SEPTEMBER 16. DAGLIA, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC.
Jenna pulled her coat up around her face, so that the wind—a hot wind, blowing off the desert—didn’t sear her face. There was a moment of desperation, in which she felt lost and fragile. Then she put it away. There was no time for that. There was no place for feelings like that. She had to control herself, to find the strength to go on, although she wasn’t certain which way to turn.
Separation from both Aubry and Bloodeagle left her in limbo. Were they alive? Her heart sank at the thought of Aubry’s death.
Her side ached. With every step, she felt her makeshift bandages pull.
Daglia’s streets were crowded with vendors, people shuttling this way and that, on their way to a thousand marketplaces. It was a very alive city, and she felt a stab of guilt. How much of that life was due to trade with PanAfrica, due to the man that they had killed? She had to assume that by now Swarna was dead, and that the alarms ringing around Daglia were the result of that death. She had heard no official announcement, but …
A jeep loaded with soldiers rumbled down the street. Oh, Goddess—did they have a description…?
A very dark-skinned man in a full-length leather cloak smiled at her. Keloid scars crisscrossed his face. Jenna instantly assumed a facade and took a hipshot position, a display of her “wares.”
Even bundled up as she was, there was nothing visible to give any man a cause for complaint. Her legs, concealed by her garments, nonetheless met at flips that tantalizingly swelled the enfolding material. Her waist was muscularly narrow. Her eyes glittered with mischief, with challenge. She knew how to focus her ki through her eyes, and warrior ki, a blend of sexuality and physical mastery, could be focused by a mistress of durga to emphasize the former.
A twentieth-century master of yogic sciences, Swami Satyanananda Sawaswati, defined it precisely: “When Kundalini has just awakened and you are not able to handle it,” he said, “it is called Kali. When you can handle it and are able to use it for beneficial purposes and you become powerful on account of it, it is called durga.”
The would-be customer was actually rocked back on his heels as if struck in the face with the force of her sensuality. He recovered swiftly and began chattering at her, holding up a handful of fingers, bargaining. Jenna used sign language to argue back at him, laughing. The soldiers passed, barely giving them a second glance.
As soon as the jeep disappeared around the corner, Jenna laughed, waved the scarred man off, and hurried away. He called after her, probably raising his offer, his voice musical with disappointment.
She turned down a side street, trying to think. She had no money, and no friends. She didn’t speak the tongue, and had no way of communicating beyond the simplest sign language. She was hunted. Goddess.
Another squad of soldiers passed along a perpendicular street, and she shrank against the wall, breath rasping in her throat. A gray tide of hopelessness rose within her.
There was a sharp wrench on her elbow, and she turned. The scarred man held her, painfully tight, and his eyes were bright with lust. He motioned toward a nearby alley with sharp, urgent flicks of his head.
She tried to tug her arm away, and he only tightened his grip and said something ugly. One hand brushed his coat back, exposing the hilt of a knife.
Something inside her both tautened and relaxed in the same moment.
This was his game? All right then, he had called it. She allowed herself to be dragged back into the alley, feigning fear. He dumped her against the wall, behind a stack of trash, and reached for his belt, grinning now with a mouthful of huge bright teeth. He was talking quickly, excitedly.
He was still talking excitedly when she kicked him dead in the balls.
There was a shocked expression in his face, and something behind the shock—anger. And suddenly she knew that she had made a mistake. Her foot struck something solid—a groin protector? Her mind blanked for a moment. A soldier. Plainclothes? Some kind of security? Oh—
His eyes glittered, and he whipped the knife out of its sheath. Before he could clear it, she had already dropped to her hands and knees, and mule-kicked up into the side of his left knee.
It is true that it takes an average of twenty-seven pounds of pressure per square inch to rip off the patella. It is also true that an adult human being with decent reflexes can bend with a blow so as to minimize that damage. He was clumsy, but not stupid. And she remembered the strength of his grip.
So when he rolled with it, she followed in, staying down like a crab. She struck at the knees once, twice, again and again—never letting him catch his breath, keeping him on the recoil until he almost forgot that he had a knife in his hand, so that he was reeling in a nightmare of defense, until he stumbled and fell. He slashed at her. Both of them were on their knees now. Jenna blocked with her forearm—a jarring sensation—and grasped his wrist, twisting massively and torquing so that his body arced as he tried to flip. But when you are already on your knees, there is no room to somersault out of such a wristlock. He went forehead-first into the pavement, smashing his nose and most of his upper teeth. Still, Jenna didn’t release the arm. She wrenched the knife from his hand, flipped it smoothly to get the correct grip, and struck him in the temple with its pommel. Hard.
He collapsed.
She rolled him over. His face was a mess—blood bubbled from between smashed teeth. His breathing was ragged, but he would live. She searched his pockets and found his wallet.
A communications card. Goddess. An off-duty soldier. Was there a tracer on it? Maybe. She tossed it away. There was also money. Not much—just a few low-denomination bills. But right now, it looked like a bloody fortune. She pinched his sleeping cheek. “I could almost kiss you,” she laughed. “I’ve never been happier to see a rapist in my entire life.”
She looked both ways up and down the alley, and left.
She took the train into the center of town, to get the hell away from there, and her temporary exuberance began to wane. There was still no path out of the Central African Republic—maybe not even out of Daglia. If she tried to get a room, she might betray herself. If she searched for someone who spoke English, that alone might betray her—although she might have no other option.
Jenna found a tavern and bought a bowl of hot cider, letting her robes cover her as much as possible. She didn’t think she would withstand any additional attentions. She hadn’t the spirit to join in the music and gaiety. Her side felt sticky and sore, and she fought with flittering dizziness. Her skin felt hot.
Just what I need—an infection.
She concentrated on the conversations around her, desperately seeking to strain any fragment of information out of the cacophony.
Listening harder didn’t make the language barrier less impenetrable. She began to wish she had killed the man in the alley. Why hadn’t she? Damn, damn damn. She was an alien, in a land where she was surrounded by enemies, and she had left behind her an enemy who could describe her. Why had she done that?
Aubry would have killed Scar-Face without a second thought, and tucked the pain away where it would never show on the outside. She was one of perhaps three people who knew what the deaths, the murders, the destruction of human life and body had cost Aubry Knight. Others saw an external shell, a husk of a man animated by an enormous vitality, a man of gigantic melancholy and rare mirth. But as he sloughed off his sociopathic shell, the violent memories emerged to haunt him.
Aubry Knight was paying the price of being inhuman. As she was now paying the price of being human.
For all of her theoretical martial knowledge, except for a single foray into Death Valley Jenna had lived a sheltered existence. Welcome to the real world. And this was the world, the world of blood and death that Aubry Knight had lived in for forty years, somehow managing to hold on to his humanity.
She was not, could not be Aubry Knight.
But neither could Aubry be Jenna.
She paid for her drink and left the bar. Night was coming to Daglia, and police patrols filled the streets. Her first task was to find a place to bed down.