Outlaw Read online

  “Support’s blasting their way in,” I said.

  “Why not just hit this place with a nuke?” Keisha asked.

  “Why nuke us when they can capture us?” Support would want to know about the Imbued, how they worked. If they could get me and Keisha, so much the better, but my bet was they really wanted their hands on these people.

  I turned to Renee. “There must be another way out?”

  “Don’t say anything,” Chloe said, suddenly animated after being silent for so long. “She wouldn’t want you to tell strangers.”

  Renee looked at us thoughtfully.

  “Well?” I pressed. I looked back down the tunnel meaningfully. I wondered who this “she” was Chloe mentioned, but didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. We had our asses to pull out of the fire.

  Renee sighed. “There is a way. Behind the waterfall—”

  “Don’t,” the big dude shouted.

  “Please, don’t,” added Chloe.

  Renee ignored them. “There’s a hidden passage that will take us away.”

  “What, to a plane?” Keisha demanded. “Support’s going to see that take off.”

  “No, a hidden way.” Determination filled Renee’s face. “But we need to get above ground.” She looked up at the rockfall. “Only this blocks our way.”

  “I can help with that,” Keisha said. She sounded like she thought the whole thing was a fool’s quest, but she’d still put herself in it. I squeezed her shoulder.

  “Don’t get all soft on me, Mat,” she said, but her eyes were smiling.

  Another boom. They were going to blast through the rock, soon.

  “Do it,” I told Keisha. She nodded.

  I led the others back, and Keisha followed for a few feet, turned back, and began gesturing. The air grew hot. Steam rose from the rock fall. The tunnel ceiling began to turn orange, then yellow, then white as it heated up. Molten rock dribbled down. She waved her arms.

  “Gotta bleed off the heat,” Keisha muttered to herself. She breathed like a locomotive. Her arms flailed until the rock had formed a crude stairway leading up to daylight. Trees loomed overhead.

  The cultists clambered up the rocky stairs and out.

  Keisha looked at me.

  “Go on ahead.” I glanced back down the tunnel the way we had come. “I’ll follow you.”

  She arched her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. I’m not dying down here.” That would suck, and would also leave my sisters and Ruth in the lurch. “I just need to cover our tracks.”

  Keisha looked like she thought I was full of shit, but she usually looked like that when it came to me.

  Still, she didn’t argue. Went up.

  I turned back down the tunnel. I needed to make sure Support didn’t find our exit, at least not until we were long gone.

  I jogged back up the twisting side tunnel, maybe a hundred yards. Stopped.

  There was a muffled boom, dust showered down. Apparently they still hadn’t gotten through the rock fall. I smiled. Good.

  “Let’s make this a longer process,” I whispered.

  The blue veins glowed around me. The power still flowed through the rock. I sent my power into the timber shoring another twenty yards in the direction of the explosions, and began rotting the wood. The rock groaned all around me. Shit.

  Cracks appeared in the tunnel walls, dirt spilling out, too close to where I was. I needed another way out, before the tunnel collapsed. If only I had Obi, the Nigerian Empowered who’d been there at the end, in Emerald Green. He’d been an earth mover. But the nasty thing about Support is they’d figure out who I was based on the evidence. So, I had to act like an earth mover, or something else; something other than a plant-controller.

  The thing was, manipulating plants was my power and would be a bitch to disguise.

  Things were so much easier when I didn’t have to hide who I was. Of course, that was how I wound up in prison.

  I crept down the tunnel, checking for signs of a major collapse. The sound of drilling ground away in the distance. Those Support bastards wouldn’t give up.

  I wondered if Winterfield was with them. My old Support supervisor was a hard-ass, but I didn’t want to injure him, or worse.

  Dust sprayed down on me.

  Not only did shoring timbers still run over this part of the tunnel, but my sense picked up wood beneath me. A buried ore cart track; wood railroad ties. I squatted and brushed away the dirt, until I could feel the creosote covered ties. The wood wasn’t as desiccated as the shoring timbers were. The creosote had preserved it better and there was water trapped in the timber. The drilling, louder now, pushed at my awareness. I’d be in deep shit, okay, deeper than I was already, if I didn’t move fast.

  I didn’t know the first thing about chemistry. But I knew that the wood had potential. The wood, I suddenly felt it, felt the power trapped inside it. Right then, at that instant, in that place, with the tunnel shadows all around me like a promise and the blue lighted veins running through the tunnel walls like someone had sprinkled pixie dust, a door opened in my mind. I could feel the wood, and the roots in a way I hadn’t before. The weight of them. The potential for growth and destruction, like coiled snakes, or a wound spring.

  The iron rails had rusted, and there was some sort of super fungus eating away at it, connecting the wood, the rails and the railroad spikes.

  The super fungus was a kind I had never sensed before.

  The drilling rose in volume, then something heavy hit the tunnel floor a hundred yards away. The fallen rock barrier must have been breached. My heart pounded faster. Didn’t have much time.

  There was potential locked in the old ties, and energy in the fungus, which shouldn’t even be alive, but it wasn’t artificial, like the monstrosities we had battled at Emerald Green and in Colombia. But it wasn’t like anything living I had encountered before either.

  The fungus began to sound like surf in my mind, washing against a sandy beach at night. The surf sound began to glow, fucking glow, in my head. Blue-green, like the sea, bubbling with life and the energy of life.

  Life can create life, and it can destroy life. Eat away at it. Choke it off from oxygen.

  Or make too much oxygen. A side tunnel of a side tunnel ran a short ways off to my left. I hadn’t noticed it before. It went maybe twenty feet. That could be another way out. I sent fungus spreading from the ties into the side- side tunnel, running fast through the rock. I made it hungry for dirt and rock, but just the dirt, and loose rock at the end of the tunnel. I urged it to eat fast, and it did. Steam rose in the blue light.

  The super fungus in the main tunnel I commanded to spew oxygen far faster than normal, millions of times faster, and then I twisted the fungus until it spat a spark, and the tunnel in front of me ignited just as black clad figures crept around the corner. The tunnel shuddered, and dirt and loose rock cascaded down. The figures disappeared behind the avalanche.

  I ran into the fresh tunnel, the ground hot beneath my feet. Little plumes of steam rose up, flashing in the blue light from the walls.

  I faced back the way I’d come. I closed my eyes and felt the fungus already changed, and pushed it to change even more. My heart pounded, like I was running a marathon up Mount Hood. My muscles screamed as the energy from this place shot through me and back into the fungus.

  Eat I told it. It ate into the rock. Change, I commanded it. I imagined the fungus becoming crystal and growing into the tunnel from all sides, until it was blocked by a shining barrier. A sound like crackling fire rushed past me. I opened my eyes and gasped.

  A forest of crystalline spikes protruded from the tunnel walls, floor and ceiling, forming a gleaming, sharp barrier of spikes that ran for fifty yards. That should keep Support away at least for a little while.

  I hoped they had survived the blast. I didn’t want to kill them, but I wasn’t going to be stopped. I was getting out of here.

  I turned and went further into the new tunnel made by my
first “batch” of altered super fungus. I slipped on loose rock again and again, falling once and banging my arm. I felt like I’d just run five miles. My sides ached. Exhaustion pulled at me. I didn’t have any energy left.

  But, I hauled myself up. I staggered up the ramp the fungus had created in the new tunnel until I reached where it broke into the open air. Tree roots hung down like ribbons. I pushed past the roots and wormed my way above ground, laying on the earth like a beached whale.

  I listened, while my breath came out in ragged gasps.

  In the distance I heard the rotors of a VTOL aircraft. I was in a clearing and exposed. I dragged myself upright, sprinting for the nearest trees, and half dove into the underbrush. My nerves felt like hot wires. I squatted down, looking back past the erupted earth. That was a dead giveaway.

  I didn’t have much time.

  There was a snap of a twig behind me and I whirled around, extending my power into the foliage, uncoiling vines and reaching my power into poison oak. It hissed like a snake in my mind, and prickled against my awareness.

  The movement was about twenty yards away.

  Shit, I could never catch a break. It wasn’t fair. I just wanted to make sure that Keisha and the cultists had gotten free, but did the world give me a chance to do so? Nope. Well, screw that noise.

  Anger boiled up inside me. I had to push it down. Couldn’t lose it here.

  Instead, I used the anger to keep me sharp, grounded. The power from this place still pulsed through me.

  A familiar looking figure in a hooded sweat shirt and jeans appeared from behind a Douglas fir.

  Alex. Alex in his grunge dude outfit.

  Behind me the VTOL aircraft flew off. Thank God for at least that much of a break.

  I sent ivy coiling around Alex, pinning him against the fir tree, and over his mouth, so that he couldn’t cry out. Then I came at him in a half-crouch. This was about doing what was necessary, even with Alex.

  His eyes watched me, no fear there.

  I stopped ten feet away, ordered the ivy to hold him tight.

  “I don’t know whose side you are on,” I said.

  I had the ivy pull back from his mouth.

  He licked his lips. “I’m not against you,” he said.

  I jerked my head behind me. “How big is the Support force here? How many VTOL aircraft and personnel?”

  “I’m still on leave,” he said.

  “What?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “You’re bullshitting me!”

  “No, Mat, I’m not. I’m really on extended leave.”

  “Then how, why are you here?”

  He squirmed against the vines. “Listen, can you release me?”

  I hesitated.

  He sighed. “I know you have trust issues, Mat, but you need to trust me.”

  Trust him.

  I clenched my fists. “How did you find me?” The ivy tightened and he winced.

  “I followed you.” He hesitated. There was something more. He was hiding that something more.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Alex.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not. I used Support intel on the Fellowship, figuring you would be following that trail.”

  Okay, that made sense, except for one thing. “You just happened to get here at the same time as me.”

  “No,” he said, suddenly sounding tired. “I got here at dawn. Support had an imminent operations tag on this location.”

  I’d never heard the term before, but when it came to Support even more than most things, I was a mushroom. Fed shit and kept in the dark.

  I ordered the vines to release him and he staggered, half fell from the tree trunk. I marched up to him, pulled him up to face me. He was six two, same as me, so I looked him straight in the eye. The backpack I carried, filled with maps and books felt suddenly heavy against me.

  “Does Support know about Ella?”

  “No,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. He didn’t blink.

  I stared back at him.

  “Promise,” he said. Despite having been lashed to tree by vines and having vine leaves covering his mouth, he smiled.

  I had to take his word.

  I slowly let out my breath. It felt like a million pounds had just dropped away from my shoulders. My legs started to go wobbly. All the power that had surged through me courtesy of Mossville was gone, and once again exhaustion fell on me like a mountain. Not now, I told myself. I didn’t have the time. Support was still in the area, and I had to get going. I closed my eyes, took a slow, deep breath, straightened up.

  I brushed past Alex, pushing my way into the underbrush, commanding the plants to pull back just enough that I could pass.

  “Hey, wait,” Alex called softly behind me. I heard him stumble through the brush I’d already told to close behind me.

  I stopped, facing him. He stumbled up to me, his hair matted from sweat.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  Bad idea, but I could stand to be with him. In fact, I wanted to be with him, right there, right then, even though I couldn’t trust him.

  “Okay. Fine,” I said. “Just keep pace with me.”

  He shook his head. “Funny. You try doing that with a killer leg cramp.”

  “What leg cramp?” I asked.

  “I had to scramble upslope and through the thick woods, and then someone had vines lash me to a tree.” He said, smiling.

  Fair enough. I eased up.

  I had the underbrush thicken behind me as we walked. The VTOL aircraft’s swishing sound had faded as it flew away. I only hoped it hadn’t spotted the others. Especially Keisha. She wouldn’t let herself get captured. She’d die fighting if she could. I bit my lip. She was smart, I told myself, she’d keep the cultists under cover and moving.

  We walked uphill for a mile, the ground sloping around the cliffs.

  It struck me then. The glimpse of the map. Persia. The Great Persian Empire. “America’s ally in the Middle East and South Asia,” Ruth had told me once.

  I couldn’t believe my little idiot of a sister had gone to Great Persia, of all places. I didn’t know anything about Persia other than what I remembered from school, and from what Ruth had told me. Great Persia controlled the world’s oil, and kept India in check. Great Persia had allies, but we were their big brother.

  It was all so far away. I did in fact not give a shit when I was younger, and now I could have cared even less.

  I hunched down beside a tree. I didn’t dare tell Alex what I’d found.

  “What are you going to do next?” he asked. “Keep looking for your sister, right?”

  Freaking mind-reader.

  “Yeah. I have to get to her before Support does.”

  “You need to bring her in, really, Mat. Otherwise—”

  This was just a rerun of the argument we’d had yesterday.

  “No. NO!” My voice got loud.

  He made a hushing gesture with his finger. “Where is she?”

  I took a deep breath, and lowered my voice. “I can’t tell you, you’ll tell Support.”

  There, it was out.

  “You can trust me,” he said.

  I arched an eyebrow. “You gotta admit that being asked to trust someone who works for the people who want to capture your sister is a big ask.”

  “The people you still work for, too.”

  I shook my head. “I quit when I died.” Since they thought I was dead, they couldn’t expect me to keep working for them.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You said they believe Keisha and I are dead!”

  He glanced down at the moss covered ground. “I said I believe they believe that. But they can put facts together just like me. The blast site was irradiated. Emerald Green was essentially leveled. I picked up the pieces of the shell you created from the plants there, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t shards they could’ve found.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” Frustration surged through me. A line of sword ferns nearby
began growing rapidly.

  “Mat, please calm down,” Alex said. “Please.”

  I tensed, then pulled my power back inside me. He was right. And it wasn’t his fault he was right. There were no guarantees. All the more reason to get to Persia as soon as possible.

  “I can help you,” he said, blurting it out in a way that was so not Alex.

  “It’s better if I do this on my own,” I said. Even if it meant going to Great Persia alone.

  “You know where she is, don’t you?” The certainty in his voice made me freeze.

  I really didn’t want to have to kill him. I couldn’t. Not Alex. But I also couldn’t let Support know.

  “Basically, yeah,” I said.

  “Let me come with you.” His voice was so earnest sounding, so caring. My eyes watered. Damn it, no crying, I told myself.

  Alex wrapped his arms around me. Hugged me gently. I hugged him back.

  I rubbed a hand against my wet face. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Don’t be.” His eyes were shining wetly at me. Had he misted up, too?

  I took a deep, shuddering breath. My sides hurt. God, I hadn’t been crying that hard, had I? Shouldn’t have, at all. Stupid. I was an idiot.

  “I can’t take you with me,” I said.

  Alex looked like I’d just slapped him. But that faded and concern returned, making me feel like the biggest jerk in the world.

  “You’re resourceful, Mat. Anyone who can infiltrate the Scourge, survive to dispatch Mutter and then lead a cell has to be. Especially with Support putting the screws to you. But heading across the world, into unknown danger, well, that’s a new problem for you. A problem I could help you with.”

  He swallowed.

  I hadn’t thought at all about how he might feel about that. I wanted to pull him close now, but I couldn’t. There wasn’t time for another soft moment. Support could come back. I had to go.

  “I wish I could take you.”

  “Then do.”

  “If I take you, and you really are there to help me, it means you just turned against Support. You’ll be a traitor. Trust me, you don’t want that.” Betraying the Scourge had nearly gotten me killed at Emerald Green. Of course, the Scourge had double-crossed me first, but I hadn’t realized it at the time.

  “But I can’t let you go on your own.”