Shadow Box

As Domi let go of him, Kane nodded. “I think the quake really ran into us,” he told her with a smile. Kane and Domi had a strange history between them, but above all else they were bound by a mutual respect as warriors. “Brought some friends for you to meet,” Kane continued, gesturing to Señor Smarts and Rosalia, who stood beside Grant, her jaw jutting at a haughty angle as she observed the albino woman.

“This is Rosalia and the gentleman is called Smarts.”

Smarts took Domi’s hand and brushed it lightly with his lips. “Enchanted, señorita,” he said, his eyes meeting hers.

After the introductions had been made, the group headed back to the camp where Decard and his team were stationed. It was a simple affair, just a bivouac created from a couple of sheets of tarpaulin propped over a small area atop posts pushed into the sand. Once he was close enough, Kane recognized the posts that Decard’s crew had used. They were the slender silver rods that the security force of Aten used as their primary weapons. The long poles were tipped by V-shaped prongs, and they were capable of unleashing a charge of energy that could fell a man, knocking him into unconsciousness or worse, depending upon the setting employed by the user.

The makeshift nature of the camp reminded Kane of the shantytown that they had just left on the outskirts of Hope. Two armed guards nodded in acknowledgment as Domi passed, leading the group beneath the slanted roof sheets. The guards were Incarnates, and both came from similar stock. They were sturdy-looking individuals, their skin a shining coffee-bean brown from the sun. Their clothing was identical—naked but for loosely woven white linen kilts threaded with golden wire, coupled with glittering collars of hammered gold that embraced their necks. The only thing to differentiate them were the unique adornments on their faces. Both men wore masks that entirely covered their heads, remarkable helmets carved of painted and varnished wood. The mask of the sec man to the left bore a fierce caricature of a crocodile, its long snout pointing down to the ground, its rows of teeth highlighted in white paint. The man to the right wore the mask of a bug, an idealized version of a beetle, with large eyes and pincers that resembled the drooping lines of Grant’s gunslinger mustache.

As Domi led the way into the small, makeshift shelter, Decard got up from his resting position on the floor and called to them. The tent was lit by three small, oil-burning lamps that had been placed around the floor space. There were more guards inside, eight in all, and several had removed their helms and were dozing.

Decard was a fresh-faced young man, about twenty years old, and with close-cropped, sandy-blond hair. He wore the armor of a Magistrate, a familiar black polycarbonate exoskeleton, and it added a sense of authority to his five-foot-ten-inch frame.

Both Smarts and Rosalia backed away when they saw the Mag armor, but Grant was standing behind them, and Rosalia let out a quiet yelp as she bumped into his chest. “Nothing to get worked up about,” Grant told her quietly.

On closer inspection, they saw that the Magistrate armor was lacking the red insignia that usually graced the left pectoral; it looked to have been torn from the outfit.

Decard himself bore a friendly expression as he walked across the tent to meet with his old comrades. The man walked with a slight limp, favoring his left leg as he came over to greet them.

“Hello, Kane,” Decard said, acknowledging the other Cerberus personnel briefly. “Glad you could all make it out here.”

“What’s going on, Decard?” Kane asked, not a man for small talk.

“I was on patrol three days ago,” Decard explained as he led the way to the back of the small shelter, “when I came across a group of Roamers. Just a family, refugees, I think, crossing the desert. They’d set up camp quite close to the city entrance, and I brought some men out here to shoo them away.” Decard looked at Kane as though hoping for approval.

Kane understood what the man meant. Decard, like himself and Grant, may have retired prematurely, but he still had the old Magistrate instincts. In Decard’s case, he had been accidentally caught up in a conspiracy involving the welfare of new hybrids, and had somehow found himself on the run. He had landed on his feet in the hidden city-kingdom of Aten, California, where he had gone native and married into royalty. Decard had found a better life than most Magistrates, and his world was generally far more sedate than that of Kane or Grant. Aten treasured its secrecy, a community hidden away from the harsh realities of the world, and Decard had become the de facto leader of the Incarnates, the guardians of the city. He still made patrols around the city-kingdom, though he used his skills as a diplomat far more often than his handgun these days.

Kane nodded, encouraging the man to continue.

“I was doing a surveillance swoop around dusk when I came across one of the same folks,” Decard told him. “Only this time she looked like this…”

Decard gestured to a figure crouching on the ground behind two standing, helmeted guards. As the guards parted, Kane saw a young woman with long blond hair, probably still in her teenage years, bearing the swollen belly of pregnancy. Her hair was damp with sweat, curtained over her eyes, and she rocked back and forth on her heels, her jaw slack. Drool oozed down her chin from her open mouth.

As Kane stepped closer, he felt something nudge him and saw that Decard was handing him a flashlight. “Go on,” Decard urged him, “she won’t bite.”

Kane leaned down and switched on the flashlight, pointing it away from the woman before turning it gradually to illuminate her clearly. She just crouched there, rocking back and forth, not reacting in the slightest to his approach. “You okay, ma’am?” he said.

The woman seemed to be ignoring him. She just rocked, back and forth repeatedly. Now that he was closer, Kane could detect a low humming, too, the noise coming from the woman, not her mouth but pushed from deep in her throat and out of her nose.

Kane reached forward with his free hand and made to tentatively touch the woman’s face. She didn’t flinch, didn’t move at all, and before Kane’s fingers met with her he turned back to Decard. “Do I need gloves?”

“Hell if I know.” Decard shrugged. He shook off one of his gloves and passed it to Kane. “Use this if you want.”

Kane took the Mag gauntlet and pulled it over his right hand before reaching for the young woman again. Crouching before her, Kane used the black fingers of the glove to stroke her hair gently from where it obscured her face. Beneath her mop of hair, as he had somehow suspected, her eyes were wide open.

Her eyes were blank, pure white orbs, white on white, all color drained away.

Chapter 5

After a moment, Kane turned away from the woman, removing his gloved hand and letting her blond bangs fall back over her face. He turned to Decard with a look of concern. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?” he asked.

Decard held up his hands. “No idea. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “She’s running a high temperature, just like the others we found.”

“There are others?” Brigid spoke up.

“There were eight in the original party that we chased off,” Decard told her, “and we found three of them running around out here at dusk. I say ‘running,’ but I don’t mean that literally, of course,” he added.

“‘Mindless, soulless wretches,’” Kane quoted from the report that Lakesh had passed on to him over the Commtact when they had received word back in Hope. “Isn’t that what you said?”

Decard took his glove back from Kane as he spoke. “It wasn’t intended as a medical diagnosis,” he said with good humor, “but it was about the best way I could think of to describe them.”

Brigid Baptiste produced a pair of thin polymer gloves from her jacket pocket and placed them over her hands. They were disposable gloves, transparent and reaching just past her wrists. Then she crouched before the pregnant woman and started speaking to her softly as she gently pushed back the woman’s hair. “You said there were others?” Brigid asked Decard, her voice calm.

“Two others. What you see here is pretty accurate to how they were,” Decard said. “We found the three of them wandering about the desert here, aimless as a leaf on the wind, just walking around in circles. I think they’re a family, or at least they were.”

“Where are the others now?” Kane asked.

Decard placed an arm around Kane’s shoulders and pulled him toward the closest opening of the bivouac. “Let’s talk about that outside,” he said quietly.

Leaving Grant, Domi and the Incarnates to watch their prisoners, Kane and Decard stood outside the tent waiting for Brigid to join them.

“Her temperature’s running at 108,” Brigid said as she walked out of the tent, brandishing a pocket thermometer that the Incarnate medic had loaned her. She sounded astonished. “She must be burning up inside.”

“Not burning,” Kane said solemnly, “melting. Can a body even take that kind of temperature?”

Brigid nodded slowly. “The human body can take greater extremes than we give it credit for,” she said, “but I don’t like her long-term chances, especially with the baby.”

Decard interjected at that point, all humor drained from his face. “The other two went like that,” he said quietly, “first they were walking about like they’d been concussed, then they sat down, mumbling and drooling.”

“And then?” Kane prompted.

“They’re dead, Kane,” Decard told him.

“Shit,” Kane spit as he noticed the mounds of earth where Decard and his team had buried two bodies. “What have you stumbled on here?”

Decard shook his head. “We’re four miles from Aten,” he said. “Far as I’m concerned, this is the very limit of my jurisdiction. I called Cerberus in because I don’t have the time or resources to deal with it. Figured maybe you do.”

“That’s mighty brave of you,” Kane growled.

Decard looked away, refusing to meet the man’s gray-blue eyes. “We look after our own, Kane,” he said, “that’s the rule of the Outlands, and you know it. These freaks get closer to the city and I’ll do what I have to, but I’m in way over my depth here.”

“What if it’s a plague,” Kane said, “an airborne virus, something you can’t just pretend doesn’t exist? What then?”

Decard paced across the sand for a moment, head low, absorbed by his thoughts.

“I’ve got four people and two prisoners,” Kane urged. “We need manpower, and your people are on the scene, Decard. Will you help us?”

Decard’s gaze swept past Kane and Brigid, and he looked off into the distance. “None of this can be brought back to the city,” he said quietly. “No prisoners, none of the infected. I am not having this spread through Aten.”

“None of us wants that,” Brigid assured him.

“I’m out here with a twelve-man team,” Decard said. “You get me and them and that’s it. Okay?”

Kane nodded. “You just keep your gun loaded.”

“Don’t worry,” Brigid told them both. “We’ll find out what it is. No one else needs to get hurt.”

BACK INSIDE the bivouac, Rosalia was peering at the far end of the tent, watching the pregnant woman rocking back and forth on her heels. “What is wrong with that lady?” she asked in an urgent whisper.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Domi said. “Friends of ours found her wandering the desert, figured we’d be able to help.”

“And what is it that you do?” Smarts chipped in politely.

“None of your nose,” Domi said, flashing him her feral smile.

Leaving Grant with the prisoners, Domi made her way to a small, tan-colored rucksack to the side of the tent and rummaged through its contents. A moment later she returned with a Sin Eater handgun in a black leather holster. “Thought you might need this,” she told Grant. “Brought one for Kane, too.”

Grant shrugged out of the right sleeve of his coat and clipped the wrist holster to his right forearm. The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and the weapon with which Grant and Kane felt most comfortable. Less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, the automatic handblaster folded in on itself to be stored in the bulky holster just above the wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific tensing of the wrist tendons, snapping the pistol automatically into the user’s hand.

The trigger of the Sin Eater had no guard; the necessity for any kind of safety features had never been foreseen when the weapon had been assigned to the infallible Magistrates. While both Grant and Kane were schooled in numerous forms of unarmed and armed combat, the Sin Eater was an old friend, a natural weight that their movements accommodated, like wearing a wristwatch.

Smarts watched with amusement as Grant finished clipping the Sin Eater in place. “I said you were Magistrates, did I not, señor?”

Grant looked at him, no hint of amusement or pity in his features. “Why don’t you help yourselves out here and give us the information we want about the hybrid DNA. You can see that you’re nothing more than deadweight to us right now. You give us the info and we’ll let you walk out of here, no questions asked.”

Smarts nodded slowly, considering the offer. “I would need to discuss this with my colleague, you understand?” he said, indicating Rosalia.