Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls - Jane Lindskold [80]
Except for the one cry of disbelief, Eleanora is silent and when Athena and I pull the last taut length of thread free to stretch between us, a single note like a plucked guitar string echoes in the empty Jungle.
Then I look down at my sister’s wreck and weep.
Sixteen
WHEN MINUTES? HOURS? LATER I COME TO MYSELF IN THE Comp-C, Dr. Aldrich is nowhere to be seen. The door to the corridor is slightly open and I hear shouting. Immediately, I set about unbuckling and unwiring myself from the chair.
I’ve never done this myself before without help and soon I am in a frustrated tangle. I finally work myself free at the expense of some skin and a twisted left pinkie.
I am scooping up Betwixt and Between and heading for the door when I notice that Eleanora is still in her chair. Hesitantly, I tiptoe over and almost choke at what I see.
That she is dead there is no doubt, but what horrifies me are the vivid red lines that trace in a bloody network about her limp body. They look like the scores of a wire whip, fresh and angry evidence of her mind struggling to dismember a body it believed was ripping apart.
I back away from her corpse, out the door, and would have fled if I had known where to go. Instead, I stand foolishly in the middle of the corridor, at a loss without a guard or nurse to direct me.
A repetition of the shouting gives me a sense of direction and, sending Athena ahead to scout, I sneak toward the sounds. Arriving at a bend in the corridor, I bring Athena back to me.
Her once vague noises are beginning to take the form of words—perhaps because of enforced intimacy in the interchange—but the overwhelming sense she brings to me is confusion to the point of speechlessness.
“No one ahead until the box,” she says, “there…churr-whoo?”
The box, I know, is how she sees the elevator. Taking her word that the next stretch of corridor is clear, I advance, unable to find words to ask her what has so baffled her. But as I round a corridor, I begin to understand.
What I had taken for shouting is a voice over the station’s intercom system. A chorus of voices old and young, melodic and cracked, are yipping and howling—a cacophony that should have chilled me but instead warms me with noisy promise. What I hear is the cry of the full Pack and that means that they have come for me.
Near the elevator doors, Holly is shaking her comlink as if that will clear the channels. Angrily, she switches it off.
“Jammed, damn it, jammed and useless.” She gestures to the wall speakers. “I wish someone would turn that racket off—they’ve got to have figured that it’s no help to us.”
“What do you figure is going on?” her companion asks, a young fellow with a red five o’clock shadow.
“Don’t know,” she shrugs. “I was having coffee and waiting word to bring Sarah back from Comp-C when the shift boss races in and tells me to get up here, pronto.”
“Good,” Rusty says. “I thought I was missing something. I’d been off shift asleep when I got called.”
Crouched behind an ornamental plant, I wish they knew more. All they’ve done is confirm my suspicion that the Pack has come. However, since the only stairwell that I know of runs beside the elevator, the guards are effectively holding both.
This doesn’t seem the time to go and try doors at random. I’m in as much danger from my Pack as from anyone else if I open a door unexpectedly. With my shaved head and patient’s clothing, I’ll too quickly seem a stranger.
Not wanting to be spotted by the guards, I move back along the corridor to Comp-C. The door is still ajar when I get there and, driven by some impulse, I return inside.
Nothing has changed. In the annex, Eleanora still sprawls, stiffening now, in her restraints. The computer banks twinkle, grunting slightly as some demand is made of them. I stare at them, stretching my hearing and catching little fragments of Jersey’s joy as he built them, echoes of Dylan