James Axler - Shadow Box

Kane had watched with growing admiration as the swordswoman, whose name was Rosalia, had turned her attention to first rescuing those people stuck in the water who had either never learned or were too panicked to swim, and then helping to entertain the lost children by teaching them the flowing movements that came naturally to her as a dancer.

“You have quite a way with children,” he remarked as they sat eating breakfast together after that first, long night.

“Children are the same as men,” she told him with a malicious gleam in her eyes, “easily captivated by simple movements.”

Kane laughed at that. “Well, I suppose it depends on who’s doing the movements,” he admitted.

The dozen or so lost and unclaimed children had slept in a storeroom behind the main hall. Kane watched the roll of her hips as Rosalia walked to the room to wake them up. As he watched, the dark-eyed woman looked back at him over her shoulder, and her hair fell over her face, adding to her exotic allure as she offered him a warm smile before leaving the hall.

Señor Smarts had offered to help, too, once he had recovered from the pounding his body had taken when he had been thrown down the street astride the motorcycle. Initially, he had wandered the now brackish streets in a daze, but when he had heard that people were getting organized at the robust church buildings, he had arrived at the door and asked how he might assist. Along with Brigid, Smarts had helped organize a reception system at the church hall where lost family members might be found.

The steady stream of lost and weary people seemed never-ending, but finally, as the sun disappeared over the horizon for the second time since the quake, their numbers started to dwindle as people began making their way back to their ruined dwellings and thinking about picking up their lives again.

While the church hall was quiet, Brigid peeled back the bandage that was wrapped around Smarts’s head and took a proper look at the wound there. “You took quite a beating,” she said, dabbing at the dried blood with a damp cloth while Grant looked on.

Across the hall, Kane was busy with the onerous task of helping frightened relatives identify the handful of dead bodies. Rosalia was sitting with five children, telling them an old story she recalled from her own childhood. There were other locals there, too, officials and selfless do-gooders who had stepped in to man the recovery operation with no thought of their own concerns. It was remarkable how well the locals and the refugees had pulled together, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in adverse circumstances.

Señor Smarts shot a fierce look at Grant as he addressed Brigid. “I think your friend shot me,” he told her.

Grant looked apologetic. “Well,” he said, shrugging.

Smarts held his gaze a moment longer before his expression mellowed a little. “What’s done is done, señor,” he admitted, “and I’m sure I was intending to do the same given the circumstances of our meeting.”

Kane joined them as Brigid sterilized and dressed Smarts’s head wound from the church’s meager supplies. “Yeah, about that,” Kane said, “what made you think that we were Magistrates?”

“It’s obvious.” The olive-skinned Mexican smiled. “You and Señor Grant here have a certain manner about you, a way of walking, your heads held high. An air of authority, arrogance that comes only with the badge of office.”

Kane smiled bitterly, shaking his head as Rosalia walked over to join the group, having finally found a family to take care of the last of her young charges. “I’m not a Mag,” Kane told Señor Smarts. “We’re not Mags.”

The man smiled again in a display of yellowing teeth. “The way that the three of you took command here, organizing and taking care of the local people, tells me different, señor. If you are not Magistrates, then you almost certainly trained to be, at some point in your past.”

Grant flicked a warning look at Kane, as if to tell him it wasn’t a topic of conversation worth pursuing.

After a moment, Kane spoke again. “Any idea what happened to the rest of your crew? Where Carnack disappeared to?”

“I’m sorry, Señor Kane.” Smarts sighed. “I was unconscious for quite a while. When I realized what had happened I felt it my duty to help out. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Very admirable,” Grant muttered before he stood up and took Kane to one side. They stood together, looking at the devastation outside the open church hall doors for a few moments, and then he spoke to Kane in a low voice. “This doesn’t change anything. That hybrid DNA is still in the hands of their extended clan. We can’t ignore that just because these two helped out.”

Kane nodded, a haunted look in his gray-blue eyes. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said quietly.

“You reckon the girl knows anything?” Grant asked.

“I’d guess Smarts is Carnack’s majordomo,” Kane reasoned. “If anyone knows the location of the gang and the DNA, it’s him. But Rosalia is more than she seems. I’d dismissed her as a—” he shrugged “—companion when I first saw her, but the way she came at me with that sword yesterday afternoon—she’s trained and she’s deadly.”

“We’ll take both of them back to Cerberus,” Grant suggested. “We can interrogate them there, see what we turn up.” He glanced back at the Mexican in the loud shirt and stained velvet coat, and at the dark-haired enchantress who stood beside him. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll be more forthcoming after all that’s happened.”

Kane chewed at his lip thoughtfully for a moment. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” he told Grant.

As the two ex-Mags were striding back to where Brigid taped gauze to Señor Smarts’s head, their Commtacts came to life and the three Cerberus teammates heard the voice of Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh inside their heads.

Lakesh was the nominal leader of the Cerberus exiles, although his suitability to that role was somewhat contentious. Their early meetings with Lakesh had shown Kane, Grant and Brigid that the accomplished cyberneticist had orchestrated a Machiavellian plan to destroy their lives in Cobaltville, albeit for the greater good, and his methods had often proved to be supremely devious. However reluctantly, Lakesh had conceded his single-minded control of Cerberus and its exiles undermined the united front necessary to battle the Annunaki and the threat they posed to humankind.

Lakesh’s mellifluous voice piped directly to their ear canals with crystal clarity. “It seems that we may have an additional problem, and I wondered how the three of you would feel about taking a little detour to look into it?”

Kane held up his index finger to let his companions know that he would deal with the transmission. “Kane here,” he said. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Decard has just got in touch with us from over in Aten,” Lakesh explained. “He’s stumbled across something on one of his regular patrols, and he thinks we might want to take a look.”

Decard, like Kane and Grant, was also an ex-Magistrate. He had been adopted into the strange culture of the hidden city-kingdom of Aten, out in the wilderness of the California desert. His path had crossed that of the Cerberus crew on several occasions. Initially hostile, the people of Aten had come to respect the Cerberus exiles, and Decard had proved himself to be a faithful friend and valuable ally.

“Did Decard say what it was?” Kane asked, aware that the ex-Mag wasn’t one to jump at shadows.

“He seemed mystified,” Lakesh explained, “but the report he gave describes a group of people who apparently have no independent will. He called them ‘mindless, soulless wretches.’”