All around her, the dark tiles stretched off away from her face. They were cold to the touch, and the room—for it was a room, she could tell that immediately from the lack of motion in the wind currents—stretched off, layered with them, the lighting reflecting from their surface in thin white strips. She was cold, too, cold and damp, her scalp wet, her hair heavy with water. She could hear the sounds of dripping coming from nearby, a constant
plop-plop-plop
rattling from several directions at once.
She pushed herself up, every part of her aching, her hands stinging with pins and needles when she pushed them against the hard floor. Her circulation felt poor, her extremities numb—either from the vomit or from the coldness of the room, she couldn’t tell which. Perhaps something else, too, the way she had come here, the journey.
It had been like a rollercoaster ride, she remembered then, a rollercoaster ride through a swimming pool. The water had pressed all around her, swirling in a freezing hug, like being held in an icy fist. She remembered its sound against her ears, and when she listened now she could still hear the faint sound of the waves, as if their echo had become trapped in the seashell swirls of her chalk-white ears.
It felt a little as if she had traveled through a broken mat-trans, the journey of discorporality resulting in body sickness when she had been reconstructed. It wasn’t the first time Domi had experienced that with a mat-trans; and while she couldn’t be sure, this felt similar enough for her to suspect that’s what the water thing had been.
But where was she?
There came a groan behind her, and Domi instinctively reached for the holstered gun at the small of her back even as she turned to face the noise. Her gun was missing. She ran her fingers along the waistband of her pants, but it wasn’t there. She couldn’t feel its familiar weight, either, now that she thought about it.
The light came from above in thin strips, bright as lightning but only a quarter-inch wide and six inches long. Peering up at the ceiling was like looking through a venetian blind.
The room, like the lighting, was narrow with slanting edges where the walls met the floor and ceiling. The walls and ceiling seemed to be made of a glossy, ash-dark substance, like plastic or coral, and there was an unpleasant dampness to the air, making it feel heavy. The room’s proportions reminded Domi of a pressure chamber used by divers. That, too, may have been an effect of the method with which she had been transported here, the racing water still primary on her mind.
Automatically, Domi’s hand was at her leg, clawing aside the damp material of her pants where it stuck to her, pulling the combat knife she kept stored in a sheath at her ankle.
Lying across the room, slumped against one of the shimmering wet walls, was Kishiro. He lay at an awkward angle, Domi saw, as if washed-up debris on a beach. It was he who had groaned.
“Kishiro?” Domi whispered, the words making her sore throat burn all the more.
The Tigers of Heaven warrior turned, his head swaying unsteadily as if it was a tethered balloon in the breeze.
“Kishiro, it’s me,” Domi continued as she scrabbled across the tiles toward him. “It’s Domi.”
Kishiro groaned again, looking at her as if through sleep. “Domi,” he spluttered, the single word sounding breathy with the strain.
“You have any idea where we are, cowboy?” Domi asked, glancing behind him, searching for a door.
“I…” Kishiro began. “I…”
“Forget it,” Domi instructed gently. “You were as out of it as I was, I guess. Take your time. It’s okay.”
As Domi spoke, she felt a strange crackling in the air, subtle, like a change in polarity, and then the lights flickered on behind her. She turned and saw to her surprise that the chamber was longer than she had first suspected. She had initially taken the darkness there for a wall, but realized now that the chamber was lit with such precision that its inhabitant could only see the section he or she was required to.
Lying there, head against his outstretched arm, lay the now-familiar figure of Hassood, his eyes closed, dusky face clenched in pain. Domi recognized him from the footage on the radio transmission unit that she had watched with Grant and the others, and she scampered across the chamber to where the man lay, still holding the knife in one hand, nudging him with a light touch. He was breathing, she saw, but slowly. He appeared unconscious, well out of it.
“Hassood?” she hissed. “Hassood, wake up. I’m a friend, from Cerberus. Wake up.”
In response, Hassood groaned and rolled away from Domi’s light but insistent prodding, swatting at the air while still asleep.
Vexation furrowing her brow, Domi turned back to Kishiro where he sat behind her, propped against the curving bank of the wall. Her eyes searched over him swiftly. “Kishiro? You have any weapons?” she whispered, keeping her voice low.
Moving slowly, almost like a man under water, Kishiro grasped for his
katana,
only to find the scabbard empty. His hand moved around under the low skirt of his shirt, reaching behind and to the other side, and a smile crossed his features. He nodded to Domi. “My
katana
is missing but I still have my
wakizashi.
”
The
wakizashi
was a shorter blade traditionally carried by samurai alongside the
katana.
Not all of the Tigers of Heaven carried them, for they were often considered to be ornamental rather than practical, their short length making them more akin to a knife than a sword. Still, they could be turned to combat if necessary, their blades kept as sharp as the
katana.
“Maybe whoever put us in here didn’t disarm us,” Domi told him, keeping her voice low, “but we need to get out of here quickly.”
“Where are we?” Kishiro asked.
“That’s a good question,” Domi told him with a tight smile. She sniffed at the air; it was filtered, but there was a dampness to it, too. “Feels like we’re underground maybe. I can’t tell for sure.”
As the two mismatched figures spoke, Domi became aware of a change in the lighting out of the corner of her eye. She turned in that direction, scanning the ceiling, the walls. As she watched, the dark wall opposite Hassood began to lighten, its ash color draining away to be replaced by what appeared to be a glowing square, roughly three feet up from the floor and becoming larger as it filled the wall. Light glowed from the square, becoming stronger as the opacity of the wall disappeared entirely, leaving the three-foot-square block clear like a window.
Domi padded toward the square on silent tread, determined to get a better look. As the dull color of the wall drained away, Domi saw that the square seemed to look into another room, with coral-like arches and steps disappearing off into the distance, seating all around. She realized in a moment what the square was—a video screen, or perhaps a window into the next room. The definition was so clear, it could almost be a hole in the wall itself.
Domi examined the room she could see within the square, feeling the coolness radiating from its glassy surface. It appeared empty, and her view remained fixed, which meant it was either a single camera or, as she had suspected, a window that had previously been covered by some unknowable technological trick, perhaps something as simple as a two-way mirror. There were seats there, arranged to face the jutting walls that ran across the farthest reach of her view. The chairs were shaped like champagne glasses, with thin stems beneath the narrow seats, swirling down to the tiled floor in subtle twisting plaits. The walls contained what appeared to be display units, something like the computer terminals used by Cerberus, and there were small glowing pods scattered throughout the ash-colored walls. The pods glowed a putrid yellow like a lizard’s eyes, keeping the room in a dusklike luminance. Beyond that, Domi saw darkness, something twinkling subtly within it.
Past the chairs, Domi saw a stairwell reaching upward beyond the level granted by the video feed. Carved in some kind of gray-black, bonelike substance, the grand stairwell looked wide enough to accommodate a SandCat, and it turned in on itself in a languid spiral like the dizzy path of a leaf in fall. There were icy columns there, thin as the bars on a prison window, shimmering in the darkness, just out of sight.
Domi stepped closer, bringing herself to within three inches of the faintly glowing square, her eyes narrowing as she peered into the room in the square. A clattering noise seemed to come from beyond, the sound soft and regular,
clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.
Close up, she could see that the panel seemed to be made of glass, her own pale reflection visible there like a ghost standing in the darkness of the room beyond.
Warily, Domi reached for the glass, touching it first with the hilt of her combat knife, a savage-looking nine-inch weapon with a serrated edge, her sole memento from the six months she had spent as a sex slave in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville. As a rule, Domi had little patience for keepsakes. Her Outlands life had been a daily struggle, and one she preferred to forget. However, the knife itself had come to represent something of her triumph over adversity, and as such she invested in it more value than it truly deserved, telling herself, perhaps, that a good knife was hard to find. She had very nearly lost this blade during a treetop battle less than a week ago, out in the vicinity of Luilekkerville, but it had been recovered by Kane’s team when they had come to her assistance.
The knife’s scarred hilt tapped against the glass with a dull thud, eliciting a curtailed sound with no discernible reverberation. Solid then, not hollow as she had hoped. That meant the glass of the screen was likely several inches thick, or two panes had been overlaid in the manner of insulated glazing. She peered again into the glass, searching for the telltale double image that generally flared in the reflections, but there was no indication of it.
Without really noticing it, Domi realized that the noise from the screen had become louder, that regular
clickety-clack
sound like an approaching locomotive or the chatter of an insect’s scraping legs. What was it?
She tentatively touched her fingers to the glass, feeling the coldness against their tips before they were even pressed against it. The transparent pane was freezing, and it felt damp. As she held her hand there, water trickled across the ridges of her fingers, cool droplets filling in the hollows at the base of her fingernails. More water, she mentally cursed.
Behind her, the dripping became more insistent, and Domi turned irritably, searching for its source. Something glistened on the far wall, twinkling beneath the overhead strip lights. It was a tiny stream of trickling water, fracturing as it ran down the wall in thin, crooked streams like bent fingers.
Domi turned back to the glass pane, and almost jumped with shock. Standing there, his face seemingly a mere foot away from hers, was Overlord Enlil of the Annunaki, his lizard’s eyes staring at her.
Chapter 15
Enlil watched Domi through the glass that divided them, a cruel sneer on his reptilian lips, his crocodile’s eyes sinister, a single vertical slit down the center of each mustard-yellow iris.
“Let us out of here!” Domi shouted at the glass.
Utterly inhuman, Enlil was a truly beautiful creature, imposing but with such an economy and grace to his movements that he seemed almost like something from a dream, something impossible to behold. At his full height, Enlil stood seven feet tall, a crest of spines curving back from the crown of his skull with a metallic glint, like wires of burnished steel. He wore simple clothing—loose, darkly colored breeches that flared at the hips and ended just past his knees, and a bloodred cloak that was cinched at his shoulders with a golden clasp, glowing like sunset despite the lack of light in the room where he stood. Beneath the golden clasp, Enlil remained bare-chested, his lizardlike hide a coppery-rust, the color of bronze washed with blood. The tiny scales there looked like a pattern of metal that had been sewn into his flesh. He stared directly into Domi’s crimson eyes, meeting her gaze with his own. “Cerberus,” he stated, the word coming like a curse in his eerie, duotonal voice.
“Let us out of here, you sick, sick bastard,” Domi snarled, the knife flashing in her hand.
Domi had met Enlil before now, on several occasions, in fact. Oft considered the cruelest of
Tiamat
’s brood, Enlil had been a near-constant thorn in the side of the Cerberus exiles. Initially, Enlil had plagued Kane, Grant, Domi, Lakesh and Brigid Baptiste in his guise as Baron Cobalt, the hybrid ruler of Cobaltville. In subsequent years, Cobalt had assumed other forms, C. W. Thrush and Sam the Imperator among them. Indeed, under the latter form, Enlil had gifted Domi’s aging lover, Lakesh, with a new flush of youth, only to cruelly snatch it away with some genetic succubus that ebbed the life out of Lakesh and almost killed him. However, it was in his current and supposed final form that Enlil had proved his most dangerous. Like the other eight members of the Annunaki royal family, Enlil had emerged from a hybrid body when the starship
Tiamat
had reappeared in Earth’s orbit, triggering a genetic download that granted the Annunaki yet another incarnation. When they had first walked the Earth, the Annunaki had been revered as gods by the primitive humans who inhabited the planet; in fact, that godly reverence had also been granted to their slave caste, the Igigi, such was the splendor attached to all things Annunaki—a race whose very slaves were gods.
Enlil and his siblings had reemerged with the
Tiamat
download to take control of the Earth in the twenty-third century. However, they had soon reverted to type, their petty jealousies turning them against one another. So it was that in squabbles with his family, the royal bloodline of the Annunaki, Enlil and his brethren had laid waste to several of the nine baronies of America, causing massive upheaval to the continent and the world beyond.
It had been a while since Domi had last encountered Enlil, however, and there had been some hope that the would-be world tyrant was finally dead. However, Domi knew all too well the Annunaki’s penchant for sidestepping their seeming inevitable demise; seeing him now was a shock, but Domi tamped down her surprise as she faced Enlil.
The overlord stared at her, those eerie lizard-slit eyes seeming to both pierce her and stare through her, as if she was as insignificant to him as a gnat buzzing around his head. And then he spoke once more, the words chiming like the tolling of brass bells, a king’s voice in a world ill prepared for such brilliance. “You will be out of there soon enough, apekin,” Enlil said, “and more yet, you will be eternally grateful to me for your release. For that release shall be a thing of beauty, child, the release of the butterfly from its cocoon.”
“Never!” Domi screamed. Angrily, she lunged at the screen with her knife, driving its point at the glass. The point hit the screen and bounced back with such force that Domi staggered back, too, dropping the blade.
At the glass panel, Enlil began to laugh. It was a braying, mocking, ugly sound made all the more disturbing by its duotonal nature. Domi glared at him, breathing heavily as water dripped around her from the tiled ceiling of the cell.
“I’ll never show you gratitude,” she stormed, spitting a gob of saliva at the surface of the glass. “The tables will turn, you’ll see. They always do. You’re a dead lizard who just doesn’t know it yet.”
Enlil continued to laugh as he turned away from the screen—be it a camera relay or a pane of glass, Domi still could not be sure. She watched as he strode away, his bloodred cape flaring around him, its heavy hem brushing at his ankles. He was barefoot, she saw now, the flaring breeches coming down just a little way past his knees, the curling clawlike talons of his toenails scraping on the tile floor to produce that
clickety-clack
sound she had heard before.
“When the Annunaki first came to Earth,” Enlil said, his back still to the screen, “the apekin here, your ancestors, believed us to be a gift from the heavens. And in a way, we were, for we were the children of Anu and we had traveled from Nibiru to bring light and beauty and all things Annunaki to this poor, pitiful ball of mud.
“But you rejected that gift,” Enlil snarled, turning back to face the screen, something small and glowing in his clawed hand. “The apekin began to foster delusions of competence, that they—that you—could manage without your gods. We let that happen, allowing our gift to be forgotten.
“But this time…this time the gift will be absolute,” Enlil breathed, his voice barely a whisper now. “This time, there will be no denying its value, and there will be no turning back once it is bestowed upon you.”
“You’re insane,” Domi spit, glaring at Enlil through the screenlike medium that separated them.
As she spoke, Domi felt the chill rise in the air, and Kishiro gasped from off to her side. Domi spun and saw Kishiro being pulled to his feet like a rag doll, water pouring around his form in thin streams like a leaking hose. He was being dragged upward against his will, his teeth clenched as he struggled against whatever power it was that had hold of him.
“What is it?” Domi asked, padding toward him. As she got closer she felt the hair on her head part, blown backward by a powerful wind. She realized then what was happening—Kishiro was being sucked up in a powerful column of air, pulled up toward the ceiling. Domi looked up there as Kishiro fought against the incredible force, and she saw the dark tiles there had drawn silently back, and water was pouring from the edges of the gap.
Icy water streamed down Kishiro’s body, pouring like a second skin over him, amassing on the floor in a pool beneath his feet. The proud warrior seemed to stand on tiptoe for a moment, his whole body stretched arrow-straight as he was tugged higher and higher toward the ceiling. Domi grabbed him but was pushed back, the coolness of the water icy against her own flesh, the temperature striking through her like a knife. She staggered back, feeling the bone-numbing coldness running through her, gritting her teeth against the sudden shock of pain. Then she looked up and saw Kishiro disappear through the dark mouth in the ceiling, his athletic form whipping up like a rocket.
“Kishiro!” Domi cried as she lunged for him again. But already she was too late and she knew it. The Tigers of Heaven warrior’s feet shot past her reaching hands, water pouring off them like a flowing river, and Domi instead grabbed for nothing but empty air. The water sluiced across her hands and forearms, so cold it felt boiling hot against her numb flesh. She jerked her hands back, crying out in agony.
Kishiro was gone. Above, the hole in the ceiling oozed closed, coming together like pursing lips before disappearing entirely, leaving just a bulbous ridge where it had been.
Domi spun on her heel, her crimson eyes twinkling like rubies as they searched the strange cell-like room. Hassood still lay there against the wall, muttering to himself in delirium. And over by the window screen, Enlil was watching the room with casual disinterest, the vertical splits of his irises fixed on the middle distance as if in thought.
An eerie shudder ran up Domi’s spine as, finally, she recognized that look in Enlil’s face. She had seen it time and again in the hallowed halls of the Cerberus redoubt, where the science-brains worked hard on their many and varied projects, learning new applications for the interphaser, testing new theories for the viral drugs that kept their people alive in the radioactive wastes between the villes. It was the look they gave to lab animals as they watched the results of their experiments, considered how next to toy with them to increase their learning.
Domi knew then, without doubt, that she and Hassood and Kishiro—and who knew how many others—were nothing more than laboratory animals to Enlil, there to be experimented on and discarded as necessary, there to die for his knowledge and his whim.
* * *
G
RANT
, K
UDO
AND
R
OSALIA
hurried along the empty streets of the dragon-shaped city, their movements echoing down the chasmlike labyrinthine alleyways that made up the eerie settlement. Grant remained in touch with Brewster Philboyd and Donald Bry at the temporary Cerberus ops center, taking directions whenever they got turned around in the nightmarish streets. Brewster Philboyd could not achieve any kind of floor plan; indeed the phenomenal city seemed impervious to satellite scan, the details ever changing on screen. All he could do was guide Grant toward the blip of Domi’s transponder and advise him if he saw that his team was heading off course.
It was a laborious process, trying to find their way through those snakelike streets between the white towers glistening in the moonlight. Grant set a brisk pace, guided by the internal beacon in his ear, and the others kept up with him without complaint. But eventually, Rosalia suggested they stop. They had covered two and a half miles eastward, probably closer to twice that with the way the streets kept doubling back on themselves like coiled springs. And the nature of the streets, with their hard surfaces and lack of the signs of human habitation, were disconcerting, encouraging a rising sense of unease in all three members of the field team. There were buildings but no doors. Doorways that opened only onto recessed walls. It was like something from a nightmare, with all the logic of dreams.
“Let’s stop for five minutes,” Rosalia said as they reached another of the oppressive little courtyards that appeared frequently among the streets. “Catch our breaths and let the dog do his business.”
Beside her, Rosalia’s scruffy mutt whimpered hopefully as it stared at her with pale eyes before scurrying off to relieve itself by one of the pillars, encouraged there with a simple flick of Rosalia’s wrist.
Automatically, Kudo took up a guard position at one of the multitude of narrow entries to the courtyard. Leaning against what looked to be a series of rough stone steps, made from some pale stone like chalk, Kudo took the time to attend to his sword. The
katana
had taken a few knocks during the fight with the water creatures, and Kudo used a portable cleaning kit to oil and cleanse the blade.
“Hell of a place,” Grant grumbled, peering around at the towering buildings that clawed their way toward the silver crescent mirror of the moon. The red laser light had stopped firing into the sky, or at least they hadn’t seen it fire for almost an hour, and nocturnal birds, owls and sand-colored nighthawks swooped around up in the higher echelons of the abandoned city.
Rosalia nodded her agreement as she perched on the edge of what appeared to be a water trough, the kind used for horses, a horizontal stone bar running at a little above waist height. As she rested against it, her hand scratched across its white surface and caught in a ridge there. Idly, she ran her slender hand along the ridge, working at it with slim fingers.
“According to Brewster,” Grant related to his companions, “we’re still about two miles out. The location of Domi’s tracker hasn’t moved since Bry last checked it, so she’s definitely settled somewhere. Still can’t raise her, though. Something’s blocking the signal.”
“Technology, huh?” Rosalia said with an resigned shrug. “What would that be, that can block your communications devices like that?”
Grant shook his head. “There’s a lot of mineral deposits around here. Could be a localized pocket blocking the signal. Might be radiation off that laser cannon. Could be about a hundred other things. She might just be too far belowground for the signal to penetrate.”
Rosalia sat watching Grant without comment, but she was thinking about how these ex-Magistrates—both Grant and his partner Kane—had come to rely so heavily on technology to assist them, with their Commtacts and their mat-trans and their shadow suits. There was nothing wrong with technology in its place, Rosalia considered, but it could be conversely limiting if you became reliant on it. Both Mags had been ignorant of the ways the gangs communicated in the Outlands, utterly unaware of the network of secret signals and hidden signposts that gang members like herself used to pass on information and to mark out their territories. Such information had been crucial to her the first time she had met with Grant, when he had chased after her across the desert of the West Coast of America. Still, despite being outnumbered and in the lair of the enemy, Grant had conducted himself with aplomb, triumphing over greater odds to cage a primal beast whose only expression was violence. For that, at least, Rosalia admired the man.