Free Meridian Six by Jaye Wells Page B

their empire once the war was over." He pointed a finger toward The Factory. "So yeah, I understand the need to run, but I also learned the hard way the price for my selfishness. If we don't stand up for our own, who will, Rabbit?"
    Rabbit looked at Icarus with eyes older than they'd been ten minutes earlier. "But if we die, who will be left to fight?"
    "If we don't fight, we might as well be dead."
    Rabbit's Adam's apple bobbed convulsively in his throat. A shudder wracked his body, but he gathered himself together and stood straight. "Okay. Let's go."
    "You sure, kiddo?" Dare asked.
    Rabbit looked at her with an expression I hadn't seen from his innocent face before. Rebellion mixed with resentment over her insistence for treating him like a kid. "I'm fine," he snapped. 
    She quickly tamped the wounded look and nodded. "Let's do this."
    Icarus smiled at the pair and then looked at me. "Well?"
    I nodded, suddenly soul-tired. "Let's get it over with."

Eight.
    Down near the water, the air was colder and damp. The kind of cold that grabbed onto your bones with skeletal fingers.
    Icarus waved us toward a dark mouth jutting over the river. Closer, I realized it was a drainage pipe. "All right. Those incinerators need an external fuel source. Most likely they've got massive propane tanks nearby with pipes leading underground into the Factory." He pointed toward a large, lone building about a hundred feet from the fence. Three guards in Troika uniforms stood out front with large guns. "There."
    "Assuming we could get past them," I said, "what's the plan?"
    Icarus removed something from his backpack. "We only have one chance with this." I squinted through the dark and saw a black device with a mess of wires and some sort of putty on the back. "If we can set this off on near the tanks, it'll cause a chain reaction through the pipes and destroy all the furnaces. The trick is to get in and out undetected so they believe it was a malfunction instead of an act of aggression. We can’t risk the Troika retaliating against the people in the blood camps."
     When we'd come up with this plan with Saga I'd argued that we needed way more than the four of us to pull it off. But it had taken us two days of walking to reach The Factory, and it would have taken three times that to contact another patrol group. Even longer for them to rendezvous with us. So Icarus wasn't kidding when he said we had one chance. If any of us were captured this plan was toast.
    "I'll do it," Dare said.
    Icarus shook his head. "The only way in is through this pipe. You won't fit." He was right. The pipe was narrower than the expanse of an average adult's shoulders.
    My eyes swiveled toward the twelve-year-old child to my left. Dare's face went ghost pale. "Icarus, no--"
    Rabbit ignored her and perked up. "I get to do it?"
    Dare grabbed Icarus's arm and dragged him away. Rabbit cringed, like his mom and dad were fighting, and looked at me. "She treats me like a baby."
    “She cares about you. That's a good thing."
    He shrugged. "Sometimes she cares too much."
    I wanted to lecture him and tell him to thank God that someone gave a shit about him. I wasn't under any illusions that Rabbit's life had been easy, but at least he never knew the soul crushing loneliness of having no one to depend on but himself. "Are you sure you're up for this?"
    The instant I said it, I regretted the question. No doubt he'd see it as a challenge.
    His chin came up. "Damn straight."
    The cold night breeze carried Dare's raised voice toward us. Icarus's quieter responses were swallowed, but soon enough they both came to join us again. Icarus looked resigned and Dare looked defeated.
    "All right, Rabbit, you're going to shimmy through the pipe. It'll lead you to a grate inside the compound. You'll have to sneak out of the pipe and get into that building." He took a few moments to show the kid how to engage the bomb. "Set the timer to two minutes from the time you engage it. That will give you a