Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (57 page)

LIZARDS

It wasn’t even locked.

The door, I mean.

The room on the other side also wasn’t a lab…which was a relief. Sort of.

Or, if it was, it was more the computer lab variety…and a much more high-tech version than Dante’s sweatbox on the ship had been, with her tubs of squids and whatever else made it smell like the ass-end of a sewer.

It also didn’t have a bunch of dead bodies in cages like the lab we’d visited earlier that day, so that was a definite bonus. I didn’t see any naked seers or humans at all, in fact. Instead I saw a row of monitors that ringed a dark room, flickering with different sets of images around a console seat in the middle where a small body with gray hair sat, facing away from me. She didn’t look over when I walked in but sat perfectly still in her padded leather swivel chair, her nearly white hair molded to her small head like a helmet.

Above, I saw my face with the prosthetics in a fish-eye lens. I saw myself glaring up at that camera, my eyes glowing from behind dark contact lenses.

The image was frozen, my scowl and my aleimi fixed on that crystal screen.

Realizing that the feed was probably already on its way to their security station, I didn’t wait. I finished crossing the room with deliberate strides.

“Bridge!” Dalejem practically shouted my name. “Fuck! They’re coming! They’re coming right now…do this thing and get out!”

He lingered by the door.

I was still enough in his light that I could feel he’d stayed there to get me out in the event the door locked behind me, or they dropped some kind of grid over the room. He already had the security panel outside the door cracked partway open. He continued to yank on the organic casing as he shouted inside to me.

“Get out of there, Alyson…” he said, emotion in his voice. “You’ve got one minute…or I’m carrying you the fuck out!”

I nodded, but scarcely heard his words.

The screen next to the one where my face still glared up in anger had just flickered into life. My eyes went there, and once they had a darker feeling crawl over my gut, what I realized had to be fear. Fear likely mixed with a splash of trauma from earlier that day.

On that second screen over the leather chair, Dragon’s face appeared.

Clear-colored irises––eyes so much like Revik’s eyes.

They stared up at me above that organic muzzle that wrapped the back of his black hair. They seemed to stare directly at me…then I realized they stared up at the same God’s eye camera that I had. The same one from the image of me on the adjacent screen.

I saw Dragon’s eyes smiling up at that camera, got an absurd shiver that made me wonder if he was smiling for me…right before he did more or less the exact same thing I had just done, kicking in the metal door.

Instead of freezing, the image continued to play.

I saw his light rip open the lock.

No wonder the door hadn’t been locked when I reached it.

The inside camera took over when he entered the room. The woman with the white hair held up her hands, her mouth moving rapidly. There was no sound.

He must have been saying something to her in return, either in his mind or with his mouth, because she paused as if listening and then talked again, seemingly louder that time or perhaps more emphatically, if the amount her mouth opened was any indication. I could see her talking faster too, even though her expression remained the same.

Then something happened.

I saw her go limp in the chair, her eyes glazed.

She looked for all the world like a machine that had been turned off.

While I watched, she began to move again, but something was off with it that time, something I had trouble putting my finger on at first. It wasn’t that she moved more stiffly exactly, but she moved strangely, her gait almost too precise, her expression too empty, her eyes focused on the wrong place…her hands too still.

I watched as she got up out of her chair and walked directly to a wall.

I saw her do something to that wall, what might have been hitting in a code or some kind of security password…she was too far out of the main part of the screen for me to see for sure, and it was too dark. I fought to record it with my own headset so we could look at it later, but something was interfering with the damned thing, so I took snapshots with my light as well, knowing my seer memory wouldn’t capture all of the motion, but enough of the images that we’d have something to look at at least.

The next thing I knew, she was walking back to the leather-backed chair, still moving like a zombie. Only now, she held something tightly in one hand. I watched her, bewildered as she slumped down and held out the thing she’d been carrying to Dragon.

It was the leather bound book we’d gotten out of that bank vault in New York.

“Dugra a’ kitre…”
I muttered.

I was still watching when the image fuzzed into static.

Then it went completely dark.

I stepped forward, thinking I might look for some way to capture what I’d just seen…but before I could reach the console, the display kicked back to life, showing a text marker in Prexci that told me the recording was erasing itself, even as a red square flashed slowly in one corner. As I looked up at that flashing red mark, it never once occurred to me that it wasn’t doing exactly what it said it was doing.

That must have been pre-programmed into the little display, as well.

It also showed me a time stamp. Less than an hour ago.

Dragon had been here less than an hour ago.

Which meant we must have just missed him in the corridors. Or if he really was a shapeshifter, like Dalejem said, maybe he’d walked right past us.

I looked down. The white-haired woman swallowed in that leather chair still hadn’t moved. She hadn’t made so much as a sound.

By then, I was pretty sure I knew why that was.

I rounded the back of the chair, looking down until her face came into view.

Immediately, I winced, flinching back a step.

“What?” Dalejem shouted, still working over the panel. “What is it?”

“She’s dead,” I said, grimacing without looking away from her face.

Powder burns darkened her hair and most of her mouth. Watery blue eyes had bugged out from the force of the shot, which might have been an organic bullet. Shot in the mouth, definitely with her lips around the barrel.

“…Gunshot,” I added. “Looks like she did it herself. But I’m pretty sure she had help.”

“Heil bloody Hitler,” he snapped, yanking on me openly with his light. I felt pain on him as he did it and winced in spite of myself. “No one will miss that psychotic seer, Alyson…trust me. Your husband told me about those experiments––”

“Jem,” I began, shaking my head. “Don’t.”

“My point is, however it happened, it’s done. Get the fuck out of there. Now!”

I felt my light react to the emotion in his, as well as the smack from his aleimi and his pain, but I didn’t take my eyes off her for a few seconds more. She looked almost posed. Like she’d fallen one way and then had been lovingly rearranged.

Near her hand resting on the console lay a data chip.

A full organic, it pulsed right at the tip of her dead fingers, a living thing.

On impulse, I leaned down, snatching it up. Only in retrospect did I realize that couldn’t have been an accident, either. One or the other of them had left it for me.

In those few seconds though, I didn’t think about that…nor would I have cared.

I was feeling the urgent thing Dalejem was yelling about by then.

“Now!” Dalejem shouted. “They’re trying to jam the door…they’ll drop the gas if they get past me. Goddamn it, Allie…get out of there! There’s too many of them…”

I tore my eyes off that sightless face, still bothered by something I could see there.

Well, something besides the obvious.

Something in her expression, maybe. Or something in the lack of it. I remembered her wandering around like a robot, apparently doing Dragon’s bidding.

The lights on, but no one home.

Like Revik, in Dubai.

Feeling that sick feeling in my stomach worsen, I scanned her, maybe to try and convince myself this was something different. I found myself toying with the idea that the body could even be fake. Some kind of set up, to make us think Dragon manipulated her around before he killed her. But the more I looked at her with my light, the more I had my doubts.

It was definitely her. The light markers were breaking down around her physical form, but I could see where they’d hooked into her body. The more physical-related ones were still there. She’d been alive, even if she’d been a corpse-rider, like Terian.

“Allie!” Dalejem shouted. “Please!”

Taking another snapshot when I felt a harder, more specific pulse of fear off his light, I turned on my heel, moving fast.

I was running by the time I reached the door.

Once I stepped outside of it, Jem grabbed my arm in strong fingers.

I watched him grip a handful of the squids with his other hand––the same organic filaments he’d been manipulating inside the panel seconds earlier––and before I could ask, he ripped down and sideways with his hand, tearing them out of their mooring. They separated from the inside panel with a wet, sickening sound. Shaking his hand out without letting go of me, he left the squids on the floor where they writhed into one another like angry worms.

I watched him wipe the slime off his hand onto his combat pants.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked him, bewildered. “Didn’t you disable the security functions on this hall at least?”

“That was surveillance,” he growled. Grunting, he lowered his voice, unslinging the rifle. “Along with memory…I hope. Images of us. It might slow the humans down. Long enough to allow us to slip through.”

He turned as he said it, and then we were both heading back down the corridor at a hard jog. I clicked back into military mode for real, right around the time his words reached me.

We had a lot of ground to cover to get back outside.

“We’ll need the secondary cloaks…” he muttered.

“It won’t give us enough time,” I reminded him.

“It’ll have to.”

I didn’t argue. I knew what that meant, as well as he. I’d be using the telekinesis to get us out of there if we did that. Which yeah, didn’t thrill me. But we’d both known it was a possibility if things didn’t go smooth for whatever reason.

“Dragon was here,” I told him. “I think he killed her.”

I didn’t glance over, but I felt his light react.

“We’ll talk about that later,” he said, noncommittal.

I nodded, once.

“Take some of my light,” he said next, touching my arm without slowing his pace. I could almost see the end of the small corridor, where it met the residency center. “Do it, Bridge. You might need it. We can’t afford to have you tapping out.”

I glanced at him, quirking an eyebrow. “We’re not there yet, brother.”

“Do it anyway,” he urged. “Before either of us gets too distracted. Or shot. Or our necks broken by that crazy fuck, Dragon. That would be distracting.”