HOPE’S BATTLEGROUND

Earth’s secret history of alien occupation is challenged by a powerful alliance of warriors driven to reclaim humanity’s birthright. But when a cruel, vicious ruler spreads a new wave of terror, the Cerberus rebels must fight for their lives.

DEATH BLOOMS

Beautiful, seductive and deadly, she is called Ereshkigal. Her flowerlike temple—eerie and alien—rises out of the desolate, sun-drenched desert of postapocalyptic Spain. The river of blood flowing to her temple doors is just the first sign of the horror to follow. With her army of Terror Priests eager to kill for their queen, Kane, Grant and Brigid must confront her dark power. But Ereshkigal’s power to control men’s lives may prove stronger than anything the Cerberus warriors have ever faced. And this evil interloper will not be satisfied until she has annihilated everything between her and total domination of Earth.

In the center of the room, Ereshkigal strode into the pool of blood

Kane watched her feet and ankles disappear beneath the surface as she entered by a hidden ramp. Her tail of feathers ruffled behind her, and several fluttered away. A trail of bloody feathers dotted across the floor already, like strange markers.

Kane stepped onto the first of the springy, leaf-like steps descending toward the pool, and something struck him from behind. Suddenly, Kane found himself falling, tumbling end over end down the staircase.

He rolled as he reached the bottom, bringing the Sin Eater up as one of Ereshkigal’s Terror Priests leapt from the topmost stair. His torso seemed freakishly long and his limbs stretched impossibly out at his sides like the wings of some bird of prey.

The man was throwing something. Kane saw it flash in the air even as he rolled.

Kane fired.

Across the room, Ereshkigal was still standing in the pool. Blood lapped at her slender hips. She smiled as she fixed Kane with her stare. Her lips moved and she began to speak the words of the chant designed to deliver the equation to the human body—the equation that could kill a man.

Hell’s Maw

James Axler

It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub, the task.

—Virgil

The Road to Outlands—From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quotes

Road to Outlands

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Epilogue

Copyright

Prologue

The room was too warm, too dark, and the dry smell of burning dust clung to it possessively.

The small space was made smaller by the drapes that had been hung from the walls and over the doors, patterned in the dark colors of blood and red wine intermingled with the purples and blacks and deepest blues of bruises on human flesh.

The room had no windows. It was located in an underground bunker, a single room in a facility that had once been called Redoubt Mike and had served the US military back in the twentieth century, two hundred years earlier. That name had been cast aside by history now, blown away on the nuclear wind that had reshaped the world and its people.

Where once there had been fluorescent lighting functioning on automated circuits, now there were candles, three dozen of them scattered across every cluttered surface and dotted across the floor like seeds broadcast from a farmer’s hand.

The room was cluttered by an odd selection of mismatched objects, feathers and bones, driftwood and skulls, jars of dried spices and plant roots vying for space along the walls, everything lit by the flicker of candle flames.

Everything here looks worn-out and tired, Nathalie thought as she pushed a hanging scarlet drape aside and strode through the doorway. She was a slim, dark-skinned woman in her twenties, six feet tall with long, bare legs that seemed to flow almost like liquid in the flickering light of the candles. She wore a calfskin jacket that jutted tightly across her breasts, leopard-print shorts and long, black boots that laced up at the back, the corset-like lacing running all the way up to the top of the boots where they sat just below her knees. The knife sheathed at her hip was as long as a man’s forearm and broadened along its length to become wider at its tip. Her hair was an afro of tight black ringlets, encircling her head like some shadowy halo. She wore dyed feathers hanging from her ears, and these seemed to twist and flutter as she entered the room, brushing against the tops of her shoulders. Her face was fixed in a solemn expression that gave nothing away, insouciant mouth unreadable.

A canvas bag hung from her shoulder on a thick strap, colored a dirty olive green but within which had been weaved threads of blue and yellow and silver. The silver threads glistened as they caught the light from the flickering flames.

Nathalie strode across the room toward the figure waiting in its center, admiring the ragged collection of junk with disdain. It was appropriate, she thought, the worn-out junk that cluttered this underground lair. Its tired and broken nature was in sympathy with the tired and broken nature of the man who presided over it, king of the flea pit, who sat in his chair at the midpoint of all the trash.

“Welcome to the djévo,” the man pronounced in a rich basso voice. “Enter freely.” His name was Papa Hurbon and his was a large frame with the richly dark skin of an octoroon. His corpulence was barely contained in the straining short-sleeved shirt he wore, and he had a bullet-shaped head that widened from his pointy crown to a bucket-like mouth. When he opened that wide maw, he showed a line of fat teeth, with two missing in the lower jaw and a golden replacement for his upper left canine. His head was shaved and beads of sweat glistened there. Both of his ears were pierced a dozen times or more, with a line of gold studs running from lobe to shell-like helix, golden hoops depending from the midpoints, and what seemed to be two petrified three-inch-long fetuses hanging from the lobes.

Hurbon sat in a wheelchair, a blanket cinched across his lower half where his waist met his legs, or more accurately, where his waist should have met his legs, for he had none. The blanket was black and patterned with skull designs that seemed to swirl like mist. Despite his disability, Papa Hurbon remained a charismatic figure, commanding all attention in the room.

Two other figures waited at the rear of the room, where a mirror had been hung, as tall and wide as the doorway on the opposing wall through which Nathalie had entered, and painted with an oily black sheen that peeked through the heavy drape that partially hid it. The figures were both tall, muscular men, so similar in fact that they might have been twins. They, too, had shaven heads, and they wore dark pants with no shoes or shirts, bare chests of defined muscles gleaming with sweat. The heat of the room was almost unbearable.

Two long strides brought Nathalie before Papa Hurbon, and she kneeled down in deference to him, casting her eyes downward. “Thank you for your ’ospitality,” she said in a soft voice that was barely a whisper.

Hurbon reached down and placed his hand against the side of Nathalie’s face, tilting it—not gently—up until she looked at him. “How wen’ your quest, sweet child?”

“It went well, my beacon,” Nathalie said, the timid hint of a hopeful smile crossing her wide lips. “I visited the site of the dragon’s death as instructed.”

Papa Hurbon nodded thoughtfully, his smile broad and bright in the shimmering flicker of the candles. “Good.”

Hurbon had heard of the dragon that had appeared on the banks of the Euphrates River in the territory known as Iraq some months ago. The dragon was not alive—instead it was a bone structure, as if the gigantic creature had died there and its carcass had been left to rot. Some had mistaken it for a city, such was its grand size, and this dragon city had played host to a fierce war between two would-be gods from the sky along with their respective armies of indoctrinated humans and fearsome lizard-like soldiers. Papa Hurbon did not know who the victors were, only that the battle had ceased almost as abruptly as it had started, and that the skeletal dragon had been abandoned and left to rot, forgotten by the gods who made it.

Papa Hurbon knew a lot about gods—he was a houngan, a vodun priest, and he followed the dark path of the Bizango. He had witnessed gods appear once before from the sky and he had heard tell that the dragon was their symbol, their home. When he had heard about the dragon city that had appeared in the Middle East, he had immediately dispatched his servant Nathalie to acquire a part of the leviathan for him. There was power in the parts of the body, power in desiccated and petrified things, and there was definitely power in the things that the gods had shaped.

“And what did you bring me, child?” Hurbon asked.

Nathalie shifted her weight just slightly until the bag she carried dropped before her, still hanging on its canvas strap. She unzipped it and pulled the mouth of the bag open. Papa Hurbon leaned closer to see what lay within under the flickering light of the candles. At first glance it looked like a drugs stash, for the bag contained layer upon layer of small plastic bags filled with white powder. Hurbon reached into the larger bag and drew out a bag, lifting it close to his face to examine its contents more closely. There were thicker flecks and chips scattered among the white powder, each of them the yellow-white of cream.

“Dragon’s teeth,” Nathalie explained as Hurbon studied the package, his brow furrowed.

“Dragon’s teeth?” Hurbon repeated, turning the bag to one side so that the powdery contents slid to one side of the larger flakes.

“I met certain people there,” Nathalie explained, “in the shadow o’ the dragon city. Merchants. They trade in exotic t’ings, parts o’ the dragon who died. You said you wanted the teeth, Papa.”

Hurbon nodded, the smile materializing once more on his face. “Bring me my mortar and pestle, girl,” he instructed. “The smallest ones, for the most delicate mixtures.”

Nodding once, Nathalie rose from the floor, her tall, lithe frame moving like liquid. Hurbon watched her depart from the room, peering up from under, still holding the bag full of dragon remains.

The girl had joined his société after its near-destruction at the hands of the insane bitch goddess Ezili Coeur Noir. Nathalie was youthful, smart and able, capable of individual action and trustworthy enough not to betray him. She was loyal to Hurbon and the vodun sect he represented and would serve and service him however he asked.

* * *

NATHALIE PUSHED THE scarlet curtain aside and strode out into the corridor beyond. She knew the corridors of the old redoubt well. Like the djévo, the corridor was lit by candles that lined the floor, flickering in the passing breeze as Nathalie walked past them. There were jars and bottles resting on the floor behind the candles, curios stored and pickled for safekeeping, each one with a purpose in the dark Bizango rituals which Papa Hurbon practiced. Papa Hurbon had taken over the abandoned military installation shortly after the whole complex had been flooded, and there were still areas that remained waterlogged, more like swimming pools now than the once regimented rooms that they had been.

Hurbon had another lodge located close by in the Louisiana countryside where he encouraged newcomers and old faithfuls to come worship in these harrowing times of destruction and confusion. The world had blown out two hundred years ago in the year 2001, when a nuclear exchange had escalated into a full-blown war in the space of just a few minutes, destroying Western civilization and setting back the course of history by generations. Only now, in the first decade of the twenty-third century, had the world finally moved beyond that awful legacy, and there was still so much of the old United States of America that remained unmapped, scarred by radiation, hostile to humankind. The survivors had flourished in nine grand villes, which dominated the landscape, their eerie otherworldly rulers—the barons—carving up the old United States into their own private territories. But it seemed that that golden age of safety and security had passed. The ruling barons had departed from their golden-towered cities, evolving into their true forms as Annunaki, lizard-like gods from outer space who had been worshipped many millennia ago in Mesopotamia and Babylon.

But the Annunaki had died, ripped apart by their own mistrust and bickering, turning on one another until there was nothing left of them but their legacy. That had been almost two years ago. In the aftermath, their villes had struggled to remain safe. Some had crumbled under attacks, others had been rebuilt as new cities that worshipped new gods, and some had simply closed the gates and knuckled down, worrying only about their own and leaving anyone outside the high walls to fend for themselves.

Papa Hurbon’s temple fell under the terrain of Beausoleil, a ville that had chosen to close ranks and reject any outlanders. Outsiders felt afraid, scared that their lands and their possessions would be taken. There were even stories that their children were being abducted for the rich ville dwellers, handed over to childless couples, or worse, roasted and eaten as delicacies. The people were scared, so they flocked to Papa Hurbon, whose fearsome charisma and powerful ways steeped in ancient ritual offered the promise of security and perhaps salvation.

Nathalie was just one of the people who had joined Hurbon’s société in the past few months since he had reemerged after sacrificing both of his legs to his deranged goddess. When asked, Hurbon told her that the sacrifice had been worth it, and that it had granted him more power than any man had ever known before. She suspected that he was right.

There was a room of the redoubt, beyond the vehicle garage whose floor was now hidden beneath an expanse of stagnant water where green clouds lurked and flies buzzed, that contained a thick-walled chamber within it. Inside the chamber, through a tiny pane of six-inch-thick glass, something incorporeal could be seen, swirling as if caught in a hurricane, its component parts unable to cling on to a form. The feeling of dread that emanated from the chamber was palpable. Nathalie had looked inside the chamber on several occasions, peering through the thick, reinforced glass of the rust-lined door. Within, she had seen a face, lit momentarily as if spied in a flash of lightning, then gone again as if it had never been.

Papa Hurbon had told her that the face belonged to his precious Ezili, an ancient loa who had taken earthly form from the Annunaki goddess called Lilitu. He told her that she was his now, that she served him where he had once served her.

Hurbon held surgery in his lodge, but he had turned the redoubt into the société’s temple, where the faithful came to bask in and add to his power. Hurbon took the responsibility easily, but then he had broad shoulders and a steady stream of young women who were only too eager to present themselves to the vodun priest.

Nathalie moved down the concrete-walled corridor, gloomy in the insufficient illumination of the candles, and stepped into the side chamber where Hurbon kept his mixing equipment. Hurbon could get it, of course, but he preferred to send others to do his bidding now—he had spent so long just striving to survive on his own he basked in the luxury of having a congregation once more.

Nathalie reached for the mortar and pestle, one of a dozen lined up by size along a dusty shelf that also contained aged items of jewelry and the skulls of a dozen different rodents and primates. The mortar was made from the curved bones of a monkey’s hand, the pestle the carved bone of a human finger.

* * *

ONCE NATHALIE HAD departed the room, Hurbon unsealed the bag of white dust and spread a little across his left hand. He sniffed it, taking in its aroma. It was redolent of obscure spices and incense, and the smell made Hurbon smile wider than before.

“The smell o’ the dragon,” he muttered, before reaching into the bag for one of the larger shards of white. The shard was a little bigger than Hurbon’s thumbnail, and it looked porous, tiny indentations running all the way across its surface. Brushing the dust back into the open bag, Hurbon took the shard and tapped it against his teeth. It felt rock-hard, and even though he had used the lightest of pressure the feel of the tooth bit was such that it made Hurbon’s teeth sing, as though they might shatter. Then Hurbon placed the shard against his tongue and licked it, feeling its rough sides and sharp edges. He winced as the sharpest edge cut a tiny incision across his tongue, and he drew the fleck of tooth away with a start.

“How the hell did they cut this thing?” Hurbon muttered. Neither man in the room answered him, nor were they supposed to—they just stared vacantly into the middle distance, not reacting to anything that occurred before them.

Sucking on his tongue where it had been cut, Hurbon reached beneath the blanket that hid his missing limbs. He had a bag beneath there, an old leather pouch, its brown surface scuffed, frayed threads showing at its edges. The pouch was large enough for Hurbon to get both hands in, and it had a strap by which it could be carried, like a woman’s purse.

Hurbon slipped the shard of dragon tooth into the pouch where it could reside beside other items that he found useful. Also in the leather pouch were a fith fath—what the ignorant nonbelievers called a voodoo doll—a chicken’s foot and a knotted material pouch of black-and-red powder. There were other bags within the larger bag that Nathalie had brought, and as houngan of the société, it was his prerogative to take a share of any spoils that came through the doors of the redoubt-turned-temple.

His men would say nothing. They were there to guard him and he had removed from them the awkward inconvenience of independent thought.

Hurbon looked up as he heard Nathalie pad back into the djévo room. In a loose sense, the room was mirrored, each decoration reflected in an ornament of similar size and shape on the other side of the room, a femur for a knife, a crystal ball for a skull and the black mirror in place of the door. It was important to keep the djévo in balance at all times, Hurbon knew, if one was to tap the powers beyond the barriè to the spirit world.

However, it was not the voodoo deities—the loa—whom he planned to contact this day. No, Papa Hurbon planned to reach out for the other faces in the darkness, and the dragon’s teeth were the vital ingredient he required to do just that.

“Are the teeth acceptable?” Nathalie asked as she handed Hurbon the mortar and pestle.

Hurbon nodded. “They are genuine, we hope” was all he said. Then he took another package of bone dust from the open bag that Nathalie had brought and tipped a small portion of its contents into the mortar where it rested on his lap.

“What is it you hope to achieve, Papa?” Nathalie asked as Papa Hurbon worked the powdery dust around in the bowl.

“Child, there is a story which comes from the Greece of ancient times,” Hurbon explained as he mixed rat’s blood with the splinters of tooth, “which tells of the Spartoí, the children of Ares. The Spartoí were powerful soldiers grown from the sown teeth of a dragon, walking dead things that fought with a great warrior called Jason. You see, the Greeks understood the power of the dragon’s teeth in conjuring warriors into this world from beyond the grave.”

“So your plan is to bring great warriors to life?” Nathalie questioned.

“No, not warriors, my sweet cherry,” Hurbon said with a flash of his fiendish smile. “Gods. The Annunaki who came to Earth brought with them a whole new comprehension of technology, utilizing organic materials in the way so-called civilized man uses steel and silicon. In this sense, the Annunaki are closer to the old ways of the path, the voodoo ways—you see?”

Nathalie nodded, awed.

“Their ways and ours are so much alike,” Hurbon continued. “Each fleck of tooth contains a genetic story, each shard a history just waiting to be unleashed.”

Hurbon pressed down hard with the pestle, and Nathalie heard something snap inside the tiny mortar bowl. “The trouble with the Annunaki is—they thought too small.

“I will sow the seeds of the dragon across the globe,” Hurbon told the woman, “and unto each shall come a new understanding and a new reckoning. The children of the dragon shall walk the Earth once again, and when they are done, my child—when they are done, why, what a glorious day that shall be.”

Hurbon stirred the bowl once more, mashing together the shards and the rat’s blood into a grisly paste.

Chapter 1

Seven months later, Zaragoza, Spain

Located in northern Spain, the city of Zaragoza was alive with color. The large city housed half a million people, and its narrow streets and alleyways were brought to life with music and the sounds of the citizens. Parts of the city had been destroyed and rebuilt over the years, but the oldest landmarks, like the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar—a huge, palace-like cathedral dedicated to Christian faith—and the Aljafería Palace, had somehow survived, repurposed, to revel in their second phoenix lives.

Above those ancient towering spires, the sky was turning a rich shade of red as the sun set, painting everything with its pinkish glow and turning the Ebro, the river that bisected the city, into a shimmering orange line.

Two figures were hurrying across the Puente de Piedra, a man and a woman. She seemed eager to cross the bridge of lions, while he was clearly more reluctant.

“Come on, Grant-san,” the young woman urged, tugging at the man’s hand, “I have no desire to be late.” Her name was Shizuka and she was the leader of the Tigers of Heaven, the ruling group of New Edo in the Western Isles of the Pacific. A formidable warrior, Shizuka was a petite woman of Asian extraction, with golden skin and dark eyes with a pleasing upward slant, lips like cherry blossoms and fine dark hair.

Shizuka wore an elegant evening dress in midnight blue. The dress sat high across her neck, leaving her arms bare and reaching to midway down her legs, cinched tightly across her hips and legs to accentuate her figure. The figure beneath was slim and athletic, taut muscles moving in slick motion as she trotted across the bridge on three-inch heels.

The man beside her could not be more at odds with Shizuka’s lithe and petite frame. In his midthirties, Grant was a hulking figure of a man, six-foot-four inches tall, all corded muscle without an ounce of fat. His skin was a rich mahogany, his head shaved, and he sported a gunslinger’s mustache. He wore a well-cut suit with blazer jacket in a shimmering gray-silk weave. Beneath the jacket he wore a wine-dark shirt and a black bow tie that, despite his best efforts not to, he could not help adjusting as they hurried across the bridge that crossed the River Ebro. Grant was an ex-Magistrate, an enforcer of baronial law, from the US settlement of Cobaltville. In recent years he had traded that role for a position with the Cerberus organization, a group dedicated to the safety of humankind, defending it from alien threats and other terrors that had been caused by extraterrestrial intervention or as fallout from the alien barons’ schemes to rule the world.

“Why should we hurry, Shizuka?” Grant asked. His voice was a rumble like distant thunder, but there was a tenderness there that spoke of his feelings for his breathtakingly beautiful companion. “This is our chance to relax. So slow down, enjoy the sights. A place this beautiful needs time to be admired.”

Grant had been with Shizuka for several years, though they had seemed to have little time to relax and enjoy one another’s company in all the time that they had been together. This visit here to Zaragoza was Grant’s attempt to change that, a moment’s quiet in the ongoing battle against alien incursion.

Shizuka had to admit that it was hard to argue with her lover’s point. She slowed down, admiring the view from the bridge as they approached the west bank. The city of Zaragoza had suffered a little at the hands of the nuclear devastation that had racked the Western hemisphere, but much of the city had survived, and what had not had been sympathetically rebuilt over the two centuries since that awful nuclear exchange. There was a palpable sense of age to the place, that tranquil beauty that only old buildings—and old stone—exhibited. The Puente de Piedra was an ancient stone bridge that crossed the Ebro in the center of the city. Two decorative bronze lions had been placed atop pillars at either end of the bridge—four in all—guarding the crossing and the travelers who used it. Making the crossing to the west side, one could see the towering, ornate turrets of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar to the right, a beautiful palace that looked something like an upturned table with its exquisite carved legs thrust up into the sky. To the left stood the rich redbrick building that housed artifacts from the Roman era, and towering behind this was the ornate spire of La Seo Cathedral, its white brickwork recolored in a luminous strawberry red as the sun set behind it. Trees lined the wide avenue that ran alongside the riverbank, obscuring the towering gray-brown structures of ornate design that looked out across the water. Wheeled wags hurried to and fro, transporting locals and visitors to destinations amid the city’s bustling nightlife.

“You continue to surprise me, Grant-san,” Shizuka said as she took in the magnificent view.

“This is why we came here,” Grant said, indicating the panorama that stretched out all around them. “The clean air, the sunlight on the water—I like to believe it’s all been put here just for us.”

“Oh, Grant,” Shizuka whispered, turning back to him and gazing longingly into his eyes. “I forget how you can make me melt within.”

For a moment Grant looked regretful. “Easy to forget,” he admitted. “I don’t make enough time for ‘us’ sometimes…”

Before he could say anything further, Shizuka placed her index finger against Grant’s lips. “Because you are too busy saving people’s lives, my brave hero,” she reminded him, “and there can be no shame in taking that choice. A weaker man than you would turn his back on his obligations.”

“Especially when there’s a hottie waiting at home for him,” Grant said, a broad smile appearing across his face as he admired his lover. But the smile faltered when he saw Shizuka’s flawless brow furrow in uncertainty. “All right, all right,” Grant said, holding his hands up as if in surrender, “so maybe I shouldn’t have called you a hottie. You’re a capable, vibrant woman who…who knows what she wants and…and…”

“Go on,” Shizuka encouraged, an air of challenge in her voice.

“And…intelligent, beautiful and wise,” Grant finished, an uncertain note of hope in his tone.

Shizuka crossed her arms over her chest and nodded. “Hai. Quite true,” she agreed. “However, that was not what caused me to question your statement, Grant-san, because I am a hottie. Rather, when have you ever known this hottie to stay at home waiting for her man?”

Grant looked suitably chastised. “You have a point.”

Shizuka raised Grant’s left arm then and twirled beneath it until she was wrapped in his grip, ready to walk beside him across the bridge. “We both have busy lives, Grant-san,” she reminded him. “You with Cerberus, me with my obligations to the Tigers of Heaven. There is no shame in our choices, nor in shouldering the responsibilities we have both been tasked to endure. However, today is not about that. This night, this week—it is all for us, with no buzzing Commtacts or pleading advisers.”

“I never had an adviser,” Grant stated as they strode arm in arm across the vast stone bridge.

“And I have never had a Commtact,” Shizuka replied, whip-fast.

The Commtact to which Shizuka referred was a remarkable tool that Grant and his fellow Cerberus operatives relied upon for global communications. It was a small radio device that was embedded beneath the skin of all Cerberus field personnel, including Grant. The subdermal devices were top-of-the-line units, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus rebels.

Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. As well as radio communications, the Commtacts could function as a translation device, operating in real time. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the user’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. This facility had the additional perk of being able to pick up and enhance any subvocalization made by the user, which meant that it was unnecessary to speak aloud to utilize the transmission function.

Broadcasts from the unit were patched through the Keyhole communications satellite, or Comsat, and then relayed to the Cerberus redoubt headquarters in Montana. Thanks to the nature of the vibration system used by the Commtact, if a user went completely deaf they would still, in theory, be able to hear, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.

“Anyway, you promised me a romantic evening of dinner and dancing,” Shizuka reminded Grant.

“The evening’s barely begun,” Grant told her, pulling the modern-day samurai a little closer as they walked past the lion-topped columns at the end of the bridge.

The pair had arrived just a few hours before, booking into a grand, family-run hotel after traveling via interphaser. Based on an alien design, the interphaser could tap quantum pathways and move people through space to specific locations instantaneously. The technology was limited by certain esoteric factors, the full gamut of which had yet to be cataloged, but what was known was that the interphaser was reliant on an ancient web of powerful, hidden lines called parallax points that stretched across the globe and beyond. This network followed old ley lines and formed a powerful technology so far beyond ancient human comprehension as to appear magical. Though fixed, the interphaser’s destination points were often located in temples, graveyards or similar sites of religious significance. These sites had frequently emerged around the interphaser’s use, ancient man sensing the incredible power that was being tapped for such instantaneous travel. Cerberus personnel’s access to an operational interphaser had taken many months of trial and error to achieve.

This time, the quantum jump had brought Grant and Shizuka close to an ancient church, more ruin than building now, located in the middle of a dusty, overgrown graveyard on the east bank, their arrival unseen. From there, the couple had made their way to the luxurious rooms in which they would be staying. The rooms were typically Spanish, painted in light colors to reflect the heat and sparsely decorated to leave them uncluttered. The bed featured a brass frame shined to look like gold in the fierce sunlight that blasted through the open window of the balcony, and a complimentary bottle of wine had been left cooling in an ice bucket for their arrival. At reception, Grant had deftly navigated the questions about how their trip had been and when they had arrived; the interphaser was a method of travel exclusive to the Cerberus organization and not something he wanted to advertise.

The midday heat of the Spanish sun was enough to knock both of them out, however, so instead of exploring the city Grant and Shizuka had spent a restful few hours just catching up with each other, tracing the familiar curves of one another’s bodies before indulging in a late-afternoon swim in the hotel’s pool. Now, at a little before 8:00 p.m., the pair made their way toward their destination, a small café that became a restaurant when the sun set.

As the chill of the approaching night began to make itself felt, Grant and Shizuka strolled past a Roman theater, a series of stepped levels organized around a semicircle where ancient actors had once performed. Now it was a little tribute to those long-forgotten days, where only the occasional play might still be performed for a specific celebration or anniversary.

The sky had turned a pleasing shade of indigo when they found the restaurant, Shizuka still aggrieved that they were late. The owner—a large-bellied, red-faced man with a graying mustache and ragged, curly hair—did not mind their tardiness. It seemed that that was very much the culture of this city. “Time,” he told them in ebullient Spanish, “is whatever you make it, and you may make of that what you will.”

Inside, the restaurant was softly lit with candlelit tables and floor-length windows that were open along a side that faced into an alleyway to allow a through breeze to keep the place cool. As they were shown to their table, Grant squeezed Shizuka’s hand, and she looked up at him. He said nothing, but his look seemed to say, Look at this place. Look at all the wonderful things out here for us to enjoy. It was a world away from the one they knew.

And so they ate, unaware of what was occurring barely a block away.

* * *

AFTER FOOD CAME DANCING. Grant jokingly tried to swear off, claiming he was too full of paella to move, but Shizuka shot him a look that could leave no doubt as to why she was the ultimate authority in New Edo.

“You will dance and you will enjoy it,” she said.

“I will dance and you will enjoy it,” Grant corrected with a mischievous, boyish grin.

They made their way down the alleyway that ran beside the restaurant, passing parked vehicles and other couples enjoying the city’s nightlife. Spain was a country of night people, the heat of the day too fierce to enjoy. Now the burning heat had turned to a refreshing night breeze, and Shizuka rubbed her bare arms as they crossed a junction and made their way toward the grand hotel that was their destination.

From outside, the grand, four-story building was awash with lights, its windows burning brightly in the darkness.

“There’s a dance hall inside,” Grant explained. “I hear it can be quite an experience.”

Shizuka smiled as she looked up at her taller companion, her face alive with delight.

Even from here, a dozen yards from the steps that led to the open front doors, they could hear the strains of a band, acoustic guitars rushing through some local number at furious speed, maracas click-clacking to keep time as the tune hurtled toward its finale, a blur of tumbling notes and riffs.

Grant and Shizuka hurried up the steps, a spring in Shizuka’s step as she led her lover through the lobby toward the grand ballroom, which dominated the hotel’s ground floor. Grant stopped momentarily to tip the doorman before dashing after Shizuka as she reached for the double doors into the ballroom itself, the strains of a flamenco emanating loudly from within.

Grant reached for Shizuka, wrapping one muscular arm around her and pulling her close as she pulled one door open. “I love you,” he said as he brought Shizuka’s face close to his own.

“I love you, too, my bravest one,” Shizuka told him before kissing him on the lips.

Then the pair turned back to the doors that were swinging open where Shizuka had pulled their handles. The hurtling notes of the furious flamenco became suddenly louder, twin guitars racing through notes as if trying to outpace one another, the maracas chattering like an insect swarm, a woman’s voice melodically reciting in a foreign tongue. But what lay beyond was enough to stop the two warriors in their tracks.

The ballroom was vast with an ornate ceiling and richly decorated walls, each carving lit by a flickering candle or the low, shaded light of a bulb. To one corner, the band was playing, four men in dinner jackets and a female singer with luxurious, dark hair tied up tight to her head with a flower clipped there and wearing a wispy dress the rich red of rose petals.

But no one was dancing. Instead, perhaps a dozen couples, dressed in their most beautiful clothes—the women’s dresses cut to accentuate their curves, the men’s suits cut to hide their own—were hanging from the ceiling in rows, each couple lined up together, two dozen nooses wrapped around two dozen necks, their feet swaying a few feet above the perfectly sprung wooden floor.

Grant and Shizuka stared at the scene in absolute horror. And suddenly a city of half a million people felt very, very empty.

Chapter 2

Grant could tell the twenty-four bodies hanging from the rafters of the ballroom were freshly deceased. He had experienced death from close up many times in his action-filled life and felt no need to shy away from it.

Beside him, Grant heard Shizuka gasp. She, too, had seen death, had dealt it at the tip of her katana sword. But this—this was something unexpected, something exceptional.

A forest of taut necks and sagging bodies hung before them, feet still twitching, tongues lolling out from faces that were strained red with pain, eyes open in accusation.

Grant took a step forward, then turned to the quintet who continued to play their whirling, racing music. “Can you all stop playing?” he shouted to them, striding across the room through the swaying human stalactites.

The band continued for several bars before its players finally brought the music to an abrupt stop. The woman singer in her rose-red dress seemed poised to say something, or perhaps to sing, and looked aggrieved as she watched Grant stalk across the room toward her.

“What happened here?” Grant demanded. “Why did they do this? When did they do this? Did you see?”

The singer stared at Grant, a flash of challenge in her dark eyes. Challenge and confusion, as if he had intruded on her dreams.

“You understand me?” Grant asked. “¿Lo entiendes?” he repeated the question in Spanish as his Commtact helpfully translated in his ear.

“Grant—look!” Shizuka called from where she remained at the front of the room close to the open doors.

Grant turned to her, then spun, following where she was pointing. A pair of double doors stood at the far end of the room, identical to the ones through which Grant and Shizuka had entered. There, through the open doors, three figures were moving swiftly down a hotel corridor, away from the scene. It could be nothing, Grant knew, but he wasn’t one to pass up a lead. Years of Magistrate training had taught him to investigate everything.

Grant ran, sprinting through the room toward the far set of doors. As he ran he called back to Shizuka, “Wait here and get the hotel people on this,” he said. “See if you can help any of these people—if they can still be helped.”

With that, Grant was gone, leaving Shizuka standing in a room full of swaying bodies, the band watching her with what seemed to be almost feral looks.

* * *

GRANT SPRINTED THROUGH the open doors and out into the corridor. The corridor was underlit, and it was decorated in luscious, dark colors with a small side table and two chairs resting against a wall. Grant glanced behind him as he chased after the rapidly disappearing figures and realized that the corridor turned in a right angle back there to wrap around the ballroom, and presumably back to the hotel reception. It probably functioned primarily as a service corridor, which staff used by way of shortcut between the kitchens and the public parts of the hotel.

A bellhop in a white jacket was just rounding the corner holding a tray of empty glasses, and his face became alarmed as he spotted Grant appear through the doors to the ballroom.

“¡Hey!” the bellhop shouted in Spanish as he spotted Grant.

Grant ignored him, scrambling along the corridor toward the retreating figures. There were three of them—two men led by a woman. The men had coffee-colored skin and were muscular and bare chested. They wore dark pants and boots. One of them seemed to have tattoos across his back, painted there in dark patches like beetles running across his skin. Two steps ahead of them, a curvaceous woman was stepping toward another door on six-inch heels. Grant saw the dazzle of the streetlight that was situated just outside when she pushed against it—and realized that it led out into the street. Glanced in the half-light of the service corridor, the woman appeared to be dressed for carnival, with a towering headdress swaying high over her head, and a plume of white feathers attached to her butt, swinging back and forth like a pendulum with every movement of her legs.

“Hey—wait up!” Grant called, scrambling along the corridor after the figures. He did not know if they had had anything to do with the scene in the ballroom, but he could only rule that out if he spoke to them.

The bare-chested men halted to let the woman slip out through the door before them. As they did so, they both turned back at Grant’s call, and he saw them more clearly in the artificial light streaming in from the street. They had shaved heads and grimly fixed expressions. And, strangely, from this distance it appeared that their eyes were blank, white orbs, like hard-boiled eggs without their shells.

“Stop!” Grant ordered, using the same tone of voice he had employed in his days giving orders as a Magistrate.

The two men ignored Grant and stepped out through the doorway. Why shouldn’t they—he had no authority here.

But Grant was determined. He dashed down the corridor and through the door before it could slam closed behind the disappearing party, shoving it open again as he stepped through.

He was in a back alley, six feet in width—just wide enough for a land wag. There were garbage cans out here and the alleyway stretched off around the edge of the hotel building, a streetlight blazing right into Grant’s face. Grant turned left and right and spotted the three figures as they trotted off down the alleyway and slipped into another side passage, the woman’s tail of white feathers bouncing up and down with every step.

Grant followed, chasing the strangely dressed trio as they disappeared from view. As he turned the corner into a narrower alleyway, he had a flash of premonition—the old instincts from his Magistrate days kicking in. He dipped his head, tucking it into his shoulders. As he did so, something came hurtling at him from the narrow alley between the tall buildings, whizzing just over his ducked head before impacting against the far wall in a shower of sparks as metal met brick.

Grant lurched aside, his right arm darting ahead to slap against the opposite wall as he sped after his quarry. It was at times like this that Grant regretted not coming armed. Behind him, he heard something metallic drop against the paving slabs with a low tinker like a falling paint tin lid—it was whatever had been tossed at him.

Up ahead, the trio turned again, and this time Grant saw as one of the men—the one with those eerie tattoos—plucked something small, circular and shiny from his waistband before drawing his arm back, ready to throw it. The object was roughly the size of a compact disc, and it hurtled toward Grant at incredible speed.

Grant stepped to the side, pressing himself against the wall as the silvery disc zipped by. In that moment he had a clear view of the woman where a streetlamp illuminated her, but only for an instant. She was stunning—olive-skinned with an oval face framed by long dark hair that cascaded to midway down her spine. Her skintight dress, the colour of a purple bruise, hugged every line of her lithe body like liquid before fraying at the hips into torn strips that fluttered all the way down to her ankles. Behind this, a cascade of white feathers fluttered at her rear like a peacock’s fan. But it was her headgear that was most impressive—rising almost eighteen inches above her head. The piece was designed like twin horns, entwining one another in a complex web of twists and turns. Grant had the sudden feeling that the stag-like horns were somehow made from bone.

In the microsecond it took Grant to register all of this, the second dark-skinned man worked the door to a building on the alleyway, and suddenly the three figures disappeared inside.

Grant gave chase again, reaching the door a fraction of a second after it had closed. It was a fire door, he realized then, completely smooth with no provision given to opening it from this side. Which raised the question of just how the hell these people had managed to open it.

But that was only one of the many questions racing through Grant’s mind at that instant. Grant hammered against the door for a few seconds, but no one responded. He looked around him, taking in the narrow alleyway as if for the first time. Three- and four-story buildings stood to either side of him, dark windows peering out onto the narrow passage, a sliver of indigo sky visible between them like an upturned river. Grant wondered where the doorway led, but there was no obvious entrance farther along the wall.

As he peered up and down the alleyway, Grant spotted something lying at the edge of the door. It was a feather, presumably from the woman’s train. Leaning down, Grant picked it from the sill of the door, lifting it closer to study it. As he did so he felt its sharp edge cut him across his thumb, just like a paper cut, and he winced. The feather was eight inches long and almost two inches wide, goose white with a pale stem. But there was red at the edges of the feather, and as Grant held it, the red spread before his eyes. In a matter of seconds, the feather had turned from purest white to a dark, bloodred.

Grant studied the feather a moment longer before slipping it into the pocket of his jacket. He had lost the strange group by now, and he was woefully aware that he had left Shizuka alone in the hotel ballroom with the hanging bodies and the eerily playing band.

“Dammit,” he cursed, turning back the way he had come. As he retraced his steps, Grant plucked up both of the metal discs that had been launched at him by the men. They were four inches across with sharp, jagged edges, a little like buzz saws. Studying them as he retraced his steps, Grant couldn’t help but wonder what on Earth he and Shizuka had managed to walk into.

* * *

WHILE GRANT WAS chasing after the mysterious figures, back at the hotel, Shizuka rapidly enlisted several members of staff to assist in untying or cutting down the dancers who were hanging from the ceiling.

“Alert the authorities,” Shizuka told a porter as he dragged a chair over from the wall to help her untie the first victim.

The porter looked mystified, and Shizuka repeated her request. “Authorities. Police.”

“Policía,” the porter repeated, nodding in understanding. He hurried off, and a few seconds later Shizuka could hear him having a hurried discussion with the hotel receptionist before he returned with more help.

It took four of them almost two minutes to get everyone down from the ceiling, and Shizuka spent the whole of that time asking aloud for anyone to speak up if they could hear her while the receptionist translated the question in Spanish. Three of the hanging figures gurgled strained responses through the pressure of the nooses, and Shizuka ensured that they were the first she assisted down from their grisly positions.

The five-piece band remained dazed by what they saw here, Shizuka noticed, as if they had only just awoken—except in this case, the nightmare was all too real.

Despite her lack of Spanish skills, Shizuka managed to take charge and organize everyone, and it was not long before all of the previously hanging figures had been brought back down to the floor. A doctor who was staying at the hotel was found and called upon to check over the grisly scene. He was a portly man in his late forties who had been enjoying an after-dinner drink in the hotel bar, and he was efficient and calm as he looked over the ballroom’s occupants. Over two-thirds of the figures were already dead; just seven had survived, and of those only two could speak.

The receptionist, a bottle blonde with dark roots showing, pretty and scarcely out of her teens by Shizuka’s reckoning, spoke flawless English with only a trace of an accent, so while the doctor worked, Shizuka cornered her and asked her what had happened.

“I didn’t know anything was wrong until Paolo called me,” she admitted, referring to the young porter who had been the first to answer Shizuka’s call.

“Didn’t you hear anything?” Shizuka probed.

“No. Nothing,” the girl replied, wide-eyed in astonishment. “I can’t believe…” She stopped and crossed herself, unable to finish her sentence.

Shizuka looked back at the ballroom, eyeing the ceiling where the nooses had been attached to the open beams that ran crossways through the room. It was a curious affair, to say the least. As she pondered, Shizuka’s eyes settled on the band, who were still waiting at one side of the room. They were talking among themselves and seemed distraught, faces ashen with the shock of what had occurred here. And yet, Shizuka recalled, they had been playing normally when she and Grant had happened upon the horrific scene, as if they were a part of it somehow.

Shizuka placed a hand on the receptionist’s side and guided her across the room. “Come, I may need you to help me speak with them,” she explained.

Bewildered by the almost-surreal scene around her, the receptionist plodded alongside Shizuka on her flat-soled pumps.

“Do any of you speak English?” Shizuka asked, addressing the band.

One of the guitarists nodded, as did the singer, while two of the others made “so-so” gestures with a shrug.

“You must have been here when all this was occurring,” Shizuka said. “What did you see?”

“See?” the singer repeated. “It’s…confused. We play as people arrive. They laugh, some dance. Then…”

“Then?” Shizuka urged.

“It’s…atropelladamente,” the singer said.

Shizuka looked from the singer to the other band members, some of whom were nodding. “I don’t understand,” she said.

The singer began rattling off something in fast-paced Spanish, her garbled words exhibiting the rat-a-tat rhythm of an old machine gun’s fire. “Un tobogán en espiral de altura sinuoso alrededor de una torre en una feria,” she said. “Una feria…fairground.”

Shizuka looked to the receptionist for help. “Fairground?” she prompted.

“Mónica says it was like seeing a twisting slide,” the receptionist translated thoughtfully. “Like the slide at the funfair.”

“The helter-skelter.” Shizuka realized after a moment.

“Si!” the singer agreed with a snap of her fingers. “But here, in my head. Inside.”

The woman’s bandmates seemed to agree, one of them translating for the drummer, whose grasp of English was very limited. Several of the men tapped their foreheads as if to show her. It was the point where many religions placed the third eye, Shizuka noticed.

At that moment, the authorities arrived, and the atmosphere in the room changed subtly. Shizuka felt it straightaway, the way that everyone suddenly became a suspect.

Two officers strode through the room, eyeing the sprawl of corpses and wounded scattered across the lavish surroundings. They were a man and a woman, both dressed smart-casual in charcoal-gray suits. The man was in his thirties, six feet tall with striking features and wavy dark hair slicked back from his forehead, a trace of stubble darkening his chin. He wore his jacket open, the pressed white collar of his shirt tightly clasped to his neck, a striped tie swaying before his broad chest. The woman was of a similar age, several inches shorter than the man, and her suit was looser, its baggy lines masking her taut, athletic figure. She wore a white T-shirt beneath the blazer, the bulge of a blaster almost hidden where it was holstered beneath her left arm. She had dark hair cascading past her shoulders in gentle waves and she wore a concerned expression that sat well on the sharp planes of her face, enhancing her flawless olive complexion.

The woman asked something in Spanish, addressing the room in general. The blonde receptionist answered, indicating Shizuka, and the two officers strode across the room toward her, while everyone else seemed to subtly rear back to give them room.

Shizuka looked mystified as the dark-haired woman babbled something in Spanish, then the hotel receptionist said something and the woman repeated her question in flawless, slightly accented English, “You found the people here? Like this?”

Shizuka nodded. “I did.”

“I’m Pretor Cáscara,” the woman explained, flashing her a badge, “and, my partner, Pretor Corcel. Are you able to answer some questions for me?”

Shizuka nodded again. “Of course.” Then Shizuka explained who she was and that she had been visiting the hotel with her partner when they had, by chance, made their grisly discovery.

“And when was this, Senora Shizuka?” the man asked, speaking for the first time. He had a refined accent, as if he had learned English from the upper-class British of a bygone age.

“Ten minutes,” Shizuka guessed. “Less maybe. I don’t… It was very unexpected.”

The woman touched Shizuka’s bare arm gently. “We understand, you must have had quite the shock.”

Shizuka took a slow, deliberate breath, gazing past the two officers to focus on the fallen bodies strewn about the room. She had seen worse than this, many times in fact—such was the cost of a life of adventure. But there was something poignant and hopeless about finding these people hanging here like this without warning or explanation. It sickened her, and for the first time since she and Grant had arrived, Shizuka had the chance to stop and realize that.

Pretor Cáscara raised her dark eyebrows, peering at Shizuka as she saw her tremor slightly. “Do you need to sit down?”

“Yes,” Shizuka blurted, so sudden that the word caught her unawares. Even as she said it, Shizuka wavered in place as if she might fall. Shock, she realized at a disconnect, as if she was thinking about someone other than herself.

The woman called Cáscara took Shizuka by the arm and led her from the room, asking one of the hotel staff in Spanish to bring a glass of water as she escorted Shizuka into the hotel lobby.

* * *

PRETOR JUAN CORCEL was left alone with the doctor as the relevant authorities arrived to remove the bodies and take the survivors away to a nearby hospital. The hotel staff had departed the crime scene, waiting nearby. As he surveyed the room, pacing in a small circle on his Italian-made loafers, the doctor asked him a question.

“I bet you have never seen anything like this, eh, Pretor?” the doctor said in Spanish while several of the living where taken away on stretchers.

Corcel shook his head. “Sadly, that is not the case.”

The doctor looked surprised. “You mean this has happened before?”

Pretor Corcel looked back at him with haunted eyes, saying nothing. “How many are alive?” he asked finally, gazing at the stretchers. Some of the sheets had been pulled over the heads to hide the faces.

“Seven,” the doctor said.

“Yes,” Pretor Corcel agreed distractedly, pacing across the room. He had seen this before; in fact this was only the latest in a spate of something that one might have called serial killings. But the details were vague, uncertain. He and his partner, Cáscara, urgently needed a break on this, before things became any worse. There had been sightings, two black men appearing close to the scenes sometimes, vague recollections of a woman, but that was all circumstantial, hearsay, like trying to grab ahold of something from a child’s drawing. There had been tiny slivers of evidence—another Pretor had been killed using a razor-sharp disc that had been pushed into his belly somehow, shredding his gut apart; bloodred feathers scattered at two of the scenes. But it all felt disconnected, with no clear picture emerging.

Corcel huffed, shaking his head. Who would do this, and why?

It was then that Juan Corcel, Pretor of the Zaragoza Justice Department with a twelve-year unblemished record of service, had what he considered at that moment to be the greatest lucky break of his career. The twin doors leading out of the ballroom crashed open and one of the black men from the eyewitness reports came hurrying through, breathless from killing. He held one of the throwing disc-like weapons in one hand, a bloody feather protruding from his jacket pocket.

In a flash, Corcel pulled his blaster—a compact Devorador de Pecados—from its hidden underarm holster and targeted the man in its sights, even as he stepped into the room. “¡Congelar!” he shouted.

* * *

GRANT HAD DASHED back to the hotel as quickly as he was able, concerned at leaving Shizuka alone amid the nightmare scene. He wished he had some way to remain in touch with her in those moments as he sprinted through the back alleys of this strange city, wished she had a Commtact like the Cerberus personnel. But she wasn’t Cerberus, despite working with them on occasion.

It took a minute or two of backtracking before Grant reached the service door to the hotel, the same one he had rushed through in pursuit of the strange trio he had spotted close to the scene. His breathing was coming heavier now, the night air cold on his skin as the initial surge of adrenaline passed.

Grant trotted down the corridor, reciting a mantra in his head, praying that Shizuka was still alive.

The twin doors to the ballroom were closed, so Grant switched the sharpened disc to his left hand before reaching for the handle with his right. By now, the feather protruding from his pocket had become bloodred; not wet, but its whole color had changed.

Grant pulled at the door and stepped through, coming face-to-face with a handsome, dark-haired man in a loose-fitting suit. Before Grant could say a word, the man produced a compact blaster and jabbed it toward Grant’s surprised face.

“¡Congelar!” the man hollered.

Grant’s Commtact translated the bellowed word automatically: “Freeze!”

Chapter 3

One side effect of the fall of the baronies was that obtaining food had become a source of dispute once more, Kane reflected. Kane was a powerfully built man with broad shoulders and rangy limbs that lent something of the wolf to his appearance. His hair was dark and his steely blue-gray eyes seemed to emotionlessly observe everything with meticulous precision. There was something of the wolf to Kane’s demeanor, too—he was a loner at heart, and a natural pack leader when the situation called for it.

Like Grant, Kane had once been a Magistrate for the Cobaltville barony in the west, where he had enforced the law of the ville. But he had stumbled upon the conspiracy behind the ville—that is, the intended subjugation of mankind—and had turned against the regime and found himself exiled along with his partner and fellow rebels. From that day on, Kane had become an active member of the Cerberus organization, dedicated to the protection of humankind, freeing humans from the shadowy shackles that had been used to oppress them and stunt their potential for hundreds of years.

Right now, Kane was sitting in the rear of a six-wheeler beside three dozen sacks of grain as it trundled along a dirt road in the province of Samariumville. The road was narrow and straight, flanked by the scarred earth of fields that had been abandoned and left fallow as legacy of the radioactive fallout from the nukecaust. Radiation levels fell year on year, but it remained an unwanted gift from the past that just kept on giving, spawning mutant crops and poisonous fruit that was of no use for consumption. Therein lay part of the problem that Kane and his team were tackling with their guarding of these transports—so much of the land was still too damaged to sustain life, even two centuries on, from the nuclear exchange that had slowed down Western civilization.

One of three, Kane’s vehicle featured an open bed, the sacks secured with rope, leaving it easy-pickings for the scavengers and cutthroats who roamed the barony. The cloudy sky was dark and ominous, and only the occasional bird caw could be heard over the growl of wag engines.

It hadn’t always been like this, Kane lamented as he eyed the overcast sky and its sheets of silver-gray ripples. Barely three years earlier, the baronies had been intact, their high walls and firm laws ensuring safety for their occupants and loaning a degree of safety to the provinces beyond. Local Magistrates had patrolled problem areas outside the ville walls, stemming the threat of outlanders and muties who might destabilize the local area or foster an uprising against the ruling baron. All of that had changed when the barons had received something Kane understood as a “genetic download,” a kind of evolutionary trigger that drew their hidden DNA to the fore, revealing the ethereal hybrid barons to be merely chrysalis states for their true forms—the reptilian Annunaki. The Annunaki were an alien race from the distant planet Nibiru, who had once been worshipped on Earth as gods during the Mesopotamian era, over six thousand years ago. Hungry for power, the Annunaki had ultimately squabbled themselves into mutual self-destruction.

However, the power vacuum left by the disappearance of the barons had resulted in the villes having to find new ways to survive and remain stable. Some had installed new barons, imitating the old system as closely as they could. Others, such as Cobaltville, had covered up their baron’s disappearance, relying instead on Magistrate rule to ensure their populace remained under strict control. Kane had even found a new experimental barony where the population had been reprogrammed to adhere to subliminal commands, losing all independent thought.

Kane didn’t know how Samariumville was running its show, nor did he much care, just as long as its people were safe. What did matter, however, was that the local territory had become more treacherous as rival gangs vied to carve up the land beyond the ville walls for their own usage. Those gangs included slave traders, gunrunners and other lowlifes who were only too happy to exploit and abuse anyone, human or mutie, who fell into their clutches. And all those crooks and ne’er-do-wells needed feeding, which was how Kane and his partners found themselves guarding this three-wag convoy as it crossed the unpopulated terrain to the west of Boontown, close to what had once been the Louisiana/Mississippi border.

Kane was here, along with two of his partners from the Cerberus organization, at the behest of a local businesswoman called Ohio Blue. Blue was an independent trader who dealt in everything from purified water supplies to esoteric objets d’art. She was very much under the radar so far as the authorities went, meaning she was unable to turn to the local Magistrates while running missions like this one—mercy missions she called them, although Kane knew the woman well enough to take that with a pinch of salt. Ohio Blue was a rogue, what Kane would call a bottom-feeder, but she was well connected and, along with her wide-reaching organization, had provided support and safety for Cerberus during their direst hour. Kane considered that he owed her for that. So when she spoke to Cerberus about running into some transport problems on this route, he had volunteered to ride shotgun and help make sure she didn’t lose any more men. Cerberus had access to resources that even the well-connected Ohio didn’t, including footage from surveillance satellites and operational air support.

Kane had dressed in muted colors, a faded gray denim jacket and combat pants, along with his favored Magistrate boots, which had a little protective armor in their construction. Beneath his clothes, Kane wore something even more durable—a skintight shadow suit, made from a superstrong weave that could dull a blade attack and offer some protection from small-arms fire. The miraculous shadow suit had other qualities, too—it was a wholly independent environment, which regulated the wearer’s body temperature, ensuring that they could survive in extremes of heat and cold and could also protect against radiation. In short, the shadow suit provided an almost undetectable layer of protection that was comparable to much more bulky forms of armor, only without compromising maneuverability.

Kane was not alone. One member of the Cerberus crew had been assigned to each of the three transport wags after a spate of attacks along this, the only route running from farms in the west to a litter of smaller, desperate communities in the south. What Ohio was getting out of the deal, Kane could only speculate, but he knew her well enough to know that the op would not be run from the goodness of her heart. Cold hard cash was in the equation somewhere, and if that didn’t sit well with Kane’s more philanthropic instincts, then he could console himself that the food was going to hungry people who needed it. Traders like Ohio Blue profited out of misery, but they served a need that otherwise went unfulfilled.

Kane’s partners were located in the two other wags, while Kane took the foremost, wary of a frontal assault. The middle wag contained Brigid Baptiste, an ex-archivist from Cobaltville who, like Kane, had stumbled onto the conspiracy at the top of the ville and been swiftly exiled from its walls. Brigid and Kane had worked together for a long time, ever since that exile into the so-called hell beyond the ville walls. During that time, they had learned that they shared a mystic bond that traversed time and space. That bond named them anam-charas, or soul friends, and it put them closer than siblings or lovers, a deeper bond than mere flesh or chronological time could contain.

Guarding the rearmost wag was Domi. Domi was another exile from Cobaltville, although she had been born an outlander in the atomic wastes beyond its high walls. Unlike most of the Cerberus staff, which numbered almost forty housed in a refitted military redoubt in Montana, Domi had little in the way of a formal education. As such, she could come across as brash, even animal-like in her desires and the methods that she considered acceptable in achieving those desires. Kane, however, trusted her implicitly. He figured that if she was wild with an uncontrollable streak, then it was better to have her at his side than at somebody else’s.

The trio of wags trundled on across the stark landscape under the afternoon cloud cover. The wags were similar without matching. They were tired things, old designs patched together and brought back into service, a caking of mud and dirt and poor repaints loaning them the appearance of patchwork quilts as they bumped over the rough road. All three had flatbed rears, though the rearmost included a rail around the bed for added security. A two-man cab sat up front, where driver and shotgun traveled, scanning the long road for danger. Behind the cab of the front and rear vehicles, a makeshift gun turret had been installed, running a .50 gauge machine gun with belt ammo, while the middle wag had two smaller guns installed on tripods on the rear. The vehicles ran on alcofuel—“homebrew engines,” the drivers called them, which gave some insight into where that fuel was coming from.

Crouched between sacks, Kane kept alert. Back in his Magistrate days he had been fabled for his point-man sense, a seemingly uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened. It was no supernatural ability, however—just the combination of his five senses making intuitive leaps at an almost Zen-like level.

The road seemed empty, abandoned even, like a lot of the back roads across the territory that had once been called the United States of America. So much had suffered in the nukecaust, and the population had been reduced to one-tenth of what it had been before the war. That left back roads like this abandoned and forgotten, and even now, two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, they remained overgrown and despoiled. There was an irony in that, Kane saw—that it was almost impossible to grow crops on the irradiated land and yet the old roads had become beds for wild grasses.

They were approaching a rise, the splutter of the wag engine loud as it tackled the incline. Kane thought back to how Ohio Blue had described the previous attacks on her freight convoys. “The wags were crippled and left to rot,” she had said, “and my men had been singed by fire, their flesh burned away. Those who had survived had been incomprehensible, babbling about red and amber lights as though they had been attacked by a predark traffic signal.”

He was armed, of course, even though that was not obvious from looking at him. Kane wore a Sin Eater, an automatic pistol, in a retractable holster hidden beneath his right sleeve. The Sin Eater’s holster was activated by a specific flinch movement of Kane’s wrist tendons, powering the weapon into his hand. The weapon itself was a compact hand blaster, roughly fourteen inches in length but able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still been a hard-contact Mag. The blaster was armed with 9 mm rounds and its trigger had no guard—the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would ever be required, for a Mag was judge, jury and executioner all in one man, and his judgment was considered to be infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service at Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand—its weight was a comfort to him, the way the weight of a wristwatch felt natural on a habitual wearer.

When it happened, it wasn’t obvious. Kane’s attention was drawn to a group of black-feathered birds who had been grazing on the scarred soil some way behind them when they suddenly took flight. The birds had moved when the wags approached, but they had returned to their meager feast almost as soon as the wags had passed. But now, a hundred yards down the road where nothing seemed to be passing, the birds took flight once more, circling in the air and issuing angry caws that could be heard even over the sound of the wag’s engine. There was another sound, too, Kane realized. Low and deep, a bass note that vibrated the air and the ground beneath them as its pitch rose. The sound could barely be heard over the spluttering roar of wag engines, but it was there—a tuneless hum, the deep thrumming noise of something mechanical.

“Domi,” Kane said, automatically activating the hidden Commtact that was located beneath his skin along the side of his head. “Pay attention to your six. I think there’s something—”

His words trailed off as he spotted the wispy trail of gray smoke rising against the silver clouds where the birds had taken flight. Not from the road but to the side.

“You don’t need to tell me how to do my job,” Domi was complaining over their shared Commtact frequency. “I’ve stood guard over more than a sack of corn before now.”

Kane tuned her out, watching the plume of smoke as it twisted in the breeze. It was not solid, it was little puffs of smoke being emitted at regular intervals—which probably meant it was an engine of some kind, Kane realized.

“Baptiste,” Kane said, calling on the other member of his field team, “do you see smoke back there, on the road behind us?”

Brigid’s familiar voice piped into Kane’s ear a moment later. “Puff-puff-puff, pause…puff-puff-puff, pause,” she began, copying the beat of the smoke. “Yes, I can see it all right.”

Around him, the wag’s engine growled as it struggled to ascend the hill, speed dropping with every foot it gained. The damn thing was overloaded, leaving them vulnerable on the incline—ripe for ambush. For a moment, Kane could see the whole of the road that they had traveled along stretched out behind him, a strip of grass and dirt and broken tarmac that ran in a perfectly straight line through the sparse fields. From this height, he could see the thing that was following them, too—not along the road but to one side of it, scrambling through the fields to his left where the crows had taken flight. It looked like a boxcar, the kind you would find on an old-style train, its dull metal finish almost perfectly camouflaged by the sky behind it. But this was no railroad train. The metal box swung high off the ground, depending from two pivoting legs that clambered over the uneven ground like a gigantic, grounded bird. Thirty feet high, it was moving at some speed, faster in fact than the three wags that Kane’s crew were protecting.

Kane watched as the strange-looking machine continued forward, getting steadily closer to the back of the convoy.

“I see it,” Domi said, her words echoing over their shared Commtacts.

“Me, too,” Brigid chimed in.

It was at that moment that the strange vehicle unleashed the first of its heat bolts, searing red-amber energy cutting through the sky accompanied by a shriek of parting air.

“Traffic signal,” Kane muttered. “Right.”

The red-hot blast carved a path toward them like a slash of blood spraying through the air.

Chapter 4

“¡Congelar!” Pretor Corcel demanded, his pistol aimed unwaveringly at Grant where the Cerberus warrior was framed in the doorway to the ballroom.

Grant knew better than to argue with a man who had a gun. He raised his hands slowly, making sure not to make any sudden movements. “I’m freezing,” he stated in English. “I’m freezing.”

The doctor who had attended the nightmarish scene had been startled by Corcel’s shout, and he looked up to see the strange man just entering the doorway.

The sharp-suited Pretor held in place, watching Grant carefully. “American?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Grant replied. He saw that the bodies had been removed from the room. More worrying was the fact that Shizuka was nowhere to be seen. The man with the blaster was twelve feet away—probably too far to rush in an open space like this, Grant calculated, too risky anyway. For now at least, Grant would have to play along and hope he could find out just what the heck was happening.

Still holding the Devorador de Pecados pistol on Grant, Pretor Corcel’s dark eyes flicked to the razor-sharp disc that his target held in his hand. “Drop the weapon,” he instructed.

“Okay.” Grant nodded. Then he lowered his left hand, moving it away from his body just slightly before dropping the razor disc. The disc struck the wooden floor with a hollow clang. “That ain’t mine,” Grant said, though he could hear how lame that must sound right now. As he dropped it, Grant studied the man whom he faced, eyeing his smart clothes and the weapon he held on him with professional surety. The man’s blaster was black with sleek lines, compact but of a large bore—probably a 9 mm, Grant guessed. It reminded him of his own weapon of choice—the Sin Eater, side arm of the Magistrate Division.

Corcel ignored Grant’s comment. “Now,” he instructed, “hands up behind your head, you understand?”

“Yeah, I understand,” Grant said, moving his hands as instructed until the fingers were laced together behind his head. He knew this move, had used it himself as a Magistrate and after that. It was the move of a professional, which meant his opponent had obviously had training in controlling people. “I think there’s probably some mistake—”

“You keep quiet and you answer my questions only when asked,” the sharp-suited man told him.

“Sure, you’ve got the gun,” Grant confirmed.

Then Pretor Corcel gave instructions to the doctor to go find his partner and bring her here. He spoke in Spanish, though Grant’s Commtact automatically translated the exchange in real time. The discussion gave little away, but Grant tried to piece together what he could. The man in the suit was addressed as “Pretor” by the other man, Grant heard, or Praetor, another word for Judge or Magistrate.

As the other man left the room, Grant addressed the figure in the dark suit. “You’re a Mag, right?” he asked. “A Magistrate?”

Corcel studied him warily. “Yes—Pretor Corcel,” he said. “You speak Spanish, then?”

“A little,” Grant lied. “Only a few words.”

Corcel nodded sullenly, waiting before Grant with the blaster aimed at him. Grant stood like that for almost two minutes until Corcel’s partner came striding into the room in a suit similar to Corcel’s.

“Pretor Cáscara,” she introduced herself immediately, flashing an ID badge in Grant’s direction, too fast to read.

Corcel rapidly explained the situation to his partner in swiftly spoken Spanish, and Grant began to understand what had happened. It seemed that Corcel had had reports of black men with shaven heads who were involved in a spate of murders, and that Grant fit the description. Cáscara stepped over to the sharp-edged disc that Grant had dropped, kneeling to examine it where it lay as the two officers spoke. Corcel explained that the suspect had been carrying the weapon when he had returned to the crime scene.

“Dumb mistake,” Cáscara lamented in Spanish.

It would have been, Grant thought, except that I picked this up from the people who actually did do this. I think.

“You,” Cáscara said to Grant in lightly accented English once she had been brought up to speed by her partner, “hands down, here, behind your back.” She showed him, crossing her wrists together at the small of her back. “I’m going to cuff you. You try anything and Pretor Corcel will shoot you, okay? He’s a good shot.”

“Top of my graduating class,” Corcel added, his pistol never wavering.

“Yeah, I get it,” Grant said, lowering his hands as instructed. “You’ve got the wrong guy, you realize?”

“We’ll figure that out back at the Sector Hall,” Cáscara told him emotionlessly as she placed a pair of plastic handcuffs on Grant’s wrists. Then she stepped away and produced a pair of latex gloves from a pocket of her jacket, which she slipped over her hands. Along with the gloves, she produced an evidence bag, into which she placed the metallic projectile that Grant had narrowly avoided.

“Had that thrown at me,” Grant explained. “There’s another one of those out there somewhere. Couldn’t see it, though.”

The two Pretors did not respond to his comment.

Once the first evidence pack was sealed, Cáscara returned to Grant, who remained standing close to the open ballroom doors. She reached for the bloodred feather that poked from one hip pocket of his jacket.

“More of these out there, too?” Cáscara challenged him. It was hard to tell with her not being a native English speaker, but Grant thought that she was employing a sarcastic tone.

“Look,” Grant said, “I had a partner here. A friend. We came here together—”

“We’ll discuss that at the Sector Hall,” Corcel cut him off.

“Sure, I just—” Grant began.

“Quiet now,” Corcel said in a warning tone, gesturing vaguely with his blaster. “Don’t make me shoot you.”

“Okay,” Grant said, “I just want to know what happened to her. If she’s okay. Her name’s Shizuka.”

Pretor Cáscara looked up at that from where she had been labeling the evidence bags with a marker pen.

“Shizuka…?” Grant repeated hopefully.

Cáscara nodded firmly just the once. “She’s here. We’ll be bringing her in,” she confirmed. Then she moved closer to Corcel and whispered something to him in Spanish. It was too quiet for Grant to hear, but he guessed he might have inadvertently just turned Shizuka into a suspect. At least she was still alive.

* * *

GRANT WAS TAKEN via secure wag past the bullfighting ring to the local Sector Hall of Justice, a grand building in the center of Zaragoza that housed the authorities. The building was four stories high and stretched the length of a block, with tinted glass in the windows and a basement level housing the garage and firing range. The Pretors—the local equivalent of Magistrates—were based here, and they patrolled not only Zaragoza City but also the state beyond, covering an eighty-mile radius that took them well into the radiation-blighted lands to the south and east.

Once inside, Grant was swiftly processed by a uniformed Pretor—his uniform consisting of flexible armor in black and red, the tailored jacket flaring at the bottom so that it created something approaching a skirt across the hips. The Pretor was armed with a boot knife and had a holster—currently empty—at his hip. Grant could see notches around the high neck of his uniform where a helmet would be secured while on patrol.

After he had been processed—a simple procedure of taking holographs and prints—Grant was taken to a secure, white-walled interview room and left alone to wait. The room featured harsh lighting and contained a single table to which Grant’s right wrist was cuffed on a short chain, along with four chairs, two to either side of the table. Grant waited almost forty minutes until Corcel, the officer whom he had first met in the hotel ballroom, joined him. Corcel’s expression was unreadable as he greeted Grant, pulling a chair across to him before reversing it to sit on, his arms resting across its back.

“Your name?” Corcel asked without preamble.

“Grant.”

“Grant…?”

“Just Grant,” Grant confirmed. “Only name I ever needed.”

“And you are an American, we have already established.”

“That’s right.”

“Whereabouts from?”

“Originally Cobaltville. More recently, all over, but still in that territory.”

“I see. And your purpose for being here, in Zaragoza?”

“Vacation, with a friend.”

Corcel checked something in the little A7 notebook he carried. “And that would be Shizuka, correct?”

Grant nodded.

“And what is your relationship to Shizuka?”

“Boyfriend/girlfriend,” Grant said, eyes locking with Corcel’s, an unspoken challenge there. “Is this going anywhere, Pretor Corcel?”

“Just establishing the facts. Do you know why you are here, Grant?”

“I got an inkling,” Grant admitted, “but why don’t you explain how you see it.”

“You were discovered at the scene of a crime,” Pretor Corcel stated, “the ballroom in the Gran Retiro. You match the description of one of our suspects, which is why you’ve been brought in for questioning. In addition to this, you had certain items about your person that we might expect to find on the perpetrator.

“Do you know what happened in the ballroom, Grant?”

Grant tilted his head to show he was uncertain. “When Shizuka and I arrived the place was full of hanging bodies—I didn’t imagine that, right?”

Corcel nodded. “Go on.”

“I guess there were twenty-two, twenty-four people hanging from the ceiling in nooses,” Grant recalled. “Didn’t know why.”

“So you confirm you were at the scene prior to our engagement?” Corcel checked.

“Yeah. I saw someone I thought was suspicious—three people, all together—and so I followed them while trusting Shizuka to look after the—I dunno what you call them—victims, maybe?”

Corcel looked intrigued. “When you say you saw someone you thought was suspicious, what happened then?”

“I followed them through the service door and out into the back streets,” Grant said, “but they threw something at me—the sharp disc-thing you saw—and escaped before I could catch up to them.”

“I see,” Corcel said, “and could you describe these people?”

Grant nodded. “Yeah, I got a good look at them and I have a good memory for faces, clothes.”

“But you yourself had nothing to do with the bodies you saw?”

“No, sir,” Grant confirmed.

Corcel watched Grant for a few seconds, searching for the truth among his words. Then Grant spoke up.

“You’ve had your chance,” Grant said, “so let me now start answering the questions you should have asked, and we’ll see if we can get somewhere on this—”

Pretor Corcel’s eyebrows rose with surprise.

“Number one,” Grant began, “I’m an ex-Magistrate—what you’d call a Pretor. So I’m one of you.”

“An ex-Magistrate…?” Corcel asked, placing emphasis on the first word.

“Cobaltville Mag Division, but I left,” Grant elaborated. “Little disagreement, but not to do with the law.”

Corcel gestured for him to explain.

“Turns out my boss was a snake—literally—so I found myself in an untenable position,” Grant explained. “Me and Shizuka came here for a vacation—she’s an important muckety-muck in New Edo, and I’ve got my own thing I wanted to get away from. My guess is that we should have been at that ballroom when all the hangings happened, but we were running late—ate later than we planned, didn’t leave the restaurant until almost ten.”

Pretor Corcel’s eyes lit up at this. “Which restaurant was this?” he asked. “Do you think the staff there could confirm you were there when you said you were?”

“I’d hope so,” Grant said. “Guy like me kind of stands out in your city.” So did Shizuka, from what he could tell, Grant mentally added, recalling that he had seen no other people here of Asian descent.

Corcel nodded slowly, pondering the information that the hulking man had given him. It could be true, although it didn’t confirm that the man calling himself Grant was not also the killer. He would need to take this one step at a time.

“So that’s why I followed them,” Grant finished. “Old instincts getting me involved when I didn’t have an invite.”

“I’ll look into your story,” Corcel told Grant, rising from his seat. “You’re going to have to sit tight until then.”

Grant nodded. Despite his frustration he could understand things from this local Magistrate’s point of view. “Just tell me something,” he said as Corcel strode across the room to the door. “Is Shizuka all right?”

Corcel stared at Grant, the professional hardness in his eyes softening for a moment. “She’s a little shook up, but otherwise she seems to be fine. We have her here right now.”

For questioning, Grant guessed. “Just make sure she’s okay for me, all right?” he asked.

Corcel nodded. “I’ll do that.”

* * *

SHIZUKA, MEANWHILE, WAS in a room two flights above from where Grant was being held. She had been checked over by one of the Pretors’ medical staff and now she sat with Pretor Cáscara on a comfortable couch, discussing what had happened in the hotel ballroom.

There was not much that Shizuka could say that she had not already told Cáscara, but she sketched out a rough timescale of the events and outlined the state of the room when they had entered and how she and Grant had discovered the bodies.

“You’ve had a traumatic few hours,” Cáscara said sympathetically. “The clinician here wants to keep an eye on you, to make sure you don’t go into shock. Do you think that would be okay?”

“I should speak to Grant,” Shizuka said.

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” Cáscara assured her. “He’s fine.”

Shizuka eyed the female Pretor warily. “Can I see him?” she asked.

“Soon, yes,” Cáscara promised.

“When?”

“Soon.”

Cáscara left Shizuka then, and the samurai woman was escorted to a safe room—a cell by another name. The room was comfortable and low-lit with white walls and a vase of flowers and a jug of water on a nightstand beside the single bed. It looked like a private hospital room. Shizuka was too tired to argue, but she remained alert for a long time, pacing the room and wondering about Grant.

In the corridor outside the room, Pretor Corcel met with his partner, Cáscara, to share information as they watched Shizuka pace back and forth through a one-way pane of glass.

“My guy says he’s innocent,” Corcel said in Spanish.

“That’s always the first defense, Juan,” Cáscara said dismissively.

“But there’s more to it than that,” Corcel continued. “He says he’s—get this—an ex-Magistrate, US. He’s retired from service, he’s not shy about explaining that, and he happened to be out here on vacation.”

Pretor Cáscara pushed one slender hand through the long bangs of her fringe. “So he’s one of us. Do you believe him?”

Corcel looked thoughtful. “It’s certainly an unusual tactic if he is lying,” he concluded. “What about the woman, Liana? What does she say?”

Cáscara peered through the one-way glass before replying, watching as Shizuka tidied her hair in the mirror that lay on the obverse side of the glass. “She says she’s the leader of the Tigers of Heaven from New Edo,” she said.

Corcel let out a grim sigh. “Their stories match. Did she give you anything else?”

“The name of a restaurant she and the boyfriend were attending when the crime was committed,” Cáscara stated.

“Yeah, I got that, too.”

“What do you think? Are they for real?”

Corcel shrugged. “The man—Grant—is certainly built. And if his story is true, then he’s been trained to kill. He could be our killer—he’s physically capable.”

“But why come back to the scene?” Cáscara wondered.

“To remove evidence maybe,” Corcel proposed. “Something he left behind. Or…”

Cáscara raised a querulous eyebrow as her partner left the sentence unfinished. “Or…?” she prompted.

“Or maybe they really did just bungle into this mess, in which case we’re no closer than we were before to finding out who’s committing these showpiece murders and how, Liana,” Corcel said grimly. “Except that my suspect claims he saw the killers—or, at least, some people he thinks were at the scene at the time of the ‘performance.’”

Emiliana Cáscara shook her head heavily. “We already have over two hundred dead in less than three weeks, Juan,” she said. “If this goes on—”

“It’s unconscionable,” Corcel agreed. “Let’s check their story first, see if it gels with what the restaurant owner remembers. After that—well, we’ll see.”

Chapter 5

Crouched among the sacks of corn in the rearmost road wag, Domi watched with a growing sense of disbelief as the weird machine came trundling across the field toward her, and a fanlike aperture irised open on its front surface. An instant later, the aperture began to glow, before unleashing a beam of red-gold energy across the distance between itself and the convoy.

Domi didn’t hesitate. She leaped up, scrambling across the rear bed of the wag even as the energy beam screamed toward her. It struck an instant later, clipping the port flank of the truck with a shriek, accompanied by a wall of burning hotness that seemed to wash across the wag in a wave.

As the wave struck, Domi dropped down behind a pile of grain sacks, sheltering behind them as the wall of heat caromed past overhead, rolling over the roof of the wag and leaving the sacks untouched.

Domi was a strange-looking woman, an albino with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair, red eyes the color of blood. She was petite and slender of frame with small, pert breasts and bird-thin limbs that she habitually kept on show, wearing only the bare minimum of clothing. For this mission, however, she wore a dark hoodie, its hood up to hide her face, and shorts, her pale legs darkened with a smearing of dirt for camouflage. She had kept her feet bare, preferring to feel the land beneath her than fuss with shoes or boots. Strapped to her ankle was a six-inch combat blade with a serrated edge. It was the same blade with which she had killed her slave master, Guana Teague, back in Cobaltville years before, and she carried it with her like a comfort blanket. Domi had another weapon, too, a Detonics Combat Master with a silver finish, which she wore holstered at her hip in a brown leather sheath.

The wag swerved under the force of the heat blast, one metal side liquefying in a moment until it resembled the remains of a wax candle, the cooling surface creating new patterns in a matter of moments. Behind her, Domi could hear the two men in the cab shout in shock as the heat ray rose the temperature within by a dozen degrees in those instants. One man cursed loudly as the surface he was touching became suddenly too hot to handle.

The wag bumped off the road for a half-dozen seconds, two wheels running along the uneven ground of the field to the right before the driver righted it.

As the wave of heat passed, Domi’s Commtact blurted to life—Kane and Brigid both asking for a status update and whether she was okay.

“I’m fine,” Domi growled between gritted teeth. Already she was unholstering her Detonics revolver, flipping off the safety as she watched the weird box on legs come striding across the abandoned landscape toward the convoy.

The towering box was moving closer, its long legs perfectly suited to traveling across the uneven ground of the surrounding fields, taking ten-foot strides toward Domi and the wag. As it closed in, Domi saw the secondary attachments running up both sides of the mysterious vehicle—twin railguns located on either side of the boxy cabin, belt-fed and situated in the gap between legs and box. The railguns were mounted on swivel balls, giving them a limited range of fire. But it was enough to cover everything in front of the weird, scaffold-like machine.

Domi took aim from behind the cover of the grain sacks, closing one eye and focusing on the aperture as it cycled again. The aperture looked flat when it was closed, interlocking metal shutters in a weblike pattern sealing off the hole. There was a flickering of brightness deep within where something was burning, Domi saw.

That was as much as Domi had time to process before the boxy construction fired again, sending another screaming blast of intense heat toward the wag like a man chucking a spear. Domi narrowed her eyes against the brightness and squeezed the trigger on her blaster, sending a 9 mm titanium-clad bullet toward the box-on-legs as the red-gold beam struck. The bullet was caught in the red wave and it disintegrated, melting down to liquid in less than a second.

* * *

TWO WAGS AHEAD, Kane eyed the weird machine as it charged across the rough terrain toward the convoy. It had already blasted the rear wag, and Kane watched as the wag slewed off the road before returning to the track. He could see that it was losing ground—their attacker’s plan was rudimentary, but that was how the classics worked.

Kane engaged his Commtact. “They’re picking us off from behind,” he shouted, “trying to split us up.”

Brigid acknowledged Kane’s observation with a “hmf” that seemed to say “well, obviously.”

Kane shouted to his driver, “Take us back and circle before we lose the back man.”

The driver—a blond-haired man of twenty with the puppy fat and bright white teeth of a teen—popped his head out of the cab and looked back. “I’ll slow but I’m not stopping, Kane,” he shouted over the roar of the straining engine. “We’ve lost too many people on this stretch of road already.”

“Good enough,” Kane spit, his eyes fixed on the mechanical colossus on the horizon.

As the driver spoke, his partner was clambering out of a roof hatch to operate the machine gun that was mounted just behind the cab. The man was slender with gangly limbs and a prominent Adam’s apple, his shoulder-length hair decorated with twisted ribbons. Wedging himself behind the cab, the man swung the heavy gun around until it pointed to the rear. Then he squeezed the trigger. “I can’t make the distance,” he said with evident irritation as he watched the shots fall short.

Kane glanced at him, then back down the road. “Get behind it,” he instructed to the driver, indicating with a circling motion of his hand. “Get behind it!”

With a shifting of grinding gears, the wag pulled up a slope to the side of the road and the driver began scanning for a clear route on which to comply with Kane’s instructions. “You better not be getting us killed, Kane,” the driver shouted as he fought with the steering wheel. “Ohio won’t never forgive you if you do that.”

“I’ll do my best to avoid it,” Kane shouted back as he watched the mechanical marvel stride closer to Domi’s wag. It was still charging, blasting another red beam of light ahead of it. Between that and his wag was the other wag—the one that Brigid Baptiste was guarding.

Kane raced through the possibilities in his sharp mind, narrowing down his options. He was a veteran of combat, but at that moment, watching the heat beam carve another slice from the rearmost wag, he couldn’t help feeling that they had brought a knife to a gunfight.

* * *

IN THE MIDDLE WAG, Brigid Baptiste had scrambled across the flatbed to operate the twin tripod guns located just behind the cab. She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, dressed in a black, skintight cat suit—in fact a shadow suit like Kane’s—over which she wore a quarter-length denim jacket and thigh-high leather boots with a TP-9 semiautomatic pistol holstered at her hip. She had long, luxuriant red-gold hair the color of sunset, green eyes like twin emeralds and the slender, perfectly defined figure of an athlete. She had a high brow that spoke of intelligence and full lips that promised passion, but in reality Brigid held both of those aspects and many more besides. An ex-archivist from Cobaltville, Brigid had become caught up in the same conspiracy that had seen Kane exiled and her removed from her post, a move that had landed her with the Cerberus organization. Brigid was well versed in hand-to-hand combat and a crack shot, but it was her eidetic—or photographic—memory that was her greatest asset, and the one that had got her into so much trouble back in her archivist days. Like Kane, Brigid was one of the high flyers of the Cerberus operation, and she had been instrumental in a number of their scientific advances. She had partnered Kane more times than either cared to count.

Brigid swung the guns around, watching as the lumbering, artificial behemoth came striding across the uneven terrain toward the rearmost road wag.

The boxy bulk of the unit was long and narrow, curved along its sides with the opening aperture located dead center, the twin railguns situated to the sides, slightly below the center—presumably geared for ground-based attacks rather than air assaults. There was a bank of windows above the heat-ray aperture through which Brigid could see several figures silhouetted. Beneath the cab was a cylinder running the length of the box, welded beneath it and bulging along its length in a series of metal rings. Brigid guessed that this housed whatever was generating the heat beam that their attackers were using to devastating effect.

Two legs were positioned on either side of the cabin box, running higher than the box itself so that they pivoted above it as it walked, swinging the cab where it hung between them by thick lengths of chain. The whole thing had been left in raw metal, giving it a homemade appearance and blending perfectly with the overcast sky.

Brigid watched as the machine blasted again, counting the seconds between each fiery burst. Thirty seconds between blasts, she timed. It’s taking that long to achieve full power again. That’s our window.

She flicked the safety on the left-hand machine gun and pressed down the trigger, sending a stuttering burst of bullets at their fast-moving pursuer.

* * *

WRONG-FOOTED, DOMI dropped and started to roll across the bed of the rearmost wag as it began to glow red with heat. The wag careened off the road again, and this time the driver could not fight it. Suddenly they were cutting through open fields of ash and soil, a clutch of birds taking flight as they were disturbed.

The box on legs followed, stamping across the field in pursuit of the struggling wag. Bullets were hammering against its armored surface from the middle wag, but the distance was too great—too few were scoring hits, and none of those hits were making any difference.

Domi flipped herself back to her feet, snatching up her blaster where it had slipped out of her hand. Then the wag was bathed in that flickering red-amber light as their attacker launched another volley of heat at them.

The rear of the truck heated in a second, a faint glow of red appearing in the center of the drop-down gate at the back. Then, with a clap of bursting tires, the back of the truck sank down into the ground where the back wheels had melted under the assault. Domi was jerked left and right as the wag began to spin out of control, bumping over the uneven ground.

“We’re losing it!” the driver yelped from up front.

Waves of dirt were kicked up as the wag continued forward for a few seconds, ripped from the ground by the ruined axles, before the wag came to a spinning halt.

Domi leaped over the glowing side of the wag as it came to a stop, landing on the churned soil with catlike grace.

Despite her youth, Domi was a seasoned veteran of combat and in peak physical fitness. She scrambled to the front of the wag as the box-on-legs began to power up its heat beam for another blast.

“Get out of there,” Domi shouted, wrenching open the driver’s door. “Get out of there before—”

Both driver and passenger—a man and a heavily tattooed woman—were slumped against the dashboard, blood on their faces and splattered against the windshield.

Domi reached for the driver, a dark-skinned man in a gray undershirt wearing a .44 in a chest rig. “Are you…?” she began, but her words died on her lips as she received no response from the man. He was alive but unconscious.

Before Domi had any more time to act, a stream of 15 mm bullets rattled against the side of the cab, churning up dirt and kicking against the wag’s side like a kicking mule. It was her that they were targeting now, Domi realized as she ducked behind the front of the cab. No doubt these road pirates didn’t want to ruin the crop that would be their haul.

* * *

CRIPPLE THE VEHICLE, disable the crew and then steal the goods—it was a pretty simple plan, Kane saw.

“We need to circle,” Kane told Brigid over the Commtact. “Get behind these scavengers and take them off the board.”

“Roger that,” Brigid agreed. A moment later, Kane saw Brigid’s wag bump off-road in preparation of making a circuit around their attacker. He only hoped that Domi was all right.

Brigid’s and Kane’s wags were both off the track now, splitting left and right to come around and challenge the mechanical assault vehicle. The wags bumped over the fallow fields, dropping down into potholes before rearing up again like scared stallions, their mounted guns blazing.

The wags were rugged, but they were not designed for this kind of treatment. Their cargo shifted and shook on their beds, and Kane’s companion wailed in frustration as one of the guy ropes tore and three sacks of grain went tumbling over the side.

“Leave ’em,” Kane instructed. “When we survive this, we can go back for them.”

The gunner looked at Kane with raised eyebrows. “When?”

“Stay positive, boy,” Kane told him. “No point losing the fight before you’ve entered it.”

Bullets spit from the turret, finding their distance now as the wag closed in on the striding behemoth. In the opposite field, on the far side of the broken strip of road, Brigid was working one of the tripod guns while one of Ohio Blue’s troops took the other, sending short bursts of bullets at the towering monstrosity trudging across the fields. Suddenly, the box-on-legs turned, slowing its stride as it brought its aperture to bear on Brigid’s wag.

“Baptiste!” Kane shouted into his Commtact, unable to do anything else.

Chapter 6

Brigid had been counting off the seconds in her head. It had been twenty-five seconds since their mystery attacker had last fired that cataclysmic ray—and she knew she should have thirty before it could do so again.

As Kane’s warning came, Brigid reached across to the other gunner, a woman in her forties with prematurely graying hair and the deeply tanned complexion of a Native American. “Get down!” Brigid instructed.

The gunner didn’t stop to query the instruction; she just let go of the tripod gun and dropped to the deck behind it. Beside her, Brigid was doing the same.

Then the ray blasted, zapping a melting beam of incredible heat toward the wag, bathing it in boiling red light. Brigid turned her head away from the blast as it washed over the back plate of the six-wheeler. She could feel the warmth running down her right-hand side as the periphery of the beam lashed against her, her shadow suit compensating instantly. Beside her, the red-skinned woman fared less well, spitting a curse as the tassels of her jacket caught fire, then tamping the flames down with swift pats of her hand.

As soon as the beam faded, Brigid was back up to work the guns again. The wag was still moving, bumping across the uneven ground of the fallow field, and it took Brigid a few seconds to adjust her aim.

“Kane, it’s taking them thirty seconds to power up that heat ray,” she said as she drew the tripod cannon around and squeezed the trigger. “That’s how long you have to drop it.”

* * *

“COPY THAT,” KANE acknowledged as his own wag went caroming over the bumpy field. “Hey, Paul,” he called to the driver while his partner worked the turret gun. “Get us closer!”

“Closer? You want closer?” the driver sounded outraged.

“Just do it!” Kane snarled back as he scrambled to the edge of the wag’s flatbed. A moment later, as the wag sped past the towering machine, Kane leaped over the side, dropping into a tuck-and-roll as he stuck the soil. Above him, the boxy construct began firing with its secondary railguns, sending a swift burst of bullets in the direction of the scrambling wag that Kane had just disembarked, drilling 15 mm shells across the roof and side of the retreating wag. The bullets struck like hail, clattering across the metal and drilling through with a sound like clashing cymbals.

The wag swerved left and right behind him as Kane rose from the ground and began to sprint across the terrain toward their towering assailant. Kane was thirty feet away from it now, and this close it looked a lot like scaffolding with a box depending from the chains. The legs were part-built, all girders and tubing with great hinge joints running down the sides, two in each leg plus a whole network of smaller hinges at the ankles to better ensure stability across any terrain. The feet were wide, flat plates, each one seven feet across with a bobbled underside that could find purchase on the uneven surface of the ground.

As Kane ran, the heat beam screamed again, sending another red line at his retreating ride, carving it almost in two. The back end of Kane’s wag tore partially away from the front and the whole wag collapsed in on itself, the wheels spinning uselessly as it sunk down in the middle. A moment later, the driver leaped from the cab, dropping the six feet to the ground where his cab had become raised. The gunner, meanwhile, lay sprawled against the turret, his flesh turned a ghastly red where the heat ray had struck him. He was dead.

Kane continued to run, knowing that he had thirty seconds to reach their enemy before it could fire another heat burst. As he ran, he powered the Sin Eater pistol into his right hand with a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons.

All around, bullets were whizzing through the air, the high mounted railguns firing down on the last of the moving wags while Brigid and her companion fired back from the twin tripods in the back of the rig. Domi, too, was shooting, using her Detonics to take potshots at the enemy’s cab to distract them. From up there, it must have seemed that they were being attacked from all sides—the perfect distraction for what Kane had in mind.

Kane reached the underside of their monstrous attacker, dodging and weaving as more 15 mm bullets churned up the ground in his wake, the right-hand railgun swiveling on its mount to try to get a bead on him. Kane held down his trigger, sending a trail of 9 mm bullets at the closest foot of the walker, searching for a weak spot. The bullets pinged against the armor, ricocheting in all directions but barely scratching the metal.

“Damn,” Kane muttered, easing his finger off the Sin Eater’s trigger and scanning the underside of the towering vehicle for inspiration. There had to be a way to bring it down, had to be some way to crack that armor.

Dancing out of the way of the moving feet, Kane activated his Commtact once again. “Baptiste? What have you got for me? How do we bring this bastard down?”

* * *

BRIGID WORKED THE tripod gun as she responded to Kane. “Find some way to stop the heat beam,” she said.

“Like how?” Kane replied, the note of desperation clear in his voice.

Brigid and her colleague were working the tripod guns mounted on the back of the wag in fits. The whole wag was warm from the effect of the heat beam, and the guns were threatening to overheat. The wag zigzagged across the field, bumping over ruts in the soil and tangled grass as a stream of bullets followed them from the high-mounted railguns, spitting sparks from the metal sides of the wag. One of the sacks of grain burst under the assault, spilling its contents in a cloud of yellow dust.

“Overheat it,” Brigid said in a sudden moment of inspiration.

* * *

“OVERHEAT IT?” KANE repeated as he chased after the machine, which was striding after Brigid’s wag. “How?”

“A weapon like that must throw out a lot of heat to operate,” Brigid reasoned.

Kane’s eyes roved across the metal surface of the walking weapon as Brigid spoke.

“If you can find the source and block it, you could—”

“Got it!” Kane said, spying a dark patch on the back of the dangling cab where wispy steam was emanating. He ran after the retreating vehicle, commanding his Sin Eater back into its hidden holster, and a moment later he leaped onto the swinging left leg as it hurtled past. Clinging there, Kane reached up, using the scaffold-like leg as a ladder, finding handholds and footholds as he ascended the swaying limb of the moving vehicle.

Bullets drummed against the cab above him as Kane scrambled up past the first knee joint, ten feet above the ground. Then he felt the whole vehicle vibrate and the heat beam fired again, cleaving the back from the remaining wag in an explosion of melted metal and tossed grain.

Kane clung tightly to the leg as it swung forward, then came down again, stomping on the edge of the wag where it was melting. Brigid and her companion leaped from the back of the wag as the colossus took another step, crushing the back end of the vehicle. It was obvious that its occupants did not mind losing a little of their spoils if it meant getting rid of the competition.

The cab turned as Brigid reached for the driver’s door. The door was jammed where the metal had become buckled under the assault, and Kane watched helplessly for a moment as his red-haired colleague wrenched at the door. As she did so, the boxy cab of the walker whirred on its hydraulics, drawing around to line up the railguns on the people below.

“Hey, ugly!” The shout was harsh and it came from behind Kane and the walker.

Kane looked down, saw Domi standing there with her Detonics pistol held in a two-handed grip and aimed high at the cab of the walker. The pistol’s silver finish glinted in the overcast light. The pistol bucked in her hands as Domi sent shot after shot into the side window of the boxy cab, firing over and over as the walking machine began to slowly react. The glass fractured, spiderwebbing in an instant but still holding in place.

Kane was close enough to the cab that he heard the voices coming from within. “Turn us around,” a woman’s voice bellowed. “Blast that pale-skinned bitch off the face of the Earth!”

Kane clung on to the leg as the cab swung around, but below Domi was already racing away, keeping up a circuit around her would-be killer as its pilots tried to affix her in their sights. It was a dangerous ploy, but it gave Brigid enough time to get the wounded driver out of her own wag, forcing the bent door open with six hard kicks of her heeled boot.

Kane did what little he could to help, reaching into a pocket of his jacket and priming the device he found there. It looked like a ball bearing, perfectly spherical with a silver finish, roughly two inches in diameter. There was a hidden seam running along the device’s center, and it took Kane less than a breath to find it and twist it, setting the device to detonate. He dropped it then, not really able to throw it the way he would have preferred, and turned his face away as the sphere fell.

The device blew seven feet above the ground, just ahead of and between the walker’s massive feet, unleashing a violent burst of light and sound as if a lightning bolt had struck the earth. The walker was unharmed but its occupants were momentarily dazzled.

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