A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) (32 page)

Jade awaited his answer, her eyes shifting their focus between his. She’d been helpful, and though he’d grown used to independence, he’d welcomed her companionship. Maybe he’d even begun to look forward to it. “Sorry,” Michael said finally. “It’s— It’s nothing personal, you know.”

“Come on. There’s some crazy-violent crap happening; you can use someone protecting your ass.” She smirked and slid a few strands of hair behind her ear. “I’ll even give you the nice-ass discount.”

A
discount
? “You really think I care about that?” he shot.

Jade’s eyes flared bright enough to force him to blink. “Fine!” she hissed at last, pulling back into her seat. “I’m sorry if I
offended
you.”

Michael scoffed. “Ever think of offering your help free of charge? Just because people need it?” Jade blinked. Before she could say anything, he leaned closer and pointed out the window at Alpha Station where they’d begun to dock. “See that out there? That’s where Diomedes died, because he was too paranoid and mercenary to do any better. All he cared about was the money, and protecting himself, and in the end, no one could protect him.”

“Michael, that’s not what I was—” She pressed her teeth together and huffed. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. We all have to protect ourselves, don’t we?”

Burning with the mental images of Diomedes and Felix dying, Michael withdrew into his seat, too tired to deal with it.

“So I guess this is goodbye, for now,” Michael told Caitlin. They stood in the main concourse of the spaceport outside of Northgate. The rest of the trip had remained uneventful. At Sunrise Station, the six other agents had split off for destinations around the globe—part of the effort to gather as many surviving AoA as possible. Nearby, Marette waited for him.

Jade had already departed without a word.

Caitlin set a hand on his arm. “Not for too long, I hope. Take care, Michael. And please, be careful.”

“You, too. Call me, if you need anything.” On impulse, he hugged her, in friendly fashion. Caitlin was barely five feet, and Michael had to bend his knees to whisper in her ear. “If I can get you any information on Felix, I will. I know you won’t stop digging.”

She nodded and met his gaze after the hug broke. “I’m pleased you understand that. I’ve already tried to reach Gideon. There’s no answer on his phone.”

Another pang of guilt hit Michael. Amid everything else, he’d given no thought to Gideon’s fate. “I hope he made it out.”

“He’s resilient,” she said with a tone that lacked conviction.

“Can’t argue with that.” Michael glanced back at Marette, who now waited alone. “Look, Caitlin, if you don’t hear anything from me by tomorrow at this time, get out of Northgate for a bit.”

“We’ll see,” she told him. “Stay safe.”

He watched her go. Maybe he should have lobbied harder to allow Caitlin into the group. Though would Caitlin have accepted? How much did she blame the AoA’s secrecy for what happened to Felix?

It occurred to Michael that he’d never found out just why Felix had left the AoA, or why that was tolerated. Marette stepped up beside him as Michael realized he might never find out at all.

*  *  *

Caitlin boarded the first airport tram car that arrived and, with three other travelers she did not recognize, endured in silence the four-minute ride from the spaceport gate to the main airport. A pair of escalators took her up toward baggage claim, where she shuffled through a crowd of others jostling for position to gather their belongings. Moments later, the polluted air outside engulfed her. She cast about for a taxi and, spotting one in particular, slid into its open back door and clapped it shut behind her.

“Thank you for waiting,” she said.

In the seat beside her, Jade adjusted the fit of her shoulder holster and then tugged her jacket closed over it. “Easy enough.” The taxi started forward. Jade had already engaged the privacy screen before Caitlin had arrived. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

“You haven’t guessed?”

Jade shrugged.

“Simple. You protect me, you help me get to the bottom of what happened with Felix, and in return I pay you. Interested?”

Jade’s eyebrows rose. “You want to hire me.”

“You’re between jobs, aren’t you? What’s the problem?”

“Just surprised, given who my last employer turned out to be. So you trust me now, Caitey?”

Caitlin turned to watch the airport streetlights pass outside. Their reflections bloomed in the taxicab’s dirty windows. “Maybe,” she said finally. “Maybe I think that if you were going to do something, you’d have done it by now. Maybe I’m too blinded by my own grief that I’d do anything to give Felix some justice. Maybe Michael trusted you, and I trust his judgment.”

Jade chuckled humorlessly at that. Caitlin turned back to her. “Or maybe I think you really are working for Suuthrien and I want you close so I can cut you down when you show your true colors. Pick one. Pick them all, I don’t care. I’ve got funds, and I’m offering you a job. Now do you bloody want it or not?”

FOR THE FIRST TIME
in Michael couldn’t remember how long, actual earth lay under his feet. He resisted the urge to savor the blades of grass that he could somehow feel through his boots and socks, and instead gave the area a once-over for threats.

The taxi had dropped them off at the edge of Falson’s Lake Park—a man-made lake that was little more than a pond. A jogging path, looking destitute in the gray November weather, circled the lake. A modest field of grass punctuated by the occasional tree or patch of neglected shrubbery bordered the path. Leaves speckled the ground and mingled with bits of trash. Michael spotted a figure lying on a bench about thirty yards down the path, a long coat pulled over him for a blanket. Beyond that, there was no one in sight.

He turned back to where Marette was paying the taxi that had brought them. Before they’d left the airport they’d located an AoA cash stash placed there for agents in need. For as long as they could, they would use only cash: an effort to keep their movements hidden for as long as possible. It was probably futile. Marette finished and turned toward him as the taxi sped away.

“Is this place natural enough?” he asked, indicating the park. Though the park’s vegetation filtered the dingy Northgate air, a faint, polluted miasma seemed to emanate from the lake. “The trees are denser if we walk about five minutes that way.”

“This area will be sufficient,” she said.

“Is that you talking, Marette,” asked Michael, “or Alyshur?” Still uncertain of the nature of their situation, he could no longer stifle his questions now that they were finally alone.

She paused, with what felt to Michael like an uneasy smile. “That was Alyshur. This is me.”

“How can I tell? What’s it like?”

Marette fished into her satchel and pulled out a black, spherical object. It reminded Michael of a liquid-filled toy ball his late uncle had owned that supposedly told the future. This one was of Thuur design and presumably far more than a toy.

“It is difficult to describe. Something akin to having someone whisper in your ear.” After a moment, she added, “And always a feeling of being watched. But we are separate minds. As to how you can tell? Feel free to ask.”

“How about I just assume it’s you unless you tell me otherwise? I guess I’ll have to give you the benefit of the doubt on the ‘separate minds’ thing.”

“
Oui
.” Marette held the sphere in her left hand and drew her fingertips across the top with the other. “Alyshur says he appreciates that you have no choice.”

Michael chuckled, rueful. “I’ve heard more comforting statements.”

“I would hope so,” she said. “This is Alyshur. Please allow me to concentrate on the scan.” Marette settled her free hand on top of the sphere—or was it Alyshur in control of that?—and closed her eyes. A low thrum stirred the air around them. It grew more intense until it seemed to emanate from the ground—first directly beneath their feet and then expanding outward. Ripples danced in jagged peaks across the lake surface. The man sleeping on the bench sat up to stare across the water.

The sphere in Marette’s hands gave no indication of being the source, yet slivers of emerald light glinted from beneath her closed eyelids.

And then the thrumming ceased. Marette returned the sphere to her satchel and opened her eyes. The green extinguished. A few crows called in the distance.

She turned to him. “It will take some time to know the results. Perhaps a day.” Michael must have balked visibly at that, because she added, “It
is
a scan of the entire planet. Natura flora have tenuous connections within ecosystems: a subtle network, in one sense like a natural Internet architecture. Though the scanner proliferates via that architecture to search across the Earth, we are nonetheless forced to be patient.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that. New Eden, then?”

She nodded. “Time to see if our wayward companions still live.”

*  *  *

“Ondrea?”

But there was no answer. Gideon slipped inside the front door of his sister’s condo and closed it behind him. So far, nothing looked amiss: nothing ransacked, no signs of a struggle. A coat closet hung open beside him, its rack half-full with coats of different kinds, all Ondrea’s size. A pair of running shoes and hand weights lay on the floor below. Yet Gideon had never visited Ondrea at home since she’d moved here, and he could not judge if anything was missing.

I should have come sooner.

He had told himself there hadn’t been time; he should have made time. He had told himself he was protecting her by not dropping by her home; he’d only done the opposite.

If
that “Suuthrien” had told the truth.

Gideon rushed from room to room, finding no sign of life, nothing to prove Ondrea had been there recently. She was away on business! Hadn’t that been what she’d said? That she’d be out of contact?

Yet she’d said so in an email. Emails could be faked.

No!

Gideon saved for last what he assumed to be her workshop. It was the place most likely to hold her, to distract her from the sounds of her last remaining brother bounding through her home. He paused at the door. He even knocked. Twice.

“Ondrea? Answer me!”

Gideon punched into the lock the access code she always set up for him, and then took hold of the latch and his breath at the same time. He pushed the door open a crack, gazing into darkness and tiny glowing readouts.

The overhead lights jumped to life.

Hope sparked and died: the lights were on a motion sensor. Ondrea’s workshop—a repurposed, medium-sized bedroom—held bits of cybernetic hardware, computers, and a myriad of tools. There was even a crude cerebral interface chair like the one she’d first used to capture his memories all those months ago at Marquand.

Yet it held no sign of his sister, dead or alive.

Gideon closed his eyes and repeatedly thumped one fist on the edge of a worktable, trying to clear his mind. He still had options. This was just a setback. He could surely find more clues here to where his sister had really gone.

A laptop computer lurked closed atop another worktable. After a moment’s hesitation, he opened it. The screen blinked to life. In the few seconds it took to boot, Gideon questioned whether it was a violation of Ondrea’s privacy. If she were in trouble, it’d be worth it.

Yet before he could try to crack his sister’s security, the logon screen flashed a facial recognition prompt.

U
SER
G
IDEON
N
OBLE
RECOGNIZED
. S
PEAK
OR
ENTER
PASSWORD
TO
PROCEED
.

He’d never used this computer before, yet Ondrea used to set him up with accounts on her own machines, going back to even before their brother Isaac had died. It was her way of emphasizing that they were family, especially after their parents’ death. His fingers hovered over the keyboard for more than a few seconds before he typed the password she always used:

fam1ly%t0geth3r

His password accepted, the load screen lasted only a heartbeat. Suddenly his sister was looking back at him, a wry smile in the corner of her lips and detached amusement in her eyes. Gideon spotted the “play” indicator: so, not a live image, just a recording.

“Hi, Gid. Hopefully you’ll never need to see this message, but making it lets me breathe easier.” Ondrea brushed platinum blond hair further from her face. “Now, it’s
possible
that I may have really screwed up. I know: never happens, right? I’m sure you remember Felix Hiatt. He played a major part in making sure you’re still you, and it gave him some problems with his memory to do it. Now that
shouldn’t
have happened. If the module I gave them to use on you hadn’t gotten smashed, things would’ve been just fine and— Well, we’ve talked about that before.”

Gideon found himself nodding to the screen. Gideon had been the one to smash the module: a misunderstanding born out of his fractured identity and panic at the time. He hadn’t been himself. Or, maybe, his self hadn’t been him.

“So he and Caitlin came to me to help fix him. You might already know this by now, depending. Of course, I agreed. They’d both risked for me. For us. Plus you know I like a challenge. But, see, that’s about the time I started working for RavenTech. Somehow they knew I was already working on Felix’s problem. It was looking like I’d be able to fix him with an engram pull and some simple upgrades to his implant. Felix’s engrams were damaged, but his natural recursive safeguards meant that with a properly tuned algorithm we— Well, like I said, it looked like I could fix him.

“RavenTech asked if it’d be possible to do a little extra. And by ‘asked’ I mean intimated they’d stop protecting me from Marquand if I refused. They wanted me to figure out a way to sneak some extra things. A code-phrase that would make him forget things, or do something and not remember. Or
not
do something.” She sighed. “I had the know-how, and the project data from your resurrection, and . . . ”