Edge Walkers (20 page)

She didn’t know. But she did know that, next to her, she could feel Gideon stirring. His breath caught, was held, let out. The bedding under her dipped, lifted as he rose. He stood in front of her, stretching, his muscles pulled taut and his tunic lifting to show a glimpse of the curve of his back. She thought of her fantasy of the shower. Regret for what could never be flooded in a crushing wave.

Gideon turned, his eyes lit bright and his head tipped to one side. “Do you smell coffee?”

She pushed aside her dreams, rose, and they followed the scent back to Temple’s rooms. Her stomach growled and her mouth started watering. She’d stopped only long enough in the Gideon’s room to grab the laptop. She’d left her shoes behind, and she stepped into the main room to find Temple awake and what was left of his family nowhere in sight. Gideon immediately crouched by the fire, inhaling steam from a stone bowl set over the flame.

Tan water simmered in front of Shoup, who looked up and held out a slim packet to her. “Instant. Tastes like crap, but—”

“But nothing,” Carrie said, leaning forward to grab the offering. “Caffeine’s caffeine.”

Gideon took it from her. “I think I still know how to make coffee,” he said. And he did. When he was done, he handed the steaming stone vessel to her, and poured cold water for himself.

“You aren’t indulging?” she asked. He shook his head, and she knew the reason without his having to tell her. He didn’t plan to reacquire a habit he had no intention of reclaiming. From that, she could only find one conclusion—he wasn’t going home with them.

Throat tight, she looked away. She couldn’t deal with that right now. She needed a distraction and she got it when Jakes stepped into the room from the back of the cavern. Jakes sat cross-legged, rested his elbows on his knees, looked from Gideon to Carrie and said, “Okay, start at the top and don’t leave anything out.”

Carrie glanced at Gideon—had she missed something last night? But Gideon turned away from her and stepped into a shadowed corner.

With his back to the wall, Gideon sank down to the floor.

Sipped his water, Gideon watched the others. He’d already decided this was up to Carrie. She should decide what to share or hold back. His only need was to make certain she didn’t end up getting hurt by anyone—particularly himself. But he’d lost all perspective about that. He didn’t know what he should say or what he could hold back. He didn’t know that any of this talking mattered. Not when it came to hunting Walkers.

Carrie didn’t seem to think that. She took a long pull of her coffee, ran her tongue over her lips and started talking. She started with things Gideon already knew.

How the Rift opened a door between worlds, how Temple had changed Gideon during the healing, left him so that he and Carrie could spark an opening to the Rift when they made a strong physical connection. She left the details about that vague. She glossed over other things, left out that the one Walker he hunted more than any other had been his wife.

Frowning over that, wondering what that omission said about Carrie, or about them, perhaps. Gideon kept silent until Carrie started on speculations she hadn’t yet shared with him. He looked at her, startled by her words.

“They seem to communicate with sounds,” Carrie said, her tone dry, her coffee half gone. “High frequencies. Some of them are probably above human hearing. Temple and his people wouldn’t have noticed because they don’t have obvious auditory senses. The Walkers also give the appearance of acting like an organized pack—which means a higher level of intelligence than you’d expect from something that appears to be energy-based. That also showed up in what I saw last night from the rings.”

Jakes nodded. “Yeah, Gideon mentioned those last night.”

Carrie slanted a glance at Gideon. Gideon stared back, lifted a hand in a ‘go for it’ gesture. She turned back to the others, drank the rest of her coffee, and slipped into what Gideon was starting to think of as her teaching voice.

She’d have made a good teacher. She had patience, and she watched Jakes and Shoup, alert for subtle shifts in eye movement and body language that gave away their interest or their growing boredom. She tried to phrase things in layman’s terms, but Jakes kept shooting narrow-eyed glances over to Gideon—and he caught the challenge embedded in those looks. Jakes wasn’t happy with any of this.

Shifting back to the main topic, Carrie said, “From what I’ve seen of the initial crossings, I don’t believe we’re drawing the Edge Walkers in—we’re not inviting them. We’re not opening doors for them. They’re punching through on their own wherever they find a weakness they can exploit.”

Alert now, body tensed, Gideon turned to her. He caught the implications behind her words, but he couldn’t believe them. Not after so long. “Not my fault?” he said, the words so quiet only she would hear. She flashed a tight smile at him, muted sympathy and her own regret in her eyes before she faced Jakes and Shoup again.

“It’s possible the Edge Walkers even created the Rift. Or it’s where they’re from. From what I’ve observed, they have to be tied to it in some fashion. In their discharged state, they almost appear to be made of the same substance as the Rift, but that’s where I’m heading into pure guesswork. What I do know is that they’re pulled back into the Rift when they lose an anchoring body. That’s why they need us. They need to inhabit a physical form to keep them in a physical world. We also know they feed on electrical power and use EM fields as a way to track food sources. What I don’t think anyone’s realized is just how good they are at that tracking.”

Gideon nodded—this fit with what he knew, but Shoup had gone blank faced and Jakes frowned. Placing her empty coffee bowl in front of her, Carrie began to drawn in the dirt.

“If this is a planetary body, imagine invisible fields around it—electromagnetic fields.” She drew lines around the bowl that curved around the bowl’s round edges. “We have polar magnetic lines—”

“Ley lines,” Gideon said.

She glanced up at him, nodding. “Exactly. And underneath that billions of smaller, natural EM fields. Get enough power going—”

“It’s going to show up. It disrupts the other fields,” Gideon said.

“Exactly. And electromagnetic fields extend infinitely through space—hell, probably through dimensions as well. I think Edge Walkers can sense every field fluctuation. They’re out there, in the Rift, just looking for changes.”

“Smoke signals,” Shoup said. “They see ‘em and come running. Barbecue’s on.”

Carrie took up her bowl, scrubbed out the lines. “If I’m right, when they find the right kind of field changes—something like from my experiment, or Gideon’s—they’re able to generate some kind of feedback loop that spikes an overload that tears open the Rift. Then they come through. And…well, I think it’s possible there are a lot of them out there. Maybe even more than one Walker inhabiting any one body.” She glanced at Gideon, held his stare for a heartbeat before she looked over to Jakes. “What we’re now seeing, the Rift opening on its own, over and over, that could be a symptom from Walkers tearing apart the fabric of every reality.”

Hands cold, face chilled, Gideon turned to her. “That’s why it’s getting worse? It’s not us?”

She nodded, dug a finger into dirt. “This is speculation, but…well, I can’t help but think something must have happened—a catalyst. A population explosion maybe and the Walkers needed more space, more food. Or maybe they just got greedy. However, I can’t shake the feeling that if we don’t figure this out soon, we might not have a home to get back to. The connection between myself and Gideon—it’s taking less and less to open a Rift, which I think means the Rift itself is being destabilized.”

Jakes shifted his stare to the fire bowl, scratched his thickening beard, looked back to Carrie, eyebrows flat, his frown tight. “But you don’t know.”

“You want facts?” Carrie said, her chin coming up. “Get me a Walker to study and a containment field to put it in. Until then, we’ve got observation from a distance and pure theory—and we can’t afford to ignore worse case scenarios. Like the one where the barriers between realities become so shredded from so many crossings they collapse. It’s like poking holes in a dam—sooner or later, it’s going to give.”

Picking up his gun, Jakes pushed to his feet. “Not my orders, not our problem. We get back home, you can figure this out with the other brains.”

Gideon stood as well. “Weren’t you listening?”

Reaching out, Carrie touched his bare foot, stopped the rest of his words. She climbed to her feet and dusted her hands on her trousers. Even after having slept, she had dark smudges under her eyes. But she had her mouth set in a line and Gideon knew that look.

She faced off against Jakes, her words clipped and tense. “There’s another issue to consider—what if we do open that door home? It’s going to be open for the Walkers, too. Maybe that’s what they want.”

Carrie glanced at Gideon and he met the look, saw the worry darkening her eyes. Fear feathered down his spine—and he knew what she’d left unsaid. “That’s why they were hanging around where you crossed. They’re still looking for a way into your lab. A way across.”

She met his stare. “One thing I saw from the rings, during Gideon’s crossing, he pulled what I think was their main anchor to Earth through to this world. That one action might have given us time back home. But the Walkers want out of this place worse than we do—they’ve drained this world so they need new feeding grounds.”

Muscles going slack, Gideon fell back against stone. Jill had been meant to be the Walkers’ anchor to Earth? His arm burned from where the things inside her had grabbed him—they’d been trying to sink another Walker into him. He knew that, knew because he could still feel the spark of something trying to crawl into him. But he’d been dragged into the Rift and had crossed over to Temple’s world. And he had hold of Jill’s wrist. He’d pulled her reanimated, inhabited corpse, and whatever was inside, with him. Christ, if they felt anything, they must hate him for spoiling their plans. Blinking, he rubbed a hand over his eyes. He let out a breath and tried to focus on what Carrie was saying. But his world kept spinning.

Not his fault—in fact, he might have done some good by getting himself stranded here, by pulling Jill’s body with him. He shook himself, pushed off the wall and rolled his shoulders to set them right again.

Carrie was still talking.

“…can’t really control it, but they ride the Rift like sharks riding an ocean current. I have to infer they have senses we don’t even begin to understand. As I said, this is all highly theoretical, but we seem to be dealing with intelligent energy that consumes energy. They’re rapacious predators that don’t know the definition of enough. But they know how to use us like we’re tools—like we’re…smart food.”

Face numb, chest hollow, Gideon stared at Carrie. Her words echoed through him, struck, hard and heavy, and set off the warning instincts he’d honed over the past two years. When he put everything Carrie had been saying together with what he knew, he didn’t like where it led.

Grabbing the edge of Carrie’s sleeve, he started for the door. “We have to go. Now.”

Eyes narrowing, Jakes stepped forward to blocked the way. “Thought you said this place was safe?”

Gideon ducked around the man. He grabbed Temple’s spare boots from the floor and grabbed the edge of Carrie’s tunic. She pulled free to lean down and pick up the laptop. He took hold of her sleeve again, pulled her with him. He threw his words back at Jakes and Shoup, “I’ll explain outside.”

He got back sour stares that he ignored. He glanced back once more to send Temple an image, a quick warning. Fear flashed back, a wave of it that staggered him—okay, Temple had got what he’d sent. At the entrance, the reality of his fears waited for them.

Walkers, pricks of bright, crawling flashes in the pre-dawn, flickered near the city edges.

Glancing over his shoulder at Carrie, Gideon told her, “They never hit the sanctuary before you came. They’ve never come out of the city before, either. They’ve never hunted anyone like this.”

Carrie nodded and her throat worked as she swallowed. Fear lay stark in her eyes. He wanted to take her hand, but he couldn’t. What if their connection opened the Rift now? What if it drew the Walkers? He didn’t dare touch her, but he moved closer, put himself between her and the things that wanted her.

Wetting her lips, she looked at him and said, “I think they’re hunting me.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It’s amazing what you can do when you have to—of course, having a Swiss Army Knife with a screwdriver helps. — Excerpt Carrie Brody’s Journal

Carrie stared out at the dark land that lay under a sullen gray sky. Erratic sparks slipped between buildings, bright white flashes that disappeared and reappeared.
Walkers.
Sniffing the air, maybe the ground, picking up traces of something—an electrical signature, perhaps. Something that marked her specific EM field. She had almost opened a doorway to Earth, and she still might be able to open it fully. Which meant they wanted her, or wanted her knowledge. Could they get that from a body they had drained of life? Could they still access memories the way she was looking to access a dead computer—just apply fresh power to see the stored data?

Her stomach twisted. Pulse kicking up fast and quick in her throat, she swallowed sharp bile, pressed a hand over the knot twisting her guts.

Behind her, boots scrabbled on dirt and Jakes muttered, “Goddammit, I’m getting tired of being the rabbit. Shoup, you got eyes on you?”

Shoup’s weapons shifted, clattered as he pulled out a pocket telescope. Glancing at him, Carrie’s fingers itched for the scope, but did she really want to see the faces of the Walkers hunting her? She fisted her hands at her sides until her knuckles ached. Damp, cold splatters struck her face and wet her shoulders. Jakes fit the palm-sized rectangle to his eye and scanned the city, lowered the scope and held it out to her. “That’s gotta be part of the why. Brody, tell me if that’s not your last guy.”

“What?” Head snapping around, shock chilled her skin. “It couldn’t be. They’d all…in the lab, I saw…”