“This thing carry two?”
Miles looked at him appraisingly. “What do you weigh these days? Two thirty?”
“Two forty,” he admitted.
“It’ll have to do. Hop on.”
Promise’s cloak was burned and soaked with blood and firefoam. The silk is ruined … Aubry mentally slapped himself. “Aubry!” Promise screamed, the flesh of her beautiful face stretched taut over her cheekbones. “Bring back my child, do you hear me, Aubry?”
He nodded, unable to speak.
8
The air slapped against them, cold and hostile, as they rose up out of the dock. They were awash in a swirl of molten colors as the distortion field bent and twisted the light around them. Then they broke free of its protective bubble, and the world became sane again.
The crowd was still disappearing, screaming and streaming off in all directions. Aubry clung one-armed to Bloodeagle’s waist, peering down at the police squads. Walking, driving, skimming—they strove to control the crowd, tried to keep them from trampling each other into the pavement.
Chrome security units whooped and shrieked in from all directions now. Searchlights dissected each building in turn. Nothing. Video would tell little, autopsy less: plasma-pulse trauma was too extreme to leave convenient, trajectory-revealing exit wounds.
The Lear airbike shuddered in the wind, dropping and struggling to reclaim altitude as gusts slammed them sideways. The wind deafened them as Bloodeagle fought his way toward the arching, emerald expanse of Tyson All-Faiths.
Aubry remembered Leslie’s sudden, hawklike intensity, the bird-dog focus that he had disregarded. So strong. So quick.
So young.
Damn damn damn!
As All-Faiths’ tangle of girders sprouted beneath them, Bloodeagle brought the Lear around toward the bare planking that constituted a temporary roof.
He had failed Leslie once. Not again. His child had focused on this building. Let the police search where they might—he would bet on his child’s instincts—
As you should have trusted your own?
To hell with it. To hell with everything but Leslie.
And God help anything, or anyone, that stood in his way.
9
I was home. Father calls this his Dark Place. It is the only place in the world that … smells right. It is within me. Here, as nowhere else, I can feel.
I feel death.
In the Dark Place, sight, and sound, and sensation don’t exist as most people experience them. Everything is immediate—as if I am a part of what is experienced. There is no spectator. There is no me. This is best.
I am very bad. I am evil. The Way is in killing. Death is life.
I remained within my breathing, floating on an air current. I am sounds too faint to hear. Am shadow-flickers too dim to detect. I am all of this.
And less.
Once, there were other Medusae. They understood. All dead now. Now, only Father. He has the Dark Place within him, but fights it. Sometimes wins. Mostly. I admire him.
I am terribly lonely.
A hundredth of a second before the woman Mira died I began to move OFF LINE. First order of action—move OFF LINE. Trust kinesthetic/visual flash. Cognitive correlation too slow.
Can’t explain. Human sensory input processes a billion impressions a minute. Reticular activating system filters all but a whisper in a hurricane of data. Must trust older, more primitive cortical structures.
Once I got OFF LINE, cognitive backtracking and sorting began. According to Miles Bloodeagle this is a conditioned adaptation of the brain’s holographic/fluid processing.
Tyson All-Faiths is a monstrosity. Mother called it neo-Byzantine. If this is a house of God, She has the aesthetics of a mud wasp.
Catholic, Muslim, Methodist, Hebrew, and Gaiac services are conducted in central shared area. Tyson was a wealthy agnostic, who left a building fund in his will. He had a nonsectarian religious vision a week before his death and took no chances.
I moved silently along a catwalk above a balcony, my senses open.
I heard a sound beneath me, and looked down on a police investigative team. At first I experienced anger—these idiots would muddy the water.
Or act as lure.
I stripped out of my dress. Strange. The softness and frills give me pleasure. This irritates Father. I need his approval, but it is pleasurable to irritate him. Strange.
Removed undergarments, and wedged all clothing into a corner. Ready for the night. I have five percent body fat. When people think I am too far away to hear, I have been called reptilian. I tell myself not to care what they think. I am Death. I am more silent than my own shadow. I was in automatic scan mode. The microreceiver in my occipital ran the electromagnetic spectrum, searching for relevant patterns. I can interpret them aurally, as visual, or as kino. At that moment, I needed audio, and selected police band. They were using encoded throatmikes. Using a primitive interpolation, I cracked the cipher before my next breath.
“—twenty-two-percent chance of vector origin mark Tyson. Perp still present.”
“Has Knight and his family been secured?”
“All except for the kid.”
“Jesus. That weird brat?”
“Keep your opinions to yourself. Keep your eyes open.”
I do not care what they think.
I do not.
I caught something. Not light … but some variation on the darkness. I wedged myself back into the shadows, and watched as three cops passed beneath me. They moved in standard inverted V, sweeping three hundred degrees a second, very alert, very “professional.”
I watched them die.
One moment there was a shadow behind them, and in the next that shadow detached itself and merged with theirs for just under two seconds. There was a rustling sound, like pillows tumbling in slow motion. And then they were dead. I heard a single word spoken: “Roku.” Japanese for the number six.
Efficient. Admirably competent. I climbed out along the catwalk, to get a better look. They were what Bloodeagle calls “body dead”: broken, twisted as if fallen from a skimmer. I stopped breathing for a moment. Query: Who has such capacity for swift, silent violence? And the inclination to use hand-to-hand when sophisticated tools are available?
Gorgon personal-encounter protocols encourage such behavior. Were there Gorgons here? More renegades? Could some have survived the battle in Death Valley? Who else has the requisite skill and strength and power to bring silent death to three armed men …
Gorgon/not Gorgon. Irrelevant. This is Challenge. To whom? Father. Of course. Kill Mira, the old, useless woman. Spare the child, and the woman of childbearing years. Terminate, with contempt, the warriors you send after him. The message was clear. I can kill anyone, anywhere, any time. Either meet me alone, or more will die. From a distance. These are my skills. Do not anger me.
First frame: three human beings. Hale. Hearty. Second frame: pile of bleeding meat. My stomach flashed hot, and the urge to EVACUATE SECTOR began to override courage programming. All humans experience this sensation. Most call it fear. Some utilize it in the manner evolution intended: to stimulate combative or evasive potentials.
Some, ignorant, are ashamed of it.
I modified the submodalities of the kino impressions by sending tendrils of thought out into my endocrines. I steadied my breathing and dropped respiration to two a minute.
I watched. Waited.
Nothing. Then, without warning, I felt the tingle. The strength seeped out of my fingers and arms. I barely managed to push back onto the catwalk.
I thought: He saw me??!
Next thought: They?
And then nothing.
10
Aubry’s senses flamed the moment he entered All-Faiths. As he walked the hallways they shifted crazily from granite to steel to glass. Now a cave, now a glade, now a hall of mirrors infinitely reflecting a lone, armed man gliding through its corridors.
The environment processor wasn�
��t fully activated. Crystal chandeliers. Now a row of Renaissance paintings: plump, haloed infants held by improbably pale Madonnas. Flickering candles shimmied in unseen winds. Now the faint echo of a ghostly choir, humming a Gregorian chant.
In the next moment, the tang of incense filled the air, and above him the ceiling assumed a mosque’s concavity. Furniture and wall decorations morphed to fit the Middle Eastern motif.
Then the surroundings flowed again. Rugged mountain peaks soared overhead, sprouting out of the earth around him. Summer wind swirled from unseen vents, plucked at his hair, dried the sweat at the back of his neck.
It was a perfect site for Gaia worship. Promise’s sister Jenna would have felt right at home. Aubry felt naked and exposed.
And vulnerable. And afraid. His body felt rusty. His survival instincts simply weren’t engaged. It was a terrifying feeling, akin to that of losing one’s core identity.
Or for Aubry Knight, perhaps even worse than that.
A distant radio chuckled, then dissolved into echoes.
Aubry held his rifle at port arms, and slid from one doorway to another. He focused his hearing, striving to send his senses out in front of him … nothing but those echoes. He dropped to his knees and peered around the corner. Even the caution was something that he was unused to feeling. Before today, there had always been a quality of recklessness, a lack of respect for his own life, a willingness to throw himself completely into the fray. Today, it simply wasn’t there.
He remembered Bloodeagle’s fluid dismount from the bike, splitting off from Aubry, ghosting down the first of two rooftop stairwells. Where Aubry was torn, Bloodeagle was at peace. The man was still alert, and alive, in a world where lack of alertness cost lives—at the least.
With a single code word, Bloodeagle could have summoned a dozen Gorgons to the scene within ten minutes. But six hundred seconds was just too damned long.
Where was Leslie? And what could possibly be in this place that could endanger his child? Promise’s last command still rang in his ears:
Find my child.
Aubry’s mind chattered like a fevered monkey, lashing him with doubts. What if this isn’t the building? Still, it was Leslie’s likeliest destination. What if he’s dead…? He couldn’t believe that. If Leslie were dead, Aubry’s heart would be a stone in his chest. He would feel it, know it, though the corpse be a world away.
No, Leslie was alive. If Aubry could just find his child …
The vomitously sweet stench of human blood and body waste clawed at his nose. Even before he rounded the next corner, Aubry knew what he would find.
The three policemen lay sprawled in terminal angularity, splashed by the filtered, artificial glare of the stained-glass window. Aubry quickly scanned the surrounding room, then knelt to examine them. Their skulls had been shattered. Their eyes had been forced from their sockets by a hideous internal pressure. It reminded Aubry of something he himself might have done, in another life, if enraged to the point of madness.
He heard a shallow, childlike inhalation, and turned to see a tiny, slender figure slumped against a column, shrouded in shadow.
Leslie. Aubry was there in two steps, fingers checking the pulse. The sweet little face was unbruised, the chest rose and fell effortlessly.
Around his neck hung a silver medallion. Aubry examined it cautiously. His first concern was ungrounded: it wasn’t an explosive device.
It was a receiver.
And even as he lifted it, it crackled in his hand.
“Greetings, my brother.” A female voice. Deep, mellifluous, and strangely familiar. There was an odd singsong quality to it.
“As you see, we can kill you, or anything you love, whenever we wish.”
“What the hell do you want from me?”
Another pause, during which Aubry heard nothing but the roar of his own breathing. “We want you,” the voice said. “Not now, but when we say. Just you. Otherwise, you will never know.”
“Will never know what?”
“When we kill everything you love.”
“There are more than one of you?”
“The woman died to show you we were serious. I want you, and you alone. The child is … interesting, but would be a distraction. Three nights from now. Come here, alone. Unarmed. And you will get the rest of your instructions.”
“And then what?”
“And then? And then one of us will die.”
The medallion became silent.
With a swift, fluid shuffle sound, Bloodeagle appeared at his side. He hadn’t seen Leslie yet. “Aubry? Did you find something?”
“Nothing,” he lied, and slipped the medallion into his pocket. “I’ve found nothing at all.”
11
Aubry and Promise took a security suite in Scavenger Towers, on the outskirts of Mazetown. Together, they watched over Leslie. The child had come out of his torpor, but still moved slowly, spoke with a thick tongue, had a frightening tendency to fall asleep. Doctors laid him on the white rectangle of the scan table, peeled him out of his clothing, inspected his pre-pubescent muscularity, and probed the moist, pinkish-brown folds of his genitals. Eyebrows were arched in surprise and speculation, but their evaluations quieted alarm. They suggested that nature be allowed to take her course.
When the doctors and the well-wishers were gone, silence descended. Aubry stood at a video wall, gazing out over a night city where most of the citizens lived and loved and worked without thinking of imminent death.
Promise appeared behind him and wrapped her arms around his muscular waist. She pressed her mouth against his back. Through his shirt, her breath warmed his skin, but not his heart. “You’re not telling me everything.” Aubry said nothing. He crossed to their bed and slipped out of his clothes, and then under the covers. He stared at the ceiling. A thin, high snoring sound, almost a whistle, pulled his eyes down. Their child was curled on his side, asleep on a cot at the side of the bed. Promise wouldn’t let Leslie out of her sight. The slightest variation in breathing patterns, the slightest shift in position, would rouse her from full sleep.
She knelt beside Aubry, the clinging film of her nightgown cloaked by her robe. It would require far denser camouflage to mute her physical presence: every movement, every inhalation or exhalation seemed to be carefully measured for impact.
Lashes half-lowered, she gazed at him, awaiting an answer. “What happened in All-Faiths, Aubry?”
“I don’t know.” But you do know, a voice inside him whispered. You know too damned well.
Aubry moistened his lips, buying time. “I found three dead police officers. Leslie was unconscious but unharmed. And there was a message. The assassin wants to meet with me.”
A red and orange aurora crackled across Promise’s face, shifted shadows on the wall. “Why?”
“Challenge. An affair of honor, perhaps. I don’t know. But it’s just between us.” He didn’t bother to tell her the rest.
Or we will kill everything that you love.
“You can’t do it,” Promise whispered. “You don’t know who they are, or what they want.”
“Yes, I do. They want me.”
Promise spoke very calmly, very directly. “You can’t do that, Aubry. You have obligations now.”
“They killed Mira.” His fingers gripped the wooden sill. It creaked. “They could have killed you, or Leslie. There must have been a reason. They could have killed me, if that was what they wanted.”
If that bitch wanted to kill you like that, he added silently.
“What are you going to do?” Suddenly, quite abruptly, he was lost to her. There was an aspect of Aubry that remained beyond her reach. A part that she had striven against. With a sudden flash of guilt she realized that she had done her very best to conquer him with softness and love. With fame and money, security and family.
That was the aspect of Aubry which had responded to Leslie’s warning. That part of him which Promise feared, because it seemed not only to detect trouble, but a
ttract it as well. And now …
Mira was dead.
Leslie stirred slightly, still recovering from the effects of the nerve ray. He tossed onto his side and back again, lost in a world of phantoms.
Aubry sat at the edge of Leslie’s bed, pulling the blanket up to the small chin with thick, dark, callused hands.
He studied the magnetic chess set in the corner of the room. Leslie and Promise’s sister Jenna were teaching Aubry the game. Jenna was a master, and Leslie an intuitive genius at chess. Aubry was just beginning to understand some of the basic ploys and gambits.
But he could play well enough to lose gracefully. He studied his position. “Knight to queen’s pawn six,” he murmured.
Leslie stirred in his sleep. He didn’t open his eyes, or take a look at the chessboard. “Queen’s bishop to queen’s knight four. Check.”
Aubry studied his position. “Damn.” He brushed one massive finger along Leslie’s cheek. He took gentle pleasure in the ebb and flow, the steady river of life as its tides swept through the body of his child, the only creature in all the world he could call his blood. In repose, Leslie’s angularity was softened. He seemed a chocolate angel, a picture of innocence and guiltless conscience.
How many people had Leslie killed? How many more would have died, if the Medusae hadn’t been stopped?
Within Leslie burned a terrible engine of destruction. The fact that unknown assassins had managed to neutralize him was sobering.
He remembered Mira, lying in a pool of blood and brains and splintered skull, and made a mental transposition. Suddenly, Mira became Promise. And then Leslie.
And now, for the first time, he slid the emotional shields back so that he could actually feel the horror.
Dead. Shattered. His child. His woman.
Aubry’s hand closed on the little bed’s metal framework. It was a quarter-inch thick along an edge, and bent beneath his hands like foil.
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