James Axler – Parallax Red Parallax Red

“Gray ghost?” echoed Kane. “Why’d he call me?”

He broke off, glancing first at Brigid, then Grant, then down at himself. Judging by their appearance, he was at least as ghostly gray as they were.

Gingerly he probed at his rib cage. Though his fingertips came away shining with blood, the wound was superficial, as was the one on his shoulder.

Brigid took him by the arm. “Let’s get back to the wag and treat you.”

He allowed himself to be pulled along. Surveying the carnage, the vista ruin all around them, he remarked, “A job well-done is a job done well.”

“Imagine that,” Grant said dourly. “Especially since you were making up shit as you went along.”

“We accomplished what we set out to do, didn’t we?” retorted Kane.

“Of course we did,” Grant drawled sarcastically. “We blocked the pass, buried some human garbage in our own little landfill and scored a public-relations coup with our nearest neighbors. You got shot at and stabbed and damn near buried alive. Yeah, I’d say we accomplished a lot.”

Brigid smiled wryly, shaking dirt particles out of her mane of hair. “Regardless, you can’t deny this day has been better than most.”

Grant opened his mouth to voice heated rebuke, thought over her words, then closed it. She was right.

Chapter 4

Lakesh found Domi standing on the edge of the precipice. He eased out of the partially open sec door, wincing at the twinge of pain shooting across his lower back. The place where Pollard had kicked him was still sore, and though his body was tender elsewhere, his bruised kidneys flared up if he moved too quickly. He’d been lucky to have been rescued from the covert interrogation session carried out by Salvo in Cobalt-ville.

DeFore had released him from the wheelchair a few days earlier, and despite the polyethylene joints in his knees, his legs felt weak and wobbly. He walked carefully across the plateau, not wanting to startle Domi. The abyss beneath her plunged straight down a thousand feet or more to an old streambed. The rusted-out carcasses of several vehicles rested there, more than likely old personnel carriers.

His step was soft, and adjusting his eyeglasses, he paused for a moment to admire the highlights the setting sun struck on Domi’s slight white form. Suddenly she turned toward him, crimson eyes blazing. Her hearing, honed from her upbringing in the Outlands to razor sharpness, detected the faint rustle of his bodysuit despite his stealthy approach.

The blaze in her eyes faded, and her lips twitched in a slightly abashed smile. Domi looked heartachingly small and fragile standing there against the awesome backdrop of the glowing western sky and towering, grim, gray rocks. Small as she was, a little over five feet tall and weighing a shade over a hundred pounds, she wasn’t frail, even by the loosest definition of the word.

Her skin was perfectly white and beautiful, like a fine pearl, and her little, hollow-cheeked face was framed by ragged, close-cropped hair the color of bone. Her eyes, as bright as rubies on either side of her delicate, thin-bridged nose, looked at him with melancholy.

Like him, she wore a white, tight-fitting bodysuit. Unlike him, her right arm was crooked at the elbow and pressed tightly over her torso by a canvas body brace. Her shoulder bulged unnaturally, swathed by heavy bandages.

“Darlingest Domi,” Lakesh said by way of a greeting. “You may be pushing the envelope of your recovery time.”

Domi tried to shrug, caught herself and replied, “Been bit worse by bedbugs back home.”

Lakesh didn’t doubt that, since home for Domi had been a squalid settlement on the Snake River in Idaho. Guana Teague, pit boss of Cobaltville, spotted her on one of his periodic forays into the Outlands and was smitten by her exotic looks and spitfire personality. In return for smuggling her into Cobaltville, she gave him six months’ sexual servitude. When Teague tried to change the terms, she cut his throat and escaped with Kane, Grant and Brigid into the Outlands. Her people back in Idaho were all dead now, murdered by the forces of the villes.

The Cerberus redoubt was now her home, though

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