Rachel grabbed the bomb from my hand. “How long?” she croaked.
“Ten minutes,” Noah said.
This was it.
FORTY-ONE
I perched on a third-storey stairwell above the south wing entrance, blending in with the rest of the crowd gathered on different levels around the Apex. Noah had taken a lower position on the opposite side, and Rachel was on the ground floor with the bomb.
From here, I could see Mum, Josh, and Skye standing in a line on a raised platform in the centre of the room, each arm held by some huge Elder. Josh had stopped struggling now, Skye was still crying, and Mum just looked absent; she was there, but nobody was inside.
The same three figures who had presided over my induction ceremony were running this show. The long-winded one who knew a lot about history was rambling through some sort of rite. The woman was there, too—the Mother. She stood like a pope overseeing the proceedings. Hackman stood behind her, with his usual self-satisfied grin. I wanted to punch it right off his stupid face.
The entire Apex was full from top to bottom. There was almost no floor space, except a small circle around the platform. Every staircase, every landing was filled with Kindred members. There had to be nearly a thousand of them here, far more than I thought there would be. We didn’t stand a chance. I checked my thinking, trying to stay positive, but it was hard, considering the odds.
Rachel would set the bomb off on a timer on the ground floor, away from my family. She assured me it was smaller than the other one, and my family would be untouched by the blast. In the ensuing chaos, Noah would grab my family while I covered him from up here. I still didn’t know how I was going to do that. There were so many people here, no one would be able to tune. As soon as we could, we would meet up in the training ground and get out through the tunnel to the ledge. I didn’t have a watch, so the only signal would be the bomb itself.
They were getting to the end of the ceremony. We had to move soon.
The Mother stepped forward. She spoke, and her words spread like tendrils through the room. “It is a sacred bond, a hallowed oath one takes when one becomes bonded to the Kindred. This oath is thicker than blood, truer than love, and more real than death.”
Skye started to sob when she heard that last part. It was all I could do not to join her.
“Yet, still some choose to betray us, all of us, by joining with the very enemies we are sworn to destroy. For thousands of years, the Kindred have survived in our many forms, moving the world towards the Final Day. So many have lived, so many have fought, so many have died for this most noble cause. These traitors spit on their graves. They spit on the name of the Kindred. They spit on you.”
She grabbed Mum’s hair and dragged her to the front of the podium.
“So, let the deaths of these be our vengeance. Let this sacrifice be swift justice to the traitor, and let their blood be a warning to all who would dare betray their brothers and sisters of the Kindred. Let it be so!”
“Let it be so!” the crowd answered with one voice.
Come on, Rachel. Come on.
The Mother continued, “It has been more than a century since the Sanctuary was opened for an execution, but this is a special case. These prisoners will receive a unique honour indeed.”
Noah looked up at me from the floor and shook his head. He didn’t know what was happening any more than I did.
Hackman stepped forward. “Open the Sanctuary!”
The entire crowd dropped to their knees except the Mother and the guards holding my family and Josh. I followed suit so as not to stand out. Far below me, through the grill in the landing, the huge carved doors to the south wing swung silently open. I had never seen them open before. From his position across the Apex, Noah made eye contact again, shaking his head subtly to stop me from moving. The whole Apex stopped breathing, frozen with anticipation, reverence, and fear. A damp stench drifted from inside the Sanctuary, sucking the warmth out of the air. My stomach chilled.
A huge Shadow entered. The top of it nearly brushed the first-floor landing. The crowd had cleared a path to the platform, and it moved silently through the crowd, heading towards my family.
This Shadow was different from the others I had seen. It looked like the one that had perched on the ceiling of my bedroom, although several times that size. Its body was ghostly, almost transparent, but huge tendrils like intestines spread out from its body, twelve in all. I had seen a cow slaughtered once, and this Shadow looked like what was left at the end.
It walked on each tendril, and they shivered and pulsed and propelled it forward. At the end of each tendril was an open space, like a wound, about the size of a fist, so black inside it felt like they were rips in space, gateways to oblivion. Every few seconds, its body became solid for a moment, and I could have sworn a face emerged, pushing out from inside the crusted skin. It reached the platform and began to ascend. There were only four steps, and it didn’t take long.
Skye screamed—it was the only sound in the room. The Shadow was going to feed, suck them dry until they were nothing but dead shells like the bodies in the clearing. I tried to tune, but the interference was overwhelming. A thousand people all staring at the same place—there was no chance I could use my abilities here.
The Shadow moved towards Skye first, drawn to her scream. I couldn’t wait any longer. I stood and ran for the stairs, shoving my way through kneeling figures. There was no way I could make it in time, but I didn’t care. Skye rose in the air, suspended by three tendrils. It had her. It began to feed. Skye stopped moving.
The floor lifted. The whole world twisted and skewed and rose to meet me. I tumbled over the side of the railing towards the ground floor, hitting two Kindred, who sprawled flat. They broke my fall, but the wind was knocked out of me. Feet running, robes everywhere, blood and fire and chaos and death. I couldn’t stand, so I twisted my head towards the platform. Rachel’s bomb had worked. The Shadow was no longer on the platform, but my family weren’t there either.
I looked back, up to the third-storey gangway I’d fallen from. It was peeling away from the wall, sending Kindred tumbling over the edge to break their skulls open on the Apex floor. One hit the stairwell railing as he dropped, snapping his spine in half. He screamed for a moment then went still, folded backwards at a horrible angle. The mask slipped off his head and clattered to the floor. It was Frank. I looked away.
I was lucky to have hit the Kindred standing on the floor; they had accidentally saved me. Neither of them were moving.
Rocks broke loose from the ceiling and walls, dislodged by the stairs as they ripped from their footings. The whole Apex was weakened by the blast. It was falling apart. Several large cracks ran up the blackened wall where Rachel had set the bomb. I couldn’t see her anywhere. Hopefully she was okay.
There was someone yelling, a voice over the screams. I tried to move myself and see them, but my right wrist was broken and wouldn’t support my weight. My other arm seemed fine, and I used it to roll over. The screams came from one of the Kindred, held in the grip of the Shadow. He struggled, pled, screamed, and then his skin drained of life and colour, wasting away to the dull texture of a corpse. His lips peeled back into a permanent snarl, and his eyes sunk in their sockets. He screamed once more, but the noise was cut short as the Shadow took the last of his breath. The body fell to the floor, crumpling in a heap, and the Shadow grabbed another man unlucky enough to be nearby. It was angry and feeding indiscriminately, making its way through life after life until it found the traitor. I had to move before it reached me.
I pushed up with my good arm and staggered to my feet. The world shivered for a moment, then settled as my head adjusted to the height change. The door to the training ground was wide open, and I made a direct line for it, stepping over blood and bodies as best I could. The Shadow took another life behind me, and a woman screamed for help but I didn’t dare look back. My hood slipped over my eyes, and I ripped it off; if I tripped, I wasn’t sure I co
uld get back up again, and no one seemed to be watching anything but their own skin. Camouflage was pointless now.
I was almost at the training ground doors when a crack ripped through the air. The stairs were tearing away from the wall right up the side of the Apex, like they’d been scraped away by an apple peeler. I paused for a second to watch, and that second saved my life. The stairs crashed down in front of the training ground doors a few steps ahead of me, pulling down rocks and debris that completely blocked the entrance. The east and west wing doors were locked, guarded from the inside to keep the Shadow out, although from what I knew of their ability to move, a little steel door was a pointless barricade.
A woman bashed on the west wing door, pleading to be let in. Of course. The doors weren’t to keep the Shadow out—they were to keep its food from running. If it could satiate itself with the bodies in the Apex, it wouldn’t go hunting for the ones who’d escaped. The woman was a sacrificial lamb.
The Shadow moved to her, lifted her, and she stopped screaming.
There were only a few people left alive in the Apex, and I didn’t want to be the last one standing. There was only one way I would make it out of here alive. The south wing. The Sanctuary. The doors were still wide open, and I ran straight for them, stumbling as my foot kicked a limp arm laying on the floor. It wasn’t attached to a body.
The Shadow was preoccupied by a rather large man near the east wing entrance and didn’t see me as I ducked inside.
The first thing I noticed was the size. I couldn’t see far, as only a few steps in front of me were lit by the light leaking in from the Apex, but I could feel I was in a cavern far bigger than the training ground. The echoes from my footsteps took a long time to come back, reflected off a thousand different surfaces. The floor was flat and scuffed under my feet, kicking up dust that filled my nose. I snuffled quietly and tried not to sneeze.
I stopped for a moment, and my eyes adjusted to the light. Columns reached from the floor to a huge arcing roof above. There were at least ten columns running in two straight lines, framing a plinth at the far side of the cavern. The floor was patterned with drawings, huge murals. They were moments in the Kindred’s history: a man with a wreath on his head playing a violin in front of a burning city; a warlord holding a gun as hundreds were buried in a mass grave; a gas chamber filled with figures who bore numbers on their arms. The darkest moments of human history were shown here, frozen in time and celebrated like a cathedral of death. In each picture was a Shadow, lurking in the corner or hiding behind a wall. During each of those moments they had been there, watching. Approving. The lead figures in each scene bore the same mark as on the Apex floor and the Kindred uniforms. The Kindred had played a part in each of these moments. They were so much more than a bunch of bad guys with powers. They orchestrated and celebrated the darkest things in this world.
I walked towards the plinth at the other end of the columns, and the murals became more and more recent. They were arranged in chronological order, from the past to the present. Slaves forced aboard a tall ship. A mushroom cloud above a burning city. Women and children slaughtered in a jungle village. Two towers burning high above a metropolitan skyline. Gunmen storming a concert hall. It was all horribly familiar.
The final drawing was of a city, burned out and empty, and every street was covered with the dead, every window and door filled with figures screaming and hiding. The sun was black, and the sky was filled with shadows. This, I didn’t recognise. It hadn’t happened. Not yet. This drawing was of the future; this was the final day, the end spoken about in the Agenda, the purging of the world in blood and darkness. It was coming.
My eyes adjusted even further to the gloom, and I could make out the edges of the cavern. Around the walls were huge carved figures, like the ones that guarded the entrance to the chapel. These were several storeys high, hewn from the rock itself, each facing towards the plinth. Each one held its hands over its eyes, not daring to look at whatever it was facing. There were thirteen in all. They felt like altars. Idols, maybe.
I neared the plinth, keeping as quiet as I could. Screams still echoed through the open door to the Apex, but they were fading and there were fewer voices crying out in protest. The Shadow was nearly done. I had to find a way out before it came back here.
The plinth was at least as tall as me, with the same letters from the chapel. The same message in the first language:
Through death we are consumed.
The last scream from the Apex stopped, and the air fell silent, drained of sound and life. The doors were a tiny square of light on the other side of the cave, and they framed a huge black figure. The Shadow was returning, and I was trapped.
FORTY-TWO
I ran to the side of the plinth. It was offset from the wall far enough for me to hide behind it. I ducked around it, sticking my head out a little to keep an eye on the Shadow’s movements. It slid slowly to the middle of the room, seeming sluggish after its meal. It stopped for a moment and stretched out its tendrils wide. I had to move, but there was nowhere to go.
Black smoke poured from the eyes of the huge statues in the wall. More Shadows.
Twelve more, emerging from their idols, trickling onto the floor like sand through an hourglass. Each statue gave birth to a Shadow. Except for one: the thirteenth statue stayed dormant. Its Shadow was already in the middle of the room.
It lolled in the centre, waiting for its brethren, huge and fat like a swollen cancer. The twelve circled around it and reached out towards its tendrils. It began to pulse, to shift and rotate and change, and the other twelve tilted back in ecstasy. They were feeding from it. It was like a mother bird regurgitating meals for its children.
With thirteen Shadows here, I had nowhere to go. My best chance was to wait it out and hope they didn’t see me. I moved right back behind the plinth, feeling the wall behind me so I wouldn’t trip and give myself away. My wrist was throbbing now; it felt like it was going to explode at the slightest movement, and I held it close to my body so it wouldn’t be bumped.
The wall disappeared under my hand, and I was reaching into space. A faint breeze came from behind me in the dark. An opening. There was an opening. I turned and groped blindly in the blackness, and no wall came up to stop me.
The tunnel was cramped, but it didn’t take long to reach the other side. It opened out into forest, leaves, and sky. Stars flushed thick overhead, and lightning flickered over the mountains beyond. I was on the opposite side to the training ground. This was the tunnel the Shadows used to head out for their hunting sessions.
Maybe my family had made it out through our planned exit and were around here somewhere, although I wasn’t sure how Rachel would have made it down the tree ladder in her condition. My best bet was to follow the creek around the base of the cliffs and pray it met up with the other one. There was trickling to my right, and I walked towards the sound. Dry leaves crunched underneath my feet like paper, but the night was eerily still, which was strange considering the chaos I had left. The earth forgets violence so fast.
I hit the creek and followed the bank as best I could, sticking to the shadows to stay hidden. Unfamiliar voices shouted in the distance. A search party, but it was coming from far away, most likely the west wing entrance. That was a good sign; they wouldn’t look for anyone near the training ground, as they didn’t know that entrance existed. And no one would dare come through the Sanctuary. With any luck, they’d keep searching in the wrong direction.
Everything felt so far away as I trudged along the bank. Aside from a few shouts that rippled across the mountain it was almost possible to forget where I was and why I was here. I didn’t, not completely, but for a moment I imagined what it would be like to forget all of this. Forget what it felt like to be covered in someone else’s blood, blood I myself had taken. Forget Skye being held up by the Shadow. Forget the dead look in my mother’s eyes, the bodies tossed aside like empty bottles drained of life. Forget the way Elijah’s neck was twisted in
the hole I made. Forget Adam’s eyes as we lay broken in the darkness of the café a lifetime ago.
I wanted to disappear, to be absorbed into the water and the trees and the sky. When I tuned, I could touch them for a moment, hear them, feel them. If I stayed there long enough, maybe it would feel like forever.
My mother’s voice entered my mind, and a memory long forgotten chose now to rear its head.
I was twelve, and Mum was pouring herself another glass of red, tipping the bottle right up so the last little bits of amnesia dripped out.
“Why do I drink? Why do you think I drink?” she slurred.
“Because of Dad?”
“Yes. And the world.”
“What’s wrong with the world?”
“What’s right with it?” She took me under her arm, wine-perfumed breath blowing over me like cigarette smoke. Even the fumes were enough to lighten my head. “Ari, everyone wants to forget. Everyone. You remember Mrs. Bantam? The lady I took you to see when Michael left?” She never called him dad any more. “You know why she’s a counsellor? Her son died, that’s why, and she helps others because it helps her forget. She pretends it’s for some noble reason, but it makes her feel needed. It’s a narcotic, my darling. Just like everyone else needs.
“You know how Caitlyn always chases the boys? It’s ‘cause when she was eight, her dad said she was ugly, her mum told me, and so she runs to boys to help her forget. Mr. Sandson, the police officer? He’s a cop ‘cause when he was in high school his sister was murdered right in front of his eyes in a home invasion, and so he punishes others to help him forget. Everyone tries to forget, my darling, and we all try to forget in our own way, the whole damn planet. Some people read, others watch movies, others take drugs, others get violent, others make money, and still more jump from relationship to relationship, meaningless physical moments that just for one moment help them take their eyes off how completely miserable and empty and pointless they really are. Me? I drink. To forget Michael, and me, and you, and Skye, and everyone. I love you, my darling, but you would be better off forgotten.”
The Fire Unseen Page 25