The Secret War - 1st novel in the Shadow Series

Chapter 2 .

VAI

I descended a few steps, and noticed that the young woman wasn't following. "You coming?"

She smirked. "No." The door whispered back into place, and I was alone on the staircase.

My volo moved erratically in the air behind me, emitting a pattern of skittering clicks that told me it had lost its connection to my okulus—which I checked. Its screen was a blizzard of static. "Volo, quies," I said. The clicking stopped. I returned my okulus to my cape. These thugs had a scrambler field up. I had never been inside a scrambler field. Until now, I'd had no reason to believe they existed. I thought they were a concoction of spy thrillers and cheap novels.

I progressed down the stairs, holding onto the handrail.

My heart twisted nervously inside my chest. I tried to turn the fear into anger. I was sure that whatever happened next, there would be violence, and maybe I even hoped so—hell, provoking violence had been my entire plan. But I'd had Warpaint by my side, and a way out—the shuttle waiting to take me to the G.E.V. Shadow. Now I was alone. No mechatronic guard. No way to contact help.

Only seconds had passed since my okulus and volo had stopped functioning properly, but already it felt like something was missing. An uncanny loneliness had bloomed in the oxygen around me. I couldn't help but breathe it in.

I reached the bottom of the stairs, and entered the room beneath the shop.

It was wide and long, much larger than the space above it. Within it there were workspaces where half-made clothes hung loosely on mannequins. The walls were lined with shelves of bolts, scraps, tools, and clothier's machinery. It looked exactly right for the storeroom of a tailor and clothesmaker, except for one thing.

At the end of the long room, Papa's well-dressed gang were all lined up, watching me as I stepped cautiously into the space. They sat on the floor or leaned against the wall. The language of their bodies showed contempt, impatience, simmering rage. There were nine of them. Mostly male, mostly Bundu-jo. In their midst, an elderly Starwatcher gentleman practiced his stabbing skills on a dressing dummy, and a Human girl, about 12, laughed as she cut herself again and again with a vibroblade, making little red stripes across her forearm. Half of them wore pistols at their waists.

To my horror, I noticed that their volos were not floating above them as they should have been, but instead had been thrown into a nearby box, where they rested unmoving atop each other like dead things.

"Where's Papa?" I demanded.

"Present." Papa stepped out from behind a rack of boots. His voice was a high-pitched rasp. Close up, he looked even worse than he did from a distance. He was the only obese Bundu-jo I'd ever seen. That wasn't a judgment, just a fact. But it was virtually physiologically impossible for Bundu-jo to carry excess weight. Over the past year, I had heard many theories about what he must have been eating to get this big—theories that started at drinking melted butter and ended at eating human flesh. It wasn't just his size that made him ugly. His pocked-up skin was a dull gray that lacked the usual Bundu-jo sheen, and his stripes looked mottled and dirty. He scraped a file over the tips of his fingers, and I noted that even they were inelegant.

He looked me over with his rheumy yellow eyes. "Oh, my. How'd a chippy slap like you find your way into my world? Big boy. You simply don't belong here."

For a split second, I hesitated. That last statement sparked an unexpected reaction. A gut thing. A weird ringing inside me. No, the truth was, I didn't belong here. I didn't belong in this time. Part of me wondered—did he know that? Was that why he wore that smug expression and spoke in that conspiratorial tone? Did he know something about me? Did he know about the 80 years I had spent in stasis? Did he know about my dead friends? My lost life? (I could still hear my father's voice. Vai, you have been asleep for a very long time.)