The woman’s flesh seemed almost washed-out compared to the café-au-lait complexions of the other members of the tribe. Her braided black hair and dark eyes gave Broken Ghost a striking appearance unlike anyone else in the tribe. She had painted her face with subtle blends, adding the illusion of shadow, intensifying her cheekbones, making her sharp-angled face appear almost skeletal, and she had weaved bits of glass and small, sharp chips of rock into her thick hair. She wore a loose undershirt that left her lean arms bare, their tight, corded muscles visible. Her skirt was really just two strips of material—one in front and one in back—that dangled to her knees and left her firm legs unencumbered.
Cloud Singer looked down at her own body, perversely unable to stop comparing herself to the magnificent warrior. By contrast, Cloud Singer was just a girl. Sixteen years old, with all the energy and suppleness that that granted, but none of the raw power of the formidable woman at the back of the cave. She wore her warrior’s garb, as she had done ever since returning home to the outback: a tight strip of material stretched across her small breasts like a bandage, with more strips across her groin and legs, wrapped around her arms and encasing her scarred knuckles. Once upon a time, those strips of material had been the pure white of the clouds for whom she sang. After the massacre in Georgia, of which she was the only survivor, the strips had been washed with the blood of a squealing boar while Cloud Singer slit its neck, squeezing its life out of it, until the material was dyed red. After that, despite protests from the elders of the tribe, Cloud Singer had refused to remove her warrior clothes, to the point of even bathing in them in the underground pool that the tribe used. Only alone, in her few moments of absolute solitude, had she stripped out of the strange uniform, and then only to be naked. Until the mission was complete, she would never wear anything other than her warrior’s garb. She had promised that much to Neverwalk as he lay there, head lolled at that dreadful angle, the dried blood splashed all about him in the underground bunker in the Caucasus Mountains.
“They’ve used their slicer,” Decimal River stated, his head turning right then left as he addressed the two women on opposite sides of the cave. He was a young man, just a few years older than Cloud Singer, and his left arm was decorated with tattoos of circuitry. He wore baggy shorts and a loose shirt, open to the waist. The shirt was dark with sweat, and clung to his dark skin where its folds touched him. His hair was braided, like Broken Ghost’s, and his face showed a nasty scar from a burn across the left cheek, stopping just shy of his eye.
“Not slicer,” Broken Ghost corrected, her voice low, eyes closed in meditation. “Mat-trans. They call it a mat-trans.”
Decimal River pulled up a window of scrolling information on the laptop’s screen, flicking his hand before the motion sensor to run quickly through the pages of information displayed there. “Fifty-seven minutes ago,” he continued, “they activated the mat-trans, crossing from their home in the Montana mountains to…here.” He pointed to a paper map that was stretched across the wall of the cave. The map showed North America, and a red cross marked the Bitterroot Mountains. His finger tapped at an area close to the bottom right, but it meant nothing to Cloud Singer.
Broken Ghost took a single pace forward, and she seemed suddenly much more imposing as Decimal River looked up at her from his seated position. “Prime the trap,” she said, her words the barest whisper as they left her mouth.
Cloud Singer smiled. Soon the Original Tribe would get its due. Soon they would have their revenge on Cerberus and its accursed leader. And then Lakesh would die.
“IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME with these bottom-feeders,” Kane growled as he mentally assessed the immediate area around the crates where the three Cerberus warriors had taken cover. The exit door was ten paces ahead of them, and there was certainly enough cover to escape the boathouse if they wanted to.
“What do you see out there, Kane?” Grant asked.
Another hail of bullets hammered into the crates beside them, splintering the wood and kicking up puffs of sawdust, and they heard the sounds of guards running all about them between the stacked crates.
“People in diving suits,” Kane said. “Frogmen armed to the teeth. They were rushing in from the open dock.”
Grant nodded toward the door to the boathouse. “You want to get out of here?”
Kane thought for a moment, glancing across at Brigid for confirmation. “Nah,” he decided. “Let’s go make friends, cause mayhem.” With that, Kane stood, reached up and pulled himself up the stack of crates beside him, clambering to the top in a series of quick, economical movements.
Raising the Sin Eater before him, Grant hunkered down and stalked off into the shadows, his black duster helping him blend into the darkness. Brigid took a different route toward the opposite side of the boathouse, weaving through the crates at a fast trot as bullets zipped all around, the TP-9 held high. As she ran, she rooted around in her satchel with her free hand, producing three small metallic spheres, like ball bearings, from its hidden depths.
As Kane pulled himself to the top of the stacked crates, he saw one of Ohio Blue’s men up there stagger backward toward him, an oozing red stain across his chest where he had been riddled with bullets from below. The man cried as he misstepped, falling from the high stack and plummeting past Kane to the solid floor almost fifteen feet below. Across from him, on a nearby tower of crates, another guard was falling over his own feet, a gout of red gushing from a large wound in what was left of his skull. Whoever the newcomers were, they were well-trained, Kane realized—it took some nice pinpoint work to take out the high guards so quickly.
He pulled himself over the lip of the crates and, keeping his body low, stalked across the towers as flashes of gunfire continued to light the floor below. The body of another security guard lay sprawled on his back close to the far side of the crate tower, a single red-rimmed wound between his staring eyes. In an automatic gesture, Kane’s left hand reached down and closed the dead man’s eyes as he passed.
Kane dropped, lying flat on his stomach, and crawled the last few yards to the edge of the tall tower. His head popped forward, and he peeked over the side as the gunfire continued below him. It looked as though a miniature war had erupted down there. In heavy helmets and diving gear, a dozen men were working as a team, using long-nosed pistols to take out Ohio Blue’s guards as they approached the beautiful trader where she cowered behind her crimson recliner, bullets flying all around.
As Kane watched, the tall blond trader reached beneath the bullet-riddled recliner and produced a long-barreled revolver from its hiding place, taped to the underside of the couch. It was a Ruger Security Six, a silver six-shooter with enough stopping power to drill through a wag door. Blue hadn’t been cowering, Kane realized; she was using the recliner as cover while she armed herself.
In a flash, Ohio Blue raised the Ruger, steadying the butt with her free hand, and blasted a shot at the lead frogman. The bullet took him full in the chest and the masked man staggered for a moment. Then, to Kane’s surprise, the frogman shook his head and continued walking toward Ohio Blue, almost as though nothing had happened.
Ohio’s guards were also having little success, and Kane now saw why. The divers were wearing bulletproof vests over their diving suits.
Ohio Blue continued firing at the lead frogman, her shots going wild as she started to panic. A moment later, the six-shooter was out of bullets, but it took several pulls of the trigger before the beautiful woman realized. She tossed aside the useless weapon and ducked behind her crimson recliner as bullets zipped all around her.
“We want her alive,” one of the frogmen reminded his team as the group got closer.
On the crates above, Kane sighted down the length of his Sin Eater, slowing his breathing
