The Tenth Legion (Book 6, Progeny of Evolution) Read Online Free PDF

her interest—a
crude glyph of some kind, etched into a table top. Two serpents,
each shaped like an “S” at right angles in a curving sort of
swastika, made up one part. Whoever drew it had superimposed a
female outline on the serpents. Lorna had seen it before,
remembered from the depths of the pre-emergent dreams featuring the
dark haired woman. Someone had painted it on a candle-lit stone
wall of a windowless room. From this chamber, since earliest
childhood, the lady in the dreams spoke to her with kind
encouragement. Afterward, Lorna recalled no details, other than a
sense of someone being in her corner of the boxing ring called
life. For certain, her parents never were.
    Lorna sighed
as she closed the folder, relegating it to Cold Case, disappointed
at having lost the reason for meeting with a certain intriguing
chief executive of CI.
    Talk about
shooting for the Moon!
    With no word
from or sight of Jerry, Lorna took matters into her own hands. She
assumed he hit a brick wall with the corporation and didn’t want to
face her. Normally, they didn’t visit one another at home
unannounced, but by day ten, another element, an element of worry
regarding his well-being entered the picture. Besides, she missed
him.
    After shift,
she hopped the crosstown bus to his neighborhood. From frequent use
of the line since meeting Jerry, she’d become friends with the
regular bus driver, a loquacious black woman who saved her the jump
seat near a smashed-out window at the front that provided minimal
ventilation. On this day, however, another driver hefted the large
steering wheel. He folded the jump seat away, peevishly making it
clear only bus line employees could use it. A single open seat lay
in the rear. With a sigh, Lorna accepted her fate. For the rest of
the trip, she endured the humid grime, the smells of previous
passengers, and the hard wooden benches in the stifle of this
moving Black Hole of Calcutta.
    Passing
another long queue outside of a store selling a meager stock of
house wares, she thought how almost all progress she’d seen in her
lifetime had come in the area of electronic surveillance, spurred
by the anti-terrorist wars. The advances had spilled over into
computers, and information technology. For the average person, food
or goods were in short supply, but the cornucopia of news,
entertainment, and electronic application overflowed in its
bounty.
    The bus
approached a steel gate that controlled entry to the community
where Jerry lived, the only way in or out. Two armed and unfriendly
guards checked IDs. At the sight of Lorna’s gold shield, their
demeanor softened. A substantial brick wall covered the rest of the
perimeter. Barbed wire laced with razors coiled along the top.
Behind the barrier, the streets were lined with mature live oaks.
Elegant tile-roofed houses sat back off the streets, surrounded by
clumps of tropical-colored plants. For over sixty years, anyone who
could afford it had retreated into these enclaves. When younger,
such acts had offended Lorna’s egalitarian sensibilities, but over
time, she realized the security bars backed up by double deadbolts
on the points of ingress to her apartment were the same thing.
    After clearing
the gate, the bus coasted down the street. It jostled over a speed
bump, and turned onto another street with a row of yellow-sided
apartment townhomes. Their white trim seemed a little worn in
spots—mold-covered parts with a sad, dark gray patina. Lorna then
realized she’d never visited Jerry in the daytime, taking an extra
minute to remember the location of his unit on the row. A sign hung
in the window of the rental management company office for Jerry’s
complex. In small print were the words “A subsidiary of CI.” The
words were too small to read, even for lycan eyes, but she knew
what they said because of the wolf’s head accompanying them, the
corporation trademark. A couple of weeks ago, she’d never noticed
the presence of the corporation, and