The generator stood fifty yards away. Nessa and Adem would have to sprint through the Skaldi to get there.
“Satisfied?” Mercy said to no one in particular.
Nessa turned to her, hefting her rifle, and for a moment I thought she was going to use it. Mercy must have thought so too, because her own rifle rose to Nessa’s chest. But then Nessa clutched Adem’s hand and pulled him from the doorway. He stumbled forward and stood shakily beside her.
“We can do this,” she whispered fiercely. “For Aleka. And Wali.”
For a moment Adem looked stricken. Then I watched his back straighten and his face take on a determined expression I’d never seen. Nessa gripped his hand and squeezed before turning to me.
“Go,” she said. “Be careful. Work fast.”
Then she and Adem were leaping through the Skaldi, firing bursts that lit the night. The creatures responded sluggishly at first, moaning and tumbling over each other in their confusion and panic to get away. Soon, though, they seemed to realize they were thousands against two and began streaming in the attackers’ direction. In seconds so many bodies blocked the way I could no longer see anything of Nessa and Adem except the pale sparks from their rifles.
“Stay close,” I said to Mercy and Ardan. “But not too close.”
“You planning to drop a Querry bomb?” Mercy said.
“You never know.”
We crept toward Udain’s headquarters, keeping low. Or, in Ardan’s case, as low as a nearly eight-foot-tall human being could. Though many of the Skaldi had followed Nessa and Adem, hundreds still covered the yard, so many that some lay squirming on each other three or four deep. When we reached the edge of the square I signaled to Mercy and Ardan, and they stooped—or loomed—by my side.
“They should be there soon,” I said.
We waited for a long minute, listening for the sound of Nessa’s and Adem’s rifles. But all we could hear were the Skaldi’s moans.
“This is taking way too long,” Mercy muttered.
“I’ll go in,” I said. “You two follow. Try to keep them from closing behind us. Let me know when we reach the charges.”
Mercy grabbed my arm. “You’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “You’re the only one who can set the charges. If you go under like you did at the altar, we’re all screwed.”
She was right. I froze, seconds ticking by like hours. Still I heard nothing that would indicate whether Nessa and Adem had reached their target. In the dim light, Mercy’s eyes flashed a grim and mirthless I told you so.
Then, all at once, the compound to our right was illuminated by a blaze of yellow light, the ground shaking beneath our feet. Sparks twisted into the sky, drawn upward by the column of smoke they lit. The Skaldi in the courtyard, attracted by the explosion, began to migrate toward the generator building. I suspected they would find nothing left of it. I hoped they wouldn’t find any sign of the two who had demolished it.
But I couldn’t think about them. We had our own job to do.
“Now!” I shouted at my companions.
Mercy sprinted through the gap in the Skaldi’s ranks, with Ardan a step behind. I followed. Over my shoulder, I heard Nessa’s and Adem’s rifles coming alive again, the howls of the creatures they hit.
The mass of Skaldi had recovered from their initial surprise, and some came streaming toward us, clumsy but determined, moaning in fury or pain. Mercy hit the ones in our path with her energy rifle, their scars peeling back before they exploded into flying fragments. Some tried to circle behind, but Ardan was sharp, and he nailed them before they had a chance to form an effective group. The wild thought flashed through my mind that we could destroy them all this way, without worrying about the explosives. But I saw the countless shadows moving in the darkness, I remembered the few survivors of our combined colonies marching slowly through the tunnel with the body of my mother, and I knew we had to stick to the plan.
Mercy stopped without warning and fell to a knee. At first I thought she was hurt, but then she signaled and Ardan came to her side, understanding immediately what she needed him to do. She entered a code into a touchpad embedded in the cement, and a square metal plate popped free, exposing corners a normal human being could probably pry up with a crowbar. Ardan used his hands. He gripped the edges of the plate and pulled, and in a single motion the plate came free and flew into the night, colliding with a Skaldi and slicing its body in two.
Mercy put a hand on his forearm. “That’s my big brother.”
His face shifted in the slightest of smiles.
While the injured thing wriggled helplessly and its fellows streamed over it to reach us, Mercy grabbed my hand and pulled me down by her side.
“There,” she said. “Work your magic.”
I reached into the hole and, guided by Mercy, manually set the charge. The Skaldi fell back before Ardan’s energy beam. In seconds we were done.
“Let’s set the other and get the hell out of here,” Mercy said. “I can try for the one that’ll do the most damage.”
“Your call,” I said, and we were up and running with Mercy in the lead.
She stopped in front of the cage. Even with the power out it was empty, as if the creatures had some dim memory of what it was meant for. In its center, just visible in the light of the burning bodies that had sprung up around the compound, I made out the black scorch mark from the creature I’d destroyed almost a week before. The three of us entered the cage, and Mercy knelt at this spot and punched the code into a keypad I’d been too busy fighting that first night to notice.
“Will two be enough?” I said. “To take out most of them?”
“The best laid plans,” she said with a smile.
Ardan wrenched the scorch-streaked plate from the ground, and once again I used the signature my mom had given me to set the charge. When I was done, I stood, wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, and looked at my two companions.
I realized the compound had gone quiet. No moans from the creatures, no crackle from the distant fires or from Nessa’s and Adem’s rifles. I looked around us and saw that the Skaldi had advanced as silently as shadows, thousands of them, forming a solid circle just beyond the cage. A soft exhalation like a rustle of fabric passed through them as the scars on their bodies yawned open, their stink enveloping us as if we’d already been pulled inside. I glanced at the door to the cage. It was closed, and something told me it wouldn’t open at my command.
The Skaldi waited. They had no reason to hurry.
“Which one of you is it?” I said to my companions. “Or were you working together all along?”
They dropped their eyes. I took out my mother’s protograph and flicked it on, scanned and zoomed until I located the four white lines that indicated our cage.
A single red dot glowed at its center.
“I could kill you both,” I said.
“It’s not me,” Mercy said. Ardan stood impassively, saying nothing.
I walked to the bars of the cage. The Skaldi outside waited hungrily.
“There’s one way to find out,” I said.
I grabbed the bars and poured everything I had into them. A pulse passed through me, almost as strong as the one I’d felt at the altar but nowhere near as painful. With an explosion of sparks, the compound’s power sprang back to life.
The perimeter fence hummed with energy, pale gold against the night sky. Stark white spotlights swept the courtyard, showing the huddled bodies of the Skaldi, their faces turned upward in what might have been shock if they’d had features to show it. Then they fell back, moaning in agony as the energy surrounded them. The cage buzzed with so much power I felt momentarily dizzy. When I stepped to the door and touched the bars, a crackle of fire leaped from my fingers and the door flew open with a clang.
I turned to face the two who shared the cage with me. Ardan stared back with an uncharacteristic expression of amazement. Mercy shook her head sadly, then withdrew a gun from its holster.
N
ot the kind that fired the energy beam. Aleka’s pistol. She held it outstretched, and I jumped back. I couldn’t read the thoughts in her eyes, but I could see something foreign there, something that passed like a shadow behind a lighted window.
“Oh, Mercy,” I said.
She stood unmoved, staring back with haunted eyes. I remembered the night I’d watched Korah die at the hands of the Skaldi. I felt the power build, and I tried to steel myself to kill the second girl I’d ever loved.
“I told you,” she said. “It’s not me. And I can prove it.”
The gun swung to the side, settling on the hulking form of Ardan.
“I love you, big brother,” Mercy said.
And then she fired.
18
The bullet tore through Ardan’s massive chest.
But there was no blood.
“I’ll take him,” I said.
The Skaldi in Ardan’s form tried to flee the cage, but the energy beam weakened it, and it fell to its knees with a crash that shook the cement pad. I took a step toward it, ready to end his suffering, when the giant frame shuddered and the Skaldi tried to escape.
It leaped from his throat, his face, his chest. It burst him like a torn cloak. It was almost free of him when, amazingly, the hands of the tattered giant grasped the creature, clutched its torso, and squeezed. It raked him with its claws, fighting to free itself from the body it had counterfeited, but he held on, arms that somehow obeyed the human he’d been holding on to the Skaldi he’d become. Those powerful arms constricted, and the Skaldi responded with an otherworldly moan of confusion and pain. Its host body was dead, had to be, but it clung to the monster that had hollowed it out and wouldn’t let go.
With a final, enormous effort, Ardan’s arms ripped the thing free of his body and flung it to the ground, where it lay motionless except for a convulsive quivering.
The remains of the man staggered to his feet. One side of his face had slid into a gaping cavity, the other side appearing like melted wax with a single dark eye peering furiously from the chaos of flesh. Mercy’s gaze never left that face as it warped and flowed. He tottered as he approached her, and at last his legs gave out and he sprawled on the floor of the cage, stretched out full length, his arm reaching for Mercy. There he lay, heaving like a mountain erupting, holding himself together through a force of will I couldn’t conceive.
Mercy fell to her knees beside the thing that had been her brother, her hand brushing hair from his tortured forehead.
“Mercy,” he groaned, and the voice was still Ardan’s, except it sounded hollow, as if it issued from the pit of his chest. “Forgive me.”
With one shaky hand, he reached up and awkwardly touched Mercy’s hair, the motion delicate and uncertain, as if he feared he might break her. Gradually, though, as his fingers flowed over the crown of her head, they recovered the tender pace I was sure they’d once known. Mercy leaned down and stroked her brother’s ruined face, coaxing a last smile from his lips.
“I went willingly with our father into the desert,” he spoke, his words slurred and broken. “I served him not from compulsion but of my own free choice, pledging myself to the power he commanded. I stole the innocent from their homes, bore them to the canyon to serve his ends. I built him an army, won him brides. It was only when I saw his plans for you that I knew what I had done.” His smile held a second longer before slipping from his face. “Do not mourn for me, Mercy. I am at peace. I have paid.”
His body began to crumble. Mercy tried to hold him, but the effort was finally too much, and his frame fell apart, sliding through her fingers in a shower of golden sand. Mercy threw herself on the ground, and for a second I thought I saw wisps of light curling around her like soothing hands. I watched them twist into the air, where they vanished in the glow of the compound. Nothing remained to mark the place he’d been, unless it was his sister’s anguished cries.
I waited until the worst of her tears had ended, then knelt beside her. She took my hands and let me pull her to her feet. For the briefest of moments her head sank to my shoulder as she clung to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Then we were running through the open door of the cage and past the stunned bodies of the Skaldi. Mercy aimed her rifle and pulled the trigger, but the only sound that came from the spent weapon was a low whine. She threw it at her feet. I glanced in the direction of the perimeter fence, but it seemed impossibly far away with the hordes that lay between us and escape.
“How long until the charges blow?” I asked Mercy.
“Thirty minutes.” Her voice had recovered its calm, but tears tattooed her face in the light of the beam. “Of which we’ve already wasted ten. What’s the plan?”
I turned to see Skaldi creeping toward us, weakened by the beam but drawn by the living energy in their human prey.
“Nessa and Adem,” I said. “They might still be alive.”
We ran for the generator shed, dodging burned and dazed Skaldi. We reached the place only to find a smoldering pile of rubble. There was no sign of the two, but their rifles lay beside the ruins. Mercy picked one up, testing it. Like her own, it had expended its charge.
“They’re gone,” I said, hardly believing the words as they left my mouth. “We need to get back underground. It’s our only chance.”
With Mercy in the lead, we returned to the stairwell that had brought us to the surface. The Skaldi tried to crawl after us, but we closed the door to hold them off. At the bottom of the stairs I flicked on the protograph, scanning and scrolling through the labyrinth of tunnels. Everywhere I looked I saw trails of red dots, like blood cells flowing through an intricate system of veins. All the paths that I could find that led away from the blast radius ran straight into them.
The Skaldi had breached the tunnels. There was no place to go. Ardan was dead, and Nessa and Adem too. And in minutes, we would join them.
Mercy leaned over me. In the depths of her eyes I saw the ghostly outlines of tunnels, the map of the world below. Finally she said, “There!”
I stopped the image on a cluster of tunnels so densely woven it looked like a spiderweb. No Skaldi had penetrated it so far as I could tell. “You know where that is?”
She took the protograph from me and scrutinized the screen. “Aleka briefed me on the tunnels. But she never said anything about this.”
I wondered if my mother would ever stop keeping secrets from me, even after she was dead. “Can they withstand the blast?”
Mercy shrugged. “Ask me fifteen minutes from now.”
“That’s the best you’ve got?”
“The best I’ve got,” she said softly, “was beaten out of me by this crummy world a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, realizing with new force how inadequate it was to say. The worst thing about this world, I thought, was that it gave no one a decent chance to grieve. “Lead the way.”
With Mercy holding the protograph and me shining the flashlight ahead of us, we set off at a run in the direction she judged the tunnels lay. The fact that the charges might blow at any second bothered me less than the mood of my companion, who kept a tight silence I knew her too well to try to break.
After running for what seemed like hours but couldn’t have been more than minutes, we entered a part of the tunnel system totally different from the rest: unlit, suffocatingly narrow, and filled with a rank smell of mold or decay. The protograph indicated that we were traveling west, the exact opposite direction the rest of our colony was moving. And it also indicated, via a timer function Mercy had discovered, that we had only a couple minutes before the charges went off.
Which made it especially problematic when the tunnel came to a dead end.
“Perfect,” Mercy said, giving off a short laugh.
I grabbed the protograph from her, desperately looking for another way out, finding none. “What do we do now?”
She might have been about to answer when the tunnel quivered, dust and chips of cement
raining down from overhead. A split second later, a powerful explosion shuddered through the reinforced concrete, then another, this one even stronger than the first. The walls groaned, and in the beam of the flashlight I saw them begin to buckle. Then the floor trembled and the ceiling cracked with an earsplitting screech. I leaped for Mercy, who shouted something I couldn’t make out just as the ceiling collapsed.
That wasn’t the worst part, though.
The worst part was when the floor did too.
Mercy coughed, her mouth dangerously close to mine.
“Damn, you sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said. “But seriously, what were you planning to do for an encore?”
I couldn’t see anything, but I felt her body on top of mine. I tried to move, only to discover I couldn’t. My lungs burned with the effort and my tongue felt thick and heavy in my mouth, but I squeezed out a couple words. “What happened?”
“The charges went off and we dropped to some kind of sublevel. Where I think you cushioned my fall. Cushioned being a relative term, of course.” She sighed, the sound coming out more like a wheeze. “My hero.”
I felt her wiggling, heard her scratching against stone. A dim light opened in the darkness, and her shape squeezed through. But when I tried to roll over and follow, I found that I couldn’t budge.
“Mercy?”
Her face, plastered with white dust, appeared in the window she’d opened. “You okay?”
“I’m—” I didn’t want to answer that too quickly. “I’m kind of . . . stuck. Can you give me a hand?”
She reached through the hole. Her fingers were as white as her face, except where blood tipped the nails. “Upsy-daisy.”
She gripped my hands and tugged. I felt the strain in her arms, but still nothing moved. Her face grew serious as she squinted into the rubble behind me.
“Your foot’s trapped,” she said. “Something on your ankle, I think.”
“I can’t feel it.”
“Your foot? Or the something?”
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