Shadow Heart (32 page)

But there were also great dangers.

She looked down at the cast on her right leg. The time had come at last to remove it. She pulled a knife from the supplies Grantoro had provided and went to work cutting her leg free. She went slowly, mindful of both Barley and Liz sleeping close by, but also out of respect for the doctors who had made it. It had been their last act, one that cost their lives. She always wanted to remember that.

The cut complete, she peeled the dried plaster away from her leg, overwhelmed with relief as the cool air hit her oxygen-starved skin once again. She inspected her leg and noticed a new mark: a long, shallow scar where the doctor had made his cut. Over time, she doubted it would even be visible.

Eager to test her newfound freedom, she stood and paced the outer wall of the building, smiling broadly as she did so. The pain and discomfort were gone. Except for the scar, it was as though the fracture had never happened.
Congratulations, Doctor. Your experiment worked
.

She paced for a while longer, for the simple reason that she
could
, and then settled back down to watch the main thoroughfare through the abandoned town. As happened often when she found herself in moments of quiet, her mind turned to Eli. She tried to stay focused on those memories she cherished most: the kiss in the doorway, their reunion in the tunnels, their hands intertwined through the bars of her dungeon cell. But every memory was tainted...spoiled by the devastation of his death.

Her thoughts turned instead to her father, whom she missed terribly. He had always been her rock, the fortress where she felt safe. Despite all the uncertainty of her childhood, he had made certain to teach her joy. That the true treasures of life where not to be found in the comforts of earthly wealth. They were in the simple things. The sound of waves crashing into the sand. The smell of a fresh rain falling upon the ground. The sight of stars in the sky...

She sat there contemplating for hours while Liz slept, aware of time but heedless of it, content to wander through memories with greater promise than any future she could hope for. She should have died with them, perhaps. At least then she would not feel so alone. She had Crenshaw, yes, and Davian, but they were not her father. They were not Eli. They could not rid her of the sense that she just barely hung on by a thread, one that might break at any moment.

And yet...strange as it was to her, she had felt more herself in the last few days than at any time in the past year. There was something about Liz that drew out the best in her, and that was a result wholly unexpected. Liz was more than what she believed herself to be, just as Eli had been.

Midnight came on swiftly, the time for her to wake Liz and get some rest herself. But as she prepared to rise, she heard something that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up straight: a distant rumble, like thunder but distinctly not. She hunkered down, still and silent as a statue.

The distant pounding grew louder, less like thunder and more like boots on concrete, and Grace suppressed a shudder. She had feared that noise all through childhood, as it normally preceded an attack from the Great Army. She had only ever experienced it once first hand, but that had been enough. More recently, it reminded her of being chased through the streets of Alexandria just before she was captured and sold into slavery.

But the world was a different place now, and the chances of so small a force of the Great Army venturing this deep into the Wilderness were slim. Grace didn’t know whether that made her more afraid or less. From what Grantoro had said, there were far worse enemies in the Wilderness these days. With luck, whoever it was would pass on by.

Luck, it seemed, was not on her side. The glint of metal reflected in starlight appeared from the main road, coming down onto the main thoroughfare where she and Liz were hidden. It would be too late to run now, but what to do? And who were they dealing with?

The Great Army still hid behind the walls of its cities, the Imperials were busy razing South America, and the Spectorium was off to the west, hunting the remnant of Silent Thunder. That left only one group, and the worst one at that.

In the starlight she could finally make out the shape of their weapons: curved, wide, and sinister.

Persian scimitars.

L
IZ WOKE TO THE
sensation of being shaken, disappointed once again to find that her time in the Wilderness was not, in fact, a dream. She drew in a breath to protest being awoken, only to have a hand clamp over her mouth. Panic rose in her chest and her eyes snapped wide, thoughts already filled with Grace lying dead nearby and herself soon to follow.

But as her gaze focused it was Grace’s blue-green eyes that stared back at her, imploring and fearful. She placed a single finger to her lips, and Liz nodded to indicate she understood.

Grace removed her hand and whispered low, “We have company. At least fifty Persians, maybe more. They are right outside.”

Fear that had temporarily fled came crashing back at the news. When Grantoro first mentioned them it had been a cause for concern, but only distant. The Wilderness was expansive, and the chances of crossing paths with the one enemy that Silent Thunder, the Conglomerate, and the World System all shared were slim. But she should have trusted in Murphy’s Law rather than basic probability: if something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

Grace helped her to her feet, and the two of them scrambled wordlessly to repack everything they had taken from Barley’s bags. In the rush Liz noticed that Grace had already doused the fire, covering it with an old pot to hide the smoke. She wondered, not for the first time, how instinctual such actions were for someone used to staying hidden out here.

“I see you’re walking again,” Liz whispered as they tiptoed back out to the open area.

“We may be running soon,” Grace replied dryly. “We can’t let them get ahead of us on the road.”

A shadow played over the walls, and Liz fell immediately into a crouch, reaching for her Gladius. Grace knelt beside her, but shook her head, “There are fifty of them and two of us. We can’t fight them.”

Liz remained still until the shadow passed, and then made her way to the nearest window, peering out at the nightmare that had descended upon them.

They moved in battle formation, eyes so wide that she could see the whites of them even from several yards away. They were alert in a way that only soldiers in enemy territory could be, anxious for battle and yet wary of it at the same time. Some walked with their hands over their weapons while others struck camp for the night: meager tents, from what she could see. Functional but light for a force that wanted to move quickly across the Wilderness.

“Where was your group?” she asked. “The ones you sent north?”

“Somewhere between Montreal and Alexandria,” Grace answered. “If what Grantoro said is true, they have traveled a long way in a very short period of time.”

Though the force was smaller, she marveled at the achievement. Having become accustomed to moving large forces across Wilderness terrain in the last year, she understood just what a feat it was. The Persians had to have extraordinary strength and discipline to make it this far inland so quickly. But though the speed seemed almost inhuman, she could believe it of these men. They had been forged in the fires of suffering…hard warriors who knew more of privation than probably anyone on this continent. Few even bothered to carry firearms, and that spoke volumes about their skill with the scimitars at their sides.

From among them she distinguished two groups: some dressed in a strange gold armor that only covered them in vital areas, leaving parts of the skin bare. Others wore a kind of black body armor that covered them completely from head to toe.

The student in her burst with a thousand questions, overcome with wonder at this piece of history that the rest of the world believed lost. But the soldier in her was afraid…intensely, unbelievably terrified. These were the hands that brought down the Old World. These were warriors from a different time, perhaps the best in the history of the world.

And the stories of their brutality preceded them.

Her heart raced as another patrol passed the building where she and Grace hid, inspecting it as though they might use it to set up a part of the camp. She looked over at Barley, suddenly aware that the slightest knicker could give them away, but the horse remained as still as they were—almost as though he could sense the direness of their situation. The men moved on, and Liz breathed out a quiet sigh of relief.

The Persians preferred a position deeper into the small town in the wider spaces, where they could set up buffer zones in the event of an attack.

“We should go as soon as they are clear,” Grace whispered in her ear. The sound of it seemed too loud, and Liz fought the urge to quiet her. “If they destroyed the force of Silent Thunder that Crenshaw sent north, they may be tracking the rest of us across the Wilderness. We need to beat them to the Corridor and warn the others.”

A sinking sense of dread spread through Liz’s chest. The smartest play was to remain hidden until the Persians moved on. From this distance it was unlikely they would even hear Barley snort. But if they emerged out into the open—even in the dark—they risked being caught, and capture by Persians was not quite the end she had in mind.

“If they see us they will pursue, capture, and probably kill us,” Liz said. “Barley will only help if we’re far enough away when they realize we’re here, being as he’s not very fast.” She shot another look back at him. “No offense.”

He neighed quietly in response.

“We have to take that chance,” Grace said. “If they get ahead of us, we may only postpone the inevitable. Plus, they are headed straight for Silent Thunder. They must be warned.”

“You don’t know that,” Liz said. “Maybe your men in the north just got in their way. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Silent Thunder forced the Persian Empire into a ground war with the United States, neutralizing more than three-quarters of their nuclear arsenal. Had it not been for that, all of this would be nuclear wasteland and perhaps they would have completed their conquest.”

“Or the entire world would be a wasteland, as Napoleon Alexander made Persia when he took absolute control of the cities. Seems like if they were after revenge, he would be the source.”

“Alexander was once of Silent Thunder,” Grace said. “And though he betrayed us and all he once stood for, the Persians might not see a difference. They will destroy us, and then turn their attention to him.”

Grace turned to stare at her, no doubt expecting shock. Alexander’s relationship to Silent Thunder was a closely guarded secret, but Liz had learned many things that had once been hidden from her while serving as Chief of Command. Sullivan had told her everything about the MWR, from his history in the Old World to his time with Silent Thunder, and then finally his transformation into the man who would conquer the world. The emperor had wanted to demonstrate that Alexander was a tyrant driven by his emotions and his personal vendettas. That he was weak, and unfit to rule.

But really Sullivan had been trying to justify his own grab for power, to distract himself and her from the reality that he was becoming more and more like the MWR every day. His actions at Rio proved that. If Napoleon Alexander was the number 1 mass murderer in the history of the world, Sullivan was a close second.

All in the name of peace, of course.

“I know about the MWR’s history,” she said dismissively. “Still, it doesn’t seem logical. Why come halfway around the world and trek across the Wilderness just to settle a decades-old grudge? Both Silent Thunder and the Persians have bigger problems now than one another.”

“Have you ever read much about the Persian Resurgence?”

Liz paused, suddenly at a loss for words. She
had
done extensive reading on the Persians during her officer training, and she had checked what she’d learned against other sources after becoming Chief of Command. The Resurgence was one of the few historical moments not glossed over or changed by Napoleon Alexander’s revisionist historians. Liz suspected it was too momentous and widely known for the historians to change even the most minute details—or perhaps Alexander held it in special regard, given his participation. In any case, even thinking about the Resurgence made her shudder.

It had started out honorably enough. Groups of nations impoverished by the advent of Solithium technology banded together to survive, as their largest export became obsolete. They had even tried to gain access to Solithium formulas themselves, but fears that they might weaponize the chemical led the Western nations to withhold it from them. Some historians theorized that giving them Solithium might have prevented what followed, but now the world would never know.

The alliance turned into a military coup, led by a young radical named Ahmed al-Zarif, and the countries were combined into the reconstituted Persian Empire. From there it was only a few small steps toward war, and they struck at their unprepared neighbors with a brutality not seen in centuries. The empire had been forged in anger and rage, and the warriors took out their vengeance on those who had kept them in suffering. Fear of them spread across the globe like a wildfire, fear that still lived in the hearts of those who spoke of them even today.