But a second thought came, almost on top of the first. If they’re as strange as the plant life, will they help me? Or will I be so different from them that they’ll think I’m an animal, or be unable to see me at all? She hid behind a fallen leaf the size of a Winnebago and watched their approach.
After a few minutes they rode into view.
They looked perfectly human, but like humans from some other time or place, somewhat medieval-looking in dress and attitude. Their mounts were horselike—she thought it might not be inaccurate to call them horses— but they weren’t exactly horses, the same way nothing else here was exactly like its counterpart at home. Their legs, for one thing, seemed too stout, not thin and graceful like a horse’s legs. And their manes resembled falling water more than flowing hair, semiopaque and constantly shifting.
But they were close enough. Salma gathered her courage and stepped out from behind the leaf. “Hello!” she called.
The riders—all men, she guessed, though she tempered that guess with the now-familiar caveat that nothing here was as it seemed—turned in their saddles to look at her. They spoke, but there was no common language, no words or sounds they made that she could understand.
“I’m—I’m lost,” she said. The men looked at her, uncomprehending. Finally, one of them rode up to her. She was terrified of what he might do, and wanted to run, but fear rooted her to the spot. The man bent over in the saddle, extended an arm toward her.
He wants me to get on with him, she thought. Should I?
Not for the first time, she found herself wishing that Buffy were here. She had developed great faith in the Slayer’s abilities. But Buffy couldn’t help her now. She was on her own, with these men she had revealed herself to.
Still, she thought, if they wanted me dead they could have killed me by now. She took the man’s arm and he hoisted her onto the saddle, behind him. A few of them spoke to one another, and they set off again. She made a couple more attempts to speak, and so did they. But it didn’t work, and after a while they gave up trying. Salma felt more alone and afraid than ever.
They took her to a massive stone castle at the edge of a plain, a trip that lasted several hours—she guessed, although she couldn’t seem to locate a sun, or any other way to tell time. At the castle they bypassed a number of rooms full of people, men and women, and instead she was taken immediately to a dark interior chamber, lit only by dozens of flickering candles. They closed the door when they left.
Salma was completely alone.
Chapter 9
Moscow, 1991
EVERYTHING HAD FALLEN APART.
In a few days it would be a new year, and that year would dawn on a world in which there was no Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had gone on television to announce that the former USSR was dissolving itself, its member states becoming independent entities. Alexis and Valerya Vishnikoff and their young daughter Alina were now Russian citizens, not Soviets.
And it was worse than that. In dissolving the Soviet Union, Gorbachev and his allies had also destroyed the power base of the Communist party. The party hierarchy had been overturned, the KGB thrown out. One day, a man had been able to know where he stood in the world. The next, everything was new. It was like starting over. But Alexis and Valerya had worked hard to get where they were. The People’s Project was finally beginning to show real results. They didn’t want to start over.
They had gone into the lab the day after Gorbachev’s announcement. But there was no work being done. People sat at their desks, stunned expressions on their faces, many in tears. Others ransacked their own work areas, stealing computers, lab equipment, office supplies—one man took the clock off the wall and the wastebasket that stood beside a little table on which there was a coffeepot, a pitcher of milk, and some sugar. No one stopped him, or made any attempt to halt the other thefts. The people who might have, the security guards and KGB plants, hadn’t even bothered to come in at all.
Alexis and Valerya huddled together in Markov’s office. Markov hadn’t shown up either—they would later learn that he had hanged himself from the rafters of his apartment, minutes after hearing Gorbachev’s statement.
“It can’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands,” Valerya was insisting. “Any of these people could walk out the door with it and sell it on the black market tomorrow. Or deliver it straight to an American agent.”
“But what can we do?” Alexis asked her, in an agony of indecision. “It doesn’t belong to us.”
“To us as much as anyone else on Earth,” Valerya countered. She looked determined. “Maybe Comrade Markov, but he isn’t even here. Who knows when he will be again? By then it could be too late.”
She held out her hands, as if imploring her husband to really listen to her. “If the Reality Tracer is stolen or destroyed, then everything you and I have worked on for the past decade is gone. Worthless. We might as well never have been born.”
“Don’t say that,” Alexis implored her. “We have each other. We have a beautiful daughter.”
That was the strongest argument he could have used. Alexis was not religious, but there were times he simply could not believe the exquisite creature they had brought into the world was not an angel. The love that filled him whenever he looked at her—and at her mother—was almost unbearable.
“Our daughter. Who will grow up without ever knowing Communism,” Valerya said. “Whose parents will have worked for years to accomplish exactly nothing. What good will we be for her? How will throwing everything we’ve done away affect her?”
“Then what do you suggest we do, Valerya?” Alexis asked, looking at his wife, gazing at her, remembering a happier time when he had been freezing cold and drinking tea, and telling her about a different catastrophe in his life. “Get a gun and sit in the lab with the Tracer until Markov comes back?”
She looked around to make sure no one watched, and leaned close to Alexis. It was not safe to assume that even Markov’s office wasn’t bugged, that there wasn’t someone listening to the whole conversation. Although, with the chaos at the KGB, he couldn’t imagine who it might be.
“We take it,” she whispered. “We take it home today, now. And we get it out of Russia, into Yugoslavia, Romania—someplace more sympathetic to our cause.”
Alexis tried to disguise his shock. “You’re talking treason!”
“Treason against what?” Valerya responded. “A government that no longer exists? A party that has been disbanded? A system that has been overthrown? It would be treason not to do something.”
Alexis paused. Through the big window of Markov’s office, he could see yet another researcher unplugging a computer from its power source and tucking it under his arm. It had only been a couple of years since the Project had acquired desktop computers—if this had happened before that, they’d have had to drive trucks up to the building and lift massive banks of equipment with cranes to steal them.
The whole thing still felt like a bad dream from which he would soon awake. But as he watched the activity in the building, he realized that there was no ignoring reality. Things had changed, overnight. The People’s Project— and, in the light of these developments, that name took on a new kind of irony—was only one casualty of the new world order, and not one that most people would ever miss. Very few knew of its existence in the first place.
“You’re right, Valerya,” he said. He touched her smooth cheek, stroked her blond hair. “As usual, you are right. Let’s get to work.”
No one tried to stop them. Only a few even looked their way as they disconnected the Reality Tracer from the computers that controlled it, and from the power outlets that charged it. They had made a quick list of the elements they needed to operate the Tracer—the main drive, the database. But the most important factor, they carried within themselves: their own innate abilities. Everything else they needed they could take in one heavily burdened trip home.
Valerya packed while Alexis retrieved Alina from school. The girl was six n
ow, a blond, apple-cheeked miniature of her mother. Seeing her father so early in the day surprised but delighted her. Alexis told the teacher that he would be taking her out for the afternoon, but didn’t bother to say that she should not watch for them to return. The teacher would figure it out soon enough, and in the meantime she would not raise any alarms.
Alina, of course, could tell that something was very wrong, but she also knew that she should not let on to anyone else. She smiled at her father and took his hand.
Alexis and Valerya owned a car now, a Citroën they had bought thirdhand from a Hungarian who ran a coffee shop on their street. By the time he got home, through the chaotic streets, with Alina, Valerya was already stuffing the car’s boot with clothing, papers, and personal items the family would not want to leave behind.
She tried to pack the car so it would look, upon cursory inspection—in case there was still anyone to inspect it— like that of a family on holiday. But at the same time she didn’t want to leave anything behind that might reveal what they had been working on. They couldn’t leave any clues as to their destination, for they had no firm plans in mind, just an overwhelming urge to get out of Russia before anyone realized what was missing. Alexis sent Alina to her room to gather some favorite toys while he pitched in with the packing.
They were on the road before dark. By the next evening, they had stopped in Poland. From there, they worked their way down through the former Soviet satellites, into Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and finally Bulgaria. Associates helped them with border crossings, though the borders, with everything falling apart, were more porous than usual. In Bulgaria, they took an apartment while Alexis found a menial job. Without a lab or any support staff, they continued the work they had begun so long ago.
America was their next move.
The People’s Project lived.
Sunnydale
Buffy held the young man’s face tenderly in her hands, feeling the roughness of his afternoon stubble, the slightly rubbery quality of his cheeks. She couldn’t imagine how things had become so intense so quickly, and found herself wishing for a moment that there was a way to turn back the clock, to restore things to the way they had been. But she knew there wasn’t. She put the face back down on the street where she had found it, and silently vowed to destroy whatever creature had torn it from some unsuspecting victim. Sunnydale crawled with vermin, supernatural beings that seemed to be here only to kill. Buffy was fed up with them.
“Buffy!” Riley called to her from around a corner, his tone hushed and urgent. She sprang to his side. Spike, patrolling with them tonight, was already there.
“What’s up?” she asked, ready for combat.
Combat, it seemed, was ready for her.
Four creatures bearing only the vaguest resemblance to anything human, or even mammalian, knelt over a human corpse. Its midsection was split open like a Christmas turkey, and the four were pulling entrails from inside it, shoving them into mouths that hinged open like an alligator’s. The fiends had two arms and two legs each, and a head on top of a body, but the body was split into sections like an insect’s. Thorax and abdomen, Buffy remembered, glad that she could use insect anatomy to distract herself momentarily from the ghastly display of human anatomy before her.
“Reminds me,” Spike said. “Gotta have a snack when we get back to Giles’s.”
“Tell me again why we let you come with us on patrol?” Riley asked.
“Animal magnetism.”
One of the creatures noticed them then, glancing over its shoulder toward where she, Riley, and Spike stood. It dropped a length of intestine and made a frantic clicking sound. The others looked up, drawing away from the body into defensive postures. Long, transparent wings on their backs unfolded.
Buffy didn’t even glance at her friends. Her rage was boundless now. These things would pay. She threw herself down the street at them. At her attack, their wings began to flutter and buzz. As she ran, Buffy pulled a stake out, knowing these weren’t vampires, but a wooden rod through the heart or some other organ would still do some damage. By the time she reached them, one was already taking flight. Buffy launched herself into the air, and caught the creature’s spindly legs before it got away.
Her weight brought it down, and they landed in a heap, on top of the others. One of Buffy’s boots grazed the corpse, and she drew it away in disgust. She jabbed the stake into the torso of the creature she’d crash-landed.
It let out a trilling, high-pitched wail, in which Buffy took a great deal of satisfaction.
Riley joined the battle, catching another of the creatures as it tried to escape. As Buffy struggled with one, she saw Riley wrestling his, keeping his head back to avoid snapping jaws while trying to break the thing’s spine. Not a bad idea, she thought. But she took a more direct route, grabbing the wounded one by its head, holding the jaws shut with her powerful hands, and snapping it hard against a building. She heard a crunching noise, and the fiend went limp in her hands.
Spike was trying to get a grip on another one, but it used its wings defensively, fluttering them at him like sword blades, and he couldn’t get close. But Buffy was too furious to be deterred. She coiled and released a snap kick that punctured the thing’s thorax. It collapsed on the ground, and she followed, driving the stake still clutched in her fist into its head. It shuddered twice and then was still.
“Neat trick, that,” Spike said.
Riley had successfully dispatched his, which left only one more, but for a second, Buffy couldn’t see it. Then she heard it, followed the sound with her gaze, up and over their heads. It had been injured when she and the first one had fallen on it; one of its wings was shredded a bit, but it was still able to gain altitude.
Just not fast enough.
“Riley!” she called, and made a quick cradle with her hands. “Boost!”
He understood, which was good. She’d practiced this with Angel, but hadn’t really worked on it with Riley. It was really pretty self-explanatory, though. He bent forward at the waist, legs tensed and ready, and repeated the cradle motion. Buffy ran toward him, jumped, and one foot landed in the cradle. As it did, Riley straightened, throwing her into the air, her own momentum furthering the leap.
The fiend fluttered frantically but couldn’t get high enough. Buffy, parallel to the second story windows of the buildings, slammed into it. It started to fall, and, her momentum gone, she dropped with it. Pacing it, she drew her right hand back past her left shoulder and backhanded the thing across its long mouth as hard as she could.
Its head swiveled, farther than it could handle. She heard its neck break, and the thing was dead by the time they crashed to the street.
Riley helped her up, a smile on his handsome face. Spike was there, too, helping to dust some of the fiend’s body parts off her shoulders.
“Now that’s what I call teamwork,” he said.
“Funny,” she replied. “That’s what I call seriously ooky.”
Cheryce had always hated the part about having to be invited across a threshold, because usually only friends and allies were willing to do that. Those one wanted to terrorize or kill were the least likely to go along with the program. Sure, there were methods one could employ to get around the technicality, but they were occasionally awkward, and Cheryce preferred to be direct whenever possible.
So when she learned that some Latin Cobras were hiding out in a trailer, less than a mile from where she had lived, she decided to be as direct as possible. She started by banging on the door.
“Hey, come out!” she shouted. “I want some answers!”
Not surprisingly, no one came out.
So she moved on to the next element of the plan. The trailer rested on a low foundation of cinder blocks. It was one of those immobile “mobile homes” that people set up in a mobile home park somewhere and left there. But that just meant it couldn’t be easily rolled out on the back of a truck; it didn’t mean it couldn’t be moved.
Cheryce wen
t to one corner, squatted down, put her hands behind her back, and wrapped them around the bottom edge of the trailer. Then, muscles straining, legs shaking, she stood. The corner of the trailer rose with her. When she had it up as high as she could get it, she let go.
It slammed down, breaking the cinder block wall, and slipped off its mooring. The lights inside went off as it disconnected from its power supply. Unbalanced now, it was easier to agitate. She pushed on its walls, shaking the whole thing like a tambourine.
A moment later, three Latin Cobras spilled out the door.
“Hey, man, what are you—oh, mamacita, ” one said, looking irritated with her. He had no hair on his head, and none on his shirtless chest. A tattoo of a coiled snake danced on his tight abdomen as he crossed his arms. “You wanted to come and play, why you being so rough?”
“I’m not here to play,” Cheryce said. “I’m here for information. Failing that, I’d be happy to just kill the three of you and drink your blood.”
Another guy clapped a hand over the first one’s shoulder. Shirtless, too, and packing six-pack abs. “Paco,” he said quietly. “She messed up the trailer like that by herself, I think maybe we should listen to her.”
“Dude,” Paco snapped, “she woulda needed a crane or something to pick the trailer up like that. So where is it, lady? How’d you do that?”
Cheryce simply looked at her fingertips. “Damn,” she said casually. “Broke a nail.”
“What you want to know?” the second guy asked.
“Jorge, I wouldn’t—”
“Shut up, Paco,” Jorge barked. “You want to take your chances with her, fine. Not me.”
Finally, the third guy spoke. “Jorge’s right,” he said. “We’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Fine,” Cheryce said. “Let’s talk about oil fields.”
When the conversation was over, five minutes later, Cheryce had a name and a location and a full stomach. Tomorrow night, she thought, I’ll boost a ride to Los Angeles and find Mr. Nicolas de la Natividad. I think tonight’s been a smashing success.