The Scarlet Empress Read online

  The pirate lord himself was nowhere to be seen, but Cino shouted instructions, his voice all but drowned in the chaos as he orchestrated the surprise attack, strutting as if he were some sort of god.

  Hatred like she’d never known welled up inside Bree, black and thick, and tinged with utter terror. You bastard. Cino had betrayed them—and had brought wreckers along for insurance! Barring a miracle, it meant she was as good as dead.

  Chapter Four

  A hand landed on the back of Bree’s head. “Go!” Ty commanded.

  “Wait, I need my—” She was going to say rifle, but it was out of reach, hanging from the hook by the bed.

  “No,” Ty barked, and shoved her. Her nose bounced off the mattress, making her eyes water. A smudge of blood proved just how forcefully in his fear Ty had shoved her to safety.

  After using all his ammo, he tossed his empty rifle to his left hand, reaiming with a loaded pistol with the right while Bree scrambled to find a weapon, any weapon.

  Ty’s pistol shots rang out. A couple of sharp, abbreviated screams told her he’d scored hits on pirates. There wasn’t much he could do about the wreckers. More shots blasted all around. Chunks of plaster exploded and shards of wood whistled past. Another grunt of pain signaled a hit.

  On her belly in the midst of it all, and against every sane cell in her body, Bree combat-crawled off the bed. It was exactly what they’d planned, if this were to happen: Ty would cover her escape. You’re too important to lose, Bree. No matter how many times they’d argued over it, Ty’s reasons won out. But hell if it didn’t go against everything in her training to leave him. She knew he could take care of himself; he was an ex-SEAL, smart and physically powerful, but she hated it, both from the heart as a woman who feared for her guy, and as a warrior who didn’t believe in turning tail and running.

  Your plan had better work, Ty, because every time we talked this through, I was supposed to have had a freaking weapon in my hand! Instead she was under attack and unarmed. And there were wreckers in the game. Of all the potential consequences she’d expected to befall her, this one was the worst.

  Bree slithered over the floor. Her weapons belt lay where she’d thrown it in her little striptease. Her hand closed over it. A huge shadow appeared over her, and a wrecker’s black boot kicked the belt from her fingers.

  Then the monster tossed her out of its way like so much trash as it made its way toward Ty and the center of the fight.

  Shock delayed the onset of pain for a couple of blessed seconds, but when it hit, she almost passed out. The heavy, armored boot had snapped her wrist bones like toothpicks. The fracture launched sensory explosions up her arm. Agony dizzied her for a moment; then the exquisite burn brought extreme mental clarity. The wreckers’ cybernetic body armor, matte black plates covering their bodies and half their faces, was surgically attached. What kind of person chose to permanently damage their bodies this way? No one with any humanity left; she was certain of that.

  They don’t care if they hurt you or not. It was bad news. Real bad. Soldiers, at least, had a code of honor. Brigands—and mercenaries—were in it for the profit.

  The question was: Who was doing the paying?

  Thunder raged outside. Wind blew in the rain. It splashed through the window and pelted everything. The floor was slippery, and her knees slid sideways. She swung her head around, searching for another weapon, and found her dagger almost by accident. She dove for it. Razor blades of pain sliced up her arm from her wrist. She couldn’t feel the hand. It had gone numb. The wrist was already horribly swollen, the skin darkening from the pooling blood underneath. She grimaced, her stomach rolling. Don’t look at it. There was a reason she’d never considered med school.

  She gripped the dagger left-handed and started climbing through the open window. She’d make a run for it, get Ahmed—if he was still alive—and his loyalists to help. Reinforcements were essential.

  The fight raged on behind her. “Save yourself, Bree.”

  She swallowed hard. Sorry, Ty, but I just can’t do that. It went against everything she was.

  She turned around in time to see him, clearly out of ammo, leaping off the bed to take on his attackers. Viciously he whipped the butt of his weapon upward. Struck under the chin, a pirate flew backward. The next in line got the rifle butt in the gut and doubled over. Spinning about, Ty took out the man lunging at his back. He was putting up a good fight, but with four wreckers waiting for a piece of him, how much longer could he last? From behind a pirate lunged at Ty, an iron bar in his raised hand. Bree didn’t think. She reacted. She hurled her dagger, and it sank deep between the pirate’s ribs.

  The man screamed and went down, pulling out the knife as he fell. Blood spurted onto the wet teak floor. Boots smeared the gore around like some kind of macabre watercolor painting. A wrecker grabbed Bree by the hair, yanking her backward, then propelling her forward to the floor. Her kneecaps skidded over the grass mats, abrading her skin. She tried to cushion her fall with her injured arm before remembering to tuck it close to her chest.

  “Bree!” Ty’s expression was raw. Two attackers jumped him before he could get to her. He took out the first with a roundhouse kick. Then the huge shadow of a wrecker loomed over him. The hulk punched Ty in the jaw and sent him flying backward. He landed hard, skidding across the floor. And he didn’t get back up.

  “No!” Bree fought to reach him, but the wrecker holding her like a pull toy dragged her backward.

  Ty stared at her, his eyes dazed, half-open slits. Blood dribbled from his slack mouth. Then his eyes began to slowly close. The promises they’d made tonight, all the good things they’d hoped for in their future, winked out in his eyes one by one like fading stars. Then his body shuddered and went limp.

  “Ty,” she whispered on a choked sob. It felt as if her heart had been ripped in half. “Help him!” she screamed. “God, someone help him, please.”

  The pirates turned to her then, their expressions terrifying. A wrecker stood behind her, fist wrapped in her hair. Forced to bow in her T-shirt and panties, she quivered with grief and shock and rage. Pain from her injured wrist slammed her in relentless waves of agony. Would they rape her before beating her to death? Or would it happen the easy way: a bullet in the back of the head?

  Yet none moved toward her. Several pirates lifted Ty’s limp body and carried him from the room. The cottage smelled of sweat and alcohol. Men milled around her, acting in their wandering inefficiency more like the brigands they were than an organized military force. But it didn’t matter who’d paid them for this; she blamed the UCE. Every event in the long chain that led them to this point had originated there. She and Ty never would have been on this raft if not for Central’s imminent rebellion. She’d hoped to figure out from the Voice of Freedom if she could help the cause the way he thought she could. Now, in one horrific instant, everything changed. Ty was hurt, maybe dead. The revolution had just become personal.

  She was part of it now, part of the rebellion, ready to fight for as long as it took, even if she never heard another word from the Voice or anyone else. If Ty had sacrificed his life for freedom, by God, she’d spend every last minute of hers making sure it wasn’t in vain.

  A pair of black-clad legs stepped in front of her. “Look at me!”

  The wrecker with his fist wrapped in her hair jerked her head back, exposing Bree’s face to Cino’s harsh glare. “You bastard,” she choked out.

  Cino backhanded her. Fire exploded in her head, for a moment rivaling the agony in her wrist and hand.

  With blood dripping from her nose, she regarded him almost serenely. She felt different inside. Not dead. Different. When Ty went down, it had changed something deep inside her. She’d become confident. Strong. She’d become Banzai Maguire.

  Cino broke eye contact first, as if she frightened him. “Get her to Elliot—now,” he ordered his men.

  She searched her brain for the name and came up empty. “Who’s Elliot?”

&n
bsp; Cino stared at her as if he couldn’t believe she’d dared ask him another question. “You might say he’s somewhat familiar to most here in these seas.”

  The men guffawed.

  “The only thing that matters to you is that Elliot plans to trade you to the UCE.”

  The UCE. Good. That was where she needed to be. The heart of the revolution. They were handing her over—alive. On the downside, it meant that somewhere, someone had their hopes set on handing her a fate worse than death.

  Cino smirked at her. “One pilot down. One to go.” Then he walked out into the night.

  The chill inside her turned to ice. One to go? Now that they were finished hunting her, they were going after Cam.

  Chapter Five

  Demon hands plucked at Lt. Cam Tucker’s body. Merciless, relentless, they jabbed and pulled her muscles and bones until she reverberated with agony.

  “Cameron . . .”

  The demons paused in their work. Someone had called her name. Who?

  “Mama?” The voice was broken, whispery, like a very old woman’s. Cam didn’t recognize it as belonging to her mother, but she knew better.

  “Cameron.”

  “Here,” she whispered. Yes, I’m here. I’m alive.

  Only she wasn’t sure she wanted to be. The demons were back at work, this time attacking her skin, their nails scraping and slicing while they played tug-of-war with her hamstrings. Cam pressed her lips together to keep from howling.

  Someone stroked her hand. There was compassion in that touch, understanding of the pain ripping through her. “I’m sorry I’m not your mama.” The high, sweet voice faded in and out. “But I will take care of you. I promise.”

  “Who . . . ?” Cam couldn’t remember who the person was, couldn’t even finish the sentence.

  The hand squeezed gently. “They call me Zhurihe. . . .”

  Zhurihe. Sure-ruh-hey. She remembered now. It was the voice Cam had heard since the darkness had lifted—and even before she was fully aware, floating . . . floating in nothingness until gut-wrenching pain had thrown her ashore. If that was what it felt like to be born, I’m glad I don’t remember the first time.

  Cam made the mistake of trying to shift positions in bed. Needles pricked her body through the mattress, joining forces with the demons that battered her day and night with their sharp, cloven little hooves. She forced her eyelids open with all the smoothness of prying a top off a rusted can. “Hay . . .” she croaked.

  “Zhurihe,” the girl corrected patiently.

  No. Hay, Cam wanted to tell her. Straw. Where was she that there was so much hay? High over her head motes of hay dust floated in the sunshine pouring through cracks in the wooden tepee. A yurt, Zhurihe had called it. So many questions. How would she ask them all? “Tell me,” Cam croaked. “Tell me what happened.” She wanted to hear it again, to hear what had happened to her. Maybe this time it would make sense; maybe this time the tears would stay dammed up until Zhurihe finished with her explanation, telling of unspeakable horrors in that high, lilting, English-accented voice of hers. “It is 2176,” the woman began. “The world has changed. . . .”

  Cam closed her eyes, trying to absorb it all.

  “Nuclear war destroyed everything you knew. It’s been fifty years. There is no modern communication, no electronics. No motorized travel.”

  “America, too?”

  “Yes, everything is gone,” Zhurihe confirmed in a gentle voice. “There is no America, no Europe. No Asia. Only this place. Mongolia. You are here now. You live with us on a farm—a cooperative, a collective farm. These people, they’re my family, though not by blood. We grow many things here. Raise livestock. And we maintain a shrine, a religious shrine, where travelers come to pray and partake of the hot springs. You will share in the work when you are well. We are your family now. . . .”

  We are your family now.

  Zhurihe had told her that over and over. That they were family, that this was her home. That nothing else existed. If Cam could scream, she would. If she could make fists without convulsing in agony, she would. All she could do was close her eyes to slow the falling tears, to get a grip on the pain, the anguish inside and out that held her in a relentless grip. Mongolia . . . It was a long way from Korea. How did she get here? And why alone? Bree, what ever happened to you?

  The ball of sorrow in her chest expanded. The last she’d heard from Bree was on the radio after they’d been shot down. Then Cam had been captured. After that, her captor had done the answering for her, using Cam’s radio to answer Bree with clicks of the mike button, luring Bree closer, to Cam’s outraged, gagged-and-bound horror. They’d been brought to a cave, tied up, and drugged. The next thing Cam knew, she’d woken in this world of pain blunted by a haze of confusion.

  She struggled to make her lips form words. “Must find other pilot,” she whispered. Bree would know what to do.

  “No.” Zhurihe’s answer was sharp. “There are gangs, dangerous gangs. They roam the less civilized areas, which encompass most of the world. Yet here, on our little farm, we are safe, free of radiation.”

  Safe . . .

  Free . . .

  This is your home now. . . .

  A rooster squawked, warning the world of sunrise. Prying one eye open, and then the other, Cam blinked up at a dark, conical, smoke-filled ceiling above her bed. It always took a few minutes to distance herself from the dreams she had of the long, painful days of her recovery. Why did the dreams come every night? Maybe it was her mind’s way of analyzing everything Zhurihe told her. Yet if that was the case, then why hadn’t anything worthwhile come of that analysis?

  Feeling like a ninety-year-old grandma, Cam rolled from her side to her back. Mercy, she hurt. All over. Her bones, her muscles . . . shoot, her damn eyelashes were killing her. She wished she could blame the hay-stuffed mattress, but she knew her daily morning pain was a consequence of more than that.

  It was only bad like this the first few minutes after waking, when she was fixing to get out of bed, not all the time like it used to be. Over the course of the day exercise worked out most of the kinks, but at night the pain settled in again as she slept.

  The bed made crunching noises and sent puffs of dust into the air that tickled her nose and made her sneeze.

  Hay. It was everywhere in the yurt. Cam wrinkled her nose at the powdery sweet odor, the first scent she’d recognized after being revived, and the first thing she’d tasted, felt, and seen after becoming aware. Straw cushioned the dirt floor; it fed the horses and served as bedding. The cloyingly sweet smell filled her nostrils from dawn until dusk, making her nose itch. It found its way into her homespun wool undies, pricking and itching, and it tangled in her hair. If I never see, feel, smell, or taste another piece of hay for the rest of my life, I’ll be the luckiest woman alive.

  More roosters crowed. Dawn meant it was time to accomplish her first chore of the day: milking the goats.

  And she used to complain about early flight briefings? At least no one required her to be mentally alert while tugging on goat nipples. It had gotten to the point where she could milk the herd in her sleep—which was likely to be the case this morning. Her body was not happy after the physical exertion she’d put it through yesterday. Not happy at all. She’d be lucky if she could walk. The people who sheltered her understood little about physical therapy. Yet Cam knew that if she wanted to heal, if she wanted to get strong again, she’d have to force herself through the daily torture disguised as training. She looked at her hands: scratched, chapped, swollen in spots from frequent falls. Those hands had once held the throttle of an F-16. Those hands now milked goats. What would her hands be doing in five years? Ten? Fifty? Did people live that long anymore? Did they want to?

  Once, her hopes and dreams for her life had stretched out like a wide-open country road in front of her. She’d known exactly where she was going, and how she was going to get there; all she had to do was follow the path. Now she couldn’t see much past the tip of
her nose. She hated driving blind.

  “Well,” she whispered to herself, emphasizing her Southern accent, which in truth she’d been losing slowly over time, “it sure don’t matter now, Miss Scarlet, does it?” Scarlet was spelled with a single T because the guys in her fighter squadron who’d given her the call sign and written the name on her helmet hadn’t known Gone with the Wind from the Weather Channel. “Now you milk goats.”

  A one-way ticket to hell—that was what she’d surely bought that day the missile slammed into her F-16. One minute she was running for her life through thick North Korean forests; the next she was here, in a cold, remote, postapocalyptic no-man’s-land. Everything else was one big, fat, useless chunk missing from her memory.

  “I can always tell when you’re thinking about the past.”

  Cam rolled over. A pretty seventeen-year-old girl smiled at her from the adjacent bed. “Zhurihe! When did you get home?”

  “A few hours ago.” Zhurihe gave a distinctive tiny sneeze that ended in a squeak.

  Cam smiled. “Allergies again.”

  Eyes watering, Zhurihe smiled. “They stay with me after I visit certain places.”

  Cam knew better than to ask just where those certain places were, or what she’d done while there. The girl disappeared with no warning for days, and once for weeks at a time. “Mushroom picking again?”

  “Uh-huh,” Zhurihe replied.

  Yeah, right. The girl’s response brought back Cam’s childhood memories of sneaking off to find her brothers behind the old tumbledown tobacco barn. They’d bribed her with Krispy Kremes so she wouldn’t make a peep about catching them chewing and smoking when they were supposed to be off picking blackberries. Cam had a strong feeling that Zhurihe hadn’t been picking mushrooms, that she never was. The girl was a pretty teenager with a baby face and braids that made her look even younger, but something about that face looked mischievous. Cam had no proof, only a nagging feeling that there was a missing piece in the puzzle. Yet it was on one of her supposed mushroom-picking missions that Zhurihe claimed she’d discovered Cam buried under the permafrost, snug in her high-tech casket.