Above, I saw my face with the prosthetics in a fish-eye lens. The image of me glared up at the camera, my eyes glowing from behind dark contact lenses.
The image was frozen, my scowl and my aleimi fixed on that crystal screen.
Realizing the feed was probably already on its way to their security station, I finished crossing the room with deliberate strides.
“Bridge!” Dalejem practically shouted my name. “Fuck! They’re coming! They’re coming right now! Do this thing and get out!”
He lingered by the door.
I was still enough in his light that I could feel he’d stayed there to get me out in the event the door locked behind me, or they dropped some kind of grid over the room. He already had the security panel outside the door cracked partway open.
He continued to yank on the organic casing as he shouted inside to me.
“Get out of there, Alyson!” he said, emotion in his voice. “You’ve got one minute. Or I’m carrying you the fuck out!”
I nodded, but scarcely heard his words.
The screen next to the one where my face still glared up in anger had just flickered into life. As it did, the VR projections that had been rotating overhead, showing blueprints of some large structure, vanished.
My eyes went to the new screen. A darker feeling crawled over my gut when a face began to materialize out of the darkness of that glass-like display.
Dragon emerged out of that black backdrop, staring straight at me.
Clear-colored irises. Eyes so much like Revik’s eyes.
They met my gaze from above that gray-green organic muzzle that wrapped the back of his black hair. He seemed to look directly through me.
As the light rose behind him, I realized he gazed at the same God’s eye camera that I had outside the door––the same one from the image of me on the adjacent screen.
His eyes smiled up at that camera. The smile unnerved me; it sent a shiver through my body as I almost wondered if he was smiling for me.
Then he lowered that face, those smiling eyes.
I saw the light in his eyes ignite, that dark-green light flaming from his irises like a living force. He aimed his gaze at the panel Dalejem stood by now, and a flash erupted from behind the organic metal, along with a cloud of darker smoke.
I guess that explained the door being unlocked when we reached it.
Unlike me, he didn’t bother to kick in the panel.
He simply bent down, turned the handle, and opened the door, walking inside.
The security footage didn’t freeze there, like it had on my face; the image-capture continued to play. Internal cameras took over once he entered the room, showing his looming form from several sides, showing his shaggy black hair, the U.S. military uniform he wore, the ceremonial knife I remembered, hooked into a loop of his belt.
Unlike for me, the woman with the white hair turned when he entered the room, swiveling in her console chair. She held up her hands to him, her mouth moving rapidly as she spoke.
There was no sound.
He must have said something to her in return, either in his mind or with his mouth, because she paused as if listening and then spoke again, seemingly louder that time or perhaps more emphatically, if the amount her mouth opened was any indication.
Then something happened.
I saw her go limp in the chair, her eyes glazed.
She looked for all the world like a machine that had been turned off.
While I watched, she began to move again, but something was off with it that time, something I had trouble putting my finger on at first. I’d never seen her in the flesh before, only avatars of Justice Novak on the feeds, so I had no basis for comparison; even so, she moved strangely, not like how I’d ever seen a human being or seer move.
I watched as she got up out of her chair and walked directly to a wall.
Her eyes focused to the left and up as she walked. No other part of her body moved apart from her legs, which took small, shuffling, but precise steps.
I saw her do something to that wall when she reached it.
She might have been hitting in a code or accessing some other security protocol––it was dark, and she was too far out of the main part of the screen for me to see for sure. I fought to record it with my headset so we could look at it later, but something was interfering with the damned thing, so I took snapshots with my light, knowing my seer memory wouldn’t capture everything, but hopefully enough we’d have something to work with.
The next thing I knew, she was walking back to her console’s swivel chair––only now, she held something tightly to her chest with both hands. I watched, bewildered as she slumped down and held out the thing she’d been carrying to Dragon.
It was the leather-bound book we’d gotten out of that bank vault in New York.
“Dugra a’ kitre,” I muttered.
I was still watching when the image fuzzed into static.
Then it went completely dark.
A time stamp flashed briefly on the screen. Less than an hour ago.
I stepped forward, thinking I might look for some way to capture or save what I’d just seen. Before I could reach the console, the display kicked back to life, showing a text marker in Prexci that told me the recording was erasing itself. A red square flashed slowly in one corner as the images began to scroll backwards. I watched the recording eat itself as it went.
Some kind of self-destruct must have been pre-programmed into the display.
The time stamp flashed behind my eyes a second time.
Dragon had been here less than an hour ago.
Which meant we must have just missed him in the corridors. Or, if he really was a shapeshifter like Dalejem said, maybe he’d walked right past us.
I looked down. The white-haired woman in the swivel chair still hadn’t moved. She hadn’t made so much as a sound.
By then, I was pretty sure I knew why that was.
I rounded the back of the chair, looking down until her face came into view.
Immediately, I winced, flinching back a step.
“What?” Dalejem shouted, still working over the panel. “What is it?”
“She’s dead.”
I grimaced without looking away from her face. Powder burns darkened her hair and most of her mouth. Watery blue eyes had bugged out from the force of the shot, which might have been an organic bullet. Shot in the roof of the mouth, definitely with her lips around the barrel. I wondered how it hadn’t been noticeable from the back, then realized the bullet had gone straight up, into her skull, and apparently remained lodged there.
“Gunshot,” I added. “Looks like she did it herself. But I’m pretty sure she had help.”
“Heil bloody Hitler,” he snapped, yanking on me openly with his light. I felt pain on him as he did it and winced. “No one will miss that psychotic seer, Alyson. Trust me. No one. Your husband told me about those experiments––”
“Jem,” I began, shaking my head. “Don’t.”
“My point is, however it happened, it’s done. Get the fuck out of there. Now!”
I felt my light react to the emotion in his, as well as the smack from his aleimi and his pain, but I didn’t take my eyes off her for a few seconds more.
She looked almost posed. Like she’d fallen one way and then had been lovingly rearranged by whoever watched her fire that final bullet.
Near her hand resting on the console lay a data chip.
A full organic, it pulsed right at the tip of her dead fingers, a living thing.
On impulse, I leaned down, snatching it up. Only in retrospect did I realize that couldn’t have been an accident, either.
One or the other of them had left it for me.
In those few seconds though, I didn’t think about that.
Nor, I suspect, would I have cared.
I was feeling the urgent thing Dalejem was yelling about by then.
“Now!” Dalejem shouted. “They’re trying to jam the door… they’ll d
rop the gas if they get past me. Goddamn it, Allie, get out of there! There’s too many of them!”
I tore my eyes off that sightless face, still bothered by something I could see.
Well, something besides the obvious.
Something in her expression, maybe. Something in the lack of it. I remembered her wandering around like a robot, apparently doing Dragon’s bidding.
The lights on, but no one home.
Like Revik, in Dubai.
Feeling that sick feeling in my stomach worsen, I scanned her, maybe to try and convince myself this was something different. My mind toyed with the idea the body could even be fake. This whole scene could be kind of set up, to make us think Dragon manipulated her around before he killed her.
But Feigran told me who Dragon was.
In through the out door.
Dragon told me, too.
The more I looked at her with my light, the more real she felt. The light markers were breaking down around her physical form, but I could see where they’d hooked into her body. The more physically-related ones were still there, although I knew they would soon follow.
She’d been alive, even if she’d been a corpse-rider, like Terian.
“Allie!” Dalejem shouted. “Please!”
Taking another snapshot when I felt a harder, more specific pulse of fear off his light, I turned on my heel, moving fast.
I was running by the time I reached the door.
Once I stepped outside of it, Jem grabbed my arm in strong fingers.
I watched him grip a handful of the squids with his other hand––the same organic filaments he’d been manipulating inside the panel seconds earlier––and before I could ask, he ripped down and sideways with his hand, tearing them out of their mooring.
They separated from the inside panel with a wet, sickening sound.
Shaking his hand out without letting go of me, he left the squids on the floor where they writhed into one another like angry worms.
I watched him wipe the slime off his hand onto his combat pants.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked him, bewildered. “Didn’t you disable the security functions on this hall at least?”
“That was surveillance,” he growled. Grunting, he lowered his voice, unslinging the rifle. “Along with memory… I hope. Images of us. It might slow the humans down. Long enough to allow us to slip through.”
He turned as he said it, and then we were both heading back down the corridor at a hard jog. I clicked back into military mode for real, right around the time his words reached me.
We had a lot of ground to cover to get back outside.
“We’ll need the secondary cloaks––” he muttered.
“It won’t give us enough time,” I reminded him.
“It’ll have to.”
I didn’t argue. I knew what that meant, as well as he. I’d be using the telekinesis to get us out of there if we did that. Which yeah, didn’t thrill me. But we’d both known it was a possibility if things didn’t go smooth for whatever reason.
“Dragon was here,” I told him. “He killed her.”
I didn’t glance over, but I felt his light react.
“We’ll talk about that later,” he said, noncommittal.
I nodded, once.
“Take some of my light,” he said next, touching my arm without slowing his pace. I could almost see the end of the small corridor, where it met the residency center. “Do it, Bridge. You might need it. We can’t afford to have you tapping out.”
I glanced at him, quirking an eyebrow. “We’re not there yet, brother.”
“Do it anyway,” he urged. “Before either of us gets too distracted. Or shot. Or our necks broken by that crazy fuck, Dragon. That would be distracting.”
Rolling my eyes, I decided not to argue.
Really, I wondered why I’d argued with him in the first place. Loading up on light prior to a possible telekinesis binge was a given.
Shoving the data key I still gripped in one hand inside my vest, I zipped up the pocket then gripped my own rifle more tightly. Increasing my pace, I hooked into the light structure in the center of Dalejem’s chest, tentatively at first––then gradually with more purpose. He offered himself and his light freely, which made me uncomfortable, too.
I continued matching his pace without thinking too clearly about that.
We were almost to the main corridor.
“You ready?” he said.
I was still pulling on his light. I could hear and feel his reaction to that in his voice. Fighting my own reactions to having him yet more entwined in my aleimi, I clenched my jaw.
“We’re going to try to cross through the human section first,” I warned him. “Beat out the sec team out if we can. So guns up, until we know our cover is blown. I know it won’t help us with the outside gate, but––”
“We won’t make it.” Dalejem shook his head, once. “You were in there too long. Dragon could be setting off alarms all over this place––”
“––Or shutting them off,” I growled. “Guy’s crazy. We can’t factor him in, Jem.”
“They’ll have routed the breach file up to SCARB by now––”
“––And we have Declan,” I reminded him. “And Chan, Talei, Kat and Mara. A little faith, brother, that they might have helped to slow those reactions down some.”
“They can’t blow their cover. They can’t. It would be a disaster.”
“And Talei assured me they wouldn’t send out a general alarm for something like this,” I said. “They’ll want us alive, and they won’t trust the regular military with––”
“Unless they changed the protocols.”
Clenching my jaw, I gave him a disbelieving look. “In which case I’ll be proved wrong, and you can laugh at me later, brother.”
I felt Dalejem’s skepticism, but that time, he remained silent.
I felt him reacting to me pulling on his light again, too.
I could feel it screwing with both of us, me as much as him.
I knew it was probably messing with our judgment. I knew it might be causing this argument as much as anything we were actually saying. Pain slid through his light even as I thought it, dense enough that my chest clenched, throwing off the rhythm of my steps. I recovered easily but separation pooled and sparked in my light in reaction, making me think of Revik––and I sure as fuck didn’t want to think about him right then, either.
The pain between us was beyond distracting now. It also felt increasingly mutual.
I still needed light, but I tried to decide if I should disengage.
“Don’t bother,” he growled. “That ship has sailed, Esteemed Bridge.”
I didn’t ask him what he meant.
Even so, my neck and face grew hot at his words.
Whatever the wisdom of us taking the time to argue about nothing when we were about to enter a firefight, we definitely didn’t have time to have that conversation.
Which meant we might not ever have it.
We’d reached the end of the hall.
34
DRAGON FIRE
I SLOWED TO a walk right before we would have been visible from the mess area linking the different segments of residential corridors. I felt Dalejem slow next to me, pacing me even as he drew slightly ahead, still aiming his rifle forward.
We’d left the secure hallway behind a few turns back, but rather than the firefight we’d more than halfway expected, we’d been met by––silence.
No one confronted us.
All the traffic we’d seen earlier in these halls had vanished.
As we made our way through secondary corridors between Novak’s secluded command center and the regular military areas, our progress was notable only in that we didn’t see another living being the whole way. Now we were getting close to that larger space, the one previously filled with humans and seers walking to and fro through wider corridors with higher ceilings.
Despite our proximity to that mor
e bustling hub, I could still hear nothing ahead.
The silence unnerved me.
The first time we’d walked through there, it was a busy thoroughfare, even in the middle of the night––a place for crossing between meetings and shifts, for coming and going from private rooms to get in a quick nap, a shower, a fuck, or whatever else.
Linking to the main mess hall for that part of the compound, it also had tables and chairs scattered under overhangs outside the more brightly-lit areas. The hall, which we’d seen from the greenish corridor, housed rows of tables and benches that ran its length, along with an old-style cafeteria, buffet-style, adjacent to an industrial-sized kitchen.
The mess hall itself was big, about three of my high school cafeterias back home––maybe ten of the cafeteria on the carrier we’d been using as common space before we abandoned it in the waters off Dubai.
All told, the space we were about to enter was huge, and should be teeming with people.
Before we got there, though, I felt it. I felt it before it occurred to me again how quiet it was, and how little I could sense with my light, even given the interference of the shield.
Given all that, I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess.
I should have known what we would see when we rounded that corner.
Even so––even feeling that misgiving and finally noticing the quiet, even after sensing ripples in my light as Dalejem reacted to the same uneasy knowing––even then, we both still skidded to a stop when we stepped out into that common area.
Dalejem reacted faster than I did.
He had his gun off his shoulder and aimed forward while I continued to stare around where we stood, feeling like I’d just been punched in the gut… again.
Bodies. Bodies strewn as far as I could see in the flickering light.
I say flickering because a number of organic lights had been blown out of the ceiling. Scorch marks decorated the walls and floors, as well as parts of the ceiling.
I could smell blood. I could actually smell it… along with burning skin, hair and flesh. I scanned over those broken forms with my eyes, listening and looking for some sign that any of them lived. Groans. Movement of any kind––even just the rise and fall of a chest.
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