City of Light (Outcast 1)

I shivered and shoved my imagination away. It wasn’t like déchet were even supposed to have imaginations, let alone feelings. But while it was true that in those déchet designed purely to be soldiers or assassins, the limbic system—or at least the parts of it that controlled emotions and sexual responses—had been medically “curtailed” upon creation, the same had not been done to those of us who were created as lures. We’d been designed as bait, and a being without feeling, one who couldn’t respond to emotional cues and who felt no emotion—be it pleasure or fear—wouldn’t have survived long in any sort of culture, let alone been sexually attractive to those we were sent to seduce.

Could I love? That was a question I’d often pondered, and one I’d never found an answer to. I certainly couldn’t breed; our creators had ensured that right out of the box. Or test tube, as was the case.

I swept my gaze across the ruins again, then—ignoring my increasing reluctance to enter this place—jumped down from the wall and headed for the remnants of the road. There was no immediate response from the Carleen ghosts, though a sudden sharpening in the tension that ran through the air suggested they were well aware of me.

Cat and Bear pressed close as I picked my way through the rubble. It seemed they disliked the feel of this place just as much as I did. We finally reached the road, though walking here wasn’t really any easier, given what little remained of the asphalt after one hundred years of weather eating at its surface was pitted with yellowed weeds and mutated trees. At least there weren’t any rifts in the immediate area—though that didn’t mean there soon wouldn’t be. There didn’t seem to be any logic—or, indeed, any compliance to the laws of gravity or nature itself—in their movements. Neither wind nor gravitational pull had any influence on them, and they could just as easily drift against a gale-force wind as they could leap upward to consume birds, shifters in winged form, or even whole aircraft. I had no idea what happened to humans or shifters caught in rifts, but I’d seen the magic within them mangle the DNA of the flora and fauna they passed over, creating monstrosities that were neither and yet both. I very much doubted such a thing was survivable. Certainl

y the poor beasts who’d become part stone or tree hadn’t lasted long.

Central—and presumably other cities in the proximity of the rifts—had made several attempts to destroy them, without success. These days they just attempted to track them, providing evacuation warnings where necessary—though, given the erratic nature of the things, those warnings were often useless.

A large tree loomed in the middle of the road, its gnarled trunk covered in a moss that glowed with an odd luminescence. I edged around it, taking care not to touch the moss, knowing from past experience that as pretty as the stuff looked, it leaked a substance that acted like acid when it touched your skin. Unpleasant and painful didn’t even begin to describe the few hours that had followed that particular exploration.

We walked on, moving deeper into Carleen. The watchfulness grew, crawling across my senses, itching at my skin. But the Carleen ghosts made no move to approach me, and that was unusual. It was almost as if they were afraid . . . but what did the ghosts of this place have to be afraid of? It wasn’t as if there was much in this world that could threaten them, and while there were vampires who lived off energy rather than flesh, they wouldn’t be active in the middle of the day. And the rifts certainly couldn’t affect them . . . could they?

Given what I’d seen rifts do to plants and animals, it was certainly possible.

The broken road began to slope up toward the center of Carleen. If the ghosts were anywhere, they’d be there, gathered in the vast remains of the shelters under city hall. It was the place where most of them had found their deaths.

Energy of a different kind crawled across my skin, its touch dark and somewhat unpleasant. It wasn’t the energy of a rift, not exactly, and yet it felt somewhat similar. I paused and looked left, scanning the shattered building remnants that rimmed a bomb crater. The sensation seemed to be ebbing from the base of that crater. I walked across and stared down into it. It was so deep that all I could see was darkness—a darkness that seemed thick enough to carve. For no good reason, I shivered and backed away from the rim. I had no idea what lay down there, and it wasn’t something I wanted to discover. Not unless I absolutely had to, anyway. Even Cat and Bear seemed reluctant to investigate, and given their love of a challenge and exploring new things, it spoke volumes about the wrongness of that darkness.

We continued on up the hill. The buildings around us fell into even more disrepair, until there was very little left but a sea of concrete and stone rubble interspersed by the occasional rusted metal strut that had been twisted into weird and wonderful shapes either by the force of the bombs, or by the rifts themselves. It was a somewhat surreal experience—almost as if I were walking on an alien landscape. Especially since the luminescent moss seemed to be more prevalent up here. I paused at the base of a monument to some forgotten general, and looked around. We were standing in the middle of what once had been a large city square. Government buildings and small eateries had lined this place, but all of them were little more than dust and memories now. To my right lay another cavernous crater—this one caused by the three bombs that had wiped out not only the government officials who’d taken refuge within the thick walls of city hall, but also everyone who’d hidden in the shelters underneath it. The ghosts were there. Their energy crawled across my senses, a touch that was as dark as it was dangerous.

I frowned, but nevertheless continued on. The Carleen ghosts stirred restlessly, but made no move to either attack or flee. They were waiting. Judging.

I stopped at the edge of the crater. This one, unlike the other, wasn’t wrapped in shadows, although the bottom of it was so deep I couldn’t pick out what lay there. But I could imagine, given the number of people who had died here. Their bones, even after a hundred years, would probably be meters deep.

“People of Carleen,” I said softly, “I need your help.”

Their energy stirred, tinged with disbelief.

“A little girl was found here several days ago,” I continued. “A ranger was with her. I need to know how she got here.”

Anger exploded, fierce enough to knock me back several feet. Cat and Bear flung themselves around me, but the attack didn’t happen. The ghosts of Carleen might be angry—murderously angry—but they weren’t angry with me.

Not yet, anyway.

But to know what was happening here, I needed to be able to garner more than just emotion. I needed to see these people, talk to them properly, and that meant joining forces with little Cat. I might have an innate ability to hear the whisperings of the dead, but it would take more than that to talk to those who’d once lived here. Carleen had been a human city, and that one fact placed these dead beyond both my seeker and communication skills. Lures might have escaped most of the DNA interventions and restrictions that had been placed on our soldier brethren, but our creators had certainly made it impossible for us to read their thoughts. I had no idea if they’d also made it impossible for us to kill a human, because I’d never had to try. But in the five years our world had been at war, I’d never heard of a lure turning on their creators. Given that soldier déchet had been rendered incapable of harming a human, it was likely similar restrictions had been placed on us.

But Cat had been created in the months before the war had erupted, when the rush to create more rifle fodder had led to greater use of growth accelerants and all sorts of other shortcuts. While she’d been destined to become a soldier, neither she nor Bear—nor any of the other, littler ones who’d been in my care that day, in fact—had had their limbic systems altered in any way. Which meant, thanks to her tabby-cat heritage, she was highly attuned to all things supernatural. These ghosts might be little more than energy and emotion to me, but for her, they were fully fleshed beings.

“Cat, I need your help to communicate.”

A mix of excitement and trepidation spun around me. What we were about to do was dangerous—for me, more than her. To converse with the human dead, I had to immerse deep into Cat’s energy, all but becoming a ghost myself—and if I stayed in that state too long, I would actually die.

Still, the need for answers was far deeper than the fear of death. “Bear, keep watch.”

I sat cross-legged on the stony ground, then closed my eyes and held out my hand. Cat’s energy settled into my palm, then began to seep into my skin, into my body, creating a connection so strong that it was hard to tell where my energy ended and hers began. At the same time, a chill touched my outer extremities and began to creep slowly inward. It was the chill of death; when it claimed my heart I would die. The clock had begun its countdown.

I opened my eyes and saw what Cat saw. Thousands of people—men, women, and children—were gathered within the crater, some of them so solid they almost looked flesh-and-blood real, others little more than insubstantial scraps of frosted air. I scanned them until I saw a small group standing slightly apart from the others. The officials, I thought grimly. Leaders then, and leaders now, if the body language in the two groups were anything to go by.

My gaze settled on the tallest of the separated dozen. “I need your help, as I said.”

“And why would you expect any help from those who have been abandoned and forgotten?”

“You’ve not been—”

“Then why has no one come to bury our bones? Why has no priest ventured here to bless our spirits and help us move on?” His voice was low but oddly rich and definitely not unpleasant. “You cannot expect to receive what you cannot give.”