City of Light (Outcast 1)

Chapter 1

It was the whispering of the ghosts that woke me.

I stretched the kinks out of my bones, then glanced at the old metal clock on the far wall to confirm what I instinctively knew. It was barely six p.m., so night hadn’t fallen yet. The ghosts were well used to my seminocturnal patterns, so something had to be wrong for them to wake me early.

I swung my legs off the bed and sat up. The tiled floor chilled my feet and the air was cool, though slightly stale. Which probably meant one of the three remaining purifiers had gone offline again. It was a frustrating problem that had started happening more often of late, thanks to the fact that parts for the decades-old machines just weren’t made anymore. And while there was one place where I probably could scavenge the bits I needed to repair them, it was also something of a last resort. Chaos was not a place you entered willingly. Not if you valued life and limb.

But if one of the purifiers had gone down again, then I either had to risk going there or close off yet another level. I might be able to survive short-term on foul air, but I still needed to breathe.

Gentle tendrils of energy trailed across my skin, a caress filled with the need to follow. But it was a touch that held no fear. Whatever disturbed the ghosts was not aimed at our bunker deep underground.

I slipped on my old combat clothes and boots, then grabbed my jacket and rose, shoving my arms into the sleeves as I walked across to the door at the far end of the bunk room. A red warning light flashed as I neared it.

“Name, rank,” a gruff metallic voice said. Over the years I’d named it Hank, simply because it reminded me somewhat of the cranky custodian who’d run the base exchange. He still haunted the lower floors, although he tended to avoid both me and the children.

“Tiger C5, déchet, lure rank.”

I pressed my thumb against the blood-work slot. A small needle shot out and took the required sample, but the door remained securely closed. Even though I’d adjusted the power ratios and cut several levels out of the security net, it still took an interminably long time for the system down here to react. But then, with only one hydrogen-fueled generator and the banks of solar batteries powering the system during the day, everything was slow. And I couldn’t risk firing up a second generator when I needed at least two running at night to cope with the main defense systems. I had only three generators in total and—with parts so scarce in the world above—I had to be careful. That meant conserving the system where I could and doing continual maintenance.

The scanner finally kicked into gear. After checking my irises, the door beeped and swung open. The corridor beyond was cold and dark, the metal walls dripping with condensation. Ghosts swirled, their little bodies wisps of fog that drifted along in blackness.

The sounds of my footfalls echoed across the stillness, hinting at the vastness of this underground military bunker. And yet this was the smallest of the three bases humans had used during the race war—a war that might have lasted only five years but had forever altered the very fabric of our world.

The shifters—with their greater strength, speed, and the capacity to heal almost any wound—should have wiped the stain of humanity from Earth. But humans had not wasted the many years leading up to the war, and the bioengineering labs, which had initially produced nothing more than body-part replacements for the sick and dying, had gone into full—and secret—production. These labs had created not only an enzyme that gave humans the same capacity to heal as the shifters, but also the designed humanoid. Or déchet, as we’d become known.

It said a lot about humanity’s opinion of us that we were given a nickname that meant “waste product.”

Most of us hadn’t come from human stock, but were rather a mix of shifter and vampire, which gave us most of their strengths and few of their weaknesses. We’d been humanity’s supersoldiers—designed to fight and to die without thought or feeling—and we’d almost turned the tide of the war.

Almost.

But not all of us had been trained strictly as soldiers, just as not all of us were unfeeling. There were a few who’d been created with more specific skills in mind—chameleons able to alter their flesh at will, and who’d been tasked with either seduction and intelligence gathering or assassination.

I was one such creation.

Of course, while humans might have designed us to be frontline soldiers in their battle with the shifters, they’d never entirely trusted us not to turn against them—even if they’d made that all but impossible through a mix of chemical and medical interventions. Which meant there’d been areas in this base that, as a déchet, I’d been banned from entering.

But as the sole survivor of the destruction that had hit this base at the war’s end 103 years ago, I’d made it my business to fully explore every available inch. The shifters had, in an effort to ensure the base could never be used again, blocked off all known access points into the base by pouring tons of concrete into them. While this had taken out sublevels one to three, it still left me with six others—and those six were huge. Which was hardly surprising since this had once been the home to not only a thousand-strong complement of déchet, but to all those who had been responsible for our creation and training.

I passed through several more security points—points that, like the one at the bunkhouse, were fixed and unalterable—and eventually made my way into the tight, circular stairwell that led to the surface level. These stairs had been one of two routes designed as emergency escapes for the humans in charge of the various sections of the Humanoid Development Project, so its presence had been unknown to all but a few and it had been designed to withstand anything the shifters could throw at the base. As it turned out, it had also withstood the concrete.

It had taken me close to a year to find this tunnel, and a couple more to find the second one, but they gave me much-needed access points to the outside world. It might be a world I ventured into only once or twice a month—generally when food or equipment supplies were low or when the need for company that was flesh-and-blood rather than ghostly became too strong to ignore—but that didn’t assuage the need to know what was going on above me on a regular basis. Being able to venture out, to watch from shadows and distance, was all that had kept me sane in the long century since the war. That and the ghosts.

I reached the surface level and pried open the hidden escape panel. Sunlight poured in through the dome over the building’s remains, shielding it from the elements and further decay. This level had once contained the day-to-day operational center of the HDP, and the battered remnants had become part of a museum dedicated to the history of a war no one wanted to see repeated. Of course, it was also a museum created by the shifters, so it emphasized both the foolishness and waste of war and also the evils of gene manipulation and bioengineering. The body-part industry and all the benefits it had once provided were now little more than bylines in history.

And though fewer and fewer were visiting the museum these days, one of the most popular exhibits still seemed to be the old tower that held all the remaining solar panels. They might be an antiquated and curiously inadequate technology to those alive today, yet the panels continued to power not only the systems that had been preserved on this floor for demonstration purposes, but all of mine.

The ghosts surrounded me as I walked across the foyer, their ethereal bodies seeming to glow in the fading streams of sunlight bathing the vast open area. As ever, it was little Cat who kept closest, while Bear surged forward, leading the way.

Both he and Cat had always considered me something of a big sister, even though we déchet shouldn’t have even understood the concept. Our closeness was primarily due to the amount of time I’d spent in the nursery unit in the years leading up to the war. Even during the war, those lures not out on assignment or in a recovery period were put to use in the nurseries; our task had been to teach and to protect the next generation of fighters.

Because despite what the shifters had believed, there’d been only a finite supply of us. Our creators had discovered early on that while the use of accelerant increased the speed of physical growth, it did not enhance mental growth. Déchet might have been designed to be nothing more than superhuman soldiers able to match the strength and speed of shifters, but sending your rifle fodder out with the body of an adult and the mind of a child really defeated the purpose of their creation. So while they’d halved our development time, they hadn’t been able to erase it completely.

I came to the tower and unlocked the thick metal doors that led to the rooftop stairwell, then unlatched the silver mesh behind them. There was enough shifter in my blood that my skin tingled as I touched it, but it wasn’t as deadly to me as it would have been to a full-blood. I slipped through the mesh and ran up the old concrete stairs, breathing air that was thick with disuse and age. Visitors wanting to see the ancient solar technology did so from the special observation platform that had been built to one side of the tower rather than accessing the panels through the tower itself, simply because the old tower was considered too dangerous. For the last couple of years there’d been talk of tearing it down before it actually fell, but, so far, nothing had actually happened. I hoped it never did. I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do if it was knocked down and I was left with only the decaying generators to power my underground systems.

We reached the metal exit plate at the top of the stairs. It was also silver, but it was so scarred with heat and blast damage that it no longer looked it. I drew back the bolts and pushed the plate open.

The children flung themselves into the glorious sunset, and that alone told me there was nothing dangerous nearby. But there was no shaking the years of training, even though the need for such measures had long since passed. I drew in a deep breath and sorted through the various scents, looking for anything unusual or out of place. There was nothing. As I climbed out of the stairwell, a slight breeze tugged at my short hair, and I looked up to see the dome’s panels had fissured yet again. It was an odd fact that this section of dome failed regularly. It was almost as if the old tower wanted to feel the wind and the rain on its fading bones. It just might get that wish tonight, because the heaviness of the clouds so tinted by the sun’s last dance of the day suggested it wasn’t going to be a good night to be out on the streets.

Not that there was ever a good night to be out on them.

I zipped up my jacket and walked through the banks of solar panels to the old metal railing that lined the rooftop. The walls of Central City rose before me, and, beyond them, a sea of glass and metal that shone brightly under the strengthening glow of the UV light towers perched on top of the massive metal D-shaped curtain wall. There were also floodlights on the rooftops of the many high-rises, all of them aimed at the streets in an effort to erase any shadows created by either the buildings or the wall itself.

Lying between Central and the bunker’s dome was the main rail line, which transported workers in glowing, caterpillar-like pods to the various production zones that provided the city with the necessities of life. But with dusk coming on, there was little movement in the yards, and the city’s drawbridge had already risen, securing Central against the coming of night.

The inhabitants of Chaos—which was the long-accepted name given to the ramshackle collection of buildings that clung to the curved sides of Central’s curtain wall—had no such protection. It was an interconnected mess of metal storage units, old wood, and plastic that was ten stories high and barely five wide. The upper reaches bristled with antennas and wind turbines that glimmered in the wash of light from Central’s UV towers, but the lower reaches of Chaos already lay encased in darkness. Lights gl

eamed in various spots, but they did little to lift the gathering shadows.

And it was in these shadows that the vampires reigned supreme.

The shifters might have claimed victory in the war, but in truth, the only real winners had been the vampires. While they’d never been a part of the war—or of society in general—their numbers had certainly grown on the back of the war’s high death toll. They were creatures untouched by the basic needs of the living. Water, power, sanitation—the very things humanity considered so vital—had no impact on the way vampires lived their lives, because their lives consisted of nothing more than hunting their next meal. And though they preferred to dine on the living, they were not averse to digging up the dead.

Before the war, most cities had relied solely on the UV towers to stop the vampires. But the cities of old had been built on a network of underground service tunnels, which gave the vampires access and protection. With most of these cities lying in ash and ruin after the war, the shifters had taken the chance to rebuild “vampire-proof” cities for both victor and vanquished to live in. So not only were there massive curtain walls and UV towers around every major city, but services now ran aboveground, in special conduits that had been “beautified” to disguise what they were.

Chaos, unprotected by either lights or walls, and still sitting on many of the old service tunnels, was regularly hit by the vampires—but neither the inhabitants of Chaos nor those in charge of Central seemed to care.

Of course, vampires were no longer the only evil to roam the night or the shadows. When the shifters had unleashed the bombs that had finally ended the war, they’d torn apart the very fabric of the world, creating drifting doorways between this world and the next. These rifts were filled with a magic that not only twisted the essence of the landscape, but also killed anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in their path. That in itself would not have been so bad if the Others had not gained access into our world through many of these rifts. These hellish creatures—creatures the humans and shifters had named demons, monsters, and death spirits, although in truth no one really knew if they were from hell or merely another time or dimension—had all found a new and easy hunting ground in the shadows of our world.

But at least one good thing had come from their arrival—it had finally forced shifters and humans to set aside all differences and act as one against a greater foe.

And yet humanity’s fear of vampires had not been usurped by this newer evil. Even I feared the vampires, and I had their blood running through my veins. It didn’t make me safe from them. Nothing would.

Ghostly fingers ran down my arm and tugged at my fingertips. I followed Cat as she drifted toward the left edge of the building, my gaze scanning the old park opposite. The shadows growing beneath the trees were vacant of life, and nothing moved. Nothing more than the wind-stirred leaves, anyway. I frowned, moving my gaze further afield, studying the street and the battered remnants of what once had been government offices, trying to uncover what was causing the little ones so much consternation.

Then I heard it.

The faint crying of a child.

A young child, not an older one, if the tone of her voice was anything to go by.

She was in the trees. At dusk, with the vampires about to come out. An easy meal if I wasn’t very quick.

I spun and ran for the stairs. The ghosts gathered around me, their energy skittering across my skin, fueling the need to hurry. I paused long enough to slam down the hatch and shove the bolts home, then scrambled down the steps three at a time, my pace threatening to send me tumbling at any moment.