Heart of Annihilation by C.R. Asay Page A

it was. She sat back. As clear as Retha on a moongrave night. How could her mother have missed it?
    “Look, Xan!” She practically shouted. She couldn’t take her eyes from the blissful harmony of the equation. “It’s not about detonation and expansion of the core, it’s about—”
    “Did you hear me, Caz?” Xander’s voice penetrated her euphoria. “Zak Faras is dead.”
    Voltage erupted from her fingers, overloading the receiver and plunging them into darkness.
    She muttered her most injurious cuss words and felt around on the wall for the reset. Her hand felt the imprint, and a blue light scanned her palm. The receiver lit the wall again, driving black numbers across Xander’s illuminated face.
    “What do you mean he’s dead?” Caz kept her voice cool, calm. She locked eyes with her brother.
    “I mean dead. Fried to a crisp.”
    “Dad takes Azshatath. At the most it would—I mean, come on! It’s never killed anyone before.”
    “That’s because no one would take it unless they had to. Zak didn’t.” Xander stared at her with his most irritating, all-knowing expression.
    She dragged her eyes from him and examined the problem on the wall. Hopefully the overload hadn’t wiped out her alterations. She was in luck. There they were, perfect, harmonious.
    “What a shame.” She coughed into her hand. “Too bad nobody cares a picoamp about a drone like Zak Faras.”
    Xander made a noise in his throat.
    “Look, Xan. Look at this. It’s the piece they’ve been looking for!”
    “Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Zak.” Xander’s voice was quiet and probing, with much more intensity than he usually directed at her. She wished he’d go back to walking on eggshells.
    Caz leveled him a cold stare.
    Xander closed his eyes. When he opened them she saw the retreat. He gave Caz a thin smile, and turned to look at the wall.
    This would finally enable her parents to begin production of the prototype. Now all she had to do was make them see that she was needed in the lab.
    She flicked her eyes away from the equation. Her thumb rotated the ring on her finger.

CHAPTER 9
Rose
    I jerked myself awake. The tips of my fingers touched the ground, keeping me from falling over.
    I must have dozed off again. It wasn’t surprising, considering everything I’d been through in the past few hours. But leaned up against a building? I gently touched my puffy eye, encouraging it to open a bit.
    The ride from Camp Williams to the Air Guard base, a nearly straight shot down Redwood Road, was slow considering that the bruised Hummer hadn’t wanted to reach speeds higher than thirty miles an hour. Fortunately, getting onto the Air Guard base was as easy as showing my military ID at the gate and dropping the commander’s name. The young security police had jumped at mention of the commander, and waved me past the barricades with flustered efficiency. Apparently my suspicion about the commander had some truth, and she was expected. I wondered, as I parked my Hummer in a more southern parking lot and walked up the narrow, nearly deserted streets, how much the guy at the gate was getting paid. Maybe he was just concerned that his face would end up like mine.
    I’d gotten here well ahead of Justet and his troops, leaving me ample time to sit out of sight in the weeds between two buildings just off the runway, fingering my bruised ribs, and going through every piece of paper and scrap of information I’d committed to memory about Dad.
    The C-130 Hercules hulked on the tarmac, a dinosaur of a plane: simple, pale, and gray as a ghost in the darkness. I remember a civilian telling me once how the C-130 was her favorite plane, with the cute pug nose that looked like it needed a smiling mouth painted under it, the low plump body and high tail to accommodate the rear hatch. However, no one who had ever flown in one could call it “cute.” Not with its notoriously loud, turbulent rides and uncomfortable