and Domi had learned long ago that it wasn’t the number of bullets you threw at a problem as much as it was the shots that stuck to an enemy. She wouldn’t spray as fast as she could shoot, and once things got even closer, then it was time to let her Detonics Combat Master speak in its earthy bellow.
“What’s happening?” Lakesh asked. Like her, he was wrapped head to toe against the desert sun, a loose hood drooped over his evermore gray hair. His blue, transplanted eyes looked across the horizon that Domi was watching.
“Nothing,” Domi answered. “Time to sit and rest. Have a sip.”
Lakesh glanced at her, his full lips turning downward in a frown. “You don’t have to baby me, love.”
The albino girl caressed his cheek, soft and wrinkled, and managed a smile. “In the desert, remember?”
Lakesh managed a snort through his large nose. “My mind isn’t completely addled.”
“Keep your strength up,” Domi urged. “We’re almost to the city, and who knows what’s waiting inside there.”
Lakesh nodded. “How long have we been traveling?”
“Couple days,” Domi answered tersely.
“There’s trouble,” Lakesh muttered. “I know you.”
“Didn’t say you for—” Domi began.
“I mean, I know you drop unnecessary wordage when you’re worried about something,” Lakesh said. “Under stress, especially ready for combat.”
“No fight yet,” Domi promised. “But it’s quiet. Too quiet.”
Lakesh took a deep breath, then glanced down at the rifle she cradled in her delicate-seeming hands. He reached out and rested his fingers over hers. “Why did we come here?”
“Fix your tangle brain,” Domi said. “Might find some one.”
“It was a year or two ago, right? Surely they abandoned Area 51, especially with the ascension,” Lakesh said. “Why make any use of a facility for breeding hybrids when—?” He paused and winced. “Tiamat is gone. Right?”
Domi nodded somberly. “Happened a year back.”
Lakesh’s brow wrinkled. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Remember old things pretty good. Now, more fused out,” Domi muttered.
Lakesh sighed. “Enlil giveth. Enlil taketh away.”
“Enlil built 51,” Domi said. “No more Tiamat, no more snake-face council, might wake up old labs.”
“Canny reasoning, except that Enlil is operating on the far side of the globe,” Lakesh said. His face twisted in concern. “I can remember that, but everything else—”
“Not natural,” Domi interrupted him. “Tangle brain caused by something different.”
“I figured that much, probably once an hour for the past several days,” Lakesh lamented.
Domi hoped that her ball cap and sunglasses hid the concern in her eyes, but the scientist still retained sharp senses, even if his memory wasn’t as keen as usual. He cupped her cheek. “You made a smart decision coming here, darling.”
“Maybe,” Domi answered. Her attention was drawn by the flicker of a shadow.
Downtown Vegas had shifted much when Sky Dog’s convoy blasted its way through, past a pitched ambush. Many of the buildings not wrecked in the explosive firefight, or by the tower collapsed to block pursuit of the convoy of Sandcats, looked about ready to collapse in on themselves. The sands had crawled over the cityscape in an effort to reclaim the territory that once belonged. Hardy scrub grew close to where underground streams still sluggishly rolled through old sewer systems, the southern Nevada reservoirs long ago shattered and deteriorated by the earthshaker bombs that destroyed most of California.
Vegas was empty, but far from devoid of life. It was the signs of movement, the leftovers of habitation, that had left Domi on high alert. Someone was still present, or more likely, had been released in the wake of the devastating battle where she had nearly died, plucked instants from death via implode grenade and pulled to safety on Thunder Isle’s remarkable time trawl. Domi was aware that the laboratories in the depths of what used to be Area 51 had churned out a colony of hybrids; she’d seen the nursery, seen the babies.
What if it wasn’t merely hybrids that lived there, or what if the infant hybrids who’d somehow survived had been altered, changed by Tiamat’s awakening signal? Domi wished she could pose these questions to Lakesh, but she didn’t even have a quarter of the vocabulary necessary to convey those thoughts to him when he was at his sharpest, let alone when he was halfway to full tangle brain.
Domi advanced from cover. “There’s a hotel. We can stay there. The sun’s going to hot.”
Lakesh nodded. Where she used to look to him as a source of learning, of protective affection unlike the grim, competitive existence she’d engaged in while growing up, now he seemed much less confident, weaker. Domi loved him with all of her heart. This was a man who had done what he could to teach her, giving her the ability to read at what he called “a third-grade level” and treating her as an adult, a woman who was an equal, despite her relative youth and her wild nature.
That love was still there, evidencing itself in the form of trust in her, trust in her ability to cut through a torrid, hostile desert and into the ruins of a dead city that wasn’t so dead.
Domi couldn’t give voice to many of the thoughts racing through her mind, but she had one clear message.
“I will not let you down,” she whispered.
PRISCILLA STAYED VERY STILL, the eternal shadow of a collapsed casino interior forming its protective cocoon over her as the grunts and snorting inhalations of the hunters resounded on the other side of a barrier of light Sheetrock. The dark might not have been good concealment from her “brothers,” but so far their noses were not keen enough to follow her spoor, even through a thin wall. She was also glad that even if their ears were sensitive, they made too much noise sniffing the air, trying to find her.
She knew all she had to do was wait. Soon enough their interest would fade and they would go elsewhere, seeking some other form of prey. She cursed herself for a fool, allowing them to spot her when she’d assumed they would be snoring heavily during the rising heat of the day. Nighttime had been the cool period, when they could exert themselves without tiring under the blazing gaze of the sun. It didn’t help them much that daylight seared their sensitive eyes, especially in such a sandblasted environment. Priscilla was glad she had the intellect and calmness to make use of items left behind by the humans, like sunglasses. She’d read somewhere of a condition called snow blindness, and it was readily apparent that there could be sand blindness, as well, when the eye is so washed in the reflection of icy white or pale yellow that even the strongest contrasts couldn’t penetrate their vision. Her days of effort, leaving the great dead lake and its abandoned buildings behind, had made her aware of the need to protect her own sensitive eyes.
She’d adjusted her schedule to the daytime thanks to the use of polarized lenses, knowing that the primitive creatures she’d struggled to escape had been forced by experience to adopt a nocturnal hunting pattern.
