Outlaw

by Dale Ivan Smith

  I exhaled sharply. The face looked like mine.

  Was this a prison? Or was it something else? The vision opened up the walls to me, and I could see tendrils stretching from the moss, up through the rock. There were other things, nearly invisible, things like pipes. An electric hum echoed through the cave.

  I struggled to see the woman inside the crystalline waterfall more clearly, but I couldn’t.

  I blinked and the vision vanished. I lay on the floor, my head on a pillow. Bey sat cross-legged beside me, Surrell kneeling next to him.

  “You have had a vision,” she said.

  “Yes, I saw, I think I saw myself. But I couldn’t tell for sure.”

  They didn’t ask for any details.

  I coughed. I started to answer, but then another vision came over me, filling my mind. A desert place, with sharp cliffs near a dry riverbed filled with boulders. My vision moved closer to the cliffs and into the shadow beneath them, out of the blazing sunlight.

  There was a nearly invisible pattern, like a root system, on the cliff wall. There was a weird glow, like an after image, coming from the rock. I blinked. The glow had vanished. There was no sign of life.

  I blinked again.

  “I had another vision.” I looked at Bey. “Sanctuary?” I described what I had seen.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  Alex helped me up. The glow. If I could see that, I could get in.

  A question suddenly burned inside me. “Did you take people to Sanctuary? Or have them transported?” I asked Bey.

  “I did once. But that way is closed.”

  “Is that why you are helping us?” I asked.

  “I’m helping you because I admire your spirit. And Alexander is a friend, even if he hasn’t written in a long while.” He fake-glowered at Alex, who chuckled. Bey grew serious again. “I’m also helping because it’s the right thing to do. I believe Sanctuary is in danger, from SAVAK, from Support, perhaps from something else.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What something else?”

  “I don’t know for certain, but what information I do have indicates shadows have gathered there.”

  “What do you know about Sanctuary?”

  “It is the site of an ancient underground city. The city’s name has been lost in the passage of time. A vast network of caves runs through the earth there. My intelligence on Dark-Net leads me to believe a “node exists” there. Frankly, there must be, since I’m not hearing about transit across the desert, which is a very harsh place. I will provide you with transport.” He motioned at Yuri. “Yuri will take you there.”

  Yuri nodded, looking like he’d been asked to run to the local market for fruit. No big deal.

  Surrell leaned over to Bey, and whispered something in his ear. His eyes widened and he smacked his forehead.

  “Forgive me, friends. No doubt you’d like to bath and perhaps change out of those travel-worn clothes of yours.”

  Come to think of it, my clothes did stink to high-heaven. No doubt I did as well.

  “A bath would be welcome,” Alex said, smiling.

  We were taken to separate rooms. Yuri brought me men’s jeans, a black sleeveless t-shirt and a button-up cotton shirt to go over it.

  Yuri looked apologetic, rubbing the back of his neck after laying the clothes out on the bed. “Sorry, it’s hard to find women’s style in your size.”

  “These will do fine,” I said. There was a bathroom across the hall from my room with an old clawfoot-style tub. The tap produced water that was plenty hot, and I took a long soak.

  After I dried off, putting on fresh clothes felt so good. Yuri came to take me to dinner, Alex already with him. Alex wore loose cotton trousers and a khaki shirt. He’d shaved and showered, and practically glowed. He smiled when he saw me and I had to fight to keep from going a little weak in the knees.

  What was happening to me? Alex cleaned up shouldn’t have made me go all wobbly, but it seemed to. I couldn’t help but smile back. If Yuri noticed our reactions, he didn’t show it. Instead, he took us downstairs to a big dining room, where Bey, Surrell, and their guards waited for us to join them.

  Bey had a feast laid out for us for dinner. I wolfed down the roast lamb, rice, bread, and on. More dates for dessert.

  Afterwards, Bey told stories about running contraband medical supplies into Pakistan, and also running other contraband out of the southern Russian reclamation zone, right under the noses of the UN-Support cordon.

  He also told the story of how he’d met James Goldin, in 1958, four years before the nuclear war that had killed millions. Both of them had become Empowered at almost the same time, Goldin a few months earlier. The future Doctor Prometheus had found Bey near the Caspian Sea, exploring ruins that his new power had revealed to him.

  Bey laughed at the memory. “He’d revealed the Revealer to me. Showed me what this gift meant.”

  He sighed and became very quiet.

  Finally, after a long pause, he said, “It was a different world then.”

  It was night when we slipped out of Tehran. Yuri drove a battered Land Rover. Alex rode shotgun and I stretched out in the back. The moon was up. The sky had cleared. Dust and sand covered everything. The rover bounced along the gravel road.

  “Not exactly a highway,” I said.

  “The government has been building those into India and to the west, to the Gulf,” Yuri said. “Deserts are low priority.”

  Which I guess was lucky for us. It meant they didn’t consider what was at the other end to be important. Bey’s last words lingered with me: It was a different world, then.

  All this cryptic shit would normally have driven me up the wall, but not today. I’d seen too much.

  I snorted.

  “You okay back there?” Alex asked, craning his neck. He looked concerned.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Just amazed at how different things look, now.”

  “Looks like that test worked some magic on you.”

  “Not just the test,” I said. “It’s all the weird things I’ve seen in the past few days. Mossville, the Imbued, the Dark-Net, and then Bey and Surrell and their test.” And the vision I’d had.

  Yuri chuckled. He kept his eyes on the road as he steered around a bend and a field of boulders. “Bey and Surrell have that effect on people.”

  “What’s your story?” I asked him, and then immediately regretted it. I didn’t normally blurt out stupid questions like that.

  He cocked his eyebrow and glanced over his shoulder at me. “I work for them.”

  “No, I mean, where are you from, how did you wind up working for Bey?”

  “We only met this morning and you want to know my life story?”

  I felt my cheeks redden. Embarrassed. I never got embarrassed. But he had a point.

  He glanced back again, giving me a judgmental look, then turned back to watch road, his fingers loose on the steering wheel. A grin broke out on his lean face. “You are easy to tease,” he said.

  He nudged Alex in the shoulder. “Must be fun.”

  Alex made a big show out of rolling his eyes. “You have no idea.”

  Both men laughed and my cheeks flamed. “Hey!”

  After they finished their yuck fest, Yuri glanced back. “You don’t get teased much, do you, Mathilda Brandt?”

  “Please, just call me Mat.” It was bad enough that Bey had insisted on calling me by my full name.

  “Sure thing, Mat. So, my story. I grew up in Kazakhstan, just outside the reclamation zone. I wanted to work for the United Nations, maybe even Support, but I guess Kazakhs, Russian-descended or not, were considered ‘unreliable.’ So, I became a bodyguard and wound up working for several different black market organizations. Eventually, Bey found me and offered me a position working for him. I thought it would be lots of money, and not much else.” He paused as we slowed to drive around boulders that had tumbled down the hill and half-covered the gravel road. The truck bounced hard for a minute. Yuri shifted gear
s, the rover shuddered, then calmed down.

  “But that wasn’t what Bey was about. He had a higher purpose. Surprised me all to hell.” He laughed, and I joined in.

  “Yeah, that was my reaction, too,” I admitted.

  “Some things you can’t see coming,” Yuri said.

  We drove on.

  Dawn was turning the sky a deep blue when Yuri pulled up next to a rocky hill.

  “This is it,” he said. We stopped. Below was the bone-dry gully, straight out of my vision.

  We got out, our boots crunching on the rock strewn ground. That was the only sound.

  Yuri shook our hands. “Take care. I hope to see you both again, soon.” He climbed back in the Land Rover and drove off in a cloud of dust.

  That first vision came back to me: the cave filled with the crystalline waterfalls and the figure inside the largest one. The longer it lingered in my head, the more I realized I knew that person.

  Me.

  10

  We stood next to the cliff. There were a few scraggly trees. I didn’t remember them from my second vision, but the cliff glowed in my special sight with an aura of power, and the tendril pattern in the rock was right there. Strange that I hadn’t seen the trees.

  The air was already hot, like a blast furnace. Sweat ran down the inside of my shirt. Sweat gleamed on Alex’s face, but it just made him look more handsome. That wasn’t fair.

  “I wonder how we get inside,” I said, and placed my hand on the cliff face.

  Light flashed through me. I shuddered, and there was a grinding sound.

  A cavern entrance opened up before us like a dragon’s mouth, ready to swallow up Alex and me. One moment there was just a rock wall, the next, the entrance to the underground opened up in front of us.

  “Here we go,” Alex said.

  I nodded. This had to rank up there as not only one of my dumber ideas, but one of the dumbest ideas, ever. But, I’d been able to deal with Mossville. This would be the same thing.

  I straightened my shoulders and walked into the dragon’s mouth.

  My hair stood on end as I went from the not-quite-dawn outside to the black interior. A grinding behind us and the cliff face closed with a gentle thud.

  For an instant, it was like there was nothing but darkest midnight, and then, I could see again. The walls glowed in vein-like lines, blue-green. Somewhere far off, I thought I heard a waterfall.

  My skin tingled like there was an Empowered nearby. The air felt electric like it had back at Mossville. Alex looked at me. He must have noticed my wide eyes.

  “You sense something?” he asked.

  “Feels like there’s an Empowered nearby.”

  “Shit. That’s because there is,” a familiar-sounding voice said. “Still stupid as ever, aren’t you, Mat?”

  Keisha!

  She strode out of the darkness, brown skin gleaming in the blue light, and gave me her patented “you are full of shit” look.

  Her expression was dead-serious, then she grinned. “Beat you here, bitch.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed her in a bear hug, held her tight. “I thought you had died,” I whispered. She hugged me back, patted my shoulder.

  “I’m too ornery to kill,” she said.

  I forced myself to pull away, and took a long look at her. She looked great, practically glowing. She wore blue jeans and a white scoop neck t-shirt under a black leather jacket. I didn’t recall ever seeing her wear a scoop neck shirt, she usually went button up. I was being an idiot, who cared what she wore?

  “How did you get here?” I asked her.

  “I took that path behind the waterfall. You know, the one you were supposed to meet us at.”

  I scowled. “I would have, if Support hadn’t swooped down.”

  “With a little help from my new friends.” She jerked her head behind her and a line of people appeared out of the darkness.

  Three were from Mossville. Renee, Chloe, and big-and-ugly. Three of the Mossville “Imbued.” I nodded at them, but they just stared back at me, their faces suspicious.

  The other three I didn’t recognize. Dark hair, olive skin, wary looks. Not that I blamed them.

  “Who’s he?” Keisha asked, staring at Alex. The grin had vanished from her face.

  “A friend.” A trickle of sweat ran down my back. Maybe she wouldn’t recognize Alex out of his grunge dude disguise. The fresh clothes Bey had given him, along with the shave and shower, made Alex look very different.

  “I don’t know you,” she said to Alex, her eyes narrowed. “But you seem familiar.”

  Alex didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know you, either,” he replied.

  Keisha stared at him for a moment longer. “Huh, sure seems like we’ve met before.”

  Alex shrugged.

  She turned to me. “You took your time getting here.”

  I snorted. “Hey, I came straight here.”

  She shook her head. “If you did, you took a very slow boat.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. We’d left Astoria a day ago, maybe two.

  I rubbed the side of my head. “How long have you been here?”

  Keisha turned to the Mossville trio. “How long has it been?”

  “Three months, two weeks, four days,” the big guy said. No hesitation.

  “What? It can’t be,” I gasped. It felt like I’d been punched hard in the gut, multiple times. I tried to sound normal, but inside my stomach was twisted in knots. “Over three and a half months? What the hell had happened?”

  “You took your sweet time getting here is what happened,” Keisha said.

  “I got here as soon as I could.” My voice nearly broke on the word, could. “How long did it take you to get here?”

  “Almost no time at all. We went into the tunnel behind the waterfall and bam! We were down below, in a really old part of the below.”

  The below? “How did you get here so fast?” I asked.

  “They knew a special way.” She nodded at three familiar people who walked out of the shadows to stand beside her.

  Bey had been right. The Dark-Net connected here.

  But why had the Dark-Net taken so long for Alex and me? It really had been a fairy road for us. Apparently, Keisha and the Mossville Fellowship must have gone through the Dark-Net as well, and they’d gotten to Sanctuary almost immediately.

  Alex didn’t say anything. He looked as stunned as I felt. The fact that Keisha and company had apparently taken a weird “way” like we had to Persia, yet gotten here way quicker than us floored him as much as me.

  I couldn’t hold off any longer. “Where’s Ella?”

  Keisha shook her head. “If you’d stuck around, you’d know.” She pursed her lips.

  “Come on, this is my sister!” It wasn’t like her to stonewall on a straight up question.

  “Not for me to say.”

  That was like a slap in the face. Everything, the others, the giant cavern we were in, the electric charge to the air, the strange time difference, all of it, faded away into the background in the face of her refusal.

  I clenched my jaw. “Bullshit.” I edged close to her, jabbed at her with a finger. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “You’ve been gone,” she said. “You wouldn’t know, would you?” She didn’t sound hurt, just told me like she saw it. She didn’t even sound angry, instead, she sounded disappointed.

  “Loris will know,” the big guy said.

  “Loris? Who’s that?” I demanded.

  “Our leader.” Keisha scowled. “You didn’t think I was in charge here, did you?”

  The way Keisha called this Loris “our leader” creeped me out.

  “Where’s Ella?” I asked again.

  “Like I said, not for me to say.”

  I grabbed Keisha. “You can’t do that. You know, damn it! Tell me!”

  She didn’t fight back, like she would have before. She just shook her head.

  “I noticed that you were a
wfully surprised to see me.” She shot Alex a nasty look. “And your pal there—I know I’ve seen him before. You’re lying to me. You know how much I hate it when I’m lied to.”

  I didn’t care about that. I wanted to see Ella, right then and there. “Tell me where Ella is.”

  She shook her head again. I wanted to punch her in the face. I kept my balled fists lowered.

  “It’s up to Loris to tell you.”

  I shook her by the shoulders. The others stepped in, the big guy reaching for me. Alex drew in a sharp breath. I let go.

  “You letting your friends cover your sorry ass now?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.

  “I was happy to see you,” Keisha said. “Not any more.”

  They surrounded us. The others had a glow about them I hadn’t seen in Mossville. My skin prickled, too, with a faint, almost Empowered sensation mingling with the sharp pinprick feeling from being close to Keisha.

  “We’ll take you to meet Loris and she can decide what to do,” Keisha said. Just like that: she wasn’t my friend, she was my captor.

  Alex caught my eye, gave a little head shake, obviously trying to tell me to chill. I didn’t feel like being chill. I wanted to take this place apart. But I kept it together. There’d be time to act later.

  One thing was for sure. I wasn’t leaving without Ella.

  Keisha’s little gang took us on a long, winding march through cave central. This was supposed to be an underground city from long ago, but all I saw were caves, more caves, and still more caves.

  “I will say this,” Keisha said after we’d been walking a while. “Your sister is doing good work here. She’s helping build something.”

  “What exactly?”

  “You should be proud of Ella. She’s put her ass on the line a lot.”

  Easy for Ella to do, since her superpower was sending projections of herself around. She wasn’t putting herself on the line.