Shadow Box

They had arrived.

“Did we do it?” Rosalia asked, her voice breathless with wonder.

“Sixty, seventy miles in a footstep,” Kane assured her. “We did it.”

“Sixty-eight miles,” Brigid confirmed as the interphaser powered down, its lotus blossom of colors sucked back inside the unit like liquid swirling down a drain. She crouched beside the device, which now rested on an otherwise unremarkable section of sand, and placed the carrying case beside it, undoing the catches. There was another circle of stone there, almost entirely buried in the sand, its cuneiform markings long since worn away.

Having packed up the interphaser in its carrying case, Brigid scanned the sky around them, looking at the constellations and assessing their position in her head.

Kane triggered the Commtact and spoke in a subdued tone, “Domi, we are on-site. Please respond.”

A few seconds passed before Domi’s enticing, husky voice was audible over the subcutaneous Commtacts.

“Hi, Kane. I’m with Decard’s team. We’re sending up a tracer on three.”

“Aten should be somewhere over that way,” Brigid decided, pointing off to the east.

Almost as soon as she said it, they saw a scarlet-colored firework whoosh into the sky, leaving a bright point high over their heads as the flare beacon floated on the wind currents.

“Guess that’s them.” Kane smiled.

IT TOOK ANOTHER fifteen minutes to cover the ground on foot, but Kane, Brigid, Grant and their two prisoners finally found their way to the temporary campsite that Decard’s crew had set up among the windswept dunes.

When she saw them approaching, Domi broke into a run and met the Cerberus team halfway.

“Madre de dios!” Smarts exclaimed as Domi raced toward them, startled by the woman’s unique appearance.

Though a fully grown woman, Domi still had the diminutive frame of a girl just entering her teens. Her limbs were thin and birdlike, yet she was a superb athlete and robust hand-to-hand combatant. Most significantly, however, Domi looked like no one else that Smarts had ever seen. She had the chalk-white skin and bone-white hair of an albino, and her eyes blazed a burning ruby-red like the flames of hell. She wore her hair in a short, pixieish style, enhancing her skeleton-like appearance, and she had chosen the briefest of clothes—a halter top and cutoff shorts—leaving her midriff, limbs and feet bare. Her clothing was beige, matching the sandy desert beneath the dark sky, its light color making her white skin seem somehow more pale than ever.

Like the other members of Kane’s field team, Cobaltville played a prominent part in Domi’s past. Domi had been forced into sexual servitude in the lowest echelons of the ville. She had grown up as a wild child of the Outlands, and her wits and decision making still had something of the instinctive to them.

“Kane,” she cried, running up to the ex-Mag and wrapping her arms around him. Kane hugged her back, looking like a giant holding a tiny, china doll. “I heard you ran into that quake over on the coast. You’re okay?”

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.”