Chapter 24

The sounds of war swirled around them and they were some of the worst that she had ever heard. Explosions. Gunfire. Screams. Minho led them through the thickly wooded forest and kept reassuring them that they were still far from the battle, but it seemed right on top of them. He held up his hand to signal something to Orange, and the group came to a stop.

For the barest of seconds she thought she heard Old Man Frypan, rinsing his iron pan with tiny pebbles and stream water, cleaning up after a fresh stew. But the fantasy vanished immediately, and there was only the harsh clanking of metal somewhere beyond the white-barked trees ahead.

"Shhh . . . ," Minho whispered.

The noise grew louder, as if a dozen Frypans had gone from cleaning pans to banging them together. "What is that?" Trish asked quietly.

Sadina's heart thumped hard enough to feel it in her ears, and she pulled the gun from Minho out of her back pocket.

The crack and warp of metal grinding on metal stopped, oddly replaced by a gurgling noise. Garbling. Mumbling.

"Something's there," Dominic said, pointing his knife somewhere straight ahead, but a lot of good that was going to do.

"Minho?" Sadina asked, wanting him to take control like her mom would have, to tell everyone it would be okay, but he remained silent. The wind blew through the bog trees beside them, creepy pine trees that looked like they weren't willing to leave the ground no matter what came after it, be it an ax, storm, or avalanche. They were full on the bottom but skinny all the way to the top, like the sky had grabbed hold and stretched them as far as they would go. Trees that looked like tall weapons themselves. Spears.

Minho shushed them again. He and Orange stood still, listening intently. The rest of the group did the same. Roxy obviously wanted to say something, but she didn't. She just held her long gun tightly in both hands.

"Guys . . ." Dominic broke the silence when the source of the metal clanking came into view.

Cranks.

Six . . . no, eight Cranks chained together in a row came through the white-barked trees up ahead. Like the kind of weird Crank-contraption they had seen on the Berg with those Grief Bearers. They stumbled over roots and smacked their heads into low-hanging branches, but stayed upright, walking closer to Sadina and her friends. They were normal humans, all sexes and ages, but with eyes full of deep emptiness. Soulless.

"Oh shit." Without hesitating, Minho pulled up his gun and started shooting them, one by one. Trish grabbed Sadina's arm as the Cranks fell alone but also together because of the chains fastened around their wrists and ankles, binding them into one fighting force. Before the last Crank in the group of eight fell from Minho's death shots, another fence row of Cranks came trampling through the woods. And then another one. And another one.

"What in the Iblis is going on!" Roxy straightened out her gun and started firing like an Orphan veteran, obviously taught well by her adopted son, but Sadina remained frozen. Gun or no gun, she could only hold Trish and walk backwards from the wall of Cranks coming at them, pushing them deeper into the creepy pine trees. Dominic and Miyoko walked backwards, too. The islanders weren't meant for war and they weren't meant for whatever this Crank-stuff was.

"I told you!" Orange shouted over to Minho as she put down one after another in a line. Two, three, four bodies fell. Sadina watched as Orange, Minho, and Roxy all fired away, the cracks and smoke of gunfire filling the already misty air. Despite the relative ease of picking them off, more and more waves of them were coming, weaving through the trees, stumbling but then dragged upright again by the chains.

The war had come to them, after all. Dammit.

"I told you!" Orange said again. Her gun fired three times in succession, each shot hitting a target. More came.

"What?" Minho asked, clearly annoyed as he reloaded his own weapon.

"How many Cranks need to be tied together and marching toward us before you'll admit there's an underground Crank Army in the Remnant Nation?" She huffed as she shot yet another Crank in the head and skipped a rock into the temple of another one.

Minho refused to take the bait or even look at her, keeping his eyes on the heads of the Cranks he was blasting. "Not much of an army without weapons!"

Orange allowed herself one moment to glare at Minho. "They are the weapons, idiot."

Roxy shot at them with relentless consistency, like it was a hidden talent no one knew about. "She's quicker than both of them . . . ," Dominic said.

He was right, but he was also wrong. Miyoko pointed out the obvious. "No. It's because there's only four or five Cranks on some of her group's chains." Miyoko freaked a little. "Where's the rest of them?" It was as if she'd spoken it into existence, the fact that there were now Cranks on the loose. They appeared out of the nearby bog, crawling on arms that ended in bloody, raggedy stumps, their hands sawed or chewed off at some point. They came anyway, dragging themselves between the pine trees.

"Minho!" Sadina shouted. There were two freed Cranks coming at the islanders but Minho, Orange, and Roxy still had their hands full.

"I'm out of ammo!" Roxy pronounced and moved to the next chain-link fence of Cranks with her knife. Sadina stared in awe at such bravery.

"Minho!" Sadina cried again, squeezing Trish tighter and moving away from the trees.

"Dominic, get it!" Miyoko screamed, pointing at the Crank closest to them. Sadina couldn't process what she was looking at, all this insanity and terror. For the first time since getting separated, she was glad that Old Man Frypan wasn't there with them to suffer such pain and anguish. "Dominic!" Miyoko yelled.

"Stab it in the neck. You can do it." Minho quickly showed Dominic where exactly to stab and slash his blade.

Dom stomped in place like he was going to pee his pants. He gripped his knife then looked directly at Miyoko, then Trish and Sadina and said, "I voted to go home!" And then he charged the Crank crawling at them from the pine trees. He stabbed it in the neck with a war cry like Sadina had never heard. He'd been so loud that it made Minho and Orange stop shooting for a second and turn around. "I got him!" Dom raised his knife in the air.

"Good job," Minho said and went back to holding the line of chained Cranks coming out of the woods. Dom had a renewed strength and went after the next Crank crawling from the pine trees. This time it took two stabbing thrusts to kill it. Sadina let Trish's hand go with a sigh of relief.

Dominic wasn't quite smiling, but a sense of pride had glistened his eyes with tears. In that moment of terror and violence, Sadina realized two things at once: First, Dom didn't have something he was particularly good at like the other islanders, he didn't have a trade to learn and train for on the island and grow into, and even though he wanted to go back home, he really had the least to go back to.

Second, Sadina realized there'd been three Cranks missing from Roxy's chain and Dominic had only stabbed two of them.

And like a tall, creepy, pine tree in the bog, a Crank rose up from the ground and stood behind a proud Dominic. Hovering with horror.

"Dom!" Sadina cried, but her voice shook and it was too late. She watched Dominic's expression change as he realized what was grabbing him. Fear paled his features and a struggle ensued. Miyoko cried out. Trish stepped forward as if to help Dom, then hesitated, then stepped back with a wash of shame swept across her features. And just as panic impaled itself within Sadina, she remembered the gun. She knew next to nothing about shooting the damned things, except the sniper breathing routine Orange and Minho had taught her. "Dom, don't move!" She sucked a long breath into her nose, deep into her lungs, and then she put every fear and all the terror into the exhale, blowing it out through her mouth.

Fear of Cranks.

Fear of Dominic dying. Trish dying. All of them dying.

Fear of every last thing in the world.

She steadied the gun in both hands then blew a bullet through the Crank's head.

Far to the south, where she finally couldn't smell the smoke any longer, she stopped to catch her breath. The Goddess' feet and lungs had never been so spent, so exhausted. She had never run so far, so fast. Alexandra could still hear the explosions and gunshots and the cries of war in her mind, haunting replays of the sounds that had shattered her heart. A ratchety BOOM in the distance shook her, reminded her it was all too real. Flint, her Evolutionary Guard, gone. The Pilgrims. The shops. All overtaken.

Her feet sank into the soft swampy ground, and she tried to remember where Mannus had beached the little boat. It was near a string of birch trees, she peeled the bark while he'd gathered their things. She should have forced Mannus to flee the city with her, why didn't she?

Nicholas. He'd looked too much like Nicholas.

She'd figure it out, recover what she could, perhaps even live on the remote island with the three scientists for a while. Once she told them of the surprise attack, they'd surely understand the raised importance of Culminating the Evolution.

Her shoes and feet were soaking wet, her hands trembled. She shoved them in her cloak pockets. Some Goddess. In her right pocket she felt the spikey bog rosemary that she'd used to poison the rogue Pilgrim. Alexandra pulled out the stems and threw them to the ground. The last thing she needed was to accidentally poison herself. She slapped her hands clean of the spiked leaves and returned them to the warmth of her cloak, only to feel something else. The letter from Nicholas she'd stashed away in stubbornness and spite. Avoidance, not wanting to hear his I told you so's from beyond or whatever the letter held. But she pulled it out now.

She needed to know what he saw that she could not.

What were his last words to her? Had he predicted the war? Had this been a part of his emergency shutdown plan?She took a breath and slowly reached into the envelope that had her name scribbled in Nicholas' handwriting. His penmanship was sloppy as hell—he'd always explained it as his mind moving far more quickly than his hands were able. She thought it showed his lack of control. Her heart raced as she unfolded the letter. She had to remind herself that she didn't need to control her own thoughts anymore—even so, it felt like Nicholas was right there, lording over her. Something rustled in the woods and caused her heart to quicken even more. Her palms squeezed the letter.

A squirrel. Just a squirrel.

Alexandra sighed.

The attack from the skies had heightened her fight or flight senses and there wasn't enough tea in Alaska to calm her nervous system, now. Of course, she'd try with the Flaring Discipline all the same. She returned to the letter, and upon unfolding it saw how short it was. Not even a full page. Did she want a dead man to say more? She was embarrassed by her misplaced disappointment.

The squirrel, the culprit, ran toward her and disappeared up an oak tree.

But behind the squirrel was a man.

He walked with a dreadful, pained scowl worse than any of the faces of death Alexandra had just witnessed in the streets of New Petersburg. Some faces were indeed worse than death. Cranks.

The man emerged from the line of trees and held its arm up, missing a chunk of wrist and two fingers. Alexandra crinkled the letter and shoved it deep into her pocket again. She backed up, looking for a stick on the ground, something, anything, to defend herself with, but it was mostly marsh. Not even a rock to throw. Nicholas was surely taunting her from the beyond.

She walked as quickly as she could between the maze of trees and brush, no choice now but to put her back to the Crank and get out of there. Her foot twisted on a jutting root, but she dodged a swinging punch from the oncoming Crank. She pushed him away and ran, toward a thicker part of the forest, despite the pain lancing up her leg.

She yelled the digits out loud as if to amplify their power.

"1, 2, 3, 5, 8!"

The Flaring Discipline was her only weapon.

"13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 . . ."

Someone in the distance shouted, kept shouting, almost melodic against the distant sounds of battle. It took him a few moments to place in his mind that the voice coming from the trees ahead was reciting numbers. Counting down cannon fire?

He motioned Orange to walk farther west. They didn't have enough ammo for another ambush and needed to conserve energy.

"Trish!" Sadina was next to him and pointed toward the strange voice, almost a chant, now.

Trish stopped walking and listened for a moment. "The numbers." She had a weird look on her face. Something like relief.

Minho glared at them both. They certainly didn't have time for island games. "No. we're going that way." He pointed to the right, west of the noise, but Sadina ignored him and walked in the other direction.

"The Book of Newt had these numbers circled," she said. "Whoever that is, she's chanting the exact same numbers! You're telling me that's a coincidence?"

"13, 21, 34, 55 . . ." Trish counted along with the woman's voice in the background.

"They're the same, I swear!" Sadina turned to Miyoko and Roxy for support.

"Then we should go check it out," Miyoko said.

Roxy shrugged. "Lady sounds innocent enough."

Minho waited to hear a cannon blast, but he didn't. "Fine. But stay behind me and be on guard." He went into stealth-mode, watching each footstep to prevent noise as they approached the crazed voice reciting numbers aloud. She appeared, running frantically at them, a woman with long black hair, wrapped in a wooly yellow cloak. She was being chased by a Crank, probably the last one who'd escaped the chained collectives.

Minho positioned and aimed his gun. "Drop to the ground!"

She slipped instead, sliding right between two trees. Whatever worked. He took the shot.

The bullet landed home, middle of the forehead. The Crank dropped, landing only a few feet from his prey, dead. Minho scanned the tree line for any more loose Cranks. "Did we get them all now?" he asked Orange.

"Hope so." She helped the woman get back to her feet, the odd robe muddied and torn.

Sadina walked right up to her. "Those numbers. What are they?"

The woman just shook her head and straightened her heavy cloak.

Minho pointed his weapon at her. "Tell us everything you know about the Godhead and what's going on up north." The stranger looked at each and every person in their group as if they were apparitions. She stared at Minho the longest, then glanced down at his uniform.

"You're never going to kill the Godhead." She spoke with an unreal confidence.

"Lady, we don't care about killing the Godhead." Orange tossed a piece of tree bark to the side; it was the first time Minho heard her admit she didn't want to kill their lifelong enemy.

"The numbers," Sadina insisted. "What does 1-2-3-4-8—mean?"

"Four isn't a sacred number!" the woman snapped, and Sadina took a step back.

Trish motioned to Sadina's pocket. "Show her the pages that Old Man Frypan circled in The Book of Newt."

"Newt?" The woman perked up as if she'd been shocked with electricity. She limped over to Sadina to see the ratty book that Frypan had given her. Minho exchanged glances with Roxy and Orange. The three of them were more worried about Kletter's captain's log than deciphering some island bible.

"Newt was one of the subjects of the Maze," Dominic said proudly, but there wasn't any way in Flare's hell this woman from Alaska didn't know who Newt was.

"Yes, dear Newt." The woman ran her fingers over the cover of the book. She then eyed Sadina, Trish, and Miyoko with a bit of awe, as if she wanted to touch their faces. "You're . . . you're from the island of immunes." She seemed dreamy, as if a giant battle wasn't taking place in the background. Like she'd gone to an island in her own mind.

"Yeah, we four are," Miyoko said. "They're from—"

Minho cut her a look that said never mind where we're from. He still held his gun in a readied position but had lowered it a little. "We're trying to get to the Godhead," he said. "Any idea how or where they're holing up—"

"I am the Godhead. Goddess Alexandra Romanov." She folded her arms in a way that might have looked powerful if she weren't wearing a bulky, dirty old cloak.

Minho lowered his weapon all the way to his side and motioned for Orange to do the same. She hesitated as if to ask are you sure before following his lead.

He didn't believe this woman was a God. She was wearing a common cloak and she sounded just about as crazy as a Crank. Looked it, too. But she seemed harmless enough.

Trish had a one-track mind. "And those numbers, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . . what do they mean?"

"They're a part of nature, of all evolution. The sequence of life, itself. The Culmination of the Evolution can't be stopped no matter how many wars your people wage on us." She raised her eyebrows at Minho.

"Goddess . . ." Minho started but he forgot her supposed name.

"Romanov." She waited.

"Goddess Romanov . . ." He didn't bother hiding the disbelief in his voice, but he didn't know if he could outright mock the poor woman, either.

Dominic stepped forward, his Crank-killing knife still in hand. "If you're a member of the Godhead, why are you hiding out here in the woods like some loon?" Miyoko elbowed Dominic. "What?"

But Minho had been thinking the same thing. "What good is a God in the middle of a swamp?"

Alexandra cleared her throat. "I was led into the woods and the southern bog for a reason." She moved closer to Dominic and glared at him until he looked away. "We don't always know the reasons for our intuition, but I trusted it enough to find myself here and you found me. The blood of immunes." She straightened out her cloak. "Evolution is brilliant like that." She turned and smiled at Sadina.

Something about her reminded Minho of the Grief Bearers. "Then where are the other two members of the Godhead?"

"They no longer exist."

"Oh?" Roxy questioned.

"I'm the only one left, now. The only God." Alexandra spoke loudly and confidently, but Minho didn't believe the Godhead could just . . . dissolve so easily. Something about this person wasn't settling right with him. Only a devil would destroy the other Gods, at least according to Roxy's Grandpa's story.

"What's your plan, then?" he asked. He couldn't get the sounds of explosions out of his head. Knowing the Remnant Nation, the destruction would be vast. "Your city is being destroyed."

"You're all a part of my plan now." The Goddess smiled at each and every one of them, unfazed by the decidedly mixed reactions. At least Trish and Sadina returned the smile. "We'll continue with the Culmination and we'll Cure the world of the Flare once and for all. It's really that simple."

Minho wanted the Flare gone, of course he did.

The Flare was still his devil.

But something about this woman didn't feel much different.