Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (19 page)

"You too, Impact," he said, pulling Impact's attention from the display. "This is good work." Elias patted his leg where a fresh dressing covered the wound under his clean fatigues. "You've officially jumped past Coop and Mos in the medic chain."

Impact looked surprised but covered it quickly with a nod not unlike Ace's and Padre's. He tried to cover the pride in his eyes as well, but Elias could read it plain as day before it slipped behind the mask of bitter distraction. He'd neglected the man all right, but maybe it wasn't too late to turn this particular soldier around. God willing it wasn't too late for Nikki.

Elias shifted his attention to Ace. "Report."

Ace covered the night's events at the home front in concise detail, from Nikki's first attempt to visit Gideon to her subsequent break-in and Gideon's escape. Her report matched Nikki's almost exactly, which was surprising enough to bring a tired smile to the surface. He'd expected Nikki to massage the truth in her favor as she might have done months ago, but she hadn't. The smile faded as he tried to decide whether this about-face was a good sign or a bad.

"Our op went as expected, to a point," Elias began his recap. As he covered the highlights of the surveillance and approach, he noted the escalation of interest around the table. Like Gram, Ace and Impact were on edge about the body bag. They knew the op parameters—assess the damage and destroy any evidence on site. That bag represented a break from mission protocol, something they knew Elias didn't take lightly.

When Elias mentioned Padre's grudging initial analysis of the bodies, Ace stopped him with a question. "You're not one to hesitate, Padre. What was wrong with the scene?"

Their post-op recaps were more informal than the traditional debriefs most of them had endured in the military, Elias and Ace from both sides of the table. They were less about evaluating individual operators and extracting intel, and more about evaluating and sharing intel with the group. But the question aspect of the debrief remained and was something Elias encouraged. Questions had a tendency to highlight details that might otherwise fall through the cracks.

 
"Most of the signs supported Gideon's story, but not all of them." The twist to Padre's mouth told Elias he was berating himself for not putting together the pieces sooner. Padre was one to rake himself over the coals when the rest of the team thought he was without fault, maybe especially then. "There were a few broken twigs—some signs that didn't make sense. Like wound angles that didn't match up. Wounds Gideon couldn't have made."

"Because he didn't," Elias took up the thread again as he stepped away from the table. "By the looks of it, Gideon fought and drove off the real attacker. We found a set of tracks leading away from the shack." Leaning down to the bag was a trick with his stiff left leg, but he made it work and unzipped the bag. "They led us to this."

Gram grunted a curse, and Ace whistled through her teeth as Elias revealed the glossy black armored skin of the creature. The arm they could see was identical in every way to Gideon's alien side, only this one wasn't fused to a man—it was part of a lethal-looking whole. They were staring at a creature only Savior and Gideon had seen on the other side of the Gateway more than fifty years ago.

Impact gave voice to what they all had to be wondering, to what had been repeating in Elias's mind since this thing jumped out of the darkness and nearly gutted him. It would have gutted him if not for Mos.

"That can't be what it looks like. How can that be here?" Impact's voice bordered on a shout. Understandable. Impact, more than any of them, had reason to be shaken by the only logical conclusion. Savior had resurrected his labs. The only way an alien could be on this side of the Gateway, when no working Gateway existed, was if Savior had somehow created it.

"It's not alone." Gideon's low voice sent a chill through Elias. He rose with a grunt to face the doorway, where Gideon stood with his alien side catching the light from the overhead and a thin trail of blood running down his human arm and dripping slowly to the polished concrete.

"You'll find another in the woods on the northeast side of the island," Gideon said, his eyes shifting away from Elias as Ace rose from her seat. He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, a gesture only slightly spoiled by the blood. "You have nothing to fear from me. The creature inside me didn't attack those men. It attacked its own kind, both last night and tonight."

As if sensing what he was about to say, Gideon shifted his gaze back to Elias. "I do not know why. I don't claim to know what the creature is thinking. I cannot, regardless of how hard I try. I do know it could have killed Nikki tonight, but it didn't."

"It could have killed me too," Ace broke in. "And Kate. But it left us all alone to get outside."

"Why?" Elias asked. "Why did it go after its own kind to kill them? How did it even know they were there?"

"I don't know. As I said I cannot see into the creature's mind." Gideon didn't look as distressed by his statement as he should have. In fact, he seemed more alive, more optimistic, than Elias had seen him since before they found the twins.
 

"We need help," Gideon said. "We need someone else who knows what it's like to be a plaything in Savior's hands. Someone who knows the way these creatures think even better than I do."

"Maybe not," Padre put in quietly. "Maybe these two were alone." He didn't sound convinced.

"They are not," Gideon said, the light of hope dimming in his human eye as the alien side flared red. "There are more. Many more. That much I saw clearly. And they will keep coming until we find the source and stop it." His hand clenched and another drop of blood fell to the floor.

No one responded. Elias glanced at the others but saw no doubt, just concern, and determination. They, it seemed, hadn't lost faith in Gideon as Elias nearly had. Or if they had, he'd rekindled it with the most unlikely of stories.

"I have no right to ask you to trust me, but that's precisely what I'm doing," Gideon said, looking at each of them in turn. "You have every right to doubt me. You have every right to doubt my visions, including what I saw tonight. I failed you. I failed all of us with my misinterpretation. I doubt I would trust me were I in your position. Yet I'm asking you once again to trust me." His eyes shifted to Elias again, the bald plea in them unmistakable. "I'm asking you to trust me with Nikki."

Elias was shaking his head without realizing it but not out of refusal, at least, not yet. "Why now? I saw you when you came back, Gideon. There was no hope left in you. What changed?"
 

Gideon hesitated, which almost made the decision for Elias. He was through with Gideon's half-truths and manipulation. If he couldn't tell the truth, the full truth...

"One of the visions I saw tonight was the same one I witnessed time and time again when Michael was alive. It was as if nothing had changed," Gideon said, his gaze unwavering. "I misunderstood it before, and I admit I still don't know how it can be true, but I do know this, Elias—the twins are still the key to defeating Savior. Both of them."

Old Breed

Nikki

"Yeah, so…why me?" she asked again.

Gideon didn't answer right away. Instead he adjusted the work glove covering his clawed hand and watched a group of oblivious townies strolling past the mouth of the alley under the streetlights, the rhythmic thrum of the nearby traffic keeping time with their steps.
 

He'd been surprisingly open and chatty from the moment she'd found him standing in her doorway like a creeper until they'd touched down on a Los Angeles commuter tower. He'd told her where he was going and why, and he'd even asked for her help, which was far more than anyone else had done in the two days since Mos was attacked. Gideon was so forthcoming it was creepy and made her more than a little suspicious. But the minute they'd climbed out of the shuttle into the failing evening light, he'd pulled his broody silence up with his deep hood and started playing the quiet game like he had a month's worth of ration pogs on the line. Since then he'd doled out answers in monosyllables and quick glances as they slowly wound their way across half the city over the course of several long hours, looking for something he'd seen in a "vision."

Once the townies were out of eyeshot, Gideon turned his mismatched gaze on Nikki. She tensed her shoulders to suppress a shiver. In the shadows of the alley, from the deeper shadows of his hood, Gideon's alien eye glowed faintly, nowhere near as angrily as it had in the vault, but that thing was going to give her the butt shivers every time she saw it from now on.

"As I said earlier," he said softly, "we need someone's help, and you're the only one who can persuade him."
 

It didn't make any more sense the second time. She was terrible at persuading people to do stuff, unless that stuff was taking a swing at her—there she excelled—or the person she wanted to persuade was Corso. She could talk him into pretty much anything. Not because he was gullible or easy to manipulate—way the opposite. He always knew exactly what she was trying to talk him into. His crooked smile said as much. But since their interests were pretty much twinsies, he usually went along. So unless Gideon wanted her to talk Corso into scoring burn or booze, he was probably in for some disappointment.

Gideon pushed away from the wall and strode from the alley out onto the sidewalk. Nikki fell in behind him without a word. She'd gotten used to his sudden shifts from motionlessness to action over the past couple hours.
 

She wasn't sure when she'd made the leap from wanting to pummel Gideon to feeling all buddy-buddy with him, which was concerning. Maybe it was when he didn't rip her apart in the vault, or maybe when he came to her for help. Maybe. More likely it was when he admitted he'd screwed up and apologized.
 

She couldn't help respecting somebody who bellied up to the bar to pay for a mistake. In her experience not many people had that kind of guts. In Nikki's mind most people took every opportunity to lay blame anywhere but on their own shoulders. They refused to carry the burden of the messes they made. The world had to have some kind of balance though. If you didn't carry your own weight, somebody else had to do it for you. Those who stepped up and chose to carry were the kind of people the world needed, the kind worth forgiving.

They walked up the street toward the increasing thrum of the traffic, keeping to the shadows under the awnings whenever they could. Nikki had gotten used to that too. Gideon had a habit of ducking into the deepest shadows he could find when somebody headed their way on the sidewalk. He took pains to avoid anyone getting a glimpse under his hood.

Until they neared the top of the hill, that is. Instead of ducking into the shadows, he stayed his course as two girls strutted by in impossibly high heels accentuating their impossibly long legs. They didn't give Nikki and Gideon even a passing glance. Why would they? Nikki could practically smell money on them. They reeked of it with their lifted chins and glammy outfits. They wouldn't have noticed a tattered looking guy like Gideon unless he grabbed them, or a girl like Nikki except to look down on her.

Nikki fixed them with an ignored stink-eye strong enough for both herself and Gideon. He hardly noticed them. He had eyes only for the shadowed alcove coming up on their left, the one with the faintly pulsing light coming from inside. He stopped when he drew even with the alcove, and Nikki stopped beside him to stare at the wooden door inside.

The sound Nikki had been hearing, the one she'd mistaken for car noise, suddenly captured her full attention, and recognition chilled her heart.

This close, she could feel it as well as hear it, the bass vibrating up through the soles of her boots, making her blood pump faster, trying to seduce her with its familiar call. She took an involuntary step back and looked up at the pitted but polished wood of the door, the dark concrete above it, and the one-word sign with a single light slowly pulsing from red to white behind it.
 

Avalon.

She'd heard of it. Everybody under thirty had heard of it. Avalon was legend. So much so, it had been at the top of Nikki's must-visit list once upon a time, before she gave up the life.
 

Gideon had brought her to a nightclub, and not just any nightclub. Avalon was on every clubber's bucket list, mostly because it was so hard to find. Avalon was a rover, a club that never stayed in one spot long. It moved from building to building, from city to city, never advertising but always drawing a crowd thanks to feverish word of mouth that spread like a flu wherever Avalon materialized. It even jumped continents, if you believed the stories, which were many and magical. People who'd been to Avalon said the drinks tasted sweeter, the music reached deeper, and the atmosphere was crazy sick.
 

Avalon's rep could have been all hype. Club culture tended to center on perceived pleasure more than the moment, odd as that seemed. The high you were on now was never as good as the last one or the next one. For true club junkies, nothing looked as good to the eyes as it did in memory or imagination, and dealing in specifics was one of the worst buzzkills imaginable. So while everybody raved about Avalon, nobody could, or would, describe it in detail.
 

The thought had crossed Nikki's mind, after it left Corso's lips, that Avalon was really just a brilliant, never ending con, that the music was as weak as the drinks and each borrowed setting was dingier than the last. But since finding the place took so much time, luck, and body-glittered sweat, those who stepped behind the scam-screen were too embarrassed to expose the lie. Instead they fed the mystique with bigger and wilder stories of their own, contributing to a shared fiction that grew stronger with each reluctant new voice. Could be Corso was just talking to hear his own honeyed voice, and to see how much Nikki would believe. She suspected he'd really been to Avalon and was either bashing it because he couldn't find it again or to help her fight temptation. Or it could be his theory was dead on.