Dawnbreaker: Legends of the Duskwalker - Book 3 (42 page)

She turned her focus back to the man whose hand she still held, fought her way back towards him, struggled against the current that threatened to carry her into that alien mass. And as she strove to free herself, she heard in her mind sporadic warning cries of the Weir, as if they’d awoken to her presence. They’d noticed the intrusion. The glowing thing at the center of the nexus twitched and pulsed. Cass wrestled herself free, felt the convergence receding. But still the spider-thing shifted and remained clear in her mind. And to her horror, it began to unfold itself; not eight legs but eighty, or eight hundred. Tendrils stretched and spread and probed. It was alerted to her presence, if not her location, and was searching, bending itself towards her. Without consciously processing, Cass knew this was the same intelligence that had pursued her when she’d freed Swoop. This was the thing that had risen from the deep to seize her.

This was Asher.

She fled then, pausing only long enough to snatch the man free before she severed her connection. The physical world snapped shut around her. The man cried out in pain or in shock and fell forward, cradling his head in his arms. Cass too felt pressure in her skull; the onset of the strange headache that had accompanied her two previous attempts. She hoped she wasn’t going to relapse into whatever state she’d experienced when she’d freed Swoop. She was counting on that reaction having been the result of the trap that had been attached to him, and not simply an escalation of the symptoms she’d suffered after her first attempt. Her ears were ringing slightly, and the experience of her second escape from Asher lingered with terrible clarity. The cries of the Weir still echoed in her mind. After a few seconds the pain reached a threshold and stabilized. Not pleasant by any means, but bearable.

The man was bent double in front of her, but he wasn’t moaning or showing any other obvious signs of distress. Cass touched his shoulder lightly. He didn’t respond immediately. His breathing was heavier than it’d been before she’d brought him out. Finally, he raised his head and his eyes to hers.

“What...” he said, and then stopped, apparently surprised at the sound of an actual word coming from his own mouth.

“It’s OK,” Cass said. “You’re OK now. You’re not connected to the Weir anymore.” He shook his head and sat up, trying to comprehend her words and their implications. “It’s a lot to process, I know.”

He’d been staring right into her eyes since he looked up, but now became self-conscious, or maybe troubled by them. He looked away across the foyer at nothing in particular, mouth open.

“What’s your name?” Cass asked.

Seconds passed before he responded. “Orrin,” he eventually said, slowly. “... I think.”

“Orrin, I’m Cass.”

“What’d you do to me?” he asked quietly, still unwilling to look at her. The tone was more curious than accusatory, but there was an edge to his voice that was unsettling.

“I set you free,” she said.

“You’re the girl from that city,” he said, flicking his eyes to her and then down to the ground in front of him. “Right? Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And before that, you stopped a man from shooting me,” he said.

“After the city,” Cass corrected. “That came after.”

He shook his head, though she couldn’t tell if he was disagreeing or was trying to clear his thoughts.

“You followed me from there, Orrin. We saw you last night and tried to find you. You ran away. Then today, you followed me here. Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said sharply, agitated. But he quickly softened. “You were... you seemed different. From the others. I wanted to see why.”

Between the headache and the strangeness of the interaction with Orrin, Cass had lost some awareness of her surroundings. It came back to her as if she’d realized she’d just caught herself right before nodding off. The foyer was darker; quite a bit darker than when they’d first entered. And those echoes of the Weir in her mind, she discovered, weren’t just in her mind at all. They were real; the Weir were out.

Something about her change must have drawn his attention. He looked up at her, then back at the door behind him.

“Is that them?” he asked. “Are they coming here?”

“They’re out,” Cass answered, “but I think we’ll be OK in here.”

Orrin scrambled up to his knees and backed up against the wall.

“Is that them?” he asked. “Are they coming here?”

He said it in the exact same tone, with the exact same cadence, like a recording stuck on a loop. His reaction hit Cass with a fresh note of dread. She’d been so intent on rescuing this man she hadn’t fully considered the potential outcomes; it’d never even occurred to her that he might not be completely stable. Everyone that Wren had Awakened had reacted differently, of course. Some, like Kit and Luck, had been relieved, and grateful, and had adjusted well. Others, like Mez, had kept to themselves and never really seemed to recover fully from the experience. But none of them had come back in the sort of shape that Orrin was in. It was too late now, though; he was Awake and it was becoming increasingly clear that he was coming apart.

“You don’t need to worry, Orrin,” she said. “I’ve done this plenty of times. We’ll be all right.”

His eyes stayed fixed on the door.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re coming. They’re coming here!”

“They’re not,” Cass said, trying to soothe him. “They don’t know we’re here, Orrin...”

And as she said it she felt it was a lie. Now that she listened carefully, it
did
seem like the cries were growing in both frequency and volume. They were calling to each other, certainly, but not in the sporadic, almost casual way that was normal to their hunt. They were coordinating. Worse. Converging.

Her experience with the datastream and the node. Maybe they really had noticed her, not just in that plane, but here too, in the real world.

“They’re coming,” Orrin repeated, shaking his head.

“Yeah,” Cass said. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

She rose to her feet, scanned her options. He turned and looked at her then, eyes wide. The rear exit wasn’t necessarily a better choice than the front door. She knew better than to go up the stairs. Rear door might be locked or rusted shut. Out the front then, the way they’d come in.

“Come on, we’ll find somewhere else. We can lose ’em,” she said, heading towards the entrance. But he shook his head again as she passed, stayed huddled against the wall. Cass stopped, turned back towards him. “Orrin, I need you to stay calm, OK? I need you to trust me. I can keep you safe, if you just do what I say.”

“You!” he shouted. “You
brought
them!”

“I’m leaving,” Cass said, trying to keep emotion out of her voice. “I’m going to find somewhere safe. You can take chances on your own, if you want to. They might not even notice you if you don’t do anything stupid. Or you can come with me, and I’ll do what I can to protect you. Either way, I’m leaving now.”

She turned back around and headed out the door. As soon as she exited, she saw the first of them. Fifty yards down the street, looking right at her. Too far for the jittergun. Not far enough to get much of a head start. The Weir made the decision for her. It rushed her, mouth wide in a howl.

Cass hunched down, tucked her chin, brought her hands up to eye level. Waited. The creature closed the distance in short seconds, leapt. And Cass sidestepped, delivered a perfect hook, buried her fist in the side of its head as it went by. It sprawled in midair, landed in an awkward heap, face down on the concrete. Motionless, once it stopped skidding.

There was a gasp behind her, and Cass turned to find Orrin standing in the entrance, eyes wide and wild.

“You... you...” he stammered. “You can’t fight them!”

Cass looked over very deliberately at the Weir she’d just felled with a single blow, and then back at Orrin, cocked her head.

“Wasn’t much of a fight,” she said. Other cries picked up, no doubt responding to the Weir’s previous howl. Orrin swiveled his head back and forth frantically, like a man trapped in a prison spotlight.

“Come on,” Cass said. His head snapped back around, his eyes locked on hers. From his wild look, she knew he was lost.

“You’re crazy, is what!” he said. “You’re crazy!”

And he took off running in whatever direction his feet happened to be pointing him.

“Orrin, no!” Cass called, but she stopped short of trying to grab him before he got out of reach. “Don’t run off!”

If he heard her, he didn’t make any sign of it. And though Cass felt she ought to chase him down, she noticed she wasn’t actually doing so. She stood and watched as he fled back the way they’d come. Right back into the arms and claws of the very thing she’d just rescued him from. Orrin disappeared around a corner.

Maybe he’d be all right. Maybe the Weir wouldn’t notice him, or they’d ignore him. But Cass had learned long ago you couldn’t save people from themselves. If she went chasing after him in his current state, he might very well think she was trying to kill him herself. And even if his head finally cleared enough for him to realize what he’d done, it was likely his panic would make him unpredictable and impossible to control, the way a drowning man clings to a would-be rescuer and dooms them both.

She’d done what she could for him, and risked all she’d been prepared to risk. Guilt tugged at her as she turned around, but it didn’t prevent her from heading off in the other direction. A lesson she’d have to think more deeply about later. Right now, getting clear needed all her attention.

Cass set off at a jog, head up, eyes constantly scanning for threats. Orrin had been partially right; she couldn’t fight them
all
. Evasion was her primary goal. But if they came at her one or two at a time, she wasn’t particularly worried about running a path right through them. She cut through an alley, and then back down a wide avenue, zigzagging her way more or less northward.

The biggest question was whether the Weir were merely closing in on her last known position, or if they were actually tracking her. The thought that they might have identified her individual signature was by far the worse possibility. If they’d caught her digital scent, it might be hours before she could completely shake pursuit. It might even take until dawn.

There was no way to know until it played out. And there was nothing she could do about it now anyway. She pressed on, ever watchful. After ten minutes of winding her way through the broken urban terrain, she had her answer. The Weir’s cries hadn’t converged in any one location and they weren’t getting any more distant either.

They were tracking her.

Cass’s heart fell with the knowledge. The situation wasn’t quite as dire as when she’d bailed Gamble and her team out and gotten cut off, but it wasn’t far removed. But if they were tracking her, they were reacting, and if they were reacting, they were a step behind. She’d have to stay ahead of them, evade contact as much as possible, strike only as a last resort. It was going to be a long night; an hours-long game of cat-and-mouse, with the highest possible stakes. And the cats had the numbers. At least this mouse had claws of its own.

Maybe it was because her conscious mind was so preoccupied with the now, or maybe it was just a gift from her well-honed survival instinct. Whatever it was, a thought slid sideways into her mind, like someone had slipped her a secret note. The Weir knew when one of theirs was killed or incapacitated. She’d seen it during her ambush run; it had nearly cost her her life when she’d stunned Swoop. And that thought triggered a distant memory that invited her to recall her old life, to go further back than she’d allowed herself to go in a long, long time. From her days with RushRuin. Back to when she’d given away her name. A tactic she’d occasionally employed with Ran and Dagon, when a target’s security or a rival crew had them outnumbered on force or outgunned on paper.

The main downside was that it usually required at least two to work. Usually. Cass decided to put it to the test. She switched tactics. Evasion was still part of the equation but now only
part
. The other part was locating an isolated target. She didn’t know what trail she was leaving that the Weir could follow; so she was going to leave a bigger one.

She slowed her pace, started using her ears as much as, if not more than, her eyes. The shattered cityscape wreaked havoc on sound waves, made it difficult to ever be certain of distance and direction. But after two or three minutes, she’d managed to pick out the direction that offered her what she figured was her best opportunity. Cass slipped into a lane between two buildings, barely wide enough for her to squeeze through sideways. If her guess was right, it’d lead her out to the lowest concentration of Weir. If not, well... she’d just wedged herself into a choke point that didn’t even afford her enough room to throw a solid punch.

As she was approaching the midpoint, a croak came from behind her. She glanced back over her shoulder, but didn’t stop moving. The end of the lane was clear, and it was impossible to know if something had just passed her by, or if the sound had merely been channeled by the buildings she was passing between. Cass picked up her pace, told herself it was the right move and not just because she was starting to get claustrophobic. When she was six feet from the exit, a shape flashed by. She inhaled reflexively. A heartbeat, two, three...

A twisted face manifested, blue-eyed, howling rage and warning. The Weir launched into the narrow space, lunged for her with arm and claws extended. Cass intercepted the Weir’s forearm with her own, crushed it into the wall and pinned it. A quick cross-step, and she drove her shoulder into the chest of the creature, checking its forward movement and enabling her to grab its trapped wrist with her other hand. She rolled back, snapping her elbow up from underneath. The Weir’s head whipped back with the impact, and Cass stomped a low-angle kick into its knee. The creature collapsed down, toppled forward towards her. She wrenched the captured arm back and around, dropped her hip onto the back of the Weir’s head and let gravity do the rest. The creature folded up at unnatural angles with sharp cracks. After that, it didn’t make any more sound.