Dragon City. James Axler

Sinclair looked at him, the way his body had become more like skin wrapping over bones these past few weeks. “Blue’s people?” she asked as she stepped closer to the gap in the window and peered outside.

       Farrell shook his head briefly. “I don’t think so. See there? Look.”

       Sinclair peered through the gap in the window, feeling the thin draft of air stabbing against her face with the constancy of a knife. It was late morning out there, the bright sun burning against the ruined landscape. Bushes and ferns lined the center strip of the old road, their leaves fluttering in the breeze. One clutch of bushes rustled, and Sinclair watched as a white cat came bounding out of them chasing after some insect or other, its prey’s wings glistening with the rainbow sheen of oil on water as it took flight.

       It was quiet after that, quiet and still, but Sinclair could still hear the noise of the drums.

       “You hear that?” Sinclair asked, tilting her head unconsciously, the way a dog might. “Music.”

       To her it sounded like the drumbeats of a marching band on parade, and it sounded real distant. It was like hearing the ocean before you could see it, that constant batting noise as the waves crashed against the shore, the heartbeat of the world.

       Farrell looked at her, eyes narrowed. “I don’t hear anything,” he admitted with confusion. They had been holed up here for more than a month now and he had noticed how sometimes Sinclair would stop and listen to something he couldn’t hear; sometimes he would catch her drumming her fingers against the arm of a worn-through chair as she took a break from her exercises. He watched her now as she continued to listen to the noise, watched as her hand reached up to touch her face, the strawberry-shake-pink insides of her dark fingers playing across that lump she had right in the middle of her forehead. It looked like a blind boil to Farrell, but it had been there a long time, never quite emerging or retreating the way a boil usually will. He hadn’t thought much about it; for the past forty-two days he hadn’t thought about much of anything if he could very much help it, just waited and hoped and prayed for Lakesh or someone else from the Cerberus hierarchy to get back in touch with them and call him and Sinclair home.

       “You can’t hear that?” Sinclair asked, her eyes still fixed on the slit in the windows. “It’s getting closer—it’s getting louder.”

       Farrell peered again out at the street, watching that point where he had seen movement before, where he thought he had seen a figure disappear into one of the tumbledown houses along the street. “Music?” he clarified. “I don’t—”

       Then a figure appeared, pushing its way through the undergrowth that had taken over the road in the past two hundred years. Farrell had fallen silent automatically, watching as the figure pushed through the plants. The figure wore a fustian robe in a dirt-colored brown, the hood over his head, pulled low to hide his features, but Farrell could see the rough salt-and-pepper beard that daubed his chin. He had wide shoulders and he moved with a certain heaviness—a big man, then, powerfully built. A moment later another figure appeared behind the first, this one slimmer but wearing an identical robe, hood low over the face. The robes were largely shapeless, going down past the knees like a monk’s habit, but Farrell could tell that this one was a woman from the way she moved her hips. Something glinted on the breast of the robe, a red shield like the Magistrates used to wear when they had guarded the villes, back before the fall of the baronies.

       “They’re Ullikummis’s people,” Farrell identified. “We should probably—”

       Before Farrell could finish, Sinclair was on her feet and had scampered over to the door in three quick steps. She moved like a jungle predator, her tread silent and fluid, the movement admirably economical. There was a gun there, a refitted Colt Mark IV. Sinclair checked the little eight-shot pistol swiftly, assuring herself the clip was home, and Farrell watched as she flicked the safety off.

       “Sela, I don’t think we should do anything that’s going to attract their attention,” Farrell said, keeping his voice to a low hiss.

       Sinclair glanced at him. “Come on.”

       Then, before Farrell could voice further complaints, Sela Sinclair was out of the door and creeping out past the broken wall of the lobby toward the main door to the house. Getting up, Farrell followed. Unlike Sinclair, he was not particularly adept in combat situations, and would much rather keep well away from the strangers. Still, if he had to face them with anyone at his side, better Sela Sinclair than being teamed with one of the Cerberus cooks or Mariah the geologist, neither of whom was much use in a firefight.

       Slowly Sinclair pulled the front door to the house back on its ancient hinges. Beyond, the once-immaculate front lawn looked more like the bottom of an aquarium, fronds and ferns jutting out of the churned-up earth. Bradley had been a casualty of the nuclear war that had ravaged the United States more than two hundred years before, and it had been long since lost, an untouched artifact from another age. For Sela Sinclair, a woman born in the twentieth century and cryogenically frozen for two centuries before being discovered and revived on the Manitius Moon Base, it was like stepping into the past half-remembered. Things out here were familiar, yet they seemed strange and ghostlike, as if a forgotten world had come back to haunt her.

       Pistol raised, Sela Sinclair stepped out onto the porch, its wooden boards groaning in complaint at her weight. She turned to Farrell and gave him a silent look of warning, indicating the creaking boards beneath them. Farrell nodded.

       Outside, three house lengths away, the two hooded figures moved through the undergrowth. They were not being especially stealthy from what Farrell could tell, but just hacked their way through it, two Stanleys searching for their Livingston.

       Sinclair edged forward, hunkering into herself as she stepped off the porch and out onto the overgrown front lawn. She was wearing dark clothes, a sleeveless vest-top in a black that had washed out to a green-gray, combat pants and sturdy boots. Farrell wore his Cerberus operational uniform, a white one-piece jumpsuit, but he had augmented this with a dark green windbreaker that blended—passably if not well—with the junglelike flora all around. He followed the sec woman as she made her way to the property boundary, passing a rusted pipe that had once formed the exhaust of an automobile, using the plants for cover, her eyes never leaving the hooded figures that approached.

       Sinclair stopped behind a clutch of sprouting reeds that had reached over seven feet in height, nosing at them with the muzzle of her gun to see the street. Farrell joined her a moment later, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, pulsing in his ears. The robed figures were moving efficiently along the street, checking left and right without slowing. Their clothes were just like the jailers who had held them captive in Life Camp Zero; there was no question in Farrell’s mind that they worked for the enemy.

       “Dammit, Sela,” he whispered, “they’re Ullikummis’s people. We need to get out of here right now.”

       A thin smile touched Sinclair’s lips. “We’ll be safe,” she assured Farrell, her voice low.

       Farrell watched the street from over Sinclair’s shoulder, glanced at the gun in her hand, back up the street. What the hell was she thinking? That she could shoot them both right here and now? What if she missed? The two recruits for Ullikummis continued making their way along the street toward them, as if sensing their presence. A shaft of sunlight cut through the plants and, just for a moment, Farrell saw the face of the woman of the group. She looked young and pretty, but her blue eyes seemed vacant, as if she was in a trance. He had overheard the Cerberus field personnel who had come into contact with Ullikummis’s troops describe them as “firewalkers,” as if their minds were locked in a hypnotic state, their actions not entirely under their own control. The way these two moved without discussion made him think there was something in that, like watching two puppets being moved across some grand stage, their strings hidden from his sight.

       Sinclair narrowed her eyes as she watched them, the Colt pistol held steadily out in front of her in a one-handed grip. Farrell watched as her other hand came up to add support to the grip, planting it firmly beneath the ball of her hand. Wait a minute, he thought. Is she nuts?

       “What