High Flyer - Michelle Diener Page 0,46

he guessed she was on the other side of the large central space where the lander was parked, in one of the big communal buildings.

It would make sense their medbay was on that side.

Darkness came early in the Spikes. The steep sides of the mountains made it difficult for the sunlight to penetrate.

He would have to wait until the light was lost, and he could move about easier, without being seen.

Every moment he waited, he risked something happening to Hana, so he would keep watch, as well as he could.

He looked for a good spot to hunker down, turning to the low wall that seemed a strange barrier to erect. It was useless in terms of protection, unless he was missing something, and he wondered why someone would take the time and effort to put it up.

If he got on the other side of it, he could keep low, move around the ruins, and approach the three communal buildings from behind.

He made sure the hut behind him blocked him from view, and then jogged to the wall and vaulted over it.

He felt a strange sense of vertigo as he swung over, and he landed hard on the other side.

He peered over the wall to check he hadn't been seen and a chill ran over him, pinpricks of cold starting at the top of his scalp, running down his neck and along his arms.

The camp had disappeared.

There was nothing in front of him but rocky ground, with the sharp incline of a mountain in the near distance.

He put both hands on the top of what was now an invisible wall and jumped over it again.

The camp emerged from what seemed like hazy air on a hot day.

He didn't waste time staring. He jumped back again and then leaned against the wall in shock.

Nothing he knew about VSC tech came close to this, except perhaps pinching to the black.

This seemed to be a shield that rendered the area it surrounded completely invisible--not just to scans, but also to the naked eye. It distorted reality, not just making the ruin and the other structures disappear, along with the people, but making the mountain slope look closer, the ground in front of it rockier and harder to traverse.

No wonder the smugglers hadn't found the camp. They'd probably looked right at it and moved on.

And no wonder Lancaster and his friends had tried so hard to stop the progress of the sky lane.

It would have been almost impossible to hide this with the construction teams and surveyors moving all through the area.

As for the reason they were hiding it . . . Iver could understand the massive importance of this. A shield this effective?

The technological implications were staggering.

These people, Lancaster among them, had tried to keep this to themselves. To steal it. And it would be Iver's pleasure to ruin their plans.

Ruin them utterly.

Chapter 18

Hana had the sense they didn't know what to do with her.

There was no place in the camp to hold her prisoner, and she ended up in the infirmary with a nervy medic who kept looking at the man in charge, Bret, as if he couldn't quite believe what was happening.

“Her foot's a mess.” The medic glanced at her as soon as the words were out of his mouth and winced. “I mean . . .”

“Get to the point, Vras. What's the problem?” Bret was staring at her, and unlike the flustered Vras, he seemed to be taking her arrival in stride.

He looked at her with the calm, focused look of a predator sizing up its prey.

She hadn't felt like prey for a long time, but she wasn't herself at the moment.

She would be working on a way to get out of this, if only she didn't feel so weak. So drained.

Her upgrade could no longer make her a faster, sharper version of herself. Not only had it shut down, but something was affecting it. There was a pulse, like a heartbeat, somewhere outside this room and to the left.

It thrummed through her, each thump vibrating in her chest.

She just wanted it to stop, and yet, she didn't dare ask about it. No one else seemed in the least bit affected, and she had the very real sense the less she spoke right now, the better.

If she was lucky, the injury to her foot was causing some of this feeling of debilitation. She didn't want to believe that her current weakness was from having her upgrade neutralized. If this had been