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bitterness of love and trust betrayed. Through it all, he recognized Grant and
Baptiste and all the bodies that had carried their souls throughout the
changing ages, throughout the long track of savagery, valor, loyalty and
deceit. And always, in the bloody scenes of the strife, their spirits were
together, living and battling and dying, being reborn and somehow always
finding one another again.
And now they had found each other again, perhaps for the final time
With a convulsive effort Kane opened his eyes, and the motion felt as if it
blew the top of his head off. He felt as if he were painfully clawing his way
up out of some deep chasm. He strained every particle of his battered
consciousness to understand, to see.
The last tendrils of mist were clearing away, and he could feel the tingling
static discharges from the raised metallic disks beneath his body. He lay on
his back and he couldn't move. It was as if something had sucked the strength
out of him.
His mind rolled with confused questions. Through the blurred swirl of his
vision, he tried to see the color of the armaglass.
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run
Before he could fully focus, bile arose in a burning column in his throat, and
he just managed to turn onto his right side before it spewed explosively from
his mouth. Fortunately he had eaten very little before the jump, so after the
first ejection of liquids and stomach acids, he only dry-heaved for a few
moments.
Drinking in gasps of cool, stale air, wiping his running nose with the sleeve
of his coat, Kane painfully hitched himself up on an elbow, squinting through
the dim light. He saw Brigid curled in a fetal position on the far side of the
six-sided chamber. Her mouth sagged partly open, her eyes were closed and she
whimpered softly to herself like a small, frightened animal. Tears glistened
on her cheeks, and her shoulders quivered.
On the other side of him, Grant coughed, groaned and tried to blink his eyes
open. A thread of blood worked its way out of his right nostril. In a voice
tight with pain, he grated, "Fucking fireblast."
Kane pushed himself up in a half-prone position, putting his back against the
earth-toned armaglass wall, silently enduring an attack of vertigo. He
massaged his throbbing temples with trembling hands. It felt as if the walls
of his cranium had been scoured with fistfuls of sand. His stomach lurched and
boiled and twisted in cramps.
"So this is what slamming instead of sliding feels like." Kane's words were a
hoarse, barely audible rasp.
Grant squirmed his way up to a sitting position, resting his forehead against
his knees. His breathing was labored. "My head feels like a slaghole full of
stickie piss."
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run
The simile made Kane's stomach slip sideways again. "Did you dream?"
"I did something& probably in my pants." His muffled voice was flat, toneless.
"Oh, God please don't let me puke. If I start, I probably won't stop."
Kane looked over toward Brigid. She was still curled up on the floor, but the
small sobs had ceased. He called her name, but she didn't respond. He forced
himself to his hands and knees, surprised and irritated by how weak he was. As
he crawled over to her, he realized the chamber was slightly smaller than the
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one in Cerberus, around three-quarters the size. He knelt beside her and
gently shook her by the shoulder. "Baptiste?"
She didn't respond, so he lightly slapped her cheek, noting with dismay how
parchment pale she looked. Brigid's eyelids flickered, then opened. Blinking,
she stared up at Kane in complete disorientation, her emerald eyes clouded by
confusion and tears.
Then her hand shot up and closed around his wrist with a fierce strength, her
nails biting into his flesh. She lunged into a sitting position, clutching him
in a desperate embrace. In a thin, aspirated voice, she whispered, "I saw you
die, Kane.
I saw you die
! You were trying to save me "
Kane was too stunned to speak. He had already discounted his vision during the
transit as a dream, a nightmare, just another symptom of jump sickness. He
didn't want to speculate that it might have been anything else. He refused to
speculate that it might be anything else.
"Just a dream, Baptiste," he said softly. "A hallucination, like Bry warned us
about."
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Some of the tension went out of her body, and she pushed herself away from
Kane, her eyes scanning his face quickly, intently, as though she were
convincing herself that he truly was who he was supposed to be. Inside him,
Kane felt a jolt as he saw the longing in her eyes, knew it to be a reflection
of the longing in his own soul. Then the moment was gone. She turned away
quickly, wiping at the tears on her cheeks. "I'm all right now," she said in a
monotone. "I
hallucinated."
She tried to stand up, staggered and swayed and would have fallen had Kane not
reached up and steadied her. "Take it slow," he said. "We're all in rocky
shape."
With a wan smile she leaned against the wall, rubbing her forehead. "My head
is splitting. Anyone need a pain reliever?"
Grant replied, "I'm feeling a little better. Let's give ourselves a few
minutes to recover on our own before we juice ourselves up."
The three of them remained where they were for a while, and at length the pain
in Kane's head abated though his stomach was still tied in cramped knots.
Carefully, as if he were ninety years old, he climbed to his feet and stumbled
on rubbery legs to the heavy door of the chamber. He noticed immediately that
the handle was bent in the middle. Obviously some terrific force had been
exerted upon it. He looked over his shoulder at Grant. "How are you feeling?"
The big man uttered a sigh and placed his hands flat on the metal disks,
heaving himself erect. "Like 220-odd pounds of steamed shit."
He reeled dizzily for a second, running a hand over his face. He dabbed at the
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run blood on his upper lip and frowned
at the spots on his fingers. "Anybody else bleeding?"
"Only you," replied Kane. He looked questioningly at Brigid. "As far as I
know."
"Remember that shot of infrasound you took in Dulce?" Brigid asked. "It
ruptured and weakened the subcutaneous capillaries in your nose. Whenever you
experience a sudden pressure change, there will be some minor hemorrhaging."
Grant leaned a shoulder against the wall. "Figures." He inhaled deeply,
exhaled slowly and asked, "Are we ready to face the motherland?"
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