Battle Born

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  Evie frowned, then squinted up at the sky, as if she could see something he didn’t. But there was nothing there. Just the quickly evaporating natural light and the toxic spill of the sunset.

  They had nothing to worry about.

  Dorian pulled the curtain aside and peered out at the deck of Tomas’s boat. Lights swam across the faces of the audience. At least two hundred people, all crammed in tight together. They bounced in time to the music throbbing out of the speakers, half a thousand bright eyes bobbing in the darkness. It was the biggest audience Drowning Chromium had ever played for.

  “Good crowd tonight.”

  Dorian jerked his head back, turned, and found Tomas Reynés himself, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, his long brown hair hanging like a curtain around his face.

  “Yeah,” Dorian muttered.

  “Your band’s looking for you.” Tomas jerked his head toward the dark corridor leading away from the stage. “And you shouldn’t be looking past the curtain like that. The audience can see you.”

  Dorian shrugged. “Nobody was paying attention to me.”

  Tomas laughed, although there was a knife’s edge to it. “They will be. Assuming you’re as good as you were the other day.”

  Dorian’s cheeks burned hot. “We will be,” he snapped, and pushed past Tomas, who grinned at him, eyes glittering. Out on the stage, Scintilla and Charybdis released a torrent of music that made Dorian’s stomach coil up with anxiety. It was just the two of them, a guy and a girl. The girl was hunched over the computer, fingers flying, and the guy howled in a throaty, angry voice. They were good. Better than Drowning Chromium? Dorian didn’t want to think about it.

  He shuffled down the corridor until he found the rest of the guys, Xavier and Alex and Hugo, who were lurking around a table stacked with bottles of water.

  “Where were you?” Xavier asked.

  “Checking out the crowd. You needed me?”

  “Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t lost your nerve.” Hugo grinned at him. He’d smeared purple makeup across his eyes for the show, and it glowed phosphorescent in the dim light.

  “Hell no.”

  Scintilla and Charybdis reached a crescendo, and the roar of the audience filtered backstage. All the guys shifted uncomfortably and tried not to look at one another.

  “Almost time,” Xavier said, picking up his guitar.

  Tomas materialized in the corridor. Scintilla and Charybdis’s crescendo had decayed into a low, dissonant hum. “I want you set up as quickly as possible,” he said. “No downtime. Like we talked about.”

  The stage went silent. Dorian could hear his blood pumping fast though his body.

  Then: a thunder of applause, screams of appreciation. Dorian was suddenly aware of the motion of the boat bobbing on the waves. His stomach lurched. He’d never thrown up before a show, but he guessed there was a first time for everything.

  Tomas had vanished down the corridor. The members of Scintilla and Charybdis shuffled around, gathering up their instruments. Dorian picked up his computer and the QJ kit, nodded at the others.

  “Give it up for Scintilla and Charybdis!” Tomas shouted from the stage, and the applause thundered up again. Dorian’s stomach flipped around. He didn’t look at the others—they were all nervous, and there was no reason to invade their headspace in the moments before they trundled onstage and performed for the biggest audience of their (admittedly short) career.

  Dorian and the rest of Drowning Chromium stopped in the wings of the stage, just as Scintilla and Charybdis came stomping past them, their skin gleaming with sweat, their faces flushed with heat. The girl nodded at Dorian, gave him a manic grin. “Good luck,” she said, and Dorian smiled back at her. Two percussion engineers meeting on the road to a show.

  The stage lights shifted, turned a kind of sickly green, and Tomas flipped his hair back and shouted out to the screaming audience.

  “We’ve got some newcomers for you tonight,” Tomas yelled. “One of the best rising talents I’ve seen in a while—”

  The audience didn’t care about this, but Dorian’s chest squeezed up in a brief fit of pride, which he quickly shunted aside.

  “I had the pleasure of seeing them perform live just yesterday and knew I had to add them to the lineup immediately. Let’s welcome Drowning Chromium!”

  The crowd screamed, pumped up from Scintilla and Charybdis’s performance. For a moment, the whole world seemed to spin around, blurring into nothing but noise and light. Then Dorian caught sight of Tomas again, gesturing with one hand for Drowning Chromium to come out on the stage. Dorian glanced at the others, and then he was moving, dragged as if by a string onto the stage. Everything went white, like the explosion of a nuclear bomb—the stage lights, shining straight into Dorian’s eyes. He turned away from the audience, found the stand where he could set up his computer and his QJ kit, and he flung himself into his work, moving as quickly as he could, connecting wires, pulling up his music program. The others strummed on their guitars, tapped against the microphones. The sound of the audience and the sound of the ocean bled together into a staticked roar that may have just been the blood in Dorian’s ears.

  He looked up, saw Hugo and Xavier and Alex in silhouette against the lights, standing in the same formation they always did when they practiced. And finally, for the first time since he’d set foot on Tomas’s boat, Dorian felt like he knew what the hell he was doing. The music he’d written months ago appeared inside his head like an abstract painting.

  Tomas had left the stage. It was just Drowning Chromium now.

  Hugo turned around and said something. Dorian couldn’t hear him, but he recognized the shape of the words on his lips. Ready?

  Dorian nodded. He swept his gaze back out toward the audience. The white lights burned his retinas and then cooled, revealing the first few rows of faces and the dark glittering expanse all around them. He couldn’t tell where the audience ended and the ocean began.

  Dorian picked up the microphone waiting for him in its stand. He pressed it close to his mouth.

  “Ready?” he screamed.

  Hugo grinned at him and threw a fist in the air. The audience roared. Dorian activated the holo and immediately the stage lights blinked out, and there was only the thin, ghostly projection of an empty field of stars. It shone out past the rest of Drowning Chromium and transformed the audience into dapples of light and shadow. Dorian leaned into the keys of his computer, jump-starting the sample of a UNSC ship engine he’d pulled off one of his mom’s rare transmissions. Then, slowly, he dragged it out until it became music, long and haunting. He lifted his head, stared not at the audience but at a place beyond, a single bright star burning in the distance.

  The band began to play: guitars wailing, Hugo growling, Dorian’s preprogrammed drum line thudding against the stage. Dorian flung projections out over the audience, blazing white lights streaked with gunmetal gray, static flashes dappling over the audience as they lifted their fists and screamed into the wild tumult of Drowning Chromium’s music. Dorian was already sweating, beads of moisture sliding in a long, sticky trail down his spine. He flung his head back and felt a coolness brush against his forehead and then vanish. Heat seemed to radiate off the stage—from the band, from their performance, all that untamed noise streaming out over the dark, silent ocean.

  The song was almost over. Dorian’s fingers flew wild over the computer display, pulling the last shimmering notes out of Xavier’s and Alex’s guitars and amplifying them into a shatter of metallic shrieking.

  Silence.

  Dorian’s ears buzzed. For the first time since the start of the song, he looked up at the audience, murky in the stage lights. Why were they being so quiet? Drowning Chromium had just killed it, and they were just standing there, not even looking at them—

  Hugo twisted around, looked confusedly at Dorian, then at Xavier and Alex, and they shrugged, looking as perplexed and irritated as Dorian felt.

  But then he real
ized the audience wasn’t looking at the stage because they were looking up at the sky. Dorian lifted his gaze just as a white streak, an inverse shadow, sailed overhead, lighting everything up bright as day. Then it vanished, and they were plunged into a gloomy purple twilight.

  “What was that?” Xavier bumped into Dorian, who jumped, blinking. “Where’s that light coming from?”

  Dorian shook his head. He realized the buzzing in his ears was the audience chattering in anxious voices.

  “Are we playing another song or what?” Hugo turned around, his sweat-streaked makeup suddenly absurd.

  “What’s going on?” said Alex.

  Someone in the audience screamed. Dorian immediately jerked his head up, and he caught sight of something moving—a flare of purple arcing against the eerie dark of the sky.

  The audience erupted into panicked shouting. Dorian thought he heard someone say Covenant.

  The purple light grew brighter, larger, closer. Dorian wandered away from his setup, over to Xavier, who stood with his head thrown back, his mouth hanging open. The crowd surged toward the side of the boat, shouting and pointing up at the sky.

  “You really think it’s the Covenant?” Xavier asked.

  Dorian didn’t answer. The purple light was coalescing into a shape. A kind of half ring with a knot on its back.

  “It’s not a human ship,” Alex said, suddenly at Dorian’s side. Hugo was with him. “Look at that light.”

  Dorian trembled. Purple light shimmered between the dark arms of the ship. No human technology would use light like that.

  Screams rippled down the boat. The audience swirled in a panicked frenzy. Not an audience anymore. A mob.

  Where was Tomas?

  “Covenant!” someone screamed, and this time the word was crystalline in its clarity as it rose above the dark noise of the crowd’s terror. “It’s the Covenant!”

  The ship was close enough that Dorian felt the blast of heat from its engines.

  “It’s headed toward shore,” Hugo said. “Toward Brume-sur-Mer.”

  Dorian glared at him. “Why would it go there?”

  “Where’s Tomas?” Hugo said. “Why isn’t he hightailing this thing back to la—”

  A sharp, strange zip rang out. A sudden, inexplicable thud. A chorus of screams.

  A smell like something burning.

  “Get down!” Dorian screamed. He shoved hard on Hugo and then slammed against the stage, dragging Alex with him. Plasma fire scorched the air above his head. The far side of the stage erupted in a flare of white-tinged flames, the heat sudden and overwhelming. Dorian peered over at Alex and found him staring back at him with his hands pressed against his head.

  “They just fired on us!” Alex shouted.

  “Stay low,” Dorian hissed. He lifted his gaze, found Hugo and Xavier both cowering against the computer stand.

  “You okay?” Dorian shouted at them.

  “No!” Xavier shouted back.

  Dorian scowled. “I meant, are you hurt, dumbass.”

  Xavier shook his head. Dorian glanced at Hugo, who jerked his head once, enough that Dorian took it for a no. Somewhere below the deck the boat began to groan, canting slightly to the side. Whatever had been fired down on them had shot clean through.

  Dorian craned his neck back. The Covenant ship was rumbling away from them, but it had left something in its wake. Shadows that buzzed in the air like insects.

  There weren’t many, maybe five or six. But they were all coming toward the boat.

  Plasma fire erupted across the deck, bathing everything in brilliant purple-tinged light. Bodies crumpled into the crowd. “Get backstage!” Dorian shouted at his bandmates. “Find Tomas!”

  Alex started to stand, but the plasma fire started up again. Dorian jerked him down. “Crawl,” he hissed. “Go.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve got a plan.” This was a lie. But Dorian didn’t think the others would be able to handle themselves, and he wasn’t about to watch his friends die. “Now get the hell out of here.”

  Alex nodded and crawled toward the curtains on the right side of the stage—still unharmed, the fire having burned itself out. Dorian jerked his head at Hugo and Xavier. “Go, both of you! I’ll be right there.”

  Hugo and Xavier didn’t have to be told twice, no shock to Dorian. They scrambled across the stage, vanishing behind the curtain just as the first of the Covenant soldiers landed on deck.

  It was an insect, a bipedal creature vaguely the size of a human, with transparent, veined wings that shimmered once and then snapped to its back as it opened fire, plasma bolts streaming into the crowd. The rest of the soldiers swarmed closer, their weaponry shredding the boat into splinters. Dark water bubbled up over the boat’s sides, sizzling when it hit the fires burning on deck. The boat tilted; everyone was tossed casually aside except for the Covenant soldiers, who hovered with a low thrum from their buzzing wings. What the hell were those things called? They’d learned it in school, but Dorian couldn’t remember.

  Whatever they were called, they were preoccupied with the crowd, not the burning stage. Not Dorian. He pressed his belly against the stage and crawled over to where Xavier’s guitar lay discarded. Dorian grabbed it by the neck and dragged it over to him, wincing at the sound of it scraping against the wood. Not that the Covenant heard it, not with that horrible, constant screaming, not with the punctuated whine of plasma pistols.

  Dorian stood up, shaking, all his muscles tense. He wrapped his hands tight around the neck of the guitar. A Covenant soldier was facing away from him, still hovering in midair, so that the two of them were level. Dorian glanced at the rest of the Covenant—they were preoccupied with the crowd.

  Dorian lunged forward, swinging the guitar with all his strength. It connected with the side of the Covenant soldier’s body, crumpling the wings and sending the soldier slamming over the side of the boat. Strings popped off the guitar.

  If they survived this, Xavier was going to kill him.

  Immediately, plasma bolts exploded around him. Dorian leapt off the stage and slammed hard against the deck, wet with a few centimeters of water. The soldiers chittered at one another, and it was then that Dorian realized the screaming on the boat had died down. His skin prickled with understanding of what silence meant here, now, the boat burning around them.

  He hoped his friends had found Tomas, and he hoped Tomas had a lifeboat tucked away somewhere, and he hoped all of them were shredding through the water toward Brume-sur-Mer. He hoped, he hoped, he hoped. Because he didn’t think he could go back for them. He didn’t think he could do anything but get off this sinking ship.

  Dorian crawled through the murk on the boat, keeping himself low. The plasma fire had shifted away from him, but he wasn’t going to risk drawing attention to himself again. He couldn’t jump over the left side of the boat—that was where the Covenant were coming from. But the right side might still be safe. He still had Xavier’s guitar. Would a guitar float? He’d find out.

  Heat and light erupted beside him, and he felt a stinging along his side. Exploding embers from the stage. He crawled more quickly, then scrambled to his feet, running as hard as he could. The cracked railing waited like a ghost in the firelight.

  He heard the Covenant shrieking. Heard the scream of plasma fire.

  Then he jumped, barely clearing the railing. For a moment, he was suspended in an inky darkness, lit only with streaks of orange from the fire.

  Then he slammed into the cold crush of the ocean. The salt water stung where the embers had burned him. He opened his eyes and looked through the gloom at nothing.

  When he broke the surface, gasping, it was like being born. He didn’t give himself a moment to rest. Only kicked his legs with a ferocious panic, propelling himself away from the fire. The guitar was a deadweight, worthless. He dropped it and dived beneath the sea, swimming with the easy strokes he had learned from Uncle Max as a child.

  He hoped this was the directi
on home.

  Do you smell something burning?” Evie asked.

  “What? Hey, don’t move the spotlight.”

  Evie jerked the spotlight back into place, shining it on Victor’s homemade village. He was hunched over one of the buildings, trying to repair it. Their mechanical dragon had smashed into it. They’d spent a good thirty minutes arguing over whose fault it was—Victor said Evie had programmed it to be too strong, Evie said the hardware was too heavy—until they both realized how dark it had gotten.

  “Let me get out the lights,” Victor had grumbled.

  Now, an hour later, Evie had to hold the spotlight steady while Victor fumbled with his village, cursing constantly under his breath.

  “I smell something burning.” Evie squinted out at the water. The sky seemed a little lighter than it should, a sickly violet-orange color, like light pollution in the cities. It made the ocean black. “Don’t you smell it?”

  “Probably just the lights,” Victor muttered. Then he sat up, looked over at her. “Hold on, it’s not the dragon, is it?”

  Evie shook her head, pointed at the place near her feet where the dragon was stretched out, still and silent, waiting for his next shot. “Dragon’s fine.”

  “It’s probably nothing, then. I’m almost done.”

  He pressed the roof of the broken house into place and held it there, squinting in concentration. Evie scanned the horizon again. The sky seemed hazy and thick. Smoke? But she couldn’t see a fire.

  “Okay, ready.”

  Evie looked back over at him. Victor and the village both cast long shadows over the tide pool, the harsh glare of the spotlights carving them into bas-reliefs of light and dark.

  “This is the last scene, right?” she said. “Because I really need to get home before my dad does.” She kept expecting to hear the familiar chime of the comm pad. It was nearly nine thirty. He tended to stay late at his meetings, which was the only reason she hadn’t insisted they leave. But if she wasn’t back by ten—

  “Yeah, and it won’t take long.” Victor straightened up, grabbed his camera, and focused it on the village. “Could you adjust the lights? They’re making some whining noise.”