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.
Nothing happened. As far as she could tell, the device was dead. “Alexia?”
Damon stood in the doorway, dressed in the same tunic and pants she wore but cut in a masculine style. She saw her terror reflected in his eyes.
“You were right, Damon,” she said, her voice shaking. “Michael was keeping secrets. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me, but he sent a signal to Aegis requesting a strike force, and they’re on their way. Do you know what that means?”
He knew. His concern hardened to a mask of grim resolve.
“War,” he said.
Chapter 18
“Why?” Theron asked, leaning on the table with his hair loose and undressed around his shoulders. “Why should your people attack us? We have heard nothing from the Council at all, nothing from the Expansionists in weeks that would suggest a motive.
What could have happened to provoke this?” He fixed his intimidating stare on Alexia.
“What did your partner tell them?”
“I don’t know,” Alexia said, meeting his gaze steadily. “I’m by no means certain the strike force actually plans to move on the colony at all. I have simply told you what the message said, and what happened from the time Damon met with us.”
She hadn’t wavered under the fury of the Bloodmaster’s attention, but Damon moved closer to her nevertheless, interposing himself slightly between her and the table at which she sat. The other members of Theron’s local council—Sergius, Emma and six other Opiri and humans—looked on with faces drawn with worry, every one of them knowing their time was running out.