Meridian Six

"Once they realized he was alive, they decided to play a little game."

"Stop," Dare whispered. "Please."

Rabbit’s eyes opened wide as saucers. I wanted to punch Icarus for putting the kid through this. But then I realized that Rabbit didn’t have the luxury of innocence. None of us did.

"First they stretched his body over the hood of a car. Then they took turns wounding him in increasingly elaborate and creative ways. By the time I came roaring from my hiding place, they’d ripped out one eye and peppered his arms and legs with more bullet holes and bite marks." His voice had taken on an edge of steel. "I managed to put a bullet through my father’s brain and kill the bastard who took his eye before they took me down. If a superior officer hadn’t come by and stopped them they would have done the same thing to me before they killed me. You see, dad was old and wounded, so he didn’t matter. But me? I was strong and young, and the officer said the Troika would need slaves to build their empire once the war was over." He pointed a finger toward The Factory. "So yeah, I understand the need to run, but I also learned the hard way the price for my selfishness. If we don’t stand up for our own, who will, Rabbit?"

Rabbit looked at Icarus with eyes older than they’d been ten minutes earlier. "But if we die, who will be left to fight?"

"If we don’t fight, we might as well be dead."

Rabbit’s Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively in his throat. A shudder wracked his body, but he gathered himself together and stood straight. "Okay. Let’s go."

"You sure, kiddo?" Dare asked.

Rabbit looked at her with an expression I hadn’t seen from his innocent face before. Rebellion mixed with resentment over her insistence for treating him like a kid. "I’m fine," he snapped.

She quickly tamped the wounded look and nodded. "Let’s do this."

Icarus smiled at the pair and then looked at me. "Well?"

I nodded, suddenly soul-tired. "Let’s get it over with."

Eight.

Down near the water, the air was colder and damp. The kind of cold that grabbed onto your bones with skeletal fingers.

Icarus waved us toward a dark mouth jutting over the river. Closer, I realized it was a drainage pipe. "All right. Those incinerators need an external fuel source. Most likely they’ve got massive propane tanks nearby with pipes leading underground into the Factory." He pointed toward a large, lone building about a hundred feet from the fence. Three guards in Troika uniforms stood out front with large guns. "There."

"Assuming we could get past them," I said, "what’s the plan?"

Icarus removed something from his backpack. "We only have one chance with this." I squinted through the dark and saw a black device with a mess of wires and some sort of putty on the back. "If we can set this off on near the tanks, it’ll cause a chain reaction through the pipes and destroy all the furnaces. The trick is to get in and out undetected so they believe it was a malfunction instead of an act of aggression. We can’t risk the Troika retaliating against the people in the blood camps."

When we’d come up with this plan with Saga I’d argued that we needed way more than the four of us to pull it off. But it had taken us two days of walking to reach The Factory, and it would have taken three times that to contact another patrol group. Even longer for them to rendezvous with us. So Icarus wasn’t kidding when he said we had one chance. If any of us were captured this plan was toast.

"I’ll do it," Dare said.

Icarus shook his head. "The only way in is through this pipe. You won’t fit." He was right. The pipe was narrower than the expanse of an average adult’s shoulders.

My eyes swiveled toward the twelve-year-old child to my left. Dare’s face went ghost pale. "Icarus, no–"

Rabbit ignored her and perked up. "I get to do it?"

Dare grabbed Icarus’s arm and dragged him away. Rabbit cringed, like his mom and dad were fighting, and looked at me. "She treats me like a baby."

“She cares about you. That’s a good thing."

He shrugged. "Sometimes she cares too much."

I wanted to lecture him and tell him to thank God that someone gave a shit about him. I wasn’t under any illusions that Rabbit’s life had been easy, but at least he never knew the soul crushing loneliness of having no one to depend on but himself. "Are you sure you’re up for this?"

The instant I said it, I regretted the question. No doubt he’d see it as a challenge.

His chin came up. "Damn straight."

The cold night breeze carried Dare’s raised voice toward us. Icarus’s quieter responses were swallowed, but soon enough they both came to join us again. Icarus looked resigned and Dare looked defeated.

"All right, Rabbit, you’re going to shimmy through the pipe. It’ll lead you to a grate inside the compound. You’ll have to sneak out of the pipe and get into that building." He took a few moments to show the kid how to engage the bomb. "Set the timer to two minutes from the time you engage it. That will give you a little lead time to get as far from the building as possible before it blows."

Rabbit practically pranced with excitement as he listened to the instructions. Dare hung back, staring off toward the river in the distance. Further downstream, the lights of Nachstadt created a surreal glow on the horizon. "You okay?" I asked, moving closer.

She shook herself and dragged her eyes from the lights. "I smell death on the air."

"Hopefully Troika deaths."

She just looked at me without speaking.

"Dare, Six?" Icarus called back. "He’s ready."

Dare sighed and dragged herself out of whatever headspace she’d retreated to. "The master calls."

I looked up at the dim stars that were determined to be seen despite the city’s lights and the Factory’s fires. "Please." I wasn’t sure to whom I was pleading or even what exactly I was asking for. I just knew that if anyone in the entire world needed help at that moment it was us.

#

Rabbit hung outside the tunnel long enough for us to take positions on a nearby rise. We needed to have a bird’s eye view of the compound so we could warn him if any guards were close. Icarus held a small remote in his hand. A punch of the button would set off a small shock on a sensor around Rabbit’s wrist. It wasn’t the best warning system, but it was all we had. Besides, even if we’d had a more sophisticated verbal warning system, we couldn’t have risked interference getting picked up by the guards’ walkie-talkies.

Once we were in position, Icarus sent a quick double-zap to the kid to let him know it was time to go. We were far enough away that Rabbit looked incredibly small and very young beside the dark river and the pipe’s wide mouth. An instant after Icarus hit the button, the kid looked down at his wrist and then waved to signal he’d received the message.