Read Online Brigends (The Final War Series Book 1) by Russell Krone - Free Book Online

the Bandit before nightfall. Their options surmounted to half one-way and half the other.
    While he picked out a secluded spot near a wall to lean against, she removed a laser-marker from her jacket. Activating it, she scorched words on the opposite wall. Satisfied with her handiwork, she stepped back to admire the calligraphy. The words lupta otopisti appeared legible with a flare in its pattern, encased inside the cartouche of a crude dog tag shape. She stowed the marker.
    He read the message. “Fight the Utopians? You wrote it in Romanian. You do realize, no one here can read it?”
    She shrugged her shoulders indifferently at the paradox of making an illiterate political statement.
    Fight the Utopians . The motto had been the battle cry of the Vanguard since the early days of the resistance movement.
    Utopians were just another tag for Zolarians... architects of the world’s destruction.
    “Stop mucking around and come rest.”
    She flicked the cigarette out the entrance and walked over to him. “I was just having fun.”
    “I could see that,” he said.
    She dropped beside him. While he tried to rest, she nervously fingered her hair. Her silent sulking was loud.
    “What’s on your mind, Commander?”
    “Nothing, sir.” She curled the inflection of sir. The womanly passive-aggressive arguing didn’t suit her.
    “Adi, spit it out.”
    She waited for dramatic effect. “You’re not giving me a lot to go on.”
    “I figured you would come back to this. You’ll have to trust me. End of discussion.”
    “You never kept me out like this.”
    “End-of-discussion.”
    She opened her mouth to say something, but he raised a stern finger and pointed it at her. She crossed her arms and returned to pouting.
    An hour passed.
    In the pitch black, every sound seemed amplified tenfold. A strange noise startled Emil and he lifted his head. He listened until he felt safe to lower his guard. The shifting of his body woke her.
    “Everything okay?” she asked.
    “I was thinking of when I first found you.”
    They thought about that day in the refugee camp outside of Prague. She was too young to remember the nuclear nightmare, or how she came to live amid the camp’s squalor. Her only companion was Cob. He was four, but starvation made him looked two. Adi, a few years older and just as sickly, protected him like a mother wolf would a cub.
    Emil found the orphans, unsheltered in the mud and rain. It was the display of their naked bodies, caked with filth and clinging to each other that brought him back from desolation’s void. Before that moment, he believed his heart had long since ceased to beat. In his grief, he lived as if he had no humanity left. Animal detachment shielded him from the loss of his mother, sister, and his culture.
    The sick children in the mud challenged that pathetic notion. Their plight galvanized his motivation and from that day forth, every decision he made was for what he believed was the greater good.
    Adi placed her head on his lap and drifted asleep to the same memory. Out of the freezing rain a savior had scooped her up in his arms and transported her to a better life. As a starving child, she found a haven in his world.
    He placed his hand on her head. She was his child, as were Anton and everyone else under his command. They were his children. The phantom he was chasing after — he didn’t want to think of it as a part of him.
    He thought of the Zolarian witch, Milari. Did she think he would fall for her tricks? Did she trance him to come to New York? Did she think he could be misled so easily?
    No. He will show her. He will show them all!
    Emil, do you know what you’re doing ? The question had a voice of its own.
    The fortifying of his pride was nothing short of a feeble effort to prove his righteousness. The nipping mystery of his actions preyed on him, keeping him from sleeping. Did the ora starbursts have any connection with the accursed crystal in his pocket? It couldn’t be a simple