Dawnbreaker: Legends of the Duskwalker - Book 3 (22 page)

“Absolutely,” Cass said. She actually wasn’t sure, but if that’s what Gamble needed from her, she was going to do it.

“All right, Swoop goes out first. Then you with the gear. I’ll follow.”

“You should go out before me,” Cass said. “Just in case.”

Gamble stopped in her preparations and held up another device that Cass didn’t recognize.

“You know how to run one of these?” she asked.

“No.”

“That’s why you go,” Gamble said. She set it down and went back to playing out the rope in a coil on the floor. She glanced over her shoulder at the doors. “We’re gonna have to risk it,” she said, mostly to herself. And then to Cass, “Get that shade open.”

Cass nodded and started to reach for the switch, then stopped. Power was still out. She was about to ask Gamble what to do but realized the time for that had passed. She was a big girl. She could solve her own problems. Cass extended the claws of her right hand, reached as high as she could, and jabbed them easily through the thick material of the blackout shade. A quick slash to the right and the lower portion of the shade peeled away. Cass caught it with her other hand and lowered it to the ground as the room flooded with daylight, dazzling. She had to shut her eyes against the onslaught that confused her senses. She tugged her veil back down over her face, tucked it into the neck of her coat. When she opened her eyes, she saw even Gamble was squinting against the light streaming in.

The window flexiglass reinforced with a thin nanocarbon mesh; rumor was it could withstand a direct hit from an armor-penetrating shaped charge, though Cass couldn’t imagine anyone ever having the opportunity to test such a scenario. Whatever the case, they clearly weren’t going to be able to bash their way out with a piece of furniture or the butts of their weapons.

“Gamble, Sky,” Sky said in Cass’s head. “Finn and I are in position.”

“Check,” Gamble said. Then to Cass, “I need a boost.”

Cass nodded and went down on one knee, keeping her other foot flat on the floor so Gamble could use her thigh as a step. Gamble clambered up and started running what looked like a thin grey cord from one side of the window to the other. It clung to the flexiglass like putty.

A low murmuration filtered in from the hall, the rustle of sand blown across rough concrete. Things were moving out there. A lot of things.

“Sky, how good’s your angle?” Gamble asked while she continued laying the cord in a rectangle. She was working fast, but with precision.

“Looking right at you, babe,” Sky said. He was doing a good job of keeping the concern out of his voice, but Cass could hear the intensity of his emotion. He was keyed up. They all were. Gamble finished attaching the cord. When she was done, it lay in a rectangle from the bottom of the window, up two and a half feet, and the full width of the flexiglass. She’d left a small gap at the bottom, maybe a half-inch wide. Gamble stepped off Cass’s leg.

“This is gonna be a real pain,” she said. She was just crouching down next to Swoop again when one of the door handles rattled violently. Both women went still. One heartbeat. Two. Three. The handle fell silent.

Seconds later, the handle at the other door shuddered. Cass held her breath. Time stretched. The blood pounded in her ears.

A scrabbling sound came from the second door, the scrape of claws against the heavy steel. Gamble went back to work.

“Back,” she said waving Cass away. When Cass had scooted a few feet away from the window, Gamble twitched something in her hand and the grey cord around the window smoked and glowed red, then orange, then white. The flexiglass hissed and deformed, and the rectangle section drooped slightly inward. It was still smoking when Gamble went to it and jammed her knife blade in one of the new seams on the side. She pried and the window sagged inward as the tiny remaining tab of softened flexiglass bent and gave way.

“Help me,” Gamble said, as she caught the panel. Cass grabbed the other side and together they pulled the cut portion free. They laid it on the ground out of the way.

The whispering rustle of the hall grew louder, or rather Cass became aware that it had become so. The same scraping started up at the other door, the sound of many hands clawing. Gamble snatched up one of the devices and began affixing it to the top of the wall where the window had just been. She wasn’t even trying to be quiet anymore. The piece of gear clamped on with a mechanical whine. There was a little wheel near the top, covered by a round metal housing.

One of the doors to the room quaked in its frame. There was no doubt now. The Weir weren’t just testing; they were intent on getting in. Cass hoped that they’d tried it before and be unable to get through, but she knew better than to trust in optimism. Gamble glanced over at the door while she threaded one end of the rope through the housing on the device.

“In the cage, far left,” Gamble said, her voice even but her words clipped. “Bottom shelf, near the front. There’s a stack, looks like little green wheels.”

“OK,” Cass said.

“Get four.”

Cass nodded and bounded across the room to the cage. Both doors were rattling now. She forced herself to focus on the task. Far left, near the front, bottom shelf. She scanned over the gear. There. Green, round, five inches across, they looked like canisters that had been compressed. One, two, three, four, she gathered them up and rushed back to Gamble.

“Mouse, almost ready,” Gamble said. When Cass reached her, she’d just finished tying an elaborate knot to a carabiner. She scooped the gear out of Cass’s hands, and then thrust the carabiner at her.

“Check,” Mouse answered.

“Hook Swoop up,” Gamble said, “Then get him up on the window ledge.”

Cass bent down and looked for where exactly she was supposed to hook the carabiner on. Gamble went down on her knees near one of the doors, and started working with whatever it was Cass had just handed her. Cass searched the harness, the device on the front, everywhere, but it wasn’t obvious where she was supposed to hook in.

“I don’t see it,” she said to Gamble.

“What?”

“The hook, where do I attach it?”

“On the front, the runner.”

Cass looked again, but she didn’t see any place that looked like it would hold.

“Where?” she asked.

Gamble let out an exasperated breath and practically leapt across the room. She snatched the carabiner from Cass’s hand and shouldered her aside. It was subtle, but there was a hitch in her movement when she went to hook Swoop in. She cursed wordlessly and grabbed the device on the harness. A twist of some hidden mechanism, and a metal ring flipped out.

“There,” Gamble said, hooking the rope to it. “Right there. Get him up.”

She left Cass’s side and rushed back to whatever she was doing by the door. Cass rolled Swoop over onto his stomach and wrestled him up into position so she could drape him across her shoulders. She’d seen Mouse do this maneuver a few times. It’d always looked effortless when he did it. The dead weight was almost more than she could manage, but she got him there. Once he was situated, she stood and struggled to get him on the ledge.

Gamble reappeared and helped get Swoop placed with his legs dangling out into space. His back was bent awkwardly, but there wasn’t much they could do about that now.

“Mouse, we’re sending him down,” Gamble said.

“Check, ready,” he replied.

“Hold him,” Gamble said to Cass. “When I say go, lower him out.”

“All right,” Cass answered.

Gamble grabbed another piece of gear and hooked it onto her own harness. Cass didn’t know when the woman had even had time to put it on. Gamble gathered the coil of rope and pulled it taut through the device on the window ledge.

“Go,” she said. And Cass gently rolled Swoop out through the window, towards the edge. Even knowing he was securely fastened, her heart dropped as gravity took over and dragged his body over the side.

Gamble sat back against the weight on the rope, anchoring as she fed the line through as quickly as she dared.

“Harness is on the floor by the bags,” she said. “Get it on.” And then without waiting for a reply from Cass, she switched over to the channel. “Mouse, you see him?” she said.

Cass scooped the harness up from next to the bags and started buckling in.

“Yeah, I see him,” he said. “Keep him comin’, keep him comin’. Five meters.”

Without warning or explanation, the clamor of the Weir at the door ceased. The room fell strangely quiet apart from the gentle whir of the rope running smoothly through its channel.

“Three meters,” Mouse said. Then a moment later, “All right, slow it down, slow it down.”

Cass looked at the doors then at Gamble. Maybe they’d given up after all.

“OK, G, I got him,” said Mouse. “I got him, he’s unhooked. Line’s clear.”

Rolling thunder filled the room as a heavy impact quivered the door with a dull report, as if someone had hammered the reinforced steel plating with a cinder block.

“Go, Mouse,” Gamble said as she wound the line back in. “Go now.”

“Talk to me, Ace,” Sky said.

“No time, babe,” Gamble answered, and that’s when Cass realized just how scared Gamble actually was, and just how much trouble they were in. Gamble never called Sky
babe
when they were on mission.

The end of the line flipped up over the edge of the window frame just as Cass was cinching the last buckle around her thigh. The door shivered from another powerful blow.

“Bags, get the bags,” Gamble said.

“Gamble–”

“Move, Cass!”

Cass snatched the rucks up off the floor, threw the straps over her shoulders so they hung across her body. There had to have been over a hundred pounds of gear in them. She was just fitting the second strap on when Gamble threaded the rope through the straps on her harness and clipped it.

“That’s gotta do, go, go, go!” Gamble said.

A third blow trembled the door and Cass heard the shriek of wrenching metal behind her as she flung herself up onto the ledge. The rucksacks dragged at her, pulled her off balance, threatened to take her the wrong way. She scissored her legs, scrambled for purchase. Gamble shoved her hard, and the world tumbled.

A second later, the line snapped tight, jarred Cass to a sudden, agonizing halt as the weight and momentum of the gear threatened to splinter her spine. Disoriented, she spun on the rope and smashed her shoulder into the wall of the compound. Then she was falling again.

No, not falling. Descending on the line, at a rate that felt barely controlled. Cass bumped and scraped the wall and scrabbled to get her feet around to keep herself off it. Above her, through the window, came the terrible banshee wail of flexing steel, followed by an inhuman roar. Unmistakably the cry of a Weir, but amplified, broader of sound, immense.

“Ace!” Sky called through the channel.

“I know, babe, I know!” Gamble said, and there was a note of panic in her voice that Cass had never heard before. “Cass, put your feet down, put your feet down!”

Cass fought to position herself, but the rucksacks had both swung to one side and she couldn’t get her balance.

“Sky,” Gamble spoke once more over the channel, eerily calm. “Love you, babe.”

Cass was still fifteen feet up when the line went slack.

Free fall.

“Ace!” Sky cried out, “No! Ace! Ace!”

For that frozen moment, it seemed to Cass as though she were floating, suspended, in the path of a wrecking ball the size of the world. She wasn’t moving; the planet was speeding towards her, intent on smashing her into oblivion. She snaked around, managed to twist in the air into a partial crouch, so that the balls of her feet would hit first. Her hands stretched out to intercept the collision.

Futile.

The shock of the impact was too sudden, too great to absorb. She catapulted to the concrete with a metallic crunch; a lightning strike of pain stole her breath and vision.

When she came to, Sky was screaming over the channel, but she couldn’t make sense of the words. If they were words at all. They sounded more like animal cries; rage, despair.

“Cass,” came Mouse’s voice; strong, insistent, punching through. “Cass, can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she struggled to answer, her voice was a ghost. It was a strain to get the air to move through her lungs. From far above her, a continuous stream of popping, like glass cracking in blistering heat.

“Finn, get Sky off channel! Cass, do you read?”

She’d forgotten to open the channel. Sky’s howls squelched, and she tried again. “Yeah, Mouse, I’m here.”

“You need to move,” he said. “Can you?”

Cass levered herself up and found she couldn’t push off with her left arm. When she looked at it, she saw her forearm was indented and bent outward at a shallow angle, as if she had another joint between wrist and elbow. She’d landed halfway on the rucksacks, which had absorbed some of the force of impact but not nearly enough for her to escape unharmed.

“Finn,” Mouse said, “I’m droppin’ Swoop, I gotta go back for Cass.”

“No,” Cass said, her senses coming back online. “No, Mouse, I’m OK. Don’t come back.”

“I’ve got a marker set,” Finn said. “Can you see it?”

Cass hauled herself to her feet, cradling her left arm close to her body. Finn’s beacon showed up superimposed on reality, a small blue circle, faintly pulsing.

“Got it,” she answered. “Gamble’s not down yet. Gotta wait for her.”

A pause.

“No, Cass,” Mouse said. “You need to move now. Right now. On your own.”

The popping sound from above dwindled away, replaced by clearer calls from the Weir. Their normal, white-noise screams. Not the thundering bellow she’d heard just before she fell. Cass bent and scooped the straps of the rucksacks up, reshouldered them with her good arm. There was no time to get them balanced. As she was standing, she realized she was still hooked in to the rope. How was Gamble getting down? She glanced back up at the window high above, but her friend wasn’t there. She couldn’t even see the line leading back up.

It was there, on the ground, in a loose pile. And that’s when Cass understood that Gamble hadn’t fed the rope out at all. She’d cut it free.