Theta (38 page)

“
There are rules to this,”
I said and shifted into gear again. “If you lie to me, I’ll kill
you. Don’t talk to strangers, and don’t make a move I haven’t
approved. If I suspect you of anything, you’re dead. Do you
understand?”

She nodded. “Don’t take the southern exit,”
she said.

“
Why not?” It was my
planned route of escape.

“
I asked the trees to help
hide us. If we go the southeastern –”

“
Trees?
” I echoed. “You want me to go a different route because
…
trees
?”

“
If I’m wrong, and I can’t
get us to the city before we’re caught, you can murder
me!”

“
When we’re free, you’re
going to tell me what a nymph is,” I directed her.

Gripping the steering wheel tightly, I
waited until the last minute to change our course. I skipped the
eastern entrance and headed towards a stretch of trees near the
southeastern staff entrance.

“
Tell me why you didn’t
escape,” I said, not trusting her, despite her connection to
Alessandra.

“
Someone told me to
stay.”

“
Who?”

Leandra was hugging her backpack. She didn’t
answer.

“
A tree?” I asked with a
snort.

“
A ghost.”

I rolled my eyes. Allowing her to accompany
me was probably a mistake. If this escape route backfired, she was
dead where she sat.

We reached the forest.

“
You need to send another
email to the trees or something?” I joked darkly.

“
They’re moving, aren’t
they?”

“
What? They’re not …” I
stopped, eyes on the flora that was shifting around us. Rather than
step out of the ground and walk to a new spot, the trees glided
from one spot to another, through the earth, as if they were
floating through water.

“
Over there.” Leandra
pointed to a spot where the trees were creating room.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen magic
used, but I would never be comfortable with something I didn’t
understand and could never control. Uneasy with the display, I
slowed instinctively and drew my weapon. Halting a short distance
from where she indicated, I climbed out of the golf cart and stared
at the trees that appeared to be alive.

“
What’re you going to do?
Shoot one?” Leandra snapped, seeing my gun clenched in my hand.
“Hurry up! The entrance is here.”

“
What entrance?” I faced
her.

“
Do you really think we
didn’t install a secondary entrance to the city on the compound?”
she retorted. “How else do you think I was able to slip by your
guards all the time?” She dropped to her knees and placed her palms
on the ground. Blue sparks lit up the space around her palms, and
the grass and soil peeled away from the spot, revealing a metal
door. “Hurry!”

The alarms all over the compound wailed. The
trees had formed a wall between us and anyone who might pursue.
Beginning to suspect I’d never be free of weird, magical beings, I
snatched Theodocia’s unconscious form from the golf cart and strode
to Leandra. She climbed down a ladder whose top rungs were all I
could distinguish in the dark hole. With misgivings heavy in my
gut, I put my gun away and followed her.

Reaching the abandoned sewer tunnel beneath,
I stepped back while she darted up to seal the entrance once more.
She leapt down and started down the tunnel, in the direction of the
city outside the compound. I jogged after her.

“
The trees aren’t coming?”
I called after her.

“
I don’t know how Lyssa
tolerated you,” Leandra said with a frustrated sigh.

“
Where are we
going?”

“
To our
headquarters.”

“
I thought we destroyed the
underground city,” I said as we walked.

“
You destroyed a couple of
sections. Mama’s army just moved to the part you
missed.”

I hadn’t missed them on purpose. I had an
idea of where Dosy was located for much of the time, thanks to
Tommy and his unnatural connection to a god. More than once I’d
walked in on him mid-conversation with Thanatos. I purposely didn’t
target the strongholds or the way stations where Dosy spent much of
her time. But I also didn’t know the full layout of the mysterious
underworld, so it was beyond me to understand how large Mama’s
operating area was.

Leandra led me through the dark tunnels with
minimal light. Her step was sure and quick. I followed closely, not
about to be left or lost in the dark. Whether she knew this path
because she was constantly traveling it, or her unusual nymph –
whatever that was – ability helped her see in the dark, she didn’t
hesitate once to enter new tunnels I didn’t sense until we turned
down them. I was blindly following her and becoming tenser the more
lost I became in the underground maze.

Dosy didn’t stir, and Leandra didn’t stop.
We walked for close to an hour, until even my sense of direction
was clueless as to how far we’d gone from the compound or which
direction we were headed or where we might be relative to the city
above. No sounds of pursuit reached me. It was our destination,
rather than who might pursue us, that left me leery.

As I walked, I listened to the chatter of
those soldiers coordinating search parties. None of them mentioned
the walking trees or the entrance to the underground. Their focus
was on the eastern and southern exits, with the response teams
scrambling between the two. With some reluctance, I admitted
Leandra’s instincts had been right. If I had fled through that
gate, I’d be caught by now, and Theodocia and I would both be in
cells in the dungeon under the House.

“
All hands return to
base.
”

The command caused silence to replace the
flurry of chaotic messages. I listened hard, as confused by the
directive as everyone else on this channel.

“
Emergency response as
well?
” someone finally asked the question
on my mind.

“
What part of ALL HANDS
don’t you understand, soldier?
” came the
quick reply. “
ERTs deploy immediately to
Site Persus and assume defensive positions.
”

I stopped walking.

“
Countdown to Persus
attack: T minus one hour, forty five minutes
.”

I checked my watch. The heavily military
jargon sent a streak of uneasiness through me. What was Cleon
thinking?

The military maintained
several clandestine sites outside the wall, one in each cardinal
direction, to include a missile-launching site called Persus.
Our
Persus
rockets
were designated as surface-to-surface projectiles and had been
placed within range of the Silent Queen’s camp as soon as we
discovered where it was. It was a precaution only, to prevent her
from making a move on Washington DC before Cleon had accomplished
the first phase of his plan, whatever that was. He told me enough
to do my job without revealing his true agenda. I suspected he
understood killing the only surviving member of the Bloodline
wasn’t smart.

The voice over the earpiece was ordering the
emergency response teams to take up defensive positions around the
site with an attack planned in less than two hours.

“
Say
again,
” said the commander of the
EST.

“
Obey your order,
soldier.
” This voice was Cleon’s.
“
Operation Bloodline is in
effect.
”

And this was the codename given to the super
secret mission to take out the Silent Queen.

“
What’re you doing?”
Leandra called. “You’ll get lost down here, if you don’t keep
up!”

My boss is going to launch
a shit load of missiles at your boss,
I
answered silently. What was Cleon thinking? He had told me multiple
times this was a last resort operation. He wanted us to keep hazing
the Silent Queen, to keep her boxed in and busy fending off our
recon teams, so she didn’t have a chance to coordinate a large
attack. If he wanted her dead, he would have destroyed her a few
weeks ago. What had changed?

It had nothing to do with my escape.
Something else had happened, if he were ignoring my betrayal and
setting his targets on the Silent Queen. Nothing I’d heard today,
before I maneuvered Adonis into freeing Theodocia, gave me any
insight into what Cleon was doing or why he had suddenly changed
his mind about the Silent Queen.

I began to smile.

What happened to the Silent Queen was
irrelevant to my interests – with the exception that I knew one
person who would trade me a ticket out of the city to hear this
secret.

I started forward, listening intently to the
exchanges as the EST dropped their current mission to find me and
prepared to move out to the western site a few kilometers outside
DC.

“
I hope you don’t plan on
sleeping too long, Dosy, or I can’t use this information for my
benefit,” I whispered.

“
Is that you?” Cleon
asked.

I glanced up from my seat on top of the
boulder in the middle of the forested area where I had met with
Pythia twice. The glow of light, emanating from the compound’s
floodlights, brightened the shadows of dusk.

“
Is
what
me?” I replied.

“
I’m experiencing mild
vertigo.”

I tilted my head. “I don’t feel it,” I said.
“Is it part of the illness you won’t admit exists?”

“
No.” He stood again, and
my attention turned from my thoughts to the relative location of my
body. If he made a run for it, I’d hear it in his mind first and
could then outrun him. Even reading his thoughts, I didn’t feel
comfortable trusting him. He was able to keep his illness from me,
and I didn’t know how. If there were a way for someone in our
circumstances to deceive or trick me, he’d be the one to figure it
out.

I paced and roamed a circle around the
boulder, alert for any flickers of light indicating Pythia was
here. As always, Cerberus was reflected in the black and white
mirror opposite me, watching me curiously. I didn’t know how to
assure him I wasn’t ever going to purposely trespass.

Although, one of my visions was of future-me
in Hades, with Adonis.

“
I am no closer to figuring
out our visions,” Cleon said, sounding puzzled.

My cheeks grew warm. Whenever I thought of
Adonis, I felt his lips pressed to mine again. I shook my head,
embarrassed to know Cleon felt it, too. “They could be pieces of
four different paths,” I said, equally frustrated. “Or … one
path.”

“
A warning.”

“
Yeah. One that’s too
disjointed to fully understand.”

“
But we can understand it,”
he insisted.

I glanced over at him.

“
I have never met a riddle
I couldn’t solve,” Cleon said. “I think the problem isn’t that we
don’t know the answer, it’s that our minds have the potential to
uncover it, if we both stop resisting the full
integration.”

My heart began to beat harder. “By full
integration, you mean we lose our separate identities and become
some kind of joined Franken-brain.”

“
I wouldn’t put it so
inelegantly, but yes.” He was frowning. We shared identical
distaste for the idea, for two completely separate reasons. I
thought he was a psychopath and wanted nothing to do with his mind,
and he viewed me as ignorant, backwards and uneducated. “But we
each maintain a unique piece of the puzzle. We think differently,
and our differences complement each other.”

“
You mean you couldn’t
survive a day without your butler, and I’m not going to win a chess
championship,” I said icily.

“
Yes.”

“
What if we don’t have to
merge our brains? What if we just … cooperate more?” I
suggested.

“
It’s preferred for
certain.”

I rolled my eyes.

“
This is awkward.” At
Pythia’s husky voice, we both spun to face her. She was studying
Cleon intently, if not a suspiciously. “This must be the
parasite.”

Cleon’s look cooled.

“
Yeah,” I said with a half
smile. “We have a problem.”

“
Aside from the fact your
minds are inseparable?”

Until that moment, I held out some hope this
was reversible or at least, I wasn’t going to be joined with Cleon
forever. From the flicker of surprise in his thoughts, he hadn’t
thought this as permanent as it was.

“
The technology wasn’t
intended for a long term –” he began.

“
Even if the technology
wasn’t intended for this, you won’t have a choice soon,” Pythia
said. “Did I not warn you against leaving your body unprotected?”
She addressed this to me.

“
Yes, but that’s why I
brought him with me. We have a truce. He knows we needed to talk to
you.”

“
He wasn’t the only threat
to which I was referring.”

Cleon understood before I did, and his
knowledge spread to me a fraction of a second later.

“
Perhaps you can convince
her. She’s on the ledge. She just needs that final push,” the
Supreme Magistrate said.