Daysider

happens again.”

Even as he spoke, Alexia knew she was losing him. Losing him to despair, to resignation, to death. Because he cared, he would do anything to keep her, or any other innocent, from suffering what his rage might unleash.

“I know what you’d like to do,” she said with quiet intensity. “You’d like to hole up somewhere out there where you’ll either let yourself starve or become an Orlok. Well, forget it. I won’t let you.”

He focused on her again and brushed a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “If emotion is what awakens this thing inside me, then I must be away from anything that provokes it.” He lifted his thumb to his mouth and tasted her tear. “From any one. You must see that, Alexia.”

“I see that you’re giving up without any real understanding of what this thing is and how to fight it.” She heard her voice begin to rise in desperation. “You said Theron was a Bloodmaster. Maybe he’s heard of this condition, or even seen it. You don’t know it can’t be cured. How can you make any decision without more information?”

For one precious moment there was a flash of uncertainty in his eyes. The shadow of hope.

“Perhaps,” he murmured.

“I won’t lose you, Damon. I lost Michael to something I didn’t understand, and I won’t let it happen again.”

“Michael—” Damon began.

“Michael wasn’t...killed,” she said slowly. “He was changed. Into an Orlok.”

She expected to see shock on Damon’s face, but he hardly reacted at all. “I know,” he said. “And I know you were keeping this from me, and that I should wait until you felt safe enough to tell me.”

More deception all around, Alexia thought grimly. “He was trying to protect us,” she said. “And he...he communicated with me, Damon.” She touched her temple. “Here. In my mind.”

Like a child playing Simon Says, Damon touched his own forehead. “Yes,” he said. “I heard him, as well. ‘Protect,’ he said. ‘Save.’”

“Then he didn’t become a monster when he changed. He retained at least some of his intelligence, his loyalty. He tried to warn me. He said that someone was coming, and right after that the double agent showed up. He said something about an attack, and war.

Somehow he must have known what the Expansionists had planned for the colony.”

“How?” Damon asked, riveted by her words.

“I don’t know. Between the time you last saw his body and he came to me as an Orlok, anything could have happened. If Lysander was the Opir he followed, he could have overheard Lysander conspiring to attack the colony.”

Damon looked away. “Alexia,” he said heavily, “I didn’t plan to burden you with this, since he can no longer do any harm. But I believe Michael had some part in stealing your patch.”

Alexia stood up so suddenly that she shoved the cot, Damon still on it, seven or eight centimeters across the floor. “What did you say?” she asked, her heart freezing in her chest.

“I didn’t want to share my suspicions,” he said, “because I had no proof. But now it seems evident to me that Theron does not have the patch. He would have no use for it here. It appears more and more likely that Expansionist operatives took it.”

“What the hell does that have to do with Michael?”

“Someone from Aegis must have told the operatives what to look for. There were many aspects of your partner’s behavior when he learned your patch was gone that seemed strange to me, and—”

“Strange?” she echoed. “To you, who have admitted that you can’t control or understand your own emotions?” She heard the cruelty of her words but was too furious to stop. “I know you never liked him, but to accuse him now, when he has no way to defend himself...”

The cot creaked as Damon got up. “I should not have told you.”

“Setting aside the fact that he would have no motive, how do you think he managed to do it?”

“I have no theory as to his motive,” Damon said softly, moving to the small window.

“Oh, that’s just wonderful.” She glared at him, wondering how any person could go from love to hate, from sympathy to antagonism so quickly. “Do you have any idea what he sacrificed to be an agent? How loyal he was...how dedicated to his work?”

“I know he was your friend, Alexia.”

“And you expect me to think you’re—” She stopped, arrested by a thought that no longer seemed so ridiculous. “Are you jealous, Damon? Jealous of how I felt about Michael and he felt about me?”

He turned to look at her. “I have no reason to be jealous of a man who—” He broke off and looked away again. “You said you were not lovers.”

“No. But if you think that gives you the right to dishonor his memory...”

He’s not dead, she reminded herself. “You’re calling him a traitor, not only to Aegis, but to me. No dhampir would ever go over to the enemy. It’s never been done in the whole history of the Enclaves.” She strode across the room to confront him. “How can you possibly justify such a bizarre claim? A feeling? ”

He didn’t answer, and Alexia was left to pace from one wall to the other and back again, too enraged to think.

Except to remember, again, what Michael had said after he’d changed.

Coming. Signal. Attack. Warn. War.

Automatically Alexia reached for the communicator, but she had left it in the room Emma had assigned her in the east dormitory. Suddenly it seemed necessary—no, imperative—that she look at it again, study it carefully as she should have done when Michael had given it to her.

Without a word to Damon, she grabbed her pants, pulled them on and rushed out the door. The colony was still quiet, but dawn was breaking and all the lanterns, widely scattered across the commons, had been put out. She found the device where she had left it on the neatly made-up cot, along with her belt and her cleaned boots. Nothing else of her clothing had been worth saving. She snatched up the communicator and held it in her trembling hand.

As before, it appeared featureless with its beetle-black shell. But after a minute of careful examination, she found the nearly invisible recessed button at one end. She pressed on it, and a touch screen lit up, marked with only two symbols. One was the emblem for Aegis: the famous da Vinci Vitruvian Man with arms outstretched within a circle and square superimposed over the figure’s legs. The other was a red square.

It was flashing.

Alexia’s fingers almost lost their grip on the device before she could touch the square.

Immediately the flashing stopped, and a blue screen took the place of the two symbols, a field covered with small print spelling out terse sentences Alexia took in at a glance.

Message received re: colony. Strike force deployed. Maintain position. Report only in emergency. Do not intervene.

As soon as she had finished reading, the screen went blank. Even the symbols disappeared.

Alexia dropped the communicator on the cot. Strike force. From Aegis. They were deployed only in the rare case of a situation where more than the usual agent pairs were required for an assignment, where stealth and speed and force were all equally vital. Its operatives were heavily armed and trained to go in quickly, complete their missions and get out without regard to the Armistice or the rules of the Zone. In case of casualties, no bodies would be left behind, nor any other evidence that they had ever been in the Zone at all.

Using them meant that Aegis was willing to risk a complete breaking of the Armistice.

Coming. Signal. Attack. Warn. War.

Someone had sent a message calling in the strike force. Had it been Michael? Was that the signal he was talking about? What had he told them that would cause Aegis to act so precipitously? Even if he had learned the Expansionists’ plans for the colony, how could that be a good enough reason for Aegis to bypass all diplomatic channels?

And why hadn’t Michael told her?

He did, she thought. Just not soon enough.

Frantically she grabbed for the communicator again and punched on the button.