Radiate by C.A. Higgins

Author:C.A. Higgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

FORWARD

The man and the woman led Mattie to a patch of smoking rubble. Perhaps it once had been someone’s home. Now it was nothing but jagged wood teething at the wind, frost settling over their outer layers, embers still lit in their depths. Mattie followed them in, and when they crouched down beneath the scarred wood, he crouched down as well. At first he did not see why they had stopped, but before long another group of strangers came by, packed together, armed, looking around with hard and wary looks. Mattie gripped his useless gun and wondered how many rounds the woman had left. Her lips had lifted in a grin at the sight of the hunting party outside their cover, but her thoughts must have tended in the same direction as Mattie’s, because she glanced toward her brother and then made a quick check of her clip before settling back on her heels to wait for them to pass.

They slipped past without seeing Mattie or his companions, well-armed, heads swinging like wolves seeking a scent. They were not wearing uniforms, or if they were, the uniforms had been so altered and distressed that Mattie could not recognize them. He looked at the passing soldiers, and slowly his vision narrowed. He did not wonder were they System or were they rebel. He looked at them, and he thought, They will kill me if they see me.

They did not see him, and after a time, the other soldiers passed and the sound of their steps was gone.

The woman rose and pressed on.

They traveled for a long way. Mattie kept track of their direction and knew that they were passing through Mara toward Aquilon, and so he stayed with them. The woman and her brother seemed to know the area, and he was not certain what they would do if he tried to leave.

At last the woman turned off the road toward a squat building that sat atop the ice. System, then, but unused; it was burned out, blackened, dark. She ducked inside, out of sight of the road. Mattie followed, his fingers flexing reflexively around his empty gun.

Inside they stood in what had once been a grand antechamber, ruined now by war. A bit of Jovian light glowed a faint and eerie orange from the half-shattered ceiling. When Mattie walked, he stepped on fallen tile. There had been a fire here, but unable to use tile and stone for fuel, it had burned itself out on the furniture.

The woman’s voice echoed oddly through all that broken tile, as if half underwater. “You did pretty good back there.”

She was busily tucking her gun back into its holster, but Mattie was not fooled by her apparent inattention. She had fought to survive; he could read it written on her skin, the way she reacted to the shift of his weight without looking up. He made a wrong move, and she would have that gun up and fired before he could blink.

She finished holstering the gun and looked up at Mattie.

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