Shadows of Divinity

by Luke Mitchell

  When I got a good look at the displays, I saw why.

  There looked to be an entire company of Legion troops swarming the building outside. At least two squads, I decided, trying to assess the feeds with a level head. Well over thirty men.

  A sizable hole had been blown in the eastern wall of the building, and soldiers were already grappling their way up. I caught a flicker of Franco retreating from a room. A glimpse of Carlisle and the others rushing down the hallway.

  “He went to get the drive,” Elise said quietly, her voice flat, as the first few soldiers climbed into the eastern breach.

  At the first dull cracks of gunfire, she flinched and appeared to snap out of her shock. “We have to help them.”

  Part of me wanted to agree. But Carlisle was right. I was in no shape. And I sure as scud wasn’t dragging Elise in front of armed men.

  “No. They’re coming back.” I went to the weapons racks, grabbed the pulse gun I’d used at Vantage, and slid an extra feeder into my arm sling for easy access. “Phineas told us to get below. What’s below?”

  As an afterthought, I grabbed a knife and clipped it to my belt. My hands were surprisingly steady. At least until another explosion shook the house, and the displays revealed a column of men storming up the stairs from street level.

  Scud.

  Once they were in, they’d be in perfect position to cut us off from Carlisle and the others. And they weren’t in the mood to waste time about it, either.

  Like its counterpart in the alley, the door at the top of the narrow stairwell was reinforced. They blew through the wall instead. As soon as it went, two of the soldiers peeled off from their allies like wild animals. The first one plowed through the entryway door with impossible ease—for a human, at least.

  Hybrids? Could it be?

  It was impossible to tell past the Legion gear and the closed helmets the pair wore. But what else could move like that?

  Before I could think to answer, the display cut out. Others followed.

  They were taking out our eyes.

  “Elise, we have to move.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me, staring at a display where Franco and Phineas were hunkered in the training room, Phineas leaning out from the doorway to lay down fire.

  Then that display cut out too.

  I could hear them now in the distance, shouting orders over the steady sounds of fighting.

  “How do we get below, Elise?”

  “Are they gonna die?” she whispered. “Are we?”

  “Hey…” I shifted the gun to my sling hand and slid my fingers under her chin to direct her gaze to mine. “Hey, stay with me. No one’s dying. It’s gonna take more than a company to stop Carlisle. And as for us”—I stroked her cheek and shifted the gun back to my good hand—“I’ll tear the entire Legion apart before I let anyone lay their hands on you.”

  Somehow, I managed to keep my voice steady despite the frightened energy I was fixing to combust with. Maybe it was simply that I meant what I said. Meant it to my core.

  Her blue eyes searched my face, measuring the truthfulness of my words. Her head slowly began to nod, and then she snapped out of her trance and bent to pull up a flap of carpet.

  There, right in front of the weapons racks. A floor hatch.

  “An escape route,” she said. “That’s what’s below. There’s a tunnel and an old lev tram.”

  Thank Alpha. We had a way out. I just didn’t know how the others were going to get to it with a couple squads swarming the house.

  I reached out with my senses and was alarmed to feel several minds headed toward our side of the house from the entryway. The two leading the group felt alien. The hybrids, I guessed.

  Before I had time to think better of it, I picked one of the human soldiers and threw myself at his mind as I had with Smirks. I barely even felt resistance. Sights and sensations flooded my awareness, and suddenly I was in the hall, and my fireteam was stumbling into my back as I stood there, motionless.

  “What the scud, Derner?” someone snapped.

  I tried to look around, and my vessel’s head turned in crisp response to my will.

  It was eerie. I didn’t like it one bit.

  But this was survival.

  Derner’s eyes showed me a house crawling with Legion troops. I couldn’t see our friends, but the sounds of fighting were thick from the other side of the house. A snap flare—Carlisle’s doing, I guessed—flashed through the hall and bleached my vessel’s sight.

  I felt disoriented soldiers stumbling into one another. Heard their muffled cries through Derner’s ringing ears.

  I grabbed the thumpers from his gear vest, pulled the pins, and tossed them blindly toward the head of the group moving for our side of the house. The last thing I felt was two of Derner’s fireteam tackling him to the ground as I pulled out of his mind with a shudder.

  “What is it?” Elise asked behind me, her voice tight.

  I turned and saw with a jolt of surprise that Elise had pushed open a section of the wall to reveal a passage that looked to lead behind Franco’s study.

  Outside, the thumpers detonated with a pair of thick booms.

  “Enemies coming for us.” I closed the door to the hallway and locked it, trying to keep my voice calm as I went to pull the escape hatch open. “The hybrids can probably smell me. You need to get below. I’ll hold the room until they’re back.”

  She just went straight to the weapons rack, shaking her head.

  “No. No way.” She plucked a compact rod and gave it a twist. The ends sprang violently outward to yield a dark staff, which she twirled through a few revolutions with a whistling speed that would have been frightening if not for the grace with which she controlled it.

  “If you stay,” she said, deadly serious. “I stay.”

  She meant it.

  I opened my mouth to say something—I don’t know what. That I understood, but that I also couldn’t lose her?

  Another explosion rocked the house before I could speak.

  More gunshots. The shouts of troops charging down the hall.

  “Elise…”

  There wasn’t enough time to convince her. To tell her everything I needed to. So I reached out to her mind and showed her—the way I felt when she was with me, the way my heart soared when she smiled. The way I needed her to be safe now.

  The tears welling in her eyes told me she saw it, that she understood. But she didn’t climb down the hatch as I’d hoped.

  She stepped past it, moving straight toward me.

  Outside, the voices were growing louder, the thuds of heavy boots closer. Down the hallway, the sharp crack of splintering wood announced the first breached door.

  I reached out to touch Elise’s cheek as she drew close. To tell her to hurry.

  My mouth was half open when she grabbed the front of my shirt and tugged, hard.

  Her lips found mine before I knew what was happening, so alive and warm and vibrant with everything that was her that, for a precious moment, I forgot everything else. The impending danger. The fear and the pain. There was nothing but that kiss. The soft heaven of her lips against mine. The intoxicating closeness of her.

  But it couldn’t last forever.

  Outside, another door splintered.

  “I’m still not leaving,” Elise whispered as she pulled back, holding my eyes.

  “Clear,” someone called down the hallway.

  Boots thudded our way.

  Alpha be damned.

  I pulled Elise with me and hunkered down behind the larger of the two desks in the room.

  It wasn’t much, but it’d buy us a moment or two, hopefully while the men all filed neatly into the room to inspect the suspicious open hatch in the floor.

  I counted seven in total as they paused outside the door. Two hybrids. Five men.

  “I’ll try to take the hybrids down first,” I sent to Elise.

  She gave an affirmative nod, some of her earlier fire giving way to tight-jawed
fear now that the danger was palpable. She also clearly hadn’t had time to put her cloaking pendant back on. There wasn’t anything to be done about that now.

  “Stay behind cover until—”

  Something struck the door with a sharp thud. A boot, probably.

  One of the hybrids must have taken the second kick, because it only took two.

  The door splintered from its hinges and smashed into the opposite wall with a crash, followed promptly by a bone-chilling roar from the doorway.

  Then they came.

  29

  Hard Ride

  “What the scud was that?” someone cried.

  Every instinct I had screamed at me to spin around and open fire as thudding boot falls paraded into the room.

  “Hey!” another voice shouted.

  Were they yelling at each other? At the hybrids?

  Boots approached. Something hissed at the air.

  I stayed crouched behind the desk, waiting, watching with my extended senses.

  “What’s this?” someone asked.

  “They must’ve fled underground,” another said.

  The moment I felt the last man cross the threshold, I opened the channel to the energy cell in my pocket and telekinetically hurled the other desk at the doorway.

  Energy crackled through my veins. A choir of shouts filled the room—soldiers scrambling to evade the heavy projectile.

  For the most part, they failed.

  The desk missed the hybrids but plowed into the mass of soldiers. In the ensuing chaos, I stood and opened fire. Or tried to, before the spots in my vision darkened and I found myself staggering to my knees.

  Behind, something growling thudded into the desk.

  Elise spun to her feet and cracked a savage blow to the hybrid’s head.

  I raised my gun in a shaky hand and fired three slugs at the creature’s head before it could shake it off.

  Two hit, and the hybrid dropped in a slack heap of scaly limbs.

  I rose, glimpsed a weapon moving to the right, and fired without thinking. The shots probably didn’t pierce the soldier’s armor, but they did give him a seconds’ pause. Enough time for Elise’s sailing staff to crash into the side of his head, javelin style.

  Elise was already flying after the weapon in a low somersault. She moved with stunningly fluid grace, rising, plucking the staff from the floor, and sweeping it into the soldier’s chin all in one movement, then bounding without pause toward the soldiers untangling themselves from their ungainly pile under the desk.

  The second hybrid watched her go uncertainly, then rounded on me and charged with an eager hiss.

  I backpedaled, taking aim.

  The hybrid dropped low behind the desk, cutting off my line of fire. Then, with a guttural chuckling noise, it rose and flung the desk at me.

  I acted on reflex, casting my mind out, desperately pulling energy from the oversized projectile. The desk crashed down at my feet. My insides crackled with the energy of its halted flight.

  I let it loose with a telekinetic blast.

  The hybrid hit the floor with an irritated roar. A wave of exhaustion rode in and nearly made me do the same. I was in no condition to be channeling this much energy. Not that I had much of a choice at the moment.

  Across the room, Elise’s staff was falling on the recovering soldiers with brutal precision. One raised his weapon only to receive lightning-fast blows to gun, arm, and head. She reversed direction without pause and slammed her staff down on another’s head.

  Still another soldier—partially pinned beneath the desk—was sighting on her with his sidearm. I took a second to telekinetically slam his head into the ground and whipped my gun back up for the recovering hybrid.

  Too late.

  The hybrid leapt over the desk and knocked me roughly to the ground, setting my wounds on fire. A strong hand found my throat and yanked up until my feet were dangling. I couldn’t breathe. I kicked as best I could.

  The hybrid slammed me against the wall, expunging what little air remained in my lungs. My right side was a sea of pain. Black spots crowded my vision. The hybrid squeezed harder. I feebly tried my gun, but the hybrid had my arm pinned.

  Darkness closed in.

  “Hal!” Elise cried somewhere far away.

  The pressure on my throat lessened, and the hybrid yanked my head to the side. My vision cleared enough to see the creature had torn its helmet off in preparation to bite my throat out.

  Then I caught a flicker of motion, and the hybrid stumbled forward as Elise’s flying staff rocketed into its back. I could barely see straight, but I felt my gun hand free as the hybrid planted its arms to keep its balance.

  I pressed the gun to the creature’s side and pulled the trigger three times.

  The hybrid shrieked in pain. I drove my good shoulder into its chest before it could bite. It didn’t go far—I was too weak right then to push it more than a few feet. But it was enough.

  My fourth and fifth slugs found the hybrid’s head.

  I shifted my aim to the soldiers, scanning for the next threat, every part of my body burning in protest.

  All clear.

  I sagged back against the wall, gasping for air.

  Then Elise was by my side.

  “Are you hurt?” I groaned.

  “Seriously? You get put through the wall by that thing and you’re asking me if I’m hurt?”

  A small grin tugged at my lips. “Yeah. Are you okay?”

  She gave a shaky laugh, shaking her head. “You’re ridiculous.”

  We both turned to look down the back hallway Elise had opened.

  That’s when I realized that the sounds of fighting had stopped elsewhere in the house.

  Not good.

  Two minutes, Carlisle had said. And it had already been at least three.

  I reached out. More troops arriving in the downstairs entryway. And there, on one of the few undamaged security displays. Reinforcements arriving outside. Another company, at least.

  “We have to go,” I croaked.

  Elise helped me to my feet, though my words had lit a spark of panic in her eyes—the beginning of the realization that the others weren’t coming. That we were on our own.

  “But, they’re—”

  “They might have made it out another way,” I said, speaking quickly. “Even if they’re captured, we can’t help them right now. There are too many out there. We need to get out, regroup.”

  “No… No, no…” She said the word like she was chanting a mantra against reality.

  “We’ll find them,” I whispered. “I promise, Elise. We will find them. But we have to go. Now.”

  She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and finally gave a reluctant nod. We hurried to the open hatch. One of the soldiers by the desk groaned something, whipping us both around, but then he slumped to the carpet.

  I waved Elise to the hatch opening and the long, narrow descent by ladder below. She didn’t argue. Just collapsed her staff to a more manageable length and clambered down the rungs. The sounds of approaching soldiers were growing too close for comfort. I scrambled after Elise and pulled the hatch and its cover closed above us without looking back.

  For now, at least, we were on our own.

  After an awkward and lengthy descent, the narrow ladder-well opened up to a dusty, low-ceilinged space formed entirely of permacrete. Elise flipped a switch on the wall, and a few dim lights flickered on to reveal the small lev tram in the center of the room, a relic of the old Divinity underway lines that hadn’t been in common use since well before I was born.

  I started for the tram… and paused when a flicker of something tickled at the edges of my senses. Had it been a sound? Just a feeling?

  Elise was watching me uncertainly. “What is it?”

  I shook my head. It was nothing. We needed to move.

  “Come on.” I hurried over and palmed the access panel by the tram’s doors.

  To my relief, they slid open.

  Pale l
ights snapped on as we stepped into the compartment, illuminating lines of sickly green polymer seats along the walls. The contrast between the lights inside and the dimness outside blinded us to everything but our own reflections in the windows and only added to my uneasy sense that we needed to get far away from here, and fast.

  “Do you know how to drive this thing?” I asked, moving instinctively toward the front.

  There. A control console.

  Elise appeared beside me. “I think it’s pretty much a go button.”

  She wasn’t wrong. At my touch, the console display powered up with a map of Divinity and a programmed route that would take us somewhere near the city’s eastern outskirts. I didn’t particularly care about the specifics. Anywhere was safer than our current location.

  I tapped the Begin Route command and grabbed a handhold with Elise as the tram hummed to life, lifted a few inches from the ground, and began to accelerate.

  We’d barely made it ten feet forward when something thumped on the roof.

  “What was that?” I hissed, reflexively hunkering down and then shifting the gun back to my good hand as I cautiously approached the rear of the tram, where the sound had come from.

  “What?” Elise asked behind me. “I didn’t hear anything…”

  My hand froze halfway to my pendant, the back of my neck tingling. Something about her tone.

  All at once, it hit me, and I threw myself away from Elise, onto the tram seats. Just as her collapsed staff came whooshing through the air at my head.

  I landed jarringly on my sling arm. A cry of pain tore out of me, the world blurring with it. Distantly, I noticed the clatter of my gun hitting the floor.

  “Elise!” I groaned, awkwardly rolling around to face her.

  Her eyes were vacant. Without remorse, she swung the club of her collapsed staff at my nearest knee. I rolled back onto my shoulders and flinched as the blow shattered the polymer seat where my legs had just been.

  She moved to reset for another strike, but I rocked forward and hooked my legs around her torso and arms before she could. She struggled soundlessly, her vacant expression eerily unchanging.

  I braced my mental defenses as best I could while wrestling to keep her under control. Then I pulled off my cloaking pendant and jammed it down around her neck.