False Horizon - Alex Archer [62]
Although, she thought, she hadn’t had much occasion to use the blade on this outing. Something told her that if Hsu Xiao was really coming here, then that would soon be rectified.
Annja wondered how Mike was doing. After he’d stormed off, she’d tried to find him but he seemed intent on avoiding any contact. Annja decided that he needed some alone time and had gone to bed to try to get some rest. She would have thought that would be an easy task given how much the strain of the past day had worn on her. But after nearly an hour of tossing and turning, even she had to admit that something wasn’t letting her sleep.
She sat on the stone window ledge and peered out across the land. The winds swept through the trees, rustling leaves. She could see the tall grasses sway. And all about this place, everything seemed perfectly still. Perfectly…perfect.
Annja frowned. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in an absolute peace. It was just that she had never seen anything that even approached the tranquility of this land. It was an oddity to her.
How is this even possible? she wondered. Where are we…exactly?
The idea that Shangri-La existed on the other side of Dhaulagiri Mountain didn’t sit right with Annja’s analytical mind. Some part of her rejected that outright, saying that it would be impossible for such a place to exist and stay hidden from the technological eye of modern man.
Despite what Vanya and Guge might want her to believe, Annja couldn’t buy into it.
Still, if they were in some sort of magical location, then what was it? How did it operate? Annja wasn’t naive enough to think that just because something may or may not be magical, there weren’t rules that it would have to abide by, as well. She’d seen enough crazy stuff in her life to know that all things in the universe—even those that were presently unexplainable—still had a rule book they had to follow.
So how did Shangri-La function?
She dressed quickly and walked down the stairs back toward the pavilion. The amazing thing about this place was there seemed to be very few individual homes anywhere. And everyone seemed to disappear to sleep at the same time. Earlier this evening, right after the party had disbanded, people simply vanished. Annja wrote it off as everyone going off to bed, but now it triggered an alarm bell inside her gut.
Her footfalls were silent on the courtyard stonework. Annja moved across the open pavilion and stole back down the grand staircase toward the fields below. As she walked, she kept her senses alert for any movement that might alert her she was not alone.
But as far as she could tell, she was just that. Alone.
This is weird, she thought. Where is everyone?
Even Tuk seemed to have vanished earlier. Annja had last seen him walking with Guge. Presumably, Tuk was going to get his father to tell him how to cross over so that Garin could find them.
Annja frowned. She wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. The times she’d been around Garin in the past had usually amounted to a lot of tension between them and then a differing agenda that left Annja on the losing end of things.
But then again, Garin had seemed sincere about wanting to keep Annja safe. But from what? The Chinese assassin? Was Annja truly in the crosshairs? And, if so, how did the Chinese know she would be coming over here? Couldn’t they have taken her out when she was back in Brooklyn?
Too many things just didn’t make sense. Her mind and spirit were at odds and the resulting battle had one casualty— Annja’s sleep.
She crossed into the open fields and started walking toward the groves of fruit trees farther ahead. She could smell their scent as she approached. Their branches looked strong and supple. Annja reached up and twisted a peach from one of the branches and held on to it as she continued toward the edge of the field.
Overhead, the stars winked at her and, somewhere