Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory #2) - Lauren Gilley Page 0,72
kinds. If she says you aren’t one, then that’s good enough for me.”
Beck nodded. “Very well.”
Lance said, “We’ve had a run-in with Shubert and his people before.” He gestured back to the map, and the others crowded in to examine it as well, though they already knew about the headquarters – had barely escaped it on that disastrous op. “An extraction mission. At the time, we didn’t understand Shubert’s – condition.”
When Lance glanced up from the map, his gaze collided with Beck’s. God, but that glowing gold was unsettling; like wading through the tall grass of a field and finding yourself face-to-face with a lion – or maybe even a dragon.
“Care to debrief me?” Beck asked.
Lance took another deep breath – he wasn’t sure when his chest would stop feeling so tight. Maybe never. “Yeah. It was our last major op…”
~*~
Before
“You won’t need those,” Morgan said of the infrared binoculars Lance pulled from his pack.
He paused. “Why not?”
“I’ll be able to sense any conduits – heavenly or hell-spawn,” she said, in that placid, monotone voice that still left his hair standing on end. She offered him a semblance of a smile, though, like she was trying to put him at ease. “You’ll be more agile with less equipment in your hands, yes?”
Slowly, he stowed the binoculars, and watched the others do the same with obvious reluctance and uncertainty. “Yeah. That’s true.”
The child-sized conduit was dressed as they were, in fatigues and tac gear, gray/white/black urban break-up camo flecked with fire-red, a helmet, goggles, boots, gloves. She carried no weapons – Bedlam had been firm on that – but Lance figured her own powers were more effective in this instance than any of their guns, knives, or grenades.
“If you can detect them, can’t they detect you?” Tris asked.
“Yes, that’s true.” She nodded. “But that’s one of the risks of bringing me along.” She looked to each of them in turn, those big, cornflower-blue, guileless eyes assessing without betraying any of the thoughts happening inside the borrowed skull.
“It’s worth the risk,” Rose said, firmly, pulling her goggles down over her eyes. The rain was picking up. “You ready, Sergeant?”
Gavin snorted at the honorific. “She call you that in bed?”
“I call your mother that in bed,” Rose fired off, without inflection. “Lance?”
“Right.”
Gavin was squawking in dismay – only that he’d been bested at his own joke, while Tris and Gallo sniggered at his expense.
“Let’s move out, as planned.”
They’d flown into the base – formerly a civilian airport, and now an army headquarters – and moved into the outer fringes of the city on camo-painted dirt bikes. They’d stopped a half-mile out, in a dark abandoned lot between two boarded-up houses, where the garbage lay thick as snow drifts, slick with algae and mold, and where stray cats yowled like babies crying. There might have been actual babies. A scan of the city from here, just across the bridge, revealed the glow of fires, the faint yellow squares of electric and candle light in windows, and lots and lots of darkness.
Lance wished for a helo, and a line dropping down onto a rooftop, and the assurance of a lone target, and a departure time. He wasn’t afraid – he refused to think of himself as that, no matter the odds – but they’d not tackled an op this dangerous, with this much possibility of disaster, in a long, long time. He felt green and unsteady again, like the newly-minted officer he’d been when he’d been assigned to infiltrate Castor’s operation.
The city was three times as dangerous, now.
They swung back onto their bikes, the rain pattering against their helmets and goggles; Morgan climbed on behind Rose, tiny arms linked tight around Rose’s waist. Rose glanced back, Lance nodded at her, and they cranked the motors.
The bridge had fared better against the corrosive rain and ash of both Rifts than the city’s skyscrapers – but it had been over thirty years, now, and Lance thought he felt it shiver beneath their bikes. A glance down at the water revealed white-capped, black chop, rain-lashed and seething. Things moved beneath the surface, cresting in flashes of sleek bodies, hard scales, and gleaming plates.
Better not to look down.
There were people on the streets, as they rode past shuttered windows and blackened shop fronts. Strong-shouldered men in black coats: the dealers. The sad, scrawny tweakers in patched clothes, dirty faces whipping toward them, dilated eyes full of fright.
Shubert’s headquarters was a narrow, three-story townhouse in a part of town that