Destiny’s Truth
Destiny’s Truth
#60 in the Deathland series
James Axler
Prologue
“Jak… Jak, honey, time to wake up…”
Jak Lauren opened his red, sore eyes, feeling the earth spin away under him as he did so. A mat-trans jump always left him feeling weak and sick, his stomach muscles cramping to make him vomit substance where there was none. He spread his hands out to grasp the smooth armaglass floor of the chamber, expecting the cold and solid material to cool his fevered palms.
But there was no armaglass; instead, registering with a ringing alarm bell in his still befuddled mind, there was warm, clammy dirt beneath his hands. His instincts fighting the jump sickness, he tried to raise himself on his elbows, his vision clearing the fog before him.
Was it Gloria looking down at him?
“Hey, honey, don’t look so startled,” the Gate queen said before drawing back a little so that Jak was able to see that they were now in the open air.
The albino youth’s senses began to cut into the confusion that had clouded him since awakening. He could smell the rich loam beneath him, soft and springy as Gloria stepped back. They were in a small clearing, surrounded by trees that looked like dwarfed and stunted elms, but in full leaf for all that. He could hear the hum of insects, and the rustles in among the undergrowth of small mammals—nothing big enough to be a threat, his senses told him. Normally, this would have made him relax, but in his bewildered state, his muscles remained tense, his attention struggling to focus as rapidly as possible.
Where he would normally spring to his feet with a lithe ease, Jak found himself struggling to hoist himself upright. His limbs were still tingling from the aftereffects of the jump, and refused to obey the impulses from his brain.
“Not right…” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Should be in mat-trans, not here. And Ryan? Others?”
He was now on his feet, clearing his head with a tentative shake that made his focus blur and the earth spin again for a second before it settled.
Gloria was now about twenty yards away from him, with her back turned toward him. There were marks on her skin that he couldn’t identify from this distance, but it seemed like a patchwork of dark dots that randomly spread across her bared skin, disappearing under the long, flaming red tresses that hung down her back.
“You feeling better now, sweets?” she asked, her husky voice low and yet carrying that melodious note that he knew so well by now. It was good to hear her. The last thing Jak remembered was the Gate tribe entering the other mat-trans chamber in the redoubt before they were flung to who knew where. There had been no guarantee that they would end up in the same place, given the unreliability of the old tech.
But if they were here, where were the rest of the companions? And where was Gloria’s faithful attendant, Tammy, and the rest of the Gate tribe?
Even as that flickered across his mind, Jak was sniffing the air, attuning his hearing to the slightest sound around, attempting to identify its source.
There was no one else around, no one human, that was, nothing but the smaller forms of wildlife that he had detected earlier.
“You’re not talking to me,” Gloria admonished. “Why not?”
“Not right,” Jak repeated, almost to himself.
“What isn’t right?” she asked. Jak prickled as she spoke. There was something in her tone that had suddenly—for no apparent reason—turned hostile, and he was sure now that something was very wrong.
The albino youth didn’t reply. He steadied himself, trying to bring his still rebelling body under control, his every instinct screaming that he was going to need complete control of himself, of his fighting capabilities, before too long.
He wasn’t wrong.
“Not talking to me again,” Gloria said, an angry hiss running through her tone. “That’s not good, is it, sweets?”
“Mebbe,” Jak replied with as neutral a tone as he could muster. It was hard, as his own hostility was rising with every moment, screaming at him that the whole situation was wrong, and that there was something even more perilous about the Gate queen than the threat of attack.