Screams echoed over the fire alarms. But the power was still on, so pop music from overhead speakers lent a jarring, upbeat soundtrack to the casino’s swift fall into chaos, as patrons stumbled about, reeling and dazed, covered in ashes and dust. Looters reached for chips while dealers and pit bosses fended them off with guns and threats. Police in riot gear arrived, moving from room to room, rounding up the rest of the survivors, looking for conspirators rather than helping victims.
Not too far from where she was standing, she heard a different sort of screaming—the sound of an animal cornered, of a person begging for his life.
She turned to see who was making that terrible noise. It was one of the roulette dealers. Military police surrounded him, their guns trained on his head. He was kneeling on the floor, cowering. “Please,” he cried, collapsing into heart-wrenching sobs. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, please don’t shoot!” he begged, and when he looked up, Nat could see what was wrong. His eyes. They were blue, a startling, iridescent hue. His lenses must have slipped off, or he’d taken them off when they burned from the smoke, as she almost did hers. The blue-eyed ones were said to be able to control minds, create illusions. Apparently, this one didn’t have the ability to control minds, or his tears.
He tried to hide his face, tried to cover his eyes with his hands. “Please!”
It was no use.
He died with his blue eyes open, his uniform splattered with blood.
Executed.
In public.
And no one cared.
“It’s all right, everyone, move on, the danger’s passed now. Move along,” the guards said, ushering the survivors to the side, away from the corpses in the middle of the broken casino, as a sanitation and recovery team began cleaning up the mess, moving the tables back upright.
Nat followed the stream of people herded in a corner, knowing what would come next—ret scans and security checks, standard procedure after a disturbance. “Ladies and gentlemen, you know the drill,” an officer announced, holding up his laser.
“Don’t blink,” security officers warned as they flashed their lights. Patrons lined up quietly—this wasn’t the first bombing they’d survived—and several were impatient to get back to their games. Already the craps dealers were calling out numbers again. It was just another day in New Vegas, just another bomb.
“I can’t get a read, you’re going to have to come with us, ma’am,” a guard said to an unfortunate soul slumped by the slot machines. The sallow-faced woman was led to a separate line. Those who failed the scans or carried suspect documentation would be thrown into lockdowns. They would be left to the mercy of the system, left to rot, forgotten, unless a celebrity took a shine to their cause, but lately the mega-rockers were all agitating to restore the ozone. The only magic they believed in was their own charisma.
It was her turn next.
“Evening,” Nat said, as she looked straight into the small red light, willing her voice to remain calm. She told herself she had nothing to fear, nothing to hide. Her eyes were the same as the rest.
The officer was roughly her age—sixteen. He had a row of pimples across his forehead, but his tone was world-weary. Tired as an old man. He kept the beam focused on her eyes until she had no choice but to blink and he had to start over.
“Sorry,” she said, crossing her arms against her chest and struggling to keep her breathing steady. Why was it taking so long? Did he see something she didn’t? She would hunt down the lockhead who’d conjured her rets if he’d proven her false.
The officer finally switched off the light.
“Everything all right?” she asked, as she flipped her long dark hair over one shoulder.
“Perfect.” He leaned closely to read her name tag. “Natasha Kestal. Pretty name for a pretty girl.”
“You’re too kind.” She smiled, thankful for the invisible gray lenses that allowed her to pass the scan.
Nat had gotten the job with fake papers and a favor, and as they waved her through to the employee lockers so she could change into a clean uniform and get back to work, she thanked the unseen stars above, because for now, she was safe.
2
“I CAN’T TAKE THIS JOB.” WES PUSHED the slim manila folder across the table without opening it. Sixteen, with soft, sandy-brown hair and warm brown eyes, he was muscular but lean and wearing a tattered down vest over a threadbare sweater and torn jeans. His face was hard, but his eyes were kind—although more often than not he had a smirk on his face.
He had one now. Wes knew all he needed to about the assignment just from the words PACIFIC RECON typed in boldface Courier across the cover. Lately all the work was in the black waters. There was nothing else. He sighed, leaning back on the plush leather chair. He had been looking forward to a real meal, but the chances of that were slim now that he’d turned down the offer. There were white tablecloths and real silverware. But it was still inside a gambling hall and every corner blinked with tiny lights as slots clinked and beeped and coins dropped into buckets.
Wes was from New Vegas and found the sound of casino clamor soothing. The Loss was still recovering from that spectacular bombing that had torn the place in half a few weeks before. A grid of gas heaters were strung across the ceiling as a temporary fix; their fiery glow the only defense against the never-ending winter outside. Snow was coming down hard, and Wes watched the dense flakes vaporize, each flake sizzling like oil in a frying pan as it hit the grid. He brushed back his hair as an errant snowflake drifted through the mesh to land on his nose.
He shivered—he never could get used to the cold; even as a boy he’d been teased for being too warm-blooded. He was wearing several layers of shirts underneath his sweater, the ghetto way to keep warm when you couldn’t afford self-heating clothing powered by a fusion battery. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t.”
Bradley ignored him and motioned the waitress over. “Two steaks. Tuscan style, Wagyu. The biggest you got,” he ordered. “I like my beef massaged,” he told Wes.
Beef was a rarity, unaffordable to the general population. Sure, there was a lot of meat around—whale, walrus, reindeer, if you could stomach it—but only the heat-elite ate beef anymore. Especially since the only cattle left were nurtured in expensive temperature-controlled stables. The cow that died to make his steak probably lived a better life than he did, Wes thought. It had probably been warm.
He locked eyes with his dinner companion. “You need another CEO kidnapped? I’m your boy. But I can’t do this.”
As a former Marine sergeant, Wes had headed one of the most sought-after mercenary teams in the city. Correction: one of the formerly most sought-after teams. He’d done well in the casino wars until he got on the bad side of one of the bosses for refusing to torch a rival’s hotel during Mardi Gras. Since then, all the work came from the secret divisions of the military: protection, intimidation, kidnapping and rescue (more often than not Wes found himself on both sides). He’d been hoping for one of those gigs.
“Wesson, be reasonable,” Bradley said, his voice icy. “You know you need this job. Take it. You’re one of the best we’ve ever had, especially after that victory in Texas. Shame you left us so soon. I’ve got a hundred guys champing at the bit to take this gig, but I thought I’d throw you a bone. Heard you haven’t worked in a while.”
Wes smiled, acknowledging the truth of the man’s words. “Except some assignments aren’t worth the trouble,” he said. “Even I need to be able to sleep at night.” He’d learned as much from his stint in the army, especially after what happened in Santonio.
“These marked factions who resist treatment and registration continue to pose a danger, and they need to be dealt with accordingly,” the older man said. “Look what they did to this place.”
Wes grunted. Sure looked like they found someone to do the casino hit he’d turned down, but what did he know. He only knew as m
uch as the rest of them—that after the ice came, dark hair and dark eyes were the norm, and the rare blue- or green- or yellow-eyed babies were born with strange marks on their bodies.
Mages’ marks, the gypsies whispered, fortune-tellers who read palms and tarot in Vegas’s dark alleys. It’s started. Others will come out of the ice and into our world.
This is the end.
The end of the beginning. The beginning of the end.
The marked children could do things—read minds, make things move without touching them, sometimes even predict the future. Enchanters, they were called, warlocks, “lockheads” and “chanters” in the popular slang.
The others who came out of the ice were smallmen, grown men the size of toddlers who were gifted with rare talents for survival, able to hide in plain sight or forage for food where none could be found; sylphs, a race of beings of luminous beauty and awesome power, it was said their hair was the color of the sun that was no more and their voices were the sound of the birds that no longer flew across the land; and finally the terrifying drau—silver-haired sylphs with white eyes and dark purpose. Drau were said to be able to kill with their minds alone, that their very hearts were made of ice.
The smallmen were rumored to live openly with their taller brethren in New Pangaea, but the sylphs and the drau kept to themselves, hidden in their remote mountain glaciers. Many doubted they truly existed, as very few had ever seen one.
In the past, the military had drafted the marked into its ranks, along with an elusive sylph or a smallman or two, but ever since that program ended in abject failure during the battle for Texas, government policy evolved to its current state of registration, containment, and blame. The marked were deemed dangerous, and people were taught to fear them.
But Wes was a Vegas native, and the city had always been a conglomeration of misfits living peacefully together for more than a hundred years since the world had been buried in sheets of ice. “It’s not that I don’t need the work, I do,” he said. “But not this.”
The stern-faced captain reached for the folder and flipped it open, paging through the documents. “I don’t see what the problem is,” he said, sliding it back across the table. “We’re not asking for much, just someone to lead the hired guns to clean up the rubbish in the Pacific. Someone like you, who knows the lay of the land—or the lay of the water, so to speak.”
The price was good, and Wes had done dangerous work before, sure, running people in and out of the Trash Pile, no questions asked. As Bradley said, he knew his way around the ruined seas, playing coyote to citizens seeking illegal passage all the way to the Xian Empire; or if they were particularly delusional, they’d ask him to find the Blue, the fabled nirvana that the pilgrims sought and no one had ever found, least of all Wes. But lately work had dried up for runners, as fewer and fewer chose to brave the difficulty of a dire ocean crossing, and even Wes was having second thoughts about his calling. He was desperate, and Bradley knew it.
“Come on, you haven’t even opened the folder,” his former captain said. “At least check out the mission.”
Wes sighed, opened the folder, and skimmed through the document. The text was redacted, black bars covered most of the words, but he got the gist of the assignment.
It was just as he’d guessed.
Dirty work.
Murder.
The waitress swung back with a couple of beers in frosted, oversize mugs. Bradley knocked his back while Wes finished reading the pages. This wasn’t his usual operation, a one-way ticket into the Pile where if anyone got hurt it was him and his boys. He could deal with that. A good run could keep his team out of the food lines for a month.
This was different. He’d done a lot to survive, but he wasn’t a paid killer.
Bradley waited patiently. No smile, no change in expression. His shirt was tucked a little too tight, hair clipped a little too short for a civilian. Even out of uniform, he had military written all over him. But the United States of America was not what it once was—no wonder everyone called it the “Remaining States of America” instead. The RSA: a handful of surviving states, and aside from its massive military machine that kept gobbling up new terrain, the country had nothing else and was hocked lock, stock, and barrel to its debtors.
The captain smiled as he wiped the froth from his lips. “Cakewalk, right?”
Wes shrugged as he closed the folder. Bradley was a hard man, one who wouldn’t blink twice before giving a kill order. Most of the time Wes followed those orders. But not this time.
In any other world, Wes might have grown up to be something else: a musician maybe, or a sculptor, a carpenter, someone who worked with his hands. But he lived in this world, in New Vegas; he had a team that counted on him, and he was cold and hungry.
When the waitress came back, she was wheeling a silver cart holding two wide platters, each one bearing a fat steak, charred on top and dripping juice over a bed of mashed potatoes. The smell of melted butter and smoke was tantalizing.
It was a far cry from the MRSs he was used to: Meals Ready to Squeeze. It was all he and his boys could afford lately: pizza squeezers, Thanksgiving dinner in a can. Some of it wasn’t even food, it came out of aerosol containers; you sprayed it directly into your mouth and called it dinner. Wes couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a hamburger, much less a steak, that smelled this good.
“So, you taking the job or not? Listen, these are hard times. Don’t sweat it. Everyone needs to eat. You should be thanking me for this opportunity. I came to you first.”
Wes shook his head, tried to get the smell of the steak out of his mind. “I told you, try someone else. You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said.
If Bradley thought he could buy him for the price of a meal, he was wrong. Wes styled himself after Paleolithic hunters he’d learned about in school, who kept their eyes trained on the horizon, always scanning, always searching for that elusive prize that would mean survival. But the tribesmen would fast for days rather than consume the meat of sacred animals. Wes liked that idea; it allowed him feel better about himself, that he wasn’t a vulture, one of those people who would do anything for a heat lamp. Wes didn’t have much, but he had his integrity.
The army captain scowled. “You really want me to send this back to the kitchen? I bet you haven’t eaten anything but mush for weeks.”
“Throw it in the garbage, what do I care,” Wes said as he tossed the folder back across the table.
Bradley straightened his lapels and shot him a withering look. “Get used to starving then.”
3
THE CASINO WAS BUZZING AS USUAL WHEN Nat arrived for work that evening. It had never even closed, not for a day, not for an hour; management didn’t care that there was a hole in the roof as long as the slot machines kept ringing. She nodded to Old Joe as she walked in and the wizened card shark smiled in greeting, his eyes disappearing into his cheeks. Joe was an anomaly, a rare bird, a man who had lived past his fiftieth birthday. He was also a legend at the casinos. Supposedly he’d been one of the smartest and most successful card sharks, and one of the most elusive—he’d brought down many a gambling hall, decimating coffers, staying just one step ahead of security. When he made his way to the Strip, the Loss offered him a job on the inside, rather than watch him walk away with their profits.
“You remind me of my niece who died in ’Tonio,” Joe had said when he’d hired her right off the felt, a skinny, starving thing who was on a winning streak at the poker tables. “She was like you—too smart for her own good.” Joe made her the same deal he gave all his fellow card counters. Work for me, help us turn in the other pros, I’ll give you a decent salary and keep you from getting beat up by the casino goons. He didn’t ask any questions about how she came to Vegas or what she was doing before, but he’d made good on his word, and got her set up.
Ask him, the voice ordered. Ask him about the stone.
Do what we came here for. You have delayed long enough. The Map has been found, the voice kept telling her. Hurry, it is time.
What map? she had asked, even if she had a feeling she already knew the answer. The pilgrims called it Anaximander’s Map; it was said to provide safe passage through the rocky, perilous waters of Hell Strait to the island doorway that led to the Blue.
“Joe?” she asked. “You got a sec?”
“What’s up?”
“Can we talk privately?”
“Sure,” he said, motioning that she should follow him to a quiet corner, where a group of tourists were robotically feeding credits into the video poker stations. The smell of smoke was overpowering, and it reminded her of her dreams.
Joe crossed his meaty arms. “What’s on your mind?”
“What is that?” she asked, pointing to the stone he wore around his wrinkled neck. The one she had noticed the first time they had met, the one that the voice in her head demanded she ask him about the moment she had set foot in the city, and in this casino. She had put off the voice for as long as she could, fearing what would happen if she did as she was told.
“This?” the old man asked, lifting the stone to the light, where it shone brightly against the dim cocoon of the gambling hall.
That is the one! Take it! Take the stone. Kill him if you must. It is ours! The voice was frenetic, excited, she could feel the monster’s need thrumming in her veins.
“No!” she said aloud, shocking herself and startling a nearby gambler who dropped her token.
“What?” Joe asked, still admiring the shining stone.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s pretty.”
“I won it at a card game a while back,” he said with a dismissive wave. “It’s supposed to be some kind of map, but it’s nothing.”
Take it! Take it! Take it from him!
“Can I hold it?” she asked, her voice quavering.
Frozen: Heart of Dread, Book One Page 2
