by Wendy Knight
Maybe it was the sheer force of fury in her voice or the fact that Akash’s group could hear the voices as well, but they agreed. Finally.
Raine jogged back to Aquis’s side, relief evident on her face. “Let’s get out of here.”
Aquis nodded, turning to go but in the sudden silence, a single cry stopped her.
A baby.
“What the—?” She froze, Galvan froze. Even Akash, who had just come around the corner, froze.
“Baby?” Raine whispered.
Again, a cry from somewhere to the left. But near.
Very near.
And then another cry.
“There’s more than one,” Araceli whispered. Her dark eyes were huge in her face, staring wildly around them.
Aquis flipped her Counsel comm back on. “There are—babies here. Somewhere. We can hear them crying. Please advise.”
“Leave them and get out. That’s an order, Aquis.”
Aquis’s face paled. “Leave—leave them? They’re babies. They’re—they’re crying. Please. Send Flint’s team.”
“His team is not coming. You’ve been ordered to fall back.”
Aquis raised her chin. Turning to her team, she said, “Go back. Find the pilot. Wait for me at the pod.”
“You’re going after them?” Araceli breathed. “But—”
The cries came again and Aquis shook her head. “I can’t leave them. Not until I know they’re okay.”
“If we could bring back a Chaos infant, we would be heroes,” Akash said quietly. “This might be how they’re creating their agents.”
“No.” Aquis’s voice was hard when she pushed past him. “We’re not taking them to be heroes. If they’re well-cared for, we leave them behind.”
“What?” Ceil gasped. “Leave them?”
“They have families.”
Galvan could see, as if she shared his same thought, what went through her head.
Flint.
Flint and his lost infant. The pain, the devastation the day they’d spoken. The utter hopelessness.
She moved purposely down the hall, leaving them behind. Galvan hesitated, torn between following her order and leaving or following her.
Akash and Ceil went after her. Araceli and Raine hesitated, and then followed.
Galvan stayed in the hall for several long seconds, wondering why he wasn’t obeying orders, wondering when he’d become so lovesick that he would follow her to certain death, or at the very least, discharge from the Elites. There’d been a point in his life that he would follow orders above all.
It had almost gotten him killed.
She’d saved him.
Galvan went after her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AQUIS’S team stayed close, Galvan on her right and Akash on her left, the others falling in behind. At least they could follow one of her orders. Not that it mattered. After this disaster, she’d never be team lead again.
She felt the noise ahead more than heard it and froze, signaling to the others to stop. Slowly, she twisted the cap off her water source.
And waited.
The Chaos waited too, but she had more patience than they did, silent and still until the agents gave up and came around the corner. She sprang forward, hitting them with a wave that wrapped around their throat and invaded their mouths, eyes, ears, noses. Anything she could do to slow them down. She molded the waves into sharp spikes, attacking again and again to distract them from the rest of her team.
When they collapsed, dead before the rest of her team got any hits in, all she could do was stare in surprise.
“This is why you’re the legend.” Galvan snickered as he stepped over them and continued down the hall.
When he said it that way, she wasn’t sure it was a compliment.
She frowned down at their bodies. They’d died too easily.
“They’re lower level. And you’re freakishly powerful,” Raine said as she paused next to Aquis, poking at one with her booted toe. It didn’t move.
Aquis pulled the water back into her bottle and twisted the cap back on, dropping it into the slot at her waist before she, too, stepped over their lifeless bodies. She walked backward, watching for more Chaos who might sneak up behind them while Galvan led the others, but he stopped outside a door, waiting for her order.
It did seem like the cries were coming from within, desperate and weak now.
Aquis edged past her team and tried the latch.
Unlocked.
It was lucky that Chaos was new and disorganized, or her team would all be dead by now. At the very least, moving through their labyrinth of a lair and opening random doors would have been much harder.
She pushed the latch all the way down. The door swung open under Aquis’s touch. The room was dark and the smell—
The smell was horrific. Like nothing she’d ever encountered before.
Death.
Her stomach roiled and she held a hand to her nose, trying to block the stench. Behind her, Raine gagged and Ciel vomited into the hall.
“I’m not going in there,” Akash gasped. “I’ll be lookout.”
Aquis sucked in a breath, trying to hold it as long as she could. Galvan stayed by her side as she moved into the room. The cries had fallen silent except for intermittent whimpering, but it was pitch black. She swung her head around, following the light on her helmet.
It landed on—
She retched, stumbling back, nearly falling into Galvan.
Bodies. Bodies and bodies of infants in various stages of decomposition.
Failed experiments, by the looks of it.
Raine cried out and escaped back into the hallway.
Aquis wanted to follow her, but there were still babies in that room that were alive. She’d heard them.
She just had to find them.
Stepping gingerly across the concrete floor, she searched more slowly with her headlamp, nearly falling backward when the glint of glowing eyes caught her attention. They were white, staring back at her silently from a pale, sunken face. The baby looked like it hadn’t eaten in days. Naked, covered in her own filth, every rib visible in her tiny body.
“Their eyes glow,” Galvan murmured, and Aquis realized he’d found another baby still alive. She turned away from the tiny, malnourished infant in front of her and followed his headlamp.
Bright blue eyes, metallic and glowing. The baby let out a wail, angry and desperate, but so weak. That had been the one she’d heard then. He wasn’t in any better shape than his sister.
Ciel picked up a sheet of paper lying on a stainless steel counter next to a sink, still splattered with blood. The place was something out of a nightmare, not a nursery at all. “They share elements.” She tucked the paper into her bag, looking up at Aquis. “There should be one more—”
Another baby, older than the first two by a couple of months, at least, sat in a cage in the corner, watching them. He was chubby—at least well fed, unlike the other two, and his eyes were an odd gold color that Aquis had never seen before. He wailed once, reaching through the bars—not toward her or any of her team, but toward the other babies.
He wanted his siblings.
“We’ve got to get them out of here,” Aquis said. “They’ll die if we don’t.”
“Agreed,” Araceli said. “How do we get into their cages? Do you see keys anywhere?”
“Incoming!” Akash yelled. There was a flash of light beyond the room—no, not light.
Fire.
Fire, and for several precious seconds Aquis couldn’t react because there were no Pyra Chaos that she’d ever heard of. The fire devoured all the other elements.
And then she remembered.
Gaia. The head of Chaos.
She was a Firestarter.
She heard Akash’s body go down before she could get out the door. “Galvan, keep working on the cages!” she bellowed, but didn’t stop to see if he’d listen. She hurdled empty bassinets and slid across gurneys, hitting the faucet
as she did so.
Water.
Unlimited water.
By the time Aquis made it to the door, Akash was gone, burned to nothing. She couldn’t save him, but the others were still fighting. Raine had taken on Gaia alone, although Aquis couldn’t see the Chaos leader. Gaia hid around the corner, throwing attacks and using the wall as a shield.
Coward.
Aquis pulled the water toward her, wrapping it around her hands and freezing it—not something she was skilled at, but when her blood ran cold, so did her element. She threw the ice balls hard at the first Chaos, shaping it into spikes and aiming for the face. They were unarmored but gouging out its eyes seemed like the fastest way to knock it out of commission.
It went down, clawing at its face, but she was already moving, pulling more water, throwing it toward Raine so she’d have something to use against Gaia until Aquis could get to her side.
More Chaos crowded the halls, monsters upon monsters. Araceli and Ciel were practically useless with no earth to control, but the Chaos Terras were equally helpless. Akash would have been their best hope, but he was gone.
Galvan erupted from the nursery, throwing fire at an Amazi/Ceali agent who had somehow gotten behind Aquis. The creature screamed as it was enveloped in flames, its attack dying in its hands.
“Pay attention!” Galvan snarled, moving on to the next one.
They were surrounded.
“Ciel, get behind me!” Aquis yelled. Ciel was a sitting duck with no attacks and nothing she could do, and yet she was right in the middle of the fight. Aquis dove in front of her, shoving her back while she threw up a wall of water, hiding her from the agents.
“Get the cages open, Ciel” Galvan ordered while he fought alongside Aquis, pulling a wall of fire in front of the door. No agents could get past that. Ciel and the babies were safe as long as Galvan could hold that wall.
Aquis spun away, pushing the water toward the Chaos agents. It was almost like they were waiting in line to attack, their elements wild and out of control. Just as often, they took out their own people instead of hitting hers.
Which she appreciated.
“Araceli, fall back to the nursery!” Aquis yelled. Why she had to even be told to get out of the fight was beyond Aquis, but it seemed to snap her out of whatever stupor she’d been in and she moved.
Too slowly.
Aquis saw the spike spiraling toward Araceli in slow motion, but no matter how fast she moved, she couldn’t get there in time. It sliced through the ice wall Aquis threw up and plowed through the wave. Nothing could stop it.
Araceli screamed once and went down, the tip of the spike protruding through the front of her chest.
Ciel screamed and the babies howled.
“Get the cages open!” Galvan bellowed, and Ciel moved away from the fire, her sobs barely audible above the roar of battle.
Raine wavered, dropping to one knee. Aquis fought to her side, forced to step over Akash and Araceli both, and flung her attacks in with Raine’s while Galvan protected the doorway.
“We’re not going to make it!” Raine cried when Aquis got to her side. “There are too many!”
Aquis couldn’t respond. It took all her concentration to fight the oncoming attacks—and she wasn’t sure she could lie convincingly enough to give Raine courage to keep fighting.
Another blast of fire shot around the corner and Aquis growled, inhuman and furious, throwing up a wall of water, icing it, slowing the fire before she flung it back. The water darts raced along the fire path, dousing the flames as it went. It was a little trick she’d learned from a lifetime of practicing with Flint and Galvan.
At the last second, she sharpened the wave into a hundred tiny blades and shoved with everything she had.
The scream was oddly familiar, but Aquis couldn’t place it. She attacked again and again, trying to fight off the incoming agents.
Behind her, Galvan yelled.
Aquis spun toward him, her wave dying, splashing to the concrete floor. Galvan was on his knees, the fire at the doorway out, and Ciel...
All Aquis could see of Ciel was her hand, reaching for the safety of the doorway.
She hadn’t made it.
“Go!” Raine yelled. “I got this!”
Aquis turned to help Galvan, adding her Amazi attacks to his fire, scooping the water off the floor and drowning everything she could reach. The agents, instead of fighting to come forward for their turn to attack, started to back away from her wrath.
“Flint’s not coming, is he?” Galvan gasped. He’d been hit, his head was bleeding and his shoulder was burned through his gear, but he fought on.
Aquis shook her head, too winded for words.
Keep moving. Keep moving. Don’t stop fighting.
Raine screamed and Aquis whirled around in time to see her devoured in flames. “Galvan!” Aquis shrieked, ignoring the Pyra burn, she grabbed him and spun him toward Raine. He pulled the fire away from her, thrusting it at the surrounding agents, but it was too late.
Raine collapsed to the floor and lay still.
Dead.
Her team was all dead.
Except Galvan.
Rage unlike anything she’d ever known overtook her and she fought blindly, throwing daggers, ice balls, drowning waves and strangling rivers, moving faster and faster as her fury grew. Agents went down, falling all over themselves in an effort to escape.
She heard the scream again—so familiar, and maybe had she not been fighting for Galvan’s life, for her own life, for the lives of the infants trapped in the room behind her—maybe she would have been able to place where it had come from, but she had no time. Every ounce of focus she possessed was used to fight back.
To kill.
“Gaia’s injured! Get her out of here!”
“Fall back! Fall back!”
Aquis chased after them, still too furious to let them live. She rounded the corner in time to see four agents dragging a Firestarter away, but her face was obscured. They screamed and writhed in pain as her Pyra element burned them but didn’t stop.
“Aquis!”
Galvan.
She spun, racing back down the hall, her footsteps echoing against the sudden silence, horror and fear nearly shutting her brain down.
Not Galvan. Not Galvan too.
Bodies littered the floor, most killed by her team, but many killed by their own Chaos. “What were you thinking?” Galvan bellowed, still alive and very, very angry. “You chased them? Why the hell aren’t we getting out of here?”
She brushed blood out of her eye—unsure where she’d been hit or even when—and stared at him. “Get out of here? We have to get the cages open.”
Galvan shook his head, already gathering their fallen comrades’ bags. “We have to get our team members’ bodies out. We can’t leave them here. Counsel said leave the infants. We don’t know what they’ll be capable of and they aren’t safe for our Elemental society.”
“Leave them?” Aquis couldn’t quite comprehend his words. “What?”
Galvan hesitated. “Well... they actually—they actually ordered us to kill them.”
Her jaw dropped.
Any minute, the agents would be back and they’d be in another fight for their lives, but she couldn’t make her brain understand him. Understand the horrific words coming out of his mouth.
“They’re babies.”
“Babies grow up, Aquis.” He scooped Aracela’s lifeless body over his shoulder, balancing everyone’s bags on the other arm, and started for the door.
How he thought they would get all the bodies out before the agents came back was beyond Aquis. She knelt next to Raine, her friend, her comrade. “I’m sorry.”
She heard noise beyond, screaming—Gaia again. She was in pain.
Revenge would be swift as soon as they regrouped.
She dragged Akash and Ciel next to Raine and then summoned the water, carrying their bodies out on a smooth wave, a horrific funeral procession. She f
ollowed, focusing on keeping the water together until they got to the pod.
Safety.
Galvan was tossing bags into the hold. Aracel’s body was already laid out in the back of the pod. The pilots—their original pilot and the one who brought their new pod, stared on in horror but didn’t say a word as she loaded the rest of the bodies.
Her team.
Her entire time, save Galvan, had been killed.
She started back toward the building, away from safety, away from freedom, back toward hell. Everything in her screamed to turn around, to get into the pod and fly away, but she kept seeing those eyes. The bright blue Amazi eyes staring at her through the bars of a cage, too weak to even cry. If she didn’t get them out of there, they would die.
Or live a life more horrible than death.
She had to go back.
Just as she reached the doorway, Galvan stepped in front of her. She skidded to a stop, staring at him incredulously.
“What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” he asked just as incredulously. “We have to go.”
She shook her head. “I can’t, Galvan. Not without them.”
“Aquis, we’re supposed to kill them. I—I can’t do that. But the Counsel is right. We have to follow orders. We don’t know what they’re capable of or what kind of a danger they’ll be. Not to mention that going back in there is suicide.”
She smiled, but it was a heartbroken smile, as she reached for Galvan, just brushing the hair off his forehead so neither of them were burned.
“You were always so good at following orders. But I have to do this.”
“I won’t let you, Aquis.”
She frowned, dropping her hand. “You—you won’t let me? What are you going to do to stop me?”
Galvan rose to his full height, which was several inches taller than Aquis. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep you from going in there. They’ll kill you.”
“You’re threatening to kill me right now. How is that better?”
“I won’t hurt you if you just follow orders for once in your damn life!”
“Those babies will die, Galvan. How can you live with that?”
“I’m letting them live when I was ordered to kill them. I don’t know what they are—monsters, probably—”