'Yeah,' Sarah said, blushing. She reached for another weapon and found a heavy plastic pipe with a slick translucent coating inside. Various bits and pieces could be clamped onto the tube. It was a SMAW according to its crate but she couldn't remember what that stood for. 'So. So, Marisol, that's a great story about the pirates. I guess you weren't just making conversation, though.'
'No,' the Mayor admitted. 'I need you to understand. I owe you for killing the lich in Manhattan.' Sarah understood what Marisol didn't say: she would have owed Sarah a lot more if Jackie hadn't died. 'You can have all the guns you can carry out of here. My people, on the other hand, are all staying here where I can keep an eye on them. Okay? I'm not going to let you have so much as one soldier.'
Sarah started to speaked but she was forestalled by her father. 'That won't be a problem,' Dekalb chirped. 'Since we're not going anywhere, either. Sarah's going to stay here with me.' He stepped between the two women. 'I have my own people to look after.'
She shook her head. She was going to have to confront him, and soon. It was just so hard. When he sat motionless in a chair he terrified her, he was one of the walking dead. When he got up and moved around and talked he was her long lost daddy. A big emotional part of her was terrified that if she said anything he would stop loving her and leave her life again.
Finding him on Governors Island, finding him still, in a certain sense, alive, meant so much. It changed her whole life. It gave her a life, where before she'd only had a past.
On some level she wondered if she was expecting too much from him. If she was setting herself up for disappointment. But no, she wouldn't explore that just yet. She retreated into those corners of her mind where Ayaan's training still reigned. Connecting with her father was going to make her vulnerable. It was going to hurt. She didn't have time to resolve any of it, just yet. 'Excuse me,' she said, and slipped out of the warehouse.
Outside she put her hand in her pocket and touched the heart scarab. 'Ptolemy,' she whispered. 'Have they mobilized?' Time for business.
perhaps vehicles one hundred perhaps vehicles,he told her.west heading west
She bit her lip. There was still time to catch the Tsarevich'and sanitize Ayaan'but she needed to get moving herself. 'I only wish we knew where they were headed. We could just get there first and ambush him. If we follow in his footsteps there's no telling what will be lying in wait for us. But the only person who might know where he's headed isn't talking to me.'
perhaps,the mummy told her,i there help can be i of help there
Monster Planet
Chapter Seven
There was no roof on top of the ventilation tower, just a lattice of metal bars designed to keep birds out. Greasy lint matted the lattice, black with soot spewed from generations of cars going by in the tunnel beneath. Sarah kept slipping but Ptolemy was right there to grab her, his hands dry and very, very strong.
His painted face betrayed no emotion whatsoever.
In the sunlight, standing upright in the breeze and the blue sky, she studied him as she never really had before. She saw how his bandages gathered in his armpits and how they had been woven across his back. There must have been dozens of layers of cloth wrapped around him. She saw flashes of gold from the small of his back, from his kneecaps, and knew he must have amulets buried in all that swaddling. She smelled her hands where he had grasped her and smelled the spice, the cinnamon and ground nutmeg smell of the resins that preserved his body. She smelled the millennia he had outlived and the strange worlds he had inhabited. To die at the height of the Roman empire, to be reborn at the end of history. She wondered what that could do to you, what it might do to your mind, your sanity.
'What did you want to show me?' she asked. He said nothing. Then he grabbed her hand. Hard. He grabbed her hand very hard. It started to hurt.