Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) Read Online Free PDF Page A

reiterated.
    “I’m ...Kayla?” I answered awkwardly. Hearing myself say the words, I realised that they felt good. And then I realised what she was doing. “I’m Kayla.” I said with a little more confidence.
    “Damn straight you are.” Meg tossed me an approving, authoritarian little nod. I smirked. Knowing that she understood me as well as she did helped. Probably as much – if not more – than the strange little exercise she’d devised. It meant that I could be close to someone without being completely in control. And if I could manage that, then...
    “I am. I’m Kayla Donohue, and I’m better than this moody, adolescent shit.”
    “There she is,” Meg smiled. “Now go be you. Up there. Naithe needs you.” I chuckled. Even without looking, I could picture him: nervously waiting and avoiding eye contact with the celebrant on one side and the swooning, photograph-snapping crowd of friends and relatives on the other.
    “ Yeah. He really does.” I confirmed. “Okay. I’m good. I got this.” She nodded silently, taking her place by my side. The string quartet finished that second-to-final song...and there was a pause as they adjusted their sheet music. Then they began to play again.
    “Ready?” Meg asked.
    “Yep. Count us in?” She nodded. I could see her right hand in my peripheral vision; tapping out a tight, precise, second-by-second metronome against her thigh. At the twenty-second mark, she nodded to me and – adjusting so I could link my arm through hers – we began to walk.

II – Seven Hills
    ~ Dio ~
    23/11/2023
    “Hey. Eve. Is that our target?” Dio squinted at the grainy images fed to the inadequate screen by the CCTV monitors that had been set up the night before.
    “One of ‘em, anyhow...” Yvonne – Eve for short – confirmed, looking up from a copy of the Colorado Tribune with a bemused shake of her head. She was doing far better than he was with the accent. Aside from the occasional lapse into ‘Yiddesque’, as she termed it, she had the surly twang of a Brooklyn local down to a methodically honed tee. Dio, on the other hand, sounded exactly like what he was: a confused, out-of-his-depth kid from Haifa, Israel; a little hard around the edges from a few years military service...but, by and large, the same person he’d always been.
    On the screen, Dio could make out a collage of squat blurs. They were, he assumed, either people in seats or – less likely – mottled, carefully arranged, pear-shaped boulders, set up – neatly as could be – in a partial arc around a grey hillock. The hill was topped with a narrow, mostly white blur that appeared to be in the process of melding with an equally narrow, mostly black blur. These two blurs were surrounded by a gauzy, wibbly blur, that was either some sort of demountable, fabric-covered pavilion, or – again, probably a little less likely – a small, to-scale replica of a nineteenth century frigate, partially dug into – or partially covered by – the hill.
    Not for the first time, Dio wished that the distribution of The Organisation’s cash wasn’t so unreasonably weighted away from hi -def. surveillance equipment. The Esquiline Division – or, at least, he and Yvonne’s tiny corner of it – was chronically underfunded and criminally under-resourced. Even Yvonne’s Colorado Tribune had – and not for the first time – pages missing. Sourcing complete newspapers shouldn’t have been any great expense. Though, he considered, over any other single thing – looking around at the mildew-scented, mould-encrusted walls of the grubby, claustrophobic bunker-like facility that he shared with Yvonne – vaguely first-world accommodations would have been nice.
    Theirs wasn’t exactly a typical arrangement, though. The Organisation, Dio knew, had a number of associates who needed to be kept safe from the ghosts of their former lives. More, he imagined, than there were room and board for in the various, appropriately out