Dragon City Read Online Free PDF Page B

sometimes he would catch her drumming her fingers against the arm of a worn-through chair as she took a break from her exercises. He watched her now as she continued to listen to the noise, watched as her hand reached up to touch her face, the strawberry-shake-pink insides of her dark fingers playing across that lump she had right in the middle of her forehead. It looked like a blind boil to Farrell, but it had been there a long time, never quite emerging or retreating the way a boil usually will. He hadn’t thought much about it; for the past forty-two days he hadn’t thought about much of anything if he could very much help it, just waited and hoped and prayed for Lakesh or someone else from the Cerberus hierarchy to get back in touch with them and call him and Sinclair home.
    “You can’t hear that?” Sinclair asked, her eyes still fixed on the slit in the windows. “It’s getting closer—it’s getting louder.”
    Farrell peered again out at the street, watching that point where he had seen movement before, where he thought he had seen a figure disappear into one of the tumbledown houses along the street. “Music?” he clarified. “I don’t—”
    Then a figure appeared, pushing its way through the undergrowth that had taken over the road in the past two hundred years. Farrell had fallen silent automatically, watching as the figure pushed through the plants. The figure wore a fustian robe in a dirt-colored brown, the hood over his head, pulled low to hide his features, but Farrell could see the rough salt-and-pepper beard that daubed his chin. He had wide shoulders and he moved with a certain heaviness—a big man, then, powerfully built. A moment later another figure appeared behind the first, this one slimmer but wearing an identical robe, hood low over the face. The robes were largely shapeless, going down past the knees like a monk’s habit, but Farrell could tell that this one was a woman from the way she moved her hips. Something glinted on the breast of the robe, a red shield like the Magistrates used to wear when they had guarded the villes, back before the fall of the baronies.
    “They’re Ullikummis’s people,” Farrell identified. “We should probably—”
    Before Farrell could finish, Sinclair was on her feet and had scampered over to the door in three quick steps. She moved like a jungle predator, her tread silent and fluid, the movement admirably economical. There was a gun there, a refitted Colt Mark IV. Sinclair checked the little eight-shot pistol swiftly, assuring herself the clip was home, and Farrell watched as she flicked the safety off.
    “Sela, I don’t think we should do anything that’s going to attract their attention,” Farrell said, keeping his voice to a low hiss.
    Sinclair glanced at him. “Come on.”
    Then, before Farrell could voice further complaints, Sela Sinclair was out of the door and creeping out past the broken wall of the lobby toward the main door to the house. Getting up, Farrell followed. Unlike Sinclair, he was not particularly adept in combat situations, and would much rather keep well away from the strangers. Still, if he had to face them with anyone at his side, better Sela Sinclair than being teamed with one of the Cerberus cooks or Mariah the geologist, neither of whom was much use in a firefight.
    Slowly Sinclair pulled the front door to the house back on its ancient hinges. Beyond, the once-immaculate front lawn looked more like the bottom of an aquarium, fronds and ferns jutting out of the churned-up earth. Bradley had been a casualty of the nuclear war that had ravaged the United States more than two hundred years before, and it had been long since lost, an untouched artifact from another age. For Sela Sinclair, a woman born in the twentieth century and cryogenically frozen for two centuries before being discovered and revived on the Manitius Moon Base, it was like stepping into the past half-remembered. Things out here were familiar, yet they