A door, fairly close by creaked as it was pushed open.
They were checking the rooms!
Amaryllis glanced down at the scanner. The readout glowed in the dim light, but it was scrolling across the screen far too quickly for her to read it. One line seemed to leap right out at her, however.
Unknown life form.
“Oh God!” she whispered, clamping a hand to her mouth an instant too late to still the horrified exclamation.
There was a furtive movement, closer this time. Dropping the scanner to the gurney, Amaryllis abandoned any attempt at silence, dashing for the window. She’d barely landed on the ground outside when she heard the door of the examination room she’d just left crash open and slam against the wall.
Leaping to her feet, she charged down the side of the building until she reached the point nearest the next building, then followed that building until she reached an alley. Behind her, she heard the sound of pounding feet and the order to halt.
She ran faster, zigzagging down a street, then veering into an alley. Along the way, she collected two more guards.
Pain blossomed in her side. She ignored it. There was no place to hide and she was of no mind to chance being trapped even if she’d spied a likely looking spot.
She’d almost reached the edge of the forest when she ran headlong into a guard. The impact stunned both of them, but Amaryllis’ momentum not only bowled him over, it propelled her several yards further and through a hedgerow. Disoriented, she scrambled to her feet as soon as she stopped rolling, staggered a couple of steps and finally found her equilibrium.
The woods were dark, however, with the trees blocking the little light filtering down from the moon, and she didn’t have the advantage of night vision that the cyborgs did. Twenty feet more and the ground dropped from beneath her unexpectedly. She rolled part of the way down and skidded on one hip the remainder, landing in a trickling brook of icy water. It snatched the breath from her lungs, but the shock cleared her head.
Shivering, she realized she’d stumbled on a bit of luck. The cold water would make it harder, if not impossible, for the cyborgs to track her with heat vision. Sucking in a few breaths of air, she dropped down and half swam half crawled through the shallow water until the sounds of pursuit faded into the distance.
When she was certain the search had turned away from her, she climbed out of the water and sat on the bank for several moments, trying to catch her breath and figure out where she was.
She couldn’t see the moon anymore and without that she had no idea which direction was north, south, east or west. The stars in the sky were unfamiliar to her, giving her no heavenly landmark at all, and she couldn’t see even a glimpse of the city.
She couldn’t stay where she was, however. The night was mild, but she was still cold from being in the frigid water so long.
In any case, she had to figure out some way to get back before she was discovered missing. Getting to her feet, she struggled up the embankment and looked around hopefully. At first, she saw nothing at all, but then, just as despair was beginning to descend upon her, she saw a wink of light in the distance. Her heart leapt. She couldn’t tell whether it was the moon, or light from a structure, but it didn’t matter. Either way, if she followed it, she was bound to find some sort of landmark that would tell her where she was.
She hoped.
A flutter of movement in her belly brought her focus to the baby.
The unknown life form.
A wave of nausea washed through her. What the hell did that mean?
The machine didn’t have the data to interpret its findings, which meant the data was pretty useless.
Tears stung her eyes abruptly and she blinked to clear her vision.
She just couldn’t think about it right now. Later, when she found her way, she’d try to figure out what it meant.
She’d been stumbling through the dark for nearly an hour before she realized she hadn’t seen the wink of light not once since that first time.
She could be following some sort of phosphorescent weather condition, or animal, or even a plant.
She was so tired she felt like dropping where she stood.
And it had all been for nothing.
The authorities were going to be looking for whoever it was that had broken into the med center.
She stopped again, searching in vain for anything that might look familiar. When she saw nothing, she prodded her tired brain, trying to retrace her movements. The med center was practically in the center of Gallen. She’d headed roughly north, she thought, when she’d run from the patrol and Reese and Dante’s plantation was north of town.
But how roughly north? And what direction had she taken after her collision with the guard? East, she finally decided.
