FOURTEEN
HIGH FIVE
The voice is deep, its soft drawl a familiar caress. Fear crackles down my spine, rushes in my blood, paralyzing me. I don’t want to look up, but it’s like I’m no longer in control of my movements. I raise my head slowly and see black boots a few yards away. The same black fatigues all the guards wore at Ingolvinlinna. Faded-blue eyes and a smile so gentle you could almost forget the semiautomatic in his hand and its elaborate optical mount.
Stiles.
Blood pounds fast in my temples. March . . . Where is he? Did they kill him?
Through the panic fogging my brain, I register Stiles’s black-gloved hand extending toward me. “Let me see your face, Island. Don’t be scared. You can get up.”
Because I don’t want him to get any closer, I comply. I take off my helmet with trembling hands and scramble up. Once I’m on back on my legs, I keep my right hand clutched firmly against my stomach.
His smile widens—he doesn’t get it. “It’s gonna be okay . . .”
“Don’t get near me. I’m not going back with you.” My voice is surprisingly harsh and steady, considering that my knees are wobbling so badly I’m not sure I could bolt even if I wanted to. But he was ready to let some doctor lobotomize me, I remind myself—he was taking me there, in fact. Dries may not be the father of the year—but he, at least, didn’t strap me to a stretcher and drug me out of my mind . . .
Stiles’s brow wrinkles in something akin to the sad face of an adult scolding a child. Nothing like the kind of genuine hurt weighing on March’s features. I won’t fall for that shit anymore. “Island,” he coos. “I couldn’t tell you everything, and I’m sorry that—”
“Shut the fuck up, and you’d better not take another goddamn step forward, or I swear we both die here!”
I can barely recognize the roar coming from me. When did I get so radical? Doesn’t matter: his smile vanishes as if it were never there in the first place. He’s seen the grenade in my hand. That hard expression, the glint of surprise in his eyes: I’m meeting the real Mr. Stiles for the first time, it seems.
“Oh, Island, do you even know how to use that?”
Adrenaline gives terrible advice: it’s the only explanation I have for that second of rage and bravado where I unpin the grenade and raise it, crushing the lever in my clenched fist. “Like that.”
“All right . . .” A dry chuckle escapes him as he raises his palms, but there’s no humor in his gaze. It’s deadly cold. “Now we got another problem to solve. Don’t move; I’m gonna walk to you slowly.”
I take a step back. “Don’t.”
“Island, believe me, I’m your safest bet right now. But I can’t help you if you fight me . . .”
Stiles is talking, but it’s not him I’m hearing; it’s Anies. I can’t make you happy if you fight me . . . “And you’ll help me how, exactly? Strap me up to a stretcher again?” My voice breaks as I remember the dark room. “Have doctors turn me into a zombie?”
“No, Island. We’re gonna talk about this—”
A row of bullets crashes into a nearby trunk, shredding its bark at the exact same time that Stiles lunges to the ground. I see a black silhouette collapse a few yards away—a man. I think he tried to cover Stiles from . . . the flash of white now dashing at him. March! I watch, frozen in place, as they grab each other and roll around in the snow, fighting for the gun in Stiles’s hand. It’s a mess of limbs and scary growls as legs kick and punches fly, and I have no idea who’s winning until March inflicts a brutal head-butt upon his adversary—that’s made only worse by the helmet he’s still wearing.
Red splashes on Stiles’s forehead, and this time it takes him too long to recover: the gun spins from his hand to March’s in a blur, almost like a magic trick. Stiles blinks through the blood running in his eyes from a large gash above his nose, barely conscious as March presses the gun to his forehead. Stiles mumbles something to him in a barely audible voice—some sort of plea?
I feel the grenade still in my hand, my muscles aching from the effort to squeeze the lever shut. When I pulled the pin, I was so angry, so desperate that I thought I had it in me to kill myself and Stiles too. But now I see his bloodied face, the way his fingers clench and unclench in the snow, and I know I could never have gone through with it.
“No!”
March’s finger pauses on the trigger, and his eyes dart over to me, turning wide when he sees the grenade. “Island—”
“Please don’t do it,” I whimper, air wheezing in my throat with each word. “No more killing.”
His hand jerks, and I’m so sure he’s going to kill Stiles after all, but I hear a loud thump as he knocks him out ruthlessly. March is on his feet right afterward and rushes to me.
“Unpinned?”
I nod with a gulp.
“All right . . .” I know he’s trying to sound reassuring, but it doesn’t work because I’m holding a fricking live grenade. “Just let me . . .”
March’s hand wraps around mine carefully. I feel a tug as the grenade changes hands, and in the time it takes for me to release a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, he’s hurled it toward the lake. There’s a distant clatter as it lands on the ice, and I count less than three seconds before a powerful explosion shatters the frozen surface in an eerie blend of light, smoke, and water.
I’m . . . stunned. A chilly wind cools the sweat on my temples, carrying snowflakes in my hair. I stare, oblivious of March’s presence, until he removes his helmet, revealing taut, sweat-soaked features. “Can you run?”
“Yeah . . .” Or maybe not. I honestly have no idea.
“Good. We need to get away from here.”
Against all odds, my body doesn’t betray me; my legs don’t collapse under me like I thought they would. Somewhere, in a part of me I had no idea even existed, there’s still enough strength, enough will to run and survive. I can feel the burn in my calf muscles, the pain that comes with each exhausted gasp, but once again I grip March’s hand and run toward the lake.
The thrum of blades whipping the air above us sends a burst of renewed energy through my system. At least now my mind is clear enough that I know why I’m running. My eyes screw shut, blinded by the helicopter’s beam. Did it come back for us because they’re done with Dries and the others? And yet . . . two quads sit abandoned at the other end of the lake, lifeless bodies lying sprawled on the ice next to them. Dries was here—I can tell that much.
“We’ll take one of those,” March shouts over the increasingly powerful droning following us.
I’ll take anything at this point, even a skateboard, as long as they don’t start shooting again. I don’t want to look up; I prefer not to know whether there’s an asshole ready to engage us up there.
Halfway to our goal, March’s feet skid on the ice, and he stops. His hand squeezes mine so tight it hurts, but I’m too frightened and exhausted to say anything. He looks around and . . . listens. After a few seconds, I too pick up on a distant rumble. What comes next is something out of E.T., except it’s not a bike that bursts from the trees under a moonlit sky and crashes onto the lake with a deafening sound, but the Bat-tank.
Panic explodes in my chest as I watch it drift our way in a cloud of ice dust, the tracks spinning madly to outrace the cracks forming on the once-smooth surface. Whoever is driving this thing deserves to die with us! I feel my feet leave the solid ground when March hauls me out of the way. We can’t run fast, this time, not against this monster. The three pairs of headlights are rushing toward us so fast all I can make out is a blinding blur.
March holds me as we roll out of the way . . . right before the tracks come to a brutal stop mere feet from us. We find ourselves bathed in the glare of the headlights, dizzy and, I suspect, both terrified. One of the doors folds up, prompting March to shield his eyes with the back of his hand to get a better look at the tank’s occupants. Seconds stretch as the helicopter too closes on us, the rotor’s powerful wind swiping icy dust in our faces.
“What are you waiting for? I don’t have all night.”
I recognize Dries’s voice, but I can’t move. I just stay curled against March like a dead, frozen thing as he pulls me up. I went through one too many brushes with cardiac arrest, and my legs won’t support me, not even when the first round of bullets clanks against the tank’s hood, shattering the ice less than three feet away from us. I feel like a sock tumbling in a washer as March lifts me in his arms and carries me inside the Bat-tank. There’s a loud buzzing in my ears, and above me, March’s and Isiporho’s faces seem like glittering smudges.
A remote, rational part of me concludes that I’m in shock, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t know how much time passes until the fog starts clearing in my mind. The helicopter . . . it’s shooting at us, and we’re making a daring escape. The maniac who made the tank jump at us is, unsurprisingly, Dominik, who seems delighted by the whole situation. The wheel spinning madly in his hands, he keeps yelling that it’s “fokken Christmas” while we tear through snow, rocks, and branches toward a trail. In the passenger seat, Dries casually comments that this is, indeed, a nice ride.
I shake my head, blink, and look down at my hand, gripping March’s so hard my nails dig into his skin. Sweet baby Jesus, we’re racing outside authorized hiking trails. In the back seat of. A. Goddamn. Tank. Also, the helicopter is still thrumming above our heads, its blinding beams swiping across the trail in an attempt to lock in on us.
Dries looks up through the windshield, on which I’m only starting to notice the bullet impacts. “We need to take care of that. Dominik, how many Javelins do we have?”
“Four.”
Next to me, Isiporho whistles while March raises an eyebrow at his boss.
I’m about to ask what’s a Javelin, but that red button blinking on the dashboard with a missile icon on it is all the explanation I need. This is madness.
A bump sends us flying and crashing through barbed wires. That . . . was the Russian border. Dominik seems to barely notice that we’re being shaken like martinis. He frowns at the dashboard. “Fok! Launcher’s fingerprint locked too.” He holds out his hand to Dries, who casually reaches under his seat and retrieves . . . a severed hand.
I swallow hard to contain a wave of nausea as Dominik arranges the bloody fingers flat on a fingerprint scan on the dashboard. A row of buttons starts blinking green, and he gives the hand back to Dries.
I register March’s whisper in my hair. “I’m terribly sorry for that.”
Not nearly as much as I am . . . Whirring sounds coming from the roof catch my attention. In the driver’s seat, Dominik is busy steering with one hand and tapping repeatedly on a touch screen with the other—to adjust the missiles’ trajectory, I gather, when I glimpse a 3-D rendering of the terrain around the tank.
I don’t really panic until I see Dries holding on to both straps of his seat. Dries, who chopped a guy’s hand to steal his tank, who was driving a rocket-launching ice-cream truck when we first met. This guy is bracing himself? He is, because Dominik suddenly slams on the brakes, sending us flying forward. March and Isiporho simultaneously hold on to the door handles and my body, preventing me from crashing through the windshield. Something weird happens with the tracks, like they’re unable to grip the snow and are spinning uselessly, before the tank bolts into reverse, the sudden acceleration crushing us against the back seat.
Within seconds, the helicopter is no longer behind us but well ahead, and I watch in fascinated horror as on the dashboard’s screen, crosshairs lock on to the aircraft and start blinking red. The moment Dominik presses the firing button, there’s almost no recoil, only a brief vibration propagating through the roof, the seat, and ultimately my body. We did fire though: two fiery lights illuminate the night sky, tracing graceful arcs all the way to the helicopter. I shield my face reflexively when it explodes, the booming shock wave hitting the tank hard, along with a rain of burning debris crashing on our roof and windshield.
As the adrenaline rush recedes and my heart rate slows down, I notice the way March wrapped his arms around me. Almost like a hug. Now that we’re no longer seconds away from certain death, this quasi-intimacy feels weird. Scary even, as if I were naked in his embrace. I squirm away tentatively, willing myself to ignore his sigh as he lets go of me.
Stoic, Dominik raises his right hand, palm turned to Dries, who considers it with a haughty twist of his lips. “You know I hate that. We’re between gentlemen here.”
The Bat-tank jolts and moves forward, ostentatiously crushing the flaming tail of the helicopter, which now lies wrecked across the trail. Dominik’s hand stays in place though.
Isiporho’s shoulders shake with quiet laughter. “I say the pup’s earned it.”
Dries’s tongue clicks in annoyance, but he relents and high-fives his disciple.
At last, Dominik places his hand back on the wheel with a self-satisfied smirk. “Since none of you are going to say it, I will: that was fucking awesome.”