by Jody Wallace
It saw him coming and withdrew—or it tried to.
The weapons bristling out of its neck like acupuncture clacked against the wall, preventing its escape. Temporarily. If it could bend rebar, it could bend swords.
The dino roared its pain and frustration. Zeke whipped out the grenade, yanked the pin and pegged it into the T-Rex’s gaping red maw.
“Fire in the hole!” He tackled Maggie behind an overturned gun assembly table.
The explosion rocked the whole room. Plaster crumbled around them. Small pieces struck his back and bounced off his vest.
Maggie wriggled beneath him. “Get up, get up. Cracks above us.”
They lurched to their feet. The emergency lighting burned through the room, now a smoky red hell instead of an armory. Zeke peered through the clouds and saw a great deal of wraith dust dispersed on the floor, darker than the powder and chips of concrete.
A T-Rex amount of wraith dust.
“It’s dead.” He grabbed her arm, not taking any time to rejoice, and ran.
Falling ceiling pelted them. They clambered through the ruined wall. Uneven footing on the piles of rubble tested Maggie, who had shorter legs. Zeke half-dragged her. He didn’t care what was going on above ground—they had a better chance up there, with wraiths, than down here, with a building collapsing on their heads.
They reached the door to the common room. Zeke slid to a stop, and they peered inside.
At first, he saw no one. Then scarlet glimmers caught his attention. He started to drag Maggie away from whatever was going to burst out of the conduit—probably another fucking T-Rex—when he realized it wasn’t a conduit.
Red emergency lights twinkled on the curator’s metal walker. The old man hobbled through the dusty, murky room toward the door.
His clothing was still neat as a pin. He hadn’t donned the protective vest. But he was alive.
“My stars,” he said when he saw them. “I wondered what exploded. I was coming to find out.”
Maggie trotted to the curator’s side. She tugged his arm. “We have to hurry, sir. The building may be unstable. There was a T-Rex. It got really mad.”
“I’m going as fast as I can, child.” The curator shuffled. The tennis balls on his walker left trails in the dust.
The structure rumbled under their feet. Maggie braced the curator.
The roar of a cave-in down the hallway near the armory heralded billows of dust. Zeke considered the ramifications of tossing one of the seven most powerful individuals in the Somnium over his back in a fireman’s carry. The arm poisoned by the Cthulhu had regained most of its strength, so he should be able to manage it.
“Where’s your guards?” he asked the curator.
Maggie and the curator reached the door. “The soldiers went to find Adishakti and Lillian. The last I heard, Adishakti had managed to vigil-block the correct area.”
“So there shouldn’t be any more manifestations?” Maggie asked. “Then we can end this.”
“We have to plow through the wraiths Karen already manifested,” Zeke pointed out, wondering how long the vigil-block would last—and how much it had exhausted Adi to place it. “What have you heard about the rest of the troops?”
“Unfortunately, I gather several more soldiers have lost their lives.” The curator shook his head sadly. “We are going to be in dire need of reinforcements soon.”
Maggie shared an anxious glance with Zeke and sheathed her sword, which was too long for her height and nearly dragged on the ground. “We’re already in dire need of reinforcements.”
“I mean after this incident. We’ve lost too many L5s. Alucinators with that sort of strength are hard to come by.”
“We can’t worry about that. We need to get you somewhere safe.” Zeke couldn’t imagine where that would be, but it wasn’t stuck underground in a structurally unsound facility.
He jogged ahead, checking the first stairwell for intruders. A soldier lay near the top, unmoving. Taking two steps at a time, he reached the soldier and checked the man’s pulse.
Dead. Zeke recognized him as one of the men who’d been guarding the curator. Had he been returning to assist the curator, or had he never made it to the surface?
No way to tell from his current position. Zeke unclipped the walkie from the soldier’s belt and flicked it on. “Zeke Garrett. I have Maggie and the curator on the first floor. Can I get an above ground status update? Over.”
The only response from the walkie was static. Dammit. Either everyone was too busy fighting to respond or everyone was dead.
He’d been in this situation before. In Harrisburg. Separated from his team, beleaguered on all sides. But this was worse. If he failed, he’d lose his life and his team’s life as well as the life of the woman he loved. Not to mention a curator. He’d go down in Somnium history as the number one cautionary tale of incompetence and stupidity, if he wasn’t already there.
“Hold my shoulder,” Maggie encouraged the old man. The curator began to negotiate the stairs, his walker at the bottom. He braced himself between Maggie and the railing. Zeke dragged the soldier’s body out of the way.
Once she had the curator at the top, Maggie jogged down the stairs for the walker. Zeke again considered hoisting the old man over his shoulder. The curator was scrawny, stooped and probably not very heavy.
“I use one of those runabout chairs at home,” the curator explained when he noticed Zeke eyeballing the walker. “I decided not to bring it on the plane. Too much baggage.”
“At your level, sir, you should have an assistant to handle your baggage,” Maggie chided. Not that the curator’s wheelchair would have been an improvement in a facility with stairs.
“Oh, I like to be independent. It gives the other curators such fits. I’m the oldest, you know.” The curator chuckled. The slide-clack of his walker was too sluggish for Zeke’s liking.
Impatient, Zeke strode ahead, checking each room for lurkers. He closed every door that still latched, which would prevent some types of wraith from escaping should they be hiding within.
“This way.” Zeke led Maggie and the curator toward the front door. The one emergency exit led out the back of the building, on the other side of the rubble. Even if it were accessible, it involved a long, hard climb up a ladder in a narrow tube. He doubted the old man could navigate that.
Though Zeke was impatient and edgy, perhaps the curator’s turtle-like speed wasn’t a bad thing. If there were no wraiths here, should they remain underground? The curator claimed Karen had been vigil-blocked, and the long, straight hallway seemed stable, unlike the bottom floor. Nothing sounded from either direction in the corridor except the creaks and moans of the protesting structure. No T-Rexes roared; no werewolves howled.
But Zeke wanted—no, needed—to see what was going on at the surface. He needed to know why nobody was answering the walkie. He needed to hear Karen had been located outside the sphere and stopped.
He needed to hear she was dead.
They passed two more bodies. One was the doctor who’d been sent to help the wounded aboveground.
So they didn’t have a physician on the premises anymore. Great.
The curator paused over the woman’s bleeding body. Zeke couldn’t tell what kind of wraith had taken her out, but it wasn’t the T-Rex. Her limbs were intact. He removed the walkie from her belt and handed it to Maggie.
“Such a shame.” The curator shook his head. “She wasn’t even an alucinator. Margaret, be a dear and close her eyes. I should say a few words. She was quite concerned for me. It’s ironic that she’s dead and I feel fine not an hour after I gave her such a scare.”
“We don’t have time for this.” With a frown at the old man, Zeke hoisted Maggie to her feet after she’d obeyed the curator’s request.
“There’s always time to pay our respects, son,” the curator admoni
shed. “Otherwise, we’re no better than the wraiths themselves, vicious and animalistic.”
If the old guy wanted to preach, why was the doctor getting special treatment and not the soldiers who’d guarded him? Zeke stifled a growl of frustration. Poorly.
The curator raised his eyebrows at Zeke and cleared his throat. “Dear Doctor Weir, you faithfully executed your duties during your employment with our fine organization. It’s possible you saved me from an uncomfortable incident. When ordered into the fray to give solace and healing to the soldiers who needed you, you didn’t hesitate. And now that you have given your life for our cause, you will not be forgotten.”
“Amen.” Maggie nudged the curator into motion, apparently as impatient as Zeke was. “Did anybody answer you on the walkie?”
Zeke grimaced. His boots ground in wraith dust on the floor. “I can’t get a response.”
Maggie tried hers too—nothing but static. She replaced it on her belt.
“It seems we’re alone,” the curator remarked. “Isn’t this a pretty pickle? Thank goodness I have two L5s to protect me. I hope the reinforcements arrive soon.”
Zeke refused to accept what he knew could be true. “We don’t know that we’re alone.”
The curator nodded kindly. “I’m sure our compatriots have a good reason to ignore repeated hails on their walkie talkies. Until they do, we should proceed as if we are all who remain.”
Zeke grunted. They approached the long stairwell to the surface and the guard post there. The facility possessed blast doors at ground level. Zeke eyed the staircase and wondered how long it was going to take the curator to climb it and whether the exertion would give the guy another heart attack.
He could stash Maggie and the curator in a room and check the surface himself. There and back in a couple minutes. The odds that the vigil-block would wear off and Karen could manifest wraiths into Maggie’s exact hiding place were much slimmer than the odds of Zeke running into a horde of wraiths on the other side of the blast doors.
“I’m going to check the top.” He assumed the blast doors were sealed. If they’d been breached, the whole place would be swarming with Karen’s minions out for Maggie’s blood. “You two hide in the kitchen.”
“Your young man doesn’t think I can handle the stairs,” the curator whispered to Maggie, loudly. He patted his knobbly hands on his walker.
“I don’t either.” Maggie stuck her hands on her hips. “Do you?”
The curator appeared to be taken aback by Maggie’s frankness. “I can’t say I’m going to enjoy it, but I’m not as decrepit as I look.”
“You’re still going to stay here,” Zeke said. “In the kitchen.”
The curator eyed him sharply. “You do realize you aren’t in charge, don’t you, Ezekiel?”
Zeke shrugged. He didn’t give a rat’s ass if he got demoted after this. Considering the danger they were in, they’d be lucky to survive. No matter how it heartened him that Maggie had such faith in him, the situation wouldn’t have escalated to this point if he hadn’t screwed up with Karen a year ago. He owed it to Maggie to do everything he could to make sure she didn’t die because of his poor decisions.
If the curator got them all eaten because he was being a stubborn cuss, that sure as hell wasn’t fair to Maggie.
“Do you want to survive this, sir, or do you want to be in charge?” Zeke asked. “If you feel it’s that important, I can’t stop you. Well, I can, but I won’t.”
The curator stiffened at Zeke’s matter-of-fact vehemence, and the wrinkled skin around his eyes creased deeply. Something hard and angry glinted behind the man’s outward sunniness.
“I could order you to comply,” he said calmly. “I believe you young people call it pulling rank.”
“Go ahead. How do plan to enforce it? Mean words?” He risked a glance at Maggie. Her expression was blank, but he fancied he saw an inkling of support there, in the tiniest quirk of her lips. And in her silence. Maggie never held her tongue if she had something to say. “Are you going to shoot me when you can’t be bothered to wear the guns we offered you in a crisis situation?”
“You don’t know what I can do.” The curator’s glacial composure spooked Zeke a little. People who couldn’t back up their threats didn’t tend to remain calm while uttering them. “And you don’t want to know what I can do. But if you continue in this vein, you may find out.”
“Because I deserve to be punished for doing everything in my power to protect one of our curators? Because I won’t drag his fragile old ass into an active warzone?” This guy, this calm-in-the-face-of-imminent-death-and-dismemberment old coot, was one of the seven most essential people in the Somnium—and in the world, since the Somnium stood between the wraiths and the civilian populace.
Perhaps, as eldest, he was the most important. The most important person in the world.
Did he want to be the most dead? No matter what the curator thought he could do—secret healing abilities, perhaps—alucinators were merely human. Humans had limits. The one-two punch of reality from Maggie and Zeke was more probably more honesty than the guy had dealt in his whole year.
Some of the iciness leached out of the curator’s posture when Zeke refused to back down. “You sound like the others. I can take care of myself, son.”
Zeke acknowledged him with a nod. “That’s exactly why I won’t stop you. You’re free to climb the stairs. Have another heart attack. Get attacked by the wraith horde when I open the blast doors. Maggie will remain in the kitchen, where it’s safe. Safer.”
“I’m definitely staying downstairs for now,” Maggie told the curator, less aggressively than Zeke. “I’m not that fantastic in combat, and Zeke will be back after he touches base with the others. Won’t you, Zeke?”
“Yes,” Zeke promised, hoping it was true. “This is a recon mission. I can move faster alone.”
“Then I believe I’ll remain downstairs with Margaret,” the curator conceded. “But we’ll be discussing your insubordination after you deal with the wraiths.”
“I look forward to it,” Zeke said. Not caring what the old bastard thought, he kissed Maggie swiftly, locked her and the curator in the kitchen, and began the climb to the surface.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Zeke had been gone five minutes and hadn’t checked in on the walkie. Maggie fingered the transmit button as she stared at the kitchen door. While it was the same reinforced metal as the other doors in the outbunker, it seemed like a flimsy barrier between her terrible swordsmanship and the wraiths that might be on the other side of it.
“Could you sense when Adi placed the vigil-block?” she asked the curator, who had fixed himself—of all things—a cheese sandwich.
He hobbled to a table and eased himself into a chair. “I respected the wishes of the doctor and didn’t access the dreamsphere. I would guesstimate, based on the last live manifestation I witnessed, that the vigil-block was placed twenty minutes ago. Miss Kingsbury developed some eerily precise aim with her manifestations, I have to say. It’s a shame she’s completely psychotic. I suspect there’s much we could learn from her.”
“I don’t know about that. She spent most of her time ranting about the Master.” Adi hadn’t told the curator about Karen’s possible healing ability, so Maggie didn’t mention it. If the curators could heal themselves, this one wouldn’t have heart trouble. “When Zeke and I were in the sphere, she was definitely controlling the wraiths.”
“Fascinating. Do you believe she chooses what manifests as well?”
“Is that something you’ve heard of before?” she asked.
“Yes and no. At our research facility, which you may have heard of, the L4s and L5s in charge of experimental manifestations can influence wraith type if they concentrate hard enough. Or if they watch the right movie several times before trancing out, you know. However, there has never been any behavior
al control during or after the manifestation process.”
Maggie wondered how he could eat at a time like this. Her stomach would reject anything she put into it. “You mentioned you’d had trouble with assassins before. Did they use wraiths as weapons?”
“We have dealt with rogues before, though I recall no accounts of one that could control his manifestations.” He tsked, more like a professor annoyed by a disappointing student than an elderly, defenseless man in a life or death situation. “Though curators can hide ourselves, actual manifestations cannot be concealed from other alucinators who might be scanning. Speaking of which, this is as good a time as any to confound the knowledge of the camouflage piercing tactic from you. Why don’t you have a seat beside me?”
“Actually, sir,” Maggie said, rather amazed, “it’s not a good time. We could be attacked at any minute, and you’re not supposed to access the sphere.”
“Confounding doesn’t require complete sphere access.” He nibbled his way around the crust of the sandwich like a child.
“I might need to locate Karen again before this is over,” she insisted, reluctant to have the old man tinkering in her memories. She hadn’t studied confounding yet and didn’t know much about it, but what if he inadvertently erased knowledge she needed? Like the fact Zeke had been gone seven whole minutes without reporting in. “The vigil-block isn’t going to last forever.”
“Are you going to be this argumentative when you’re my student?” he asked.
“Probably.”
“And your young man?”
Zeke was a decent teacher, better than he realized, but she couldn’t imagine what type of student he’d be. “Worse.”
“I see I’ll have my work cut out for me.” The curator didn’t seem perturbed by the relationship he’d detected between Maggie and Zeke. Did he realize Zeke was bellatorix or was he assuming Zeke would transfer to the Orbis where Maggie would be training?
Then again, the curator didn’t seem perturbed by this entire situation.
