Kane strode over to the ruined glass frontage of the building, looking down the street. “Take the evidence, you also take the prisoner,” he said with a cocky smile. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Swiftly, Kane stepped out of the building and made his way across the courtyard, sticking close to the walls where the shadows were deepest. A moment later he was out on the street, where burned-out automobiles creaked in the wind. He may not know this ville but he knew the ville design—which meant he knew just where the Magistrate Hall of Justice should be. And if he found that, Kane felt sure he would fine Grant, too—alive or dead.
Chapter 23
The sun was beginning its slow descent to the horizon, and Brigid could feel the temperature dropping.
The streets were ghost boulevards stretching through the ville, the only movements created by the raging winds that soared through the streets, licking against the buildings with an anger only Mother Nature herself could conjure. Brigid trudged back toward the hospital where all of this had started, Mossberg shotgun in one hand, radio set in the other.
It was six blocks to the hospital. Even in the dwindling sunlight, the ville was a mess. Whatever had struck had done immeasurable damage. Much of that damage was cosmetic, but it gave the overall effect of an environment that had rotted, like a moldy orange left in the fruit bowl too long.
Brigid sought out the shadows to hide her from the predatory Magistrates who patrolled the city. On the one hand, she yearned to cling to the shadows that sat at the edge of the tall buildings lining the streets. On the other, she was fearful of getting too close in case the punishing winds tore something loose—a hunk of masonry or a windowpane—and flung it into her. Quietly she was also afraid of something else—that someone might be waiting in one of those silent monoliths, that Daryl Morganstern might once more materialize in the shadows, demanding his pound of flesh.
By the time she reached the hospital, the sunlight had diminished to almost nothing, painting the streets a bloody shade of red as the sun set. The hospital was just as she had left it, the wreck of an automobile parked out front, the exterior wall ravaged so its floors were visible through the ruins, open to view like some giant’s doll house.
Brigid needed to get to the third floor, where the mat-trans—or whatever it was—was located. Getting out had been easier, clambering over the ledge and down to the street. To get up again she either needed a fixed line of some sort or she would have to find a staircase.
The reason they had climbed down, of course, was because the doors to the room had been sealed. Brigid was confident that if she could get up there, she could find a way in. With that thought, Brigid strode determinedly into the hospital, shotgun and radio clutched in her hands.
She didn’t realize that she was being watched. Two eyes, pale like boiled eggs, peered through the tinted visor of the Magistrate’s helmet where he hid in the burned-out wreck outside the hospital, watching as Brigid picked her way inside, her red-gold hair disappearing into the shadows. His helmet had a terrifying motif—a skeletal demon baby strangling itself with its own tail. Magistrate East had been certain that the rogues would return here, to the place of their incursion, in due course. It was simply a matter of time, and Magistrate East had the infinite patience of a dead man.
Once he was sure that the redhead was inside, East pushed at the driver’s door of the car, shoving it open with a shudder of warped metal. Then he stepped from the vehicle, Soul Eater pistol ready in his hand, and he squawked into the hidden microphone pickup in his helmet. His shrieking voice sounded like radio static as he reported in, the sound muffled by the howling of the winds as he strode toward the holed wall of the building where the woman had just disappeared.
A moment later, East was inside the hospital, blaster ready, searching for the living.
* * *
K
ANE
FOUND
THE
H
ALL
OF
J
USTICE
without difficulty. On his Earth, the villes followed the same basic blueprint, with only minor deviations from ville to ville. Brigid had explained it to him recently, discovering a hidden pattern to the construction of man’s cities. It was an Annunaki design, tooled to affect an occupant’s thinking processes. Variations on the same design could be found throughout history, each one a secret monument to man’s slavery and his subservience to the Annunaki will.
Kane approached with the setting sun at his rear, hiding in the shadows it cast. The sunset painted the silver-gray clouds a peachy red as it dwindled in the sky. Carved from stone, the building was several stories high. A stylized representation of Justice stood on a plinth that was inset on a central balcony, presiding over its upper levels in blindfold with scales descending from her outstretched hand. Kane smiled with ironic amusement when he realized that Justice was not a woman, but rather a representation of a hybrid, like Baron Cobalt or any one of the other barons he had encountered in his life since leaving Cobaltville. Like so much of this ville, the exterior stone walls of the Hall of Justice had turned dark as charcoal where they had been burned, streaks of black running across the paler stone like a tiger’s stripes. The windows were dark, too, caked with debris.
The Hall of Justice was built on an incline with steps leading up to its impressive main doors. Beneath these, twin roads led to its lowest level, which sank to either side of the steps, where matching rollback doors were located, flush to the walls of the building, adorned with the Magistrates Division shield. An underground garage, Kane knew.
There were several patrolmen about, their faces obscured by the masklike helmets they wore. One pair trudged together down the stone steps, their gait slow and determined. Another waited by the double doors into the Hall of Justice itself, his weapon holstered in a bulging sleeve.
Kane began to walk around the building, looking for a side entrance. As he did so, one of the wide doors at the base of the structure opened, and Kane was surprised to see three vehicles come speeding out of it. They were two large personnel carriers led by a two-man patrol vehicle that hurried past him. Kane ducked back into the shadows as they sped past on the cracked pavement of the roadway. There were two Magistrates in the patrol car, their faces set grimly beneath their helmets. The twin personnel carriers followed, their design reminding Kane of the Sandcats he and Grant had once used, tank treads over their rear-most sets of wheels. The driving pod contained two figures, driver and passenger, both of them in Magistrate uniform. Behind this, the walls of the personnel carriers were solid armor, with a thin strip of tinted armaglass that Kane’s eyes could not penetrate. He watched as they sped by, bumping a little over the damaged road surface.
Kane watched them depart from his hiding place in the shadow of an abandoned café’s awning, hurrying away from him in the direction he had come from. Beneath the steps at the front of the Magistrate Hall, the garage door shimmered closed, shuffling down on its greased treads. Once Kane was certain that no one else was nearby, he scrambled across the road, keeping himself low to the ground in a semicrouch. The Magistrate at the top of the stairs took no notice as Kane crept past the front of the building on the opposite side of the street. Kane spotted the service road running to the left-hand side of the Hall of Justice and he headed toward it, scurrying along as swiftly as he could. All around, the winds continued to howl, whipping up flecks of ash and loose gravel from the pitted surface of the road. In the distance, Kane could hear the tinkling sound of broken glass, another busted windowpane being danced across the hard surface of the road.
Then Kane was opposite the side street, head ducked low to his shoulders, arms pumping as he weaved between patches of shadow. There was a barrier there, operating on a hinge assembly and painted with red-and-white chevrons. The barrier could be raised to allow vehicles through and had a sentry post beside it where the operator would sit. From across the street, Kane could see that the sentry box was empty; this whole ville appeared to be lifeless, Kane realized, so there would be little cause to keep the post manned.
A swift look around him, then Kane was dashing across the crosswalk, feet pounding on the cracked road surface. Kane didn’t slow as he reached the waist-high barricade, simply hurdled it, one leg kicking out in front of him, the other behind like a pair of scissors.
Past the barrier, Kane kept running, darting into the shadows cast by the building as a pair of patrolling Magistrates came striding obliviously around the street corner. Kane held his breath as he watched them, their hands pushed deep into the pockets of their black greatcoats. Neither glanced at him. They simply marched past in silence, the fearsome wind catching at the tails of the long coats they wore.
Swiftly Kane brought himself tight to the far wall, the one that sat opposite the Hall of Justice. This was a service road, the kind used by refuse collectors, he realized. Rainwater streaked across the cracked surface of the road, pooling in little ovals where the road’s surface was uneven. Up ahead there was a fenced-in area where the trash bins would be stored. The fencing was made of tightly placed struts of wood, each standing almost nine feet in height with a sharpened point at its apex. The fenced-in section ran seven feet square, enough to hold maybe ten bins. Beyond that was a door with a step up, set back in a recess in the wall. Kane eyed the door—it was bolted and riveted in place, and the paintwork was scarred and flaking. It looked like a fire exit and, at a glance, Kane would guess that the door was alarmed.
He turned back to the trash area, analyzing it more carefully. A wide gate ran the whole length of the boxed-in section, designed to open out on one side to allow full access to the trash cans within. That meant there had to be a way to get the trash in there in the first place, Kane realized, most likely a door on the inside of the fenced-in area. He eyed the sharpened points of the fencing again, weighing the options in his mind.
It was guesswork, of course, assumption and supposition.
His life as a Magistrate had trained Kane to think through situations logically, to assess risks and to know how to draw reasonable conclusions about a situation. The only life they had found since they had arrived in this ville had been the Magistrates, and it had been Mags who had chased after Grant. He and Baptiste had checked a half dozen of these buildings and all of them were deserted, the only life remaining was in the form of skeletons and old video recordings. But the Magistrate’s Hall of Justice was abuzz with activity, Mags and vehicles bustling about.
“Heaven knows who they’re looking to prosecute,” Kane muttered, eyes still on the tall fence around the litter bins.
If Grant was anywhere, it would be here. Brought in for questioning, maybe, or medical attention. Or on a slab in the morgue, a dark voice whispered in the back of Kane’s mind. Ignore it, Kane told himself. Live in the present.
Kane shrugged out of his tailored jacket. It was streaked with dirt now, from clambering down the side of the hospital and from crouching in the grass by the lake, speckled with dirt and frayed fibers from the other places he had been and the skirmish with the dead Mag. Kane turned the jacket around, putting his arms in the reverse ends of the sleeves so that the open front of the jacket was toward him, a little like a straitjacket.
Kane stepped back, walking foot over foot until he was as far back down the alleyway as he could get. There were windows above him, overlooking this service area, but there were no lights up there, no one looking down through the smeared and ruined windows that he could see.
Kane glanced down to the street end of the alley, confirming that no one was coming. Then he began to run, the jacket reversed over his hands in front of him, feet pounding against the chipped tarmac of the road, boots splashing in the puddles.
Kane ran at full speed, legs blurring as he sprinted toward the fenced-in area, the jacket swinging back and forth as his arms pumped like pistons. Three steps from the fence, Kane kicked off, leaping into the air and scrambling up the wall, driven upward by his momentum. He reached forward with his right arm, slapped his palm hard against the wooden spike that topped the post there. The jacket had bunched under his hand just as he had planned, creating a makeshift cushion as he pressed against the sharpened point.
With a grunt, Kane drew his body up, reaching over the fence with his left arm. Kane grunted again as the inside of his left elbow slammed against one of the pointed posts and was once again grateful for the protection granted by the rolled-up jacket. Kane’s booted toes clattered against the wooden struts, and then he was over, swinging his whole body above the fence that barred his way, legs clearing the pointed posts by little more than an inch.
Kane sailed over the fence and crashed down an instant later on the large, wheeled bins that waited inside the trash corral. He winced, conscious that he was making a lot of noise as he rolled across the top of the bulging bin, bounced from its surface and tumbled into an identical trash can that stood beside it. Then he was no longer moving, and he pulled himself to a graceful halt atop one of the tall bins. His jacket was still caught on the railing, and when Kane pulled at it one of the sleeves tore. He had his shadow suit beneath his shirt, so he wasn’t about to get cold.
Kane looked around him, the echoes of the hollow bins still loud in his ears. There were six large trash receptacles inside the area, each one almost as tall as a man, leaving just enough floor space for a single person to step into the fenced-in area to dump the trash. The area had not been emptied in months, Kane guessed, judging by the stink of the bins and the lopsided stack of bulging black bin sacks that lay strewed across the tops of the bins and the ground below.
The area was almost a perfect square, with fencing on three sides while the fourth wall was made up by the side of the justice building itself. There was a door set into the wall, with a grille over the window and a metal clip fitted below the handle. The metal clip could be affixed to the wall by a padlock, but the lock was missing.
Kane eased himself down from the trash can, dropping down among the bags of garbage. Several of them had split, and the stench of rotten food was heady in the air. Oddly, Kane noticed, there were no flies buzzing about. He had already noted the lack of insects in the ville, but seeing trash strewed about like this without the accompanying hum of insects’ wings felt odd, almost surreal.