Blood Rules (21 page)

“They thought it was a fair trade for survival.”

From farther behind us, the oldster must've overheard, and his voice got gritty. “He treats them like showpieces.”

“That's the idea,” Gabriel said.

Indenturing had become common practice after the world had changed—survival could be more important than pride. It seemed as if no one had bothered to look back to decades ago and think how people would've reacted to the sight of leashes round someone's neck. Hell, I didn't even put a leash on Chaplin because . . . Well, first, he wouldn't tolerate that nonsense. Second, he was no animal.

We all watched the businessman and his girls stroll away. He was a bad guy. I knew it in my bones because decent people didn't humiliate others just for sport.

The oldster branched off from the rest of us, and I knew what he had in mind. His dander was up, and we couldn't afford it.

“We've got an appointment, oldster,” I whispered.

He made a wretched sound but fell back.

Trying to concentrate on the topic at hand, I didn't think about the girls or the lowlords or any of the other garbage that the hubs seemed to breed.

I tried real hard not to think about anything but that asylum and how we were going to get into it.

We made it to the meeting spot far ahead of time, in the shadows of the General Benefactors building where Taraline had found Gabriel and me last night. After we inspected the area with our hand weapons subtly drawn to see if Stamp had set up an ambush, we settled into the darkness.

Soon, Taraline slipped in. I could feel that Gabriel sensed her before she even spoke.

“Is your friend coming?” he asked.

If Taraline was impressed that he knew she was there, she didn't indicate it. “Yes, Jo is a minute behind me.”

“Then I'll do what needs to be done,” he said. He hadn't complained about needing to sway this person. I'm sure it was because he could taste that cure just as surely as I could.

Gabriel obviously heard our “Jo” outside the shadows, because he began moving out of the darkness and toward the concrete park where she'd probably be waiting. We'd already agreed that I'd go with him while Taraline stayed back with the others, who'd be scanning for Stamp or other interlopers.

But before we left, Gabriel asked Taraline, “Has your friend been taking more neuroenhancers than she used to?”

The answer would matter. If Jo was hopped up, he'd have a hard time grabbing hold of her thoughts.

“Her intake is still minimal.” Taraline's deep voice was serene. “Jo has been resisting them. Even back when I was still living in the hub, she talked about leaving behind GBVille and this life, so she's a perfect candidate for giving us information. She's a workaholic, so she hardly needs to be inspired to do a turbo job at work, but she's tired, just like so many others.”

So work was Jo's own personal distraction. It wasn't jolly boxes or running the streets.

“Why didn't Jo ever leave here?” I asked.

“Why don't most people leave?” Taraline asked.

Even as monsters, we were all familiar with fear of the unknown. We'd felt it when Stamp had visited the New Badlands, and it'd taken Gabriel's influence for us to stand up to the dangers, even if we should've done so long before.

Without Taraline, Gabriel and I left the shadows, then approached a woman wearing a stiff, blandly colored suit. Her back was to us as she sat on a park bench in a square with stepping-stones and piped-in fountain noises. In back of her, the asylum waited on its hill, a red-stucco contrast to the sterility.

I almost expected Jo to be holding a facial recognition scanner, and when I saw that she was empty-handed, I sighed in relief. It would suck if Stamp had gotten cozy with the government and already reported us, putting those of us he knew in the database as identified monsters. I wasn't sure I even wanted to find out.

Before she heard our stealth approach, I noticed that she was wearing a disease mask, and as she turned round at the sound of us, all I could see were her big brown eyes and slicked-back mahogany hair.

Gabriel locked Jo into his sway before she could even comment on the two strangers who'd sneaked up on her.

“Good to meet you, Jo,” he said, not including me in his sway.

“So good to meet you, too,” she said.

Yup, locked and loaded—and, afterward, Jo would be left to think that we'd all had a much less intense conversation.

I kept an eye out for anyone nearby who'd notice us, but the park was deserted, maybe because there weren't any carnerotica screens or jolly box corners to attract folk. The government hadn't even put any cameras round here because it was so dependent on the hubites' filming habits, which saved them loads of money they could use on themselves and their pet projects.

“You know about the asylum?” Gabriel asked.

“I contracted with the government for some of the weapons they use inside.”

They used weapons inside? Maybe on the monsters . . . ?

“Thank you, Jo,” Gabriel said.

My heart pounded, my chest buzzing as I connected to him.

“This is what I'd like you to do,” he said. “We need to know the layout of the property. Can you quietly get blueprints for us through any of your connections at the asylum?”

“Yes.”

“And security information, too. That's very important, Jo.”

“Security information.”

Gabriel glanced to the side, as if he'd sensed something. And then, from an angle of shadow near the concrete steps, I heard Taraline's voice.

She'd blended. “Gabriel, I didn't dare ask her about this before, but now's the time for us to bring up how we're going to get into that asylum. Years ago, before Jo came to GBVille, she contracted with the military, so she'll be able to construct something for us without us having to go on the Nets. She can also procure materials for what I have in mind, because she'll have access to them because of her work.”

I checked Jo out a little more. The military, huh? Ever since the end of the Before years, the military had turned into an all-defensive body rather than an offensive one. They kept our country to itself except for key business arrangements with the investor/allies who also owned us.

“What exactly should I ask Jo?” Gabriel said to Taraline.

“Ask her if a weapon based on a smaller version of an e-bomb would work for our purposes. It could disable power—generators, vehicles, communication, all with an electromagnetic pulse.”

Holy crap.

Taraline had
really
thought this through. Her willingness to do anything—even take advantage of a friend's exposed mind—impressed the hell out of me and Gabriel. Long ago, one terrorist group had hatched an e-bomb plan on Chicago, but they'd been caught and slaughtered before they'd succeeded. After that, the government had cracked down on security and performed tons of executions, preventing more attacks until the terrorists' money had dwindled and they had seemingly gone underground.

Maybe they were still there. Or maybe they were distractoids now.

“The bombs were designed to act like lightning strikes,” Taraline added. “My boyfriend . . .” She paused. “My
ex
used to be a science online teacher. He would talk about science and how it applied to everything from defense to cooking. That's why I thought of it.”

Her ex. It sounded as if he'd left Taraline—or Taraline had left him—after the dymorrdia had come visiting.

“The thing is,” Taraline added, “there's a very high chance that our device could affect more than the asylum. Databases and hardware here in the hub might not start up again. It could fry just about everything, but it would level the playing field for us.”

I smiled at the practicality of it. I should've thought more about the consequences of knocking out power in a hub, but all that mattered for me, my neighbors, and maybe all of us monsters in the end was a cure. “Our device wouldn't do a thing to
our
primal abilities.”

Gabriel laughed at Taraline's chutzpah. I just kept smiling, thanking-all for the night we'd met that psychic in the outpost.

Taraline was as silent as the shadows, but I'd bet in that hiding place of hers, she was smiling, too.

S
everal nights passed as the Badlanders prepared for their sneak attack on the asylum. Now, the night before its launch, when the moon was just a crescent, they'd done everything they could think to do, even going so far as to stock their safe rendezvous point—an abandoned mine shaft that was a couple human-travel days distant from GBVille—with their extra supplies.

Then they had come back here, to the front of their cave, where the Little Romanian scents of that sour meat soup and a cornmeal mush floated past them, not even tweaking their hunger. In addition to everything else, they'd hunted far away from the hub, goading their animal cravings with blood from some stray felines, smaller than those Badlands feracats.

Blood nourished them for what was to come.

“So this could be it,” the oldster said from his seat near the boulders, where Chaplin napped against his leg. “Either we find what we're searching for up there or we die trying.”

As he looked up at the outline of GBVille, Gabriel thought that the lantern light made the old man look like a rusted antique trussed up in the black clothing he'd borrowed from Taraline. Next to him, Pucci leaned against a boulder, also watching the hub. Hana reclined near the cave's entrance, her eyes closed, meditating, the mellowest of them all.

The most high-strung Badlander had to be Mariah, who was with Taraline back in the cave. The two women were checking over the pair of what Jo called her own version of old e-bomb technology—“power blasters.” She'd constructed modified versions while under Gabriel's sway, and he'd justified using his mind powers because it was for Jo's own good; she didn't need to recall that she'd aided and abetted a bunch of monsters.

Yup, he'd wiped Jo's mind of the past several nights well and decently. His absent vampire creator might've even been proud if she'd cared enough to hang around and see how her little progeny had grown up. But he'd even gone beyond just mind-wiping Jo. He'd sensed a bitterness toward the government in her, and when she'd finished her work, Gabriel had suggested that she might find better happiness in another place. She'd been open to it, and he wondered if, someday, she'd end up in an outpost like the one that housed the psychic.

No matter where she eventually resided, Gabriel wished Jo all the best, because she'd funded and given them the key to their attack. One of the cylindrical power blasters would serve as backup, just in case the first malfunctioned. However, merely a single device, which Jo had called a “model based on a flux compression generator bomb,” would be enough to take out every technological advantage that the asylum and the hub around it held, even if the item was detonated outside the asylum's wall. She'd said that they needn't worry about effects from the blaster, as it wasn't supposed to harm people.

Too bad the government hadn't shielded anything in the hub, which meant that they hadn't protected their vital equipment by encasing it in what she called a Faraday cage. Since computers and other hardware required outside power, shielding wasn't practical, and it would put that equipment out of contact with the world outside, where it was needed.

Truthfully, Gabriel hadn't listened much to Jo's technical chatter. He had no interest in engineering—as a human he'd been a craftsman, a career that was simple and straightforward—so he didn't give a rat's ass about the things Jo had been saying about the power blasters acting like a majorly powerful old microwave oven or how they could generate “a concentrated beam of microwave energy.” All he'd heard while she was updating him was “blah, blah, and blah” as he'd studied the blueprints he'd drawn from what Jo had been told about the inside of the asylum—a place she'd never actually gone into.

The layman's version of their plan was this: Taraline would set off a power blaster, and then the Badlanders would enter in monster form during the resulting confusion. The chaos of no power—lights, communication, cameras, the whole bit—should give the Badlanders enough time to strong-arm any human who could advise them or even lead them to a cure. If all went well, the group would be able to speed out of the asylum and the city before the humans even discovered what'd hit them. Afterward, they would go into deep hiding for a while.

Not a bad plan, really. Not perfect, either, but then again, what was?

Gabriel just hoped that there'd be no remaining Shredders guarding the wall. The only security plans that Jo had been able to get hold of had been vague about that, referring to “sentinels.” She also hadn't been able to tell him if there were definitely monsters being kept in the asylum, only the old standby—lycanthropic, mentally deranged humans.

Next to him, Pucci spoke, sounding wistful. “If there were one thing I'd wish for tonight, it'd be that Jo could've told us for certain whether there really is a cure up there. We just might be running headfirst into nothing.”

Just like back in the Badlands, when Gabriel had been trying to get the community to stand up to Stamp, he wasn't about to hear any negativity now. “If there's nothing definitive up there this time, we'll find something at the next asylum in another hub. We'll just have to figure out a different way to get into it, seeing as I'm sure the staffs will be advised in the future about power blasters.”