rumble of it vibrating within her.
Beware...
Right. As if she didn’t already know.
The man in the suit gave her all of his attention for the first time. With some exasperation he said, “Are we going to have a problem here?”
“Marat, do you want—?” one of the muscle twins asked.
But the suited man shook his head. “I’m sure we can come to a quieter understanding,” he said.
She understood, then. They might not care about her, but they did care about being caught. Although, since they’d have plenty of time to get away from this place, maybe they cared just as much about having official attention drawn to whatever strange thing they’d done—them with their ominous disks, inexplicable glyphs digging into tarnished bronze.
She pulled out the phone.
Marat’s expression darkened. “You stupid cunt,” he said, his crude language a shocking contrast to his urbane appearance but not to the malice on his face.
“Take your garbage and go,” she suggested, but her voice didn’t come out quite right—it lacked any ringing strength, mostly because she’d forgotten how to breathe. She’d expected thoughtlessness, not malevolence—and she knew she’d made a big mistake. That these woods, these roads, this town...it had changed more than she’d ever expected.
Kai was right. She’d been away too long.
“Seriously,” she said, trying to hide her uncertainty in a conciliatory tone. “It’s not a big deal. There’s a bear-safe garbage bin just down the—”
“If we’d wanted a bear-safe bin,” Marat said, cruel anger licking his words, “we’d have found one in the first place. Hantz, find a memory wiper. Aeli, grab her.”
Memory wiper? What the—?
One of the muscle twins regarded the open case with dismay. “But these are all damaged workings, or we wouldn’t be—”
“Do it!” Marat snapped, and the other muscle twin unlimbered himself to move.
Beware them!
“Don’t you dare—!” Regan said, the words a gasp of combined fear and outrage as she stepped back up the hill. “Don’t you—!” She stabbed at the phone pad. “Nine-one-one!”
The suited man only looked at her with scorn. “Reception,” he said, a single-word response that called her bluff. Deep in her mind the world growled. If the men heard it, they showed no sign.
The one called Aeli strode across the dry pool—and instead of scrambling back up the hill, she stood fast, struggling to take it all in. Because how could they really care so much about old metal disks? How did any of this make sense?
So she couldn’t quite believe it, and her hesitation left her perfectly positioned to see the strobing flash and flicker of light from the woods behind the men, to feel the burst of relief that certainly wasn’t hers.
And then Kai emerged from those woods.
He ran hard and barefoot, not in those Daniel Boone pants but in a damned breechclout and leggings, his torso bare to the morning spring and gleaming with health, muscles flowing.
Her astonishment must have warned the men. The muscle twins turned; Marat jerked around, his hand dipping into his pocket to pull out that which he’d slipped away upon her approach.
“Gun!” Regan cried wildly, gripping the walking stick like a bat, unable to reach Aeli from her perch. “He’s got a gun!”
Not that it slowed Kai for an instant, even as the gun went off—a thin, sharp report that barely echoed against the slopes. He ducked the incoming blow from Hantz and left the man staggering to regain his balance; rather than charging around to grab Marat’s gun, he somehow flipped his body around and slammed his heel into the man’s chest. Another bullet dug into the thin, hard dirt of the dry pool; Marat sprawled on his back, and the gun went flying.
Kai landed in a crouch—impossibly upright if on all fours, and already facing Hantz again.
“No!” Regan cried again as Aeli jerked around to take Kai from behind. She threw the useless phone aside and slid off her platform of rock and root, surfing the slope down to the dry pool with the walking stick in hand.
Aeli reached for Kai’s vulnerable back—a move of brute force, to yank him away and toss him down—but suddenly Kai wasn’t there any longer. He dropped down to a crouch and along the way his leg whipped out, his low shin catching Hantz just above the knee. Hantz shouted in pain as the leg gave way—and Kai twisted like a cat, back in a crouch and facing Aeli, ready to drive up from below.
But Regan had reached Aeli, too, and she’d found her temper somewhere along the way. “I said no!” she cried and slammed the walking stick down across the meat of his shoulder, close to the base of his neck. Kai leaped out of the way as Aeli fell—and when he landed and rolled, he came up with the gun in hand.
“Sentinel!” Marat spat at him.
“No,” Kai told him, crouching easily, one knee on the ground and the gun not pointing at anything in particular. Regan backed uneasily away, the stick still held like a bat, aware that Kai hadn’t truly needed her and that she might, in fact, just get in his way. “Just myself. But this is my home, and this is my friend. I won’t let you get hurt, either.”
The man narrowed his eyes and climbed to his feet, dusting himself off. “There were rumors of a family here many years ago,” he said, and gestured peremptorily at the muscle twins—a command to stand down, not that either of them had actually regained their feet. “But not for some time. Just as we became interested in them, it seems they left.”
Kai said nothing.
The man smiled grimly at him. “We always wondered why a family would stay apart that way. And why Southwest Brevis allowed them to do it.”
Kai said nothing. Nor did he move. For the first time Regan realized he’d been shot—that blood sheeted along the outside of his arm.
Finally, the man said softly, “My name is Marat. Remember it. You’ll be needing it in the near future.” He jerked his head at his muscle twins, who hauled themselves upright. Hantz limped; Aeli seemed dazed. But they gathered the metal disks and returned them to their partitioned and padded cases, while Marat stood off to the side and Kai waited, still silent.
Regan tried to pretend she wasn’t there at all.
Marat lingered as the men headed unsteadily down the narrow cut of the dry creek leading out from the pool. He eyed Kai with a deliberate gaze, taking in his remarkable nature, making obvious note of the breechclout and leggings and even of his preternaturally quiet strength in waiting. “It would have been better for you,” he said, “if you had not interfered.”
Kai still said nothing. Regan understood it to be not reticence, but that Kai had already said what he’d had to say.
Then Marat looked at her, and she flinched from it, suddenly exposed. She and her stick. He said, “It would have been better for you, too. What lies between us is nothing of
