A moment ago she'd thought that she would have done anything to get her freedom, but she couldn't betray an innocent babe.
Adel stiffened, and as his composure vanished, a snarl escaped his lips. Frustrated, he took aim quickly and the muzzle of his pistol flashed three times in rapid succession. Dogs yelped and dropped to the ground, muscles quivering. The odor of blood and burning flesh arose. Dogs kicked and whimpered as they died.
Sommer cringed.
"You!" he growled, "you ruined my dogs!" Adel's eyes widened as he pointed the gun at her face, steadied his aim. Sommer prepared to die. Adel had been an excellent shot for at least five hundred years, since the very invention of the hand cannon.
Adel gritted his teeth.
Suddenly a fierce protective instinct took over. Sommer argued, "I heard ... I heard a few weeks ago, that Lucius killed one of his own sons. He didn't like the child's ... features." She said it accusingly, incensed.
At least she knew now why she had run.
Adel shrugged. "He didn't like its nose. A good eugenics program requires that we cull... defectives."
Sommer knew that Adel considered her to be "defective." She was a masaak, like him, but she wasn't one of Lucius's well-bred Draghouls. She was from "feral" stock. She was an Ael. Her ancestors had been hiding from Lucius and his Draghouls for hundreds of years.
An image flashed through her mind, an ancient memory. It was from an incident that had occurred eighteen hundred years before she was born. She didn't recall who had given the memory to her.
She saw Lucius, dressed in a fine red-silk toga, sitting in the balcony at the Roman Coliseum. He conversed with a general as he devoured a breast of swan. Down in the arena, a brutish Christian with a crude ax was trying to defend himself while a pair of hungry lions circled. It was only a minor pre-show, before the gladiatorial combats began. The Christian was a missionary named Titus who had preached in the streets of Rome, hounding the philosophers.
"Ego dont "have ullus problems per homines," Lucius jested, "I don't have any problem with humans," he waited before delivering the punch-line, "hunting them is such fine sport." He laughed.
Just then, the crowd roared as a lion lunged. With one swipe of its paw it jerked the Christian's feet from under him, while its hunting partner pounced.
In those days, Lucius looked much as he did now, but there was a vitality to him, a light in his eyes, that had since burned out.
Lucius no longer had that "fire in the belly" one needs to be a global dictator. Sommer hoped that Lucius and his empire would soon crumble like a log that has turned to ash.
"Sommer," Adel said softly. He crouched. "I'm not angry. But I need you to make this right. We must find this child. Perhaps you cannot recall what you have done, but you should be able to tell me what you might do. Where would you take him, given the proper provocation?"
Sommer shook her head. She couldn't imagine. "Home?" she moaned, guessing. Immediately she wished that she'd held her tongue. She wouldn't want to lead them toward her family.
"We've checked," Adel said.
Sommer's heart pounded. They'd been to her house? They'd found her mother? Her father and sisters? What would Lucius have done to them?
Gone, she realized. They're all gone. The news left her sickened, shocked. Her mind seemed to shut down.
"I have an offer," Adel suggested. "Cooperate. Help us find the child. You can have ... money. A few million? And life. We'll give you a thousand extra years. Imagine what you could do with both?"
"I don't want your money," Sommer famed. She set her jaw. "And I'd rather die than live among you."
"Then ... perhaps you'd barter for your sisters' lives," Adel suggested, as if he'd grown tired of her games.
"They're still alive?" she asked. She wasn't sure if she believed him. She certainly didn't trust him. But she realized that she had no choice. In order to earn mercy for her family, she'd have to do both.
The gun in Adel's left hand flashed as he waved it in the moonlight. Such was his skill that Sommer did not see the Taser in his right hand until the electric arc shot toward her, and she fell into darkness.
Three thousand miles away, an infant woke in the night, and cried for his mother.
Chapter 1
Into the Desert
“We all become lost children at one time or another. When no one else can find us, we mustfind ourselves.”
Bron Jones wasn't afraid when Jenny called him in to speak with his foster mother. He hadn't done anything wrong. Still, sometimes people will knock you down even if you don't deserve it.
"Bron," Jenny said loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the lawnmower, in a tone of both care and warning, "mom wants you."
At eleven years old, Jenny Stillman was savvier than other kids. With a mom like hers, she had to be. Jenny could smell trouble coming a week in advance.
Bron cut the gas to the mower, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and tried to steel himself for whatever might come.
With his foster mother, Melvina Stillman, you could never tell what it might be. He imagined that she would gripe about his mowing. Bron had begun at eight in order to beat the heat of the day. Here in Alpine, Utah, it might get into the hundreds in late August, and the huge lawn needed to be done by ten.
But Melvina suffered from aches and pains, and she didn't sleep well at night. Bron figured that she'd want him to put off the mowing for a couple more hours while she slept, but he could never tell what the crazy woman might want.
He gave Jenny a questioning look, and she whispered, "You're in serious trouble!" while holding her hand up to her mouth to signal that Melvina was on the phone.
Great, Bron thought, she's talking to social services. He'd been living in the system from the time he was an infant, getting bounced from home to home. He was used to being talked about, prodded, and torn apart.
What's the worst that could happen? he wondered. He knew the answer. They could send me to another home, somewhere terrible.
Bron had almost hit rock bottom. Melvina hated him. To her, he was just a paycheck worth $518 a month in "maintenance fees." If she controlled her costs, she could feed him for $150 per month and dress him in hand-me-downs from the neighbors. That left $368 in profit that she could use to feed her own seven kids, with the bonus that she could work Bron like a house servant, cooking dinners, mowing lawns, and changing diapers.
Melvina got paid to keep Bron as her slave.
Bron wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and turned toward the house, a grand old yellow Victorian with a pair of turrets on each end and green gingerbread trim around the windows. It looked like a place that should be throwing parties, not a home so filled with poverty and despair.
He stopped for a moment, peering up. Crouched on the chimney was a crow, just watching him, its black feathers ruffled against an invisible wind. The crow cawed once, and then leapt into the sky, beating its midnight wings, feathers extended like fingers to rake the heavens.