Free Web NovelChapter 134: [The Host Is Being Delivered.]
"Sherry," I whispered, shaking her gently by the shoulder.
She came back slowly, reluctant, body heavy and warm against mine. Her head lifted from my chest with a soft inhale, brunette hair sticking to her cheek. She blinked, taking in the tangled mess of limbs across the back seat—May’s leg still draped over my knees, her own thigh hooked between mine—and let out a quiet, raspy chuckle.
"Sorry," she murmured, voice thick with sleep. "Used you again."
"It’s okay."
She studied my face for half a second, then followed my gaze out the window. The plain was sliding past us, dry grass and yellow sand moving steadily from front to back. Not us driving through it. It moving past us.
We both looked through the windshield at the same time. Then twisted to check the rear glass.
The armored car sat squarely on the flatbed of a massive heavy truck, its enormous tires chewing up the plain at speed. The vehicle beneath us rumbled with deep, powerful vibrations that traveled up through the chassis into our seats. Chains and thick straps held our car down, metal groaning softly with every bump in the road.
"What do we do?" Sherry asked, already untangling herself from me, spine straightening.
"Wake everyone up," I said.
May stirred before I even finished speaking. She stretched like a cat, fingers dragging slowly across her face, pushing blonde hair from her eyes. Then her gaze sharpened as she looked out Code’s window. She went very still.
"Another problem," she said flatly, the tone of someone whose reaction tank had run bone-dry.
She leaned forward and smacked Mercury hard on the shoulder. "Wake the fuck up."
The car came alive in a chain reaction.
Mercury jerked upright from Harmione’s lap, hair wild, eyes wide and confused as she blinked against the bright sunlight. "Wha—?"
Harmione sat up next, red hair falling across her face in messy strands. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.
Sinn lifted his head off the steering wheel with a sharp inhale, neck cracking. The exact expression of a man realizing he had fallen asleep at the wheel and was now dealing with the consequences washed over his scarred face, jaw tight, eyes narrowing.
Code opened his eyes last. Calm. Almost bored. Like he’d been waiting for something exactly like this and was mildly disappointed it had taken this long.
Our armored vehicle sat lashed to the flatbed of the speeding truck, the plain blurring past on both sides. Wind whipped across the open bed, tugging at loose straps and making the chains clink rhythmically.
"Who the hell is driving that thing?" Sinn growled, staring through the rearshield at the cab far ahead.
Nobody answered. Because none of us knew.Then the system lit up.
[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]
[Ability users detected.]
[Host is being delivered.]
Delivered, I thought, the word sitting heavy and wrong. Not captured. Delivered.
The truck kept accelerating across the plain, carrying all seven of us, and the specimen still taped up in our boot, toward something none of us had agreed to.
The morning sun beat down harder through the windows, turning the inside of the car into a slow oven while human voices drifted faintly from the truck cab ahead, laughing and talking like this was just another ordinary run.
"Should we jump?" Harmione asked, craning her neck to watch the ground blurring past the windows.
"At this speed," Mercury answered, half-laughing, "that’s a very permanent solution to a temporary problem."
"What actually happened last night?" May asked. She folded her legs beneath her on the seat, skirt riding high on her thighs, eyes moving across all of us with the calm, clinical assessment of someone doing morning inventory on a disaster.
"Last thing I remember," Sinn said, rubbing the back of his neck, "is parking the car three separate times because I kept waking up with my forehead on the wheel."
Mercury burst out laughing, loud, unrestrained, shoulders shaking so hard her dark hair whipped across her face. The rest of us followed. Even Sinn. A short, rough bark that turned into real laughter, the kind that came from deep in the chest after too many hours of running on nothing but adrenaline.
We were being carried off to an unknown destination by strangers, and somehow that made it funnier.
"Abram was right about resting," Sinn admitted once the laughter died down. He glanced at me in the rearview, mouth twitching. "I’ll file that."
"Do you think they want us dead?" Harmione asked.
"No," most of us answered at the same time, from different corners of the car.
"If they wanted us dead we’d already be dead," Sinn said, tapping one finger on the steering wheel. "Hauling a vehicle this heavy takes real effort. You don’t burn that kind of fuel and manpower just to kill people." freeweɓnovel.cøm
"Outside settlement," I said. "Has to be."
"Not Goth," Sherry cut in immediately, her thigh still warm against mine. "Goth doesn’t run vehicles this size on real fuel. Nothing out here does." She turned to look at me. "This feels like infrastructure you’d expect inside the walls."
"Yeah," Sinn muttered, staring out at the passing landscape, recalibrating. "Someone out here has real resources. Real organization."
"I think we’ve been on this thing for over five hours," Mercury said, twisting to look at the white sand now streaking past the windows.
I followed her gaze. The sand had changed. Bright white, almost reflective under the climbing sun, nothing like the dull ochre plain I’d grown up on. We were deep in unfamiliar territory now, somewhere the walls had never mapped, or had chosen not to.
"So what do we do?" Mercury asked.
"We relax," I said, leaning back into the seat. "This is already beyond our control. Whatever’s waiting at the end of this ride... that’s what it is."
Code leaned further back, crossed one leg over the other, and started whistling. A low, tuneless sound that somehow cut through the engine rumble and the wind. Completely unbothered.
The truck began to slow. freeweɓnovel.cøm
Brakes hissed. The massive tires crunched heavily into white sand. Chains rattled as tension released. The entire flatbed shuddered once, then stopped completely.
White sand stretched out on both sides as far as the windows allowed, endless, glaring, baking under the sun. No buildings. No movement. Just a vast sea of white broken only by the heat haze rising in shimmering waves.
We had arrived. But we still couldn’t see what we had arrived at.
Code crossed his legs the other way and whistled louder, the sound bright and careless in the sudden quiet.
