by James Axler
“Ullikummis?” Grant asked, the name a question. Ullikummis had demonstrated that he could control stone, and he had been the major thorn in Cerberus’s side these past few months. While it was dangerous to assume he was behind everything the warriors faced, it was also a reasonable proposition to consider.
Still running her index finger between the cobblestones, Rosalia looked perplexed. “Rocks, yes—but water? That doesn’t seem to be his style, Magistrate.”
Kudo led Grant over to the part of the open courtyard where Kishiro had been dragged under water. “My brother disappeared here,” he explained, toeing it with his boot in a wide circle.
Grant looked at the area, noticing straight away that it was flat, other than the natural protrusions that the cobbles created. Were they really cobbles? There was definitely no space for a pool deep enough to drag a man under. “It makes no sense,” he said softly, speaking his thoughts aloud.
Still tracing her fingers along the grouting between the cobbles, Rosalia spoke up once more. “There’s a slope,” she said. “It’s subtle but it’s there. Water can move fast, Grant—with another power behind it, it could run away from an area like this in the space of a few seconds, maybe less.”
“Doesn’t explain the pool,” Grant grumbled.
“They all disappeared together,” Rosalia reminded him. “There were five of these water creatures but when I hit your one with electricity they all went poof.”
“So they’re connected,” Grant agreed. “It’s not five creatures we’re facing, it’s one.”
“Like fingers on a hand,” Rosalia proposed.
“Or puppets,” Grant mused. “Mannequins. A skilled puppeteer can operate more than one puppet at the same time, bringing to it the illusion of life.”
“What, you think someone’s controlling these things? Giving them instructions?” Rosalia asked.
Grant nodded in reply. “They weren’t predators,” he said. “They came for us the way the old sec men would come in the villes, either driving strangers away or killing them.”
“Or a kidnapping,” Rosalia suggested.
Rosalia’s dog whined as she stood, and she tickled it behind the ears affectionately for a moment. “It’s okay,” she said to console it. “Danger’s passed for now.”
Grant looked around the courtyard again, peering up at the moon overhead and pondering just what to do next. “If they are guards,” he suggested, “then there’s a chance they took Domi and Kishiro in for questioning or whatever.”
Belying his usual air of tranquility, Kudo appeared to jump just slightly. “Do you really think so?”
Grant brought his hand up to hush the conversation as he engaged his Commtact. “Domi?” he called. “Come in, Domi. Do you read?”
Grant waited for Domi to respond. Their Commtacts were linked, making this the simplest manner in which to check on her. He waited briefly before trying her again, but the result was the same both times—no reply.
Across the courtyard, Rosalia plucked Kishiro’s discarded katana from the ground, taking care not to touch its razor-keen edge as she pushed it through her belt. While her competence with firearms was remarkable, Rosalia was far more at home with an edged weapon, knives and swords her specialities. Though she had several knives secreted throughout her clothing, she hadn’t brought a sword on this mission herself. Right now, however, this one would do just fine.
Grant spoke into his Commtact, keeping his voice low. The unit itself would boost his words, so there was no need to raise his voice and attract any unnecessary attention. “Cerberus, this is Grant. Do you read? Over.”
After a momentary pause Donald Bry’s familiar voice reported back over Grant’s Commtact, asking for an update.
“We had a little excitement,” Grant said with deliberate vagueness, “and I lost track of Domi in the process. Can you locate her from your end?”
“This sounds serious, Grant,” Bry replied thoughtfully. “What happened?”
“We’re not sure yet,” Grant explained. “Let’s not worry Lakesh unduly. He has more than enough on his plate there already right now.”
* * *
AT THE TEMPORARY CERBERUS facility on the Pacific shore, Donald Bry peered up guiltily from his computer terminal to where Lakesh was talking with Mariah Falk and Reba DeFore about the medical implications of Edwards’s condition. He was speaking into a headset, so Lakesh couldn’t hear both sides of the discussion.
“Is that Grant?” Lakesh asked, noticing Bry speaking into the Commtact’s headset.
“Yes, sir, I’m just bringing up some data for him now,” Bry confirmed.
Lakesh held his hand up, keeping his voice low. “For now, Donald, let’s not tell Grant that Kane is out in the field. The two have been through a lot together, but I wouldn’t want to worry Grant unduly.”
Bry nodded, barely concealing the smile that threatened to burst to life on his features. It seemed that right now everyone wanted to protect everyone else from something.
After a moment Bry tracked down Domi’s transponder signal on his telemetry readout.
* * *
“GRANT?” BRY’S VOICE came over the Commtact. “I’ve found her. She’s about four miles from your current location. You need to head into the city itself, toward the river. By my estimate, she seems to be close to the eastern side, near the center. I’ll patch through a beacon signal for you, which will register…like this.”
Standing in the courtyard, Grant heard a very low pulse in his ear, a single bleep so low as to be almost unconscious.
“When you get nearer, the clicks will become more frequent,” Bry explained. “Let me know if it becomes a distraction.”
“Thanks, Donald,” Grant acknowledged. “Will do.”
With that, Grant closed down the communication and began striding from the courtyard, his mismatched partners in tow. “Domi’s alive,” he told them shortly, “which bodes well for Kishiro. Even money they’re being held together, at least for now. The sooner we trace them, the less chance there is they’ll have been split up.”
Hurrying along at Grant’s heels, Kudo nodded once in gratitude. “Thank you, friend Grant,” he said. “We must hope that fate is with us.”
“Hoping sounds about right,” Grant grumbled. “We have a long march ahead of us—four miles across town—and I don’t want to get sloshed, so let’s avoid bumping into any more of the water babies if we can help it.”
Together, Grant, Kudo and Rosalia hurried urgently through the streets of the dragon city, with Rosalia’s dog scampering along behind her at a fast trot.
* * *
BLACK AND RED—playing cards on a table.
The two colors whirled in front of Domi’s eyes, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t seem to make sense of them, couldn’t remember how the game was played.
As swiftly as it had started, the whirling stopped and in its place was nothingness, a soft blackness that might have come from the two colors as they coalesced. Domi peered into that inky nothingness for a long while, trying to recall what had gone before.
She had been attacked, along with her teammates in the courtyard. Finally, she had turned on her attacker, its liquid form like a fractured mirror glistening in the silvery moonlight. And then…
Domi felt the bile surge up her esophagus in a violent rush, the aching clench in her belly, and suddenly her eyes were open and she was vomiting, a tasteless, watery gush blurting from her open mouth before she even had time to think. All she could see were the dark tiles, her face just inches from them as her watery expulsion surged out in front of her, pooling on the tiles, colorless but with a faint smell like brine. Domi shuddered and heaved again, another mouthful of the salty vomit bursting from her mouth, her belly clenched like a fist, forcing her to
remain doubled over, lying on that cold floor. The watery vomit washed across the slick, black tiles, and Domi tasted the bitter tang of stomach acid as the last of the vomit drooled out of her, leaving her ribs aching, her stomach shaking, her throat burning.
All around her, the dark tiles stretched off away from her face. They were cold to the touch, and the room—for it was a room, she could tell that immediately from the lack of motion in the wind currents—stretched off, layered with them, the lighting reflecting from their surface in thin white strips. She was cold, too, cold and damp, her scalp wet, her hair heavy with water. She could hear the sounds of dripping coming from nearby, a constant plop-plop-plop rattling from several directions at once.
She pushed herself up, every part of her aching, her hands stinging with pins and needles when she pushed them against the hard floor. Her circulation felt poor, her extremities numb—either from the vomit or from the coldness of the room, she couldn’t tell which. Perhaps something else, too, the way she had come here, the journey.
It had been like a rollercoaster ride, she remembered then, a rollercoaster ride through a swimming pool. The water had pressed all around her, swirling in a freezing hug, like being held in an icy fist. She remembered its sound against her ears, and when she listened now she could still hear the faint sound of the waves, as if their echo had become trapped in the seashell swirls of her chalk-white ears.
It felt a little as if she had traveled through a broken mat-trans, the journey of discorporality resulting in body sickness when she had been reconstructed. It wasn’t the first time Domi had experienced that with a mat-trans; and while she couldn’t be sure, this felt similar enough for her to suspect that’s what the water thing had been.
But where was she?
There came a groan behind her, and Domi instinctively reached for the holstered gun at the small of her back even as she turned to face the noise. Her gun was missing. She ran her fingers along the waistband of her pants, but it wasn’t there. She couldn’t feel its familiar weight, either, now that she thought about it.
The light came from above in thin strips, bright as lightning but only a quarter-inch wide and six inches long. Peering up at the ceiling was like looking through a venetian blind.
The room, like the lighting, was narrow with slanting edges where the walls met the floor and ceiling. The walls and ceiling seemed to be made of a glossy, ash-dark substance, like plastic or coral, and there was an unpleasant dampness to the air, making it feel heavy. The room’s proportions reminded Domi of a pressure chamber used by divers. That, too, may have been an effect of the method with which she had been transported here, the racing water still primary on her mind.
Automatically, Domi’s hand was at her leg, clawing aside the damp material of her pants where it stuck to her, pulling the combat knife she kept stored in a sheath at her ankle.
Lying across the room, slumped against one of the shimmering wet walls, was Kishiro. He lay at an awkward angle, Domi saw, as if washed-up debris on a beach. It was he who had groaned.
“Kishiro?” Domi whispered, the words making her sore throat burn all the more.
The Tigers of Heaven warrior turned, his head swaying unsteadily as if it was a tethered balloon in the breeze.
“Kishiro, it’s me,” Domi continued as she scrabbled across the tiles toward him. “It’s Domi.”
Kishiro groaned again, looking at her as if through sleep. “Domi,” he spluttered, the single word sounding breathy with the strain.
“You have any idea where we are, cowboy?” Domi asked, glancing behind him, searching for a door.
“I…” Kishiro began. “I…”
“Forget it,” Domi instructed gently. “You were as out of it as I was, I guess. Take your time. It’s okay.”
As Domi spoke, she felt a strange crackling in the air, subtle, like a change in polarity, and then the lights flickered on behind her. She turned and saw to her surprise that the chamber was longer than she had first suspected. She had initially taken the darkness there for a wall, but realized now that the chamber was lit with such precision that its inhabitant could only see the section he or she was required to.
Lying there, head against his outstretched arm, lay the now-familiar figure of Hassood, his eyes closed, dusky face clenched in pain. Domi recognized him from the footage on the radio transmission unit that she had watched with Grant and the others, and she scampered across the chamber to where the man lay, still holding the knife in one hand, nudging him with a light touch. He was breathing, she saw, but slowly. He appeared unconscious, well out of it.
“Hassood?” she hissed. “Hassood, wake up. I’m a friend, from Cerberus. Wake up.”
In response, Hassood groaned and rolled away from Domi’s light but insistent prodding, swatting at the air while still asleep.
Vexation furrowing her brow, Domi turned back to Kishiro where he sat behind her, propped against the curving bank of the wall. Her eyes searched over him swiftly. “Kishiro? You have any weapons?” she whispered, keeping her voice low.
Moving slowly, almost like a man under water, Kishiro grasped for his katana, only to find the scabbard empty. His hand moved around under the low skirt of his shirt, reaching behind and to the other side, and a smile crossed his features. He nodded to Domi. “My katana is missing but I still have my wakizashi.”
The wakizashi was a shorter blade traditionally carried by samurai alongside the katana. Not all of the Tigers of Heaven carried them, for they were often considered to be ornamental rather than practical, their short length making them more akin to a knife than a sword. Still, they could be turned to combat if necessary, their blades kept as sharp as the katana.
“Maybe whoever put us in here didn’t disarm us,” Domi told him, keeping her voice low, “but we need to get out of here quickly.”
“Where are we?” Kishiro asked.
“That’s a good question,” Domi told him with a tight smile. She sniffed at the air; it was filtered, but there was a dampness to it, too. “Feels like we’re underground maybe. I can’t tell for sure.”
As the two mismatched figures spoke, Domi became aware of a change in the lighting out of the corner of her eye. She turned in that direction, scanning the ceiling, the walls. As she watched, the dark wall opposite Hassood began to lighten, its ash color draining away to be replaced by what appeared to be a glowing square, roughly three feet up from the floor and becoming larger as it filled the wall. Light glowed from the square, becoming stronger as the opacity of the wall disappeared entirely, leaving the three-foot-square block clear like a window.
Domi padded toward the square on silent tread, determined to get a better look. As the dull color of the wall drained away, Domi saw that the square seemed to look into another room, with coral-like arches and steps disappearing off into the distance, seating all around. She realized in a moment what the square was—a video screen, or perhaps a window into the next room. The definition was so clear, it could almost be a hole in the wall itself.
Domi examined the room she could see within the square, feeling the coolness radiating from its glassy surface. It appeared empty, and her view remained fixed, which meant it was either a single camera or, as she had suspected, a window that had previously been covered by some unknowable technological trick, perhaps something as simple as a two-way mirror. There were seats there, arranged to face the jutting walls that ran across the farthest reach of her view. The chairs were shaped like champagne glasses, with thin stems beneath the narrow seats, swirling down to the tiled floor in subtle twisting plaits. The walls contained what appeared to be display units, something like the computer terminals used by Cerberus, and there were small glowing pods scattered throughout the ash-colored walls. The pods glowed a putrid yellow like a lizard’s eyes, keeping the room in a dusklike luminance. Beyond that, Domi saw darkness, somet
hing twinkling subtly within it.
Past the chairs, Domi saw a stairwell reaching upward beyond the level granted by the video feed. Carved in some kind of gray-black, bonelike substance, the grand stairwell looked wide enough to accommodate a SandCat, and it turned in on itself in a languid spiral like the dizzy path of a leaf in fall. There were icy columns there, thin as the bars on a prison window, shimmering in the darkness, just out of sight.
Domi stepped closer, bringing herself to within three inches of the faintly glowing square, her eyes narrowing as she peered into the room in the square. A clattering noise seemed to come from beyond, the sound soft and regular, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Close up, she could see that the panel seemed to be made of glass, her own pale reflection visible there like a ghost standing in the darkness of the room beyond.
Warily, Domi reached for the glass, touching it first with the hilt of her combat knife, a savage-looking nine-inch weapon with a serrated edge, her sole memento from the six months she had spent as a sex slave in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville. As a rule, Domi had little patience for keepsakes. Her Outlands life had been a daily struggle, and one she preferred to forget. However, the knife itself had come to represent something of her triumph over adversity, and as such she invested in it more value than it truly deserved, telling herself, perhaps, that a good knife was hard to find. She had very nearly lost this blade during a treetop battle less than a week ago, out in the vicinity of Luilekkerville, but it had been recovered by Kane’s team when they had come to her assistance.
The knife’s scarred hilt tapped against the glass with a dull thud, eliciting a curtailed sound with no discernible reverberation. Solid then, not hollow as she had hoped. That meant the glass of the screen was likely several inches thick, or two panes had been overlaid in the manner of insulated glazing. She peered again into the glass, searching for the telltale double image that generally flared in the reflections, but there was no indication of it.