I was relatively sure that what made the most sense for me at this point was to get far enough away from the fighting and Shadow’s army as possible, then call ‘Dori and the others for pick up, in a place we hadn’t actually mapped.
Someplace outside of the area controlled by the communication networks of the Dreng.
I’d already left the old part of the City behind.
The wall around the Lao Hu compound continued to stretch out next to me, but I knew I was well into the “new” northern border as they still called it, even though this portion of the wall had stood there for several hundred years.
The new wall had been built by the Lao Hu themselves, while the human Imperial Family still lived inside the City. That had been a few hundred years before the communists came to power, when the human authority remained largely in the hands of an academic bureaucratic class and the royals themselves.
The addition of the higher wall, which encompassed the massive gardens that Revik walked through to find me along with several lakes and a fair bit of arable land and housing, had been built to increase the territory of the City to better accommodate the Lao Hu.
Even way back then––well before official First Contact occurred between the seer race and the West and back when seers were still thought of as mythological creatures by anyone outside of China itself––the Imperial family treasured their growing stable of Chinese seers.
When I’d lived in the City, the “new” quadrant had been where most of the humans and non-infiltrator seers lived. It had also been where most of the crops were grown, and where they housed their water and most of their hydropower.
It was where the children went to school. Where their hospitals and markets lived.
Beyond the wall on that side, meaning to the north, there was another lake.
Beyond that was a river. The Nanchang, according to the map I’d seen.
I fought to decide yet again if I should try to contact the Lao Hu before I left. Meaning directly, via someone on the other side of that wall.
For now, I had my headset off.
I wondered if there was some way to pass a message to someone within. There would be other doors out here, I knew. Doors I might be able to find, if I was careful. Now that the construct was down, I knew I might have a sporting chance of using the higher parts of my light, at least. I might even be able to use my light to talk to Voi Pai herself.
Like it or not, I was still connected to them.
I knew Revik was right, though.
I was still too close to Shadow’s major deployments.
I needed to wait, to get out of the circle of channel-screening surrounding the City––and preferably out of Beijing itself––before I started sending up any great big flares about who and where I was. Revik had been absolutely adamant on that point.
To him, it had zero to do with intelligence concerns. From what Revik said, Shadow’s people would hunt me if they knew where I was…or even if they knew I was anywhere near the City. He said that would have been true even if I hadn’t just brought down their whole damned network. He hadn’t soft-pedaled that message at all.
He’d been zero-bullshit crystal clear.
They hated me.
Pretty much the whole of Shadow’s army hated my guts. No lingering sympathies remained even among the religious fanatics, nor from those who in the past thought I might be brainwashed by humans. No sympathies remained with anyone who’d known me when Revik had led that army under Salinse.
All of that was gone, he said.
Completely and totally erased.
They hated me like a religion now, possibly from something woven in the construct itself. A few hated me to the point of obsessive, homicidal rage, he informed me.
I knew he’d said it like that so I wouldn’t underestimate his words.
Even so, it hurt, and not only because I could feel flickers of how that hate had affected him while he’d been there, living inside their world.
I didn’t have time to think about that either, though.
I didn’t have time to think about Revik at all. Not in terms of the last things he’d said to me. Not in terms of what I’d felt off him, or the alien lights that had left imprints on parts of his aleimi as well. Some part of me wanted to obsess on all of it, to know details I knew I didn’t really want to know. Some part of me wanted to pick apart his final words to me, too…to make more of them…or less of them…than how he’d probably meant them.
Some part of me obsessed on the ambiguity there, on any gaps it could find between the different things he might have meant. Some fearful, masochistic side of me wanted to believe the worst of it, maybe just to prepare myself.
That same part of me heard his words as goodbye.
But I couldn’t think about that.
I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about any of it.
But yeah, I was thinking about it anyway.
Right up until when gunshots rang out in the early morning air.
I ducked in instinct, letting out a low gasp as I melted sideways and deeper into the trees. Even then, my first thought was of Revik…until it hit me that the shots came from my side of the wall, that Revik was long gone, and probably already underground.
Whoever this was, they were firing at me.
I stumbled as I began to run, grappling with the shoulder bag as I lengthened my strides over the uneven ground. Scanning the horizon, I aimed my feet for a denser cluster of trees past the last edge of the wall.
I fought to remember the geography here, what I’d studied with Jem over that map.
The moats were far behind me. I was too far away from the exit point I told Revik about. I’d walked in the opposite direction, fearing running into Shadow stragglers.
There was that river in front of me.
I tried to remember how far away it would be from here.
Fighting with the shoulder bag as I ran in the green dress, I yanked out the second gun right around when I reached that denser cover. Pressing my back into a larger tree, I grabbed an extra magazine, wedging it in the waistband of the dress before I shoved the satchel behind my back and out of my hands’ way.
Holding up the gun, I clicked the trigger twice to deactivate the safety right before I peered around the trunk, looking in the direction from which those original shots came.
Nothing. I couldn’t see anyone.
Even as I thought it, something stung me in the side of the neck.
Not from the direction of the original shots.
From the east. My right.
Something hit into my flesh, hard, making me gasp.
It stung like fire as soon as it got there. Reaching up with my free hand, I yanked it out, squeezing off three shots from my gun in the direction from which it came. I did both things without thought, adjusting my position around the tree so I’d have cover on both sides even as I looked to the west and north, making sure they didn’t have someone waiting on those sides, too.
They’d fucking driven me here.
They used the gunfire to drive me to that damned shooter in these trees.
All of that ran through my mind in less than a heartbeat.
I was still gripping the gun as the liquid started coursing tangibly through my blood. I could already feel it warping my aleimi.
Only then did I look down at what I held in my hand.
Panting, I stood there for a few seconds, feeling my beating heart carry the poison to other parts of me, feeling it spread out through my body and limbs as I stared down at the orange-tufted dart, focusing on the striped barb still carrying a thin layer of my blood.
“Fucking whore!” a voice snarled, from the trees to the southeast, maybe forty yards away.
It had to be the shooter. The one who hit me with the dart.
I knew that voice. I knew it.
It was Ute.
That time, I didn’t think.
Muttering under my breath, I yanked my back off t
he tree.
I didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t wait. The dart would knock me out if I waited.
I wasn’t Revik. I had to run.
I ignited the headset with a thought command even as I did, moving fast, almost due north as I fought to wind myself deeper into those trees. Still running between trees, gripping the gun in one hand, I sent a thought command to Balidor.
Nothing. I didn’t even get static.
I tried Jem next. Then Wreg. Jon. Jorag.
Finally I tried Jasek, thinking he might be closer.
On all of them, I got nothing but dead air.
It hit me after I’d cycled through the list of names a second time, then a third, that the silence wasn’t a matter of them not answering.
The signal was being blocked.
That had to be from Ute and her little pals too.
“Shit,” I muttered, even as I ignited the bare edges of the telekinesis.
I was pretty sure the drug had already gotten too far into my system for that, though. I struggled to grasp those higher structures with my light, clenching my jaw as I fought to concentrate, to even get my consciousness high enough to feel them.
My lower-level sight was already being affected, of course…but truthfully, my lower-level sight had been shit lately anyway. I knew Jem had noticed. He’d commented on it a few times, that something was off with me there. He’d thought it was exhaustion.
I hadn’t really wanted to think about what it was.
In any case, I’d learned to rely on Jem for most of the lower stuff.
I’d focused mainly on using those higher structures of mine when we’d worked at hunting the network seers, or while we’d been searching for Dragon. Those higher structures seemed untouched by whatever was wrong with me, but then, they seemed to operate no matter what was going on with me down here.
I did that again now, trying to get above the drug, above whatever that cloying blindness was that was hitting me with increasing regularity down below.
I continued to move through those woods as I did, although not as fast.
I didn’t let myself slow down and fuck with my light for long, however.
I couldn’t.
Turning, I made up my mind. Sprinting through the trees, I increased the length of my strides, accelerating faster even as I did my best to keep to the darkest part of the tree line. Ahead of me, I could already smell water; the lake outside the wall must be close. I could see the end of the wall now, too, the high, crazily-steep corner of the hundred-foot stone boundary that blocked the sun around the edges of the Forbidden City of the Lao Hu.
As I approached the edge of that centuries old territory marker, it hit me that I knew where I was going.
Well, assuming I could find it.
Of course, even if I could find it, getting there might not even help me.
I might end up trapped in a different way…or hell, drowned, if this drug ended up being stronger than I feared. I knew the flooding had been intense lately, that there was a good chance that the water would be entirely unswimmable. I could get smashed up in the debris washing down from the mountains, or I simply might not be able to reach the waterline at all.
For some reason, it was the only thing that made sense to me, though.
So I ran, all out, for the river.
33
TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
Revik had never run down stairs in the dark so quickly in his life.
Not even as a kid. Not even running from Gerwix.
The thought brought a morbid twist of humor to his light, a twist that never really turned into full-blown amusement. It didn’t even really touch the lower areas of his light, much less do much to lift the mood he couldn’t seem to crawl out of, which seemed to be gradually worsening since he’d woken up in his wife’s lap outside the City’s walls.
He welcomed the thought anyway, if only because it was one more thing to think about that wasn’t his wife.
Having an objective and a relatively short time window helped more.
It kept his mind running in straight lines, kept it off the walls closing around him the deeper he descended into that cave…kept his light focused more or less on task and on the time window he’d negotiated with Allie to do this thing.
More to the point, it helped him avoid thinking about what he’d tasted in her light…what some part of his aleimi still tugged and obsessed on and fucking tasted, seemingly without him having any ability to control it.
It had been really hard not to yell at her.
Really, really fucking hard.
Kneeling in front of the organic control panel of the warehouse-sized fusion generator, he glanced at his watch, knowing without looking how much time had passed.
Thirty-eight minutes, fourteen seconds…
The watch reflected the same. Looking at the watch was ritual.
Fundamentally irrational, like all rituals.
It was also a means of motivating himself to move his ass.
He was already behind. His time got fucked as early as the stairs.
He’d more or less run, full-tilt down those eight steep staircases, using his light partly to see and partly to keep his feet from missteps, scanning from higher parts of himself for more tactical purposes aboveground and deeper below.
No one had been guarding the opening.
He’d managed to move more or less invisibly across the City’s grounds too, by using various shields and light disguises and even some careful pushes…but mostly because the vast majority of the seers and human’s he’d come across had been too distracted to pay much attention to him, particularly when they couldn’t see his light. So getting to that corner of the wall by the horse paddocks hadn’t been overly rough, either.
But the staircase had been bad.
Well, worse than he’d remembered.
He’d been sweating bullets by the time he reached that seventh landing; his heart had been hammering in his chest, and not only from physical exertion. He’d been fighting the edges of a full-blown panic attack, even after detaching a good portion of his light from his body and edging further into that distance in smaller and smaller increments as his panic worsened.
Nineteen minutes, twelve seconds…
That was the full amount of time that passed before he made it to that landing, starting with where he’d left the wall and Allie.
He’d definitely miscalculated on the fucking stairs.
He’d also forgotten he’d been drunk that night. His mental timepiece had been off. Moreover, he’d had his ass kicked in the aftermath, which probably hadn’t helped in terms of his memory of those events, either.
It would take longer to climb out.
He should have asked Allie for more time for the goddamned stairs.
He couldn’t think about that now, though.
Finding the fusion generator hadn’t been hard.
Six and a half minutes…
Twenty-five minutes, forty-one seconds running count…
More time got sucked up while he tried to figure out why he couldn’t turn the damned thing on, or get any of the organic machines to talk to him despite the fact that he could feel them powered up and conscious around him. Another handful of seconds before he admitted to himself he likely wouldn’t be able to figure out what the problem was, not in time.
Twelve minutes, forty-eight seconds…
Edging damned close to that forty minute mark…
The organic wasn’t listening to a single fucking thing he’d asked it to do. It wasn’t even like the AI he’d encountered that wouldn’t let him into that sentient room. This was some kind of total fucking lockdown; like he didn’t even have access to argue with the thing, or be heard by any level of its security access protocols.
He had maybe five more minutes to screw around with it.
Six, tops. Then he had to make a decision.
He bled more of his light into the living light of the machine, using the higher levels of his aleimi
that time. He wondered if he could crack the actual aleimic structure of the organic, like he’d done with that wall. There might not be manual controls for this thing though, not that he could figure out in time. Turning on a fusion reactor wasn’t exactly the same as opening a door…and Revik had no idea if killing its organic “mind” and the living components of the reactor would basically destroy the machine itself.
He couldn’t even get enough of a grip on it to hack the damned thing…
Jem could have done it.
Jem would have this thing opening like a fucking flower right now…
The thought popped into his head, bringing a flush of anger so intense he could only sit there for a few seconds, fighting to control his light.
Anyway, he had no idea if it were even true.
Even Garensche hit walls now and then, especially with some of Menlim’s toys.
Forcing Dalejem out of his mind and light, he focused back on the machine, trying to coax his way inside the morphing strands. The thing kept sliding away from him though, going from an amoeba to a more sophisticated life form, then all the way down to a near-deadline pattern that barely contained a flicker of consciousness at all.
What access would I need to discuss options? he asked it, bleeding his Elaerian light into the living but physical parts of the panel.
Silence.
Who would you let in? he sent, trying again. Who are you looking for, friend?
Silence.
Request information on option to override controls with telekinesis, he sent, just to see what it would say. Possible damage to autonomy of living component…
When it still didn’t answer him, he exhaled in irritation.
“What if I just cracked you in half, you bitch?” he muttered, feeling his jaw harden as the animosity in his light grew hotter. “Would you talk to me then?”
That time it shocked him.
Meaning, the mechanism gave him an actual electrical shock, something physical.
The pulse came out of the floor, hitting him in the knees and his hand where he leaned on the tile. It startled him enough that he regained his feet in reflex, then stepped away.
He stood there. Panting.
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 65