There was anger in her gaze.

  “They deactivated Timothy,” she said. “Then they launched a missile at the Immortal.”

  “What?” Michael reared back. “That’s impossible. Why would Rolo do that?”

  “To take the throne,” Steve said.

  Michael stared at his older confidant in horror.

  “That’s why Charmer has done this to you, amigo.” Steve ran a hand over the stubble on his head. “Holy shit, they smelled blood in the water and attacked.”

  “What about the Hell Divers?” Michael asked. “What about everyone else on the airship?”

  “The greenhorns probably don’t even know, and the other divers were in Brisbane. If they were alive, they’re stranded there,” she replied. “I’m the only one who knows the truth about what happened, and I’m the only one who refused to swear loyalty.”

  “And that’s why you’re here?”

  Michael fought past the anger and confusion. “Surely Charmer knows you will tell us, even with the threats against those you love, which means—”

  “He wants you to know,” Steve said.

  “Because he knows we can’t do anything and no one will believe us,” Eevi replied.

  FIVE

  “For shit’s sake, keep us steady, Garrett,” said General Jack. “I want a better look at this ship.”

  “Working on it, General,” replied the pilot. He sat in the cockpit, flipping switches and manipulating the cyclic stick and collective lever.

  Thunder rattled the helicopter as it dipped lower over the ocean. Kade sat strapped in with his back to the hull, hands now cuffed. He turned for a better look out the viewports but couldn’t see bloody anything in the darkness.

  Secured in the other seats throughout the troop hold were six knights, plus General Jack. Kade didn’t know the full names of the other men but had heard one of them called Mal, another called Nobu, and a third called Zen. He still didn’t have a name for the knight who had accompanied him for most of his imprisonment.

  That soldier was on his right, wearing the holstered pistol he had taken from Kade, as well as his laser rifle.

  The chopper yawed to the left after hitting another patch of turbulence.

  “Garrett!” the general called out.

  “Doing my bloody best, sir,” Garrett shot back.

  “Do better!”

  The pilot reached out to the dashboard of ancient-looking equipment, flipping chipped plastic switches and tapping controls with iffy interfaces. It felt as if they were keeping this bird in the air with duct tape and baling wire. Hell, the thing had to be 270 or even 280 years old. He was amazed it still worked.

  They flew lower again, rattling like the old jack-in-the-box toy he’d had as a kid. Black waves stretched as far as Kade could see out of the cockpit. It seemed something was down there.

  “Be advised, I got eyes on a small ship,” Garrett announced. “Looks similar to what our scouts saw.”

  It had to be the Frog, Kade thought.

  General Jack peered through the cracked Plexiglas. “Watch out for any antiaircraft,” he said.

  “Copy that, General. Got my eyes peeled, and weapons are hot.”

  Lightning flashed outside the cockpit, illuminating the interior of the troop hold. The knights all sat with their crossbows and rifles cradled over their plate armor. They looked ready for a fight.

  “General, I thought you were going to take me to King Xavier,” Kade said.

  General Jack craned his neck but said nothing, then quickly turned back to the windshield.

  Kade looked past him as the pilot took them down toward the ocean.

  “Keep your distance,” the general said.

  “Roger that, sir.”

  The chopper roared out of the clouds. Kade searched the whitecaps for the Frog.

  “The target isn’t moving,” Garrett reported.

  “You’re sure?” General Jack asked.

  “Positive. It’s anchored off the River Heads public boat ramp.” The pilot flipped a switch that turned on the radio. “Got an incoming transmission from our scouts.”

  “Go ahead with it.”

  The radio crackled with a voice Kade had not heard.

  “Queen One, Queen One, this is Knight Two. Do you copy? Over.”

  General Jack picked up the receiver. “Copy, Knight Two. This is Queen Actual; go ahead.”

  “Sir, we have a unit with eyes on multiple hostiles along the shoreline of River Heads.”

  Kade fidgeted in his seat, trying to hear over the rotors.

  “They must be salvaging,” Garrett said.

  “Good luck findin’ ’em down there. Bloody hell, those broken-down boats are home to a sampling of local wildlife,” the general said with a laugh. Several other knights joined in.

  “We should help them,” Kade suggested.

  That quieted the entire troop hold.

  “Help them?” the general asked. “They’re lucky I don’t ram a missile up their biscuits right now.”

  “Give me the order, and I will,” Garrett said.

  “You don’t understand—none of you!” Kade yelled. “The king didn’t drop that warhead. He was trying to—”

  “To find the Coral Castle so he can add us to his empire in the wastes?” General Jack shook his head. “Not on my watch, mate.”

  “We were searching for help, General.”

  “Shut your mouth,” said the knight next to Kade.

  Kade glanced over, eyeing his pistol on the man’s duty belt.

  “This king of yours,” General Jack said. “You think he’s out there scavenging with his troops, or is he the type of guy to stay on the ship?”

  To Kade, the answer was obvious. The king would probably be out there with the soldiers. But it might be better to play ignorant, especially now that he wasn’t sure whether they were taking him to X or going to blast the Frog to kingdom come.

  “Now you speak,” said the knight beside him.

  “I don’t know,” Kade lied.

  Jack went back to the pilot and said something Kade couldn’t make out.

  A moment later, the bird pulled up, back into the clouds.

  Kade relaxed as they flew away from the Frog.

  Looking over his shoulder again, he noticed they weren’t heading back out to sea, where the Coral Castle was. They were going toward the mainland.

  Kade tensed up again. Maybe they were headed to find the scavenging party. He sat in silence for another ten minutes until General Jack finally returned to the troop hold.

  “Get ready for landing at the Starfish,” he said.

  That was the first Kade had heard the name of the place they were headed. He noted it as he watched the knights cross-checking their weapons. He felt naked without one, but he knew better than to ask. These people were nothing if not cautious.

  “Landing zone looks clear, General,” Garrett reported. “I’ve circled twice.”

  “Circle again.”

  Cautious indeed, Kade thought. He tried to peek out the cockpit windows but saw only the storm on the horizon.

  The chopper made another circle before finally descending. It set down with a jolt.

  “Okay, let’s move!” General Jack boomed over the roar of the twin turboshaft engines.

  Two soldiers went to the door and slid it open before hopping out into the darkness. Keeping low, they moved away with their crossbows up.

  The knight with Kade’s weapons started to put the bag over Kade’s head again, but the general stopped him. “Too dangerous,” he said.

  “General, all due respect, but the Forerunner said—”

  “The Forerunner doesn’t have to fight monsters, Lucky.”

  The knight stuffed the bag away in his vest and gestured for Kade. “Let’s go.”

  “Your name’s Lucky?” Kade asked.

  “I said let’s go.” The anger in his voice was impossible to miss.

  Kade jumped out onto the cracked runway and moved away from the chopper. With his night-vision optics offline, he relied on the lightning to see. The sporadic flashes lit up a passenger plane, its fuselage split in half on the broken asphalt.

  “Stay close,” Lucky said. “There are things that live in the dark here.”

  “You don’t say,” Kade muttered under his breath, not that the knight could have heard him over the beat of the rotors. The draft gusted against them as they hurried away.

  Lucky shouldered the laser rifle he had taken from Kade. They kept near the front of the formation. General Jack stayed in the middle, cradling a drum-fed submachine gun with a suppressor on the barrel.

  The Sea King lifted back off. With no running lights, the hulking machine blended into the dark storm above them.

  The team double-timed it toward destroyed hangars across the airfield. Lightning forked over the rubble, capturing several of the collapsed structures, which looked like turtle shells.

  The knights picked up speed. Kade tried to keep up, but his ankle hurt, and the handcuffs made running awkward. He scanned the hangars ahead and noticed something new: a fence that somehow was still standing. Not your usual chain-link affair, either. This was made of steel and stood at least ten feet high, topped with metal spikes and coils of barbed wire. This wasn’t just an airport. Kade had a feeling this was a base of some sort. They had kept it up, securing the perimeter with the fence.

  The knights opened a gate in the fence that surrounded the destroyed hangars, and waved everyone forward. Ahead, Kade saw something with a tiny red light, rotating on a pole.

  A camera, he realized. It followed them as they went to the rubble that was once used to house airplanes. Sticking out of one of the mounds was an airplane wing. The knights ducked under it and then into what looked like an excavated tunnel.

  “Watch your step,” Lucky said.

  Kade reached out with his cuffed hands to hold on to Lucky’s shoulder as he entered a pitch-black staircase that went underground. A beam came on, lighting up the stairs that seemed to have no end. They went down six or seven flights.

  At the bottom, the knight on point stood sentry outside an open blast door. Lights were already on inside. Kade followed the others into a large chamber where three more Sea King helicopters sat in various stages of repair.

  “Bulldozer, you here?” shouted Lucky.

  “Who’s the new bastard?”

  The voice came from above, and all the knights looked up at a man lowering toward them in a harness. He wore a welding hood and armored knee and elbow pads.

  “The hell you doing up there?” asked General Jack.

  “Fixing the door so Garrett can land. It’s gonna be another hour before I get it open.”

  “An hour?”

  “You didn’t give me much warning you all were coming,” Bulldozer said.

  His heavy black boots hit the ground with a thud. The man was short and stocky and didn’t appear to be a soldier like his comrades. He glanced up at the ceiling. “Damned track is off. Can’t get her to open all the way.”

  “Hurry that shit up,” the general said. “We’re wasting fuel.”

  “Tell Garrett to put down at the Crab Nest. I checked; it’s secure.”

  “And risk being seen? You been down here in the dark too long, mate.”

  “There are more hostiles out there, Bulldozer,” Lucky said. “Allies of his.”

  He jerked a thumb toward Kade, but Kade was hardly paying attention. He continued to stare around him in awed silence.

  If he hadn’t gotten up close, he would never have seen the fence around the hangars. From any distance, this place looked destroyed and abandoned.

  “Come with me,” said Lucky.

  Kade followed him across the subterranean hangar to a door on the other side of the three helicopters. The knights settled in, placing their weapons against the wall and drinking from their water bottles.

  Lucky led Kade to the door that opened to a small barracks furnished with bunks, crates, and shelves stocked with jars of food and jugs of water. He checked the jars and found pickled fish. Other jars were marked Seaweed.

  An adjoining room served as a command center. Lucky flicked on the lights over a dozen monitors displaying feeds from this compound.

  “Have a seat,” Lucky said.

  Kade found a metal chair.

  Lucky stayed at the door so he could keep an eye on Kade and still watch the chamber.

  “How long we staying here?” Kade asked.

  No response.

  At the click of approaching footsteps, Lucky moved from the door to let the general into the room. Kade rose to his feet, but General Jack motioned for him to remain sitting. He removed his helmet and set it on the adjacent table. Then he grabbed a chair and pulled it over so they were face to face.

  “I’m going to ask you a few questions, and you’re going to answer,” he said.

  General Jack leaned in and stared at Kade. “You got a family?” he asked. “Or anyone out there waiting for you?”

  Kade looked down.

  “He asked you a question,” Lucky said. He moved over and glowered at Kade, who looked right back at him.

  “A man with a family can be a dangerous thing when he’s trying to get home,” General Jack said. “Then again, men can be dangerous no matter what.”

  “Mine’s gone,” Kade said. “Been gone awhile.”

  Lucky seemed to soften some, judging by his less-stiff stance.

  “Sorry for your loss,” said the general. After waiting a beat, he asked, “How long has your king been king?”

  Kade wasn’t sure he wanted to answer that either.

  “I’m not your enemy. Neither is King Xavier. You have to believe me, I—”

  “You’re a prisoner,” Lucky said. “The general is talking. You listen, and you answer his questions.”

  General Jack frowned. “Leave us.”

  “Sir?” Lucky asked.

  “I said leave us.”

  Lucky strode off and shut the door a bit hard, perhaps.

  “The Coral Castle exists because of men like him, so while he’s a bit rough around the edges, he’s an important sentry along the ramparts,” the general said. “Same with the Forerunner. He’s been around a very long time, and while I don’t agree with everything he orders, I follow those orders because those orders keep us alive.”

  “I understand orders all too well,” Kade said. “I also understand men like Lucky. We have several like him.”

  “Hell Divers?”

  “Yes.”

  “So riddle me this.” General Jack leaned forward again. “The Hell Divers and King X were not originally part of the Cazador Kingdom at the Metal Islands; is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Kade said. He feared that telling them what had really happened would make him even more of a target. It might make these knights believe the sky people had invaded the Metal Islands; killed the king, el Pulpo; and taken over. But it was far more complicated than that.

  “I need to understand the history,” Jack said.

  Kade didn’t see a good way to do that, because history made them look like conquistadores. How could he justify King Xavier’s alliance with the Cazadores? Brutal warriors known for hunting and kidnapping survivors by baiting them in the wastes and then eating them.

  Sure, King Xavier had killed their leader, but there were still soldiers in the ranks responsible for heinous crimes.

  Maybe there was a way, though . . .

  Kade cleared his throat. “My people lived on an airship that took off from Australia during the collapse,” he said. “We traveled the globe for hundreds of years until I led a team of Hell Divers to the surface and discovered a promising message. That message led us to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.”

  He spent the next few minutes describing what had happened to his family, and his time imprisoned there. Finally, he got to the part where his people were rescued by Michael Everhart and a team of Hell Divers who defeated the machines.

  “It was Hell Divers who ended the threat of the defectors,” Kade said. “King X was one of the most legendary divers before he became king, and he risked a lot to bring more survivors from around the world back to our home.”

  “This home—you have yet to tell us where it is.”

  “And I won’t,” Kade said. “I’ll protect it just as you have protected the location of your home.”

  “I see . . .” The general leaned back, taking it all in. He promptly stood and walked over to the supply crates. “You hungry?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I could eat.”

  The door opened, and Lucky stepped back inside the underground hangar.

  “Bulldozer thinks he fixed the door, and Garrett is about to land,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll be right there.”

  Grinding sounded in the distance. General Jack tossed Kade a sealed pack of something freeze-dried. He caught it in his bound hands.

  “Hope you like bananas. You guys got those back home, right?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” Kade said. “Thanks.”

  As Kade crunched down on the first delicious bite, the grinding noise morphed into a whine, followed by clattering, then shouting.

  Getting up from his chair, Kade moved over toward the door and looked up at the retracting ceiling. Sparks shot out from one of the wheels rolling along the tracks overhead.

  Lightning flashed far above, its blue glow capturing the frame of the Sea King helicopter. Garrett held the position, hovering and waiting to touch down.

  But something seemed to be wrong.

  Bulldozer used a harness connected to a pulley system to raise himself toward the grinding wheels. On the ground, the knights and the general waited, watching. The huge overhead door opened about a quarter of the way before jolting hard and stopping altogether.

  Indistinct shouting came from all directions.

 

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