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Chapter 149
The Obsidian Corps medical facility sat behind three fences and a hill, and its corridors smelled of disinfectant and floor polish.Dominic had never been so glad of a smell in his life. Nothing here was sweet.A field medic had stitched his palm in the helicopter. Eleven stitches. Someone had found him a set of black fatigues and a pair of boots that didn't quite fit. He walked the corridor with Webb half a pace behind him, and every soldier and nurse they passed stopped dead and pressed themselves against the wall.Eleanor had been taken straight to a private room on the third floor. When Dominic looked in through the door, she was asleep under a thin white blanket with a drip in her arm, her short grey hair dark against the pillow.The duty doctor was a colonel with tired eyes and steady hands."She's badly malnourished," he said quietly. "And there's something in her blood we've never seen before. Long-term exposure, years of it. Her liver's struggling. Her memory..." He spread hi
Chapter 148
The rear door of Webb's vehicle was open. The dome light was on.She was curled in the corner of the back seat with Webb's jacket pulled around her shoulders, her bare feet tucked up under her. She was shaking, though the heater was running. Her eyes moved constantly, from the window to the door to the dark trees, like a bird watching for hawks.Then they found Dominic.She shrank back against the far door.He understood why. He stood in the headlights in torn white linen, barefoot, soaked to the elbows in his own blood, his face streaked black with smoke. He looked like something that had crawled out of a fire. To a frightened woman who didn't know her own name, he looked like every nightmare she had ever forgotten.Dominic stopped where he was."Webb," he said, without turning. "Water. And a cloth."Webb put a canteen and a field towel into his hands. Dominic wet the towel and wiped his face slowly, then his neck, then as much of his hands as he could. The water ran pink onto the gr
Chapter 147
Dominic went back in alone.The sergeant offered him a rifle and two men. He took a torch and nothing else."If she comes out any door but mine," he said, "you stop her. Alive.""Yes, my Lord."The chamber was cold now. Wind came down through the broken canopy and stirred the dead filaments of the formation, which swung slowly on its last cable and creaked like a ship at anchor. Glass crunched under his bare feet. He didn't feel it.He crossed to the side passage.The door to the quiet room stood half open. No light showed inside. He switched off the torch, waited until his eyes found the faint grey shape of the doorway, and listened.Somewhere inside, metal scraped softly against metal.Dominic stepped through.* * *The quiet room was as he remembered it. The low table. The two cushions. The warming stone, cold now. The clay pot had been knocked over and lay in two pieces on the floor.The shelf on the far wall had been swung out from the stone on hidden hinges.Behind it was a stee
Chapter 146
Four minutes.Dominic took the stairs three at a time, up out of the smoke and the dying fire, and came out into the alcove at the foot of the spiral stair.The way into the chamber was gone.Where there had always been an open stone arch, a steel shutter now filled the gap from floor to ceiling, painted the same pale colour as the walls. It must have dropped when the lights went out. He hit it with his shoulder. It didn't even rattle.Through it, faintly, he could hear coughing. Someone was crying.He pressed the radio. "Daniel. Who's in there with you?""Yuna, Priya, Reva, Soo-Jin, Lila." Daniel's voice was ragged. "That's all, sir. Marcus and Emma went out through the quiet room. Just before the lights went. Emma said she was taking him to rest."Of course they did. Root wouldn't gas her own people."Every door is steel, sir. I've tried them all."Dominic looked up the spiral stair, into the dark.The chamber's walls were stone and its doors were steel. But its roof was glass, and
Chapter 145
Dominic didn't answer her.He pushed the iron door open another few centimeters, slid through the gap and pulled it almost closed behind him. Beyond it was a narrow stone stair leading down into a darkness so complete he couldn't see his own hand."There's no need to hide," the voice said. A second speaker crackled somewhere below him, so that she seemed to follow him down. "The lenses see heat, dear. You're a very bright shape on my screen. Rather beautiful, actually."He went down the stairs by touch, one hand on the wall."Fifty-one days," the woman went on, comfortably. "Do you know what you cost me? A War God doesn't come cheaply. Three conversations with three different people, spread across two months, each one dropping a single crumb. You followed them so well." A soft laugh. "You told my people you were a man who notices when three data points converge. You never asked who placed them."At the bottom of the stair, he stopped."Who are you?" he said quietly."Someone who gave
Chapter 144
Webb was already running."Hale, Brandt, Okafor, with me," he snapped, sliding down the slope toward the vehicle hidden in the trees below. "Sergeant, you hold the gate. If that window flashes again, or if you hear a single shot, you go in. You don't wait for me.""Sir, who's in the van?"Webb didn't answer. He didn't know.He only knew that for four years Dominic Kane had never asked him for anything twice, and tonight, for the first time, the War God's signal had come with blood on the window sill.The engine caught on the first turn. Webb drove without headlights, down a logging track he had walked on foot two days ago, the trees flashing past in shades of black and darker black. Far below, through the branches, two red taillights crawled toward the outer road.He put his foot down.* * *The door of the east room was oak, five centimeters thick, with an iron lock older than Dominic.He didn't waste time on it.He tore the bandage from his hand, wound it twice around his palm again
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