Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine by JC Andrijeski Page B

only be one book…the same book that had been in the security deposit box along with the Displacement Lists. That book had disappeared right before the first big tsunami hit New York, right around the time Cass kidnapped me.
    We’d assumed Shadow had it.
    I’d asked Kali about the book too, but she hadn’t been able to tell me much. She admitted she’d put it there along with the data key holding the Displacement Lists, but she told me she’d only done it because her dreams told her she should.
    Which yeah, not super helpful.
    When I asked where she got the book in the first place, she said one of her agents found it in the mountain caves that Syrimne’s rebellion used during WWI.
    Apparently, Kali got that from her dreams, too.
    But the book. We’d never figured out anything in terms of the significance of that damned book. It had been full of symbols and writing no one could read, or even identify. According to Kali, no one in her group could identify them, either.
    Looking at Feigran now, I decided to take the chance.
    How? I asked, barely thinking the words. How do I look for it, Feigran? Who has it?
    There was another lingering pause before he answered.
    She knows, he whispered, the words lingering as if floating on a faraway breeze. The red-eyed one…the hunter. She knows…
    I knew who he meant that time, too.
    Even so, I wasn’t Feigran. I couldn’t reach my light past sight-restraint collars, or military grade constructs. I couldn’t reach past Barrier containment tank walls, either.
    Hell, I couldn’t even hide most things from my own husband.
    So I knew I’d be pressing my luck, if I tried to pursue this any further.
    So, yeah…I didn’t ask.
    Anyway, he’d given me a place to start.

5
    KISS

    Chandre stood on the high wall, looking southwest.
    Clicking out briefly from her work in the Barrier, she grew conscious of the sunlight turning more orange, deepening and coloring the clouds.
    It occurred to her that she hadn’t been monitoring the time very well. A few hours remained in the day, but not so many as she would have liked. She had intended to pull together her small squad for one more planning session that day.
    The Sword wanted her to leave soon. Within the next few days.
    Out of the city, north and west to Bangladesh, then into India. Then arranging for a boat or plane out of Mumbai or Kolkata and back to North America.
    The thought of returning to that place, to what had been called the United States, made Chandre tired. The thought of leaving her people behind was not a welcome one, either…nor was the thought of once more being separated from the Bridge and Sword.
    Because of that, the distraction with the Thais was perversely welcome.
    So far up here, she’d been using her light skill more than her skill with conventional weaponry, mainly to help push back the horde aiming to overrun the newly-created opening in the wall. She wasn’t working it alone. Jorag had just come down here to assist in crowd control in person, while Deklan, Oli and Anale assisted remotely.
    It should have been an easy task for just one seer.
    But the raging mob had “help,” if one wanted to call it that, in the form of seers pushing the crowd to rush the wall from the other side, even if it risked their lives.
    As a result, using the chaotically structured light of the mob itself only worked in short bursts. Chandre could feel at least six seers working the other side of that wall with the Mythers. They systematically unraveled any calm she, Jorag, Deklan, Oli and Anale managed to descend over the mass of desperate humans. Chandre herself would get a portion of the crowd to snap out of their frenzy only to have to return to that same section moments later as the Myther seers injected jolts of fear back into the group light.
    A few dozen Thai soldiers stood just outside of the broken part of the wall, guarding the engineers as they struggled frantically to repair the hole and the corresponding semi-organic