Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (102 page)

“Agreed,” he said.

Balidor felt Jon’s light wrap into Wreg’s, even as he moved to stand closer to him.

For a long time after that, none of them spoke aloud.

Nor did they stop trying to contact anyone they could find.

I walked fast along the wall, trying to stick to the trees even as I mulled over what made the most sense, in terms of finding my way out of Beijing. Given that I had to get to a place where I could transmit, I couldn’t use the same exit as Revik. The airport was still inside the zone where all communication links were being monitored.

Jem and I tossed around a few secondary exits.

Even then, we’d had a pretty good idea that Revik and I might need to split up.

I was relatively sure that what made the most sense for me at this point was to get far enough away from the fighting and Shadow’s army as possible, then call ‘Dori and the others for pick up, in a place we hadn’t actually mapped.

Someplace outside of the area controlled by the communication networks of the Dreng.

I’d already left the old part of the City behind.

The wall around the Lao Hu compound continued to stretch out next to me, but I knew I was well into the “new” northern border as they still called it, even though this portion of the wall had stood there for several hundred years.

The new wall had been built by the Lao Hu themselves, while the human Imperial Family still lived inside the City. That had been a few hundred years before the communists came to power, when the human authority remained largely in the hands of an academic bureaucratic class and the royals themselves.

The addition of the higher wall, which encompassed the massive gardens that Revik walked through to find me along with several lakes and a fair bit of arable land and housing, had been built to increase the territory of the City to better accommodate the Lao Hu.

Even way back then––well before official First Contact occurred between the seer race and the West and back when seers were still thought of as mythological creatures by anyone outside of China itself––the Imperial family treasured their growing stable of Chinese seers.

When I’d lived in the City, the “new” quadrant had been where most of the humans and non-infiltrator seers lived. It had also been where most of the crops were grown, and where they housed their water and most of their hydropower.

It was where the children went to school. Where their hospitals and markets lived.

Beyond the wall on that side, meaning to the north, there was another lake.

Beyond that was a river. The Nanchang, according to the map I’d seen.

I fought to decide yet again if I should try to contact the Lao Hu before I left. Meaning directly, via someone on the other side of that wall.

For now, I had my headset off.

I wondered if there was some way to pass a message to someone within. There would be other doors out here, I knew. Doors I might be able to find, if I was careful. Now that the construct was down, I knew I might have a sporting chance of using the higher parts of my light, at least. I might even be able to use my light to talk to Voi Pai herself.

Like it or not, I was still connected to them.

I knew Revik was right, though.

I was still too close to Shadow’s major deployments.

I needed to wait, to get out of the circle of channel-screening surrounding the City––and preferably out of Beijing itself––before I started sending up any great big flares about who and where I was. Revik had been absolutely adamant on that point.

To him, it had zero to do with intelligence concerns. From what Revik said, Shadow’s people would
hunt
me if they knew where I was…or even if they knew I was anywhere near the City. He said that would have been true even if I hadn’t just brought down their whole damned network. He hadn’t soft-pedaled that message at all.

He’d been zero-bullshit crystal clear.

They hated me.

Pretty much the whole of Shadow’s army hated my guts. No lingering sympathies remained even among the religious fanatics, nor from those who in the past thought I might be brainwashed by humans. No sympathies remained with anyone who’d known me when Revik had led that army under Salinse.

All of that was gone, he said.

Completely and totally erased.

They hated me like a religion now, possibly from something woven in the construct itself. A few hated me to the point of obsessive, homicidal rage, he informed me.

I knew he’d said it like that so I wouldn’t underestimate his words.

Even so, it hurt, and not only because I could feel flickers of how that hate had affected him while he’d been there, living inside their world.

I didn’t have time to think about that either, though.

I didn’t have time to think about Revik at all. Not in terms of the last things he’d said to me. Not in terms of what I’d felt off him, or the alien lights that had left imprints on parts of his aleimi as well. Some part of me wanted to obsess on all of it, to know details I knew I didn’t really want to know. Some part of me wanted to pick apart his final words to me, too…to make more of them…or less of them…than how he’d probably meant them.

Some part of me obsessed on the ambiguity there, on any gaps it could find between the different things he might have meant. Some fearful, masochistic side of me wanted to believe the worst of it, maybe just to prepare myself.

That same part of me heard his words as goodbye.

But I couldn’t think about that.

I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about any of it.

But yeah, I was thinking about it anyway.

Right up until when gunshots rang out in the early morning air.

I ducked in instinct, letting out a low gasp as I melted sideways and deeper into the trees. Even then, my first thought was of Revik…until it hit me that the shots came from my side of the wall, that Revik was long gone, and probably already underground.

Whoever this was, they were firing at me.

I stumbled as I began to run, grappling with the shoulder bag as I lengthened my strides over the uneven ground. Scanning the horizon, I aimed my feet for a denser cluster of trees past the last edge of the wall.

I fought to remember the geography here, what I’d studied with Jem over that map.

The moats were far behind me. I was too far away from the exit point I told Revik about. I’d walked in the opposite direction, fearing running into Shadow stragglers.

There was that river in front of me.

I tried to remember how far away it would be from here.

Fighting with the shoulder bag as I ran in the green dress, I yanked out the second gun right around when I reached that denser cover. Pressing my back into a larger tree, I grabbed an extra magazine, wedging it in the waistband of the dress before I shoved the satchel behind my back and out of my hands’ way.

Holding up the gun, I clicked the trigger twice to deactivate the safety right before I peered around the trunk, looking in the direction from which those original shots came.

Nothing. I couldn’t see anyone.

Even as I thought it, something stung me in the side of the neck.

Not from the direction of the original shots.

From the east. My right.

Something hit into my flesh, hard, making me gasp.

It stung like fire as soon as it got there. Reaching up with my free hand, I yanked it out, squeezing off three shots from my gun in the direction from which it came. I did both things without thought, adjusting my position around the tree so I’d have cover on both sides even as I looked to the west and north, making sure they didn’t have someone waiting on those sides, too.

They’d fucking driven me here.

They used the gunfire to drive me to that damned shooter in these trees.

All of that ran through my mind in less than a heartbeat.

I was still gripping the gun as the liquid started coursing tangibly through my blood. I could already feel it warping my aleimi.

Only then did I look down at what I held in my hand.

Panting, I stood there for a few seconds, feeling my beating heart carry the poison to other parts of me, feeling it spread out through my body and limbs as I stared down at the orange-tufted dart, focusing on the striped barb still carrying a thin layer of my blood.

“Fucking
whore!”
a voice snarled, from the trees to the southeast, maybe forty yards away.

It had to be the shooter. The one who hit me with the dart.

I knew that voice. I knew it.

It was Ute.

That time, I didn’t think.

Muttering under my breath, I yanked my back off the tree.

I didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t wait. The dart would knock me out if I waited.

I wasn’t Revik. I had to run.

I ignited the headset with a thought command even as I did, moving fast, almost due north as I fought to wind myself deeper into those trees. Still running between trees, gripping the gun in one hand, I sent a thought command to Balidor.

Nothing. I didn’t even get static.

I tried Jem next. Then Wreg. Jon. Jorag.

Finally I tried Jasek, thinking he might be closer.

On all of them, I got nothing but dead air.

It hit me after I’d cycled through the list of names a second time, then a third, that the silence wasn’t a matter of them not answering.

The signal was being blocked.

That had to be from Ute and her little pals too.

“Shit,” I muttered, even as I ignited the bare edges of the telekinesis.

I was pretty sure the drug had already gotten too far into my system for that, though. I struggled to grasp those higher structures with my light, clenching my jaw as I fought to concentrate, to even get my consciousness high enough to feel them.

My lower-level sight was already being affected, of course…but truthfully, my lower-level sight had been shit lately anyway. I knew Jem had noticed. He’d commented on it a few times, that something was off with me there. He’d thought it was exhaustion.

I hadn’t really wanted to think about what it was.

In any case, I’d learned to rely on Jem for most of the lower stuff.

I’d focused mainly on using those higher structures of mine when we’d worked at hunting the network seers, or while we’d been searching for Dragon. Those higher structures seemed untouched by whatever was wrong with me, but then, they seemed to operate no matter what was going on with me down here.

I did that again now, trying to get above the drug, above whatever that cloying blindness was that was hitting me with increasing regularity down below.

I continued to move through those woods as I did, although not as fast.

I didn’t let myself slow down and fuck with my light for long, however.

I couldn’t.

Turning, I made up my mind. Sprinting through the trees, I increased the length of my strides, accelerating faster even as I did my best to keep to the darkest part of the tree line. Ahead of me, I could already smell water; the lake outside the wall must be close. I could see the end of the wall now, too, the high, crazily-steep corner of the hundred-foot stone boundary that blocked the sun around the edges of the Forbidden City of the Lao Hu.