Read Online The Assassins of Altis by Jack Campbell - Free Book Online

question, then thought about it. “Am I different? I’ve been through a lot. I’ve fallen in love. So much of what I was taught to believe I now know to be a lie. I’ve been told I’m…someone. Does that make me different?”
    “When I sense you near me,” Alain said slowly, “your presence burns brighter than before, but it is still the same, just brighter.”
    “My presence.” Every once in a while her Mage would say something totally strange like that. “I thought you could only sense other Mages.”
    “I can sense you as well,” Alain said as if that was unremarkable.
    “That thread thing, you mean,” Mari said.
    “Yes, that thread which connects us, but also you. You are very bright, and warm, like a fire.”
    That felt kind of nice, Mari thought. Also kind of weird, though. A male Mechanic would have said something like that to her as a form of exaggerated flattery, but Mari had no doubt that Alain meant literally what he said, that she was somehow a fire to his Mage senses. “Do I get…warmer…when I’m angry?”
    Alain shook his head. “No. There are times when your brightness becomes more intense, but that happens when you are thinking hard on something.”
    “Really? So you’re actually admiring my mind?” Mari laughed out loud with delight at the idea, drawing looks from the nearest commons on the street.
    Mari gazed at the buildings around them as she and Alain went through the gate. She had known Palandur, but now she knew Marandur as well, and the similarities between the dead city and living one were disconcerting enough to drive the laughter from her. At some moments everything felt unreal, as if what Alain had said the Mages believed really was the way things were, and she was walking through some kind of illusion in which dead city and living city were both here at the same place and time. Mari reached out to grip Alain’s hand, comforted by that solid presence. “I’m pretty sure I know the way to the university from here. It’s near enough to the Mechanics Guild Academy that I saw it a few times.”
    Mari began edging to the south, trying to remember the layout of the Imperial capital. She found another pretext to search the crowds behind them, confirming that the Imperial police officer was still sauntering along within eyesight. “He’s definitely staying with us.”
    There were a good number of Mechanics in Palandur, swaggering down the streets with commons giving way as expected of them, so no one thought it unusual for Mari and Alain to avoid those Mechanics by wide margins. Mari tried to discreetly study them to see if she recognized any, but wasn’t able to tell through the crowds and the distance she had to put between herself and the Mechanics for safety’s sake. “There are probably Mechanics here who would help me,” she muttered to Alain, “but the academy is full of others who would turn me in without a second thought.”
    “Are we going to that Mechanic Academy?” Alain asked.
    “No. I don’t dare go near it, and isn’t that ironic for a girl who was one of the stars of the academy several months ago?”
    Mages were here, too, in relatively large numbers, moving silently among the commons like wraiths avoided with fear and loathing. Alain seemed unconcerned about being recognized by any of them in his common clothing, and Mari recalled him once saying that no Mage would bother looking at a common.
    When they reached the area of the university, Mari’s relief at finding it was submerged in a moment of shock and recognition. “Alain, I was right. When the Imperials built Palandur they copied Marandur. The university here is identical to the one in Marandur. Or rather identical to what the university in Marandur looked like before the city was destroyed.” There was the same open stretch of land separating the walls of the university from the city around it, here a well-maintained park with clipped grass and trimmed trees ending in a brick wall standing