“Now then, we’ll soon have you warm.” Beck stood up as fingers of orange flame caressed around the straight edges of the peat bricks. The space filled with a pleasant, earthy aroma.
He dragged one of the pews closer to the fire.
Her heart beat faster with each step she took into the room. But the damp cold was a more powerful influence for the moment, and finally she sank into the pew.
As Beck moved onto the dais, she stretched her arms and legs toward the stove, rubbing her forearms while she kept one eye on her host.
Turning his back to her, he removed the Manti guns from his waistband and began to undress. Her eyes jerked back to the fire, heart in her throat. She’d half risen from her seat before she realized he was changing his wet clothes.
Her gaze moved furtively over his shoulders and back, and she thought of Paxton. Like him, Beck was tall, broad, muscular … and scarred. Below one shoulder blade was an irregular patch of shiny, pink skin.
“What happened to your back?” she asked without thinking—he’d know now that she’d been looking at him.
He glanced over his shoulder, and her cheeks flamed.
“Burned,” he replied. “The bugmen torched our refugee camp. Only a handful of us survived.”
Asha had never known anyone who’d experienced direct conflict with the enemy. The virus had done most of their work for them. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
She went back to staring into the fire, and a few minutes later he joined her on the pew, leaving a gentlemanly gap of about an arm’s length between them. Still, she fidgeted in her seat.
He leaned his elbows on his knees, spreading his long fingers in front of the fire. “I want to hear your story, Asha. How did you come to be taken by those two?” He kept his gaze on the crackling peat instead of her, and she sank against the back of the pew, breathing a little easier.
“I don’t know exactly.”
He frowned into the flames. “I don’t understand.”
She collected the pieces together in her head, assembling them into the most coherent explanation she could, considering the gaping holes in her memory.
When she finished, he studied her with furrowed brow. “Have you ever lost your memory before?”
“No. I mean—not as far as I know.”
“Do you think someone’s tampered with it intentionally?”
The tension from her shoulders eased down to settle as weariness in the center of her chest. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve all but given up trying to figure it out.” Tears stung her eyes, but the heat dried them before they could fall. “I just want to find a way to go home.”
“Tell me about home,” Beck prompted in a low voice.
She studied his softened features, and the sympathy she felt from him warmed her inside as the fire had warmed her out, loosening her reserve. But as she told him about Sanctuary, he looked increasingly confused.
Finally he shook his head. “I don’t understand it, love. I can’t think of why the bugmen would leave you alone like they have.”
“They’re superstitious about the rock formations—the arches and pinnacles. The Manti have a sort of reverence for … for naturally formed anomalies.”
He eyed her skeptically. “But you were picked up there by this captain.”
She nodded. “Near the border. I didn’t know they ever came that close. But I don’t think he was supposed to be there.”
Beck’s lips parted, and his gaze distanced as he thought about what she’d said. She could see that something didn’t sit right.
“You have web access in Sanctuary, and working computers?”
“Working computers, and our own network. But there is no more web, as far as we know.”
He leaned forward. “So how did you come by the information in your Archive?”
“The data was all collected and preserved by the woman who founded our city, Ophelia Engle. It was just a refugee camp back then. She’d been preparing for global apocalypse for thirty years.”
The name “Ophelia” tickled at Asha’s memory for some reason, but before she could chase the thought down its hole, Beck said, “Thirty years?”
Asha nodded. “She had a crawler that downloaded and dumped data onto storage drives. She put some thought into what to collect, but none into how to organize or tag it. We’re still sorting out the mess.”
“Is she still alive?”
“No. About fifteen years ago she suddenly went crazy. Or crazier. Drowned herself in the Colorado River. That’s when everyone started calling her ‘Ophelia.’ But a small group of people who were close to her took the whole thing very seriously—believed she was a prophet, and kept records of all the crazy stuff she’d said.” Until their leader disappeared a year later. Along with his data drive.
“Sounds like a woman worth knowing,” replied Beck, smiling in an attempt at lightness.
Asha returned the smile. “I don’t remember her very well. But I wouldn’t have a job without her.”
Sitting back from the fire, Beck said, “So the information in your Archive is all dated.”
“Yes, purely historical. Older than the war now—more than twenty-five years.”
“And you have no interaction with the Manti?”
His expression had sobered, and she began to feel uneasy. “No. Why do you ask?”
“Because it doesn’t add up, love. I can accept that they’re spooked by your city. I know far less about them than you do. But I don’t imagine they’d have to set foot in it to destroy it. I’ve seen what they can do. They must have a reason for leaving you alone so long.”
Coldness spread out from her belly as she remembered a question she’d asked Paxton back on Banshee. A question he’d never answered.
Why does an amir need to send his son to watch over the defenseless remains of his conquered enemies?
* * *
Impervious to the ages as the abbey appeared from the outside, the inside told a different story. All those signs of human habitation Pax had watched for on their approach were contained within the building itself. Lines for drying laundry, stacks of fuel for their fires, piles of animal bones and other refuse. The opulence suggested by the building’s exterior had been rubbed out completely. Furnishings were spare and battered. Smoke had blackened the walls.
The people themselves—mostly women and children—were raggedly clothed. Pinched, soiled, and watchful. Children clung to their mothers’ legs, wide-eyed. One woman rested against a wall bouncing a fussy infant. As her gaze shifted to the doorway, where he and Iris waited with the others, she cried out and hurried from the room.
There was one man present, sharpening a knife by a window, and he rose to meet them.
“Father Carrick.” He greeted the priest with respect, but he eyed Pax and Iris with open hostility.
“Where are the others?” asked Carrick.
The man tested the edge of his knife with his thumb, his eyes never leaving the Manti. “Here and there. Hunting. Stacking peat. Taking the air in the garden.” His mouth twisted into a gap-toothed smile as his gaze shifted to Carrick.
The priest smiled mildly at the man’s attempt at a joke. “All right, John. Round up any that you can and keep them inside. We need to keep a watch for enemy ships.”
“Looks like we’ve already found one,” John observed.
“So we have. Will you fetch me some rope, if we’ve any left?”
“All right, Father,” he said with a nod. Then he turned and headed for a hallway that led off the large foyer.
As he exited the room, silence enveloped them, and Pax noticed everyone else had slipped out during the exchange.
A few moments later John returned with a thick coil of rope. “Are you putting them in with that other one, then?”
“I am.”
The man shot a dark look Iris’s direction. “This one might just be a match for it.”
Pax and Iris exchanged a wordless, What other on
e? Beck had told Asha the other crew was dead.
When Pax glanced again at Carrick he noticed the priest’s dark eyes had fixed on his sister. Pax’s body tightened with wariness. But as Carrick directed them away from the doorway, he realized it wasn’t anything he’d sensed that had set him on his guard—it was what he hadn’t sensed. He couldn’t get a read on the man at all.
Carrick led them around one end of the building to a small wood, where there were about a dozen women and children washing bedding—in large, old-fashioned freestanding bathtubs—concealed beneath the tangled oak branches.
“Go on inside,” the priest called to them. “You can finish this later.”
As their curious gazes settled on Carrick’s prisoners, they cleared the area without argument, filing back around to the abbey’s entrance.
Carrick led the party into the deeper shadows of the wood, to an outbuilding that was a hybrid of old stone foundation and corrugated metal siding.
“Let’s go,” ordered Carrick, opening the askew wooden door with a loud creak.
Rough hands shoved them inside, and Pax strained to see in the gloom. While his day vision was sharper than his human captors’, mantises were daytime predators and he lacked this advantage in the low light. His other heightened senses helped him navigate in darkness, as well as detect other creatures’ movements, but seeing into dark corners was not one of his talents.
The information his eyes failed to provide now came in the form of a low, humming hiss that issued from the back of the partially collapsed building.
“What’s in here?” he demanded.
“Cousin of yours,” growled Finn, holding a knife to Pax’s throat while the others hoisted his arms overhead.
Pax glanced at Iris. Her night vision was no better than his, but her sense of smell was more sophisticated.
“Some kind of wasp,” she murmured. “Advanced mutation.”
“Both of you hush up,” snapped the red-haired woman Beck had called Alice, holding her knife on Iris.
Their captors bound them tightly to an overhead beam, about three meters apart.
When Carrick and the others started for the door, Iris called, “What are you going to do with us?”
“Stick a knife in you if it’s up to me,” replied Finn. “You start any trouble and that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“Just keep quiet for a while,” said the priest in a more moderate tone. His gaze rested on Iris, the whites of his eyes oddly bright in the gloom. “Beck will be in to talk to you later.”
He followed the others out, and the door slapped closed. Someone secured it with a chain, dull light streaming around its ill-fitting edges.
Given some time alone together their chances of figuring a way out of this were better than fair—though it didn’t bode well that the other crew had not escaped. But the whole situation was complicated by the fact Pax had no intention of leaving without Asha.
“Who are you?” Iris called toward the back of the shed.
A dark shape stirred in the straw. Iris was answered by another vibrating hiss. Hairs lifted along the back of Pax’s neck.
The genetically modified came in all shapes and sizes. Fantastic as Iris appeared to the “pure” DNA humans, she was still a reasoning, sentient being. This was not by accident. Pax’s father had founded Sustainable Transgenics, with its reproductive advisors and in vitro labs, for the sole purpose of preserving the Manti as a humanoid species.
Instead of feeling kinship with the beast they couldn’t quite see, he felt revulsion. None of the Manti liked to be reminded of what they could become if they weren’t careful about their breeding behavior. He was keenly aware of his own hypocrisy, embracing the mutations that made him stronger, faster, and more sensually perceptive, while reviling those that caused distasteful psychological and physical traits.
The Manti hated their parent race. They also wanted to remain as like them as they could without casting off their own identity. From a historical perspective, it was not unprecedented. But that didn’t make it easier to live with.
Iris twisted her slender neck from one side to the other, trying to get a better perspective on that living, rustling corner of the shed.
“Forget it,” he said. “Let’s concentrate on getting out of here.”
“It might be dangerous, Pax.”
“That’s my point. Now help me.” He tugged at the cords that bound his wrists to the beam above, and it creaked in protest.
“Stop doing that. You’ll pull it down around our ears. I’ll try to work loose. I don’t suppose you have a plan for after that?”
“You go for the ship. I’ll go for Asha.”
A prickly silence permeated the air around him, and he glanced at her.
She stared at him. “Have you lost your mind? We haven’t had enough trouble from her?”
“More than enough.”
“Then leave her. We’ll come back later and deal with them all at once.”
He shook his head, knowing he deserved every particle of scorn firing at him from her large irises.
“What is it with you and this woman?”
I have no fucking idea was not an answer likely to gain him any ground, so he didn’t bother. “Come on,” he said, giving his restraints another tug. “Let’s get these off.”
A sudden bang at the back of the shed jerked them both to attention.
“Lord of the—”
A dark shape shot up from the straw, rushing forward and hurtling between them. Iris gave a startled cry, and Pax gripped the beam and raised himself, kicking at the creature with his legs. But it kept right on charging at the door, scrambling close to the ground like it was wounded. Brown cellophane wings cloaked its back—most likely not functional. Human transgenics were far too heavy for flight.
The chain held, but the hinges didn’t. A shriek sounded in the garden as the creature scuttled out the doorway. A few meters into the yard it halted, seeming to shrink and draw itself inward. Wings lifted from the hard, dark shell of its torso and began to vibrate.
The wasp lifted from the ground.
“Not good,” snapped Iris.
About that much they were in agreement. “Watch your head,” he warned.
TRANSGENIC
Before Iris could protest, Pax had thrown all his weight into the rope that bound his wrists to the overhead timber. The beam held, but the rope loosened enough to allow him to slide to the end and yank the beam free from the supporting timber. Iris swore as the beam dropped, bringing down half the roof with it. Pax waded through thatch to Iris, using her arm spikes to sever the remaining rope. Then he freed her wrists and they exited the rubble.
Father Carrick intercepted them outside, ax held aloft. A hunched old woman hovered behind him, watching them with wide eyes. Finn and Alice stood a few meters away, looking significantly less threatening now that their captives were at large.
“You don’t have time to waste on us,” Pax warned them.
Iris stepped between Pax and the priest, raising her arms and wings in warning. Carrick tossed his head to clear dark waves of hair from his eyes.
The resemblance between the two—both slender and ropey, light skin contrasting with dark hair and brows—created a pleasing symmetry. The priest was no match for Iris, but it would be a fight worth watching—if they didn’t desperately need to vacate the camp.
“Where did you find that thing?” asked Iris, holding her position as the priest shifted his stance.
Carrick’s eyes glittered, and Pax got the sense that—holy man or not—he was in his element, squaring off with an enemy.
“Found it scavenging in the refuse heap. Wounded. Unable to fly. Or so it seemed.”
Iris raised an eyebrow. “So you decided to make a pet of it?”
Carrick’s lips twisted up at one corner. “We chained it up and left it to die. Beck had the notion we could make use of its parts. The creature’s body is like armor.”
The old woman suddenly stepp
ed out from behind the priest and approached Iris, a stream of animated but unintelligible sounds issuing from her papery lips.
“Keep back, Mother!” called Carrick. The ax lowered a fraction as he flung out his arm to catch her. He muttered more words of command in the same language she’d spoken.
She stopped with her wide eyes fixed on Iris. Pax caught one word she repeated several times: shee, shee, shee.
“She’s not a fairy woman,” the priest explained in his low, growling voice. “She’s a mu—” Mutant. But Carrick hesitated, finally finishing with more of what Pax assumed was Gaelic.
The old woman’s lips parted again, and she regarded Iris with more awe than fear. Noting that her reply to her son continued use of the word “shee”—and that she tugged insistently at his jacket—Pax determined the priest’s explanation had been rejected.
The biohacker who’d engineered Iris’s mother admittedly had a whimsical flair. While ostensibly working on a U.S. Defense Department contract to incorporate predator insect traits into human physiology, Dr. Gregoire had been more interested in playing god. Using ancient stories—and the more modern illustrations inspired by them—Gregoire had brought mythological races to life.
In a way the old woman was right; Iris was more fairy woman than any woman ever had been.
Pax took hold of his sister’s arm. “We have to go. Now.” Glancing at Carrick he said, “Your captive has most likely gone back to her hive, reeking of attack pheromone because you’ve made her angry. It’s only a matter of time before they come down on top of you. On top of us. Unless you want to watch all these people die”—his gaze flitted to the old woman—“you need to take me to Beck.”
* * *
Asha felt Beck’s eyes on her as she turned over the questions he’d raised in her mind.
His brow creased as he said, “I don’t mean to trouble you, love. We may be able to get some answers from the two that came with you. The other crew started talking in the end, though what they told us wasn’t of much use.”
The Ophelia Prophecy Page 6