Darksider: Reveler Series 3 (11 page)

After thirty seconds that took forever, Lambert moved away and engaged Marshal Shaw in discussion. Lots of gushing going on over there.

Harlen couldn’t resist the impulse one moment more. He pulled up
Apocalypse Pow
—the grid in front of him lit with its end-of-the-world setting, buildings crumbled, dust in the air. Some tough-looking revelers moved through the area where Sera had been showing off, but she was no longer there. He rapidly searched through the other grids, a roar of frustration rising from his belly.

Lambert did this. Somehow he was involved.

Harlen called up the exit log for the Rêve. It showed two departures, both without tags to identify them.

***

Sera felt him before she saw him.

A shiver ran down her spine even though the sun blazed like an incoming fireball overhead. Emotion and intention spread in the dreamwaters, and now that her own fear and stress didn’t overwhelm her, she could sense her stalker’s cloying interest lapping up against her mind.

Gotcha, you bastard
, she thought.

Sera looked around for a column. She knew they were there, but they were an optical illusion, often invisible in the dreamscape. But if she really looked for one, changed her perspective, it would appear, jutting out of the rubble. In the Agora, columns meant safety and oversight. The columns were like Harlen—strong, steady, dependable—holding up the sky. And that’s exactly what she needed right now. The ancient architecture amid the roil of modern desolation somehow worked. Sera leaned over and slapped the smooth surface of a column with the flat of her hand.

A moment passed, then…

“What is the nature of your emergency?” a soft voice said in her ear.

She shivered. It was
him.
And how dumb of her. If her stalker were Chimera, he’d be able to control the columns, too, just like Harlen.

She whipped around but only found a crowd of people pressing in close to cheer some black belt reveler doing acrobatic kicking flips that were visually impressive but not very useful in a fight.

Her stalker had to have altered his appearance so that he was one among the throng.

Harlen said he’d be watching.
Okay…
She raised her arms and waved her hands.

“To whom are you waving?” the voice asked. She turned quickly but, again, couldn’t pick out one person. Neither of the two close enough to whisper—a woman crunching her knuckles and a big bald guy with sweat beading on his head—seemed like they could be her stalker. “Do you have a friend here to help you?”

Why, yes. In fact, she did.
Harlen? Any time now.

“What if I have a friend to help me, too?”

That would suck. But she wasn’t going to be afraid. She was very good at maneuvering Darkside, or had been once. This guy knew nothing about her control. He’d only seen her at her worst, stressed and afraid, but she was on a high now. Never higher.

Harlen was back in her life. Work was just complicated for him at the moment.

A breath at her neck stirred her hair. “Did you come here to learn how to fight me?”

Another shiver skated down her spine. Her heart was beating fast, but she gritted her teeth and kept still.

It was tricky how her stalker could be so close, but she couldn’t see him. He was very good at concealing himself.

“No,” she said. He would know if she lied. “I can fight already.”

The bald guy looked at her as if she were crazy for talking to herself.

She smiled at him and shouldered deeper into the crowd. Somewhere in the waking world these were real people with spouses and kids and mortgages, just here to have some fun, see if they could take a punch, or maybe work on their courage. She settled next to a kick-ass granny—short, stooped, and gray, but with brass knuckles.

“They can’t protect you,” the voice said. “You belong to me.”

Sera felt the caress of fingertips on her cheek and flinched, swatting the air next to her.

A couple other revelers looked at her askance.

Panic wormed its way into her bravado. Rubbing the remnant of his touch off her cheek, she asked, “Why me? Why are you bothering me?”

Another reveler sidestepped away from her.

“I was only supposed to report on you, someone who had once shown aptitude for Rêve, but Serafina, you shine.” An invisible hand stroked across her ribs just under her breasts, as if to pull her to him.

She shoved that sensation away, too. Crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t touch me!”

He was messing with her, putting her on the defensive. Making her flinch. She hated that.

The granny smiled at her. “You’re a good fighter, but maybe you’ve had enough of this sun. You should ask to wake up.”

The sun needed to take its shine down a notch, but yes, that was the obvious thing to do—escape this. Most revelers needed the Rêve company to pull them out of shared dreaming, but she’d always been able to do it on her own. She could wake up. Except she bet this guy could wake at will, too, and thereby get away. Live to play another day.

Which just burned. The opportunity was now, but because he was Chimera, the Agora’s Rêves operated on his terms.

But…not all places Darkside did.

The Scrape. No one could wake directly from the Scrape. Sera didn’t have Jordan’s ability to simply shove him there, but maybe he’d follow her out. Play cat to her mouse. Once in that howling, relentless wind, the real contest would begin, but on equal footing.

She waited for him to touch her again. Her reaction had to be authentic or he’d sense her deception, the lie in the waters.

He came at her throat, a strong hand with bruising fingers. “You’ll come with me.”

Her mouth went dry. And her heart fluttered instead of beat. No sane person would leave a crowd of people with him, so she shook her head.
No.
He had to do better than that. Less trite. More menace, please.

“Come with me, or I’ll invade the dreams of everyone you love, one by one. I’ll eat their hope and leave nothing left but fear in their lives. But I only
want
you.”

Eating hope was sufficiently awful. Sera supposed she could go with that.

She let her stalker pull her back through the crowd. She stumbled at the rising incline made of rubble and concrete. The hum of the Rêve’s boundary tickled on her skin. Seemed like he was planning on taking her outside the Rêve, too.

She’d go on her terms.

When she sensed his rising anticipation, she grabbed for the wrist at her neck with one hand
 
while stepping to the side and struck his groin with her other. When he went down, she elbowed him in the face.

Self-defense 101. Plus, men were sensitive about their manly parts, apparently even in dreams.

She glanced back over her shoulder as she ran and finally got a good look at him as he straightened from her assault: midforties, brown hair, angular face, grimacing mouth. She would now recognize him in any lineup or mug shot.

He reached out for her, but she was already in flight. Crossing the boundary sizzled, and then she was almost held aloft by the gale on the other side. Her hair struck her face and got in her mouth, and the sand stung her eyes. But for once, she welcomed the cruel wind.

There was one place she knew where she might have the upper hand, where he would be lost. It was a labyrinth conceived by a genius, whose brain was so on fire with creativity that her hair glowed magenta.

Sera leaned into the storm and trudged across the Scrape, feet sinking into the sand, wind harrying her backward. The air was crying with the force of the gusts, lamenting a misery that would have no end. Modern philosophers wrote papers on the dust storm, what it could mean, where it came from, but to her, it was the sound of loneliness. She knew the feeling well.

Her stalker trailed behind her, and she let him make up some distance to keep him hopeful and fixated.
This way. I’ve got you now.

When she faced forward again, into the storm, she staggered, surprised.

Several meters from her position, almost a figment of her imagination, obscured by the gusts of sand, stood a creature—a
creature
. Its eyes were gray, like Steve Coll’s had been, and the rest of him was gray, too. Naked, sexless, like a wrinkled, hairless old man. The wind blew bone cold from its direction.

Steve said these creatures ate revelers.

She ducked to the side, hiding in the wind, and pushed forward, hoping the thing went for her stalker. No such luck. When she crossed into Maze City, her stalker crossed, too, pelting behind her down a street where old-time streetlamps glowed with an eerie white light and long, faceless brick buildings fronted the streets. The Scrape’s sand had blown up against the buildings in wavering ripples, as if the dreamwaters lapped there, too.

The directions to the cozy room began with three blocks forward. She fled into an industrial park, cranes and whatnot clawing overhead, where a single block seemed endless—three of them would go on for miles. And she couldn’t take the left because her pursuer was too close. She veered around a corner and ducked inside a glass doorway where she heaved for breath and prayed he’d pass by.

“I’m seriously thinking about letting him catch you,” a voice said.

Sera jolted and turned around.

Maisie stood with her arms crossed, daggers in her eyes.

“Oh, thank God.” It worked. “That’s
him
.”

“But why’d you bring him here? Take him to your own goddamned dreamscape.”

Nuh-uh. He knew her dreams too well. “Yours is better. He’ll get lost and trapped here. Then Harlen can grab him.”

“And when Harlen turns him over to the authorities and this guy tells them about my city, you don’t think they’ll try to find it? Find me?”

Sera hadn’t thought that far ahead. A valid concern. She had one more for Maisie. “Also, there are monsters in the Scrape.”

Maisie rolled her eyes. “Did you bring one of those in with you, too?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sera was gone; Lambert had distracted him.

The long list of revelers within the
Carnival Rio
Rêve skated in front of Harlen’s vision, but all his attention had narrowed to Lambert, who was just now excusing himself from speaking to Marshal Erika Shaw. Any moment now, he’d exit the Agora and be gone.

Like hell.

In the absence of Rook, the only tracker who Harlen trusted to seek out and find Sera, Harlen was going to break some laws. The most immediate way to discover where Sera had gone was go to the source. Or
become
the source.

Harlen was going to proxy Lambert, and he felt icily calm, almost cheerful, about doing it. The pain would be nothing.

Erika Shaw had walked over to review the list of revelers Harlen had on-screen. Her lips were moving, but he had no idea what she was saying, and didn’t care. Then she accessed and entered the
Rio
Rêve.

Across the null space, Lambert put a hand to a column as if he was going to access another Rêve.
 

Proxy drops were made by a team deployed to surveil a specific subject. Insertion and extraction required an order of operations to keep both the proxy and the information received safe. Since Harlen didn’t have the resources to execute a drop, he leaped.

As with time, distance was inconstant Darkside. Didn’t matter how near or far Lambert was.

Lambert must’ve sensed something because he half turned back, but it was too late. In a crackle of searing, hissing static, Harlen’s consciousness filtered into Lambert’s. Acute disorientation reversed the visual spectrum of color—red going green, blue to yellow. Volume increased and also intermittently cut out, so sound came in pops and bursts. There was a foul taste in Lambert’s mouth, and the sensations of moving didn’t have a natural rock-step rhythm. Felt forced. Felt…alien.

Proxying always came with side effects. The
him–not him
dichotomy made Harlen’s brain and guts blaze, trying to resolve the contradiction. The first traces of panic touched his nerves, but he ignored the response. It would get much worse. He had to stay long enough to learn where Sera had been taken.

Lambert returned his attention to the Rêve access menu he’d initiated at the column. He selected one of the few that required an override to enter from the Agora, and from there he stepped into a dream projection of the Chimera headquarters in San Diego. Harlen had been at headquarters just yesterday morning.

The saturation of overhead lighting mixing with sunlight from the side windows was perfect, the footfalls on the white floor had the exact levels of
tap
and
squeak
, the slightly bleached smell of the air-conditioned atmosphere was flawless—each detail combined would fool even Harlen into thinking that this headquarters Rêve was really the headquarters in the waking world.

This shouldn’t exist.
There were laws about replicating government buildings.

James Dugan and his smirk came around the corner. He didn’t seem surprised to see Lambert there and approached him with the casualness of familiarity, as if they were equals.