The security officer pushed Wes out the opening and onto the floor of the chopper, and that was the last thing Wes remembered before the building exploded, crumbling to the ground, and everything went black.
Chapter 15
THE VOICE WAS A FORCE THAT PUSHED her into the ground. Its terror was overpowering, and it washed over her entire being, coming in waves and threatening to drown her. It was like being attacked by that iron bomb again. Nat put a hand on her forehead. She was shaking. Her head throbbed and there were tears in her eyes. “Someone’s calling me. Someone needs my help. I don’t know what to do. It hurts.”
“Let me help,” Faix said quietly. “Open your mind to me. I believe I can amplify the message and take away the pain. Trust me, Nat. Let me help you.”
Nat considered his offer, relieved to discover there were limits to his ability to tap into her consciousness. If he needed permission to enter deep into her mind, it meant she could also keep him out and must have been successful in closing herself off before. But that didn’t matter now. Only the pain mattered. She needed relief. Now. If Faix could help her, she would let him.
Sensing her acquiescence, he came closer, his white hair brushing her face as he whispered in her ear, “Relax. Clear your mind. Don’t resist. I will do the rest.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
He put a hand on her forehead.
Nat tried not to think, not to do anything. It was easy enough; the throbbing in her head was overpowering. She took a breath and told him to start, to do whatever he could.
His forehead touched hers. She felt his presence in her mind, like a ghost, like a shadow on an overcast day. The pain faded and an image appeared.
Walls of pristine white marble. Steel doors. Cries echoed through the darkness. A chorus of pain. Cell after cell after cell. Prisoners, pilgrims, huddled together, cold and afraid. In one cell, heavy iron chains hung from the wall, sapphire blood pooled on the floor, and a girl in a white robe cowered in the corner.
A girl she would know anywhere.
Liannan! Nat screamed. Where are you?
Nat! Listen! Don’t let them—
With a jolt, Nat snapped awake from the dream, pushing Faix backward, severing their link, sending him tumbling. He looked surprised, shaken.
“Did you see?” she asked. “Did you see her?”
He nodded, his face aghast.
“What was wrong with her—” Nat shuddered. Liannan’s robe was covered with her bright sapphire blood. What happened to her? Where was she being held? Where was everyone else? Brendon? Roark? Wes? Shakes? Farouk? Were they prisoners, too?
Nat kneeled in the dirt, shaking. She had to help Liannan, but how? Without her drakon, without her power, she was useless.
“You must learn to believe, Nat,” said Faix, reading her mind as always. “We found you once before, when you were a prisoner on the ocean. Do you remember the birds who visited you when you were on the deck of the slave ship?”
Nat nodded slowly.
“Those birds traveled from Vallonis, and so shall we. We will find them. Let me see what you saw, one more time.”
She let him touch her forehead with his hand again, felt his power soothing her anxiety.
The image returned, the stark white rooms, long corridors full of soldiers and prisoners. It was all a fast-moving blur.
Concentrate, sent Faix.
Nat focused on any markers she could see, anything that would give away the location. But all she saw were alabaster walls, concrete floors. No signs, nothing that would indicate a specific location.
There’s nothing, she sent Faix.
You are still attached to the material world. Concentrate on what you cannot see.
Then she understood. She focused on the source of the call; if she could hear it clearly, Faix could take them there, wherever that was. She focused her energies. Nat! Nat! Listen! Don’t let them— Save—
Don’t let them kill us! Save us! That’s what Liannan was telling her before the connection was severed. She wouldn’t. Nat opened her eyes. She knew where to go now. “Show me the way.”
“In the gray lands, the doors to Vallonis are few as we must protect our country, but a door from Vallonis to your world can take us anywhere. However, once we pass through the door, we cannot use it to travel back here. We can reach your friend, but the return journey will be long and difficult.”
“I understand.” It wouldn’t be her first trip across the black waters; she had survived the ocean before and she could do it again, even if she had to do it without her drakon. Liannan needed her.
And I need Liannan. The two had survived the black waters, she had helped bring Nat to the Blue, and she had taught Nat to understand her power and commune with her drakon. Liannan was one of the few friends Nat had in the world.
Faix waved his hand in a circle, and the ground shook, and the entire forest before them whirled as if it were a great stew and he was stirring the pot, weaving the grass and rocks and the very sky into a hole in the air. He was shaping the void, sculpting the ether, creating a doorway where none had stood before. The hole was no larger than a pinprick at first, but it gradually widened, larger and larger. Soon the circle was as wide as Nat was tall. Faix put his hands together and drew them up close to his chest, then pushed his fingers forward and turned the ring into a tunnel, a passage made from the earth and sky of Vallonis.
This battle would be different from the others she had won. With no drakon at her command, she had only herself, her sword and shield, and the sylph by her side. It would have to be enough to save Liannan. Nat followed Faix into the passage. There was no time to waste.
Chapter 16
HIS HANDS WERE SHAKING UNCONTROLLABLY. Wes wedged his fingers between his arm and chest, trying to stop them from trembling, but the tremors would not abate. The room he was in wasn’t cold or damp. Something was wrong with him. At first he’d thought it was the ice, since the snow got to everyone eventually. The cold got into your bones. They called it ice disease, even though it wasn’t a real disease, like cancer or even rickets or scurvy, which the vitamin-deficient populace suffered from due to the lack of sunlight and citrus fruits, no matter how much Nutri they drank. Ice disease was just a name given to a common set of symptoms, an ailment everyone got eventually, like the flu. Only it was worse than influenza. There was no cure, no vaccine, and it never went away.
When he started losing his vision a few years ago, and his hands started trembling, Wes just assumed he had the same thing everyone else did. But lately, he wondered. Usually when his vision went white, he would be blind for a few moments. But on the speedway he hadn’t gone blind. He’d seen Nat. There was something wrong with him, all right, but maybe it wasn’t the ice.
He couldn’t worry about it now. He had other, more pressing concerns. He had woken up strapped to a bed in the back of an ambulance. The explosion had taken out the hospital, and he suffered some burns to his face and smoke inhalation. His lungs had been at minimum capacity for keeping him alive. Every breath he’d drawn felt shallow and desperate.
He had no idea where he was, and only vaguely remembered being flown to an air base, then bundled up and taken somewhere else. He could be anywhere in the world, in any one of the RSA’s secret military detention centers. Wes recognized the lime-green walls that denoted a military prison. Someone had once told him the pale color was chosen for its calming effects, but the green just made him nauseous. Green floor. Green walls. Green ceiling. Green lights.
He had failed. How badly, he had no way of knowing. Not yet.
Eliza was dead or she was not. She had escaped or she had not. Either way, it had nothing to do with him.
He had been too late.
Wes didn’t know what happened to his boys; he hoped Shakes and Farouk had gotten away, but the limo had been under fire when they last saw it. For al
l Wes knew they were dead, or locked in another cell. He hadn’t been allowed out of his cell since he arrived, and hadn’t spoken to anyone but himself.
If it was meant to drive him crazy, it was working. Then again, he could have told them they were wasting their time. He’d been crazy a whole lot longer than this.
Wes counted the days by the lights in his cell. The room went black for eight or nine hours each day. The room had gone dark seven times, so he guessed seven days had passed. He couldn’t be certain. For all he knew a month had gone by. His mind was foggy, disoriented, and now he was trembling all over.
What do they want from me?
When the guards came one day, he overheard them talking about the lockdown. No one was allowed out of their cells. There had been some kind of riot the other week, and everyone was on edge.
Food arrived, with some regularity, through a slot in the door. Heat drifted through a grille in the wall. The light in his cell was greenish, but constant. These were the good things. So his captors wanted him alive; there was that, at least. Wes didn’t try to think about why—there were too many possible reasons, and none of them were comforting.
Your comfort is not the point, he reminded himself.
Your sister is. Your friends.
Or at least they were.
The slot opened. A tray passed through the hole. He wondered if the prison designers had modeled his cell on old vids downloaded from the nets, or if prisons always looked like this—green and empty, with a slot in the door for food.
Wes took the tray, which contained a bowl of a gray viscous pudding—vitamin-infused soy cake, if you used the proper name, or VISC, as it was called down at the Fo-Pro lines. He sat down and took the plastic spoon and napkin from the tray, laying the napkin on his lap and the tray on the napkin. No sense making a mess.
In old vids, prisoners threw their meals across the rooms, but that made no sense to Wes. He was hungry, and if he threw the tray across the room, who would clean up the mess? No one. He’d just be eating off the floor instead of from a bowl.
He had to close his eyes, had to pretend the food looked like something other than gray slime, to get himself to swallow. He was halfway through the bowl when the door squealed on its hinges. Soldiers stood in the doorway.
“Time to go,” said one, a square-jawed, square-headed grunt with a shaved head.
“I don’t get to finish my gourmet dinner?” he asked.
“C’mon,” said the other, his eyes flashing with anger, black flames tattooed on his neck.
Wes put the tray aside with a sigh. He’d actually enjoyed the taste of gray slime. He should tell Shakes, if he ever saw him again, that it wasn’t too bad if you closed your eyes and didn’t smell it.
The soldiers escorted him out of the room and into a small metal room, with a table and a chair on either side of it, and everything bolted to the floor. Wes had been in a room like this before, except then he’d been on the other side of the table.
He sat on a chair, the metal cold against his legs, sending a chill up his back.
The guards uncuffed him and left him alone.
It was a long time before the door opened again.
Wes caught a familiar scent and heard low whistling that accompanied footsteps on the concrete. He knew that whistling, that cheap cologne. How long had it been since he’d sat down with Bradley at the restaurant? He remembered the cold beer, the Wagyu steaks with hot butter, the meal he turned down when he last spoke to his old commander. He wished he’d had even one piece of that steak, just a taste, but he’d just left it there, getting cold.
“Wesson.” Bradley slid smoothly into the chair across from Wes. “We meet again. Another table, a different location. I hear the food’s not as good here. How’s the slime?”
“Not bad,” Wes lied as he shifted in his chair. The processed glop was starting to curdle in his stomach. “How’d you know it was me?” he asked, remembering that the guard knew his name. “At the hospital?”
“Would you believe we were waiting for you all along?” Bradley asked, his eyes crinkling with amusement, as if he knew a secret. The commander had grown a mustache, his uniform looked starched, and there were a few new medals pinned to his pocket, a pair of gray flags Wes didn’t recognize.
Wes grunted. He knew what Bradley wanted from him before he even asked: the same thing he’d always wanted. For Wes to work the black waters. Round up the pilgrims to sell to the traders and the slavers, the priests and the masters. It was likely the only reason Wes was still alive, because he was still useful. Wes gritted his teeth; he would rot in prison before he took the job.
“You like it here? You like the view?” Bradley asked with a soft smile, knowing Wes’s cell had only four walls and no window.
“Let’s skip to the job, Bradley. Tell me what you want so I can say no and you can send me back to the cell.”
“Now, don’t get too excited, boy. And don’t think you’re so smart, either. I’ll tell you what, Wesson. Let’s make a bet.”
“A bet? You’re going to bet that I’ll take the job? Okay. I’ll play,” Wes said, rubbing his hands together.
Bradley smiled. “Good. Tell me. How am I going to get you back into the service?” He opened the file in front of him. “I could pin all the damage in El Dorado on you, you know. You were seen at the hospital; I could have witnesses saying they saw you set the fire. Arson. But what’s another mark on your criminal record?”
Wes shrugged. “Do I look like a guy who cares?”
Bradley smirked. “No. And that wasn’t the way.”
Wes frowned. He guessed Bradley was intimating they had a hostage, someone close to him that he could hurt. Maybe Shakes, maybe Farouk, too. Bradley knew he and Shakes worked together. Or if not the boys, then who? Liannan? The smallmen? But Wes wasn’t sure Bradley knew about the marked on his team. Eliza? But hadn’t she been transferred already? The notion was too painful, so he pushed it from his thoughts.
“You don’t want to guess?” Bradley asked with a twinkle in his eye, so smug that Wes wanted to shove an icicle through his brain. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s just cut to it like you’ve asked. I’ll tell you how we’ll motivate you. We’ve got her.”
Her.
Does he mean Nat? They have Nat?
“She’s been with us for a very long time,” Bradley said lazily, and Wes realized he meant Eliza. Of course, they still had Eliza. Wes felt as if he had been punched in the gut. “I didn’t realize she was your sister, or I would have used her as leverage earlier.”
Wes glared at him.
“We flew her out to the Red City this morning. Took her home, shall we say.” He was clearly enjoying himself. “We’ve got a base out there, a great place to get rid of those we no longer need. You’ve heard of the flesh markets, haven’t you? The Temple of the High Priestess of the White? Lady Algeana has a soft spot for her kind. Unless . . .”
“Unless I work for you,” Wes growled. “It just gets better and better.”
“Bingo.” Bradley smiled. “Do I win the bet?”
Wes didn’t reply.
“I think I do, because you’re not going to let that happen, are you? You know what I think? I think you were in El Dorado to break her out.” He smirked. “So predictable. So ridiculously honorable, coming from someone like you.”
Wes looked at him. “Foreign concept, eh?”
“Not really. Just a luxurious one. And luxury is something you don’t have.”
Wes said nothing.
Bradley smirked. “But don’t worry. She’s alive and safe. And you’re going to keep her that way—aren’t you? I’m pretty sure I win our little bet. Because from now on, you work for me and you do everything I say. Deal?”
Wes flexed his fists as he contemplated his lack of options. He had never felt so powerless.
Bradley sa
t back in his chair. “You know, you really should have taken me up on that steak.”
Part the Second:
RYDDER AND SYLPH
To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.
—SUN TZU
Chapter 17
HIS UNIFORM WAS WARM BUT ITCHY. Wes wasn’t a uniform person. He scratched his neck underneath his collar, still a bit shocked to find himself back in gray wool synthetic, RSA badges, and stripes on his shoulders. He wasn’t cold anymore, but that was little consolation for the task they’d sent him to do.
The military had been through a few changes since his time in the service. They’d suffered major losses during a recent conflict in the Tasman Sea, and their resources were stretched beyond limit. Now they needed sailors who could navigate the trash-filled oceans without getting lost or sinking their ships, so they were recruiting ex-runners, former coyotes who knew the oceans and the pilgrim routes. Wes was the best runner in Vegas, the one who had the most luck evading the naval scouts, helping pilgrims cross the waters. Now they wanted him to use his skills against the same desperate souls he used to help.
After accepting the commission, Wes was flown to a naval outpost in New Java for a perfunctory training session, where he was schooled in the routes and procedures of patrol. Wes commanded a ship that was part of a team of two search vessels, light cruisers working in tandem around the seas surrounding the South Asian islands. Wes’s every move would be tracked by satellite from the base, and there were quotas to fill, expectations to be met.
“Don’t think you can go out there on surveillance and come back empty-handed, Lieutenant,” Bradley threatened that morning before Wes left to take command of his crew, a few days after he had been released from his cell. “We fish out two dozen pilgrims a month, so don’t think you can bullshit me. With your record, I expect double, triple our usual intake. Happy hunting,” Bradley said with his skull-head smile.
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