Jump Zone: Cleo Falls Read online

  It came to her.

  Tobacco.

  Three

  Cleo Rush was not what he expected.

  Libra was told she was a savage, like all the people who inhabited the remote northern wilds of Old Canada. Technically, they were Upper Ameradans, but everyone in Lower A knew they were a few DNA strands short of civilized and didn’t like the association.

  Her dossier described her as a motherless girl who would fight to survive and to kill if she were threatened. He half-expected pointed teeth, a spear, and excess body hair.

  They were wrong.

  He was told she’d be carrying weapons and to expect resistance. He was told to get her while she was alone, drug her, bag her, and transport her back to Gomeda. He was told she was dangerous.

  They were wrong.

  He didn’t know it was Cleo Rush when he pulled her limp body from the water, but armed with the physical description that would ensure her identity—the distinguishable birthmark on her cheek—it wasn’t hard to figure out. The thrashing and shouting in her sleep confirmed it, especially when she called her brother, repeatedly, by name.

  They gave him a cover story, which he’d memorized in case of capture and questioning, but they were skeptical about his ability to make it sound convincing. Though that was before the last-minute change in his target.

  Either way, they needn’t have worried.

  If he was anything, he was a great liar. Always had been. His life depended on it. He would have lied, bluffed, and fibbed his way into her world if that’s what it took. But this—her literally falling out of the sky at his feet—this was so much better. Luck or fate, one of them was on his side. How else could it be explained?

  Instead of the wild animal he’d anticipated, Cleo was an injured, frightened, and unarmed woman, with heart-stopping, double-take beauty. He couldn’t stop himself from staring. When she was cold, puking, and blue in the face, not so much… But by the light of day, wow.

  Bringing her back to life was no picnic, but four billion cashpoints and a get-out-of-jail-free card was pretty good incentive. He’d done dirtier jobs for far less.

  “Spade-shaped hairy leaves around a spiky formation with yellow flowers,” he murmured, reciting the items she’d requested as he headed out of the small clearing where he’d made a camp.

  Armed with a mesh pouch for collecting her grocery list, he also surreptitiously tucked his DEL-48, special edition direct energy pulse laser, into the waistband of his pants at the small of his back, in case he met a real wild animal. If there was one memorable fact that stuck out in his training, it was that the Taiga had a problem with misplaced polar grizzlies with a taste for human flesh. While the DEL wouldn’t kill anything much over two hundred pounds, it would stun the zhang-hell out of whatever he hit long enough to make a clean escape.

  “And chamomile,” she called after him, interrupting his thoughts. “Don’t forget the chamomile.”

  She might as well have been asking for moondust. He was so out of his league in this place. Spade-shaped hairy leaves and chamomile, feathery green, low to the ground, spade shaped feathery leaves—zhang! “Let me find the hairy spades before you clutter my head with more green things,” he said with a quick glance back. She was sitting up in those barely-fastened pants, sipping a cup of water.

  Aside from the pink puckered scar that marred her cheek, her skin was a delicious shade of bronzed honey. Didn’t see much of anything past ghostly pale complexions in Gomeda.

  She looked tired, a little worn out from her ordeal, but that was a good sign as far as he was concerned. He fervently hoped it wasn’t an act, that the wound was as serious as it looked and she wasn’t sending him on a wild goose chase so she could flee. Then he’d have to rely on the tracker, and turning on his satcom was a risky move in the Taiga.

  He’d been careful to do nothing to make her distrust him. In fact, he’d purposely been reckless, leaving his blade behind when he went for water earlier in the day—she hadn’t touched it—and just now, he left behind his pack, unguarded, hanging on a tree in plain sight. He counted on her rustling through it while he was gone. The important stuff was well hidden a good distance away. She wouldn’t find anything but some basic hiking equipment—rain shield, food packets, satcom.

  Zhang hell! That was a careless mistake. Though without his biorhythm, she couldn’t turn it on.

  One thing he learned from his stint at the penal colony was the fine art of poker. More specifically, simple observation, since it helped to figure out if someone was bluffing. Cleo’s tell was the chunk of black rock that hung around her neck. When she became unsettled, she played with it. If she did go through his stuff, Libra expected she’d be clutching it pretty good when he returned.

  He walked through the forest, keeping the river within hearing range so he wouldn’t get lost. Despite his crash course in wilderness survival, which he didn’t pay as much attention to as he probably should have, this was new to him—the terrain, the climate, the entire forest experience.

  Home couldn’t be more opposite to this vast and unending landscape that made him feel dizzy and inconsequential. In Gomeda, the vast sprawling city he called home, he couldn’t take two steps without tripping over someone. Out here, there was nothing but trees and rocks, rocks and trees, and more zhanging trees. It made him appreciate the zillion-to-one chance that he and Cleo could show up at the same waterfall on the same evening. Almost too bizarre to wrap his head around.

  At one point during the endless night of staring at Cleo, it occurred to him it that it might be a trap of the joke’s-on-me variety. Nah. Achan couldn’t be that cruel. The old man busted him out of hard-labor camp. If he wanted him good and truly punished for stealing those medical supplies out from under his rich, wrinkled ass, gramps would have left him there for the duration of his sentence.

  Libra looked down at the raw skin on his palms, imagining what they would look like with nine more years of handling toxic waste. Nah, this was a much better gig.

  How did these people survive without buildings and buzz trains and…civilization? Survival amongst the eleven million people of Gomeda was an every-day challenge, but all you really needed was a bad-ass attitude, a good knowledge of the rules, and enough coin to break them. Simple. And he had two out of the three.

  This mission would give him the third, ensuring his survival and his freedom. That had been the deal-maker; sweet freedom, because money alone, even that much, couldn’t motivate him enough to work for a bastard like Achan Cade.

  When it was over, he’d live comfortably, something he hadn’t known for a long time. There’d be no hunger, violence, or depravity. He could continue to do what he was passionate about, but in a smarter, more creative way. He could distribute the wealth of Gomeda as far as the slums of New Chicago and have the resources to cover his hide.

  He smiled at the thought of delivering Cleo in a tidy little package, days earlier than anyone expected. He could taste freedom on his tongue now, could taste it in his mouth even as he’d pressed his lips to hers and tried to revive her.

  He’d saved her.

  Now Cleo Rush would save him.

  Four

  What kind of idiot made camp so close to a waterfall?

  Cleo strained to hear over the incessant thrum. She gave another visual sweep of her surroundings before closing her eyes and tapping into her years of training to achieve a focused state. She concentrated on the movement of her diaphragm as her lungs filled and emptied, pushed the oxygen lower into her belly before letting it out slowly. Each cycle took her deeper into a state of intense meditation. She tuned into the suck and push of blood through her heart and mentally slowed her system until she felt centered. When she entered the zone, she filtered the sensory input of her surroundings, listened with an acute awareness.

  She felt ever
y molecule of air that entered her ear canal, vibrated the tympanic membrane, and sent a burst of energy through the cochlear nerve. Her cerebral cortex took over, comparing what she heard with her mental inventory.

  Unlike hearing, which was mechanical, sight, smell, and taste were harder to amplify because those senses depended on a chemical reaction.

  But she could. It was her gift. Learning to maximize her senses had taken her years of intense training, but she mastered it in time for the Leadership Challenge. In the singular darkness of her mind, Cleo was able to filter through the distractions and become one with her environment.

  Snake, slithering into a rock pile, twenty-five feet to the west of the clearing.

  Four chipmunks, chattering while they ran up and down the spruce trees in the grove between the camp and the river. Nope, five.

  Branch snapping—

  Chickadees, sparrows, a lone female cardinal, red-breasted sapsuckers, and the familiar sounds of Canada Geese flying at approximately one hundred and twenty feet, two miles to the east.

  Splashing, downstream, a couple of otters. Her nose picked this up even before her ears. Cute little critters, but otters had a distinct pungency.

  Cleo switched her focus to smell as she continued to inhale deeply. The air around their campsite was permeated with spruce and pine, the earthy smell of composting foliage—a sure sign of autumn’s fast approach, and something else. Something else out there stirred her senses, tugged at her concentration.

  Raccoons—burrowed somewhere upwind.

  As mischievous as they were, raccoons wouldn’t make the hair on the back of Cleo’s neck tingle. No, there was something else.

  Wolverine scat. Days old, no threat. And…

  Cleo took a final breath and tensed as a rush of adrenaline flooded her system.

  Alphacat.

  “Pay attention to the rocks. You know all about rocks, don’t you, boy?”

  “Yeah, I know about rocks. They’re big, heavy, and hot.” Libra flashed the old man his acid-burned hands.

  “Never mind those kind. You need to look for peculiar patterns or formations, evidence of mining, tapping a vein, or stripping. I’ll want a full report.”

  Libra almost forgot that part of the conversation. At the time, he’d reckoned Achan was giving him a personal dig about the way the inmates were clearing contaminated rubble and debris from the Dead Zone, but now, surrounded by the unfamiliar geography of the Ameradan Shield, he understood. Tons of zhanging rock, everywhere he looked, everywhere he stepped. But what constituted an odd formation? He had no clue.

  He stared at the outcropping stone two times his height that blocked the path ahead. It had an angled peak, like it had been driven upward through the soil. Instead of navigating around it, he took a running leap and caught the toe of his boot about a third of the way up, then used his hands to spring his body up sideways, twisting in mid-air to give him upward momentum, scoring a perfect landing on the uneven cap. Anyone watching would have been impressed. He let one corner of his mouth slide up and did a mock bow.

  And thinking of Cleo, because that’s exactly who he had in mind when he bowed, he realized that he had three options. He had enough ampoules of psychoactive drug to have her willingly walk out of here with him, but he had serious reservations about using it. The side effects could permanently warp her mind, and Libra didn’t want to zhang-up her brain, savage or not.

  Especially now that he’d met her.

  Since she wasn’t the undomesticated ape-woman he’d expected, he loathed the thought of a bag-and-drag approach. To be cautious, he had injected the implant, so knocking her unconscious wouldn’t be a problem if it became necessary.

  But a third, more satisfying scenario—and one that would make the mission go faster and smoother, with less complication—would be if she simply went with him, crossed the Cut Road of her own volition.

  Question was, how would he get her to go?

  Seduction was worth a thought. He wasn’t completely without charm and looks. Could he make a woman fall in love and drop everything when she didn’t know him, didn’t trust him? From the way she spit out the water he’d given her, he knew he had a way to go. He hadn’t thought twice before adding the vitamin supplement to the cup, never considered that she’d never had one before. Zhang hell, what did they do for nutrient-deprivation out here? Once he took a gulp to prove it wasn’t poisoned, she took a tentative sip, but her suspicious brown eyes stayed locked on his face the entire time. Maybe she knew about Zenwater, the poison they ladled out in Gomeda to keep everyone calm and controllable?

  The trees thinned out as he approached the edge of what looked to be a sharp drop. He scanned the area following the line of the distant horizon. Nothing but rocks and trees, miles and miles of nothing. Why would anyone choose to live here?

  There didn’t appear to be any easy routes through this zhang-damned country. No roads, rails, or hover paths, just endless, winding trails through ridiculously difficult terrain. How the hell did these people move?

  He stopped on the edge of a stout cliff and looked down. There, at the bottom, just what Cleo ordered: yellow spiked plants.

  Cleo.

  She reminded him of a cat, the way her eyes tilted up in the corners, the way she tracked his every move, intently and with suspicion. She never looked relaxed or at ease, even when she slept. Her limbs were tight, like over-wound springs. He had no doubt she’d put up a good fight if he tried to physically subdue her. But oh man, a part of him would like to try.

  He was told that she was some kind of warrior. He laughed at the thought. She was a bitty thing. He was six two, and the top of her head barely came to his chin.

  And how would one fight with all those curves?

  He shook his head to clear the image of her that was stuck in his mind so he could properly assess the series of shallow ledges between him and the yellow spike below. He leaped off the edge with the agility of a cougar, bouncing from ledge to ledge. The shale was jagged around the edges but slippery on the flat surfaces, so he was as careful as possible considering the speed at which he descended.

  Time was of the essence. The quicker down, the quicker back, and the more time he had for his plan. He would use the sound of the waterfall to mask his approach. He wanted to learn more about the mysterious Cleo Rush, and, just like he had learned at the poker table, the best way to learn was to observe the subject. In this case, it was preferable to do it unseen, see how she acted in her natural habitat.

  Five

  Long habit had her grasping for the throwing knives in the harness she always wore across her torso, but of course, they were gone, lost to the river. Fight or flight time.

  Running, climbing a tree, both out of the question thanks to her mashed-up leg. Besides, the cat could do both far better than a human. She scanned the campsite, looking for a tool, a stick, anything she could use as a weapon.

  With options running out, she fervently hoped her nasal passages had been damaged during the drowning and she was wrong about this. But that smell was unmistakable.

  Definitely alphacat.

  Flesh eaters had an entirely different aroma than herbivores. And alphacats—genetic hybrids gone wrong—were anything but benign. They were rare in the Taiga, and Cleo had never encountered one alive, but she’d heard the stories. The Heron Clan lost two hunters and countless arrows bringing down the one whose black-and-gray-spotted pelt lay on her father’s bedroom floor.

  She could hear it now, even in her less heightened state, getting closer, zeroing in on her scent. Fresh meat. Breakfast. The fresh blood in her wound beckoning to it. She, the injured prey.

  For the second day in a row, Cleo’s survival was being tested. The second time in as many days when her heart rate climbed well beyond the zone in which she could think rationally.
A second dance with death.

  Damn waterfall! She would have heard the cats approach sooner if he hadn’t made camp so close to the damn water.

  Just the thought of her companion sparked an idea. He’d left his backpack behind, hanging on a tree. She prayed it would have something useful in it. Acid spray was a staple of sightseers, was it not? In case they had to defend themselves from itty-bitty squirrels. Maybe she could temporarily blind the cat and give her a small chance to escape.

  If she didn’t get slashed to death first.

  Knees bent, she positioned her left foot a few inches off the ground, rocked her body back and thrust forward, hands out, using the momentum of her body and the muscles of her right leg to get herself upright.

  Fighting a wave of head-spinning nausea, she hobbled forward, eyes on her goal. She flinched and stumbled as pain radiated out of her wound. Another wave of dizziness threatened to knock her down. Lack of food, blood loss… hardly her fighting best. Cleo dropped her head to her chest and inhaled deeply. She couldn’t afford to pass out now. Not while she was being stalked for breakfast. And after it was finished with her, it would follow the urbanite’s scent—her savior would be dessert.

  The bag hung twelve feet away. Her head still throbbing, she didn’t dare risk hopping the distance in case she lost her balance and toppled. If she fell, it would be The End.

  She tugged the protruding end of a two-foot log from the smoldering fire, a thick-headed, dead tree branch that he’d not bothered to break up. Gripping it from the cool end, she smacked it on the ground to dislodge the loose embers that encased the bottom. Holding it out at arm’s distance, she leaned on it and jumped forward with her left foot.