And yet
The feather-light flickering of the Gaia power taught to her by Mother Sonja was whispering at the very back of her mind, in a locked room at the end of a deserted and dusty corridor where memories lived.
“Ryan,” she said again.
THE SODBUSTER’S SMALL, filthy shack was around fifteen miles away from where Krysty lay wakeful.
Rain pounded against its mud-slick walls, streaming off the crudely thatched roof. Under the torrential downpour, the whole structure seemed about to collapse, and rain trickled through the sheaves of long straw in a dozen places, pattering on the packed earth of the uneven floor.
The old man, muttering and cursing under his breath, had been hobbling busily around like a malevolent gnome, pushing the iron pot of rancid rabbit stew from under one of the leaks, dragging Ryan’s unconscious figure and his worn mattress from out of the way of another. He moved his own bed nearer the rattling window to avoid a third steady flood.
“Bastard rain. Should’ve left fucker out in the mud. Why bother? Dyin’. Only, though, if he had lived, I could’ve”
He stopped, his red-rimmed eyes darting to the door, where he thought he’d heard something scratching at the wood. He picked up Ryan’s blaster, handling it with an innate clumsiness, thumbing back the hammer. He sidled to the entrance and applied an eye to a long split in the planking.
“Jesus on the Cross!” He took a step back as he saw a large black panther, its coat sleek with rain, pawing hesitantly at the makeshift door. The animal’s eyes gleamed a golden green in the frequent flashes of chem lightning that tore at the darkness.
He pointed the heavy automatic and tugged on the trigger. He made no effort to brace himself against the recoil and yelped at the explosion and the kick that nearly sprained his wrist. The 9 mm bullet tore a chunk of wood from the door, going high above the head of the snarling predator and scything out across the river.
The animal jumped away from the cabin in an amazing four-legged, stiff-backed leap, its head turning from side to side, tail whisking angrily.
“Git fuck away,” the old man yelled, “or you get another one through the head.”
Ryan twitched at the familiar sound of the SIG-Sauer being fired, then lay motionless again.
The huge panther turned around and moved silently inland, not once looking back at the cabin.
“Teach yer fuckin’ lesson, big shitter!” He flourished the blaster in triumph.
The storm hung around for hours, dumping a ceaseless flood of water, raising the level of the river by a couple of feet. But the old man had lived there long enough to know the tributary of the mighty Sippi in all its moods and had built his raggedy home high enough above flood level to avoid all but a freakish breaking of the banks.
Now he sat by the window and peered out past the flap of sacking, waiting for the storm to pass as all storms eventually did.
And Ryan lay still, locked into the heart of his own personal darkness.
If he dreamed, he dreamed only of black pools in deep-buried caverns where no shred of moonlight ever penetrated. No light of star, no glimmer of the noon sun. Occasionally, if you’d watched him very closely, you might have seen a small movement of a finger, closing and opening, a twitch of the great scar that coursed across his face.
But the heartbeat and respiration continued slow and regular. The old man had already come to realize that his guest was someone very different. Any ordinary man would have died some time ago. The dreadful bruising of his body showed the extent of a great fall, and he appeared to have come through the worst part of the gorge, where the torrent raged and the fanged rocks waited.
Yet his body showed all manner of old scars, cuts and bullet holes. It was the body of a fighting man.
A killer.
IT WAS NO MORE than a breath of wind on the cheek, the touch of a down feather as it settled on the mirrored surface of a woodland pool, the brush of a moth’s wing, a whispered sentence in the dark corridor of a long-abandoned mansion.