LITMIR.BIZ

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her bound wrists. “I can’t shake your hand.”

      Suddenly they both laughed, the laughter of people without hope. Trinity wasn’t completely faking it. She knew her odds of coming out of this alive and free were minimal, but that wasn’t what she feared. She had to obtain the necessary information and get word out of Erebus. If this was to be her last assignment, she intended to make it count.

      “Attention,” the soldier at the front of the column shouted, his helmet reflecting the sunlight. “You’ll be boarding the ferry now. When we reach the Larkspur Ferry Terminal, you will board a transport to the border of the Zone, where we will proceed on foot to the transfer point.” He scanned the small gathering, his eyes—and his feelings—hidden behind his visor. “Any disruption or attempt to escape will be met with force.”

      He glanced at his fellow soldiers flanking the crooked line of dozen convicts and moved closer. “Stay alive,” he said in a soft voice obviously meant only for the prisoners. “There’s always a chance things will change. If we ever beat the bloodsuckers—”

      “Sergeant!” one of the other soldiers said. “Ferry’s ready to board.”

      The sergeant stepped back and nodded brusquely, gesturing with his rifle. The convicts walked onto the boat and moved to the center of the deck, heads down and shoulders slumped. The soldiers instructed them to sit on the hard benches under the canvas canopy and then clipped the prisoner’s ankles to rings fixed to the deck at their feet.

      Trinity watched the soldiers patrolling the deck, far more than were needed to escort a dozen petty offenders. Did any of them have relatives or friends who’d been deported? She knew that the kin of politicians and higher-ups in the government were usually spared this punishment, including the board of directors of Aegis itself.

      It wasn’t fair. But neither was the fact that the bloodsuckers had devastated the earth before the attrition of their own numbers had forced them into a truce. These men and women were soldiers, and sometimes soldiers did what they didn’t want to do.

      You can never forget you’re only a slave from now on, she told herself. You have to make sure you’re chosen by the right Bloodmaster or Bloodlord. And then you have to make yourself indispensable to him.

      That meant playing the part of a proper serf—and, if necessary, revealing her dhampir nature. Because, in spite of the supposed rarity of half-breed captives among the Nightsiders, it was believed that the leeches found nothing more delectable than dhampir blood.

      Or more addictive. Some Nightsiders were highly prone to physical dependence on that same blood. And that was Trinity’s most powerful secret weapon. A dependent Nightsider was one she could manipulate.

      But she intended to keep her true nature hidden as long as possible. In addition to the contacts, she wore caps over her front teeth to conceal her longer incisors, and no Nightsider she encountered would immediately be able to detect the difference in the smell and unique taste of her blood.

      The experimental drugs she’d been given—drugs whose antidote had been inserted into one of her molars—would mask those differences until she didn’t need to hide them. They would also counter the addictive qualities of her blood until she required them. But just as important were the injections that were supposed to lessen the risk of Conversion or pregnancy.

      Of course, no one was completely sure what happened when a dhampir was converted, in spite of the many times Aegis operatives had come into contact with Opir agents in the field. If any dhampir had become a Nightsider, he or she had never returned to the Enclave. And no one had ever seen the child of a dhampir and a Nightsider.

      The engine of the ferry rumbled beneath Trinity’s feet, drawing her out of her thoughts, and soon the vessel was pulling away from the pier. No one spoke until they reached the Terminal in the old county of Marin. One boy of about eighteen let out a yell of sheer terror and then went silent when one of the soldiers turned his way.

      After that, there was only more silence as the soldiers herded the prisoners to the truck.

      The ride was jolting and uncomfortable, the truck carrying its unwilling passengers over roads left to weeds and weather, across fallow and overgrown fields, past empty towns and small cities that seemed to echo with ghostly voices.

      Trinity stared straight ahead as the truck cut north toward the transfer point in the abandoned city of Santa Rosa. It was dusk when the truck reached its destination. The soldiers helped the exhausted prisoners climb down from the vehicle, unfastened the cuffs and offered them dinner rations and water. Some ate as if they were starving; others ignored the food completely.

      Trinity ate. She needed all her strength, and because she was one of the sixty percent of dhampires who didn’t require drugs to digest solid food, she was free to eat whatever she wanted. Once she was finished, she listened to the hoot of an owl and the nearly silent footfalls of a coyote in the hills—sounds none of the humans could detect.

      By sunset, as the human soldiers watched with guns raised and night visors glowing, the Nightsiders, anonymous behind their own visors, emerged from the fringe of oak woods at the base of the hills to the west.

      In minutes the formal exchange had been made. The Enclave soldiers stepped back, and the Nightsiders closed in around the exiles.

      No one put up a struggle. The Nightsiders spoke no more than was strictly necessary. The prisoners climbed into the hills and walked along narrow roads that wound through the Mayacamas mountains, wreathed in darkness lit only by the sweeping beams of the Opir soldiers’ headlamps. Halfway up to the pass, the Nightsiders made camp and allowed their charges to eat and sleep.

      Trinity remained awake, listening and observing as the bloodsuckers spoke among themselves in their ancient language, hoping that one of them would be careless enough to reveal something that might be of use to her.

      But none said anything she didn’t already know. After a while, the soldiers and their prisoners continued up the mountain, making camp again with the rising of the sun. The Nightsiders set up a shelter of heavy canvas, and two rested while the other two kept watch.

      Near the end of the second night, they saw Erebus.

      The vampire city was all black crystal spires and obsidian facets, a vast hive surrounded by pastures and fields of grain that produced food to keep the serfs alive and healthy. Trinity knew that Erebus housed some five thousand Opiri—and three times as many humans. Below the Citadel’s foundations lay countless chambers occupied by the lowest-ranked free Opiri and public serfs who served the city as a whole.

      In the spires, the Towers, lived those of highest rank: the Bloodmasters and Bloodlords with their Households of vassals, serfs and client Freebloods. In their feudal society, rank and power were everything.

      One of the prisoners began to weep and collapsed to her knees. A wiry man in his twenties helped her up with quiet words of comfort. Then they were moving again at a faster pace as the Opir raced the sunrise, descending out of the hills.

      When the exiles were within a quarter mile of their new “home,” three of the soldiers picked up the slowest prisoners and flung the humans over their shoulders like sacks of grain. The rest, including Trinity, crept closer and closer to the Citadel until they were at its foot, gathering under the stares of the Freeblood guards along the sheltered battlements.

      Trinity gazed up at the tall, heavy gates, obsidian black like the rest of the Citadel, and watched them swing inward. More Opir soldiers waited inside to take charge of the prisoners.

      The humans stood inside a wide, enclosed area between the curtain wall and the Citadel proper. Heavy material that seemed to be a combination of canvas and plastic stretched across the open space several yards above Trinity’s head, protecting the Opiri within. Bright lights, harmless to the Nightsiders, shone from niches in the walls, obviously installed for the benefit of the human serfs, who were hard at work performing various tasks. The towers, visible through a slight gap in the canopy, pierced the lightening sky and the scudding, orange clouds.

      The second set of soldiers uncuffed

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