Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls - Jane Lindskold [62]
A touch of night air tells me that Professor Isabella has the window open in my room. Two guards down and a third occupied with her injured comrade. Midline distracts a fourth, using the doorframe as a shield from the tranq slivers. A pair remain by Dr. Haas, trying to get a clear line to one of us without hitting one of their allies.
I decide to continue equaling the odds. The owl swirls up and around, diving at the man firing at Midline. Automatically, the man raises his gun, shooting at the darting, dodging blur on wings.
“Don’t fire at the bird,” Dr. Haas shouts. “It’s the blond girl who’s doing it! Get her!”
Actually, she is not completely correct. Athena’s own circuitry is handling her immediate activity, but if they get my wristband…In my moment of revelation, I completely forget the guard behind me. She turns from helping the man Abalone had hit and grabs me.
My arm is pinned behind me with expert pressure and minimal force, yet moving brings sudden, sharp pain. I freeze in place.
Dr. Haas tosses her white lab coat over Athena and the owl sinks, still beating her wings until a safety override shuts off the motion and she crumples. I wonder if only I hear the chirped anger.
Abalone and Midline are poised to spring, but I call out desperately, “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king…”
Abalone completes the line, sliding the door shut, “that treason can but ‘peep’ to what it would.”
I barely hear Midline’s whispered, “We be of one blood, ye and I” before the door clicks shut.
Suddenly brave, Dr. Haas’s two goons leap forward and to the door. Dr. Haas walks to an intercom.
“They won’t get away,” she says to me as she flips it on and begins to rapid-fire instructions.
But when the guards burst open the jammed door of my bedroom, the room is empty. The grounds are searched, but no one is found, nor does security report any unauthorized vehicles crossing the Institute’s airspace.
No one even tries to question me and even if they did, I had been so distracted when Abalone reviewed her escape plans that I could not have told them how it was managed. But I do remember that Peep has been Abalone’s pupil and suspect that alone is enough to guarantee a quick and easy escape.
But this is small comfort; larger is the knowledge that the Institute will not trouble them further. Now that I am returned, they will have no reason.
I hope.
Thirteen
NOT EVEN AN HOUR AFTER MY SURRENDER, I AM TAKEN TO A panel van and from there to a small airfield. At some point, I must have been sedated, because I remember very little of the ensuing journey.
When I come to myself, I am in a room that smells hospital but proclaims prison. The windows are sealed and the door has no latch on the inside. Yet, I had expected something like this. What I had not expected was to find Betwixt and Between and Athena waiting for me on a small round table. Athena’s control band sits beside her.
I leap up from the narrow bed, slowing as my head swims.
“Careful, Sarah,” Betwixt cautions. “I think this room is monitored. Watch what you say.”
“I have drunken deep of joy,” I promise, “and I will taste no other wine tonight.”
“That’s careful enough,” Between mutters. “I can barely understand her.”
I hug them, ignoring the hardness of their rubbery spikes. Then, more gently, I stroke Athena’s wings, checking for damage from her fall.
“Oh, dear girls, we are in a pickle,” Betwixt says. “I watched as they brought us in and this place is about as accessible as a hibernating mud crab. I am not sure that even Abalone’s magic can find us. We may be stuck.”
Picking them up and setting Athena on my shoulder, I go to the window. The prospect is not promising. A green tangle surrounds us above and below. I remember Sherlock Holmes’s horror of the countryside and wonder what he would make of a tropical jungle which not only isolates, but conceals and destroys as well.
Next, I inspect my quarters. The room I awoke