A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) (7 page)

For a moment there was no answer, but then came, “Throw out your guns and come out! Slowly!”

“What’s to stop you from just shooting us when we do?” Jade shouted.

“We just want him, sweetheart!” one of the freelancers shouted back. “You get on your way and we won’t stop you!”

“I don’t know, I’m getting a bundle to keep him safe! Going to compensate me for my losses?” She winked in a way that only left Michael uncertain about her earnestness.

Michael pointed to the window and whispered, “Go! I’ll climb down after you when the transfer’s done.”


You
go!” she hissed. “I’ll cover you and bring that thing with me!”

“You shot Deets!” The freelancer’s shout aborted Michael’s reply, but he shook his head nonetheless. “You’ll be lucky we let you get away at all!”

“Well Deets shouldn’t have rushed his ass in here guns blazing, then, should he?”

“Look,” Michael tried, shouting again. “What do you want with me? Who are you?”

“Transfer complete.” It came from the AE-35 platform itself. Holes was apparently savvy enough to keep his own volume low. Michael crept over and unhooked it.

“Toss the gun! Come out slow like I said! Then we talk! You’ve got five seconds!”

Michael slid the platform into his pack. “Okay, okay! Just give us a sec! The door’s blocked!” He pointed to the window. Seeming to understand his intent, Jade shook her head and motioned like an angry umpire for him to go first.

“Five!” came the reply.

Michael holstered his weapon and took hold of the cables. Naked pavement loomed in the alley three stories down.

“Four!”

Jade inched to the window, gun still drawn. With a silent prayer that the cables would hold, he swung himself out of the window and somehow managed to stifle a curse as the ground threatened below.

“Three!”

The cables tugged and pinched at his clutching palms as his own weight dragged them through his grip. He lowered himself, hand under hand, as quickly as he could. So far it was holding. He passed a second-story window and could no longer hear the count above. He spared a glance upward. Jade wasn’t there.

He dropped farther, and another hail of gunfire echoed from the apartment. Michael took a breath and wrapped his arms around the cables. Gravity did the rest. The friction of the cable sliding through his arms barely slowed his fall.

Concrete smacked his soles. Michael rolled with the impact and spilled up against the building’s stucco exterior. One hand scraped across the stucco; the other skidded across the concrete. Ripped skin stung his palms and his legs felt cracked, but he was on the ground.

More gunfire jerked his attention back up. Jade swung out over the window sill as if in free-fall. Michael’s stomach clenched in anticipation of her plunge, but she clenched the cables and jerked to a stop a mere foot below the window.

Then one of the cables gave way and she plunged another foot.

Michael clambered to his feet, struggling for a way to catch her from a two-and-a-half-story fall. She glanced down, their eyes met, and she dropped.

He had only a moment to realize she still had a loose grip on the cables—they rushed through her hands the way he’d let them slide through his arms—and then her body slammed into his chest. Michael dropped to his knees with the impact, arms tightening. The next thing he knew, they were in a heap on the concrete. Atop them lay the fallen cables, the ends of each now snapped.

“Nice catch,” Jade gasped.

“Thanks.” Saying it took all the breath he had left in him. He struggled to draw another as Jade clambered off of him and tugged him up.

“Run!” she ordered.

Michael nodded, still fighting for breath. Behind them, between Marc’s apartment and the neighboring building, stretched a fence that blocked their path. Jade pulled him forward, toward the street.

They rushed the corner and Jade plowed straight into a man who rounded the corner at the same moment: the freelancer with the orange tattoo. Both of them startled, Jade fell back against the wall to steady herself. Michael rushed forward to hurl an impromptu punch at wherever he could hit. It took the freelancer in the stomach. Body armor met Michael’s knuckles. The freelancer doubled forward regardless, but in his rush to land the punch, Michael was off-balance. He caught himself on one foot and tried to spin for a second attack before the other could recover, but there wasn’t time.

Draw his weapon? Try to block his counterattack?

Jade lunged in and grabbed the freelancer’s shoulder faster than seemed possible. With a sizzling crackle swiftly eclipsed by a scream of pain, the freelancer spasmed as if jolted, and fell to his knees.

Jade let go. As one, they looked around the corner toward the apartment entrance. The freelancer must have run down ahead when they’d been going out the window: none of the others had yet arrived.

“Okay,” shot Jade, “
now
run!”

 

“You’ve got a taser in your hand?” They’d paused in an alley next to a bar about five blocks from Marc’s apartment. Live music thrummed through the walls amid the acrid aroma of years of cigarette smoke. Michael could see no sign of the freelancers following.

“Yeah, but you call it ‘handy’ and I’ll zap you in the junk.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

Jade peered at her right wrist, twisting her mouth into a scowl. “Only good for two shots before it needs a recharge. Used to be four, but the battery blows.”

Michael nodded. “You okay?”

“Takes more than falling out a window to stop me, ace. You just had to risk your neck to save your computer pal, eh?” Annoyance painted her tone, but the grin on her face seemed to imply it was less than sincere. “Better not have broken that thing on the way down.”

Michael checked on Holes’s new home. Nothing looked damaged.

“All systems remain in order,” Holes reported.

Michael breathed a sigh of relief and closed the bag again. “Any idea who those guys were?”

“Uh, lousy shots?” Jade shrugged and then peered both ways down the street before turning back to him. She slid a lose strand of red hair behind one ear. “Let’s not stand here discussing it. You can pick where we go, but let’s just go.”

“I can pick? Gee, thanks.”

“I’m magnanimous.” She slapped his butt. “Pick!”

Momentarily at a loss for words, and with only half-formed ideas for destinations, he led her further away from Marc’s place. Jade caught up to walk on his right side. The sunlight was gone completely and the sky above them was lit only by the haze of Northgate’s light pollution. Cars passed on the street beside them. The bar’s music faded into their past.

“Keep an eye out for a cab,” Michael said.

“I’m scoping for threats. Cab’s your department.”

He let it go, instead taking a breath and switching to, “Holes didn’t hire you.”

She watched him out of the corner of her eye. It was a moment before she responded. “Didn’t say he did. We going to have a problem about this?”

“I’d just like to know who did.”

“Life’s mysterious. I’d tell you, if I knew.”

“What’s your email address? And the address they contact you from? Maybe Holes can do some digging.”

“You’re not hacking my email,” she said.

“It’s not hacking, it’s—” Maybe it was hacking. Was it? “It doesn’t bother you, not knowing?”

“They don’t want me to know, so I don’t know. Part of my fee pays for anonymity. I’m not jeopardizing that just so you can feel all warm and fuzzy.”

“It’s not—”

“Listen, guy, you’ve clearly got someone gunning for you. Yeah, you’re not helpless anymore, but don’t you want protection? Or have I drawn one of those really fun jobs where I get to protect a suicide case?”

“I don’t even know who wants me dead,” Michael tried. “If I know who wants me alive—”

“Not hacking my email.”

Michael sighed. They paused on the edge of a crosswalk, momentarily alone aside the kaleidoscope of traffic. A garbage truck passed by, wafting its odor across Michael’s nose. “How long have you been a freelancer?” he asked.

She eyed him with a moment’s suspicion. “Since I was nineteen. Got what you could call ‘unofficial instruction’ before that.”

Michael had trouble pegging ages, but that probably meant at least five or six years’ experience, if true. “It’s only really been about nine months for me.”

“Including your three months unconscious?”

The light changed. They crossed. A police drone, its lights flashing, flew above their path as it rushed toward some crisis elsewhere.

“Yeah, including,” Michael said. “My first real job was with a mentor of mine. A middleman came to him with an anonymous offer to track down someone he claimed was an arsonist—the same arsonist, so he said, who’d just burned down our apartment. I wondered who the employer was. Diomedes didn’t care. He said it didn’t matter so long as the money was good.”

“Diomedes was your mentor?” she asked.

“You knew him?”

“Only by his rep. And that hit in the Corporate District in August, right?”

Should he tell her Diomedes was dead?
No, stay focused.
“This was before that, back in February. Our employer turned out to be someone who wanted both the arsonist
and
Diomedes dead, and the arsonist wasn’t even an arsonist. The employer was behind the fires. We found out before it was too late, but given things like that, how can you not care who’s hiring you?”

“The guy hired Diomedes hoping he’d turn out dead? So his money wasn’t really ‘good,’ was it?” She smirked with a twinkle in her violet eyes that Michael found surprisingly pleasant despite the argument.

“That’s not the point,” he managed after a moment. “If I don’t know who hired you, how do I trust your protection?”

Jade heaved a sigh. Her words came in a growled whisper. “Because I’m a professional. And regardless of the rest of the employer’s agenda,
protecting you
is what I’m paid for, and I do my job! Geez, you’re a mess! I’ve told you all I know!”

“So you say.”

She stepped in front of him and grabbed his arm. Her eyes—whites, irises, and pupils together—flashed a solid, glowing violet. “If I wanted to hurt you I’ve had plenty of chances. You want a fucking signed affidavit?”

Her eyes returned to normal. Michael stared her down through his consternation. “Point taken,” he said after a moment, and then stepped around her and continued. She let him. “But doesn’t it bother you at all that you might be getting played?”

“Michael, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the freelancer life may pay well, it may be challenging, it may set your blood pounding in a rush that gets you jazzed for the whole night in a single moment, but it is not perfect.”

“So, yes, in other words.”

She shrugged. “I like the way I said it better.”

“At least give me the email address he contacted you from. Maybe Holes can get some info on it.”

The clack of Jade’s boots along the sidewalk punctuated her silence for what must have been another twenty yards. “Fine. We get somewhere safe and I’ll give it over. Just tell Holes not to let whoever it is know I gave it to you.”

“What about
your
email address?”

“To quote your little computer friend: nope.”

“I’d trust you a little more if you’d—”

“Let you read my email?” she finished. “Life’s rough all over, guy.”

“Fair enough.”

Michael felt the first sprinkles of rain brush his face and remembered he ought to be looking for a cab. He cast about for one and found his eyes lingering a moment on hers. “Cool flash thing your eyes did, by the way. Nice effect.”

“Mm. They do that on their own with the right trigger. Blood pressure, adrenal spikes and such. Gotta have style, you know? Oh, hey: taxi!”

She flagged it down. Once it pulled up, Jade checked the cab’s interior and then, apparently satisfied, held the door to watch the area while he got in. He let her.

He’d need to find a moment in private to tell Holes to find Jade’s email address and, regardless of her protests, check her account to make sure she was on the level. Could the A.I. manage that? Marc had seemed confident in its abilities whenever he talked about it. Michael’s gut was telling him nothing on her; with all that was going on, he had to try, just to be careful.

She clambered in beside him. The door clapped shut.

The driver didn’t bother to turn his head. His voice filtered through the holes in the bulletproof glass between them. “Where to?”

Michael considered the question. Get somewhere safe, Jade had said. Where was safe now?

 

 
VIII

“FUCK IT, HE’S BLOCKING
the screen. Let me move around and—”

Caitlin put a hand on Rue’s shoulder to hold her back. “He’ll see you.” The man they were trailing had his back to them. It blocked their view of the ticket kiosk at which he stood.

“Not all-up-in-his-shit close, just enough to see past him.”

Rue’s eyes were artificial; she could zoom in from a distance. Yet given the kiosk’s position in the crowded, Romanesque train station . . . “There’s nowhere to see around him without getting too near. We’ll keep following. See which platform he chooses.”

Rue scowled, adjusted her jacket, and pulled her jet black hair out from under the back of its collar. “You’re the boss.”

“I’m not the boss, I just—” Caitlin turned to Rue, still watching the kiosk out of the corner of her eye. “Thanks for helping with this, Rue.”

Rue flashed a crooked smile that made her silver lip piercing twinkle. “We’re both Scry, Cait.”

“Aye.”

Their quarry completed his ticket purchase and Caitlin ducked behind a stone pillar as he turned. She waited for Rue to motion that the coast was clear. For likely the fifth time in as many minutes, Caitlin swallowed her guilt for stalking Felix this way. Yet what choice did she have? It was for his own good.

She caught sight of the back of Felix’s head as he passed. He was making for the southbound platforms and she ducked back farther. Rue began to tail him anew a few moments later. She waived Caitlin forward with a motion behind her back. Caitlin let her vanish into the crowd as much as she dared—Rue was only a few inches taller than she and neither were blessed with height—and then emerged from her hiding spot.

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