Broken Sky

Chapter Six

Sarah had been in a hallway when Jack opened the crate. Despite the video's poor quality, she'd seen enough. She ducked into an empty office where she could speak in an urgent whisper. "Jack, you have to go."

"I'm going, I'm going."

The scene on her phone blurred as he dropped the crate's cover and ran, heading for the hill.

"The sphere," she half-shouted. "They'll know—"

Jack cursed and dashed back to the first container. He shoved the metal ball and ran away again. The sphere rolled to the front of the lid, wobbled on the raised edge, then turned and drifted to the rear of the crate. It tumbled off, landing in tall weeds, hidden from view.

"It fell—" she started to warn him, but he'd apparently seen the same thing. He stopped running. Sarah heard voices in the background. "No, keep going. I hear them too."

The image jerked as he moved into the denser woods covering the hill. Fading voices and distant laughter accompanied the shaky video while he climbed. Sarah didn't speak again until flashes of brightly lit grass marked the thinner forest at the summit.

"Are they following you?"

He didn't answer. She waited as he rushed down to the truck, gathered his tools, tossed them into the cargo box, then drove away. The scene bounced wildly as the vehicle trundled through the forest. Finally, after a few more minutes, he started laughing.

"It isn't funny." Her fear vanished as he kept laughing. "Seriously. They had guns."

"It's not that." Jack set his phone on the dashboard so she could see his face. It didn't make her feel better that he was still grinning. "I was worried my parents wouldn't let me take the truck if I couldn't fix the drone outside the workshop. I was just imagining their reaction if I told them what really happened."

"So, what are you going to tell them?"

He seemed perplexed. "Nothing."

"Who are you going to tell?"

"No one. I've learned my lesson; I'll stay away from anything like that in the future."

"But you said yourself—there aren't supposed to be guns on Cirrus."

"Don't tell anyone, okay? It'll get back to my parents and they won't let me work out of town. Then I can't prove I can run a business on my own. It's not a big deal. There's probably a good reason for them being out there."

Sarah wasn't about to acknowledge that Jack was right, but knew he was normally very cautious. He wouldn't have gone to the site if he hadn't expected a crash to clean up. She reluctantly agreed not to tell.

"I have to go now," she said as footsteps approached the office door. "Jada's coming in to fill her volunteer hours for graduation. Call me when you get to Fairview."

- - - - -

Sarah reached the parking lot just as Jada was securing her bike in the rack with dozens of others.

At five-foot-two, Jada might go unnoticed in a crowd except for the dozen brightly colored tattoos that graced her arms and calves. She also had three piercings in each ear and a shiny gold stud on the side of her nose. Her bike, with its custom snakeskin paint job, was another expression of her individuality.

"Ça va?" Jada asked. In Caerton—a city as multicultural as New York or Toronto—most people spoke a little of several languages besides English. Jada was fluent in her parents' native tongues: Hindi and French. She'd also taught Sarah how to swear in both. "What are we doing this afternoon?"