MoonFall Read Online Free PDF

pulled. She stumbled against his outstretched leg and lost her footing, tumbling down the stairs.
    Not for the first time, Noah found himself grateful for the experience he’d gained fighting Jeb and Pete when they were young. A younger brother had to learn all the hardest, filthiest tricks if he was ever to stay standing.
    He followed the soldier down the stairs, leaping over her as she started to rise, turning back for a kick that sent her sprawling once more. Better to fight dirty than to fight half-assed.
    Glancing around on the landing below, he looked without luck for any sign of Bourne, then he hurried down the flight of stairs, pausing again as he reached the second floor.
    There the pistol was, lying just in front of a classroom doorway. Noah ran over and bent down to scoop up his traveling companion.
    A shadow slid out of the doorway and what felt like a meteor strike slammed against the side of Noah’s head. He sank to his knees as spots danced across his vision. He tried to reach for Bourne but only fumbled uselessly as the world split in two and spun around him.
    “Dionite scum.”
    Another blow, against the back of his head this time. Noah sprawled flat on his front, cold tiles pressing against his face. He turned his head just enough to see the first soldier looking down at him, pure disdain in his eyes. What the hell was this guy’s problem? What was a Dionite? And who cared this much about a bunch of old books?
    “Taking you back to Apollo,” the soldier said, his accent giving the words a harsh edge.
    Before Noah could even wonder who or what Apollo was, the soldier’s musket butt descended one last time, smashing against Noah’s face and sending him into darkness.

C HAPTER F IVE

    A P LACE OF S AFETY

    I N EVERY STORY Noah had ever read or watched, when the hero got knocked out he woke up in captivity, usually someplace dark -- whether it was a prison cell, the bowels of a ship, the boot of a car, or a secret bunker buried somewhere in the mountains. Two things told Noah this wasn’t one of those stories. First, he wasn’t yet in that darkened room, waiting for some pissed off guy on a power trip with slicked back hair and a bad accent to interrogate him. And second, he was no kind of hero.
    His first awareness was the feeling in his feet, a stuttering stab of pain as he was dragged along, toes trailing on the hard, broken surface of a poorly kept road. If there was one thing Noah’s feet could recognize by touch, it was a poorly kept road.
    Sight would have made it all easier, of course. He could have looked around, got his bearings, prepared himself for the weight of his own body tugging mercilessly at his shoulders as the soldiers dragged him along with his arms hauled around their necks. Might have been he could have started finding his feet sooner, getting them underneath him before that big damn pothole nearly smashed his big toe.
    But no, sight didn’t even come second, as he mustered the will to drag his weary eyes open. Second was hearing, the sound of their footsteps on the road, of one soldier cursing under his breath in what sounded like Russian, and what Noah’s befuddled brain took for the sound of a town up ahead, folks talking and walking and going about their day. A sound he hadn’t heard in years, and hadn’t expected to ever hear again.
    Next came smell, the fearsome body odor of someone who’d spent far too long wrapped in layers of armor and needed cleaning up worse than a dog that had been rolling in shit. And then the taste of blood in Noah’s own mouth, which was hardly surprising given the way his last memory went down.
    So by the time he finally forced his eyes open and raised his head into the fading light of day, Noah had a pretty good idea of what was going on around him.
    The town still came as a shock.
    It was one thing to hear the sound of hundreds of people all in one place, voices bouncing off buildings, the rumble of cart wheels and the demands for someone