Facing the Gray

by Carol Beth Anderson

  But Relin stood, and with a scream,

  He raised his sword and led the fight.

  -From Relin the Fierce, Author Unknown

  “Tavi!” Tullen cried. He pushed through innumerable people, most of whom were trying to get farther away from the council building.

  But he saw a few others, like himself, who were running toward the explosions instead. All of them shared the same expressions of horror. Doubtless their loved ones were trapped in the council building, that crumbling monolith that represented the supposed stability of their society. Along with Tullen, they ran against the crowds with a recklessness born of desperation.

  “Tavi!” Tullen repeated.

  “Stop!”

  Tullen barely registered Evitt’s voice. “Tavi!”

  “Stop! Stop saying her name!”

  The words finally broke through the cloud of fear in Tullen’s mind. Evitt was right. If a Gray heard Tavi’s name, it could ruin their chances of getting her out safely. He released a wordless bellow. And he continued to power through the crowds.

  “Say something to me,” Tullen said, forcing himself to keep his voice quiet. “Just say something. Please.”

  He hadn’t heard from Tavi in several minutes, but he’d been listening to her since before she and Jenevy had entered the building. He’d heard the explosions near her. He’d heard her explain the brightness of her magic to Jenevy. And then he’d heard her start to moan, a low, weak sound that seemed more animal than human. That noise still filled his ears, and it, more than the thunderous detonations, ignited his frenzied panic.

  “Tullen.” Tavi’s voice entered his ears, small and strained. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” he said, shoving a man to the side and barreling through. One step closer. “Thank Sava. What happened? Are you all right?”

  “We’re at the back door,” she said. “A huge stone fell on us. My magic is keeping it from crushing us. But I’m so tired. Please come. I don’t know how long—”

  “I’m coming,” he said. “Save your strength. I’m coming.” He wanted to tell her to keep talking, but she sounded so exhausted, and he knew her ability to hang onto her magic was the only thing keeping her and Jenevy alive. He pushed through the crowds with renewed dedication.

  And then an idea struck him, and he looked over his shoulder, more relieved than words could express that Evitt was still behind him. He stopped for long enough to grasp Evitt’s shoulder and blurt, “Tavi is buried under rubble, behind the building. Go to the meeting place. Get Narre—she can break apart the stone. Go!”

  Evitt didn’t take the time to confirm it; he simply turned around and ran alongside the rest of the terrified crowd.

  Tullen turned, barreling through fearful clusters of people, and shifted his attention back to Tavi. She was no longer moaning, but he could hear her shallow breaths. “You’re strong,” he said. “Stronger than anyone I know. Hang on. I’ll be there soon.”

  Sella stood in a crowded meeting room in the office annex next to the council building. She jolted when the air shook with another explosion. The walls muffled the sound somewhat, but it was still thrillingly loud.

  Konner turned his head to her. “That was six,” he said under his breath, and then he looked at the people around him. Sella, Aldin, ten gray councillors, and fifteen safety officers stood in the room, all of them watching Konner in anticipation.

  He repeated himself, louder this time. “That was six!” Everyone clapped.

  As the applause died down, the door opened. A safety officer entered and strode toward Konner. Sella was close enough to overhear the conversation.

  “I can’t find Ash,” the officer murmured.

  “Are you sure you went to the right place?” Konner asked.

  “I’m certain. I saw the fountain you described to me. I even broke into the building to see if he’d gone inside. He’s not there.”

  “Take two more officers and keep looking,” Konner said.

  The officer nodded and approached two of his colleagues.

  Sella turned to Konner. “Everything all right?

  “Everything will be fine,” Konner said, his eyes on the three safety officers heading toward the exit.

  Sella didn’t press. “Should I go now?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He turned his attention back to her and smirked. “Time to be a hero.”

  “And if I come across any councillors?”

  Konner shook his head. “There are no surviving councillors.”

  Sella raised her eyebrows. “But if I do see any—”

  “There are no surviving councillors, other than Camalyn and the ones in this room,” Konner repeated firmly.

  “Got it.” Sella left the room at a jog.

  Moving toward the council building was torturous. Each foot Tullen advanced was hard-won. But all at once, the crowd thinned. A moment later, Tullen found himself in open space around the building, joined only by others who were in the same predicament as him.

  The front stairs and platform were still intact, though the building itself was smoky, and parts of it were crumbling. All the other desperate souls who were looking for loved ones went up the stairs, but Tullen sprinted around the side of the building.

  Soon he arrived at the rear, and his eyes widened in horror at what he saw there. Much of the back wall of the building had crumbled away, creating jagged windows into the space beyond. Smoke billowed from the top floor.

  He reached the doorway. The door itself hung awkwardly, some of its hinges having been torn away. In front of it was a pile of rubble. There were countless broken bricks, but what frightened him most were three large, thick pieces of marble, each of them too massive for one person to move.

  Tullen knelt and took a second to evaluate the scene. He couldn’t see Tavi and found it hard to believe she was alive under the heavy stones. Then he spotted a few streams of eye-searing magical light radiating from the pile of stone and brick, and he couldn’t repress a smile. “I’m here.”

  Tavi whispered, “Please help. I can’t hold it.”

  “You can. Narre’s coming, and she’ll help.”

  “Can’t you move the stones?”

  “Some of them are too big.” Tullen stood and walked around the entire area. “But I’m going to try to dig through the bricks.” As he spoke, he grasped bricks and threw them to the side. There were so many, most of them crumbled into smaller pieces. And once he got them out of the way, the marble pieces would still be there.

  Jenevy’s voice emerged from the pile. “Thank you for coming.”

  Jenevy. Mortified that he’d forgotten to even ask after his friend from the Meadow, Tullen ran through several possible responses, discarding them all as quickly as the broken bricks. Finally he settled on, “We’ll get you both out of here.”

  Sella approached the council building. She activated her gift and smiled as the searing pain of it filled her eyes. Each of the Grays had a different response to the pain of their magic. Aldin shrugged it off. Reba, the silly weakling, had avoided using gray magic altogether. But Sella seemed to be the only one who gloried in it. It reminded her she was different. Powerful. Alive.

  She stood at the side of the building and gazed through its walls. In the lobby and the hallways surrounding the Chamber, several people were running around and pulling on locked doors, clearly looking for survivors. They needed to leave.

  Sella let her magic go and jogged around to the front of the building. She walked up the empty steps, across the large platform, and in through the front doors. There was smoke in the lobby, but not so much that she couldn’t breathe through it.

  She approached a woman who was standing and crying, her face in her hands. “Who are you seeking?” she asked.

  “My daughter!” The woman was crying so hard that Sella could only pick out certain words and phrases. “She . . . council meeting . . . gallery . . . smoke . . . it was locked. My girl, my girl!”

  Sella bit back her contempt and gra
sped the woman’s hands. “I am twice-blessed,” she lied. “Both hearing and sight. I’ll use my hearing gift to pinpoint any sounds of life in this building and my sight gift to look for people through the walls. But my magic only works if it’s quiet and I can concentrate. If you want your daughter to have a chance to live, you must wait outside.”

  “You’ll find her?” the woman asked.

  “If she’s alive, I will find her.”

  Ten minutes later, Sella had convinced all the others to leave, though they hadn’t all gone as easily as the first woman.

  Her magic active again, Sella stood in the lobby and focused her vision past the walls of the Chamber. Death and violence had never particularly bothered her. But what she saw in the large room beyond the walls made her stomach turn.

  People surrounded the downstairs doors, lying where they’d fallen. Most of them were councillors, and Sella wouldn’t have to put any of them out of their misery. The bombs had done their job.

  She kept moving, changing her perspective to see past the smoke. Not everyone was next to the doors. Other victims lay in awkward positions on the floor of the chamber, two of them even on the large council table. They appeared to have fallen from the upstairs gallery.

  Sella adjusted her stance, finding a place where she had a line of sight through the smoke and into the gallery. The second floor had clearly taken the brunt of the damage. Parts of the balcony floor had buckled, and chairs had tumbled to the main floor. The railing had broken in multiple places.

  The bombs had caused several fires to break out, thanks to gas lamps in the gallery. Konner had snuffed the flames in the hallway lamps, but he’d counted on fires starting inside the gallery. Some areas in the room were still burning, belching smoke as they fed on plaster and varnished furniture.

  Bodies lay all over the gallery. Konner had altered these bombs to be deadlier than earlier iterations. It had worked; Sella saw great quantities of blood from vicious shrapnel wounds. A few people were blackened and burned. Most of them, however, had likely suffocated in the thick smoke.

  The bombs had blown holes into the upstairs doors and wooden columns. The gallery seated 100 people, and most of them were still in the balcony, but Konner had predicted that a few might brave the fires and escape into the hallway. Sella shifted her position and looked into the corridors. Sure enough, several bodies lay in the smoky hallways.

  Then she turned her eyes to the stairwell. About ten more people lay in front of it. They’d avoided succumbing to the smoke and fire for long enough to get to the stairs, only to be stopped there by a heavy metal gate. It was on tracks and usually rested, unseen, in the attic above the gallery level. The gate was there to provide additional protection to councillors during private sessions, though it hadn’t been used in many years. Until today.

  Sella pulled her gaze back into the lobby, trying to shed her disgust. I’ve got to find someone who’s alive, someone who deserves to be. She walked through the building, looking into closets and offices. It seemed everyone had left.

  She reached a bathroom, gazed through the walls, and almost kept going, but then her eyes caught a figure huddled under the sink. It was a little boy, holding his knees to his chest. And he was moving, his head turning slowly back and forth.

  Sella smiled. When the time was right, she would rescue him. She went into the office next door and sat next to the window, which had been broken by either an explosion or a desperate citizen. Taking a deep breath of the fresh air, she waited.

  “Tullen.” Tavi breathed the word through her dry mouth, so quietly she doubted Jenevy could hear her. “I can’t, Tullen.”

  “You can. Just a little longer. I don’t doubt you for a second.”

  A few minutes earlier, Tullen had finished moving the bricks from Tavi and Jenevy, but the massive marble pieces kept them pinned. Part of Tavi had wanted to give up when Tullen had said he could do no more. Then she’d heard him crying. The sound had compressed her heart and revived her will.

  So she’d silently cried out to Sava, and strength had sprouted from the dry soil deep inside her. But now her whole body screamed with fiery pain, like she’d fallen down a cliff and shattered every bone. And she’d never felt such deep exhaustion. It called to her, begging her to sleep, to let go.

  Jenevy’s soft voice broke through Tavi’s agony. “Thank you, Tavi. I wish I could help.”

  Tavi held on. Every few seconds, Tullen murmured encouragement to her. She wanted to see him again, and she focused her desires on that.

  And then, Tavi heard the most beautiful sound she could have imagined: Narre’s voice. “There!” her cousin shouted.

  Running footsteps followed the cry, and then the sweet sound of Narre’s voice reached Tavi from just inches away. “We’re here!”

  “Break it all into powder!” Tullen urged.

  “Then they’d breathe in all that dust,” Narre replied. “I’ll break them into pieces. Ash, get ready to move them.”

  They’d brought Ash? Tavi’s gut tightened, but she shunned the cold fingers of alarm that tried to take hold. She couldn’t spare the energy fear required.

  There was a crack, and Tavi sensed her magical shield shift. Several cubes of marble, each the size of a man’s fist, tumbled to the ground. She could still feel much of it resting on her magic, but in the time it took for her to blink twice, Ash’s gifted hands moved them all. A breeze tickled her hair.

  “Just like that, Ash,” Narre said.

  It took less than a minute for Narre and Ash to get rid of the other two slabs of marble, Narre breaking it and Ash moving it. Tavi felt a physical release as the strain on her magic lessened, then disappeared.

  She knew she was free, and she tried to sit up, but her body insisted on falling, lowering all its weight onto Jenevy, releasing every bit of tension and magic all at once. Even her eyelids fell, shuttering her vision. Quiet tears escaped down her cheeks.

  Then strong hands were under her arms, and she felt herself being picked up. An arm came under her back, and another under her knees, and she was pulled close to someone’s chest. Her eyes still closed, she breathed in deeply. The scent of bread dough, cook smoke, and sweat filled her lungs. “Tullen,” she murmured, and she felt the rumble of his chest as he released a laugh.

  “We should go.”

  Hearing Sall’s voice, Tavi forced her eyes open. Who all had come?

  There was Narre, holding Jenevy in a tight embrace. Next to them were Ash and Evitt, both watching her. Reba was on her knees next to the rubble, wiping her eyes. And Wrey stood to the side, head down. They all still wore their ridiculous masks, and she wondered if they wanted to burn them as badly as she did hers.

  “Can you walk, Tavi?” Tullen asked.

  “I can try.”

  But on the ground, her legs collapsed like those of a newborn deer, and Tullen picked her up, helping her situate herself on his back. He didn’t seem to mind.

  They rushed to the street behind the council building. After a brief, hushed conversation, they agreed to go to the place Ash was supposed to meet Konner. They’d look for a place to hide nearby. Hopefully they could capture Konner when he came looking for Ash.

  If only we could have found him earlier. Tavi looked back at the smoking building. She felt sick, and it was from more than the physical stress of the day. Laying her head on Tullen’s shoulder, Tavi mourned all the people she’d heard crying out behind the closed doors of the council chamber. By the time she’d been rescued, the voices had all been silenced.

  The Golds had taken a few dozen steps when a voice rang through the air. It was loud, echoing between the buildings, but it sounded as though it originated one street over, in front of the council building.

  Voice amplification was a common-enough magical skill. Some speech-blessed individuals could amplify their own voices, and some who had touch gifts could place a hand on another speaker’s chest or back to allow them to speak to crowds.

  They’d all expected som
eone to talk to the people on Liberation Day, so it wasn’t the existence of an amplified voice that stopped them all in their tracks. It was the speaker’s particular vocal qualities. His confidence, eloquence, and power.

  The voice belonged to Konner Burrell.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  RELIN: I don’t have a plan. I have many plans. One is rarely sufficient.

  -From Relin: A Play in Three Acts by Hestina Arlo

  A palpable terror accompanied the Golds as they made their way back toward the street, bringing Ash and Wrey with them. Even after losing the man he’d groomed to be king, Konner clearly still planned to use the day’s events to benefit himself. But none of the Golds could predict how.

  Konner’s initial announcement had been brief. He’d acknowledged the fear and uncertainty of the crowd and told them he would speak to them in half an hour about the day’s tragedy. Last, he’d asked them to gather any friends or family who’d left the celebration.

  Tavi held onto Tullen’s shoulders as he carried her. They found a place to stand along the edges of the crowd, near the front.

  “I think I can get down,” Tavi said.

  “You sure?”

  She smiled behind her mask. “It’s worth a try.”

  He set her on the ground, and her legs held. She was wobbly, but she felt her strength returning. Hopefully she’d be able to walk home without assistance.

  Tavi’s gaze settled on Narre and Ash. “Thank you both,” she said. Narre smiled, and Ash nodded. Tavi’s eyes traveled down to his arm. He’d linked it with Wrey’s, like they were sweethearts taking a stroll. Tavi gave Narre a questioning look.

  “They’re bonded together,” Narre said. “It makes it hard for them to run off.”

  Tavi started to laugh, until she noticed Jenevy crying. Tavi’s smile disappeared, and tears filled her eyes. She hadn’t even had time to think about what had happened to Pala, and the tragedy of it slammed into her. She wanted to believe the midwife might still be alive, but she’d seen how much smoke was coming from the second floor. Besides, she’d listened for Pala’s voice, but no one at all was speaking upstairs in the council building. Pala was dead, along with too many others; Tavi knew it with a certainty she hated.