She hurried over to him, and he threw his arms out to meet her.
"You did it!" he said in a hoarse voice. She stepped in to his arms and gave him a tight squeeze. "Anna, are you alright?"
She pulled away. "Fine. Different, maybe. How long have I been out?"
His eyes boggled at her, like her standing there was a miracle, then gave a little shake and looked at his watch. "It has been six hours since I woke. I do not know how much longer than that. I found the people wandering, and started this." He gestured around them. "They think the infection's over, and they are going home!"
Anna's mind raced ahead. This was just the first step of many. All the pieces had to be put into place.
"You'll need to take the leper with you," she said, running through a swift mental checklist. "Sealed off well or it'll hurt them. You also need to get comms synced up with Jake and Lucas; set up a mobile lab, they're going to need every hand they can get. Then you have to run."
It didn't occur to her to say 'we'. There wasn't any 'we' anymore, now their paths were diverging. That reality wasn't lost on Peters, and he nodded.
"You," he said.
Anna smiled. They'd both known this moment was coming.
"I have already used their communications," he added. "I spoke to Helen." His tone became grave. "Istanbul are still ahead of the bombs. Lucas is working. He said you should have warned him about your shield. It has set his research back."
Anna stifled a harsh comment. Lucas didn't like her these days, everyone knew that; it seemed he blamed her for all of this. Maybe he was right. Perhaps she should have found a way to let him know. She'd avoided jumping through Istanbul for just that reason.
"Tell him the baby is gone," she said abruptly. There was no use sugar-coating it. "I felt it melt away. Get him to clear out a test run; I'll be there soon."
Peters frowned. "The baby is gone?"
Anna stepped closer and put one hand on his cheek. He was a dear man, really, and though there wasn't time for this, she would make time. "It's all right. It wasn't ever real; we both know that. And I understand what I have to do, now. The world's opening up, and maybe that's all the baby ever was; a door for me to walk through. It's part of me now, which means Ravi is, and the ocean is too."
Peters gulped. His eyes shone. It was obvious there was a lot he wanted to say, but she knew it all already, so instead he gave a short, sharp nod.
"I will take these people. I'm sorry I cannot come with you, Anna."
She laughed. "I don't want you to die. I need you here, coordinating with the other bunkers. Lucas will know how to use them. You just need to make them see. There's no more fighting amongst ourselves anymore. This has to stick."
"Yes. I will do it." A heavy pause, loaded with so many things unsaid. "Anna."
"Peters." She smiled. "Expect these bastards to try and shoot you down."
Peters nodded. That was plain to them both. If one leper could become a shield, why couldn't they all, for all the bunkers in the world, and how would the shadow SEAL like that? "Good luck go with you, Anna. Save us, if you can."
"I'll try."
She turned and strode away before she crumbled into tears. It didn't have to be many steps. After three she felt for her lepers and pulled them in. It was easy now, and they responded with a feather-light touch. She felt Peters' eyes on her back. She reached in, twisted, and jumped out of existence.
* * *
It took ten jumps to Gap.
It was thousands of miles, but there were new ways through the line now; pathways that became clear as she jumped more, patterns that emerged from the storm and let her bypass the distance easily.
When she landed she was not so broken as before. She breathed the fresh Alps air and looked at the bunker hole and the spray of bodies around it; always walking in Amo's footsteps, always cleaning up his messes.
She stood another one of her lepers up as a shield within minutes; the process becoming more refined and accustomed. There was guilt attached to it, in sacrificing a leper, but there were thousands of other lives at stake and one more death was a weight she could easily bear.
In the bunker she dug out the top command officers as they woke. They were disoriented, staggering, walking off the hangover of weeks spent trapped under the line. They asked her questions and made fumbled demands, but their words rang like the garbled cries of babies off Anna's outer shell.
She was a fire and they all needed heat. When she spoke it was only natural for them to listen. They didn't know her but she radiated authority, so they obeyed.
"You are under fire by the shadow SEAL," she told them. "They are sending bombs even now. You need to evacuate immediately, and don't stop running. Do you have exodus protocols?"
The commander nodded woozily.
She explained about the mobile lab equipment and the comms gear and storing the leper, as the dizzy collection of men and women around her grew. They were dressed in clothes that now sagged on their withered frames, with red-rimmed eyes fatigued by weeks of flashing on and off. Their brains were dry and slow, but Anna caught them each in her gaze and imprinted the words into them like a brand.
"Who are you?" one of them asked.
Anna looked at her; a younger woman, with buzzed brown hair and piercings in her left eyebrow.
"I'm Anna," she said, because that was enough.
It was twenty-three jumps to Istanbul. They passed in what felt like seconds.
Sabiha Gökçen International Airport had been reduced to a barren, cratered moonscape. There were no listing planes left on their melted rubber wheels, no terminals or flight control tower other than great humps of debris, with barely any hint left of where the runways had been. Instead there were great, rubble-strewn holes bored into the earth, as if the upper layers of skin and muscle had been gouged out to reveal the guts below.
Bunker busting bombs, she thought. Gritty gray dust rose from the gouges steadily, like final breaths exhaled from a dying beast. Anna stood on a low pile of jagged cement clods, sparkled with fragments of glass and veined with twisted lengths of steel rebar, and looked down into the depths. Far below an electric light was flashing, shooting occasional sparks. That was a corridor. The bright oblong hole of it receded away under the earth in one direction, the other stopped up with the wreckage of a crumpled jet fuselage.
They'd blown Istanbul bunker off the map.
They.
She rubbed acrid dust from her eyes and wondered how long had passed since the shadow SEAL's last strike fell. She turned to the west, where there was a drifting pall of smoke in the sky; evidence of more bombs, tracing the line of her people as they'd fled.
It was going to get a lot worse. She knew that. The jump-headache was settling into a permanent throb in the back of her head, and soon it would become a hammer. But that was OK. This was her role now.
The Istanbul convoy needed a shield. Nine more bunkers around the world needed shields. It didn't seem any coincidence that she had ten lepers left. Now they were all vulnerable, and there wasn't any time to rest. She was on the Pacific again, steering her catamaran under the constant drive of the wind, leaning hard out and unable to close her eyes for a single second.
"I'll see you soon, Ravi," she said, and jumped.
LARA
INTERLUDE 3
"He says he'll only speak to you," said Rachel Heron.
Olan Harrison stood at the window looking out over the dramatic, splintered sweep of the Huangshan Mountains, beneath an acid blue sky. All the pieces were falling into place, and his vision was coming to full fruition. For so long he'd waited for this moment; the Last Mayor, first and greatest of the naturally immune.
He couldn't see him from the mountaintop facility; none of the retrograde humans had reached within five miles of the Redoubt, though they had certainly tried. The type ones had come first and the type twos had followed to pile on top, but none of them had been able to penetrate his shield walls.
"How did he loo
k?" Olan asked, but didn't turn. His gaze caused discomfort, and he largely held it in reserve with Rachel.
"Half-addled," she answered. "Drunk on something, though I didn't detect any drugs or alcohol in his system. Half rage, half euphoria, and dangerous. He's powerful, Olan."
Olan nodded slowly. Yes, that made sense. A man goes mad. A man comes back from madness with special gifts. There could be great euphoria in finally finding the true face of your enemy.
"And he said no."
Heron cleared her throat. "His exact words were, 'Tell that wrinkled old rib-cracking bitch to come down here and face me himself.'"
Olan allowed a small smile. You had to be forgiving with children.
"Has he felt our capacity?"
"No, sir," she said sharply. "At least, he couldn't have. We're fully dampened outside the shield, as you ordered."
"Couldn't have?"
"He shouldn't have been able to," Heron clarified. "He has no training, no focus at all. But he said something about walls. He threatened to tear them down." A pause. "He's not the man you think he is, Olan. He'd be better off dead."
Olan rested his fingertips on the glass and watched the smoky hint of condensation form around them. Better off dead? Two hundred and thirty-five people had been rescued before the curtain fell on the old world; that was the best Little Olan had managed, back when the AI had had executive control. Now together they had swelled their ranks in the Redoubt to nearly a thousand. Every one counted, and this one, the Last Mayor, counted far more than most.
He turned and looked Rachel Heron full in her sharp, inquisitive brown eyes. The sudden weight of his gaze startled her, and she backed up a step, catching her breath. He had that effect; an artifact of the cloned body they had built for him. His eyes shone with a bright inner white light, like the dead.
"Don't underestimate his value," he said. "Many others have, and look where they are now."
Heron regained her composure quickly, meeting his gaze. He knew that was uncomfortable; the brightness was painful to behold. "He's hopelessly splintered. He's a danger to himself as well as us, and he'll never have the integrity to match our advanced control. He's a walking time bomb, as good as dead already, and the same goes for all his dregs from America. We don't need any of them."
Olan took a step closer, making her flinch slightly. "Dead men are the most dangerous, Rachel. Don't you agree?"
Heron shuddered as if he'd walked over her grave, though her face swiftly smoothed back to impassive. She hadn't needed any training to learn that iron self-control.
"Sometimes," she allowed, "but we can't afford to be complacent."
As soon as she said it she registered the mistake. He allowed her punishment to be another slight smile. Behind it came the ever-present threat of the box, and a thousand severed threads. "And you think me complacent?"
She withered inside, but remained defiant, staring at him until it became too uncomfortable. This was their constant dance, and he enjoyed it. Everything had a purpose.
"Ask me," he said. "I know you are curious."
"I don't need to ask," Rachel said, keeping the sullenness from her voice. "He has power; he was the first. He can be a vehicle."
He nodded. That was enough for now. "Then ask the other question."
At that she looked up, surprised. Sometimes he could still surprise her; the ways he traced his thoughts across hers, gathering information. Quickly her jaw set.
"James While," she said, never one to waste time. "Is he conscious yet?"
Olan smiled wider. It had surprised him that While still mattered to her. Perhaps she'd loved this man, once, maybe even more than Olan had.
"You needn't worry about James," he said. "You'll see him when the time is right. Concern yourself with the elimination of his SEAL. In the meantime, keep the Last Mayor detained at the wall. I will go see him myself."
Her eyes widened. "Olan-" she began, but he waved a hand and she fell silent. There wasn't any intent behind the motion, any power more than the smile earlier, but she'd learned like all the rest what force he could summon on a whim. The very T4 cells in her body belonged to him, after all.
"Yes, sir," she said, teeth gritted. "Should he be allowed to understand the means of his confinement?"
Harrison Olan let his lips quirk upward. So few things provided genuine amusement these days. Mastering reality could make things dull.
"He may already understand more than you or I, Rachel. This man has peered into a different kind of abyss." A pause. "Let's see what he can do."
* * *
Rachel Heron rode the elevator down from Olan Harrison's floor, fuming with a frustration she couldn't quite name. Every interaction with him left her feeling that way these days, like there were secret motives driving him that she couldn't even glimpse, while her own ploys shone plainly beneath his bright gaze.
Perhaps that was true. Olan Harrison ruled his people with an unremitting, invasive fervor, and made no exception for her. They were all part of his vision, and his vision required constant control. The rules that encircled them were totalitarian and complete, with chances for meaningful free will decisions only meted out in the course of their duties.
She thumbed the button for the third floor again, hard. At least that much remained to her; her body, her emotions, her thoughts. She'd seen Olan strip many people of even those, so they walked round the complex and worked and enacted his will without really being present in any human way.
With the tiniest fragment of his power he 'boxed' people, reducing them to passengers in their own bodies and minds, deprived of sensation, of the ability to speak or be truly 'seen'. Heron had felt it only once, after she'd disappointed him in the moments after the Severing, and shuddered at the memory.
It had been the worst kind of solitary confinement. You saw everything, you heard everything, but you weren't really there. People saw your body and face, even interacted with you, while at the same time they could see that you were shackled and gagged on the line. It was an unbearable deprivation, to be so trapped within your own skin.
She shuddered, and the elevator stopped at Strategic Governance. Here she felt at least one layer of the frustration peel away. In this place she had a semblance of control, even if everything she did was tailored to Olan Harrison's overriding goals.
The office was a long, undulating space that hugged the flank of the mountain range, with floor-to-ceiling windows composing the outer wall. On the left were the many meeting, research and command bays, each a glass-walled pod nestled into the raw red mountain rock, fitted with tables, desks and screens of varying sizes; some set up for presentations, some arranged for line work and logistical crunching. The building's construction was a masterwork of engineering, laser-cut to match the Huangshan bedrock precisely, slotting in and adapting to the mountain's pattern like a key in a lock.
Normally the panoramic sweep of it impressed her, seeming to invite the whole of the ever-changing view inside, but not today. Instead she felt uneasy still, about Olan perhaps, or the strange sense of regret Amo had shaken loose.
Using her training, she forcefully put that uneasiness to one side. It wouldn't interrupt her plans. For over a decade she'd waited, doing Olan's bidding, biding her time. Now the end was drawing near, and she was ready to buttress her past decisions with a final push that would finally lead to something close to freedom.
"He's throwing his army around," said Arter Rain.
Rachel Heron blinked and focused on her lieutenant, Arter, standing in her pod. He was a Lazarus-capture set in a second-generation model, with the glowing eyes replaced. As her second-in-command he was primarily responsible for the stealth walls that shielded them from the SEAL, and had kept the retrograde Homo Sapiens at a five-mile remove back when they'd been a threat.
He had the standard face of a second gen, with a few simple gene splices drawn from his corpse to help distinguish him; slightly larger nose, green eyes. The fourth generation body models were much
better; healthier and sleeker, but most of the Lazarus-captures preferred to stay with the model they were first descended into. It was a kind of status symbol.
Rachel Heron was one of the few remaining who hadn't opted for a Lazarus upgrade, preferring to keep her original body intact, weaknesses on the line be damned. Most were gen two or three; only Olan himself was generation one, with its artifact of glowing eyes.
"He's doing what?" Heron asked.
Arter pointed at the screen on the pod's wall. On it was a silent drone video feed, one of the models they'd been using to follow Amo since he'd left the Siberian super-Array behind.
"It looks like they're dancing," Arter said, slightly bemused.
The screen showed Amo and his army, shot from a high angle, with the bulk of them spreading behind him down the sprawl of the type two foothills. From above it was clearer what a rainbow of types his army was made of, with a good representation of threes, fours and fives steadily catching up. The slower ones were still rolling their way east from Mongolia, monitored by separate drones.
Mostly there were types one and two, and Amo had them all moving at once, while he stood atop a low body-crag and directed them like a conductor running an orchestra. Some of them shook their bodies and jumped. Others seemed to be doing some kind of coordinated waltz.
"He's been doing it for a while," Arter said. "I think he's playing? Maybe he really is just mad."
Heron watched a moment longer. She'd spoken to the man just an hour ago. Out there at the shield's furthest edge he'd held himself out like a kind of drunken, dangerous jester. In every word they'd exchanged there'd been a kind of judgmental satire; like him talking to her was a joke, and her listening was a joke, and their whole pretense of conversation was a grand and ridiculous joke, which perhaps only he knew the punch line to.
Absent that niggling sense of threat, this dancing army might have seemed only silly and crazy. With that sense added though, it felt dangerous. It was why she'd pressed for Olan to dismiss him from his plans. She knew only too well how dangerous a mad, half-dead man could be. Just look at how close James While and Joran Helkegarde had come to shutting them down in those hard, early years.
Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Page 6