Impostors Page 20

  I stand there, watching him work.

  I should warn Zura what’s happening, but we’re too close to the city to risk a ping. I could climb back, but I don’t want to leave Leyva alone. And maybe he’s right—a rushed repair job can only make things worse.

  There’s nothing to do but wait, and try to figure out what Dr. Leyva is up to.

  As the sun rises, the colony of solar panels begins to stir.

  Instead of jockeying for light, they’re flowing away toward the outskirts of Shreve. Leyva’s plan was for them to attack the city’s infrastructure—clogging drains, getting in the way of loading drones, covering up the markings in the road that guide cargo trucks.

  There was also something about starting fires. That must be what he has in mind now. I’m pretty sure the most powerful object in the solar system is the sun. But I’m not sure why he needs to take my weapon apart.

  While Dr. Leyva works, I pace back and forth. My father’s tower is too close for me to relax. It’s all I can do not to stare at it.

  I imagine him inside, plotting his next moves against us. Is he still angry that I’ve turned against him?

  Or, now that I’ve served my purpose, does he even care?

  A couple of hours after dawn, someone in Shreve notices the solar colony’s strange behavior. A hovercar peels off from the formation over the city and heads toward us.

  “Are we ready?” I ask.

  “Maybe.” Dr. Leyva hands me his improvised contraption. It looks like a demented littlie’s science project—the laser torch from his tool kit mated with what’s left of my plasma gun. “Have you figured it out yet?”

  I look down at the horde of solar panels. They’re set to high reflectivity, glittering like mirrors in the sun.

  Hundreds of thousands of them.

  “Archimedes,” I say.

  “Ah.” The doctor looks impressed with me.

  “It’s a legend, about an ancient inventor. He burned ships with mirrors, like a pre-Rusty laser. My military tutor taught me that one when I was ten.”

  When I told Rafi, we spent the day incinerating ants.

  I raise my altered plasma gun. “So this is a target indicator?”

  “Exactly,” Leyva says. “The sabotage code contains a swarming function. Light something up with that, and all the panels will focus on it. But don’t fire till you have to. Not sure how many shots you’ll get before it all burns out.”

  I sigh, checking the seals on my sneak suit.

  In the sky, the scout ship has come to a halt directly above the colony of panels. It lingers there, drifting back and forth like a survey drone.

  The crew probably thinks this is a malfunction, not an attack. Maybe they’ll send out a team in a groundcar to investigate. That might buy Zura another hour for her repairs.

  The scout car rises up, and for a moment I think it’s headed home to Shreve. But then it starts a slow loop around the edges of the solar colony.

  Searching.

  Motionless in our suits, Leyva and I are invisible. But on the other side of the hill, the hovercar is belly up, its camo skin damaged by flechettes and the crash.

  I see the exact moment when the scout spots our car. It drops a little in the sky, taking a closer look. Then the scream of its lifting fans changes in pitch.

  It wheels into a tight turn—

  —and a ring of plasma streaks up from behind the hill. Two lifting fans vaporized, the scout car spins earthward, out of control.

  It crashes against our side of the hill, and begins to roll downward in a gyre of flame.

  Headed straight toward us.

  Dr. Leyva’s staring, transfixed.

  “Run!” I grab his arm and pull him out of the scout car’s path.

  It’s hurtling faster as it comes, flinging off hot metal parts. Its remaining lifting fans are still spinning, sending it careening from side to side, a crooked flaming wheel.

  Dr. Leyva stumbles, and his tool kit spills.

  “Leave it!” I shout.

  “Well, obviously.” He rises to his feet. “Hold on, Frey. It’s going to miss us.”

  I turn in time to see the wreck thunder past, leaving a dark trail of burned grass behind.

  Dr. Leyva looks ecstatic.

  “The transcendent spectacle of objects in calamitous motion,” he murmurs. “War is such beautiful collisions.”

  “That was pretty bubbly,” I say.

  The scout car rolls onward until it loses momentum on the flatter ground. It spirals to a stop like a spent coin.

  Leyva looks up. “But nothing compared to what comes next.”

  Half a dozen hovercars are approaching us from Shreve. These aren’t scouts—they’re armored attack craft, heavier than anything in our fleet.

  I let out a whistle. “A bunch of mirrors are going to take those down?”

  “We’ll see.” He smiles. “Aim it as you would a gun.”

  I take another look at the contraption. The laser torch has been fitted with a new lens. I recognize the double-trigger mechanism from the plasma gun, from which the battery and other, more mysterious parts have been borrowed.

  When I pull the priming trigger, a familiar whine fills the air.

  “How many shots?”

  Leyva shrugs. “One or two—or maybe zero? Just keep pulling the trigger till it breaks.”

  I give him a tired look, aim the device at the center of the approaching squadron, and fire.

  The laser torch lights up in my hands, hot and buzzing.

  A bright spot appears on one of the distant hovercars, a ruby circle of light. My target is moving, and at first it’s hard to keep the laser steady.

  But as I hold my aim, the car grows brighter and brighter. Thousands of tiny lights join mine, then tens of thousands more, until my target is glowing like the sun.

  It doesn’t burst into flame—duralloy armor doesn’t burn. But its six engines are already spinning a thousand times a second. It doesn’t take much for one of them to overheat.

  A plume of smoke erupts, then a second, coiling around the hovercar. It banks in the sky, spinning downward like a leaf.

  “Wow,” I breathe. “This thing really works.”

  “Solar power,” Dr. Leyva says reverently.

  I shift the laser to another car in the squadron, and seconds later its engines are smoking too.

  The horde of mirrors seems to take on a life of its own. As each car falls, the collective focus shifts to the next brightest in the sky. One by one, the squadron is turned into tumbling motes of smoke and flame.

  I release the trigger. Dr. Leyva’s contraption is hot in my hands, and a whiff of burned plastic hits my nose. The lens looks darkened in the center.

  “Nice work, Doctor. But I think your gun is fried.”

  “We should probably get back to the ship, then.”

  We turn and run.

  At the top of the hill, Leyva comes to a panting halt. I turn and look back at Shreve.

  More hovercraft have formed into attack squadrons. But they aren’t hurtling toward us. They’ve come to a halt at the city’s edge, hovering motionless.

  “They’re afraid,” Leyva says, breathless.

  Of course. They’ve seen the panels take down six of their own, and Shreve is surrounded by solar stations. The crews must think they’re all infected.

  Until they can figure out what’s going on, they’re trapped inside the city limits.

  I look down the far side of the hill.

  Our hovercar is still upside down, but its fans are spinning. Col and the two Specials are waiting a safe distance away. Zura must be at the controls, taking all the risk herself.

  Are her repairs really finished? Or is it simply that we have no choice?

  The car rises slowly into the air, the engines screaming. It climbs until it’s almost level with us, wobbling uncertainly.

  “And now the tricky part,” Leyva murmurs.

  In one motion, two of the four lifting fans roll over
in their frames. The car flips to right-side up, then back to upside down, then over again. For a moment it looks like it’s going to careen away, end over end—

  But it steadies in the air, all four fans pointing downward at last.

  I let out an exhausted sigh. “She did it.”

  “Frey,” Leyva says softly. “Your father’s house.”

  I turn back to face the city.

  The squadrons that threatened to come at us have pulled back from the edge of the solar colony. Instead of retaking their stations over the city, most of the Shreve fleet is now in a tight ring around my father’s tower.

  They’re guarding him, leaving the rest of the city open to attack.

  “Of course,” I say. “They think this is just a diversion.”

  “Not completely incorrect,” Dr. Leyva says. “In the long run, we’re coming for him. Now we know how he’ll react.”

  I could have told him that. No diversion is big enough for my father to leave himself vulnerable.

  Nothing will come easy.

  “We should go.” Leyva gestures at a last scout car lingering at the city’s outskirts.

  It’s drifting slowly over the infected solar colony, testing the waters, ready to retreat if the mirrors turn on it.

  I raise Leyva’s contraption. But when I pull the priming trigger, the gun sputters in my hands. The battery is dripping, the last of its hydrogen bound with oxygen in the air, turned to water.

  “Bring that along,” Leyva says. “If the enemy think it’s my usual standard of work, we shall hardly strike terror in their hearts.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.”

  We race down the hill.

  Zura is landing, and Col is waving for us to hurry.

  As we speed away from Shreve, Dr. Leyva isn’t entirely truthful with the others.

  “… and when we couldn’t reverse the sabotage code, Frey and I decided to cobble together a weapon.”

  “Two hours without a word from you,” Zura grumbles from the pilot seat. “We thought you’d been captured.”

  Dr. Leyva shrugs. “But think of the results—all it cost us was a plasma gun. Shreve lost six hovercars!”

  Col listens, gazing with admiration at the makeshift weapon in my hands. I’ll have to tell him later that Leyva’s plan was not quite as improvised as he’s admitting.

  But it got the job done. We’re headed back to base. My father’s army is bloodied and tentative. And, for the first time, we’ve brought the fight to the city of Shreve itself.

  “Well, you scared them.” Col turns to the airscreen in front of him. “There’s no pursuit yet.”

  “Most of the fleet went straight to my father’s tower,” I say. “He’s more concerned with his own safety than catching us.”

  “They’re also guarding Rafia,” Dr. Leyva says. “He may have an inkling of our plans for her.”

  I stare out the window at the forest flashing past. That’s still the problem—how do I declare a war against my father with Rafi in his house?

  We have to steal her away somehow. Or cut them both off from the feeds so my father can’t reveal that I’m an impostor. But as long as she’s in his tower, neither option seems likely.

  The airscreen lights up.

  “Three blips,” Col says. “Not from the city—they’re right in front of us!”

  Zura turns from her controls. “Probably Shreve units coming back from night patrol. They’ll be low on juice. Won’t be able to chase us for long.”

  “Right,” Col says. “Head for the water, then.”

  Zura banks us into a sharp turn—southeast, toward the gulf, a long detour on the way back to the White Mountain.

  The Shreve hovercars stay on our tail. They aren’t fast enough to catch us, but we can’t seem to shake them either.

  An hour passes. Two. By the time we reach the waters of the gulf, it’s almost noon. The high sun sets the ocean sparkling around us.

  As I squint in the light, I wonder what it was like for the crews of those doomed hovercars back in Shreve. All those stings of sunlight swarming them, like death from a million bees.

  Dr. Leyva’s brilliance has a cruel streak.

  But maybe I shouldn’t judge. I killed someone with a pulse knife when I was fifteen.

  We fly farther into the gulf, until there’s no land within a hundred klicks. A dangerous place for hovercars with low batteries to follow us.

  But the blips on the radar stay in pursuit, like they’ve got all the juice in the world. Shreve must have hidden recharging bases out in the wild, just like we do.

  I lean against Col, trying to get some sleep while I can. But the twitchiness I’ve felt since seeing the skyline of home lingers in my bones. I can feel those hovercars pursuing us, like fragments of my father’s will.

  Only the warmth of Col’s body keeps me from jumping out of my skin.

  “This isn’t working,” Zura finally says. “If we go any farther out of our way, we won’t make it home without stopping to charge.”

  Col swears. “But we can’t lead them back to the White Mountain.”

  I lean forward in my seat, my muscles coiled tight.

  “Then let’s fight them.”

  Zura looks back at me. “It’s three to one.”

  “I didn’t say fight fair.”

  “What do you mean?” Col asks.

  I look around the cabin. It’s full of mission gear—plasma guns, spare sneak suits, body armor, hoverboards, my pulse knife.

  A plan starts to form.

  “Just get us to an island,” I say. “One with mountains, and plenty of cover.”

  Col’s eyes light up. “I know just the place.”

  “Five, four, three …”

  Col and I push ourselves out the hovercar door.

  We fall for long, dizzy-making seconds, the board shuddering under our feet in the wind of the drop.

  A war cry—more like a scream—leaps from my mouth. My arms are out wide in the warm air, like a tightrope walker’s. Col’s hands are tight around my waist.

  For a moment it feels like we’ll fly apart—me, Col, and the board all scattered on the waves below. But the magnetics in our crash bracelets keep us together. And finally the lifting fans spin up, the hoverboard bringing us to a knee-bending halt in midair.

  “Whoa,” he says in my ear. “This is not your safest plan.”

  I don’t answer—while my father is in power, I’ll never be safe. We lean sideways and peel away, giving the Specials some room.

  They’re just overhead, already falling from the car on two hoverboards. Not bothering with midair halts, they execute elegant turns and zoom off toward the island a few kilometers away.

  “Show-offs,” I say. “Come on.”

  We lean together, Col’s arms still tight around my waist. The board slides down the tropical air currents. The shallow sea below is bright azure, rippled with sunshine and dark stripes of coral beneath the waves.

  We’re in the Cubans, a string of islands two hundred klicks south of the mainland. The patch of land we’ve chosen is just a tidal plain with a craggy peak rising at either end.

  Col and I head toward the island’s highest point. Buffeted by a stiff ocean wind, the board jerks and hitches beneath us. But it’s good to stretch my muscles, to feel him pressed against me in the unsettled air.

  I try to notice every detail, to hang on to this moment of us alone together over the bright sea—endless, boundless, brief.

  We arrive at the summit, step from the board onto a pile of rubble. The peak is crowned with the crumbling remains of an old fort, its view commanding the entire island.

  “Looks like someone’s had this idea before,” Col says, unstrapping the plasma gun from his shoulder.

  “Always take the high ground.” My sneak suit shifts, taking on the colors of the ancient concrete and its rusted metal skeleton.

  I check my plasma gun.

  Zura’s voice comes in my ear.

  Last t
ransmission before they’re close enough to hear us—

  Everybody in position?

  Col taps his ear. “We’re ready.”

  The two Specials answer that they’re almost set. I see their board landing a few klicks away, on the island’s other peak. A moment later, they’ve disappeared into the rocks.

  Zura’s voice comes again.

  Don’t wait for me to start this.

  When you get a shot, take it.

  “Will do.” Col takes cover beside me. “Be careful, everyone.”

  Below us, our hovercar is landing on the tidal plain, midway between the two peaks. Its solar panels slowly unfurl, their dark mirrors catching the sun. Exactly like a car that’s run out of juice in the worst possible spot.

  Our pursuers should pass right between us and the Specials on the other peak.

  There’s nothing to do now but wait.

  Waiting is nervous-making.

  “Four plasma guns,” I murmur. “And they’ve got three hovercars. We’ve only got one shot to spare.”

  Col raises his field glasses. “Your math is solid.”

  I look at him. “Shouldn’t you be lecturing me on the plant life?”

  Col does not disappoint. “Before the seas rose, this whole archipelago was one long island. Mountains, rain forests, swamps—a biological superpower. A paradise.”

  “Huh.” There are more old bunkers strewn below us, their metal skeletons rusting in the sun. “Looks more like a military base than a resort.”

  Col shrugs. “There was a conflict about economic systems.”

  “That’s Rusties for you,” I say.

  The birds, at least, are making good use of the bunkers. Feathers and droppings litter the ground. Every cranny is stuffed with the spirals of old nests.

  I feel this privacy again, tinged with the hum of an approaching battle.

  It makes me want to touch him.

  “I miss this, Col. The two of us, alone in the wild.”

  “Me too. Sorry about my war getting in the way.”

  I smile, but it’s not really a joke. The war that connects us, divides us.

  “You’ve got an army to command, Col. A whole world to convince that Victoria shouldn’t be forgotten. That’s a lot.”