Page 125 of The Hero Within
They wouldn't kill him. They used wargs as soldiers in the Confederacy.
Broke them to their will.
The thought made the knot twist even tighter within her, but she couldn't think of that. Johnny would survive, no matter what they did to him. He was strong, and he knew she'd come back for him.
She'd promised.
All she had to do was get through this week, and figure out how to break one warg out of a highly secured military facility in the middle of a walled city-state full of people who were gunning for her head.
Piece of cake, right?
Saving Johnny Coltonseemed an impossible task.
But Eden had dealt with impossible before, and as she'd learned in Cortez City, to get what you wanted, you had to work out what your opponent wanted too....
The problem was, she no longer had just one opponent. And this time she was working alone.
Step one had been secured, thanks to Mayhew. She’d given him the letter she’d prepared for General Bligh, and he’d promised to get it to the general. A day ago, the radio room in Absolution had called her aside; General Bligh had received her terms and was interested in discussing the matter.
Miles Wentworth had been arrested, and his case was due to be processed in Cortez City in a month’s time. Eden had agreed to be a witness, and Bligh was going to send a helicopter for her. Mayhew had dug up some damning evidence—somehow it was released to the general public—and the general had been smoothing affairs over by shipping out large quantities of the vaccine to the settlements.
She had time to breathe, and now it was time to turn all of her attention on rescuing Johnny.
She just needed to wrangle a herd of ornery cattle into line. Easier said than done, but she'd run through all possible scenarios in her mind, and prepared her retaliating arguments.
The council waited as Eden strode through the doors to the meeting room in Absolution; Meredith Hammerstein arguing with Ben Whitshaw at one end of the table; Maggie Carpenter nursing a mug of tea at the other end and staring at nothing with bleary eyes; Bart Carpenter, Maggie's greedy brother; Alan Cummings, rifling through documents as if he'd never seen the terms listed in them before; and Susan Hawker, who was probably going to be her staunchest opponent here.
Susan straightened with a scowl. "You're late."
Eden didn't take her seat. Instead she rested her hands over the back of the vacant chair left for her. "Sorry. Didn't realize you had anything better to do. I was too busy saving lives."
Maggie wrapped her hand around a mug of steaming chamomile tea and slid it toward Eden. "Andwe appreciate it. We all know we owe you the lives of nearly everyone in this town," she said, with a pointed look around the table. "Have you had any sleep?"
Sleep. God.Eden's eyes felt grainy enough she suspected half the Wastelands were embedded beneath her lids. "I'll sleep when this is all over. Have you had a chance to look at my proposal?"
Alan looked up from the page scrawled in Eden's neat handwriting. "These terms are nearly half what they were before."
"You're right." Eden feigned shock. "AndI was lucky to get that out of General Bligh. It seems the Confederacy is done playing your games. You were going to grant them the Copperplate mining rights a month ago if they agreed to all your terms. They accepted. And then you got greedy and added gold to the list, and Miles Wentworth clearly decided killing off the locals would be a more profitable exercise. Considering I helped foil that plan and am nowtryingto salvage the deal for the sake of Absolution, I think you can grant me a little bit of leeway."
"What's this?" Bart demanded, stabbing his finger at what Eden knew would be item five.
"It's an additional term," she said, her voice settling into a steely resolve. "And it isnotnegotiable."
The Confederacy didn’t count wargs as people. She needed leverage if she was going to get him out.
"You're basing this entire agreement around the life of one warg?" he protested.
The slimy little bastard was probably thinking of the money that had slipped through his fingers. He was the one who'd talked the majority of the council—bar Eden and Maggie—into adding gold to the original terms.
"Yes." She stared him down. "I am. If Bligh doesn't agree to this one term of mine, then it's off the table."
It wasn't Bligh she was trying to bluff. She would never deny her people the chance at medication and food they desperately needed, but the council didn't need to know that.
Because she didn't have any other options of saving the man she loved.
She'd seen where Johnny was no doubt being held. Sneaking into a Confederacy-controlled city was one thing. Managing to break into the military camp, find the one warg she wanted to rescue, and escape? Impossible.
She'd spent all week putting her people first—saving their lives. It had broken her heart to do so, but every time she thought of Johnny, she remembered his last words to her.Whatever it takes. If it had been her own life on the line, a choice between him and her, then she wouldn't have suffered a moment of doubt. But there'd been too many innocents to consider. The Confederacy wouldn't kill him. They'd try to use him. It was standard operating procedure for them, and she had to believe he was still alive.
