But the clothes were just one part of it. After all, the real Marion couldn’t be seen outside at the same time as her double. Fortunately, Raider’s converted Angel wife was a hardcore businesswoman who often spent days, sometimes as long as a week, out of Lumina. Raider’s tourist cover was that of a handyman. This allowed him plenty of freedom to move about the Angel city whenever he needed to, and he had a special understanding with his daughter about “Mommy’s problem.” Put simply, Marion was a Guardian Resistance tourist too.
Still on the night shift, 4pm was early morning for me, but I was wide awake for Alia’s first training mission. It was just one lap around Lumina with Raider to hold her hand. I trusted Raider a lot more than I liked him, but even so, I had plenty of doubts.
Terry and I followed Alia up to Raider’s living room, where Marion quietly sat with a Guardian-appointed babysitter.
“Wish me luck, Addy,” Alia whispered into my mind as she hugged me one last time.
“You don’t need luck,” I told her. “You’ve got Cindy watching out for you. You’ll be fine.”
Raider gave me a reassuring look and said, “The Seraphim won’t bother checking a child her size too closely, especially since she’s with me. Don’t worry. I will guarantee Alyssa’s safety.”
“On your life,” I informed him.
Raider grinned. “What did I tell you about trust, kid?”
As I watched them leave, I muttered under my breath, “I am really getting tired of people calling me kid.”
“Come on,” said Terry, pulling on my hand. “Let’s go watch the monitors.”
We did. I watched Raider take my sister through the park and out to the local supermarket. I watched them return with bags of groceries. I held my breath every time they passed someone on the sidewalk. As I watched them, I told myself over and over that this wasn’t so different from the time we sent Alia out to help Samuel’s heart surgery. I told myself that Alia was a soldier, and that I had allowed her to accept this risk, which she had every right to accept even without my consent.
“You do realize that this is just a training mission, don’t you?” said Terry, watching me with amusement.
“Huh?” was my unfocused response.
“Come on, Richard! This is nothing compared to what she’s already done.”
That was as true as it was irrelevant. Sure, Alia had been through plenty of tighter spots than a milk run to a nearby store, but the thing about taking risks is that the law of averages eventually catches up with you. How much you have survived in the past is no indicator of what could happen in the next five seconds.
As I watched Alia and Raider chatting their way back to Nonus, I couldn’t help but think of how Cindy had so loathed the idea of me joining Guardian missions with Terry. Now I finally understood what Cindy had felt as she watched me leave for the Holy Land. My sister was walking amongst Angel Seraphim right now, and all I could do was watch her through a camera. It was a truly humbling experience to discover how much worse that felt than being out there myself.
Alia returned safely to Nonus Twenty Point Five with a carton of fresh milk and a bag of chocolate chip cookies.
“See?” I said as we shared the cookies in the surveillance room. “I knew you’d be fine out there.”
Alia laughed. “Liar!”
Now that she was officially a blood runner, Alia, who had often been staying up with me during the night shift, readjusted her sleep schedule to ensure that she was awake and ready for a real blood run with Raider.
The first one came near the end of November. A pair of tourists had been discovered by the Seraphim. One of them had managed to escape alive, but he had suffered severe burns on his upper body as well as taken a focused telekinetic blast to his right arm. Raider quietly escorted Alia out to a Resistance safe house located in the basement of a coffee shop where the injured tourist had taken refuge.
Again, I breathlessly watched their progress from the surveillance room. Alia returned all smiles, as she did from two more blood runs during the first half of December. I began to get a little used to it. I was mildly amused to discover that on her blood runs, Alia always carried around the little pony doll that Candace had given her. If I was keeping my fears to myself, Alia was putting on her bravest face too.
In addition to the actual blood runs, Raider periodically took Alia out on training missions, walking her around Lumina and visiting safe houses in every building that had them. One of the reasons for this was to familiarize Alia with the Resistance network in case she got separated from Raider. Alia, despite having no mental blocking training, wasn’t considered a security risk simply because no one in their right mind would delve a child. According to Alia, some of the locations she visited were new even to Raider.
Since Alia’s second mission, James had kindly swapped his day shift with me so that I could be up during my sister’s blood-running hours. Willow had warned me, but the day shift was considerably busier than the night. There were many more people outside that we had to watch and log, not to mention the frequent parroting of announcements on the human intercom system.
Alia often sat with Terry and me during our day shifts. She didn’t have many other places to be, anyway, so she worked as part-time camera crew. The first snow fell in early December, and we sometimes saw Patrick Land and a few of his school friends having snowball fights in the park. I could tell that Alia longed to be out there, but she watched the monitors and said nothing.
In the after-school hours, we would also catch glimpses of the real Marion outside playing with her friends or walking with her father. Many of our cameras were shared by Angel security elsewhere, so I made my sister study Marion’s manner carefully. Marion liked to skip and let her long hair dance about as she walked. Alia did her best to imitate this. Even from a fair distance, I could always tell the difference between Marion and Alia, but I was relieved to see that, at least in their heavy winter jackets, the girls looked convincingly identical on the video.
Over the weeks, Alia had become very close to Raider and to her body double. Raider even jokingly called Alia his “other daughter,” which greatly eased my mind since I knew he would look after her with his life, and I had asked for nothing less. Marion, who looked up to Alia like a big sister, sometimes came down into Twenty Point Five to play. In turn, Alia and I occasionally spent time with Marion up in Raider’s condo, secretly cooking up proper meals when we could no longer stand the prison-grade food in Twenty Point Five’s mess hall. Whenever I could get someone to cover the day shift for me in the surveillance room, we spent the whole day up there, which allowed me to enjoy the sunlight through the windows in Raider’s living room. Even a winter sun was much better than none at all.
Just about any lifestyle can become routine. Even one in a place like Nonus Twenty Point Five. But things were still moving along outside and everywhere. Before the end of the year, Mark had dinner (breakfast for James and Ed Regis) with us in the mess hall where he gave us a report on the information we had provided upon our arrival.
“The Guardian Council identified Cindy’s policeman friend as one Sergeant Brian Desmond,” said Mark, “and it appears that Richard was right about Cindy sending Brian the Guardians’ secret files.”
By the word “appears,” I could already guess what we were about to be told next. I raised my eyebrows and braced myself.
“Unfortunately, Sergeant Desmond is dead,” reported Mark. “He shot himself several years ago. It was deemed a suicide.”
“How typical,” I said sarcastically.
Of course I felt sorry for Bullet-in-the-Butt Brian, yet another outside casualty of our psionic war, but more than that, I was just plain frustrated. Terry had warned me that this would end up being another wild-goose chase, but I had still hoped for something small to come of it. Every time we hit one of these dead ends, I felt as if we were trapped in a room full of locked doors where successfully picking one of the locks would only reveal a brick wall behind it.
“What about those two dead Angels from Wood-claw?” asked Terry.
“Our intelligence team is still working on that one,” said Mark. When Terry gave him an incredulous stare, he explained, “Neither of them matches any of the Seraphim or even common Angels in Lumina or at other major Angel settlements. We’re currently exploring the possibility that they may have been members of a separate Seraph division.”
“What separate division?” asked James.
Mark replied evasively, “It’s just a theory. We’ve heard rumors of the existence of a small, very select group of Angels that run top-secret operations for the king.”
“Such as?”
“We don’t honestly know,” said Mark. “But King Divine knows that we have plenty of eyes and ears in his new capital city, as of course we do. He knows this city once belonged to the Guardians and that destroying the Resistance is nearly impossible because we’re usually a step ahead of the Lumina government. Meanwhile, the Guardian Council has its spies in many of the other Angel settlements all over this country and abroad. That’s why it’s taking King Divine so long to destroy us.”
Ed Regis asked, “So this supposed secret Seraph team works outside of the usual chain of command?”
Mark nodded. “We believe there are a handful of well-trusted people who only take orders directly from and report directly to Randal Divine himself. But we don’t know who they are, where they are, or what, exactly, they’re planning here or elsewhere. And that’s assuming they even exist.”
James said in a frustrated tone, “Then if Wood-claw could have kept those guys from killing themselves, they really might have taken us to the king.”
Mark shrugged. “Again, it’s just a theory.”
“So we’re another two leads down and nothing new in Lumina,” I said dejectedly. “If we don’t get something soon, this war could be over for us before the end of next year.”
“As Cindy was so fond of saying, Richard, we just have to be patient.”
“Tell that to our allies!” I snapped back.
Over the last few weeks, a host of small independent psionic settlements had followed the example set by the Meridian and openly declared their allegiance to the Angels. We knew that a few of them had only done so in order to avoid direct conflict while they continued to secretly assist the Guardian Council, but most of the factions were serious in their commitment. Their leaders and family heads were turning themselves in for conversion. Our hourglass was emptying at an increasingly alarming pace, and every time I heard of yet another surrender, I was reminded of Raider’s words at the Chinese restaurant about the approaching tipping point of this war. How much longer did we really have?
Terry, who no doubt felt the same impatience, suddenly asked, “Just out of curiosity, Jacob, what about the Dog’s Gate?”
“What about it?” asked Mark.
“Do the Guardians still use it?”
“Yes, but not often,” said Mark. “Under the circumstances, there’s very little left to negotiate.”
Looking around, I could tell that Alia and I were the only ones who didn’t know what the Dog’s Gate was. Even our ex-Wolf seemed to be following the conversation. I was hoping my sister might ask in my stead so that I would be spared another embarrassing admission of how little I knew about the psionic world, but no such luck: Alia kept her mouth shut.
Putting my hand up, I asked, “What’s the Dog’s Gate?”
Predictably, Terry gave me a “you’ve got to be joking” look.
Ed Regis explained, “It’s a bar and restaurant out east. It’s run by an independent faction with ties to the Historian, and it serves as neutral ground for all of the psionic factions. Even the Wolves used to occasionally drop in to speak with faction representatives and negotiate temporary truces or request the extradition of psionic criminals.”
I shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
“Why do you ask?” Mark said to Terry. “The Dog’s Gate and fifty miles around it is neutral ground. You know this. You can’t capture or interrogate Angels there, and they won’t simply tell you their deepest secrets because you buy them a drink.”
Terry silently stared back at Mark.
Mark asked uncomfortably, “You’re not planning on breaking neutral ground, are you, Tiffany?”
Terry still didn’t reply, looking equally uncomfortable with the idea, so I answered in her stead, “Never ask us what we’re prepared to break to win this war.”
Mark said warningly, “You would risk the anger of the Historian, Richard.”
“I’m not afraid of that brat,” I replied evenly.
“Never mind, Jacob,” said Terry, finding her voice again. “It was just a thought. A possible last resort.”
Mark gave her a worried frown. “I would hate to be the one that tells Cindy that her children were killed over a neutral-ground violation.”
“I’m not Cindy’s child,” said Terry. “Anyway, forget about it for now.”
We finished our dinner and, parting with Mark, headed back down the narrow, cluttered corridors, carefully ducking the ceiling pipes.
As we walked, Alia, who had been silent all through dinner, griped, “I wish we didn’t have to talk about dead people when we’re eating.”
I agreed, but I doubted the food here would have tasted that much better one way or the other.
Ignoring Alia’s complaint, Terry whispered, “Assuming those Angels really were members of some super top-secret task force that reports straight to Randal Divine, what the hell were they doing snooping around the Wood-claw outpost?”
It was a rhetorical question but I answered it anyway. “They were looking for me.”
Terry nodded. “They knew that you were on the Wolf plane and that you bailed over the city. They probably didn’t know exactly where Wood-claw itself was hidden, but they’d assume that’s where you were hiding.”
I smiled. “So I guess we dodged another bullet, huh?”
“Dodging bullets doesn’t help, Half-head,” said Terry, her voice rising in frustration. “Damn the Wood-claw Knights! Those Angels could have changed everything.”
The corridor was empty but I still put a finger to my lips to quiet her down. “Let’s just work with what we have, Tiffy,” I said calmingly.
Terry didn’t reply, but James said darkly, “That’d be easier if we actually had something, Richard. Maybe we’re wasting our time here.”
“Where do you think we should be?” I asked him.
“Somewhere where we could hunt the Angels on our own terms,” said James. “This is just sitting around and watching the world turn. It’s not getting us anywhere.”
I nodded in agreement. Back during our months traveling around the country in a motorhome, the Guardian Resistance in Lumina had seemed like the best place for us to be, but now I wasn’t so sure. With the exception of keeping an additional blood runner in Lumina, our presence here wasn’t making any great difference in the war effort. Nor in the course of almost two months helping to catalog the movements of Lumina’s Angels had we come across anything that could lead us a step closer to the secret location of Randal Divine and his adopted daughter.
“How much longer are we going to stay here?” James asked Terry.
“As long as it takes,” she replied automatically.
James let out a frustrated little huff.
I knew that James’s discontent wasn’t only caused by our collective lack of progress, but also his own. During the first week of our stay, Proton had made it absolutely clear that under no circumstance would James be given psionic blocking training at Nonus Twenty Point Five. Being a powerful berserker himself, Proton was keenly aware of the dangers associated with mind control. Though the official minimum age was eighteen, Proton believed in twenty-plus, and since James was restricted to the camera crew anyway, there was no reason to risk damaging his brain.
“We’re rotting away in front of computers when we could be out there fighting this war,” said
James.
“Believe me, Jack,” said Terry, “I’m just as frustrated as you, but we really have nothing to go on right now. At least here we still have a chance. Like Jacob said, be patient.”
This from our fearless leader, who not many months ago had been considering attacking a random Angel outpost on the slim chance that someone there might have information. But Terry had given up on that plan entirely. Our time in the surveillance room had taught us that Randal Divine had hidden himself far too well for hit and miss tactics to work.
Making our way through the now familiar maze, we found Raider at the door to our sleeping quarters.
“I was looking for you,” he said to Alia.
“Another run?” I asked apprehensively.
“No,” replied Raider. “My wife had to leave on one last emergency business trip before the holidays and Marion wanted to invite her stunt double up for a sleepover tonight.”
Alia jumped at the offer. “Can I go?” she asked me excitedly. “Please?”
“Sure,” I said. It wasn’t Alia’s first sleepover with Marion, and the conversation there would probably be more to her liking anyway.
Alia grabbed her duffle bag and left with Raider.
Watching them go, James said, “When I first met that guy, I really didn’t like him very much.”
“Raider’s a good man,” I said. “He just takes some getting used to.”
There was still almost an hour left to the end of the day shift, and Terry and I were supposed to head directly back to the surveillance room after dinner, but James and Ed Regis offered to start their shift early.
Guardian Angel (Psionic Pentalogy Book 5) Page 18