A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

room’s otherwise total darkness. Dahlia leaned her back against the door, drew a deep breath, and smiled, savoring.
    “Lights,” she said finally.
    On command, the two table lamps and her kitchen’s overhead came to life in a rapid, artificial sunrise. She peeled herself off the door and floated to her bedroom on a wave of accomplishment. Damn, she loved days like this!
    She was fumbling to remove her heels before getting even halfway in the bedroom door. Her saltwater reef tank cast a bluish white glow across the walls. The bedroom was cramped, but it was enough. It was home.
    Dahlia sat down in her dress at the edge of the bed, a few feet from the tank. Anemones wafted and grasped in the water in a patient quest for food. A tiny sea cucumber detached from the glass and floated along the artificial current to the other side of the tank. Her two wrasse fish, Alfonse and Lorenzo, danced like flickers of flame among the corals, and a pistol shrimp named Capone scrambled back into hiding.
    “Hey, gang. Guess what I did?” Dahlia removed her other shoe and began to massage her sole. “No one? Hello?” Yeah, so she was talking to fish. She didn’t usually, but success—and, alright, the glasses of wine in her—had her giddy. “You’re looking at the woman who saved the Frankford Women’s Shelter!”
    Alfonse appeared focused on his dance. The anemones continued to waft, oblivious. Lorenzo, however, darted up to the top of the tank on the side closest to her, stopped, and pooped.
    Dahlia sniggered. “Fine, be that way.”
    All right, so fish didn’t know the northeastern Philadelphia shelter from a hole in the ground. She made for her closet, eager to trade the long black dress she’d worn to the fundraiser for something more comfortable. A few minutes later, the dress was back on its hanger and Dahlia was barefoot in a pair of black sweats. She grabbed her favorite red t-shirt from the floor, slipped it over her head, and—after a few moments at the tank to watch the feather duster worm withdraw into its tube—trotted out of the bedroom again.
    Dahlia had spent most of the fundraiser pleading the shelter’s case to various local businesspeople who might turn a compassionate eye to it. Adrenaline had sufficed for nourishment, but now her stomach growled for attention. She grabbed a can of soup and the last of an overpriced baguette teetering on the edge of going stale and set to turning them into something edible.
    If hunger hadn’t made her so impatient, she’d have ordered in. She deserved a little celebration, after all. Saving the shelter was her first major success for the Agents of Aeneas since her recruitment. That shelter helped over three dozen battered women and children each week to get back on their feet and find ways to fend for themselves.
    Beyond that, it was the nature of this particular victory that made her feel fantastic. So much of what the Agents of Aeneas did felt like subterfuge and misdirection: redirecting funds to worthy causes via computer trickery, working agents into positions of power to better guide policy decisions, or engineering back doors for fellow agents in need, like the AoA work-arounds at airport security. It was all for the cause—and the cause was a worthy one—but her efforts tonight were a straightforward appeal to the humanity of ordinary people.
    She wasn’t naïve. Without their technology, the AoA could not survive. Their crowning achievement, the secret network architecture known as the “UnderNet”, allowed global communication on a well-hidden, ghosted infrastructure lurking beneath the Internet. Partially built on something the Illuminati created during the Internet’s early days, when it was just for government functions and inter-university research exchange, the network now featured AoA additions made after the Illuminati had crumbled and the AoA rose from its ashes. Dahlia didn’t know the specifics; tech wasn’t her area. Yet it was vital.
    Even