Outlanders - Tomb of Time Part 4

Domi had slept for a time but she dreamed and the dreams were full of sadness, of dying babies that were blendings of human and nonhuman but babies just the same.

She awakened with a jerk at the sound of thunder, her hand reflexively streaking for the Detonics Combat Master snugged in a shoulder holster. Born and honed in the Outlands, her senses were not mazed by slumber and she instantly knew where she was and what was happening.

Sitting in the pilot's chair of the Sandcat, she listened to the first faint patter of raindrops against the armagla.s.s-and-ceramic-coated hull of the vehicle. The rain was sporadic at first, an on-and-off drizzle.

Then it swiftly became a hammering downpour.

Domi carefully opened the port-side ob slit a crack and looked outside.

The sky was a canopy of billowing clouds, completely blotting out the sunlight. Discolored and livid, streaked with green, the sky looked as if it had been bruised. Incandescent flares of lightning seared her sensitive eyes. A gale-force wind howled aroundthe ruins, swirling curtains of loose debris mixed in with hail.

A flash of lightning, dazzlingly close, burned its afterimage into her retinas, followed by a peal of thunder so violent it made the Sandcat quiver. Hastily, Domi closed the ob port, her nose wrinkling at the chemical stink. She wasn't concerned about the acid rain penetrating the skin of the Cat. Built two centuries ago to take part in a ground war that was never fought, the Sandcat's low-slung, blocky cha.s.sis was supported by a pair of flat, retractable tracks.

The gun turret, concealed within an armored bubble topside, held a pair of USMG-73 heavy machine guns. The vehicle's armor not only served as protection from projectiles, but also went opaque when exposed to energy-based weapons, such as particle-beam emitters. It was also too tough to be adversely affected by corrosives.

The interior was the perfect size to comfortably hold four people. At the front of the compartment were the pilot's and copilot's chairs; the rear storage module housed the computer links for the electronic systems. A double row of three jump seats faced one another. The seats could be folded down to make serviceable, narrow bunks.

Another thunderclap, sounding like an artillery sh.e.l.l exploding at point-blank range, caused the floor plates under Domi's feet to vibrate for a second. She didn't react, even though the loud noise made her bite back a startled curse. An albino by birth, her skin was normally as white as milk so she couldn't turn pale no matter how frightened she was.

She was every inch of five feet tall and barely weighed a hundred pounds. On either side of her thin-bridged nose, her eyes glittered grimly like drops of blood. Her disarrayed, short-cropped hair was the color of bone.

The storm increased hi intensity, and within a moment Domi had the impression she was trapped in a bubble at the center of a maelstrom of shrieking violence. She remained outwardly calm as the Sand-cat rocked on its tracks. During her upbringing in the Outland settlement of h.e.l.ls Canyon, she had survived any number of natural and unnatural threats, from mutie animals to mutie weather.

Domi had lived most of her young life in the wild places, far from the cushioned tyranny of the baronies.

She had spent years cautiously treading the ragged edge of death, and her inner fiber had been forged into an iron strength and an implacable stoicism. She didn't react when pieces of wind-tossed rubble banged loudly on the exterior of the Sandcat, most of it sounding like stone, but some of it was metal, judging by the gonglike chimes.

Although she felt a pang of anxiety about Kane and Brigid, a particularly sharp one in regard to Grant, she didn't bother trying to raise them on the Sandcat's comm equipment. She wasn't technolog- ically adept, but she knew the storm would make a hash out of radio waves.

To pa.s.s the time she checked the action of her handgun. Since the stainless-steel blaster weighed only a pound and a half, it was perfectly suited for a girl of her pet.i.te build. Grant had expressed doubt she could handle the recoil when she selected it from Cerberus redoubt's exceptionally well-equipped armory nearly a year and half ago. She had never experienced problems with it, except during the period when she recovered from a bullet wound that shattered the coracoid bone of her right shoulder.

Ejecting the 7-round magazine from within the pistol's checkered walnut grip, she inspected the springmechanism, then slid the clip back in place. Reaching down, she patted (he knife with its nine-inch, wickedly serrated blade sheathed to her right calf. It was her only memento of the six months she'd spent as Guana Teague's s.e.x slave in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville. She'd sold herself into slavery in an effort to get a piece of the good life available to ville dwellers. She ended the term of slavery by cutting the monstrous Teague's throat with the blade, and saved Grant's life with the same impulsive act.

Thinking about Grant caused her full lips to twitch unconsciously in a half frown, half smile. Whenever she thought about the big man with his lion's growl of a voice, she felt a mingling of love, anger and disappointment.

She loved the man for his courage and compa.s.sion, but she experienced anger and disappointment that he never allowed that compa.s.sion to turn into pa.s.sion-at least not toward her. Domi was too practical, too pragmatic to expend much energy on girlish daydreams that had already proved to be lost causes.

Grant, like Kane, had been through the dehumanizing cruelty of Magistrate training yet they had somehow, almost miraculously, managed to retain their humanity. But vestiges of their Mag years still lurked close to the surface, particularly in Grant. He presented a dour, closed and private persona, rarely showing emotion. He was taciturn and slow to genuine anger, but when he was provoked, his destructive ruthlessness could be frightening. With him, slights were never forgotten, and she knew he still stung from the whip of angry words she had lashed him with months ago: "Big man, big chest, big shoulders, legs like trees. Guess they don't tell the story, huh?"

Domi regretted speaking those words almost as soon as they left her lips, but she had never apologized.

When Grant rejected her love again on that day, she swore it was for the last time. Then, a month or so later, when she came across Grant and Shizuka, the female samurai from New Edo, locked in a fierce embrace, she also swore she would never forgive him.

Shaking her head, Domi tried to drive the memories of that night from her mind. There were a lot of memories swimming around within the walls of her skull she would just as soon have excised, and that brief glimpse of Grant showering the j.a.panese woman's face with pa.s.sionate kisses topped the list.

Another memory she wished could be removed from her brain was one that had recently invaded her dreams. Like Kane, she had spent two weeks in captivity within the vast subterranean installation known as Area 51. Both of them had been shown the end result of their war against the barons-dying hybrid infants.

She didn't know why the sight of the dying hybrid babies horrified her so profoundly, filling her with guilt and remorse. After all, she had gone to the installation in the Nevada desert to kill hybrids. The very concept of the hybrids triggered a xenophobic madness in her, the overwhelming urge to kill them as she had killed venomous snakes that slithered into her Outland settlement. But upon visiting the nursery turned morgue, she felt only shame, as if the guilt of the entire human race were laid on her small shoulders.

She knew what everyone knew about the formation of ville society. In the century following sky-dark, self-proclaimed barons had warred against one another, each struggling for control and absolute power over territory. Then they realized that greater rewards were possible if unity in command, purpose and organization was achieved.The nine most powerful baronies that survived the long wars over territorial expansion and resources divided control of the continent among themselves. A hierarchical ruling system was put into place, and the city-states adopted the name of the t.i.tular heads of state.

But it wasn't until she arrived in Cerberus that she learned the true nature of the ville rulers. The baronial oligarchy ruling the nine villes was more than the governing body of postnukecaust America-they were a living expression of the ancient G.o.d-king system. Their semidivine status derived from the means of their birth. They were hybrids of human and nonhuman, a blending of genetic material with the sole purpose of creating new humans to inherit the Earth. The barons served as a bridge between predark and postdark, the plenipotentiaries of the alien Archon Directorate itself.

According to what Kane, Brigid, Domi and Grant had been told by Lakesh upon their arrival at the Cerberus redoubt nearly two years before, the entirety of human history was intertwined with the ent.i.ties called Archons, who conspired with willing human p.a.w.ns to control humankind through political chaos, staged wars, famines, plagues and natural disasters. Their goal was always the unification of the world under their control, with all nonessential and nonproductive humans eliminated.

But over the past few months, Brigid, Kane, Domi and Grant had learned that the elaborate backstory was all a ruse, bits of truth mixed in with outrageous fiction. The Archon Directorate did not exist, except as a vast cover story, created in the twentieth century and grown larger with each succeeding generation.

The only so-called Archon on Earth was Balam, the last of an extinct race that had once shared the planet with humankind.

Balam claimed that the Archon Directorate was an appellation and a myth created by the predark government agencies as a control mechanism. La-kesh referred to it as the Oz Effect, wherein a single vulnerable ent.i.ty created the illusion of being the representative of an all-powerful body.

Once they learned that, then they realized victory over hybrid tyranny was an achievable goal. In furtherance of that goal, Domi and her companions inadvertently destroyed the medical facility beneath the Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico. The barons depended on the facility to bolster their immune systems. Once a year the oligarchy traveled to the installation for medical treatments. They received fresh transfusions of blood, and a regimen of biochemical genetic therapy designed to strengthen their autoimmune systems, thus granting them an- other year of life and power. The six-leveled facility in New Mexico had originally been constructed to house two main divisions of the Totality Concept- Overproject Whisper and Overproject Excalibur.

Whisper dealt with rinding new pathways across s.p.a.ce and time, and Excalibur was exclusively involved in creating new forms of life. According to Lakesh, after the inst.i.tution of the unification program, only Excalibur's biological section was revived to maintain the lives of the barons and to grow new hybrids.

The destruction of the Archuleta Mesa had done more than smash the barons' ability to sustain their lives. It had also taken away their future by destroying the incubation chambers. Less than two dozen infants remained out of two thousand.

When Domi was finally reunited with Kane, he expressed deep skepticism of her sea-change of beliefs, even after seeing the babies for himself. He reminded her how devoted she was to the war against the hybrid barons, and she recalled with crystal clarity the furious, accusatory words she flung at him: "War isn't against babies, not even against hybrids. It's against the barons and against men like you and Grant!

Men like you used to be. I wasn't afraid of hybrids in the Outlands. Didn't even know such as themexisted. But I was sure as s.h.i.t scared of the baron's sec men-the Mags. That's who was my enemy."

When Kane darkly observed that the words she spoke didn't sound in character, she retorted angrily, "You and Grant didn't stay what you were. I don't have to stay what I am. If it means working with the hybrids against the barons, against the Mags, then I will. I'll forgive 'em for being born."

He seemed to understand her point of view. She hoped he did, but it didn't really matter. They hadn't spoken of what they witnessed or what they went through during their captivity. Kane was reticent to talk about it, particularly to Brigid. Domi didn't blame him, but she kept her own knowledge of his experiences to herself.

Brigid and Grant treated her differently now, but not necessarily with the kind of respect they would accord an equal. Instead, they were extremely solicitous of her, as if she had miraculously recovered from a terminal illness.

Domi knew it had something to do with her impulsive actions during the final violent moments of the battle to occupy the Area 51 installation. She remembered s.n.a.t.c.hing up the implode gren Kane dropped, but she had no recollection of its detonation. Her very next conscious memory was of being on her hands and knees throwing up.

A momentous event had occurred, she knew, but she couldn't recall what it entailed. But sometimes, in her slumber, when her consciousness teetered between sleep and waking, fragmented images flashed through her mind, so fleeting and brief they were like impressionistic sketches, not memories. Over the past couple of months Domi had mentally compiled a number of images and tried to arrange them in some kind of coherent form. So far, she hadn't been successful.

She became aware that the keening of the wind and the drumming on the Sandcat's hull was tapering off, but Domi waited, not opening any of the ob ports until she was sure the heart of the storm had pa.s.sed over or blown itself out.

After several minutes pa.s.sed with no renewal of the elements' fury, she touched a switch on the instrument console and lowered the thin metal shutters that covered the forward windshield. Peering out through the double-glazed thickness of bulletproof polymers, she looked at the ruins spread out all around.

The rubble glistened with moisture, and the characteristic reek of the chem storm was faint. Another cloudburst had followed hard on the heels of the acid-rain downpour and diluted the most potent of the toxins. In the distance she could easily see the black charring of countless ancient fires on the facades of surviving buildings.

Debris was heaped so high in so many places, the decision had been made not to risk damaging the Sandcat by pushing through it, around or over it.

None of them relished the idea of being stranded so many miles from Cerberus.

Checking the chron on the instrument panel, Domi uneasily noted two hours had elapsed since she had last heard from her companions. Putting on a headset, she punched in Brigid's trans-comm channel and received only the hissing and popping of static. She got the same result when she tried raising Kane, so she reluctantly opened Grant's frequency.His response, when it finally filtered into her ear, was so shot through with buzzes and electronic snaps he was barely comprehensible. "-lost Kane and Br- Stay where...are until I...you. We'll be-"

His voice dissolved in a mushy stream of hisses. Domi tried to reestablish contact but gave up after a minute. She knew the local atmosphere was still too ionized by the recent pa.s.sage of the storm to allow for clear communications.

She thought about trying the satellite uplink to Cerberus, which Bry was so fond of, but decided not to waste her time. Even if she managed to get through, she doubted the advice Lakesh might offer would be of any use.

If Kane and Brigid were dead, Grant wouldn't have employed the euphemism "lost." He was blunt and straightforward, and if he said lost, that's what he meant. After sitting and thinking for another few minutes, she came to a decision. Domi popped open the pa.s.senger-side gull-wing door and climbed out, surveying her surroundings. The skies were still overcast, almost smoky. The air held the stench of sulfur. She looked in the direction her companions had taken, lifting her gaze to the distant stem of the building Brigid referred to as the Sears Tower. Fixing the landmark in relation to her present position, she made up her mind to follow them on foot.

Domi closed and locked the Sandcat's door, made sure her trans-comm and own pair of microbinocu-lars were clipped to her belt and started walking. Everywhere she looked there seemed to be nothing but piles of blackened stone and half-slagged metal, some of them heaped as high as fifty feet.

She followed the same trail she'd seen her companions take, but once they were out of her field of vision, she had to take her best guess. What little track they might've left was completely obliterated by the scouring of the wind and rain.

Some of the avenues were so completely blocked by fallen buildings, Domi detoured around them rather than try to climb them. Always she kept the looming tower in her line of sight. When she came to a knitted ma.s.s of wreckage that appeared to be several buildings that had fallen together, she paused to study it, looking for a way through it or over it rather than around.

A series of concrete slabs formed something of a crude staircase over the top of the rubble, and she began clambering up them. She froze in midstep when she heard the tramp of running feet-and the screams. Her hand leaped to the b.u.t.t of her Combat Master as she pivoted on the ball of her right foot, tracking for the source of the commotion. Far hi the distance she heard the brazen peal of a bell.

Chapter 6.

Kane's body crashed into a bend, and the relentless current washed him around it, the cornerstones flaying his clothes and the skin beneath. His arms were outstretched in a semblance of a dive, and his head sunk between his shoulders as the floodwaters launched him down the shaft like a projectile.

He felt himself falling headfirst, surrounded by the thundering torrent. He was all but unconscious, and by the time his sluggish thought processes understood he was floating, not rocketing along a chute, water had filled his mouth and he swallowed it rather than inhale. He had no idea of where he was. Struggling, he twisted and lifted his head, instinctively trying to force his body upright. Above him he saw a faint gray radiance, and he managed to stroke for it.Kane's head and shoulders broke the surface and his strangulated inhalation echoed hollowly all around him. Feebly, he paddled through the water, sneezing water from his sinus pa.s.sages. His vision blurry, he saw he floated in a narrow inlet at the base of a towering, smooth-faced cliff. It required a moment or two of squinting and focusing for him to recognize the cliff as a building looming high above him.

The inlet was bisected by a stout wire fence. Leaves, bits of wood and pieces of flotsam less identifiable bobbed against the links. Kane swam laboriously to the fence, hooking his fingers into the diamond-shaped openings, and heaved himself half out of the muddy water swirling around his legs.

Kane hung on to it spread-eagled, racked by vomiting, his stomach and lungs emptying themselves of the foul water he had inhaled and swallowed. He was oblivious to the lessening of the wind's strength and the distant rumbling of thunder as the storm center moved away. Finally, he felt strong enough to move.

He turned his head and squinted Wearily at his surroundings. The concrete-walled channel cut between two towering buildings, casting it into deep shadow. He realized after a few seconds of careful study that the buildings weren't actually all that tall or ma.s.sive. The channel was just sunk deep below them, and they were positioned on high bulwarks of stone. The brickwork and concrete blocks were coated by damp green moss. From the direction he had come, he saw how the man-made ca.n.a.l bent around a thirty-degree curve and disappeared.

Clinging to the wire by his right hand, Kane performed a careful inventory. His clothes were torn in places, the skin underneath abraded, but no bones seemed broken. He probed carefully at the swelling on the side of his head, but his fingertips didn't come away b.l.o.o.d.y. Still, he wasn't overly relieved. He could be suffering from a serious closed-skull injury, and he knew head traumas were always tricky. He could have sustained a skull fracture and be suffering from a subdural leakage of blood.

His trans-comm unit was gone, as well as his wrist chron. His Copperhead subgun no longer dangled from his shoulder. His Sin Eater was still snugly bolstered to his forearm, but he hoped he had the time to inspect it before he was forced to use it. His web belt with his fourteen-inch combat knife was still in place, too, so he wasn't helpless despite how he felt.

Drawing in a deep breath, he started to call Bri-gid's name, but his throat was constricted due to the water he swallowed and raw from his stomach's efforts to eject it. His voice was a raspy croak, and even the attempt to shout her name triggered a spasm of shuddering and dry heaving.

After he recovered, he deliberately forced himself not to think about Brigid, Grant or DeFore. Grim determination replaced the anxiety in his mind. Slowly, Kane began to inch his way along the fence toward the left wall of the channel, holding on to the interlocked wire strands with his hands, his feet still in the water. He noted absently how the water level was slowly but steadily dropping. It was dif- ficult to move at first. His muscles were stiff and aching, but as he made more progress the pain receded somewhat.

He had crept sideways less than a yard when an impact against his legs nearly jarred him from his perch.

Kane twisted his body, his mouth uttering a harshly whispered obscenity. He gazed down and saw a black shape pressing against the backs of his legs, washed there by the current. His body tautened as he tried to identify the nature of the shape. With the electric shock of surprise, energy flooded back intohim, driving away the lethargy.

After a few seconds of slit-eyed study, Kane finally recognized a human figure bobbing lifelessly against the fence. In the dim light, he at first thought it was a man dipped in black ink, then he wondered fleeting if it were another man turned to an obsidian statue. Regardless, he had seen and made enough corpses in his life to recognize one when it floated at his feet. He reached down to grasp a wrist. The fabric clinging to the limb felt like leather.

Kane continued edging sideways, pulling the body with him. By the time he reached the curved wall of the inlet and the left the fence, the water level had dropped so much that the corpse's legs dragged on the silt-covered bottom.

Kane wrestled him up onto the concrete and dropped him facedown. After catching his breath, he turned him over. The man was nearly seven feet tall and gaunt to the point of emaciation. A blank, featureless face was turned to the sky, and Kane eyed it warily. Although he knew it was a mask of some sort, he didn't like the looks of it. Tentatively, he touched it, noting how it felt like spun gla.s.s beneath his fingertips.

Running the fingers of both hands around the edges of the mask, then inserting them beneath the rim, he pulled up slowly. With a faint click, the covering lifted away. The face that stared up at him wasn't much of an improvement over the mask. His skin was pallid and white, but not due to the type of albinism Domi was born with. It was the land of grub white that came of never being exposed to sunlight. A strand of hair escaping from beneath the tight cowl was faintly golden, too, like silky flax.

Kane looked the corpse over, studying its long jaw, narrow chin and high cheekbones. Dead and l.u.s.terless black eyes stared up from beneath eyebrows that resembled tufts of white thread. His stomach turned a cold flip-flop. He recognized the facial type-he had seen it often enough over the past year or so, particularly during his captivity in Area 51.

The man was a hybrid. If not a full-fledged one, then certainly some traces of Archon genetic material were buried in his familial woodpile. Certainly none of the barons or the other hybrids in Kane's experience had ever attained such a height. Nor did the eyes possess the prominent supraorbital ridges. They were of normal human size and shape, as well, not overly large or back-slanted. However, the eyes were so pale a gray as to be almost the color of water.

He inspected the mask, surprised by how thin and lightweight it was. He a.s.sumed it was made of a material like one-way gla.s.s, but to his consternation it was just as opaque on the inside as the outside. It was of exquisite workmanship, but Kane saw no manner by which the man could have seen through it, relying just on his vision. He turned it over in his hands several times. A thread-thin black line formed a complete border around the inner rim, and Kane guessed it was a magnetic strip.

Setting the face covering down, Kane turned the man's head to one side, searching for a seal on the cowl. Although he looked as if he had been dead for some time, his unnaturally smooth skin still retained warmth. There was a dry crunching of fractured cervical vertebrae and when Kane withdrew his hands, his fingers came away b.l.o.o.d.y.

Leaning closer, he saw how the long column of the throat had been slashed, right at the jaw hinge. The wound however looked superficial, more unsightly than truly life-threatening. He decided it was morelikely the man had died of a broken neck, not of a cut one, the injury probably sustained in a fall.

At the back of the pale man's head, his groping fingers found a seal, an almost invisible and imperceptible seam. It opened when he exerted pressure on it, tracing a finger along its length. He peeled it off, seeing that the corpse's hair was little more than a finely textured golden down, like the fine fur on the underbelly of a mouse. The headpiece felt like lightweight leather, almost as soft and flexible as doeskin.

When Kane turned it inside out, light gleamed from an inlay of delicate microcircuitry, a webwork no more substantial in appearance than gossamer. He frowned at it, perplexed by its purpose, touching it, scratching at it with a fingernail. On the outer edges of the headpiece was a very narrow double fold, so narrow he couldn't see between the two pieces of fabric.

Moving on a sudden impulse, Kane tugged the cowl over his head, seriously doubting it would fit at all, much less snugly. To his surprise the fit was perfect, and he received the distinct impression the material automatically adjusted and adhered to the contours of his skull.

Picking up the mask, he cautiously raised it, placing it over his own face. He pressed the rim against the edges of the cowl. When he brought his hands away, the mask remained in place, affixed to the cowl by the magnetic strip. Then, to his surprise, he sensed rather than felt a weak electrical field juicing through the face shield. For an instant, he saw noth- ing, then the inside of the mask shimmered with an effect like water sluicing away dust on a pane of gla.s.s. The mask seemed to turn transparent.

Slowly, Kane turned his head, to the left and right, looking at his surroundings through the visor.

Everything seemed to have a slightly more luminous sheen, all the hard edges and sharp corners blunted by a faint amber haze as of late-autumn sunlight filtered through golden-and-orange leaves.

Craning his neck, he studied the wall of the building looming above him. He focused on a decorative, scrolled cornice that jutted a foot or more from the roof. It abruptly swelled in his vision, rushing forward so fast, he almost stumbled backward into the channel.

Seeming to float in the air between his eyes and the interior of the mask, a column of numbers appeared, glowing red against the amber. The out-thrusting piece of masonry looked close enough to touch. After a few seconds of confusion, Kane realized that when he focused on a distant object, the visor magnified it and provided a readout as to distance and dimension.

He swore in astonishment. He hadn't come across any predark tech with such abilities in all of the places he had visited over the past year and a half. For the next minute, he experimented with the visor, his fascination pushing away his aches, pains and worries. In conjunction with the microcircuitry in the headpiece, the mask functioned as a very efficient range finder. He also discovered the visor possessed a thermal-viewing capability.

When he looked at the body of the black-clad man, what little body heat radiated by his head registered as a yellowish shimmer. The skintight suit he wore apparently blocked his thermal signature, much like the uncomfortable and unreliable Stealth cloaks available in the Cerberus armory. With the face shield in place, a person in the suit would become a living shadow.Although Kane experienced a pang of disgust, he ran his hands over the bodysuit, searching for zippers or b.u.t.tons. On the right side, he found a magnetic seal and he opened it the same way he had done with the cowl. He peeled the coverall off the corpse, a little dismayed to see that the garment was one continuous piece, from the hard-soled boots to the gloves. Fortunately, rigor hadn't settled in the corpse's limbs, so removing the suit wasn't as difficult or as time-consuming as it could have been otherwise. Still, his flesh crawled whenever he touched the marble-white, clammy flesh.

The man was naked beneath the shadowsuit-as Kane found himself referring to it-and he was completely dry. Amazingly, no water had seeped in. Unlike the other male hybrids he had encountered, the man's genitals appeared to be of normal development.

Glancing inside the shadowsuit, Kane saw a similar pattern of rmarocircuitry spread out in a web-work pattern as in the cowl. He could only guess at its purpose, and he decided he had already spent enough time with the corpse and his clothes.

Removing the cowl and face shield, Kane rolled both up within the black bodysuit. Tucking them beneath an arm, he began scaling, the wall of the channel, careful of his footing, but with all possible haste. Although the storm front was gone, the sky was still deeply overcast, the thick clouds blurring the sun to little more than a weak, grayish-yellow disk.

Kane figured only two or three hours of ineffectual daylight remained. Dusk would arrive quickly, with almost no demarcation between day and night. He had no intention of being caught out in the open, particularly if the dead man had living friends who might find him with his clothes under his arm and jump to the wrong conclusions. Of course, he told himself wryly, he would jump to the very same wrong conclusions himself.

The climb was strenuous, and the various pains in his body returned with a vengeance. The concrete was smooth and footholds were hard to come by. Most of the handholds were mere slits between slabs of the concrete, but he wedged his fingers in and pulled himself along. Twice, he nearly lost his grip and slid back down the rain-wet wall. Finally, Kane reached a flat shelf of crumbling concrete, and, panting heavily, he clambered on top of it.

He ma.s.saged his cramped fingers and forearms and looked around. Behind him were the rusting remains of a high fence topped with broken coils of razor wire. The building on the other side of it was part of a compound of single-story, windowless structures. Doing his best to soften the harshness of his breathing, he listened for sounds of human habitation or, considering Brigid's tales of Midnites, inhuman habitation.

Other than the faint drone of swarms of tiny winged gnats flying around, he heard nothing. Kane tested the sensitive spring-and-cable mechanism of his Sin Eater's holster, making sure it wasn't fouled by mud.

He flexed his wrist tendons and the weapon slapped into his waiting hand, but a bit slower than was normal.

Kane repeated the motion several times, more to find something to occupy his attention than worrying about Brigid Baptiste. Most of the time he shied away from scrutinizing his feelings for the woman. They were as deep as they were complicated, and the unspoken bond between them was an issue neither one discussed.

From the very first time he had met her, he was affected by the energy Brigid radiated, a force intangible, yet one that triggered a melancholy longing in his soul. That strange, sad longing only deepenedafter a bout of jump sickness both of them suffered during mat-trans jump to Russia. The main symptoms of jump sickness were vivid, almost-real hallucinations.

He and Brigid had shared the same hallucination, but both knew on a visceral, primal level it hadn't been triggered by the gateway delirium. It was a revelation that they were joined by chains of fate, their destinies linked. Lakesh had postulated the so-called jump dreams might not be hallucinations at all, but inchoate glimpses into other lives and other realities triggered by the quantum channels opened by the gateway units. At the time, Kane had refused to consider that possibility, but now he wasn't so certain.