Page 5 of The Night Prince 3
She gave him a grateful smile. He had to believe in what he said. He needed it to be true. To fail again was too much to bear.
As they threaded their way between the cars, Aquilan was keenly aware of all living things around them. Especially dark things. But he sensed no Leviathan lurking or any of the other creatures that had taken up in the ruins to nest and hunt. However, he did sense humans.
“Humans, up ahead,” he hissed and held up a hand to bring everyone to a stop. “Come out!” he called. “We know you are there!”
“It is your king!” Elasha added.
The humans who had been hiding behind and inside of vehicles emerged into the sunlight. There were a dozen of them with rifles and swords, which were mostly useless against the creatures that inhabited Chicago. They wore clothing that bore strange designs of brown, tan and black that made them somewhat meld into their surroundings.
“We’ve actually been waiting for you,” a woman said to Elasha. “You’re Lady Elasha, right?”
“I am.” Elasha’s horse danced beneath her as the human approached.
The woman had dark brown hair that was tied back in a ponytail. “Cara sent word that you might be coming.”
“Cara did that?” Elasha’s cheeks flamed and her voice changed, becoming softer and sweeter somehow. “She always knows what I’m going to do.”
The woman gave a brief nod as if that was a very good description of this “Cara” and added, “She said that you were looking for Lord Darcassan?”
“Yes, have you seen him?” Aquilan asked.
The woman’s eyes were obscured by sunglasses like Declan’s were, but he felt her gaze swing to him. She gave another nod. “I did. Last night when I was on a recon mission. He went into the Thompson Center. I didn’t see him come out. And he hasn’t been spotted coming out of any other building.”
“The Thompson Center has an entrance to the Pedway,” Finley said.
The human grimaced. “If he went down into the Pedway, you might as well turn around and go back to Lightwell.”
“What? Why?” Elasha demanded.
The woman looked grim. “Because no one who goes down there lives.”
A Gift
“The James R. Thompson Center was originally the State of Illinois Center until it got too expensive for the Illinois state government to inhabit it and they sold the building to Google,” Finley stated as he stood by Declan’s elbow. “How the mighty have fallen. I don’t even think Google had a chance to take it over before the war.”
His best friend was not telling him about the post-modernist rotunda building whose whole aspect looked like what someone in the past thought the future would look like. Finley was reminding himself. Declan understood why.
With its round base and steep glass walls that rose up like a sheer ice cliff before them, Declan could almost remember what it had been like when the streets were full of people and there’d be tourists coming in and out of the building, eating in the food court in the lower area or heading to one of the L trains, what Chicago termed its elevated and subway lines. The memory of the buzz of life was all it was. The ruins were silent and dark now. More like a monument to the dead than the living.
“It’s fared a little better against the plant-life,” Declan remarked. “Walls are too steep for them to get a foothold.”
The vines that thrust up through the asphalt and concrete sidewalks and roads did hang down like a beaded curtain around the first level of the Thompson Center, but the upper floors, which were simply walls of glass, were mostly clear. Surprisingly, many of the panes were still intact, too, but Declan supposed they were of incredibly sturdy glass. They had been “walls” of the former state building after all.
“What is Google?” Elasha asked as she dusted her hands off on her thighs.
“Oh, it was…” Here Finley gave a sigh. “It was a technology company. An information technology company at its core. Its search engine was known to…” He broke off when he saw her furrowed brow. “Basically, it was a librarian in a way. It helped you find answers to questions, brought information to your fingertips, let you explore many subjects. You could get lost down plenty of rabbit holes with Google.”
“Oh, well, that’s quite useful!” she answered.
“Yes, it was very useful,” Finley nodded.
“Did it have as many sources as the Athenaeum?” she asked.
“You might not believe this, but it had far more,” Finley explained. “All of human knowledge could be accessed through something called the internet. And Google, among many other things it did, allowed you to search that information efficiently. You could learn anything. Find out anything. It was incredible.”
Elasha looked a little dubious, but said neutrally, “Well, I can understand why you would miss such a thing.”
“Like your ridwin, we could contact people all over the globe immediately and search all that information with our phones.” Finley moved his thumb over his palm as if he was his old phone. Declan could feel the silky smooth glass under his own just watching that movement.
