching it to the roof above her.
“If we saw this tree house, then you can bet the patrol will find it if they search this way. It’s the obvious place to hide. This device should jam any infrared or bio scanners, but I’m also going to get some branches and vines, see if I can’t cover it up to hide it from sight.”
Yeah, that was probably the smart thing to do. “If they’re coming, I’ll hoot like an owl.”
She paused in scrunching through the door to send him an unimpressed frown.
“How about you just whistle, or say company coming?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” He’d started to get the feeling that his grins annoyed her, so he sent her the most charming one he could slap on his face.
The frown turned into a full dark glare. “That’s exactly the point. Crashing a shuttle and hiding from a patrol of soldiers who want to kill you is not fun.”
“If this isn’t fun, then I don’t know what is.”
Before her narrowed eyes could burn a hole right through him, he lowered his head to look through the scope. As she left, her muttering about moronic stick jockey floated back up to him. He couldn’t help a small smile as he focused the scope through the tree branches and took a head count of what soldiers he could see.
Most people thought he was an idiot a lot of the time, like he didn’t have the God-given sense to know danger when it french kissed him like a cheap hooker. But what did they want him to do? Get all pissed and broody about the fragility of his life and possibility of facing his mortality?
There were worse things in life than being killed. Getting dead was easy, because once it was done, poof, nothing else to worry about. But life, well that’s what people really should be petrified of. Life hurt. Life could be hard. People could spend years pretending to be a brother and then betray everything a guy believed in, every moment of that friendship built on one mother of a lie.
His chest got tight with the heart-attack-like sensation that’d become a constant companion in the last few weeks. It was panic, pure and simple. Anxiety wrapping an iron fist around his chest and squeezing like a compactor. But he forced it down and compartmentalized, because if he acknowledged it, if he gave credence to that weakness, it would mean the enemy had started winning. And damned if he was going to take that lying down like a bitch.
He forced his breathing to even out, zeroing his attention on what the CS Soldiers were doing. They’d checked out the wreckage, and after finding no one inside, looked to be organizing search parties.
Two soldiers stayed by the wreckage, while four others spilt into pairs and headed off in opposite directions. All in all, six wasn’t exactly a huge search party. So either they didn’t think there was much of a threat to be found, or they didn’t have the resources to expend on a thorough investigation. The two pairs walked off at an angle away from the tree house, leaving them safe for the time being. In the air, a single ship droned back and forth in a grid search pattern.
Scratching on the outer side of the far wall brought his attention up from the scope, but it was only Jenna working to secure more foliage over the exposed planks he’d initially spotted.
He returned to surveying the CSS as the soldiers came and went from sight, and the afternoon shadows got longer. Jenna returned inside the tree house, the interior even dimmer since she’d covered the doorway and partially covered the window. A stiff breeze had sprung up in the past hour, making the boards and tree creak and groan eerily.
“They making any progress out there?” she asked as she sat opposite him. She kept her legs tucked up, but her knee still ended up brushing his thigh. Talk about cozy.
“On finding us? No. Wasting their own time? Yeah, they’re making heaps of progress in that department. They’ll be heading in this direction anytime now. It’s the only bearing they haven’t searched.”
He shifted back from the window and handed the scope over to her. They did the shuffle-spin around each other again so she could take up the lookout post.
“How many did you count?”
He winced at the aches from crouching in the same position at the window for so long. Maybe he should have tried to keep his legs to himself, but he wasn’t exactly a small guy and this tree house definitely hadn’t been made for someone of his size.
“Definitely only six. Two haven’t moved from the ship since the others started searching.”
“Not much of a patrol,” she muttered, seemingly more to herself.
“That’s what I thought.” He shifted again, unable to get comfortable. Nothing for it. He maneuvered so he ended up with a leg on either side of her. Either she didn’t notice or didn’t care, because she didn’t say anything about it. “And now it’s your turn to keep an eye out while I go down.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him, expression impassive. “Where are you going?”
“Need to stretch my legs, maybe grab a drink from the river. Crashing that shuttle earlier and all the look-outing was thirsty work.”
He almost expected her to argue, tell him he could just put up with sore legs and a little bit of thirst, but she pretty much shrugged him off as she turned her attention back to the patrol.
“If you get caught and give my position away, I’ll kill you myself.”
He stared at the back of her head. Damned if he could tell whether or not that was a joke.
Carefully, so as not to dislodge her handiwork, he pushed through the vines and leaves in the doorway, legs still aching as he clambered down from the tree house, relieved when he put his boots back on solid ground again. He stretched out his muscles and then glanced up. Jenna had done an amazing job concealing the tree house, the structure no longer visible from the ground. He ambled over to the river and knelt, splashing his face and taking a few mouthfuls of the clear, cold water.
He could say without a hint of doubt that he had never met a woman like Jenna in his life. Lucky that fake-plastic-bimbo look she was rocking totally put him off, or he would’ve found himself a little too interested in Mary-contrary. As it stood, it challenged him not to get sucked in by her paradoxical, sincere green gaze. Except a reminder that she’d probably kill him, should it prove advantageous to her, quickly fixed up any delusions he had in that department.
Though he’d known the risks in doing a drop-off behind enemy lines, he’d actually hoped the assignment would be pretty straight forward. Yet now that he was on the ground, despite knowing he’d be shot on sight by any CS Soldiers who came across him, it was like a dark mantle had been lifted, leaving him to breathe easier and step lighter than he’d been able to do in the last few weeks. Yeah, it was dangerous as hell down here. But it was easier. At least he could see his enemies coming and know for sure who he needed to shoot in the head.
Voices through the trees froze him on the spot, his ears straining to work out which direction the sound had come from. Damn it, the patrol had still been a fair way off. How had they gotten here already, and why hadn’t Jenna tried to warn him? Probably because Ms. Kickass Secret Agent honestly didn’t care if he got caught, so long as he didn’t compromise her assignment.
Turning, he hurried back toward their hideout, but halfway there, a glance up revealed he could no longer tell which tree he needed to climb.
“Seb, you idiot,” he muttered, a hot wash of frustration flaring through him.
A laugh trilled through the trees, closer now, the answering voice teasing, not exactly sounding like a pair of patrolling soldiers.
He scanned the bigger trees surrounding him, trying to pick out the head-high branch he and Jenna had used to climb up. The voices had become clearer, sounding younger and carefree. Maybe not the patrolling soldiers after all, but not anyone he wanted to come across while wearing his UEF uniform, patches or not attached.
Finally, he found a familiar-looking branch and hurried over to it, a slight, fresh scuffmark on the trunk confirming his destination. He hauled himself up, climbing quicker than when they’d first gone up, nearly slipping once, which would have sent him plunging to the ground.
He practically dived through the vines into the darker interior, leaving Jenna looking at him as if she seriously doubted his intellect.
“We’ve got company,” he explained over a ragged exhale, trying to catch his breath.
“I know,” he said offhandedly as she returned her attention to the crash site.
“And you couldn’t have warned me?” So nice to know his survival companion didn’t give an ugly duck’s ass if he got caught.
“No threat. Just a couple of teenagers walking along the river. The patrols are still nearly half a click away. They’ll be coming by here in another few minutes, though.”
“You don’t think the teens are heading for this tree house, do you?” He pushed some of the doorway leaves aside, taking a second to find where the pair had emerged from the forest and were indeed ambling along the river like Jenna said.
“Not likely. Didn’t look like anyone had been up here in years when we found the place, and now that I’ve covered it up, they probably won’t be able to find it, even if they’re looking.”
Yeah, he got that memo firsthand.
He didn’t reply, keeping an eye on the teens as they got closer, holding hands and balancing on rocks along the edge of the river, chatting and laughing as though they didn’t have a care in the world. Which they probably didn’t.
The boy overbalanced on a rock and laughed as he jumped to stable ground. A second later, he gently pulled the girl down and she went into his arms. The boy took the opportunity to steal a kiss, the girl welcoming the move.
“Smooth, buddy,” Seb murmured.
“What’s going on?” Jenna asked quietly from behind him.
“They’re making out.” And didn’t look like they planned on stopping anytime soon, getting lost in the moment and each other.
“Good, we need the distraction.”
He pulled back from the doorway and shifted to look at Jenna, still with her face in the scope and attention tuned to the patrol through the window.
“What do you mean? You’re going to watch them to keep yourself entertained while we’re waiting to hopefully not be caught by that patrol?”
She shot him an exasperated frown. “No, I mean the soldiers are coming this way, and when they find that young couple, they’ll think they’ve got their culprits from the ship crash. They’ll be detained, and hopefully the patrol will call it a day.”
“Well, that sucks for them.” He snatched another look at the teens. The boy had pressed the girl up against a tree, and making out had progressed to breast groping.
“Nothing will come of it. The CSS will work out they didn’t have anything to do with the shuttle crash, but by the time they come back, we’ll be long gone.”
He sighed as he settled against the wall, hitching one of his legs up and bracing his elbow on his knee, letting his gaze wander over her lithe form balanced in front of the window. Despite the ragged, loose clothing, she had the kind of curves he usually took notice of, even if she wasn’t his type. Okay, he’d stop pretending, at least to himself, that she didn’t have a rockin’ body. Pity about the plastic features and bad attitude.
A few silent minutes went by, Seb quietly tapping a boot, that damn Kat Sparkles song still stuck in his head on a repeating loop. He’d meant to torture Jenna with it, but ended up driving himself nuts instead. In fact, he didn’t even realize he’d started humming it out loud until she shot him a sharp look and shushed him like he was a toddler.
“Company coming.” She stretched across his leg and lay on her stomach, parting the bottom of the doorway foliage.
With a bit of maneuvering, he got down next to her, setting his shoulder against hers as he looked out through the gap she’d made.
The two teens were still going at it, but in another moment, a pair of CS Soldiers emerged through the forest. They immediately spotted the couple and brought their guns up, yelling at the kids to get down on their knees with their hands on their heads.
For a heart pounding few seconds, he worried the agitated, obviously inexperienced soldiers were going to shoot the confused teens. But the pair were apprehended without incident, hands secured in cuffs as the soldiers peppered them with questions that only confused the young lovers even more. The girl started crying, while the boy attempted to explain his way out of the situation.
The two soldiers took a kid each and led them toward the crashed shuttle.
“Hope they’re treated okay,” he murmured as they disappeared from sight.
Jenna glanced at him, surprise crossing her almost-plastic features, the first real expression he’d seen on her face. Their close proximity—jammed in the doorway together—left them only inches apart. And once again, he thought her too-honest jade eyes didn’t match the fakeness of her appearance.
“You actually care what happens to them? They’re technically the enemy.”
“I care only as far as the fact that they’re innocent and got caught up in our mess while we escape. And they’re not the enemy. They’re just a couple of kids who had the bad luck to be born on this backward-ass, dictatorship of a planet.”
“But when they get old enough they’ll probably join the CSS.”
“So we should kill them now, or hope they get killed before that can happen to save us the trouble?” Okay, now Ms Kickass was starting to annoy him. Did she have no moral compass whatsoever? He’d heard CIs were cold, heartless sons of bitches, but this could nearly be classified as sociopathic.
Her brows lowered, obviously not impressed with his logic. “I didn’t say that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
She simply stared back at him in silence, but he couldn’t begin to guess what was going on in that head of hers. Finally, she pushed up, putting herself back by the window and ducking behind the safety of her scope.
“How about we stow the chitchat until we can get the hell out of here?”
“Fine with me,” he mumbled, half rolling to sit up, then resuming his position from earlier.
“You can’t really be that idealistic. You’re a fighter pilot.” She abandoned the scope to stare at him with a perplexed expression, as if she were trying to figure out a puzzle. Because obviously not killing random people for no particular reason made little sense to her.
“And you can’t really be that mercenary. Though, since you’re CI, I guess you are,” he shot back.
“It’s not mercenary, it’s logical. Spend as much time operating behind enemy lines as I do and you start to see the truth. Anyone has the potential to be your enemy.”
The words struck a little too deep, a little too personal, and he had to glance away from her, the heart-attack ache rising again. Yeah, he knew too well anyone could turn out to be the enemy, especially those a person would least suspect.
“So you do know what I’m talking about,” she continued, since obviously he wasn’t as practiced as she was in hiding strong emotion. “Why the charming, idealistic front?”
He summoned a grin he wasn’t feeling. “Why not? It’s easier to make a joke than get all depressed about things out of our control. And it’s not a front, it’s who I am.”
“I don’t buy it. Just now, I saw something on your face, something you couldn’t hide behind that smile. What was it?”
“None of your goddamn business, that’s what it was.” He crossed his arms, her question teasing out the dark, ugly feelings he’d been trying to ignore the past few weeks since discovering his best friend was actually a scumbag CSS mole responsible for the deaths of who-knew-how-many other fighter pilots and UEF soldiers.
“Okay, sorry I asked,” she relented, holding up a hand in surrender.
“Why did you ask? It’s not like we need to know a single thing about each other. After today, we’ll never see each other again, right?”
Her gaze roamed over him, expression becoming thoughtful, those green eyes intelligent and too intriguing. “I don’t know why I asked. Usually I wouldn’t. Usually I wouldn’t see the fighter pilot—or whatever UEF soldier happens to be helping me—as anything except a means to an end. But there’s something about you that piques my curiosity—”
She recoiled slightly, as if she was shocked by her own admission.
Some of his irritation at her drained away. Yeah, he kind of got the curiosity thing, except he was totally stumped by her. Mostly by his own fascination with her. In the past, he would have walked away from a woman who looked like her without a second thought. But things about Jenna didn’t add up, and he couldn’t deny he wanted to know the hows and whys.
He scuffed a hand over his hair, scalp prickling as the weird urge to open up to her ambushed him. Glancing at the cobwebbed roof, he couldn’t believe he was going with the impulse to actually talk about anything.
“It was my best friend. We met as FP trainees, and—I don’t know. You know how there are some people you just click with, like you’ve been friends forever, even though you just met five minutes ago? That was me and Lawler. They started making jokes in the squadron about us being the dynamic duo, called us Rayler instead of addressing us separately. Ten years he was like my other half. Turned out the whole thing was a big freaking lie—he was a damned CSS mole. Betrayed the squadron and UEF.” Even saying the words left a bitter taste in the back of his throat, just like the day he’d found out, when his then-CO, Captain Leigh Alphin, had told him Lawler had been caught. That had resulted in Seb spending a good ten minutes in the head throwing up until his guts had ached. The shock had been that physical.
“And he betrayed you,” Jenna concluded in a low voice.
He grabbed a breath before looking at her. “Yeah. It kicked me in the guts, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Who knows how many fighter pilots and UEF soldiers he was directly and indirectly responsible for getting killed?”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Seb.” The words were sincere, once again clashing with the fakeness of her outward appearance.
He slouched down against the wall, more than happy to be done with that little chitchat session. “Shit happens in combat, right? I’m not the only one who’s been screwed by this godforsaken war.”
The sudden drone of multiple ships stopped Jenna from replying, not that he wanted or needed to hear any empty platitudes from her. She shifted to the window with the scope once again, leaving him relieved that she wasn’t staring at him with those too-intelligent jade green eyes anymore. Why the hell had he said anything to her? It wasn’t like he owed her any explanation for the way he dealt with life day to day. So what had prompted him to spill his guts to some chick he wasn’t ever going to see again?
Maybe that was it. The knowledge that he wasn’t going to see her again made it easy and complication-free to get stuff off his chest that had been sitting for too long like a boulder.
“The ships are leaving the area. Looks like they’re giving up the search,” she reported. “We’ll give it half an hour just to be sure, and then move out.”
Half an hour and he could tell Ms Kickass good-bye, and maybe next time CI came to him with a mission, he’d give it more than half a second’s thought before agreeing to sign on.