the amber he wore in his watch.
He had just ditched the watch in a nearby tunnel. He had backup amber set at a different frequency, but he could not risk using it yet. It would not take the men who were following them long to pick up the second signal and realize that he had switched amber.
There was only one chance left.
“Close your eyes and don’t move, Mary Beth. I promise you that if we both stay absolutely still for the next few minutes, the bad men won’t even see us.”
“Okay,” Mary Beth whispered.
She clung to him, one arm wrapped around his neck, and regarded him with the solemn trust that only a six-year-old child could give. It was a miracle that she had any confidence in him at all after what she’d been through. She had never met him before in her life. But forty-five minutes ago he had rescued her from the kidnappers, and she had believed him when he told her that he had come to take her home.
The sounds of the approaching men were closer now. They were using a sled. There was no way a man carrying a six-year-old kid could outrun one.
Not much longer, he thought. Maybe thirty seconds. He had to get the timing right, or he and Mary Beth would never make it out of this chamber.
Mary Beth closed her eyes and pressed her face against his chest, a child trying to hide from the monsters under the bed.
The sled was very close now. He could hear the sound of the simple amber-drive motor. Only the most primitive kinds of engines worked underground.
“He’s close,” one of the men said, excited. “We’ve got him. Can’t be more than a hundred feet away.”
“Move it,” another man said. “If he gets out of here with the girl, we’re all dead.”
“Stay very, very still, Mary Beth,” he whispered. She froze in his arms.
He pulled silver light. A lot of it.
The sled hummed loudly. It rolled out of one of the ten vaulted entrances of the underground chamber. And then the driver brought the damn thing to a halt, right in the middle of the room.
“Check the frequency,” the driver snapped.
He held his breath and his focus, counting the seconds.
One minute.
The second man on the sled studied the amber-rez locator. “Straight ahead.”
Two minutes.
“You sure?” the driver demanded, looking at the nine other doorways.
“Positive. I’m telling you, I’ve got a solid reading.”
“I don’t like this,” the third man said uneasily. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
Three minutes. The men continued to argue. Mary Beth did not stir, although he could feel her little body shivering with fear.
Four minutes.
“All right, let’s go,” the driver said, making the executive decision.
The bastard finally rezzed the sled’s engine. The little vehicle shot across the chamber. It made straight for the vaulted doorway, zeroing in on the frequency of the amber watch that lay on the quartz floor just inside.
The sled passed within a yard of where he stood with Mary Beth pressed tightly against his chest.
Five minutes. An eternity.
“Ghost-shit,” the driver howled. “That’s his damned watch. He tricked us.”
But it was too late. The driver couldn’t stop the sled in time. It plowed straight through the faint shadows cloaking the vaulted entrance of the tunnel, triggering the alien illusion trap.
The men screamed when they were plunged into the trap’s psychically generated alien nightmares, but not for long. No human could stay conscious for more than a few seconds under those conditions. Mary Beth jerked at the sounds.
He stopped working silver light. He was breathing hard and already starting to shake. He didn’t need to test his amber to know that he had melted it. Luckily he now had a fresh supply.
“It’s okay, Mary Beth,” he said. “The bad men can’t hurt you now.”
She raised her head and looked at him with big, amazed eyes. “They went right past us, but they didn’t even see us.”
“No,” he said. “They didn’t.”
He had to move quickly. The clock was ticking. He had maybe fifteen minutes at most to get back to the rendezvous point and turn Mary Beth over to the team. At least they now had the sled. With the illusion trap triggered, it was safe to go through the doorway to get it.
“It was like we were invisible,” Mary Beth whispered, watching him kick the three unconscious men off the sled.
“Yeah.” He checked the slab’s amber-rez locator. It was functioning. “Like we were invisible.”
He made the rendezvous point. The last thing he remembered was the face of the hunter who took the girl out of his arms. Then the cold chills swept over him, and everything faded to black.
FIVE DAYS LATER HE AWOKE TO DISCOVER THAT HE was trapped in a living hell named the Glenfield Institute, dimly aware of what was going on around him but utterly unable to communicate. He could smell the coffee the doctors drank and hear their grim diagnosis.
“Psi coma. He may never come out of it. Even if he does surface, he’s going to be a total burnout case. He’ll spend the rest of his life in a parapsych ward.”
Chapter 19
TITUS KENNINGTON LOOKED AROUND BENSON LANDRY’S office with amused disdain. Talk about clinging to the past, he thought. Unlike the Cadence Guild headquarters, which under Mercer Wyatt’s command had been moved into a gleaming downtown office tower, the Frequency Guild was still located in its original compound in the Old Quarter of the city.
The decision to move the Cadence Guild headquarters downtown had been a public relations bid designed to make the organization appear more mainstream. Here in Frequency, however, the local authorities were apparently not overconcerned with public opinion. The very fact that a man like Benson Landry had risen to such a prominent position in the Guild was proof that the local organization was not all that determined to modernize.
Landry was unstable and very dangerous. The dark energy emanating from him was similar to other para- sociopaths Titus had encountered in the course of his professional career. In addition, the man was obviously clinging to sanity by his fingertips. When this was over, he would have to be dealt with. But right now he was the only tool available for the job at hand.
Landry’s office had been built in the period following the Era of Discord when the status and power of the Guilds had been at their height. The room was paneled in spectrum wood and elaborately inlaid with yellow amber. A variety of alien antiquities, including an array of unusual-looking green quartz vases, were arranged around the room. The top of Landry’s desk was a smooth slab of quartz. The walls of the Dead City rose right outside the window. At night the office would be suffused with a radiant green light.
Power resonated throughout the room, not just the symbolic power associated with status and authority that one expected to encounter in the domain of a Guild Council member, but the very real paranormal power that emanated from the catacombs below.
Landry looked at him. “I brought Miss Stowe because I thought she would find this interesting.”
“Yes, of course.” Titus gave the blonde his soothing, Trust me, I’m a doctor smile. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Stowe.”
She smiled back, looking baffled but not frightened. She was clearly making an effort to show polite interest, a professional call girl who was accustomed to satisfying the whims of her clients.
“Benson tells me that you want to demonstrate an alien artifact to him,” she said.
