City of Light (Outcast 1)

Bear made a happy little noise and sped off to complete his mission. I walked across to the ranger and knelt beside him. His pulse was still erratic, but it seemed stronger. Maybe his natural healing abilities were kicking in.

Which meant I’d better get him downstairs and restrained. I’d been in more than a dozen shifter camps during my time in the war, and I’d witnessed the fate of captured déchet. I had no desire to have such destruction wreaked on me.

I dragged him up onto my shoulders again and headed for the stairs. A half dozen little forms drifted ahead of me, but most of them stayed behind to keep watch over both the security systems and the few remaining vampires who still prowled outside.

Which was odd. The vampires were smart enough to realize when their prey was beyond reach, and they’d attempted to breach this building often enough in the past to know that once the complete system was running, there was no getting through it.

So what was it about this ranger and the child that made them desperate enough to keep battering the walls and flinging themselves at the lasers?

Or did they, I wondered, remembering that odd darkness I’d sensed behind the vampires, have little other choice? Were they being controlled by something—or someone—else?

That was a terrifying prospect if true. But how could it be? It wasn’t as if anyone—human or shifter—could actually communicate with them. I’m sure vampires did have some form of language, but it certainly wasn’t one the rest of us could understand.

Maybe Penny would know what was going on—although to be honest, it didn’t matter if she didn’t. My task now was to fulfill my promise to her, then get them both out of here—and as fast as possible. Whatever they were involved in, whatever trouble dogged their heels, we didn’t need it. The world had buried and forgotten us, and I very much wanted to keep it that way.

I made my way down the stairs and into the rarely used darkness that was D tunnel. My footsteps echoed against the metal floor, a sharp ta

ttoo of sound that my little flotilla of ghosts happily danced to. As we neared the end of the tunnel, the metal flooring gave way to undulating concrete, evidence of how close this tunnel had come to being filled. I ducked through the half-collapsed doorway into the foyer of level four, the area that had housed the main medical facilities for the bunker’s combatant déchet divisions. Several of the rooms closest to the tunnel that led up to level three had been flooded by concrete, but the rest of this level had survived intact. The medical equipment—although undoubtedly out-of-date by today’s standards—still worked. Why the shifters hadn’t destroyed these machines along with all the equipment in both the creation labs and the nurseries, I had no idea, but I’d thanked the goddess Rhea many a time over the years for that one piece of luck. I might be able to heal myself as well as any shifter, but there were still times that using a machine was infinitely better. Like when I’d fallen from the damn museum roof and broken my leg. The machines had turned a week of recovery into a day.

Penny swung around as I entered the room, and her relief was palpable.

“You’re here.”

I raised an eyebrow as I lowered the ranger onto one of the mediscan beds. I stripped off the remnants of his torn and bloodied shirt and tossed it in the nearby garbage chute, then laid him down. The soft foam enveloped his body, and the bed instantly began to emit a soft beeping sound—his heartbeat, amplified by the light panel above.

“You were told I would be. Why would you expect otherwise?”

“Because people lie.”

Yes, they did, but it was unusual for someone so young to say that with such surety. “And who has been lying to you? Jonas?”

The light panel shimmered as I pressed several buttons. Jonas’s biorhythms came up—his brain activity was high. Either he was close to waking, or he was having some pretty vivid dreams. I glanced down at his face. His eyes weren’t moving under their closed lids, but that didn’t mean anything. I pressed another button. Metal clamps slid over his ankles and right arm. I might have been bred to be as strong and as fast as most shifters, but he was a ranger, lean and muscular. It was better to be safe than sorry.

I set the scanner in motion, then glanced at Penny. She was studying me with solemn eyes. “Who lied to you, Penny?”

“The man.”

“What man?” I said patiently.

“The man who killed my family.”

I glanced at the crisscrossed mass of scars that decorated her arms, and again anger washed through me. “Why did he kill your family?”

She half shrugged. “He just did.”

“Did Jonas or the police catch him?”

“No.” She hugged her arms across her chest, as if she was trying to comfort herself. Yet there were few tears in her eyes and no emotion in her voice as she asked, “Is Jonas going to be okay?”

I glanced at the scan results. No major internal damage, and aside from the broken arm, no major limb damage. “I think so.”

“He was poisoned, you know.”

I blinked and looked at her again. “Poisoned?”

She nodded. “He told me. He said we had to get back to Chaos quickly, because only Nuri could heal him.”

Chaos. The one place on Earth I really didn’t want to go. And it wasn’t a reluctance that stemmed from the fact that its inhabitants were a broken mix of thieves, murderers, whores, and drug gangs, as well as Central’s unwanted or forgotten, all of them trying to scrape by the best way they could. No, it was the sheer and utter closeness of it all. Everything and everyone literally lived on top of one another; there was no space, no air, hardly any light, and certainly little room to move. I’d been there only once, but I’d wanted to run screaming from it after only a few minutes.