The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  But…

  Not now! Be quiet. Trust Mr. Gao. Everything will be okay, Serafina – just stay strong for me.

  The bookshelf slammed in front of her, just centimeters from her face, and the darkness was warm and stale and total. Sara put her hand over her mouth to keep from making a sound, tears running freely from her eyes. Behind her, Daniel Gao shifted uncomfortably, leaning against the back wall of the alcove to avoid pressing tight against her.

  The fifth knock was nearly open assault.

  Her father answered the door politely before the last set of knocks could conclude. Judging by the silence that followed, that briefly surprised the visitors. A conversation began, and then almost immediately grew heated. Sara strained to hear, but all she could make out was raised voices and agitation. Daniel brushed against her in the dark and only the hand she clamped over her mouth stopped her from screaming.

  There was another sound she couldn’t identify, and then a loud thud that made her jump. In the quiet seconds that followed, Sara heard her mother sobbing quietly in the hall as she locked the door to the library behind her.

  Then Sara heard footsteps on the stairs. Many footsteps.

  Miss Ricci, forgive my impropriety, Daniel Gao thought, the rigidity of his thoughts an unpleasant intrusion in her mind. But it will be easier for me to hide your thoughts if…

  She felt his hand slide beneath her ponytail and rest on the back of her neck, and elbowed him in the stomach by reflex.

  …Miss Ricci, please! You are transmitting your worry and fear quite loudly, for those who know how to hear it! Without physical contact, I cannot…

  Sara struggled against him in the tight space, the diminishing hot air and the old chips of drywall crunching beneath her feet.

  There were steps on the second floor. Her mother said something, her voice perfectly calm. Sara heard her father shout, and then a thud, like a steak being dropped on the floor. She opened her mouth to yell, and Daniel Gao smothered her cry with his other hand. She fought as he wrapped an arm around her chest, and then her body went limp.

  I apologize, Miss Ricci, Daniel Gao thought. I promised your father I would protect you, however, and I mean to keep my promise.

  Sara wanted to struggle, to free herself, but her body refused any such commands, hanging as limp as damp laundry in Daniel Gao’s arms in the confines of the alcove, like some nightmare version of Seven Minutes in Heaven. Daniel stopped covering her mouth, instead using both arms to keep her steady and stable.

  Her mother said something in the hallway. She could not make out the words, but she recognized the tone. It was a warning.

  Sara never heard a response, but Ghada must not have liked what she heard, because the house shuddered with the constrained forces of her telekinetic protocol, every window in the house blowing out simultaneously in an orchestra of shattered glass, in concert with Sara’s mother’s fury.

  There was confusion, breaking furniture and screams and splintered wood. There was a scream that started high, and then slowly died away, only to be cut off mercilessly short at the end. Sara was mortified by the confinement, the stranger holding her, her paralyzed body, and the staccato pounding of her heart.

  The door to the library burst open with a crash, followed by the sounds of something colliding with the stacks on the far side of the room. Her father groaned, and her mother shouted. The house was briefly rattled by her mother’s telekinesis. The clamor culminated with a gunshot and the sound of splatter against the bookshelves.

  Her father screamed, an incoherent combination of outrage and despair. Sweat ran down Sara’s face in rivulets, or perhaps they were tears. Her father said something in a plaintive tone, but the only response was laughter, along with a wet sound she could not place.

  She felt Daniel Gao’s breath catch. Then, suddenly, she was tired beyond all reason.

  Best to sleep now, Daniel Gao urged in her mind. Best to dream.

  Her vision did not go black, because there was already so little light by which Serafina could see. Instead, there was simple quiet, transitioning gradually to an absence of awareness that felt as still and cold as a basement floor.

  ***

  The car slipped through empty streets beneath the sober light of the early morning, Central nearly as quiet as when it was first discovered, vacant and sitting ready for new tenants. There were no birds to announce the dawn, and no lights behind the windows they rolled past. Reggie Oster was glued to the window, forehead pressed against the bulletproof glass, trying to get a better look at the cloud of brown smoke drifting into the city from an estate on the outskirts of Central, against the grey mass of the sky.

  “Which is it, do you think?”

  Kiaan Parkier glanced up briefly from the road, gloved hands tightening on the wheel.

  “Black Sun, probably,” he said, turning his attention back to driving. “Purge.”

  “Some, maybe,” Reggie agreed doubtfully. “How many of them are still in Central, though? That’s a lot of smoke.”

  “So?” Kiaan shrugged. “Then it’s one of Thule’s.”

  Reggie studied the smoke in the air, as if by some quality of color or thickness he could determine its origin.

  “Or one of ours,” Reggie said darkly. “Could be.”

  “No way. Lord North is two moves ahead.”

  “You think? They say Lord Thule can predict the future.”

  The Audi was low and silver, a few years old, the suspension sluggish with the weight of bolted armor panels. The engine’s faint whine was just audible above the stereo.

  “You sound pretty scared,” Kiaan observed, giving Reggie a narrow look. “Having second thoughts about which side you picked?”

  “What? No! That’s not it.”

  “Really? Because you seem very impressed with Thule’s protocol. Maybe you’d be happier with the freaks?”

  “No way,” Reggie said, shuddering. “I’ve met Lóa and Mateo. That’s not for me.”

  “Then you’re with us,” Kiaan grunted. “Act like it.”

  Reggie nodded queasily, watching the dull smoke drift and congregate. There seemed to be more of it, or perhaps it was just the greater clarity that the dawn provided, dulled slightly by the perpetual fog of Central.

  “Yeah,” Reggie said, licking his lips. “You think…?”

  The explosion was like clap of thunder, the shaped charge elevating the car a meter above the roadway before it overturned, flipping over and rolling. Reggie was torn from his seat by the explosion, and for a moment felt like he was floating in the cabin of the rolling car. Then the car came to a wrenching stop as it collided with the corner of a building, and Reggie’s head was dashed against the inverted floor.

  Kiaan was pinned in place by the airbag and semiconscious. Cy So put his Smith & Wesson to Kiaan’s temple and splattered the contents of his head across the windshield and the white plastic of the deflating airbag. Cy leaned in further, glancing at Reggie, motionless and bleeding from the head, and then put two more shots into him. The detonator dangled loosely from Cy So’s fingers, nearly forgotten, until Muhammed Omar took it gently from his hands.

  “Well done,” Muhammed said, putting his arm around the boy and leading him away from the car, which had begun to burn. “Welcome to the Thule Cartel.”

  ***

  Chandi Tuesday left her mother’s apartment in Central eight minutes before six; a full twenty-two minutes before Hegemony security would arrive to raid the premises. Chandi was filled with regret, looking around at the art and bric-a-brac she had grown up with, knowing it would be torn to pieces in an hour by thugs in the employ of the Thule Cartel, in a vain attempt to locate a clue to her current location, but her mother just laughed and claimed that she looked forward to making Chandi’s father buy new things.

  Her mother kissed her goodbye at the door, slipping a small bindle made from an exquisite hand-dyed silk scarf into Chandi’s coat pocket. Chandi held on to her for a moment, breathing in her mother’s
scent – Chanel No. 5, rosewater, cumin and cardamom from the kitchen. It would be the final time she and her mother embraced, Chandi was certain, though the reasons were obscure. Too many futures crowded her view.

  There was no need for words between them, as there never had been. Chandi’s mother was a low-level telepath, and had shared in her daughter’s prescience since her Activation. Her mother bore the burdens of foreknowledge with a graceful optimism that awed Chandi, and inspired her. Chandi was nearly grown before she learned to emulate her mother’s confident disposition.

  Central was cold beneath a thick layer of fog, pulled like a blanket up to the neck of a sleeper. The sound of her footsteps was muffled by the humidity, and despite the cold, Chandi could see tiny droplets of water beading on her glasses and on the skin of her arms. She pulled her woven shawl tighter around her shoulders and hurried down the street.

  She had meant to apport, obviously, and a technician was scheduled to have arrived at her mother’s flat nearly an hour earlier. Chandi realized that the technician was not going to show fifteen minutes before the scheduled appointment, dutifully contacting her Black Sun handler to report the rendezvous that had not yet been missed. The Operator at the other end was somewhat surprised by the timing of the contact, but not the content – apport technicians were in short supply, and their protocols less than reliable due to the sheer amount of traffic. Chandi Tuesday was told to wait for collection by Black Sun forces, but she knew already they would be too late.

  There were no taxis. The streets she hurried down were dreary beneath the heather skies of Central, the irresolute light of dawn only serving to deepen the shadows. Everything was wrong, and Chandi wondered distractedly what had happened to the future.

  Following instinct and protocol, Chandi followed the street she was on as the neighborhood shifted slowly from residential to commercial, the converted buildings of Central overlarge and clumsy for any purpose, with far too much vertical space and too little horizontal. Chandi caught sight of herself in a shop window, the stone front cut neatly to accommodate the massive rectangle of plate glass. Dressed in a tailored suit in oxblood and vintage overcoat she had found at an estate sale in upstate New York, where her father lived, Chandi was reminded briefly of old photographs of her mother’s days at the Academy, and just after, managing cartel business before her pregnancy. Chandi pulled the shawl she had borrowed from her mother tight about her neck and fretted, hurrying down a street where every window was dark.

  The Isolation Field Protocol was a tightness across her skin; an inferred pressure at the base of her skull and the top of her mouth; a cotton candy taste that made her lips curl in disgust. Chandi hated sweets.

  She could have run, but she was wearing nice shoes, and given her current uncertainty, her only pair. Chandi sat down on a convenient stoop, sculpted with local concrete at great cost, by a cartel with a surplus of funds and nostalgia for the real world. The planters on either side of her were stocked with rhododendron in unearthly pink and another color that was lost still to the gloom, old enough to tower over the door they flanked, and the smell reminded Chandi of something private.

  They came slowly and in the open, the small group walking at an even pace she guessed was designed not to startle her. Not that there was anywhere for her to run. Chandi felt tension she had not noticed till that moment it left her shoulders, when she realized they intended to talk. At least at first.

  “There she is,” a man with a long nose and comically unnecessary sunglasses said, taking her picture rather rudely with a cell phone. “That her?”

  “Yes, Thomas, it is,” Hope said, with a friendly smile. “It’s hard to mistake your best friend, after all.”

  “Miss Tuesday?” An unfamiliar, handsome man with Latin features offered her his hand. “My name is Mateo Navarre. It is a pleasure.”

  Chandi took his hand cautiously, flinching as they made contact, but nothing happened.

  “No need to be so nervous!” Mateo chided her. “You are safe with me, Miss Tuesday, provided we find ourselves in agreement. Simple, yes?” Chandi nodded quickly. “Yes. I prefer things to be clear. I am not enamored with deception.”

  With a distracted gesture, Mateo waved his hand across the sky, and it turned the hot, washed-out blue she remembered from the summer in Abu Dubai.

  “Please don’t be afraid, Chandi,” Hope urged, sitting down beside her. “Mateo and Thomas – Thomas Park; he was two years ahead of us at the Academy, remember? – aren’t so bad.”

  “That’s nice,” Chandi said coldly. “Why did you help the Thule Cartel find me, Hope?”

  “Because it’s what’s best,” Hope said firmly, taking Chandi’s hand. “For everyone concerned.”

  “Lord Thule put her on recruitment is what,” Thomas volunteered, with an impertinent grin. “We’ve spent the last couple days running down her mates from school, you know?”

  “Oh, do stop,” Hope complained. “Please don’t pretend that I’m doing something sinister, Chandi. I’m trying to help my friends stay alive, the same as you did. You just picked the wrong side, that’s all. Lucky for both of us, the Thule Cartel is tolerant of that sort of mistake.”

  “You are working the Thule Cartel?” Chandi shook her hand free. “Do you know how ugly their part in this story will become, before this is all over? I’m not the one who picked the wrong side, Hope, no matter what you might think.”

  “You had best listen to your friend, Miss Tuesday,” Mateo Navarre advised. “She’s trying to do you a favor, in my opinion. Now, as I understand it, you’re the type to have visions, Miss. Is that correct?”

  Chandi shifted uncomfortably against the cold concrete of the step. She regretted sitting down, now, and the way it allowed Thomas and Mateo to tower over her.

  “Yes, well, I do operate a precognitive…”

  “We all understand the complexities,” Mateo Navarre said, touching one of the rhododendrons, which promptly turned to gold, from leaves to petals. “Prescience is a heavy burden, but we find ourselves in need, Miss Tuesday. You have likely noticed by now that all apports have become uncertain, and the long-distance variety has become downright endangered?”

  Chandi hesitated momentarily, but Mateo noticed.

  “Perhaps when the Black Sun failed to retrieve you, as scheduled?” Mateo’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “It is not advisable to try and keep secrets from me, Miss Tuesday.”

  “It’s true,” Chandi agreed nervously. “They were supposed to arrive this morning. Then they said they would come by and pick me up this evening, but they never showed…”

  “Don’t feel bad!” Hope said, patting her hand comfortingly. “The very same thing happened to us.”

  “The whole world is at loose ends,” Thomas said, jingling whatever he kept in his pockets and grinning like a naughty boy. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” Chandi squinted at Thomas, but he laughed and said nothing, so she turned her attention reluctantly to Hope. “What is he talking about?”

  “I don’t know what happened, not exactly, but the apport technicians started to have trouble this morning. Anything further than line of sight, and apparently…I don’t know,” Hope said, with a melodramatic sigh. “I don’t mind telling you that the Thule Cartel lost more than a few technicians, trying to complete an apport, and I suspect that the other factions did the same. What’s worse…”

  “Hope, I know the Miss is your friend and all, but,” Thomas said, “begging your pardon, should you be sharing quite so much?”

  “It’s all fine,” Hope said, frowning at him and touching his arm. “Isn’t it? It isn’t like Chandi is going to tell anyone, now, is she?”

  Chandi shook her head. Thomas grinned and shrugged.

  “Telepathy isn’t working beyond line of sight, either. We can talk, but it’s an effort, and anything more is a terrible chore.” Hope’s expression was full of apologies. “We are all functioning at a bit of a loss, while the
people back at home try and work out what to do next. In the meantime, we all need to do our very best, don’t you think?”

  “That’s always a good idea,” Chandi said. “I think.”

  “That’s good! We’re in agreement again, you see?” Mateo Navarre sat down on the other side of her, jabbing Chandi with a bony elbow to drive home his point. “Not so long ago, however, you made a fateful decision, didn’t you, Miss Tuesday?”

  “About that…”

  “We understand, Miss Tuesday. You did what you thought best, given that you had an idea of what was coming. You see the future, Miss. I can’t argue with that. For the sake of discussion, however, I do wonder – how well do you see the present, Miss Tuesday?”

  “I-I’m not sure what…”

  “Here is the present, as I see it – things have changed. There may have been a time when the Black Sun was best positioned to protect you, Miss Tuesday, but the Black Sun has never had an enormous presence in Central, and most of the cartel was recalled in the wake of Josef Martynova’s assassination. The Auditors were deployed when the apport system collapsed, so they are presumably in Las Vegas – or even in the Outer Dark, God help ‘em. You are, I’m afraid, all alone, in a city where there is only the Hegemony.”

  Chandi blanched and said nothing.

  “Contact your people, if you don’t believe me, and if you can,” Mateo continued, taking a thin brown cigarillo from a stamped metal case in the breast pocket of his jacket. “They will lie, assure you that all is well, but they will not send help, or rescue you. They are helpless to intervene. The only question which remains to be settled is to whom the rule of Central will fall.”

  “What about the Director?” Chandi asked. “Surely she won’t…”

  “She will,” Thomas said, leaning in closer than she would have liked. “It’s the same with all you lot. You say you won’t, but all you mean is you need a little sweet talk.”