From somewhere nearby Prumble heard a new sound, like someone screaming into a pillow. Multiple people, he realized.

“First things first,” Prumble said. He hauled himself to his feet and lumbered over to a door, which, given the layout, was on his floor. He crouched and tapped a button on the floor next to it, smiling as the barrier slid aside.

Skadz stared up at him, eyes wide. The guard named Vaughn sat next to him. Both had tape across their mouths.

Prumble grinned. “You didn’t think you could ditch me that easily, did you?”

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Key Ship

2.APR.2285

Skyler’s body teetered on the verge of giving up. He felt like someone had hot-glued a line of pure fire to his chin, like a hammer had been working at his shins, his knees. Worst of all, each step they forced him to take brought a pinpoint of white agony from somewhere deep inside his gut, as if a razor blade banged and clattered on one long, lazy journey through his intestinal tract.

Something was wrong in there; something had popped or torn when Grillo’s men had held him to the floor and cuffed him.

Cuffed. Shit. He’d almost forgotten the hard-edged nylon straps about his wrists, so tight his hands had become two nerveless oven mitts attached by a ring of biting teeth where his arms ended. He willed his fingers into a little tap dance against one another, cursing himself once again for failing to flex as the binding ties were zipped. Relaxation brought no marginal relief, much less a looseness that could be exploited.

The hallway curved upward ahead at an almost imperceptible slope. Given the enormous size of the ship—ship, station, whatever the hell it was—Skyler guessed the circumference must be three times that of Black Level or any of the other Platz-built stations.

Every twenty meters or so a perpendicular hallway jutted off to Skyler’s right.

Only one hallway went left, back toward Ana, though it ended only forty meters in and glowed faintly purple.

Purple. A hue he’d seen before, a hue he’d been enveloped in. The shade sent a chill through him that temporarily masked every ache he felt.

The sight of that glow triggered something in him. The barest whisper of a plan. It trickled in slowly, his brain under siege from seven other directions. If he could somehow shove Grillo inside one of those purple fields, maybe Warthen and Larsen as well, then he’d have hours to finish the task he’d come here to do before they could even turn around and run back out. Assuming, he admitted to himself, the glow came from a field similar to the one in Ireland—

Something smacked into his shin. He’d been so laser focused on Grillo’s back he hadn’t realized they’d come to some kind of room, the portal to which was raised like a bulkhead. A faint white glow came from within the spherical room beyond. Skyler glanced inside as he stepped through, assessing the situation out of a mixture of instinct and habit. He discarded the alien oddness of the place and focused on details. An exit, directly across. Another, to his right, halfway up the sphere. Someone had placed a metal ladder diagonally from the floor to the lip of that portal. Beyond he could see enough hints to know that the key room lay within. He turned, focused on the people present. His gaze swept past the head of Grillo and his elite guards, past a crowd of armed Jacobites who stood within, and into the terrified eyes of Tania Sharma.

She should have lost all hope right then and there.

The sight of Skyler, bound, chin and neck caked with blood and sand, hair matted and wild, should have extinguished the candle within her. That flame did flicker, dipped precariously to the barest whisper of blue flame in an endless void.

But then she saw his eyes. Had he simply stared at her, she would have abandoned the few fine shreds of optimism within her and let the candle wither, sputter, die.

He did not stare at her, though. As he stepped into the room, urged forward by the nudge of a gun barrel, his gaze leveled toward her, yes, but it stopped only for the briefest of instants, then continued on. He noted the tape across her mouth, her seated position on her hands. Vanessa, next to her, in the same state. He studied with the same almost callous calculation. Each person in the room. Grillo, the guards. Their faces, their weapons, their postures. She could see it in his stony expression. That analysis. His apparently innate hardwired ability to take in a scene and digest it with all the warmth of a computer algorithm. Tabulating options, building a mental hierarchy of anything and everything available to him.

The scavenger.

Another captive marched up the stairs behind him. Tania expected, even here, even now with a twinge of disappointment, the diminutive form of Ana. Or worse, Blackfield. Yet neither appeared to be with him, a detail she forced aside. For now all that mattered was who did stand behind him.

Tania saw a woman who stood a head taller than Skyler and towered over Grillo. Despite the short dyed-black hair, Tania recognized her instantly.

She would have smiled if the duct tape smashed across her mouth would allow it. Her candle danced back to life.

Skyler had no fucking clue what to do.

Tania and Vanessa, bound and gagged as he was. No sign of Pablo, which gnawed at his already-stressed gut. Pablo would never have willingly left Vanessa’s side. Either they held the man elsewhere or something much worse had happened.

Samantha, behind him, also bound and gagged. No sign of Skadz, though Skyler wasted less worry there. Skadz might simply have decided to stay in Darwin with Prumble.

Given the sorry state of things, only one path seemed the reasonable choice: do whatever the hell Grillo wanted.

Buy time, for himself as much as Ana. He almost chuckled at the sudden realization that the girl was, in the end, still the wild card.

He buried with extreme prejudice the wave of delight and relief that swept through him when Tania’s face appeared before him. It simply would not do to give Grillo any more buttons to push in order to secure cooperation. The slumlord had plenty of those already, whether he knew it or not.

“I assume you all know one another?” Grillo asked, gesturing vaguely with his left hand at the space between Skyler and Tania. He’d pulled a pistol from his jacket and held it lightly against his right thigh.

No one replied. No one could, mouths taped. Grillo went on. “Good. Now, one of you immunes better volunteer to finish this job, or I’ll have no choice but to implement some population control measures.”

Skyler felt his own weight shift to one foot, his body deciding before his brain, ready to step forward before anyone else could. Nobody moved, though, whether of their own volition or taking a cue from him. A heavy silence settled in the long room and Skyler kept his foot still.

Grillo’s right arm raised with mechanical smoothness, the pistol pointed toward Tania, seated a few meters away. She recoiled, shrank away. Vanessa, next to her, remained still, her face a mask.

Skyler stepped forward and grunted as loudly as the tape on his mouth would allow.

The gun lowered.

Skyler felt Tania’s look like the heat of a spotlight on his skin, but ignored it. He took a full, slow stride toward Grillo, placing himself between the man and his two seated captives.

A thin, satisfied smile tugged at the corners of Grillo’s mouth. He stepped up to meet Skyler, then reached and yanked the tape from his mouth in one swift motion. The pain across Skyler’s lips barely registered, masked by the renewed gritty burn across the gouge on his chin as the skin was tugged and separated yet again.

Skyler couldn’t help but wince. Couldn’t help but notice the flicker of sadistic ecstasy in Grillo’s otherwise placid face. Skyler met the gaze, stared it back into the dark corner it had emerged from. “This isn’t going to work, you know,” he said.

“Your problem, Skyler, is that you lack faith.”

“Not true. I have faith this isn’t going to work.”

Grillo clacked his teeth together. “A comedian, are we?”

“You’ve got me there. I’d probably make a great zealot if it weren’t for my sense of humor.”

A crease formed across Grillo’s forehead, halfway between his eyes and his greasy, perfectly combed hair. A flash of redness on the skin there, too. “You don’t know me very well, Skyler. Miss Rinn does. She could have warned you against talk like that if she hadn’t been censored herself.” He let the words settle, then lifted a radio to his lips. “Shoot one of them,” he said. “Skadz …” He trailed off, looking for some flicker of recognition in Skyler’s face.

Whether he found it or not, Skyler couldn’t tell. The news that Skadz was here somewhere almost didn’t register, not right away. When it did click into place, Skyler had no idea what information, if any, his expression had given away.

Grillo nodded. He’d learned something. “Belay that,” he said. “The other one. Vaughn.”

The name meant nothing to Skyler, but Samantha suddenly howled beneath the tape on her mouth and thrashed against the man holding her. Another guard had to step in and help restrain her.

“That’s not necessary,” Skyler said.

“Oh it is, it is. I don’t make empty threats. Ever.” He spoke into the radio again. “Once in the heart, then dispose of the body. Confirm, please.”

The sounds of Samantha’s anger-fueled struggle filled the stark silence that followed. Eventually she stopped.

Grillo held Skyler’s gaze for a long moment before that worry line appeared across his forehead again. “Confirm, please,” he repeated into the radio.

No response came. One of the Jacobite guards shifted uneasily in the otherwise absolute stillness within the room.

Grillo dropped the radio to floor and stamped down on it with one swift strike of his heel. Bits of plastic and metal skittered across the floor. A strand of hair drooped across the man’s forehead. He brushed it back with the side of his pistol with only partial success, some composure returning to his face in the same motion, as if a switch had been turned off. Still, he drew his breaths through clenched teeth, eyes fixed on the broken remnants of the radio.

No one spoke. They were, Skyler realized, as shocked at the outburst as he was. Grillo teetered on an edge.

“You,” he said evenly to one of the guards not shadowing a prisoner, “go check on them. And you, follow him. Pull the ladder in and only lower it if he returns. Clear? Go right now, quick as you can. The rest of you hold this room at all costs. No one gets inside the temple, understood?”

The men nodded in unison and began to spread out, taking cover positions on both doors.

“Enough conversation,” Grillo said. “Any more distractions and Dr. Sharma here will join Kelly Adelaide in the afterlife. Do I need to prove my mettle in this regard, Sam? Or will you vouch.”

Skyler glanced over his shoulder at Sam. Her gaze met his, and she nodded once. Kelly was dead, and apparently for the simple reason that Grillo had needed to prove his sincerity.

The ball of ice inside Skyler’s chest turned into an avalanche, spreading through his veins until his entire body seemed to realign into a machine finely tuned for one single purpose.

Kill. This. Man.

Grillo shrugged. “Now that we’re all on the same page, it’s time. Warthen, Larsen, you and your men with me. Weck, organize the female prisoners in the center of this chamber. Let them shoot through that if they want to reach us.”

He turned then, and climbed the ladder to the portal high on the side of the room. Alex Warthen followed, robotic in the way he shadowed his new boss.

The younger guard, Larsen, fell in behind Skyler and helped him up the steps. At the top, Skyler found another ladder leading down. Warthen waited there, and with a strong grip at Skyler’s elbow, helped him through and down to the key room floor, which rippled with lines of cold, blue-white light.

Beside the base of the ladder lay a pair of nylon sacks. Skyler could see hints of shimmering light through the material. One blue, one yellow.

“Bring those,” Grillo said, then turned and strode purposefully along the immense, cylindrical room without looking back.

In zero-g, Skyler had thought of the room as a tall silo, with ten sides. But the spin-induced gravity forced him to shift his perspective once again. The room had become a long tube, at least a hundred meters from tip to tip, and twenty meters in diameter.

Skyler, guided solely by the viselike grip Alex Warthen had on his elbow, fell in step behind Grillo. The floor—perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not—was one of the two sections that still awaited a corresponding object to be installed. Directly above him he saw the purple, vaguely hourglass-shaped object recovered in Ireland, still resting in its form-fitted receptacle. Following the circle clockwise, Skyler noted the red object, circular with a half-moon-like chunk missing from the top, found just east of Belem. Counterclockwise, he saw a new object. This one had a triangular shape, one tip squared off. It glowed in a soothing emerald.

The object that Tania, Vanessa, and Pablo had gone after. He wondered where they’d found it, and where Pablo was. Awaiting their return in Belem, most likely. Bringing him along here would have been logistically difficult, no doubt, and really why would they have?

Skyler pushed the thoughts away and renewed his focus. Two objects still needed to be installed. Grillo had both, and the majority of known immunes at his disposal to do the work. Refusal would serve no purpose. Skyler would say no; Grillo would shoot Tania. Then Sam. Then Skadz, if Skadz yet lived and was still captive. Then Vanessa. By then he’d probably find Ana, too. One of them would speak up, offer to do the deed, for the simple reason that none of them had any bloody clue what was going to happen.

As far as Skyler was concerned, whatever the Builders had to offer might well be something he’d gladly let Grillo have all to himself. A case of the clap if there was any justice. No point in sacrificing anyone until they knew.