What Dreams Shadows Cast Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One - Vogg

  Chapter Two - Day by Day

  Chapter Three - Second Verse, Same as the First

  Chapter Four - A Visit

  Chapter Five - Lizards and Shifters

  Chapter Six - Vogg

  Chapter Seven - Monsters and Gods

  Chapter Eight - A Surprise Meeting

  Chapter Nine - Trust Us to be Jansynians

  Chapter Ten - Vogg

  Chapter Eleven - The Body

  Chapter Twelve - A Familiar Face

  Chapter Thirteen - The Desert

  Chapter Fourteen - Vogg

  Chapter Fifteen - Into the Darkness

  Chapter Sixteen - The Impossible City

  Chapter Seventeen - Vogg

  Chapter Eighteen - Exploring

  Chapter Nineteen - No Secrets

  Chapter Twenty - Vogg

  Chapter Twenty-One - Magic

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Vogg

  Chapter Twenty-Three - More Questions

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Vogg

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Shifters and Stasis

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Blood on Stone

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Struggles

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Vogg

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Digging Deep

  Chapter Thirty - Interlude

  Chapter Thirty-One - A New Theory

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Trust Me

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Nothing like You’ve Ever Known

  Chapter Thirty-Four - The City That Was

  Chapter Thirty-Five - Escape

  Chapter Thirty-Six - A Lost Thread

  Chapter Thirty-Seven - Last Stand

  Chapter Thirty-Eight - Vogg

  Chapter Thirty-Nine - Up and Out

  Chapter Forty - Vogg

  Chapter Forty-One - Day by Day by Day

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Also by Barbara J. Webb

  WHAT DREAMS SHADOWS CAST

  by Barbara J. Webb

  CHAPTER ONE

  Vogg

  I felt an itchy thud as something landed on my tail. I turned my head, whipped my flashlight around to see a spider the size of my palm. I knocked it off with the flashlight and ground it to dust under the ball of my foot. I stood still, listening for any other hint of movement in the darkness that surrounded me.

  “You okay?” Ash called from the other side of the tunnel.

  No, was the answer. I didn’t want to be underground. I didn’t want to be in the dark. I hated the hollow echo of my claws scraping against the gravel. I hated the dead smell of the air.

  “It’s nothing, Priest Ash. Continue.”

  Once upon a time, before the Abandon, men of faith spoke for the gods. They promised a better world, and when that promise was shattered, when the better world was bathed in blood and fire, the people turned on those men and killed them.

  I don’t blame the priests. I never confused them for the gods they served. We were all betrayed together. And as hard as this new world has been for me, I can’t imagine the nightmares, the torments that haunt these fallen priests. These former men of faith.

  Men of faith like the one I followed today as we explored Miroc’s forgotten underground.

  Ash stopped, shining his light up his side of the tunnel. “This spot looks solid,” he said. Ash Drake, former priest of Kaifail. The subterranean tunnels were immense, wide enough that I heard his voice louder through the earpiece that I wore than from the soft echoes that came across the gulf of darkness between us. “No cracks. No sign of any recent disturbances. What’s it like over there, Vogg?”

  I ran my light up and down in a thorough exploration of the stone. “The same. These walls are impassable.”

  Spark’s voice came through my earpiece, cracking as the signal fought its way through the layers of city and stone above us. “There is no impassable. It’s only a question of how much time and effort it would take them to break through.”

  “Nothing’s coming through here,” Ash answered with confidence. “If any monsters want to sneak up on us, there are easier ways.”

  I knew Ash had very specific monsters in mind. We all did. Spark, Iris, Ash, me—in the six months since the disaster that had brought us all together, those monsters had never been far from our minds. These monsters were clever. They were resourceful. And they were subtle.

  But I couldn’t disagree with Ash’s assessment. “Any attempt to reopen these tunnels would be loud and impractically slow.”

  “Good enough,” Spark answered. “Drop the bugs and get out of there.” I heard the soft click of her disconnect.

  We each had a small bag of tiny spy bugs Spark had built. Each miniature camera was mounted on a nest of clever robotic legs, like spiders, to wedge themselves into tiny cracks and solidly grip the smallest protrusion. We spread them around the tunnel so they could see everything. Each of them would sit dormant until it detected any light, motion, or sound. We had been spreading these around the city, in places where people—or things that were not people—might try to sneak in. Which meant I had spent a lot of time in dark places of late.

  The flashlight in my hand was too weak to light the whole tunnel. Priest Ash and I were each an island of light moving through a vast darkness. I kept my light pointed before us, to mind the rocky, uneven footing, while Ash swept his all around, tracing the walls, looking for any breaks or gaps we might have missed.

  All the while, my free hand never strayed far from the gun at my right hip, unless it was to double check the placement of the sword on my left. There was no reason to believe we weren’t alone. But reason wasn’t a drive I’d seen much of these last couple years.

  This tunnel had been the main line for all the northern routes out of the city. Seven tracks, spaced wide enough to accommodate the huge passenger and freight trains that had connected Miroc to the rest of the world. Further along, the tracks split and separated but those tunnels were blocked. They’d been collapsed when Miroc’s leaders had heard reports of the monsters killing Tala. It was good. It meant we didn’t have to do that work ourselves. We only had to make sure the barriers were still intact.

  The underground air made my skin crawl. I looked forward to going home and giving my scales a good scrub. But I don’t complain. It’s good to have a purpose. Even when that purpose so often reminds me of uncomfortable things.

  “I have to confess, I get chills imagining what might be on the other side of these walls,” Ash said, his mind apparently following the same track as my own.

  “It does no good to imagine. We will have to face the creatures that infested Tala and, for all we know, the rest of the world. When that happens, we must be ready to fight the beasts that stand before us. Not the construct of our fears.”

  “You’re just a ray of sunshine.”

  In six months with Priest Ash, I’d learned how much he loved the sound of his own voice, and how I could politely ignore many of the things he said without him taking offense.

  “I hate the waiting,” Ash said. “We know there are monsters out there. We know they’ll come for us at some point. It kills me, this constant state of…” His light bobbled all around as he waved his hand expressively.

  I could wait. Every day of peace was a gift. I hadn’t forgotten the deaths, the destruction, the horrors that had come of the last monsters we’d fought.

  Neither had Ash. I knew that. But he still possessed a great amount of faith. Not in the gods, but in himself. In his friends. In the idea that our world still had the chance of a happy ending.

  I wasn’t sure what I believed. I don’t know that it mattered. W
hether I believed or not, the world would go on, moving to the demands of greater powers than me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Day by Day

  Vogg and I emerged onto the street, blinking against the sudden light. Even on a cloudy day, the outside was a hundred times brighter than below.

  We parted ways. Each of us had to make our reports. Vogg would go fill Spark in on the details of our exploration. Me, I had to go face Amelia.

  Six months since we’d brought rain back to Miroc, six months since we’d been on the edge of dying from lack of water, and now the entire city seemed determined to pretend our troubles were over.

  Miroc had always had more parks than any desert could support, thanks to the rain summoned by the sky-goddess’s priests. That greenery had all died off when the Abandon came and the gods had stopped taking requests.

  Now, thanks to Spark and Vogg and Iris and me, rain had returned to Miroc, through the technology the Jansynians had stolen from Spark. The city council was determined to show their citizens that everything was fine again through an aggressive city beautification project that was not only utterly ludicrous, but it ignored all the other shortages and problems that persisted.

  Fortunately, not everyone in the city was as short-sighted as the city council. My employers knew we were living on borrowed time. My employers knew we needed to be looking ahead. All because of one woman, our leader, Amelia Price.

  No one knew that Amelia Price was dead.

  Amelia was at her desk, staring at her computer screen, a frown on her beautiful face. In her perfectly tailored suit, with her perfectly styled hair, and perfectly manicured nails, no one could guess the truth. No one would ever see the creature that now lived inside her skin.

  I waited in the doorway. She knew I was there. This new Amelia was aware of everything around her every moment. Nothing escaped her notice. But that didn’t mean she was going to allow me to interrupt whatever thought-process she was working through.

  “What do you need, Ash?” she finally asked. The irritation in her voice was one hundred percent Amelia. Her own mother wouldn’t know that she’d changed. Some days—most of them—I wished that I didn’t.

  “We’ve finished with the train tunnels,” I said from the doorway. “Nothing’s sneaking up on us from below the city. I think it’s time to redirect our attention. Iris has been telling me about an influx of refugees. A lot of people coming in, and also a lot of people going out.”

  That got Amelia’s attention. We were starved for news from the outside. And she wouldn’t have missed the most obvious question about the people who were leaving—where would they go? She looked up, tapping her fingers on the desk in the steady rhythm that had always meant Amelia thinking.

  Some days I could almost forget that it was Syed moving those fingers, looking at me through Amelia’s eyes. That it was Syed’s mind and Syed’s decisions now guiding Price & Breckenridge. For six months I’d been braced for some dramatic moment, some drastic change that had never happened. As far as I could tell, Syed had done nothing that Amelia wouldn’t have done, had made no decision Amelia wouldn’t have made. He lived in her body with the same perfect mimicry I’d seen the rest of his people capable of.

  It was creepy. It was wrong. But it was a lesser evil, compared to everything else that had gone wrong in the world. And the truth was, we needed him. And he needed us. Which led to this awkward state of truce and a thin layer of pretense, and no one was all-the-way happy with any of it.

  Syed-Amelia stopped tapping and leaned back in her chair. “I want a full report from Spark of the state of her project. I want to know when our surveillance is all online and how she plans to monitor it. In the meanwhile, you, Iris, and Vogg can start talking to the people who’ve come new to the city. Find out where they came from and what happened there.”

  “Done.”

  She nodded. “There’s more.”

  I paused in the doorway.

  “I’m sending you to the Crescent. Take Iris with you. Just in case.”

  “Excuse me?” The last time any of us had been to the Crescent, it had been in the course of an assault on the most powerful Jansynian corporation in Miroc. We broke through their security, infiltrated their computer network, and killed a number of their personnel, including their director of security. We were lucky to escape with nothing worse than a stern warning not to come back.

  “Coronis Technologies,” Amelia continued. “Are you familiar with them?”

  I shook my head. “I know they’re one of the companies with a presence here, but Seana never talked about them.” After six months, I could say her name without flinching.

  “They’ve sent a number of requests to meet with us. This most recent invitation was phrased with some urgency. I find myself curious about what they want.”

  “And you’re sending me?”

  “Who better?” Amelia’s cool tone held just a hint of amusement. Yes, Syed’s imitation of her was perfect.

  There was still the matter of just in case. “What did the invitations say?”

  Amelia waved the question away. “Nothing specific. Mutual benefits. New opportunities. Corporate double-speak. But the fact they keep trying…it intrigues me.”

  If there was one deep-down, driving trait Syed and Amelia shared, it was curiosity. And unfortunately for my own health and safety, I possessed the exact same weakness. “When should I go?”

  “Whenever is most convenient,” she answered in a voice that clearly communicated what she meant was now.

  And yet, I lingered. That fatal flaw of curiosity holding me back. “Can I ask you something?”

  Her silence wasn’t a no, which was possibly the most encouragement I was going to get.

  I stepped in and closed the door behind me. This wasn’t a question for the hall, where anyone could overhear. Because this question was for Syed, not Amelia. “What comes next?”

  Amelia tilted her head, seeming surprised by the question. “What is it you’re really asking?”

  “It’s been six months. The city is back on its feet—or as close as we’re going to get. We’ve spies and cameras spread around so that nothing’s getting in or out that we’re not going to notice. I want to know what’s next. We’ve been waiting for shadows, but we haven’t seen any. I don’t want to waste another six months sitting around just hoping for something to happen.”

  “What would you suggest we do?”

  Unfortunately, I had no answer. Just a restlessness, a sense that we were wasting time that was already too short.

  Amelia leaned back, crossed her arms. “I’m happy to entertain any ideas you care to bring me. In the meanwhile, if you’re looking for something to occupy yourself, perhaps you could pursue the avenues I’ve offered.”

  In other words, go do your job. “I’ll go talk to the Jansynians.”

  She nodded and pulled back up to her computer. I was dismissed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Second Verse, Same as the First

  Six months ago, I made this same trip, and it couldn’t have been more different. I had emerged from the tube station into a sun-bleached wasteland where the blinding dome of the Crescent sat atop the only island of life in this part of the city.

  Now Iris and I were part of a crowd of people getting off at this stop. Instead of sun and heat greeting me as the escalator pushed us into the street, I staggered as a sudden burst of chilly wind turned my robe into a parachute, and I felt the first drops of a rainstorm that had blown up from nowhere. Weather, it turned out, was a tricky thing. Spark’s satellite had given the Jansynians the power to make it rain but, in practice, that translated to a lot more volatile weather than anyone was used to.

  Blocks ahead of us, the Corporate Crescent looked the same, although its glass dome was dulled by the clouds. The Jansynians’ city in the sky, it never changed. As Miroc waxed and waned below, the Crescent remained.

  I pulled my hood up against the uncomfortably cold rain as Iris and I join
ed the crowd headed towards the gated receiving yard that was the furthest most non-Jansynians ever made it into their territory. My clothes were already damp and clammy. I was going to be downright miserable by the time we got there.

  Iris’s discomfort had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with our destination. “You know this is the worst idea ever, right?” she asked as we shuffled along with the crowd.

  “Probably, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think they’d shoot us in front of witnesses.”

  “Well then. I’m sure we have nothing to worry about.”

  Contrary or not, I was glad to have Iris with me. Even if Amelia hadn’t suggested it, I would probably have asked her along. Even more than Vogg, I trusted Iris to get us out of any bad situation that might develop. “Remember, they invited us.”

  “Coronis invited us. Desavris is still pissed.”

  For all her complaints, Iris looked calm enough. And Iris’s nature made it difficult for her to hide what she was feeling. So she wasn’t that worried, which I found reassuring.

  I didn’t completely understand how the corporate politics of the Crescent worked. I knew there were a number of companies up there under the dome, of which Desavris was the largest here in Miroc. The one entrance that led down to the city—an enormous glass-encased lift through which all imports and exports passed—was controlled by Desavris. Which meant, in the unlikely event Coronis did invite us upstairs, we’d have to pass through the space of the corporation we’d made an enemy of.

  The rain cut off as we crossed through the gates into the receiving yard. A wall of water marked whatever invisible barrier stood between us and the weather.

  The yard was busy as ever. Workers—Jansynian and non—rushing around moving cargo to and from the lift. Armed guards, too, were scattered about, watching everyone who came in off the street. They politely intercepted anyone who left the proscribed path.

  Iris and I moved into the line leading to the security station. I no longer had the security tab they’d given me in the brief time when I was a welcome visitor to the Crescent. When we made it up to the guard at the counter, I put on my best smile and began, “I’m Joshua Drake, from Price &—”