The reaction was quick and unquestionable, the more he attempted to convince himself that force must be used against another Ferox—the more drastically sick he became. So much so, that his mind was already beginning to fear the thoughts themselves. He was becoming concretely aware of the punishment and hesitant to tempt its wrath.
Only when he completely stopped imagining harming a Ferox did the retching end, his gut seeming to slowly unclench itself.
Then—something like pleasure washed through him.
He felt as though he bore witness to something beautiful even as the lingering sourness in his stomach had far from disappeared.
Yet, he felt something akin to what a man feels watching a sunrise.
As it passed, a disturbing understanding came to him. The Feroxian body—it seemed to have given him a definitive answer in regard to what he was capable of. It had also rewarded him for forcing the notion from his mind.
This was how his Borealis Ancestors had kept the Ferox from fighting amongst themselves. There was no reward for thoughts that led to violence against one another, only pain. Yet, in giving those thoughts up, there was a reward. A sense of beauty . . .
And it was rendering him useless.
If Heyer had failed, they all failed.
Jonathan had known he’d only be able to send one man with Heyer. He knew he had to choose a man powerful enough to make a difference. The Alpha Slayer was the perfect choice—except, it could only be worn by the one man neither of them trusted.
But they also knew that whoever Heyer took with him, was more than likely buying a one-way ticket. Heyer had made sure that Grant understood this. Strange, it hadn’t changed his mind. For reasons he likely no longer understood himself, he wanted to go where the alien was going.
“Grant, I . . . I can’t get through,” Heyer said. “We need you.”
There was a pause before Grant’s reply came. Just long enough for Heyer to fear that Grant might abandon them at the moment it would destroy them all.
“I’m . . . I’m gonna try,” he said. “I’m coming.”
Heyer let out a breath. “Thank y—”
“You were looking for me,” a Feroxian voice said. “I noticed them turning you away.”
Heyer turned to find the daughter of Burns the Flame looking down at him. He felt it again, something strong between his host and the female.
“Of what tribe are you, brother? You speak . . . strangely.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE
THE FEROX SWARMED the streets around them. They surrounded the convention center, clung to walls of the nearby buildings to stare down on them from above. Their numbers stretched farther than he could see in the green haze.
Yet, they didn’t attack.
They were all acting strangely, listening to a voice only they could hear. The Never Army eyed them warily. Those who had true Borealis steel weapons held them at the ready. Jonathan had told his people to expect this restraint. They had all expected they would need to hold that roof until they were certain the prophet had left the opening of the conduit.
Jonathan had felt it unlikely that he needed to give Malkier any new reasons to want to kill him, but why risk leaving any of the Borealis’s buttons unpressed? Why not challenge the Ferox’s faith in the prophet? See if he could be forced to show his people that Brings the Rain was little more than a blaspheming abomination—a mortal.
Jonathan had no illusions that Malkier was stupid. He knew that if he came, it was because he was willing to play his game. It was all a simple question: Did Malkier believe he was truly invincible? That he was, in all the ways that mattered, a god.
Jonathan believed otherwise.
After Rourke’s account of the armor the prophet was sporting, he did not think Malkier had gotten all dressed up for nothing. A lot of trouble to go to just to look impressive while the Ferox extracted his revenge.
“Brings the Rain,” the prophet’s voice echoed through the city.
Jonathan looked down over the edge of the roof and found the Ferox below parting to clear a path. He could hear the heavy armored footsteps of the prophet long before he stepped out of the haze.
He came to a stop on the opposite side of the intersection. The street in front of him clearing of Ferox.
“The gods accept your challenge,” Malkier said.
“You all know what to do,” Jonathan said over the comm as he stepped onto the lip of the roof.
“Wait. You’re going down there?” Rylee said. “He could set them on you with a word.”
“I don’t believe he will,” Jonathan said.
He was about to drop off the roof, but he turned around one last time. “Rylee. He will try to kill you first.”
“I won’t let that happen,” she said.
He dropped off the roof into the Ferox clearing. Using the gleamers at the last moment to stop himself from landing with pavement breaking impact. He looked around, felt the weight of a thousand white eyes watching him. Then dropped the last two inches to the ground.
He told himself there was only one enemy standing before him and fixed his gaze on Malkier.
He reached into a pouch at his belt and pulled out an octagonal disc a little smaller than a hockey puck. The Borealis watched his every move as he pressed a side surface on the disc.
Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . .
Malkier’s armored head tilted curiously at the puck as the sound accelerated. The Ferox closest to him moved further away, as though he’d told them to get clear. The prophet did not budge. The time between each sound grew short, a countdown rushing toward a conclusion.
Jonathan took two steps, and casually threw the puck as if he was tossing a frisbee. His strength put speed on it, and it flew from his hand headed straight for the prophet. At the last moment, it corrected course like a magnet pulled to metal and slapped flat on Malkier’s chest plate with a clank.
He came to a stop and waited. The Borealis’s helmet turned to look down at the disc, then back to Jonathan. He made no move to remove it. As they watched one another the beep became one long tone.
A thunderbolt shot up from Malkier. Started with the puck and then seemed to reach up for the sky. Malkier’s armor—drew it in like a lightning rod. For a moment the light was blindingly bright to the Ferox who watched. The arcing electricity eventually reaching away from Malkier’s armor to caress any nearby conductor and find its way to ground. Parked cars, streetlights, a fire hydrant all sharing the current until the puck’s charge was depleted.
The Ferox that had shrunk back to a safe distance stared in shock and awe for a moment. Soon they looked about to see that nothing had changed, a few scorches on the concrete was all that had come of the strange light show. Their prophet remained unmoved, breathing steadily and staring back at Brings the Rain. A pillar of invincibility.
When it ended, Malkier looked down, his hand pulling what remained of the lightening puck from his chest. He crushed what remained of it and let it fall to the street.
Inside of his helmet, spoken so only Olivia could hear, Jonathan gave the order. “Press the trigger, Olivia.”
A split second went by, and numbers appeared at the corner of Jonathan’s HUD. It began at twenty and started counting down.
“Good luck, Mr. Tibbs,” Olivia said.
As the last of the puck crumbled to the ground, Malkier spoke, “I suppose you had to try.”
“Figured you’d understand,” Jonathan said.
To the Ferox watching, their exchange of words was unexpected. The prophet was simply speaking with the challenger in the tongue of the abominations. Their eyes went back and forth between them though they didn’t understand a word.
Malkier’s head turned up toward the building where Rylee and the rest of The Never Army watched. “I am eternally curious at how you survived for so long after your bond was severed.”
“Same way you survive anything,” Jonathan said. “Kept breathing.”
“You’ve reestabl
ished the bond,” Malkier said. “How did it feel to replace the last one?”
“Honestly, sometimes it’s like she never left,” Jonathan said.
Malkier studied him curiously. “A stronger pairing. Such a strong bond. I bet that severing her from you will be excruciating.”
“I suspect you’re right,” Jonathan admitted.
“Does she know why you don’t have her fight beside you?”
“You got it all wrong, we flipped a coin. She lost.”
Malkier breathed, his armor’s filtration system pushing out expired air as though Jonathan’s unwillingness to recognize the gravity of the situation was growing quite tiresome. “Does she know you fear the broken bond more than death?”
Jonathan took a last look at the timer. 6 . . . 5 . . .
“Malkier, I’m mortal, I fear a lot of things more than death,” he said, freeing Excali-bar 2.0 from his back. “How about you?”
3 . . . 2 . . .
A final message played throughout the city. Jonathan speaking in Feroxian one last time.
I . . . am . . . Brings the Rain.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIX
IT IS SAID that 150 decibels is loud enough to burst a human ear drum. When a nuclear bomb is detonated, the sound reaches over two hundred and ten decibels.
When five nuclear weapons go off in unison, well, one can imagine.
When that count down dropped to zero, there was no great burst of light—no mushroom clouds. Jonathan, Malkier, and anyone close to them was too shrouded in the WX gas to see the monstrous spectacle in all its glory for themselves.
Now, if a person were standing on the opposite shore, far enough from the gas to get a clearer view, that person would be witnessing five massive pillars of water as they erupted from the surface of Puget Sound. Magnificent geysers spreading out as they reached toward the sky. At first, it would be as though the five fingers of God had burst forth from the depths. They grew to the size of mountains, then came together to form one wall of water the likes no one on Earth had ever witnessed.
While the detonations could be felt for miles, the tremors that followed on the heels of those explosions were not a result of the bombs themselves. Beneath the feet of anyone standing inside of Seattle, human or Ferox, the land itself rolled as though it were the surface of the ocean. Together, they all surfed a massive wave.
What was left of Seattle shivered and lurched as though the planet had just been given an unexpected nudge—a poke in the ribs. The buildings whose foundations were already in precarious conditions began to collapse. Those that stayed up swayed troublingly with the motion of the Earth.
For a moment—as the earthquake passed under them, no one, not man or Ferox, was thinking about a fight. Rather, they were looking for something to hold on to. But, unlike the Ferox hordes, The Never Army had all been bracing for impact. For the Ferox the act was unnerving—the harbinger of a thing they could not yet see. The unnatural shaking of the Earth only telling them that something beyond their comprehension had been unleashed.
In fact, few noticed that Jonathan Tibbs was no longer standing in the intersection. That the moment they were all distracted, he had moved. Then came the water. Thinning as it spread out from the point of detonation, it hit Seattle like a hurricane. The WX gas hid it from their eyes at first, but eventually the Ferox all looked up in horror at what was pushing the gas away and consuming it.
Brings the Rain, indeed.
They ran at first, and who could blame them. It was as though a hurricane had appeared from nowhere. They ran from it in a panic. Stampeding over one another to flee. If the prophet said anything to calm them, in those moments right before he disappeared into the white of propelled water, they paid it no heed, they did not likely even hear.
What they didn’t understand is what came for them now hid the real danger. Sure, it was a sight that would terrify anyone. But in the end, it was just water thrown into the air, so much that it looked like a wall reaching far above the skyscrapers. The wind and water cleansed a great deal of the air of WX.
Only those Ferox closest to where Hurricane Olivia made landfall were in any danger of actually drowning from the volume of water.
As the shaking eased and the ground of the city settled into a lower rumble, it seemed as though the worst had passed. It was the Ferox nearest Seattle’s shoreline who got the first glimpse of what came for them next. Though they were in no state to be especially observant when the waters of Puget Sound began to pull away revealing ocean floor that had not seen daylight since the last ice age. The waters pulled back from the city itself, and as they receded, it became very clear that something much larger was forming off the coast. A wave, swelling into a wall. A wall that—there was no mistaking—was headed their way.
A tsunami is a large wave caused by a sudden drop in the ocean floor—usually the result of an underwater earthquake. What was headed for Seattle now was based on the same principles. The only difference being that the shifting of the earth beneath Puget Sound was—mostly—a manmade event.
Mr. Clean may not have been able to provide the necessary thermonuclear weapons, but he could tell Jonathan the number of bombs that would be necessary, along with the coordinates and depths of where they would need to be placed under the sea floor.
Of course, since the devices were manmade, the issue of keeping them functional when Malkier fried the whole of human technology had been a challenge. That was where The Cell’s containment shell had come into play. If Mr. Clean hadn’t been able to pull Heyer or him out of those big black Easter eggs when they were prisoners—Jonathan had been willing to bet anything inside would be safe from whatever Malkier might throw at them.
That last bit had required some MacGyvering from Mr. Clean. Just like all the rest of the explosives in the city, they still needed detonators that wouldn’t be rendered useless upon the conduit’s arrival. In the end, Jonathan had handed Olivia a trigger that could detonate the weapons when he gave the signal.
And yes—that had been part of the deal.
The US Government wasn’t providing WMDs to Jonathan no matter how convinced they were he was telling the truth. So, unless a government agent maintained control of firing the weapons they were off the table. Jonathan had no arguments—for that matter, he was fine leaving the detonation of every explosive they had throughout the city in her hands.
After spending a whole evening egging Olivia on to pull that trigger beneath The Cell’s hangar facility only for nothing to come of it—no big boom—he liked to think there was a certain symmetry to her being the one to pull the trigger now.
It had—just felt right.
As the Ferox around the city began to understand what was coming for them, they looked at the water with terror. Some began to move farther inland, racing away from the shoreline as fast as they could.
That was when the second detonation went off.
Olivia waited until the wave broke near the shore. Then the box with the big red button began to glow a bright sunset red.
It was at that moment that Rylee heard Jonathan’s voice over the comm. “I’m sorry, Rylee. But I told Leah, I won’t watch it happen again.”
She was on the ground, watching the box brighten as it neared detonation, one of Mr. Clean’s extra batteries beginning to spill energy out.
“What . . . what are we talking about?”
“Must have been a good kiss, I really thought you were gonna catch me,” he said, “would have been embarrassing.”
In the next few seconds, Rylee’s eyes went wide with sudden realization. When Jonathan had dove off the roof, the presence of the stone he’d taken off the scarred Ferox—it hadn’t gone with him. It was still here, it was . . .
As she reached frantically for her belt, a sphere of orange light shot away from the box with the big red button. A globe of Borealis energy passed through her and the rest of the army as she took hold of the stone that shouldn’t have been there in her pouch. She brought it o
ut just in time to see the energy field hit her open hand. It tickled a bit, as it passed through her, but the globe’s energy was the same as what already flowed through her, Jonathan, and every man in their army. As a matter of fact, it was the exact energy signature that ran their devices—and it was expanding out toward the entire city.
The portal stone shattered. Turned to fluid and clung to her, crawling up her armor looking for an opening, then finding its way through the suit’s vents.
“I love you,” he said.
A portal formed around her. “If Malkier doesn’t kill you, I’m going to.”
“See you soon.”
The Ferox running away from the wave stopped in their tracks as the globe began to expand out from the convention center.
They couldn’t flee the wave without running through that orange glowing sphere.
However, instinct told them one of these acts of god meant certain death while the other was a gamble. So, they took their chances with the globe, and as it passed through them, nothing seemed to come of it right away.
Then, a familiar breaking occurred inside of them. In a matter of seconds, red portals appeared all throughout the city. The stones inside the Ferox shattering—as though one of The Never Army had reached inside each creature and broken it. In an instant, a chain reaction triggered sending every Ferox in the city home.
Well—every Ferox but one. The one whose armor had been built to make sure he was impervious to everything. Perhaps most notably—a suit of armor that protected him even from the air itself.
He knew Heyer wouldn’t ask him to step into the Feroxian masses below for anything less than a critical problem, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
The gateway fields were bursting with activity. Red globes appearing throughout the entire circle around the platform so rapidly it seemed the entire conduit would collapse from the strain. Yet, none carried human corpses. It was as though the Ferox were being forcefully ejected from The Never in droves.
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