Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

The gunshots echoed against the stone after the men had exhausted their ammo. Through billows of swirling, eye-stinging smoke she saw them lower their arms. Elias eyed her and said, “What’d he do?”

Nevaeh stood and gazed back toward the rooms. Ben was just entering Sebastian’s room. She said, “I don’t know.”

Elias nodded and moved forward. Nevaeh grabbed his arm and stepped in front of him. She inched ahead, gun raised. When they reached the last of the light, where she’d pegged Creed, she broke a candle from its wax moorings. It pushed the darkness away, revealing blood glistening on the floor. A wide smear ended in a single handprint. A few feet farther, a thick ribbon of it snaked away. They reached the end of the corridor, where it joined another passage, running left and right. The blood continued down the left passage, as she knew it would: it led to the nearest exit. She held the candle to the wall. Creed had left a bloody handprint.

“Where’d you get him?” Phin said.

Nevaeh shook her head. She squatted again and held out the candle. The blood trailed into the darkness, drizzled near the right-hand wall, as though Creed needed its support. She thought of the many hunting expeditions she’d been on, how animals rarely fell where they’d been shot. More often, they ran-sometimes for miles-until finally succumbing to the blood loss.

A flashlight beamed past her, illuminating the passage’s limestone walls far past the candle’s reach: more blood, but no Creed. Jordan stepped beside her with the light. He also held a revolver, big in his small hand.

Five shots, she thought. I fired five times. Her small Beretta held nine, leaving enough to bring him down-if she caught up with him. She took the. 357 from Jordan and handed it to Elias. Then she grabbed the flashlight and pushed Jordan back. “Go back to your room,” she said. Then the three adults went after Creed.

Nevaeh, Elias, and Phin returned fifteen minutes later. They found the others in Sebastian’s room. Jordan and Alexa sat on the cot, with Sebastian lying between them. A wet cloth was draped over his forehead.

Alexa spotted them first and said, “He won’t wake up.”

“Creed conked him good,” Toby said, pushing off the wall. “Did you get him?”

Nevaeh shook her head, and Phin said, “He couldn’t have gotten far.”

“Far enough,” Nevaeh said. They had followed Creed’s blood trail until it tapered to nothing. Either he’d found something to staunch it, or the wound wasn’t as bad as Nevaeh had thought and it had stopped bleeding on its own.

“What I want to know,” came Ben’s voice, “is why you shot at him.”

For a moment Nevaeh thought he’d slipped into an invisibility suit, but then the fighting chair rotated and there he sat, glaring at her.

“None of us is a prisoner. We are all free to come and go. That’s the way it’s always been.”

“Not when he’s talking about stopping us,” Nevaeh said. “Not when he knows our plans. Anyway, I didn’t shoot until I saw Sebastian on the floor. Stop grilling me.” She glanced around at the Tribe-the eight of them remaining, she thought achingly. Their faces reflected both sadness and anger-at Creed, not her, she hoped.

Ben stood and leaned against the edge of the shark-fishing workbench, turning a reel in his hand, pretending to examine it. He said, “It would be nice to know that you aren’t going to shoot me someday when I step out for air.”

“Don’t knock anybody out on your way, and I won’t.”

Ben headed toward the cot, passing Sebastian’s computer-laden workbench. Nevaeh’s heart skipped a beat at what she saw there. She strode to the bench and picked up the black soda can with the glass dome. The dome was shattered, and the chip it had displayed was gone. She waved it at Ben, scattering bits of glass across the floor.

“Creed took the chip.”

Ben instantly looked sick, which told her more than words could.

She said, “He can convince authorities of our intentions with it, can’t he?” She went to Sebastian and leaned over him. “Sebastian!” She slapped him.

Jordan grabbed her arm, and Alexa said, “Don’t! He’s hurt!”

Nevaeh shook her arm free and slapped him again. Sebastian moaned. His eyelids rose a bit.

“Sebastian!” She held the top of the can toward him. “Creed took the chip!”

His lids fluttered and stayed open. He put his hand to his forehead and pulled off the cloth. “What happened?”

“Creed clobbered you,” she said. “He took the chip and left. How bad is it?”

He moaned again. “I woke up, and he was at the workbench. I said something and he rushed me. That’s all I remember. Headache, but I’m okay.”

“Not you,” Nevaeh said. “How bad is his taking the chip? What does it mean to us?” She snapped her head around to address Ben. “Even if he doesn’t use it to alert the authorities, we’re down one drone. Sebastian’s simulation says we need them all.”

“No,” Sebastian said, his voice barely audible. “Without even a single chip, we’re dead in the water. They talk to each other, like a net over the entire fleet. It’s a safeguard to prevent hijacking one. Nobody has the resources to grab the whole lot… that’s the thinking, anyway.”

“So it’s either all or none?” Ben said.

Sebastian nodded.

Nevaeh leaned a knee against the edge of the cot and hung her head. “Does Creed know that?” she said.

“He was in here yesterday, asking about how it all works.”

“And you told him?”

He stared at her as though a third eye had just appeared in her forehead. He said, “We’re… family.”

She straightened and turned to Ben. “I’m not letting go,” she said. “It’s our only chance to do this. We were made to do this. What if this is it? Our ticket home? We have to go after him.” She looked at the others.

Phin and Toby nodded. Elias was Elias: leaning back against a wall, one leg cocked up and his foot on the wall. He was rolling a cigarette, licking the paper and pushing it down. He stuck it in his mouth and lit it, then squinted at her through a cloud of smoke and nodded. All eyes turned to Ben.

Ben looked at each of them in turn, then at the floor for a long time. Finally he nodded. “Creed wants to stop us. Not once, but forever. It’s not just this project…”

“Not-” Nevaeh started, intending to reiterate the importance of this one strike and how long they’d been planning.

But Ben held up a hand to stop her. “With that chip, he can raise an army-quite literally, an army-to stop us, to find us. It’ll be the end, and not the way we had hoped.” He turned away and seemed to speak to himself. “Hoped… for so long, so long.”

“Okay, then,” Nevaeh said. “Where’s he heading? How do we find him?”

Ben paced back past the workbench, running his hand over its surface. “He’ll seek help,” he said. “Sean, maybe.”

At the name, Nevaeh’s stomach cramped. She’d spent years forgetting him, and now she wanted to deny Ben’s logic. But she couldn’t; he was right.

“Sean?” Phin said. “Why?”

“They’re allies now,” Nevaeh said. “On the same side. Sean will know how to best use the chip and Creed’s knowledge against us.”

“But how can Creed reach him?” Toby said. “ We don’t know how.”

“One of the Keepers,” Ben said. “They’d know. Plus, they’d give him shelter.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Phin said, pointing at Ben. “A Haven.”

Set up millennia ago, Havens were safe houses designed to give them shelter from anyone wishing them harm. Anyone, including their own kind. Originally, they were established as part of a truce between the Tribe and a group of former Tribe members-a group their leader, once called Gehazi but now known as Bale, half jokingly called the Clan. Bale disagreed with the Tribe’s targeting of only “sinners,” people who abused the privilege of life by hurting others; he was bent on causing destruction, of taking his pain and anguish out on everyone.