Page 57 of Dragon’s Rebel

Chapter 25

Thorne compiled everything they knew into the computer searches and started his web crawls, looking for specific references to key words, especially in conjunction with each other.

Rebel got antsy.

Her memories were starting to come out of the box she’d put them in, and it was making her feel shaky and vulnerable.

Things she swore she’d never feel again. That she refused to feel again.

The horror of that night would have paralyzed her, if she let it. But she just kept putting one foot in front of the other, doing the next thing that needed doing, until it was forced out of her mind and into the box.

Now grief was threatening to rise up and overwhelm her, like a tsunami coming in from offshore.

She couldn’t let it. They had to get the Seal. That was all that mattered. And she was the one who had to find it, or attract it, or whatever the fuck she had to do.

None of which could happen if she were curled into a fetal position while her heart shredded inside her.

Rebel knew only one thing would keep the feelings at bay when they got this bad. Focus. Something she had to focus on so hard that there was no room for anything else.

She went back to her room and got her spare cable and harness. She hadn’t been back up on a wire since the night on top of BioGen, and that was bad.

She couldn’t let the next time be a time when it really mattered. What if she froze? She had to make sure she had no lingering fear.

So she went up to the landing pad on the roof and hooked her grappling hook over the parapet. She crouched there, balanced on her toes, where there was no support and nothing to hold on to. She was on her own.

Below the house, the almost vertical slope of the ridge dropped down over five hundred feet. If she fell, she’d either bash her brains out on a rock, or be impaled on the pointy top of a pine tree.

But that couldn’t happen, she reminded herself. She had her cable and harness, and she’d tested the emergency stop mechanism herself. Twice.

She retested the hold of the grappling hook, and then pushed off the side.

For a second she was dizzy, seeing the BioGen parking lot rushing up at her, but she shoved that vision away. She focused on the feel of the cable sliding through her gloved hands, on counting the seconds as the cable unwound, nothing but air under her feet until she arced back and they hit the reassuring stone wall of the mansion.

She was okay.

She pushed off again, gritting her teeth against the fear.

And again.

And then the fourth time, she felt that sweet, soaring exhilaration of freedom. Her whole body relaxed, and everything felt right. She was flying, then came to rest against the side of the mansion like a bird alighting on a branch.

She did it again, and again.

When she got to the bottom, she climbed back up, finding hand- and footholds on the rough stone of the mansion, climbing from balcony to balcony, knowing her cable would catch her if she fell.

But she wouldn’t fall.

And when she got to the top, she did it all again.

On her second trip up the side of the mansion, she pulled herself up to a balcony railing and found Thorne waiting for her on the other side. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded.

“How long have you been there?” she asked, panting and exhilarated.

“Long enough,” he said. “May I ask why you’re climbing up the side of the mansion like you’re planning on breaking in?”

“Practice,” she said. “I have to keep my skills sharp.”

He looked over the edge of the balcony. “I’d feel a lot better about it if you had wings.”