Escape (43 page)

“Are you okay?” She realized how stupid it was to ask that as soon as the words had left her mouth.

Ferrel shrugged wincingly and his crooked arm snapped straight. Jilly watched in astonishment as the bloody furrow in his arm sealed before her eyes. He shook his arm and flexed his fingers and elbow experimentally. Something like dust fell from his arm, and Ferrel watched it fall, nodding approvingly.

“Spectral
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

“
Spectral?
” Jilly echoed incredulously. “What are you?!” She took a stumbling half-step away from him, then stopped with a sudden hollow stab of dread, and in a much quieter voice asked: “What am I?”

Ferrel looked up at her and smiled broadly. “I'm something more than I used to be. Come, let us complete the journey to Crater City.”

Jilly was shaking her head and slowly backing away from Ferrel. “I'm n-not going with you,” she said, her teeth chattering from a mixture of fear, spent adrenaline, and cold.

Ferrel seemed to blur, and suddenly he was in front of her, holding her roughly by the collar of her tunic. He shook her ever so lightly, but she could see the violence simmering in his eyes.

“Yes. You are.” More disturbing than anything was the toothy grin on his face which belied the venom in his voice. With that, he let go of her and shoved her away from him. She stumbled and fell on her rear and sat blinking up at Ferrel's retreating form. Feeling certain that Lystra Deswin must be as shocked as she, Jilly's eyes skipped sideways to the old man's wrinkly face
—

Only to find him grinning as toothily as Ferrel, his gaze locked unnervingly on her. Jilly gulped back a sudden acid taste of fear and disquiet. Somewhere within herself she found the strength to rise. She impatiently dusted powdery snow from her pants and started toward her wolvin, doing her best to avoid Lystra's creepy gaze. The sooner they got to Crater City, the sooner they would be able to find out what was wrong with them, and hopefully
 
.
 
.
 
.

Fix it.

* * *

10 Minutes Earlier
 
.
 
.
 
.

Lystra Deswin slid down the back of his wolvin mount as the beast sat down, and he landed in the grass with a poof of fluffy snowflakes. He heard Jilly call out behind him: “Lystra?”

“Time for a break!” he called back, screaming to be heard above the driving snow and wind, but she gave no reply, so he assumed she hadn't heard him. A minute later her wolvin came prancing up beside him and plopped down in the grass beside his. Jilly fell out of the saddle a few micró-astroms from him, without even having noticed him lying in the tall grass.

He got up and brushed the snow off his tunic. Turning in the direction that Jilly had fallen, he said: “Short break. I believe we are little more than ten minutes from Crater City now.” He caught a glimpse of Ferrel and his wolvin trotting toward him, and went on, “Relieve yourselves if you need to. You may eat the snow if you're thirsty, else you'll find water in your travel bags. You'll also find some food in there if you are hungry.”

With that, Lystra left them, and began walking toward a nearby rocky outcropping where he could find some privacy to take his own advice. A few hours on wolvinback was more than his old bladder could take.

As Lystra reached the mound of boulders, he found he was mercifully sheltered from the snowstorm by rocks. He loosened the drawstrings around his waist, and
—

Heard something odd. Frowning, he listened as he relieved himself. It was a deep, rumbling roar, barely audible above the wind. It didn't sound animal
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

The sound was coming from just the other side of the rocks. Curious, Lystra  retied the drawstrings around his waist and felt his way around the circumference of a massive boulder. A fuzzy red glow began to light the impenetrable dark, revealing a hazy wall of falling snow. The rumbling sound grew louder, and as Lystra rounded the boulder, he was nearly blinded by the bright red light. Then, as suddenly as if someone had flicked a switch, the light was gone, and the rumbling sound along with it.

Frowning into the sudden darkness, he called out: “Hello? Anyone out there?” Concerned that it might be more changers, Lystra switched to his folksy accent: “I dun like bein' surprised. You changers iden'ify yerselves or I'll shoot! This 'ere land belongs to the Constantic Order!” The so-called civilized people on Da Shon were often violently opposed to the order's legislated presence in the Forsaken Lands, and Lystra had long since found it expedient to fulfull their expectations of him and act the part of an uneducated mental incompetent, so as to keep changers off balance until he could properly assess their threat level.

No answer came from the swirling darkness, and Lystra began to fear that he was going mad. Perhaps he had imagined the entire thing. He'd heard of people getting lost in snowstorms and hallucinating, but he wasn't exactly lost. Nor delirous from hunger and cold. Not yet anyway.

Lystra shook his head, causing wet, snow-crusted strings of his long silver hair to flare across his shoulders, scattering broken snowflakes into the night. He turned around and heard the heavy
thump
of something landing directly in front of him. Lystra stopped and frowned, peering into the imprenetrable dark. There was nothing.

He was imagining things again.

Lystra put one foot foward, and ran into something solid. He looked up, and saw a pair of glowing red eyes staring back at him. A set of wickedly glinting teeth flashed into a crescent shape
—
a grin. Lystra's mouth opened in a scream that died soundlessly on his lips as a hard, leathery hand fell across his mouth. He began to struggle, but found suddenly that his body was numb, and sluggish, and he couldn't. His mind grew fuzzy and his thoughts indistinct as his knees buckled and he sank to the snow-covered grass.

* * *

The snow was falling; in the distance, a wolvin howled. The wind whistled softly, skittering across the tops of the endless fields of snow-crusted grass. Overhead, the clouds shifted, revealing a dim, roughly-shaped moon. A small burrowing creature crept out of his den and began sniffing around the edges of a warm body. Disguised as a mountain of snow, it
smelled
like food. The creature burrowed its snout into the snow, and found the source of the heat: warm, living flesh lay exposed. As it opened its jaws for an experimental bite, a hand shot out and crushed it to a bloody pulp. The hand loosened, letting the mishapen lump of flesh fall to the ground.

Dimmi blinked, or tried to, only to find that her eyelashes were stuck together. Blindly, she reached up and physically parted her eyelids, yanking out a few of the fragile hairs in the process. Her face was wet and frozen with melted snow.

She sat up and looked about her. There was no one and nothing in the immediate vicinity. But wait
 
.
 
.
 
.

There
was
someone. Visible even through the grass, there was a fuzzy glow of warmth that Dimmi somehow recognized as life. She wasn't accustomed to being able to see through obstacles, but she recognized it for what it was: her eyes were getting stronger; now she could see in infrared.

Dimmi stood up and walked over to the warm glow of life, and gazed dispassionately down upon Kieran Hawker. His chest rose and fell steadily beneath a thin layer of snow, and she frowned. Hadn't she killed him? Somehow he had survived, but he had deserved to die. They all had. They were traitors, betrayers, enemies, and thieves. Kieran and Ferrel had stolen her ship. All of them had been collaborating with that creepy old man. They had shot her with something, dragged her out here, and then
 
.
 
.
 
.
she had woken up. Whatever they had been planning to do to her had failed.

But her vengeance would not. Dimmi bent to her ankles and withdrew a dagger. Kneeling beside Kieran, she pressed the blade to his throat.
Let's see you survive without your head,
she thought.

A hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. Glowing red eyes swiveled up to hers and narrowed fractionally.
They betrayed me, too.

Dimmi's brow lifted.
You deserved it.

They left us
both
here to die. I can help you. Let's kill them together.

Dimmi cocked her head and pressed harder with her dagger against his throat. He matched her force, and the blade didn't budge.
Why should I trust you?
She thought.

Because like you, I'm not what I once was.

Dimmi's frown deepened, and then she smiled and stood, sheathing her dagger in her belt. She could sense the truth of his thoughts. Moreover, she could feel the change he spoke of pulsing through her own veins, and most convincing of all, memories were coming to her with sudden, dark flashes of déjà vu. The gaps were filling in. Suddenly she remembered everything, and she knew how she'd come to wake up in Kieran's quarters aboard the
Shadow
with no memory of how she'd gotten there. Reading her thoughts, Kieran sat up and began nodding sagely. Memories flashed through his mind, coalescing with hers, confirming everything that had happened to them.

She remembered the strange, nightmarish creature who'd come to visit her in the
Shadow's
brig. How its leathery hands had grasped her; the spreading numbness; and then a deep, dreamless sleep.

He remembered going to the brig to check on her, finding her collapsed on the floor, taking her to medbay and hooking her up to the brain scanner. She'd awoken, seemingly a different person. Later she'd tried to seduce him in what were to be her quarters for the night: he'd tried to leave, and she'd begged him not to. Then she'd kissed him, and he'd sunk to the floor, numbness spreading. As his consciousness had faded, he'd seen her dissolve and coalesce into the same, nightmarish creature, with intimately familiar glowing red eyes.

Dimmi remembered none of that, and neither of them had to guess why. She wasn't the creature, the creature had been
her
. She had been taken somewhere else, and left there for a time, soundly sleeping. If they were to review the ship's security recordings they would no doubt see how she had been removed from the cell, where she had been taken, and how the creature had taken her place on the floor of the cell.

Kieran joined Dimmi in standing. Now everything made sense. What the creature was and where it had come from seemed irrelevant: they knew what had happened to them; they were changing; and neither one of them was afraid. Kieran grinned, and his gaze slid away, out to the horizon. Dimmi followed his gaze, already knowing his thoughts. The snow had given them an opportunity. Their friends had left a trail. True, fresh snow was continually falling, and the trail had been covered, but it was impossible to fully cover the tracks of the massive wolvins, running at top speed through the long grass. They had torn a track through the delicate herbage, and scattered the freshly-fallen snow, leaving an uneven furrow that was clearly visible to their keen eyes.

Let's go.
Kieran thought.

Dimmi nodded.

And they were off, tearing down the hill with incedible speed. For a moment Kieran was startled, knowing he'd never run so fast before in his life. He doubted if the wolvins could run as fast. A distant shred of his mind argued that what he was doing was impossible, but then he remembered having bent the bars of his cell to escape from the detention wing aboard the orbital transfer station, and he knew it was not so strange.

Merely another change.

Kieran's grin broadened, and he urged his legs to run faster. And faster still he ran, with Dimmi easily keeping pace beside him.

Chapter 24

J
illy gripped the wolvin's fur with numb, frozen fingers, using the pain to focus her thoughts. Ferrel wasn't himself. She wasn't herself, either, but the changes hadn't begun to manifest in her personality. The old man was right. They were going to become psychotic in the final stages. Ferrel was already pretty close. She had no way of knowing how much more advanced his case was than hers, but she knew she was running out of time. Even if a doctor could diagnose and cure them within minutes of getting to an appropriate clinic, she wasn't sure it would be in time to reverse whatever had already happened.

How much farther was it to Crater City, anyway?

Even as she wondered that, the answer came:
We're there.

Jilly sat up slowly, careful not to lose her balance on the wolvin's back. The snow had stopped falling, but the air felt somehow the colder for it, now that all the snow was on the ground rather than in the clouds. For a moment, she couldn't see what Ferrel meant: then all of a sudden she realized that it hadn't stopped snowing, and that the empty black space ahead wasn't the sky against the horizon
—
it was an unimaginably large structure, a dome. The snow continued falling above and around the dome, but due to the angle of the wind, they were sheltered in the leeward side of the enormous structure.