Cry For Tomorrow (34 page)

“Great! Now, let’s get out of here.”

We all turned, intending to head for the doorway, until Rainor called. “No! Over here. This
is
a palace after all and there has been more than one royal personage that needed to make a fast exit over the years.” He grinned mirthlessly at us as he pushed aside a large tapestry decorating the back wall. “There are stairs—don’t fall!” he warned as he disappeared into the dark recess. “Last one through close the door,” echoed his command.

The air in the tunnel was hot and musty-smelling, but it didn’t take us long to run down the three flights of stone steps even in the dark. First to reach the bottom, Rainor slammed his shoulder into the door, letting in fresh air and the gloom of late afternoon.

“This way,” he called softly as we passed through a door that had been hidden in the greenery at the base of the tower. “I chose the landing pad under Selena’s apartments on the chance that things might not go well with our interview,” he laughed dryly. “Unfortunately, when you have to deal with my sister, that happens way too often.” He held up a hand, signaling us to wait.

“Ben!”
He nodded his head, indicating that he wanted the other man to follow. Together, they slid along the side of the building and disappeared around the corner.

“Halie, what are they doing?”
whispered Kelly as she huddled against my side.

Before I could answer, Rainor’s head appeared at the corner of the building and he was signaling us to follow.

“Come on,” I whispered as I took a firm grip on my sister’s arm to keep her safe at my side. I threw a quick look behind us to be sure that Jake and Jennie were following before breaking into a run to catch up to Ben and Rainor. We barely slowed when we turned the corner of the building and nearly tripped over the collapsed bodies of two guards lying against the wall. We jumped over their sprawled legs and raced toward the flitter and the hatch that Ben was holding open for us.

“Wait,” Jake hissed at Jennie. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back to the side of the fallen guards.

“Hurry, we don’t want to fall behind,” Jennie gasped.

“I’ll only be a minute!” Jake hurriedly ran his hands through the guards’ pockets and rolled the bodies just enough to reach the weapons that had been trapped under them when they fell. Tucking the tasers under his waist band, he took the precaution of covering them with his shirt-tail before nodding to Jennie. “Got ‘em. Let’s go!”

There was no further challenge and Rainor had the flitter in the air in minutes.

“How much of a head start do you think we’ll have?” asked Jake as the flitter buzzed between the buildings and headed out over the open water. Taking advantage of their pilot’s distraction, he passed one of his purloined weapons into Jennie’s hand. “Just in case,
”
he whispered in her ear.

“That depends on how long it is before someone finds the guards, but I doubt that it will be much.” Rainor expertly banked the small flitter and slid sideways between a pair of buildings. He barely cleared the tips of the masts of a small fleet of sailing ships on the other side before gaining some altitude.

“How do you plan to get us back into the over-world,” Ben asked.

“I’m betting they’ll be watching the over-land route I usually take, but don’t worry,” Rainor assured us, “I do have an alternate route.”

A nagging doubt had been gnawing at my mind since we’d encountered the rogue agent, Harris, at the palace and I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. Determined to get to a place where I could more easily read their faces, I forced my way into the small space between the men. “I hate to be the voice of doom and all, but are you sure that we can entrust this gem to our government? Everything I’ve seen them doing in the last six months points to something rotten in the higher echelons. “

“She’s right,” agreed Jake. “How do you know, for sure, where any of these people really stand on things? They may even be part of this conspiracy to bring the aggressive ghouls through. All we really know right now is that it’s quite possible the government on over-world is just as interested in gaining control of these violent ghouls to boost the ranks of their own armies as the Source is. If they let the worlds merge in a way that allows the ghouls to come through like this, all hell will break loose, and we’ll all be left trying to survive in it.”

Ben nodded. “You’re right. It’s looking like there’s been a whole lot of betrayal going on here, on both sides, and it’s up to us to ensure that no one is allowed to manipulate this event into a disaster worse than the original.”

“Well I’m glad that you’re all in agreement,” said Rainor, “because I have a plan.”

“Then I think it’s about time you enlightened us all,” Ben answered for everyone.

“Okay.” Rainor nodded his head in satisfaction. “Things at home have been looking real suspicious for a while now, so, as I mentioned earlier, I took the precaution of making an alternate plan with Karol. If everything went according to plan then she has already moved all of the freaks she can get to out of the city and onto one or the other of the communes lying in the wilderness outside of the city. She’ll be waiting to hear from me.”

“Well, at least some of those poor people are out of reach of the agents, but how is this going to help us?” Jennie asked him.

“Because we need them to complete our mission,” Rainor told her. Seeing our worried looks he went on, “I have friends on the Council who, fortunately for us, are not all loyal to Selena. When we first heard the rumors about the super-crystal we decided that the prudent thing would be to make an alternate plan just in case she became uncontrollable and I was forced to take it from her.”

“We determined that if we could have the crystal energized by a psi, then we would be able to break it into smaller gems that can be controlled by a collection of the freaks. This would allow them to dampen the effect as the two worlds draw together, slowly releasing the gases that will neutralize the ghouls and allow a gentle merging rather than a collision that will rupture the curtain and result in massive earthquakes—”

Whatever else he was going to say was forgotten when the flitter suddenly lurched sideways and dropped toward the waves lapping at the shores of the island.

“Everybody hold on. We’re under attack!” Rainor jerked the nose of the small ship up and angled away from the pair of flitters closing in from our right. Keeping the flitter flying low over the waves, he hastily began tapping in a code on the communicator.

“It’s not much further now,” he assured us as he swerved to avoid another blast of fire from the pursuing ships. The nose of the ship came close enough to the water to cover the windows in salt-spray before he threw his whole body into bringing the ship around to the left and nearly in reverse.

The water beside us exploded and, like a miniature tsunami, it rose above the flitter. Too terrified to even scream, I grabbed hold of my sister and held on as the tower of water resolved into a horde of ghouls.

The walls of the flitter vibrated with the sounds of laughing and delighted howling as the ghouls ignored it and pounced upon the two pursuit vessels. The largest and surely the ugliest of the ghouls leaned over our flitter, placing its one great eye close to the windshield and
winked
at Rainor.

With their prize wrapped in watery limbs, the horde sank back into the ocean.

“Friends of yours?” gulped Jake.

“Yes.” Rainor laughed. “The specters owed me a favor.”

Returning to a higher altitude, we continued our flight over the ocean and the dozens of small cays scattered in the wake of the big island for nearly an hour. The sun had dropped below the horizon before Rainor brought the flitter to a lower altitude and returned to skimming the waves.

“Okay, everybody hang on, we are about to make a major change in direction,” he warned. Spinning the steering wheel hard, he brought the flitter about in a right angle to the direction we’d been traveling.

I was trying really hard to remain calm when I leaned against the side of the flitter and stared down. “The water looks really shallow down there,” I noted. Even in the pale glimmer of moonlight, I could see the shimmer of white sand under the shallow waves, and the very solid white of the coral reef suddenly thrusting into the air before us.

I
nearly choked, trying not to scream, when I realized that Rainor was aiming the flitter at a glowing shadow deep under the reef. I remembered to breathe again when the nose of the little ship slid effortlessly under the wall of coral and into the glowing mouth of a cave.

“We’re flying all the way this time,” Rainor told us belatedly. “This tunnel will take us to the village on the coast where Karol will be meeting us.”

There was a concert of relieved sighs as we all released the breaths we’d been holding.

Everyone was trying to relax a little, but I noticed that no one had taken their eyes off the windows. The water surrounding us was glowing from the millions of tiny phosphorescent creatures living in the nutrient-rich water, and it was alive with swimming phantoms and fish-like ghouls of so many different varieties that I quickly lost count. Some bumped against the windows or sides of the slow moving vessel, but most continued on with whatever business they were about without taking notice of us.

“Why are there so many phantoms gathered here?” Jennie asked our pilot as she returned the stare of the bug-eyed phantom plastered against her window.

“There’s a strong magnetic current in the area that is attracting them. They can sense that the time is near.” Rainor steered around an especially large cluster of ghouls. “But they don’t really understand what’s happening, or why, they’re just reacting.”

The water suddenly changed color, becoming a rich, golden color, and a shimmering wall of dark water rose to block the channel.

“Okay, folks, this is our exit,” Rainor warned us as he aimed the nose of the flitter directly at the wall.

I know that I was not the only one who grabbed hold of something, just in case. But the frame of the little flitter barely shivered when it struck the wall. There was a resistance as if we were flowing through thick mud, but the sensation was short-lived.

My ears popped with the sudden change in air-pressure and I was thrown forward in my seat as the ship emerged into a channel of deep blue water on the other side.

I was relieved when I saw Rainor pull back on the steering wheel and aim the nose of the flitter into the bright water overhead.

The flitter erupted in a foaming wave of water and squirming phantoms and came to a stop, gently bobbing on the quiet water just beyond the surf line. Like moths to a flame, our escort of phantoms fluttered into the light, their shimmering bodies dripping rainbows across the horizon. We all let out a sigh of relief when Rainor cut the engines to a soft purr.

The mass of our ship bobbing gently on the water was creating small wakes that washed shoreward, only to be shattered in a froth of morning sunshine and white water against the rotted hull of a half-sunken ship. Blackened with age and rot, her hull still bore remnants of peeling paint and the name,
Southern Belle,
in faded letters along the side that now lay facing the sun. Not to be halted by this talisman of the past, the waves parted and rolled on, expiring on the gleaming white sand beach beyond.

We humans may have been overwhelmed by the scene that greeted us, but the phantoms that had escaped from under-world in our wake were not. Delighted to be free in the sunlight and a fresh morning breeze, they frolicked like children on the first day of summer vacation. Swooping from sky to wave, they disappeared, only to reappear a moment later dripping with water and sand and rainbows. Their acrobatics lightened the mood and brought smiles to our faces.

Rainor nudged the throttle and let the ship drift until it was parallel with the shore. In minutes, we’d floated clear of the wreckage and were in sight of the beach and a line of sand dunes rising pristine as new-fallen snow. The scene was marred only by the wind-blasted walls of concrete that jutted from the waves of sand, solitary survivors of a half-century of wind and storms.

Silenced by these markers of death and loss, none of the passengers of our small flying machine spoke when Rainor aimed the nose of the craft into a narrow inlet at the north end of the beach. The only signs of recent habitation we could see were the small fishing boats anchored in the inlet that we passed as we drifted toward a short pier jutting from the shore a hundred yards into the channel. A small flitter similar to our own bobbed on the far side of the pier, but Rainor ignored it and let ours slide in beside a small skiff with cracked and peeling paint of red and blue.

“That was some ride,” Jake said with a groan as he pushed his shoulder against the hatch door. The vacuum seal broke with a soft sigh as it swung open. Leaning out the door, he caught hold of a dangling rope swinging from the pier and tugged on it. A soft
thump
warned of our proximity when the flitter touched the side of the dock.

Jake jumped clear of the hatch and turned to grab the frame, holding it as steady as was possible while the rest of us climbed out. Even the dog and frogg jumped without hesitating this time.

“Wow, I would be just as happy if I never have to ride in one of these things ever again,” gasped Kelly. Shivering, she stopped long enough to take her jacket from the pack she was dragging behind her. She shrugged into it as she resumed following the animals along the dock.

I was as glad as my sister to be on solid ground again, but our arrival also meant that we were just that much closer to the conclusion of this mission. Frowning, I shook back my hair, mildly annoyed by the long locks being tossed about my head by the light wind that was sweeping down on us. There were so many things I had to work out still. This whole trip had been taken with the intention of gathering facts, but nothing had been what was expected. It seemed to me that the more I’d learned about this whole merging business and the two factions involved, the more doubts I had.