The Orphan Army Read online

  Was this a wild dog or a runaway?

  It wasn’t a Stinger; he knew that much for sure. The mutant scorpion dogs all had red eyes. Demon eyes, according to Lizabeth.

  “It’s okay,” said Milo, rising from cover and taking a tentative half step. “It’s okay, girl. . . .”

  The dog—if it was a dog—did not come out of the shadows.

  Milo shifted the slingshot to one hand and used the other to fish in his jeans pocket for a piece of jerky. He always carried a few pieces to chew on. Then he carefully eased between two of the devil’s walkingstick trees and moved cautiously to the edge of the clearing. He held the jerky out as he took another careful step. And another.

  The eyes watched him with what appeared to be great interest, but the dog didn’t come out of the shadows.

  “Here, girl. . . . Come on, girl. . . . Good girl . . . ,” Milo soothed. “It’s okay. . . .”

  The look in those eyes was not openly hostile. He’d seen how a dog looks when it’s ready to pounce. This wasn’t like that at all. These eyes were intelligent, but they were not at all friendly.

  No sir.

  Even so, Milo took another step. The animal fascinated him. If it was a stray, then maybe he could tame it and bring it back to camp. His best friend, Shark, had a dog, a Jack Russell. Milo’s dog had died during the invasion, back when he was six. He hadn’t had any pet since then, and five years is a long time not to have something to love and cuddle and play with.

  The eyes blinked once, very slowly.

  Milo paused. “It’s okay. . . . I won’t hurt you.”

  He took another step.

  The eyes blinked once more, but this time they did not open. Milo stopped and stared as hard as he could into the darkness, trying to make out the dog shape.

  The eyes did not open again.

  After a few more seconds, Milo realized that the dog must have turned away during that second blink.

  He moved over to the spot, but when he got there, the shadows were empty. He unclipped his rechargeable flashlight and shone the light over the ground.

  Nothing.

  Not even paw prints.

  The soft ground was completely unmarked. He pressed his fingers lightly against the dirt and withdrew them. They left a very clear mark.

  So, why hadn’t the dog?

  “Weird,” Milo said to the gloom, and he stood there wondering if he’d seen what he thought he’d seen. A dog with eyes that big would have to be pretty large. The size of a shepherd, or bigger. And yet it hadn’t left a single print.

  He tucked the slingshot into his belt and swept the flashlight beam slowly around the burned clearing. From that angle, he could see inside the grove of shattered holly trees. As he steadied the light, he realized that the trees were not there by accident. There were plenty of holly trees in swamp country, but these weren’t growing in a random pattern. They’d clearly been planted to hide something, and now that something was revealed.

  It was a mound of stones. Orderly and tall. Four sloping sides with a wide base and a narrow top that probably stood at least twelve or thirteen feet high. Or they had before the crashing vehicle clipped off the top. Now the top few feet of the structure lay in a sprawl of cracked and burned stones.

  Milo stared at it in wonder. It was something so odd, so out of place that it caught him totally off guard.

  The ruined structure was . . . a pyramid.

  Stuck into the cracks between the stones were flowers—­all withered now from the heat of the crash—sprigs of herbs, small pieces of old jewelry, and tiny carvings of animals made from various kinds of stone and crystal. There were wolves and bears, owls and snakes. And some animals Milo couldn’t identify. Strange things that looked like centaurs and mermaids and gargoyles.

  All of it was covered in a thin layer of soot.

  “So weird,” Milo said again. But it was more than that. Looking at the pyramid touched some feelings that were buried so deeply in his head that he couldn’t identify them, couldn’t begin to catalog them. They raised goose bumps all up and down his arms. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

  Get out of here, he thought, giving himself an order, knowing that flight was the best thing. Their training protocols for any situation offering even the possibility of danger was simple: Run, run, run.

  Yet he lingered, the flashlight playing over the remains of the pyramid.

  When he finally switched off the beam, the darkness rushed back to fill all of the lighted places. In that darkness, the pyramid became nearly invisible.

  It doesn’t want to be seen.

  The thought came into his head from left field, and Milo grunted aloud at the strangeness of it.

  He thought about the dog eyes—if it was a dog.

  They had watched him from right here, right beside this pyramid.

  The storm clouds, already dark, thickened to blackness.

  Milo began to doubt that he’d seen the dog. There had been no footprints after all. He tried to tell himself that he’d imagined it. That he hadn’t seen any weird eyes. That what he saw wasn’t what he thought. Conflicting and confusing suggestions warred with his memories. And in his instincts.

  He had seen something.

  The dark, however, had taken it away and left no trace.

  The dark does that. Milo knew that for sure.

  And Milo didn’t like the dark.

  It was dark that night when Dad went missing.

  The dark scared Milo.

  A lot.

  It was too easy to lose things in the dark.

  The eyes and the shadow that owned them were gone. That’s what Milo thought. The forest felt somehow different. Still strange, but not as threatening. It didn’t have the kind of vibe he imagined would be there if one of the Bugs were here. Or one of their mutant creatures.

  “You read too many crazy books,” he told himself, then repeated what his teachers told him all the time. “Do your job. Investigate, locate, identify, scavenge.”

  That was the key to survival in this broken world. Find the tech—ours or theirs—and bring it back, so the soldiers and scientists could repair it or adapt it to help in the war.

  Milo crouched by the edge of the crash site and studied the debris. That was another thing he’d been taught: Observe first, touch second.

  He wondered what it would be like to scavenge a hive ship. That would be fascinating, and there would probably be a lot of useful tech aboard. There were seven of them around the world.

  Thunder rumbled far to the east.

  At least Milo hoped it was thunder.

  In his dreams—and Milo dreamed too much and too vividly—that sound was always a bad thing. It was never a coming storm. Not in any natural sense. In his dreams the rumble was low and mean and heavy, and it brought with it a lumbering hive ship. The ship would stop above the camp and hang in the sky like a weapon that refused to fall but instead remained poised to strike. Then it would release the thousands of hunter-killer drones that clung to its keel, and when they had done their damage, then the shocktroopers would come down on the saucer-­shaped drop-ships, firing weapons with each of their four segmented arms.

  Those were not nice dreams.

  Milo hated his dreams.

  Mostly.

  He’d seen a crash site in the dream he’d had last night. It was why he’d veered off from his pod and come this way. At first he was delighted to be the one to find the wreck. Now, as the thunder rumbled behind the trees, he wasn’t so sure.

  But now he saw flashes of lightning far above the darkness. They veined the clouds with red.

  It was only a storm.

  Rain and wind, but not here. Far away.

  He relaxed by one micro degree.

  Then he heard a sound behind him.

  No, that wasn’t right. It was more of a feeling that there was something behind him. He paused, because in moments like that it’s hard to know whether you should whip around to confront whatever’s there,
or turn slowly so as not to provoke something that’s just idling.

  The woods were too creepy and he was too scared, so he leaped to one side, twisted around in midair, and landed in a crouch with his slingshot raised and his mouth opened to yell out for help.

  Milo froze right where he was. In that position.

  There was no lurking Stinger there ready to kill him.

  Nor was there a black bear, an eastern cougar, or even an old swamp alligator.

  No, the thing that stood there in the woods behind him . . .

  . . . was a girl.

  The girl was a stranger.

  And she was strange.

  Small, slim, about his age. Eleven. Maybe twelve. With lots of long pale hair that looked almost gray. Or silver. The ends of her hair danced as if there were a breeze that blew past her but went around Milo.

  She stood in a slanting shaft of sunlight that cut through the thickening clouds. The girl wore a simple cotton dress without pattern or fancy stitchery, but it didn’t look homemade. It looked old, like some of the faded linen Milo had seen in houses his pod had scavenged. Antique cloth, edged with milky white ribbon. Around her waist she wore a simple brown belt of braided leather set with a plain, square wooden buckle. Her legs and feet were bare. Around her neck she wore a chain of copper links that supported a black onyx pendant inlaid with a crescent moon made from carved bone.

  Milo took in these details, cataloging them the way all scavengers are taught. See everything, observe it, store it.

  However, the thing that riveted Milo and kept him standing there, arm raised, mouth open, was her eyes. They were girl eyes in a girl face, but they were the exact pale arctic color of the animal eyes he’d seen staring at him from the shadows.

  Exactly the same.

  Which he knew was impossible.

  That hadn’t been a girl back there a few minutes ago. No way on earth.

  And yet this girl’s eyes were the same color, and they studied him with the same frosty intensity that bordered on hostility.

  Milo realized that his mouth was still hanging open. He closed it, swallowed, then said, “Hey . . . are you okay? I mean, are you lost?”

  The girl looked at him but said nothing. They stood twenty feet apart. A damp breeze blew flower petals and torn pieces of leaves between them.

  “What’s your name?” asked Milo. “Where are you from?”

  Those eyes seemed to drill right through him. It was not the friendliest of expressions.

  “Look,” said Milo, “I won’t hurt you. I—”

  “You, boy . . . ,” she said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Her voice was as strange as her eyes. Soft, with a touch of bayou country French accent. Refined and remote.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Her eyes narrowed quickly into suspicious slits. “And what would you do with my name, boy? Would you conjure with it?”

  She had a girl’s voice but she spoke like an adult. Even her inflection seemed older than her years. Milo had encountered something like that once before, with a kid who had been traveling with a pack of refugees who were all adults. The kid hadn’t been around anyone his own age since the invasion, and because times were so hard, he’d never had the chance to act his age.

  “I have no idea what that means,” said Milo, half smiling.

  His smile was not returned. Instead the girl lifted her chin and looked down her nose at him.

  “Then tell me your name, boy,” she demanded.

  “First, stop calling me ‘boy.’ My name’s Milo. Milo Silk. I’m with the Third Louisiana Volunteers. My mom’s the commanding officer and—”

  “You’re stupid to say that much.”

  “I . . . um . . . why?”

  She looked at him as if he really was stupid. “Because the more people know about you, the more power they have. Everyone knows that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s why I said you were stupid, boy.”

  Being called “boy” was wearing thin on him even with the strangeness of the encounter. The way the girl spoke, the straight way she stood with her head high and chin raised, it was like she thought he was a spitty place on the ground. Like he was not only younger—which he wasn’t—but somehow “less” than she was.

  “Not really sure how that works,” he said, his smile totally forced now. “The Bugs can’t understand English. Actually, they can’t understand any Earth language.” He paused but couldn’t help adding, “Everyone knows that.”

  She glared at him. “Of course I know that.”

  “So,” he said, “you’re not going to tell me your name?”

  Instead of answering that, she snapped, “You’re not supposed to be here. This place isn’t for you.”

  “I know that,” he said, and his words seemed to surprise both of them. With a jolt, he realized that he did know it. There was nothing about this place that felt welcoming to him. No, that wasn’t quite right, and Milo searched his feelings to put a better definition on it. This place wasn’t for him. It was meant for . . .

  For what? For whom?

  He had no answer for those questions.

  The girl seemed surprised by his response. She had begun to say something and stopped, lips parted, a frown line between her brows. After a moment, she said, “Well, good, then.”

  She seemed to be expecting him to leave. Fat chance, he thought. If she was part of some rogue group of scavengers, then Milo didn’t want to lose this crash site. No way. Besides, as annoying and strange as the girl was, he felt bad for her. If she really was with a rogue group, then they would be living very rough. Unless you traveled with a large group that had doctors, teachers, storytellers, and the rest, it was hard to ever be happy. Being happy was one of the things that kept the human race alive despite the hardships and loss. His mom had told him that once, and it stuck in Milo’s mind. He and his friends had a lot of schoolwork—in the field and sit-down—and more than they wanted as far as chores went, but there was always time for playing, hanging out, doing normal kid stuff. Or, as normal as stuff was since the invasion.

  This girl, though, didn’t look like she ever spent a summer afternoon playing make-the-rules-up-as-you-go goofball, or plotting evil master plans for breaking into the food cart to steal some pies, or catching frogs among the reeds down on the riverbank.

  “I didn’t know this place was even here,” he said. “My pod is out on a scavenger hunt. We were told there was a wreck and we came to find it.”

  “Pod?” she asked, clearly confused. “Were you grown from a seed, boy? Are you an elemental?”

  “Um . . . no?” he said, and mentally added “weirdo.” “I’m talking about my training pod. You know, twelve kids and a pod-leader? That’s how everyone does it.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t make any sense.”

  “Neither do you.”

  She looked him up and down. “Is that your aspect?”

  “My what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You know, you don’t make much sense, either. People ever tell you that?”

  When she didn’t answer, Milo pointed to the blackened clearing where the wreckage lay amid tangles of withered grass. “Did you see it come down?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she wrapped her arms around her chest as if there were a cold wind.

  “Did you—?” Milo pressed.

  “You should not be here,” she said, repeating her earlier comment but this time spacing her words out in a clear warning.

  “I know. We already agreed on that. Why do you keep saying it?”

  She took a couple steps to the left, moving toward the very edge of the debris field to where the broken pyramid stood. At first her eyes seemed dreamy and distant and there was the smallest hint of a smile on her lips. Like someone about to see an old friend. Milo turned with her, and he saw the exact moment when she spotted the pyramid.

  She froze as if she’d hit a wall. Her eyes flared so wi
de he could see the whites all around the irises. Her pale skin went dead white, and a small cry burst from her throat.

  “Oh no . . . ,” she breathed. “Spirits of Night . . . how? Noooo!”

  “That?” Milo pointed. “That wasn’t me. It was like that when I got here. I swear.”

  Tears filled the girl’s eyes and began pouring down her cheeks as the first heavy sobs broke in her chest.

  “What is it?” asked Milo, taking a tentative step toward her. “Are you all right?”

  The girl wheeled on him, eyes blazing with sudden heat, lips pulling back from her white teeth. Her hands came up, fingers curled like claws. For a moment Milo was certain she was going to attack him.

  “What . . . have . . . you . . . done?” she snarled, and in that moment, she did not sound like a girl. Or even a girl trying to talk like an adult.

  For just a moment her voice was much lower. Rougher.

  Infinitely stranger.

  Milo took several stumbling backward steps, all the way to the edge of the woods, ready to turn and flee. He was immediately and completely terrified.

  Of a girl?

  Yes.

  Of this girl.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he protested, holding his hands up, palms out. “Believe me, I didn’t do anything.”

  The girl continued to glare at him. Then she whirled and rushed to the pyramid, brushing the stones with her fingertips, searching it with her eyes, looking at the fallen pieces. Then she screamed.

  She screamed so loud the birds leaped from the surrounding trees and fled into the eastern sky.

  The girl staggered back from the pyramid.

  “It’s gone!” she wailed. “Shadows save us all, it’s gone!”

  “What’s gone?” asked Milo. He wanted to go over to her but didn’t dare. She was visibly trembling, and he was afraid that if he moved at all, she’d spook and bolt.

  “The Heart! Sacred Spirits of Night, the Heart of Darkness is gone.”

  “What’s that?”