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CHAPTER NINETEEN
Haina
“Coulda, shoulda, woulda, bud. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” Rix said to Zane snidely as we packed up the last of the items we wanted to take from the cabin and loaded them into the rowboat as the sun was finally sinking below the horizon. “We could have just as easily been spotted in the boat out on the water by that drone. At least now, we have supplies, you got some sleep—though it doesn’t seem to have done anything for your mood—and we know they’re coming for us. So we can be ready.”
Zane shot him a look but didn’t say anything.
When Rix and I returned to the cabin after encountering the mother cougar and the drone, Zane was asleep. We relayed the news to Jorik and were halfway through when Zane woke up in the foulest of moods and berated us for staying in this cabin as long as we had.
By the time we were ready to pack up the rowboat and return to the sailboat, we’d all had quite enough of his ranting.
“We have to take another vial tonight,” he told the guys. “That leaves us with two more vials, so nine days today. We wasted two here when we could have been sailing closer to where we need to be.”
“Would you just shut the fuck up already?” Rix said, though it came out more like a growl. “We get it. We know. We fucked up. But what’s done is done. We’re not going to let our guard down anymore. We let the freedom get to our head and ignored our training. But we’re on high alert now. Sir, yes, sir.” He saluted Zane, but only with his middle finger out. I didn’t know what that meant, but the reaction it garnered from Zane said that it wasn’t a kind gesture.
“You have no fucking clue…” Zane murmured, untying the rowboat from where we had it secured to a rock. Jorik began rowing. “No fucking clue what’s going to happen.”
“Goodbye, orgy cabin,” Rix said, waving solemnly at the dark log house hidden in the trees. “Thank you for everything.”
I grinned at him over my shoulder, and he winked back.
That earned us an even rumblier growl from Zane, which we promptly ignored.
We unloaded everything into the sailboat and were heading out of the inlet before the first stars started to wink in the sky. The dark trees around us and the inky water below made the entire world feel even darker, almost like the shadows were closing in. I didn’t like the feeling and tried to keep my eyes to the sky, counting the stars and drawing on their brightness and billion-year-old wisdom to help us get out of this disaster.
Since we’d all slept, nobody felt inclined to retire to the bunk below, so we all lounged around up top on the deck. Zane took the helm and steered back to open water, and I huddled under a stack of blankets with Rix on one side and Jorik on the other.
Soon their hands were making their way up my shirt and down my pants.
It wasn’t long before I was coming, then the three of us retreated down to the cabin and the bed with new sheets and blankets to finish what they started. I wasn’t sure how long we were down in the cabin, probably a few hours, dozing in and out of sleep, making each other come, but I was just coming down from another orgasm when the distant sound of a chopper had me shoving Rix off me abruptly so I could roll out of bed. “Oh NO!”
“What?” Jorik asked.
“Chopper!”
“CHOPPER!” Zane called out from the top deck.
“Fuck!” Rix exclaimed, grabbing his pants from the floor and tugging them on, the same with Jorik.
I scrambled to put on clothes and was just tugging a shirt on over my head with no bra when I heard the first cracking shots of an automatic rifle. They were not from our boat. They wereaimedat our boat.
“Shit! We have the cloaking device on, right?” Rix asked, grabbing two automatic rifles from the table.
“Haina still has a chip in her somewhere,” Jorik said, grabbing a grenade launcher—something we’d found at the cabin—and an automatic rifle. “The device isn’t a faraday cage. It won’t hide her completely.”
“Fuck!” Rix said, climbing the ladder.
I grabbed my bow, a quiver of arrows, and two automatic rifles, then just for good measure, I quickly strapped my dagger sheath to my thigh and put my Yakku blade between my teeth.
When you were fighting for your life, you could really never have too many weapons.
It was hard to see what was happening since the spotlight from the chopper was blinding, but through the haze of bright light, I could spot two ropes swinging from the chopper.
Crap.
More shots rang out into the night. The flash of the guns being shot from the helicopter competed with the spotlight, making it even more difficult to see what was happening. I spied two people inside the chopper through the open door, while there were another two people in the cockpit. But that didn’t mean there weren’t more inside. The helicopter was too far away for me to detect any heartbeats on board.
Zane was steering the boat, but he had one of the rifles Rix had grabbed cocked against his hip, and he was firing off round after round toward the rotors while Rix and Jorik were doing the same.
