Angels of Darkness

ahead a couple dozen yards. Karina watched them, aware of Lucas striding next to her, like some tiger who had learned to walk upright. The air was dry, and the heat beat down on them from the pale, burned-out sky, painting the path in stripes of bright yellow sunshine.
    â€œWe’re in a fragment of reality,” Karina said.
    â€œYes,” Lucas said.
    â€œWhy is the sun shining? Why is there air?”
    â€œBecause the fluctuation occurs on the universal level,” Lucas said.
    â€œSo it’s a duplicate sun?”
    â€œNo, it’s the same sun the Earth has. We just get access to it on a different level. Think of a house with many rooms. We walked out of the main room into a smaller side bedroom, but we’re still under the same roof.”
    Karina sighed. “It makes my head hurt.”
    â€œDon’t talk about dimensions to any Rippers, then,” Lucas said.
    â€œRippers?”
    â€œThey make inter-dimensional rents that let people like you and me travel back and forth. You get one of them started on the subject and the insanity pours out until you want to stick your head in a bucket of water just to wash it out of your mind. When a man has to continuously cut himself, because pain helps him punch through dimensions, you can’t expect him to be lucid anyway.”
    Karina glanced at him. “You seem irritated.”
    Lucas’s thick black eyebrows knitted together. “We found out how the lizard got through the net. It tunneled under it. A long, deep tunnel, almost twenty-five meters.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œThere was more than one tunnel,” Lucas said.
    More than one tunnel meant other lizards. “Did you track them down?”
    Lucas nodded.
    â€œDid they transmit what they saw?”
    Another nod.
    â€œSo the enemy knows where we are?”
    Lucas grimaced. “Difficult to say. The Rippers are saying there was too much inter-dimensional interference for the transmission to have gone through fully. But it’s possible.” He clenched his teeth, pondering something, and said, “We had perimeter alarms, infrared, microwave, and frequency sensors. The sensors are very specific: if you look on Cedric’s collar, you’ll see a transmitter. The transmitter broadcasts a code. The sensors check this code against the database and if the code is active, the sensors don’t register an alarm. For some reason someone loaded an old set of codes into the system. The lizards came through fitted with transmitters of their own and when they broadcast the outdated set of codes, the system didn’t flag them.”
    â€œHow did they know which codes to load?”
    Lucas’s eyes turned darker. “There was a woman. Galatea. She was a donor like you.”
    He said her name like she was a plague. “Was she your donor?”
    â€œYes. She defected.”
    He’d clenched his teeth again. There was more to this story. “Were you lovers?”
    Lucas stopped and for a moment she thought she might have pushed him too far. “We fucked,” he said.
    Aha. She kept pushing. “For how long?”
    There was a short pause before he answered. “For four years.”
    â€œThat’s some long fucking,” Karina said. He’d loved Galatea. He was in love, and she betrayed him, and now he wanted to kill her. Any woman past the age of fifteen would’ve connected these dots. He must’ve been young—it had obviously left a deep scar. “What was she like?”
    Lucas took a step toward her. A wild thing looked back at her from his eyes, the thing full of lust and aggression. She realized that in his mind he was peeling off her clothes and thinking of what it would be like, and suddenly she was back in the tub, naked, sitting two feet away from him and afraid he would cross the distance.
    He stared at her. “Would you like me to tell you about it?”
    She squared her shoulders. “No.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOkay, then.”
    He turned and they sped up to narrow the gap between themselves and Emily. Karina kept the pace, exhaling quietly. He had no brakes, at least not the ones she was used to as a woman. Ordinary men didn’t end dinners by breaking the table with their brother’s spine, they didn’t kill lizards by caving their heads in, they didn’t turn into monsters, and they didn’t feed on women. Ordinary men didn’t