“Ekani,” said Daniel delicately, “I can understand how you would think that. In fact, that’s why I originally approached them. But you have to realize that this place isn’t what it seems like.”
“You said you were here only two times before. How can you be sure? How long were you here?”
“Well, it’s hard to tell, but maybe a couple of hours all together.”
“And did you actually talk to one of them?”
Daniel shook his head. “No, like I said, I didn’t get close enough.”
“Then we need to try it.”
“Listen,” Daniel began.
“No, you listen to me! The Guild controls everything! There is no other place for us to go. If we go to any Guild world we will be found. They own every government and police force, every soldier and spy, every street informant there is. You cannot hide from them. Ask him,” she said, pointing at Saul, “if you don’t believe me. That’s his job. This world is our only chance. We can’t just abandon it because you had a bad feeling. It’s too important for that!”
Daniel frowned and nodded. “Yeah, okay. I see that. But we need to be extra careful. I may have only been here for a little while, but I promise you there’s something not right with those people.”
Ekani’s face softened, and she said, “You may be right, but we have to know. If we ever want to start rescuing people from the Guild, we have to have a safe place to bring them, and this has to be it.”
“Fair enough, but not yet, okay? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted. Let’s rest first, and then we’ll go.”
“We’ll need to set watches then,” said Sika, standing up. “There are only a few of us that are coping right now. Somebody has to watch over the others and guard against attack.”
“Good point. You figure out the watches and we’ll do it,” said Daniel.
After consideration, Sika broke them up into three groups of people, each one containing either himself, Iyah, or Saul. Daniel was left out of the watch rotation on the premise that he needed to be fresh and protected at all times, since he was the only transport they had to Autumn in the future.
Daniel protested, feeling guilty, but not as stridently as he could have. In truth, he was beat, and could barely keep his eyes open. Before he knew it, somebody was shaking him awake.
“Hey,” said Saul, “time to meet the locals. We’ve already had five more people zone out on us, including Bruce. If we don’t get some help soon, we’re going to be permanent residents of this poppy field.”
Daniel stood up and rubbed his eyes. It was hard to come all the way awake against Autumn’s insistent pull. “Five? Shit, who’s left?”
“You, me, Iyah, Sika, and Ekani. And I’ll give you ten to one that Ekani’s going to be next. If we’re going to do something, it has to be now.”
“Dammit, I never should have gone to sleep!”
“Nothing you could have done, the feeling that runs through this place just thickened up on us all of a sudden. Everybody kind of glazed over, and when things went back to normal, some of us didn’t snap out of it.”
“What if it gets thick again and stays that way? We’ll all be stuck.”
“No shit. Which is why we need to either check out the locals, or leave.”
“Yeah. I’ll take Sika and Ekani and we’ll check it out. You and Iyah keep watch here.”
“You think that’s a good idea? If your gut’s right, those things could be dangerous.”
“I’m as close to an expert on this place that we have, Saul. I think I need to be part of our first contact effort. As Ekani pointed out, this is our only shot at a place to live away from the Guild. I don’t want it to fail for lack of some little detail or understanding with all that’s at stake. Besides, you only need me if you want to come back to this world, and if things go down the crapper, I doubt you’ll be wanting to do that anyway.”
Saul shook his head. “I wish that were true, but while you were sleeping I checked out possible places to Walk to, in case we had to bug out fast. I can’t see anything out there. Nothing. Not Earth, not Olympus, nada. If something happens to you, we’re well and truly screwed.”
Daniel did a quick check to make sure he could still find his way back and was greatly relieved to find his view of the Veil unchanged.
“Not good,” said Daniel. “But I still want to go. If it gets so bad that Iyah or Sika can’t save me over there, I’m probably screwed over here as well.”
Saul threw his hands up in exasperation and said, “Fine, we’ll all go. By your logic, here is just as safe as over there, so we might as well all be over there trying to make nice for the neighbors. And if we get killed, I want to be there to say I told you so.”
In the end they decided to leave Sika with the fallen, since Iyah refused to let Saul and Daniel go without her, and nobody really liked the idea of leaving their unconscious friends alone on the ground.
They walked towards the park in a tense knot. The swish of slick leaves underfoot and the singing of the breeze through the stiff branches overhead were the only sounds. Everything was fine until they reached the edge of the park.
The place was disturbing on a nearly subconscious level. Instincts began clamoring for attention, and their hind-brains began handing out sweat and adrenaline for no obvious reason.
Daniel looked at Ekani and asked in a tight voice, “You still want to go ahead with this?”
She nodded. “How we perceive them may have nothing to do with how they actually are. This whole environment is alien to us, we may just not have the right instincts for it. For all we know, this is some kind of passive defense around the park.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows at her.
“I know, Daniel. But we have to try. Please.”
He nodded and they pressed on. They were close enough now to hear the whispered voices of the Parents talking to themselves. It was a soft sound, a susurrus of blended voices, but the actual words were never clear.
Instead, it was an endless flow of things you thought you might have understood, but nothing you could put a finger on while it was in your ear. At twenty feet away Ekani stopped. She had realized, just as Daniel had on his first trip, that the Parents weren’t speaking to each other. They were just murmuring into thin air, each talking at the same time as the others, none of them looking at any of their companions.
Daniel made a new realization as well. Every pram had its sunshade closed, or a blanket stretched across the interior. He couldn’t see into any of the baskets.
Ekani composed herself and started walking again. Daniel shook his head in admiration. She had a will of iron.
The nearest group of Parents had three members, two women and a man. There was a single pram to one side. The women were handsome without being pretty, but very respectable looking. The man appeared to be a professional of some kind, maybe fifty years old with a carefully trimmed mustache and bushy gray eyebrows.
At ten feet, the entire group stopped speaking at once. Then the Parents turned to Ekani, who was the closest.
The two already pointed in her general direction swiveled at the waist and neck to look, never moving their feet or arms. The one facing away jerked around a full 180 degrees, also turning only her torso and neck. The woman’s legs and stomach twisted bonelessly to allow her to face directly behind her and her arms swung loose and straight from the shoulders as if they were just pinned on.
Looking down, Daniel saw that their shoes didn’t actually touch the ground, but instead grew out of their legs at almost ground level, with a thick brown stalk growing out of the sole and into the earth beneath them.
Ekani screamed. The creatures opened their mouths impossibly wide as if to scream back, their faces distorting and bunching up like rubber masks, but instead of sound, a thick cloud of dirty yellow spores poured out.
Saul yelled, “Run!” at the top of his lungs, but it was too late. The spore cloud swirled around them in the stiff breeze, smelling like mildew
ed flowers, earthy and rank.
“Get back!” shouted Iyah as she hauled Saul and a nearly hysterical Ekani backwards by the arms. Daniel stumbled backwards with them.
The closest groups of Parents began swiveling around as the chemical message dispersed through the park, and they, too began spewing out their own missives. The pram nearest to Daniel yawned open in a vertical split like a doctor’s bag with a pram painted on it. Sticky threads stretched and sagged between the split sides and there was a frantic scrabbling of thin white legs and antennae from inside.
Daniel knew he should be running, but he was mesmerized watching the thing heave itself out of its container. It was folded up tightly inside and wriggling frantically to get out, jerking and twisting. With every thrashing movement, more bone-white spindly legs showed, until four or five of them cleared the opening and began pushing with needle-sharp tips against the sides of the enclosure.
“Don’t stand there gawking at it, you idiot, run!” said Iyah from twenty feet away. She hovered there, waiting for Daniel to start moving.
He saw it pop free of its container, long legs joined by a pulpy sack-like center that was segmented like a caterpillar. The body had shiny black eyes studded randomly all over it, what looked like a stinger on its twitching rear, and a face full of thin, razor-sharp palps that had far too many joints. Each one curled and waved inwards, towards a mouth composed of jagged planes that fit together like the shards of a broken mirror.
Daniel spun around to flee, regretting that he hadn’t left a split second earlier, before he had seen the tips of antennae and legs poking out of the mouths of the Parents.
Everyone ran.
Thirty yards away, Saul was thrown forward onto the ground. A bug had its mouthparts buried in his back, with all of its legs thrashing in the air. As Daniel watched, he realized that the bug wasn’t white at all, but clear like a sausage casing, with thousands of tightly packed folds inside of its fleshy abdomen. Black-red blood began zigzagging through its belly as the channels began to fill.
Iyah grabbed it behind the head and ripped it off of Saul’s back, leaving a ragged hole where the serrated mouthparts had been digging. Held up at the end of Iyah’s arm, Daniel could clearly see strings of skin and muscle whipping around as the creature’s palps clawed the air in a frenzy. Iyah slammed it into the ground. The soft body split open, releasing coils of tightly packed tubes, most of which were still clear and empty. The razor-sharp legs trembled, and the stinger began dribbling a foul smelling clear fluid. It died.
Iyah scooped up Saul’s unconscious body in her arms and began sprinting back to where Sika was watching over the others.
Daniel drew harder on the Veil to keep up as she began to pull away from him. When he did, the constant fog of Autumn seemed to thin, and his vision twisted and swam. He stumbled and drew harder.
Autumn as he knew it faded away. He was running across a rocky prairie, with stunted trees poking out of dusty gravel as far as he could see. The sun was high overhead, pale and wan in a washed-out sky, and the air was much warmer and dryer than he had thought.
The ground was shot through with shallow ravines, and growing in the shade were long stretches of Arrat Illahi. The plants were small, a few feet across at the largest, and their vines were threadlike and thinly stretched out on the walls. Occasionally a plant would have a coiled knot in it, no bigger than a few inches across, looking for all the world like a fly wrapped in a spider’s web.
The network of ravines stretched as far as he could see, splotchy with dark patches of Illahi, and dotted with clusters of their small white flowers. And for the first time, he could smell their narcotic perfume. It hung heavy in the air, redolent of licorice and turpentine. The source of Autumn’s debilitating atmosphere became clear.
They rejoined Sika without attracting any other bugs, so Daniel let go of the fierce flow that he had maintained on the way over with a gasp of relief. When he looked back into the park, he saw that the Sentinels had closed back up and once again appeared to be people due to the hallucinogenic toxin given off by the Illahi.
Sika and Iyah had placed Saul facedown on the ground. Iyah held a double handful of cloth against the wound, already sodden and dark with blood.
Sika knelt down next to her. “Is he going to make it?”
Iyah’s face was hard, but her eyes were panicked. “He’s lost too much blood and I think there’s spinal damage. He’s going to die unless we do something.”
Sika nodded. “The Scinte. Either Gray or the council has it.”
“Then you take it from them,” Iyah said through clenched teeth. “You take it from them right now.”
Without a word, Daniel clasped Sika’s shoulder and took them back into the fire.
31
Daniel dropped them into the bathroom of his apartment in Walker Hall. It was a pretty sure bet that there was a guard inside, or at least outside in the hall, but he figured the chances of one being in his bathroom were pretty slim.
As soon as they arrived, Sika put one finger to his lips and motioned for Daniel to stay put.
Daniel nodded silently. Sika left the room, gliding out the door without a sound. After a few seconds of scouting the apartment he was back, walking normally. He gestured for Daniel to follow him.
They crept out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, until they reached Daniel’s wardrobe. It was a massive piece of furniture, beautifully detailed and glowing with decades of careful hand polishing.
Sika held up one hand for Daniel to be still and gently opened the doors. Then he ever so slowly pushed the few pieces of hanging clothes over to one side. Placing one foot in the wardrobe, he leaned inside and put his head against the rear wall and listened for several minutes.
Daniel’s expression darkened at the realization that a hidden doorway to the interior passages of the building had been inside his room the entire time. Maybe every room had one of these entrances, but he doubted it, and even if they did, it didn’t make him feel any less creeped out.
Finally satisfied, Sika reached up and released a hidden catch built into the wardrobe’s ceiling. The door swung inward without a sound, revealing a pitch black rectangle that Sika stepped into with no hesitation. Daniel followed, closing the outer door of the wardrobe behind him. After they were inside, Sika pushed the hidden doorway shut.
Closing the door triggered tiny lights in the passageway, little more than a faint glow illuminating the edges of the corridor floor.
“Okay,” said Sika. “We can talk, but quietly.”
Daniel nodded and asked, “So how do we find the Scinte? Do you know where they might be keeping it?”
“I think so. The exact delivery date is kept secret in an attempt to prevent the package from being intercepted, so Keldon only calls a council meeting after it arrives. Until then, it’s usually stored in the Hazard Vault.”
“Unless,” said Daniel, “Gray didn’t give it up when he came back to Olympus. If it’s the most valuable thing in the universe, then why wouldn’t he keep it for himself? What better leverage could you have if you’re trying to take over the council?”
“That’s not really Gray’s style. He might be a murdering bastard, but he’s very loyal to the Guild. He would never steal from the council, or at least not from Keldon. He’s been his right hand man for more than sixty years.”
Daniel shrugged invisibly in the dim light. “If you say so. Then let’s get to the vault as quickly as we can, I don’t know how much longer Saul has.”
Sika sighed and scrubbed the back of his bald head with his knuckles. “Agreed, right after we steal back the equipment that was taken from us in holding. We’ll want it if we’re going to survive being fugitives after this.”
“Do we have time for that?”
“It’s on the way to the vault. It won’t take but a minute. These passages will get us down there, but there’s no exit into the equipment locker from in here, so we’ll have to cross some open space to get inside. It sho
uld be quick and easy, so just follow my lead.”
“No problem. Go.”
They moved together down the murky hallway. In several places the hidden passage ran parallel to the corridors of Walker Hall, and when it did, pinpoints of light studded the outer wall of the passageway, where tiny viewports were installed every twenty feet. As they passed, Daniel caught glimpses of people carrying on their everyday business not five feet away, separated from the fugitives by nothing more than a thin wooden panel.
They eventually arrived at a concrete section of the hallway that came to a dead end. To their left was an alcove that contained a deep vertical shaft. Sika took Daniel’s hand and put it on a cold metal bar running horizontally at the rear of the alcove. It was the rung of a ladder.
He leaned in close and whispered. “Follow me down. We’re going to end up very close to the main guard station. If we meet anyone else in the passage, I want you to press against the wall as quietly as you can. Don’t try to warn me or do anything else that might make a sound.”
Without waiting for a response, Sika swung over to the ladder and started down. Daniel waited for a count of five and then followed him, descending into complete darkness.
Climbing down in the pitch dark was disorienting, especially when combined with the faint movement of air coming up the shaft, and more than once Daniel swayed backwards and ended up with both hands clenched tightly to a cold iron rung, getting his bearings.
When they finally reached the bottom, Sika put his hands on Daniel’s back to warn him, nearly startling a shout out of him in the process. Sika then turned and walked towards a brilliant pinhole and put his face against it, eclipsing the tiny star.
“I don’t see anyone. The equipment locker is to the right at the end of the hall, maybe twenty feet away. There really isn’t much call for holding prisoner’s effects, so it’s more like a locked storage closet than anything else. Just stay close and be quiet.”
Walker Page 24