City of Light (Outcast 1)

Although I couldn’t see them, there were ghosts here. Ghosts whose energy felt as odious as the darkness itself; it was almost as if this place had infected them, made them into what it was.

Which made very little sense at all.

I frowned and took another step forward. The heavy darkness slid around me, a sensation not unlike the caress of silk against bare skin, but somehow unclean. Then, with little warning, it gave way and lifted.

I blinked and looked around. The crater’s base was strewn with rubble, bones, and refuse. And, in one corner, spinning on its axis, was a small, dark globe of shimmering, sparkling energy.

The fear crawling in my stomach exploded through the rest of me. That globe was a rift. Stationary, visible, and outputting a different sort of energy from the other rifts I’d come across, but a rift nevertheless. Penny had come through here, through it, if the Carleen ghosts were to be believed—and I did. There was no other reason for her to be here. No other way for her to get to Carleen without their having seen her.

But a rift . . . I backed away but hit the thick wall of shadows and was forced to stop. I hissed and tried to remain calm. Penny had come through this place. Where she had come, I could go.

But Penny had been stained by darkness—possibly this darkness. I didn’t want that darkness in me. Didn’t want it to even touch me.

I closed my eyes and weighed the terror of approaching—entering—that rift against the need for answers. I could walk away now and no one would ever know—no one but the Carleen ghosts. If they’d remained around to witness my retreat, that is.

It was tempting—very, very tempting.

But then I saw the disintegrating features of my little ghosts, heard their screams as the Draccid gas that was fed into our air systems ate at their little bodies. Could feel the weight of them in my arms as Cat, Bear, and I tried—and failed—to get them out of the nursery and save as many as we could.

We hadn’t known it was useless, that there was no safety to be found anywhere in the bunker. Not until the Draccid began eating at me, anyway, and Cat and Bear had crawled into my arms to die.

But I’d sworn, in the long months of my recovery, to never, ever let another child suffer if I could at all help it, and that was a promise I had no desire to break—not even now, faced as I was with whatever terrors might wait on the other side of that rift. Besides, I might have been called many things during my years as a lure, but “coward” had never been one of them. It wasn’t a title I wanted to earn now.

I clenched my fists and forced reluctant feet forward. The rift’s energy slashed at my skin, its touch sharp enough to draw blood. I bit my lip and drew a gun, flicking off the safety as the whips of power wrapped around me, drawing me closer, hastening my steps into that spinning orb.

I couldn’t have stopped now even if I’d wanted to.

The orb began to rotate faster and faster. Air spun around me, thick and foul and filled with dust, growing stronger and stronger, until it felt like I was being pulled into the heart of a gale. A dark gale, from which there was no light, no life, and possibly no escape.

Only the fact that Penny had somehow escaped not only from wherever she was being held, but from the orb itself, kept me from panicking, from fighting to be free.

The darkness of the orb encased me. Energy burned around me, through me, until it felt as if it were pulling me apart, atom by atom; it studied me, moved me, then, piece by piece, put me back together again.

Then the energy died, the whips holding me disintegrated, and I was spat out into an entirely different type of darkness. One that had a wooden floor, and where the air held the thick scent of perfume and sex.

Then pain overwhelmed everything else, and I shuddered, gasping for breath and kneeling on all fours, unable to move, sweat and blood dripping from my face and streaming down my arms to puddle on the floor beneath me.

The wounds on my arms, I reflected absently, looked like knife cuts—just as the scars on Penny’s arms had.

She hadn’t been attacked with a knife. Those scars had come from traversing the false rifts many, many times.

What the hell was going on?

To understand that, I needed to move. To explore where I’d been dumped. But moving was going to hurt; hell, even breathing hurt. It wasn’t like I had many other choices, though. Kneeling here, bleeding and sweating, wasn’t going to get me much in the way of answers.

I gritted my teeth and pushed to my feet, my breath a hiss of air as the shadowed room did several mad laps around me. For a few minutes, I did nothing more than stand there, battling to keep my knees locked and my body upright.

Then, as the pain eased, I looked around. The room was large and rectangular, with no windows and only the one door at the far end. Even from here, I could see the heavy padlock. Oddly, the lock was on this side, not the other, meaning it was designed to keep everyone else out rather than something in.

There was little else in this room beyond dust and cobwebs, and certainly no indication that anyone had come through here recently, much less a little girl.

I frowned and looked over my shoulder. The globe hovered above the floor, but it was less obvious in the shadows of this room. Its energy was muted, indistinct, as if all the fire had gone from it. A result of my using it, perhaps? Or was it naturally muted on this side—wherever the hell this side was? That was a question in urgent need of an answer, but first I needed to recover my strength.

I sheathed my weapon, then staggered over to the wall and leaned against it. After closing my eyes, I focused on my breathing, on slowing every intake of air as I reached the calm and peace of my healing state.

I have no idea how long I remained there. Healing could take minutes or it could take hours, and in this silent place of dust and cobwebs, it was rather hard to judge the passage of time.

When I finally opened my eyes, I felt renewed. The wounds on my arms—and no doubt those on my face—had healed, leaving no trace of the scars that had littered Penny’s body. I still stank of sweat and blood, but there was little I could do about that. Not until I got back home, or at least stole some clothes from somewhere.