Dead City

by Debbie Cassidy

  Panic squeezed my insides, trying to make pulp out of my organs.

  Fight.

  Great, the voice was back. Fight? But how?

  Take away the advantage.

  Yes. Yes. Take away the souls.

  I ran at the nearest eater, dodging the laser blasts that chipped away at stone and blasted the earth, and, using the tombstone as a step, launched myself into the air and up onto the eater’s back. It thrashed, trying to dislodge me, and lasers flew past my head.

  I smashed the glass with the tail end of my staff, once, twice, creating cracks. The silver soul thrashed inside, pressing itself to the cracks.

  Fucking hell, what was this dome made of?

  Fight.

  Fuck you, why don’t you fucking fight? One more hit with all my might and the dome shattered. The soul slipped free. I leapt off the eater, blasting it with arcana as soon as I hit the ground.

  It went down, just like an eater should. One down, four to go.

  The next few minutes were spent in dodge and blast and smash, but my gut was squirming, and my mind was itching as it worked out the plan. Genesis’s plan to use potential souls to protect his eaters and get them to the feast he’d been denied. Haven was the gateway to where all souls went. He wanted to pass, to get into the mausoleum.

  Death had figured this out lightning quick, and he’d retreated into the mausoleum. How could I be mad at him? One soul to save the many.

  Well, this soul wasn’t ready to be put to bed just yet. I spun and blasted the final soul eater, knocking it back, and then launched myself at it, intent on getting on top, but its arm shot out and knocked me back. My grip on my staff slipped, and my back hit the ground. The air whooshed from my lungs. Looked like it had my move pegged.

  I rolled and came up against a metallic obstruction. The eater was looming above me, its obsidian eyes peering into my very soul. And then they lit up crimson. It was about to fire. My heart stalled in my chest, and my hand came up to blast it with arcana. Its head rocked to the side, and then it turned slowly back to face me. My reflection glared back at me from the inky depths of its eyes, and then Genesis’s horrific voice drifted out of its mouth.

  “The one that did not die. The one with the hidden soul. The one who can project arcana from her hand. The last one left. Let me see inside. Let me see.”

  Its mouth descended toward me, and my scream was accompanied by several blasts of arcana as I tried to ward it off, and then the world flared brightly, so bright I was blinded. Hands grabbed me under the arms and hauled me up.

  My vision cleared to see Death’s face.

  “I can’t kill it,” he said. “You have to do that.”

  The eater was swaying, still blinded by the light. My staff lay on the ground to my left. This was my chance. I ran at the eater, scooping up my staff along the way, and used a gravestone as a launch pad to land on its back.

  “Die, motherfucker!” I smashed the wood into the dome over and over, watching as the silver danced beneath, and then I saw it, a flash of a face, the “o” of a mouth, and the glitter of eyes. I knew that face?

  Heather stared back at me from beneath the cracked glass, confirming my conclusion.

  “I’m sorry, Heather.”

  I smashed the dome, setting her spirit free. It jetted off toward the mausoleum, and the eater clanked and squealed.

  “Time to go to sleep, bitch!” I slapped my palm to the metal and released a stream of power.

  The eater shuddered and then toppled to the ground. I leapt free, avoiding getting trapped beneath it, and then there was absolute silence.

  The ground was littered with glass and metal, but this was just the beginning because there would be more. I’d taken down five eaters, but there had been almost thirty souls on the Run.

  I turned to Death. “Genesis will try again.”

  “The potential souls … He used them, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, and there are many more.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “Then it’s time.” His shoulders rose and fell in a heartfelt sigh. “The doorway between this world and the next will need to be closed.”

  “Wait, what does that mean?”

  “It means no more souls will be able to pass over. I’m sorry, I must protect the after. I can’t allow Genesis to find his way through the light; if he does, then he will have access to more power than you could ever imagine. He will be unstoppable.”

  It meant that our souls were doomed. Doomed to wander and fade or be used up by Genesis. It meant that we’d have to do everything in our power to stop him for good.

  “Do it.” I slid my staff back into its sheath, and then walked toward the mausoleum and picked up my burning candle. “I’ll warn the Hive.”

  “Be safe, Echo.” He backed up into the dark mouth of the structure, and then the whole building folded in on itself and winked out.

  A heavy weight settled on my shoulders, a weight I’d have to carry all the way back to the Hive.

  I passed back through the arch into the dead zone, but this time, there was no prickle over my skin. This time, I didn’t wait for the unhallowed to attack or beguile, because their silence before and Toby’s warning now made sense—they must have sensed Genesis’s intrusion. They’d known. More would come. But please, not now, not yet. The power inside me needed time to recharge. I broke into a jog, shielding the candle from the breeze.

  How much farther? Where was Toby? Where was his music? But there was only the crunch of my boots on the graveled tracks and the cotton-wool silence of the zone pressing in on me from either side. I reached out to Lyrian but found only emptiness.

  “Hello, power voice, you there?” My whisper was too loud in the silence.

  Not for much longer.

  Anything was better than nothing. Marika?

  No. Just a memory she left behind, a task she set in place. The task is complete. It’s time to fade.

  You’re a spell? I thought the words. But you made me feel things.

  I remembered I loved him once. But I am nothing. I am a residue. You carry the mantle for us all. The last of our will was used to remake you—a human with the perfect balance of genes to forge a new world. In you, we are reborn. You must live.

  You waited for me to fall into that chasm?

  We knew you would, and now you must fight.

  A sigh drifted through my mind, and then I was alone. My stomach tightened in precognitive warning, and then the thick silence was broken by the clink and clank of metal.

  Oh, shit.

  I ran. The candle flickered, my pulse hammered, and then silver bloomed in the periphery of my vision a moment before a red laser fire cut across my path. Two soul eaters were running at me, silver souls gleaming on their backs. No more, please.

  A sob broke from my lips, because fuck, I was tired, and there was no outrunning them. I’d have to fight. I spun to face them, shooting a jet of emerald arcana through the night. It burst across the nearest one’s body but didn’t slow it down. It kept coming. It was almost on me. The candle flickered wildly. If they got to the tracks, the candle could go out, and then I’d be completely defenseless. I had to go to them. It was the only way. Hand shaking, I placed the candle on the ground snug between a gap in the tracks and then slid my staff from its sheath.

  “Come on, you fuckers!”

  With a battle cry, I leapt off the tracks.

  There was nothing to launch off, no way to get onto their backs. Lasers tore up the ground as I leapt and rolled, each movement hammering in the realization that there was no escape, that there was no winning this one. With the souls on their backs, they were immune to the arcana, just as a potential soul would be. It was all about the souls, not the bodies. It made sense now. A guardian’s body and soul were attuned to arcana, at one with arcana, and Genesis had figured this out. He’d found a way to shield his eaters, and now he had me, the last guardian, trapped in the dead zone. I was the only one that knew the truth, and if I didn’t make
it out alive … If I failed …

  No. Failure was not an option, but fighting words didn’t help as fire bit into my side. They didn’t help as an inferno raced across my back. They didn’t help as I hit the earth, clawing at it to get away, to get anywhere but here.

  A cough squeezed my lungs and throat, and wetness filled my mouth. Blood. I was bleeding. Terror dug claws into my neck. Dying here, now, was a no. My soul … My soul would belong to Genesis. I couldn’t let that happen.

  I flipped onto my back to face the monsters as they crawled over me. Eyes glowed red, preparing to end this. To end me.

  My scream was a thing of rage, and then one of the eaters smashed its companion back with a swipe of its metallic arm. It looked down on me for a long beat and then turned on its companion, leaping up to land on its fallen comrade and smash its body into the ground again and again until the silver light on its back escaped into the air.

  Shit? Some kind of malfunction? My chance. I scrambled up, fighting the urge to scream with the pain that shot through my body. I had to get to the tracks. Had to get out. I stagger-ran, dragging my injured leg and fighting the urge to cough up more blood. The world swayed, but I kept going, headed toward the blue light of my candle.

  There … I was almost there. Music filled the air. Tinkling and broken and wonderful. Toby. The clank of metal grew closer, coming up behind me.

  No. Don’t look back. Don’t.

  I hit the tracks, scooped up the candle, and kept running. But the eater was running alongside me. Parallel to me. Not attacking, just running. What the fuck. And then it rushed forward onto the tracks, cutting me off.

  “No. No!” My palm blast came up empty, and the fight spilled out of me. I hit the ground with my knees. “Fuck you. Fuck you, Genesis.”

  The eater stared at me for a long beat and then it reached out a metal arm and touched my face with it. My breath came shallow, heart smashing my ribs. That same arm went to the hard-packed earth on the side of the tracks and began to scratch at it, fast and urgent. It finished its scratching and stepped off the tracks, its eyes still on me, and then it reached up and smashed the dome on its back. Its body convulsed and hit the ground. Without the soul to shield it from the dead zone’s effects, it was rendered inactive.

  It had killed itself. It could have killed me, but it had killed itself. Why? Pulling myself to my feet, the candle clutched loosely in my hand, I walked slowly up the track and stopped where it had stood a moment ago. The ground by the silver track was marred with lines and circles. Ones and zeros. A code. I knew this code. Binary. It was binary. Shit. I scanned it, referring to my memory for the answer to decoding it. Six words … that’s all it was, but those six words almost brought me to my knees again. They wrapped my heart in barbed wire and made it bleed.

  It’s Dad. Kill me. Kill Genesis.

  Dad … Dad had saved me. He’d been in the eater … he’d …

  Mournful howls filled the air, hungry and angry.

  The unhallowed.

  “Run, pretty girl.” Toby’s voice drifted out of the darkness to my left. “Run before they crawl inside your head and pull you off the path. Run before my music stops.”

  I ran. I ran with the unhallowed tracking me, with the tug of their hunger pressing at my mind, with despair clawing at my chest. I ran.

  A shadow loomed up ahead, and joy surged in my chest. The station house … I was almost there. Almost at the platform.

  A gust of air hit me from the right so hard it almost knocked me off the track. Almost but not quite. Fuck you, unhallowed.

  Laughter rose up around me, cruel and wet, and then my mind latched on to why.

  My candle was out.

  The unhallowed closed in, sweeping toward the track as I put my last ounce of energy into the run. My lungs burned, my body screamed in pain, and then bony fingers wrapped in my hair and yanked me off the path.

  “No!” My eyes burned with the injustice, rage a burning coil in my chest. “No, let me go. Damn you. Let me go!”

  But the phantom hands were on me, teeth sinking into my flesh like a thousand needles, tearing at my clothes to get past the flesh, to get inside.

  “No.” Blood coated the inside of my throat. Numb, I was numb as they shook me like a rag doll.

  The darkness closed in, and heck, it was kind of nice just to let go, there was even music. Tinkling music.

  I knew that tune?

  Growls and moans cut through the tune and then died.

  “Hey, pretty girl. No time to nap now. Time to get up.”

  “Toby?”

  “I got you.”

  I was rising, floating.

  “I can’t see. I can’t …”

  “Your eyes are closed, pretty girl. But it’s all right. I got you.”

  He lowered me onto a hard wood surface. My staff dug into my back, but that was good, it meant I was alive.

  “Time to wake up,” he said. And then his phantom lips brushed my cheek, and the world bloomed into light as I cracked open my heavy eyelids.

  “Echo?” Deacon’s voice was a blessing to my ears.

  A sob shook my chest and tears blurred the sky. “Deacon, I can’t. I can’t move.”

  Deacon was cursing, and then Lyrian’s face came into view, his lips twisted in an expression that was impossible to read.

  “Echo, we got you. We got you.”

  My sobs turned to laughter.

  “She’s laughing,” Deacon said. “Why is she laughing?”

  “Because she’s alive,” Lyrian said. “She made it.”

  There was too much pain and bouts of darkness as I blacked out and came to. But there was Deacon’s soothing voice and Lyrian’s consciousness in my mind holding me together. Micha’s distress shot through my heart at one point.

  I was dying.

  That much was evident.

  I was dying, and Deacon may have been able to hide this from me, but Lyrian and Micha’s pain was too raw.

  But I’d made it, and I had to tell them. I had to tell them what had happened. I slipped into the darkness, the space between, where Lyrian and I had first connected, and I filled it with images of my story.

  Now it was done. Now I could rest.

  Chapter 23

  MICHA

  Something is wrong. Something is wrong, and my insides are twisted in knots. Something’s happened to Echo. I drop my spoon with a clatter, sending the stew splashing all over the table.

  “Micha?” Mother’s face is a map of concern.

  “Go,” Father says. There is fire in his eyes. Comprehension. “Go. Now.”

  I’m up and running before I can think, but terror is a fist around my heart because the warm connection I share with Echo is cooling, ebbing, and I know without a shadow of a doubt she is dying.

  DEACON

  “Hold on, Echo. Hold on. We’re almost there.”

  Can she even hear me? Her pulse is nothing but the flutter of a butterfly’s wing. She’s slipping away, and I have no idea why or what happened. But the marks on her body are laser lashes. Lashes that didn’t quite cut through.

  How is this possible? How could there be lasers in the dead zone?

  I need her to live, not because I need answers, but because if she dies, then the part of me that has come alive after so long will die with her.

  “Hold on, Echo.”

  LYRIAN

  The rope is slipping. The connection is breaking. No. She won’t go into the darkness alone. I won’t let her be alone. Her mind and her pain will be mine. So much pain that it quakes me. It cracks my heart in two, and then I see … I see what she is trying to tell me, and I hold her. She’s mine, even though Micha can never know the truth. She’s mine in every way, but I’ll stand apart if only she lives. Gods of the old world, let her live. Take my strength and use it, but let her live.

  EMORY

  Echo is on the brink of death, broken and bleeding. I can’t breathe. What the fuck is this? How the hell did this happen? Rage stirs
inside me—Gideon wanting out, wanting to touch.

  Fuck you. Not now.

  Mine.

  She’s dying, you arsehole. Let me save her.

  She dies, you die.

  The fool. He has no clue.

  For a moment, my mind is blank, and then my instincts are taking over. Lyrian lays her on her bed. They haven’t even taken her to the med bay. They think it’s too late, and the pallor of her skin and her shallow, ragged breaths force me to come to the same assessment. Green power hovers over her limbs. It’s trying to heal her. The arcana is trying, but it’s failing.

  Lyrian lets out a strangled cry and climbs up onto the bed with her. He pulls her into his arms, and something inside me breaks.

  Like fuck will I let her die, because if she dies, she takes the light with her not only for the Hive but for everyone in this fucking room. There is a way to save her, to allow the arcana inside her enough time to do its work.

  “Keep her here,” I growl at Lyrian and Deacon. “Do not let her slip away. I’ll be back.”

  I know what can save her. But by saving her, I’ll be dooming myself.

  Chapter 24

  I woke to warmth and a tangle of arms and legs. A heart beat either side of me, and two scents mingled to tease my senses—Micha’s sandalwood scent and Lyrian’s fruity one. I was trapped snugly between the two of them. Each had an arm slung over my waist. Each had his head dipped toward mine.

  “Echo?” Micha raised his head to look down on me with ember eyes. “Oh, thank God.”

  Lyrian’s grip on my waist tightened as he sat up to study me. “You’re okay, Echo. You’re okay.” His voice was hoarse, his eyes red-rimmed.

  “I’m alive …”