The Dawn of Dae (Dae Portals Book 1) (41 page)

My legs gave out, and Rob caught me, pulling me to him. Working my sweater the rest of the way off, he tossed it aside. One of his hands pressed to the back of my neck, prodding and poking at me. A shudder ran through me, followed by a yelp when he found a particularly sore spot.

“Well, I don’t think you broke your neck at least,” Rob said, and I grimaced at the doubtful tone of his voice.

“If I had broken it, I’d be paralyzed or dead.” That I had been, at least for a little while, incapable of doing anything more than twitch worried me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “I’ll head to a fringe hospital if I need to.”

“Like hell you will,” Rob snarled.

“What’s your problem? The hospitals aren’t that bad. Can’t let the workers get sick, you know,” I grumbled.

Without a word, Rob massaged at the kink in my neck until there was a crack and a pop, and the muscles along my shoulders rippled and twitched. I gasped, reaching up to touch the spot, but Rob captured my hand in his. “Leave it. Your back is a mess of spasms. I’ll do what I can for a few minutes before we head down. Colby, want to start taking out the surveillance system? Start on the other side of the building so they’re looking the other way.”

“Mommy!” Darting across the rooftop, Colby halted some fifty feet away before burrowing through to the interior of the skyscraper.

“You have a terrifying roommate, Miss Daegberht. I’m satisfied you have a suitable guard when I can’t be nearby.”

“Who said you get to stay nearby?” I hissed.

“I said.”

“We’ve talked about this before. I get to decide.”

“No, you don’t.” With a soft laugh, Rob released my hand and pushed my hair away from the back of my neck. “You really did a number on yourself this time.”

“I guessed that much. Falling a story or two and smacking into the side of a building hurts. I’m lucky I didn’t snap my neck when I reached the end of my line.” I clenched my teeth together, held my breath, and risked rolling my shoulders.

The fact I sounded like the percussion section of a band concerned me. Rob ran his hands over my shoulders and massaged them. “If you can’t walk down the steps on your own, I’ll carry you. You’ll have to manage the couple of blocks to the car or it’ll look suspicious, though. I’ll adjust the cases so I’ll carry most of the weight in mine. I’ll go with the lawyer story and mine has the sensitive material I don’t trust with someone from a lower caste.”

“I’ll manage.” With some help from Rob and using the building for support, I got to my feet and risked leaning over the edge to stare at the Ivory Tower. The garden-covered rooftop looked abandoned, although the access door to the penthouse floor was open. “It’s only a matter of time before they find the holes on this side of the building.”

Rob crouched at my feet to pick up my sweater and grab the cases so he could reorganize them. “As soon as Colby is done with his destruction, we’ll get out of here.”

I glanced down at him, arching a brow at the rifle hanging across his back. “Perhaps you should put your gun away while you’re packing things up.”

Rob smacked his hand to his shoulder, groping for the strap. “Shit, I forgot about the rifle.”

I laughed and stared out over the city. A faint hint of smoke in the air and a subtle haze over Baltimore was the only evidence I could spot of the riots that had followed the Dawn of Dae. While Rob dismantled his weapon and packed it away, I wondered how much had changed—and how much would stay the same.

How would I fit in, especially if Kenneth had rigged my harness to fail? Was there a place for me in a world inhabited by dae?

Only time would tell.

By the time Colby returned, the city was alive with people and dae. The honk of car horns gave Baltimore a deceptive sense of normality. While some dae chose to fly, none of them came near the rooftops of the skyscrapers.

“The government was quick to establish a few laws regarding aerial limitations of dae,” Rob explained. Startled by his unnerving accuracy at guessing what I was thinking, I twisted to face him.

Picking up the first of the cases, he slung it over his shoulder. Before he could grab the second, I snatched it, ignoring the pain in my back. I set it between my feet so he wouldn’t claim it. I unzipped my coat in anticipation of climbing down hundreds upon hundreds of steps. “Are you sure you don’t read minds?”

“You aren’t exactly subtle; you were staring at the fliers,” he replied, grinning at me. “Wings would be rather convenient right now, I do have to admit. You don’t feel like you’re going to sprout any, do you?”

Instead of rewarding his idiocy with a reply, I heaved the strap over my shoulder and straightened. It was heavier than I liked, but lighter than I expected. My back protested the work, but I ignored the discomfort and tested my luck by walking in the direction of the access stairwell for the rest of the building.

Colby waited by the steel door, and as I drew close, it left a smear of orange residue over the locking mechanism, which blackened and smoked. In the matter of a minute, a gaping hole remained. Rob caught up with me, shoved his shoulder against the door, and popped it open.

“I’ll go first. If you fall, try to do so against me rather than down the steps.”

“I have no intention of falling,” I hissed.

“Good.”

Taking the elevator would have been a lot riskier but a lot easier, and by the time we had gone down three flights of stairs, I was ready to locate the nearest one and take the risk. Rob waited at the landing below, watching me with narrowed eyes.

“You’re limping.”

“No shit I’m limping,” I muttered, glaring at him. To make it perfectly clear I wasn’t about to accept pity from him or anyone else, I gripped the strap of my case so he wouldn’t take it from me and kept walking. “You’d be limping, too.”

“Yes, for about five minutes.”

“Fucking dae.”

“Later.”

I came to a halt, staring at him with wide eyes. The way he smirked at me promised all sorts of interesting things, and I was so distracted by what his tone and his smile implied I forgot I was supposed to be proving I didn’t need—or want—him for anything.

“Like the thought of that, don’t you?” he murmured.

I blushed, and convinced my face was about to burst into flame, I stomped down the stairs, spitting curses at him every step of the way. His laughter followed in my wake.

My embarrassment and annoyance at myself sustained me all the way to the ground level of the skyscraper. In the time it took us to climb down all the steps, I had cursed myself hoarse.

Rob snorted, shook his head, and pointed up at the emergency exit sign. “Think you can prevent the alarm from going off, Colby?”

Colby’s solution to the problem was to eat a hole in the door large enough for us to slip through. It hopped outside, gurgled, and threw up on the asphalt. The steaming black pile of twisted metal, harness scraps, and electronics was three times larger than Colby and reeked of burned plastic. I gagged and averted my eyes.

“Mommy,” my roommate whined.

I swallowed several times to control my stomach. “It’s okay, Colby. Rob’ll make an entire pot of soup just for you, okay?”

“Mommy.”

“Me? Why me?”

“You were the one who suggested Colby eat all that junk. You upset its stomach. You will pay the price for that, sir. You will make soup, and you will nurse Colby back to health.” I smothered my doubts and held my hands out to Colby. “Come on, I’ll carry you.”

Colby launched itself at me and landed against my chest with a squish. It weighed far more than macaroni and cheese should have weighed, but instead of complaining, I worked my arm under it, grateful the leather coat kept the neon-orange gunk off me and my clothes.

Rob sighed. “Fine, I’ll make Colby soup.”

“I’ll take some, too.”

“You will get a proper meal, Miss Daegberht. You have eaten almost nothing but soup for two weeks.”

I widened my eyes. “But you make good soup.”

Laughing, he brushed by me. “I’ll consider adding an appetizer of soup to your lunch. We’re likely going to miss breakfast.”

“If you even think of slipping any drugs into my lunch, I will kill you in your sleep,” I warned him.

“If that means you’ll be sleeping with me again, it is a risk I am willing to take.”

“Pervert!”

“For you, yes.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I settled for a few choice curses.

Chapter Twenty-Six

While the fringe had suffered a notable amount of destruction during the Dawn of Dae and the resulting riots, Rob managed to locate a clear route through the port-side of the district. Colby slept in the back with the two cases of drugs and electronics. At least, I guessed my roommate was asleep.

In addition to its single-word vocabulary, it snored, something that triggered fit after fit of helpless giggles. “It’s snoring.”

“It? How rude. You gave Colby a name, but not a gender?” Rob snickered, adjusting the rearview mirror to get a glimpse of my macaroni and cheese friend. “I suppose identifying Colby’s gender is a bit tricky.”

“A bit? It eats through metal doors, glass walls, and likes apples. It’s above gender rules.”

“I’m quite content with my status as a man.” Rob reached over and flicked his finger at my hair, and wrinkling my nose, I shifted away from him to lean against the door. “Being a man has certain privileges and uses, and one of those includes a healthy interest in women.”

“Typical,” I muttered.

“You liked it.”

I decided it was in my best interest to ignore Rob’s perversions for the moment. “I’m probably not going to recognize anything. I saw the place at night,” I admitted, ashamed of my inability to remember exactly where in the fringe I had been taken. The throbbing in my head wasn’t helping matters, either.

All I wanted to do was curl up somewhere and sleep, and the pain in my skull was enough to make me hesitantly reconsider my stance against medications.

“I know. It’s worth a try, anyway. With so many of the streets closed, I have a feeling the best I can do is get close to where I first picked up your trail the night you escaped. If you recognize anything, let me know. If not, we’ll come back and try again.”

“If he’s smart, he’s already gone.”

“Unfortunately, he does seem to have some intellect; the police have been after him since the day he attacked the college. He’s disappeared from everyone’s radar. Infuriating, but there’s not much I can do about it right now. Still, if we can figure out which warehouse he stashed you in, it’s a start.”

“It was near the water. He worked at one of the shipyards. He said he worked at the port, and that he had been selected for interviewing because he had turned an entire shipment of steel into slag.”

“If his goal was to get in with other interviewees, it’s possible he did it on purpose.”

The other interviewees had been children, and knowing some of them had died because of Arthur infuriated me even more than what he had done to me. “Show me where you found me.”

“I’ll get us as close as I can,” Rob replied, and while he weaved his way across the fringe, I stared out the window and tried to piece together what had happened when I had been kidnapped.

I took a deep breath, ignored the growing anxiety the memories caused, and said, “The warehouse was at least five or six stories tall—maybe taller. Open concept, meant for ocean shipping containers. Abandoned with a brick front. It wasn’t far from the water—maybe a few blocks at most.”

“Abandoned? Temporarily or permanently?”

“There was a single stack of rusted cargo containers inside. I used those to access the larger windows—about three stories up for those. The lower windows were too small for people to go through, probably to deter theft.”

“That substantially limits the search radius for the warehouse at least. We can probably find good candidates from satellite imagery.”

“You can get satellite images?” I blurted.

“Miss Daegbhert, whatever you want, I will find a way to get it for you. To catch Hasling and make him pay for what he has done, I’ll do far more than get a few pretty pictures of Baltimore’s harbors.” Rob shook his head, turned the car onto a major street, and drummed his fingers against the steering wheel as traffic ground to a halt. “We probably won’t find out much even if we do locate the warehouse.”