The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) (7 page)

Two of the squad dragged Danny to his feet and searched him, though he knew they would find nothing in his coat. Only Danny had access to its hidden pockets.

He was thrown back to the ground then, and cord was wrapped around his wrists and tightly cinched. A heavy boot crashed into his side, and he knew it was revenge for what Nala had done. Danny was able to crane his neck to see that the two fallen squad members were being attended to. Attend all you like, he thought. In a few minutes’ time none of it will matter.

He was calm now, filled with terrible power, his decision made. He watched the soldiers move around him with huge detachment. When a small blond girl appeared beside the television, he barely blinked. The appearance was so unlikely that it was moments before the elite squad
reacted and one of the women shouted and brought up her weapon. The gun blazed fire, but the blond girl was no longer there. Instead, she was standing by the door. Bullets stitched up the wall, but this time the girl appeared right beside the woman, snatching the gun and disappearing. At the same time the skylight above their heads crashed open and a winged figure burst through, grabbing two of the remaining weapons as they were raised to fire. But there was still one gun left.

Danny watched these events unfold with a certain admiration for the attackers’ skill coupled with mild regret that their courage didn’t really matter. It’s Dixie and Les, a small voice said in his head. You can’t unleash your power on them. But he’d seen Nala gunned down. He had to do something. Besides, there was still one armed squad member left. The man’s hard eyes had picked out Les; his gun barrel swung upward. There was no time to disarm him. They were all too far away.…

From out of nowhere a small figure struck the man behind the knees. He went over backward, the gun discharging harmlessly into the ceiling. Nala! Confusion gripped Danny. Nala was dead! Momentarily he lost hold of the power seething within him. He felt as if his temples would burst as he fought to control it. With a supreme effort he restrained it, his whole body shaking, the desire to destroy receding.…

He had done it. They were safe from his power, at least. Then he saw that Nala had trained his gun on the squad members and his finger was tightening on the trigger.

“No!” Danny screamed the word. More than a word. Some of the residual power had remained unsuppressed and burst from his mouth as he yelled. The windows shattered. Part of the ceiling collapsed. The hardened members of the elite squad fell to the ground. Dixie flickered in and out of view. Even Nala whimpered and dropped the gun, while Les flew in an aimless circle.

Danny found that he had snapped the ties around his hands. He grabbed the battered revolver from one of his hidden pockets and trained it on the squad as they got slowly to their feet. Les, recovering quickly, hovered five feet above the ground, a gun in each hand pointed at the soldiers.

“Don’t move,” he said slowly. “Danny, you nearly burst my eardrums.”

Without a word, Nala ran to tie up the squad members. Dixie helped.

“Where did you two come from?” Danny gasped, amazed.

“Followed you,” Les said cheerfully. “I carried Dixie. I’ve been practicing my flying. You want to work on your navigation, Danny. Couldn’t believe it when you flew into that storm. We just went around it.”

“We thought you’d try to rescue your … the other agent who brought you up,” Dixie said.

“Sometimes for a spy you’re pretty transparent,” Les said.

“And there are other people around here not transparent at all,” Danny said. “Nala, I saw them shoot you in the chest!”

Nala reached inside his jerkin and brought out the steel tray that Danny had given him with food on it. “When I hear them come in, I do this,” the Cherb explained. Danny looked at the tray. It was pocked with bullet marks, but none had penetrated.

“What are we going to do with this lot?” Dixie said.

“Bullet here,” Nala said, pointing to the back of his neck.

“Cut it out, Nala,” Danny said. “First of all, Dixie and Les, you have to go back. This is not your fight. You’re needed at Wilsons.”

“Forget about it, Danny, that’s not going to happen. We’re here for good.”

“I’ve lost too … too many people.”

“Think about it,” Dixie said, serious for once. “You reckon it’s any less dangerous in Wilsons? If and when the Cherbs invade, the place is finished.”

“I’m betting that whatever happens in the end, you’ll be involved with it,” Les added. “Besides, things happen when you’re around. This is what I think.… You were lured here to a trap. They let Stone go—because I can’t see any other way he got out of that place. He was the bait. And the trap would have worked if we hadn’t helped. You need us, Danny.”

Danny looked at his friends, a plan forming in his mind.

“Okay,” he said, “but here’s what we have to do. They were expecting two prisoners, so that’s what we’ll give them. Dixie, come here.”

P
earl lay awake in the darkness. The men had left her alone for two days now. Her body was racked with pain and sleep was difficult. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Sometimes a dream brought her back to the time when Danny was small. She would remember bathing him, reading him stories and chatting when he came home from school, and would smile in her sleep. But waking always brought pain and fear. The men would come again.

And indeed her cell door did clang open that morning. Two men entered and she shrank against the wall. It had always been two men in the days of torture. But this time they laughed at her feeble protests. They made her stand against the wall and measured her. Then they weighed her on a portable scale. Finally they put a tape around her neck, recording the results carefully in a notebook. When they went away, she lay down again. She had no illusions about the place she was in. She would never see the sun again, but she longed to see Danny’s face one more time. She tried to find a comfortable space for her broken body in the hope that sleep would bring perhaps one more sweet memory.

A
t Wilsons Academy for the Devious Arts, Master Brunholm yelled into Vandra’s face.

“You will tell what you know, or I’ll bring that so-called assassin friend of yours in and get it out of him.”

“He doesn’t know anything,” Vandra said.

“A few days locked in the Butts and we’ll soon find out if you’re telling the truth! Where are they?”

“I told you a thousand times, I don’t know!”

“Has Danny gone over to the other side?”

“Leave her alone, Marcus,” Devoy said. “What’s done is done. They are gone. The physick had nothing to do with it.” Brunholm made a gesture of disgust and Vandra took it as a dismissal, almost running from the room.

“I nearly had her admitting her guilt,” Brunholm said angrily.

“Forget about it. We must think about what is going on. With the Treaty Stone broken, I had expected a Cherb invasion. But nothing has happened. Are the Ring of Five up to something else?”

“We need to send someone to Grist to find out what’s happening,” Brunholm said, “but who do we have who we can trust?”

“The student body is weak, and there are many we can’t trust. Starling’s cover was blown in Grist. I suspect we would be sending her to her doom.”

“Then it must be the physick.”

“She may be needed here.”

“If the Cherbs invade here, there will be no need of a healer. We will all be dead.”

“She can’t be sent alone.”

“Then Toxique must be sent with her.”

Brunholm grimaced. “He’s not fit for undercover work. He jumps at shadows. He’d scream if a mouse ran over his toe.”

“But he also has the gift of anticipation. He knows when things are going to happen.”

“Bah, we’re clutching at straws here.”

“Straws are all we have, Marcus.”

Devoy went to the window and stared west as though he could penetrate the clouds that lay between Wilsons and the great Cherb fortress of Grist.

“H
alt! Who goes there?” The sentry was taking no chances. Kilrootford had been on the highest state of alert for weeks now. They were all jumpy and on edge. The escape hadn’t helped matters. Heads had rolled in the upper division. The other prisoner’s security had been doubled. The sentry had seen her when they’d brought her in. She was a sad blond lady.

“Nice-looking,” he’d said to one of his colleagues.

“She won’t be by the time they’ve finished with her,” the other man said with an unpleasant laugh.

“Outland patrol,” came the reply now. The sentry lowered his rifle a little, but a different kind of tension crept in. He had been told to expect a patrol, but they were early. They weren’t due to pass the gates for another thirty minutes. The elite squad were the best, it was fair to say, but they were arrogant and aloof, and he didn’t like dealing with them.

He could see them clearly now, walking in the dusk. There were four figures. Two were prisoners—a bedraggled blond girl and a skinny boy being prodded along at rifle point by two ski-masked squad members. Then the
sentry’s mouth fell open. The thin boy had something growing from his shoulders, a feathery mass.… No, they couldn’t be. He rubbed his eyes. The boy definitely had wings. Proper curving wings rising proud of his shoulders.

The sentry had read accounts of winged figures being spotted, but like most people he had dismissed them as being as probable as crop circles or alien abductions. Now one of these winged figures was trudging down the road toward him.

“What you got?” He directed his question at one of the ski-masked figures, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Got a report of intruders in the south quadrant,” one of the figures replied. “Found this freak and the girl when we got there. We need to get them straight to the lab.”

“Can’t let you do that.” The sentry’s voice was nervous. “Orders. I was told you’d be coming in with one or two prisoners but that I wasn’t to let you in until eight o’clock, and then I was to direct you to block X.”

“Whose orders?”

“Direct from the prime minister’s office. Longford himself.”

“This won’t wait.”

“It will have to.”

Under the ski mask Danny was puzzled. He presumed that the sentry was expecting the real elite squad (who were now tied up in the holiday cottage) to bring in two prisoners—Danny and Nala—but why was the timing so precise? The only answer was that something was
due to happen when they were finally permitted into the complex. He knew it wouldn’t be anything good, and the only way to thwart it would be to get in
ahead
of time.

“We have to go in,” he said. The sentry gripped his rifle.

“Orders …,” he began. He never finished the sentence. In a few minutes he was trussed up tight, gagged and hidden in a corner of the sentry box.

I
n block X the door to Pearl’s cell opened. She was hauled to her feet and her arms were pinned behind her back.

“Where are you taking me?” she said, but there was no reply. Just before they got to the door a black mask was put over her eyes. Blindfolded and tied, she was frogmarched along, only odors reaching her behind the mask, and they were odors that had become familiar to her since she had been brought to this place. Sweat, blood, fear, loneliness.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked again. For her pains she received an open-handed slap to the side of her face that made her reel in pain. She got the message. No more questions.

D
anny and Nala kept their ski masks on, although Les had made them lower their rifles.

“I don’t want that Cherb pointing anything at me,” he said. If Nala was offended, he didn’t show it.

“I don’t understand it,” Dixie said nervously. “There should be more security around. Even at the gate, there was only one sentry.”

It was true. They were walking through the complex with ease. No one challenged them. In fact, no one was there to challenge them. They were the only people on the neat paths leading from one nondescript building to another. Dixie tried to peer through windows, but the ones that didn’t give onto dormitories or canteens were frosted glass.

“I don’t like it,” Les said. The sinister air of the deserted camp only increased as they went through unlocked gates channeling them toward a large, windowless building at the farthest reaches of the camp.

“Sanitize,” Nala growled from under his ski mask.

“What?”

“They sanitize camp.”

“What, like a cleaning thing?” Dixie looked puzzled.

“No,” Danny said, “we learned about it with Brunholm. It’s where one side withdraws everyone from a location. It’s to give a team like us a clean run in without anybody challenging them.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because something nasty is waiting for them when they get there,” Les said grimly.

“We have an advantage, though,” Danny said. “They’re not expecting us for another thirty minutes.”