Elemental Power

by Rachel Morgan

  “I—okay—sorry.” Eric reached toward the wall just below the mirror, and his hand moved out of sight. But from the motion of his arm, it appeared he was turning a dial.

  “All of them, you idiot,” the mayor snapped. He leaned past Eric and turned his hand at three different spots. A hissing sound reached Ridley’s ears as she pulled magic hastily from the air. Though she felt as though she could probably use her own magic now without sending her body into a dizzy, stomach-emptying state, she figured it was safer not to try.

  “Quickly, quickly, quickly,” Callie muttered, wringing her hands and bobbing up and down. “I think it’s starting to come through.”

  With precise movements of their fingers and hands, Ridley and Malachi performed the basic conjuration within seconds. Ridley pushed the resulting magic toward her jacket, which she’d dropped onto the floor a few moments before. The magic wrapped around it and lifted it straight up, while Ridley’s hand swayed this way and that to direct the jacket toward the vent on her side. Within moments, she’d managed to completely cover the parallel slits of the vent. Glancing to the other side of the ceiling, Malachi had done the same with his bunched-up T-shirt. “Some of it’s probably getting through the fabric,” he said to Ridley, “but it’s better than breathing in a full blast of it.”

  The mayor moved to the wall beside the door and pressed a button on what appeared to be an intercom. He leaned toward it and barked, “Tell them to increase the pressure on those canisters linked to cell eight. Immediately.”

  He dropped his hand, and turned back toward Ridley. She met his gaze as his eyes pierced into hers. “I will watch you die,” he said, softly enough that she could barely hear his voice through the speakers. She gritted her teeth and refused to look away. The magic she’d conjured still held her jacket in place, but with her hands raised toward it, she could sense the growing force behind the jacket as the pressure on the other side of the air vent grew. The mayor’s thin lips curved upward. “It’s only a matter of time,” he said. And yet … was it Ridley’s imagination, or was the pressure decreasing now?

  “Wait!” a woman’s voice screeched. She rushed into the observation room and grabbed the doorframe to pull herself to a stop. “Waitwaitwait! Don’t do that. We’re supposed to—”

  “Get the hell out of here!” the mayor snapped at her.

  “But he said to stop!”

  “I DON’T CARE!” Mayor Madson bellowed. “My word is law in this base. That girl was involved in the death of my son, and I WANT HER DEAD!”

  An older man, breathless and flustered, appeared beside the woman. “Nat’s closed the vents,” he said. “We received orders to—”

  “Shut up!” the mayor hissed, then cursed beneath his breath. “Sometimes,” he muttered, “if you want a job done, you have to do it yourself.” He tugged at something out of sight below the mirror, and when he stepped back, there was a small, black object in his hand. A gun, Ridley realized with sinking dread. The mayor shoved aside the two newcomers and stepped past them.

  “Wait, are you crazy?” Eric shouted. “You can’t go in there!”

  “Nonono,” Callie moaned.

  “This is our chance,” Ridley said, blood pumping wildly through her veins.

  “Ridley,” Malachi said sharply. “I can do what your father did outside the wall yesterday.”

  Ridley hesitated, her brain taking a second to figure out what he was talking about. “Okay,” she answered as the memory flashed across her mind, knowing there was no time to ask how Malachi knew that conjuration.

  “What are you talking about?” Eric shouted through the glass at them.

  “Distract him when he comes in.” Malachi was pulling swiftly at the air now, and the sound of numbers being punched into a keypad came from the other side of the door. “Just get the gun away from him!” Malachi added in a rush of breath as a loud beep reached Ridley’s ears. She dove forward, thinking of air and hoping she didn’t land flat on her face in a nauseous heap.

  She vanished before hitting the floor. The use of her own magic made her want to gag, but she could just maintain her hold on it. As the door swung open, she spun as fast as she could, whirling herself into a small tornado, then rushing past the mayor. But she was so dizzy, and she couldn’t see if she’d knocked him aside, and Eric was yelling something, and the magic was too much to hold on to. She dropped out of the air and landed heavily on her feet.

  The gun was on the floor in front of her.

  The mayor was struggling to his feet out in the passageway.

  She could get to the gun. She could grab it before he did. She could—

  “Get back!” Malachi yelled, and at the last second, Ridley launched away from the gun instead of toward it. A sparking flash of magic flared past her, separating almost instantly into three blue fireballs. It might have been catastrophic if they’d landed on a surface somewhere within the arxium-lined cell, but Malachi had aimed for the passageway, and that was precisely where the magic struck.

  21

  The shock wave threw Ridley backward, but her instinctive reaction—air—saved her before she hit the wall. Callie wasn’t so lucky. As Ridley rose toward the ceiling to get her bearings in the aftermath of the explosion, she saw Callie slumped on the floor against the wall. In the passageway, which now had three small craters in the floor and cracks zigzagging in every direction, the mayor was in a worse state. Blood smeared the wall he’d been thrown against, and his large figure lay motionless on the floor. Malachi had vanished, so he must have concealed himself with air as well. Knowing he could take care of himself, Ridley turned to Callie.

  She swooped down, wrapped her invisible self around Callie, and sped through the door and over the mayor. The man and woman who’d tried to stop him from administering the arxium gas leaned over him, while Eric shouted into the intercom in the observation room. Ridley didn’t stop to listen to any of them. She needed to find Dad, and she needed to get out of here.

  The other doors off this passageway were all open, and the rooms they led to were empty. Ridley reached the end of the passage and realized there were probably rooms on the other side of the one she’d escaped. So she darted back around and glided through the air as fast as she could, past Eric and the man and woman trying to resuscitate Mayor Madson. But the other two rooms at the far end of the passage were just as empty, and after that, there was only a dead end.

  She swooped back, dragging a gust of wind past the four people on the floor as she raced by. She was probably giving herself away, but who cared? She was invisible, already flying around the corner, long gone before anyone could run after her. But she was still stuck inside this stupid building, and she hadn’t seen a single window to the outside world yet.

  Into the next corridor, and then another, and another. Finally, she came to a closed door, which meant she’d have to use actual hands to open it. She let herself become visible, then staggered to the side as Callie’s weight almost dragged her to the floor. The unconscious woman slipped from Ridley’s one-armed grasp around her waist and slumped to the floor.

  “Crap,” Ridley muttered. After glancing behind her—why did it feel like someone was there?—she crouched down and pressed two fingers to Callie’s neck, just to be certain. There hadn’t been time to check when she fled the cell they’d been locked in. A steady pulse beat beneath her fingers, and she let out a relieved breath. She straightened, stepped over Callie’s arm, and reached forward to open the door. Then she pushed her magic outward again, ready to conceal them both as air.

  “Let me help you.”

  Ridley’s heart almost jumped clear of her chest until she realized the voice behind her belonged to Malachi. “Holyfreakincrap,” she breathed, her shoulders sagging.

  “Sorry.” Malachi bent to pick Callie up.

  “How did you manage to follow me if I was invisible?” Ridley asked.

  “I don’t know. I just sort of … sensed you.

  “Oh. Weird.” She frowned
, remembering the feeling of someone behind her a minute ago. “I think I noticed something like that too. Anyway, let me just check …” She darted ahead to look into the next room. It was windowless, and through the open doorway on the other side was another bare corridor. “Oh come on. How big is this place? I wish they at least had some signs up. I don’t know where they keep other prisoners, or where the exit is, or—”

  A deep boom shuddered through the building, rattling the door on its hinges. “What was that?” Malachi asked, whipping around to look behind him.

  “Maybe we should go that way,” Ridley said, taking a step past him.

  “You want to go toward the source of the bang?”

  “If it’s the kind of explosion that broke through a wall, then maybe we can get out that way.” And once she was out, she could get a better sense of the building’s layout. Then she could come back inside and find Dad.

  “What if it’s the kind of explosion that turns into a great big fire and kills people?”

  “We’re elementals, Malachi. Fire doesn’t kill us.”

  Malachi adjusted his grip beneath Callie’s knees. “Okay, you have a point.”

  “But it might kill my dad, if he’s anywhere near it.” Ridley’s stomach churned at the thought. “So I’m heading that way.”

  Malachi sighed. “Fine, let’s go toward the bang.”

  Within the next heartbeat, they’d both vanished. Ridley rushed along another empty corridor with Malachi just behind her. Not that she could see him, but she sensed there was someone there, occupying the space.

  She wondered at the fact that they hadn’t come across a single person since leaving the corridor with the unconscious mayor. Perhaps Eric hadn’t been lying when he said this building was far out in the wastelands. It would make sense, then, that there weren’t too many people here.

  She swerved around a corner—and finally found something that wasn’t a plain room or passageway. She slowed and glided past three rooms, each with a large, clear window through which one could observe whatever happened inside. There were still no people anywhere, but the contents of the rooms were enough to send a shiver through Ridley’s invisible body: Tables with operating equipment. Beds with leathers straps and buckles—restraints—hanging from the sides.

  She felt the floor beneath her feet and realized, with only a vague sense of concern, that she’d completely lost hold of her focus and was now visible. She stepped slowly past the third room and saw that the next one—with a glass door and a glass wall providing a complete view of the interior—was a laboratory. Was this where they made their arxium gas and spray? So they could experiment with immobilizing and killing elementals? It made her heart hammer against her ribcage and her blood burn like—

  Infernos that cleanse lands.

  Unbidden, Grandpa’s words rose to her mind. I could be the kind of fire that consumes this place, she thought. It was a wild and terrifying thought. She’d always avoided fire because of how volatile it could be. She’d reminded Malachi that it couldn’t kill them, and yet she’d always been afraid of it.

  “Ridley, come on!” She flinched, her head jerking toward the voice. Malachi was visible too, still holding Callie in his arms. Perhaps he’d sensed Ridley was no longer behind him and had come back.

  “How can you stand to look at this?” She jabbed her hand toward the laboratory while somewhere nearby, another boom resounded. “This is where they concoct evil substances meant to harm and kill us. And did you see those beds back there? They experiment on people here.”

  “I can’t stand to look at it,” Malachi said, “which is why I’m trying to find a way out of here. Do you want me to leave you behind? Or do you want to find your dad and get out of this place?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ridley muttered. She moved toward him, becoming air in an instant. Together, they rushed away from the horrors behind them and swooped down a set of stairs. The sounds of fighting—shouts, gunshots, explosions—grew louder.

  And then right there, at the bottom of the stairs, they found the source of all the commotion. Ahead of them was an enclosed courtyard covered by a glass ceiling. At least, Ridley assumed it had been enclosed before something blasted a hole through one of the walls and smashed through part of the ceiling. Broken pot plants and scattered soil littered the mosaic tiled floor, while flashes of magic darted across the courtyard. She counted five people: a man lying prone on the floor, two women with guns, and two—

  Archer! And Dad! She almost shouted their names before remembering she was concealed by air. She darted around the edge of the courtyard, her eyes glued to both of them. They were using magic—Archer included—their hands and arms sweeping through the air and moving in rapid patterns before shoving the magic away. Fireballs, sharpened stones, a thick, flat piece of metal that deflected bullets. They performed conjuration after conjuration that Ridley had never seen before. Half the courtyard was destroyed, and yet the two women with guns had managed to survive so far.

  In a rush of wind, Ridley spun away from the wall. She twirled faster and faster, almost letting go completely, and yet not quite trusting the elemental magic around her. If it whipped up a sudden hurricane, would Dad and Archer survive? So she spun herself into a small tornado and plunged past the two women. Everything became a confusing blur. By the time she’d slowed enough to figure out what was going on, the two women were down, and Archer was tying something around the one’s hands while Malachi raced toward the other.

  “Dad!” Ridley called out in a breathless gasp as she landed and staggered forward a few steps before regaining her balance. Her father’s arms caught her and pulled her tightly against him. “How did you get away from them?” she asked.

  “Archer found me. What happened to you guys? Is Callie okay?”

  Ridley’s eyes darted about behind Dad until she spotted Callie, lying on the floor beside an overturned fern. “There was an explosion, and I think she hit her head against a wall. I hope she’s okay. It was that conjuration you did yesterday with the fireballs. Malachi knew how to do it.”

  “Oh, yes, I taught him last night after the rest of you went to bed.”

  “Ridley!”

  Ridley stepped out of her father’s embrace as Archer called her name. She’d barely taken a step before he was right in front of her. “I’m so, so sorry I left you,” he said as he swept her into his arms. “I was on the wrong side of the hotel, keeping watch, and by the time I got back, it was too late.”

  “It’s okay,” she answered as her arms wrapped tightly around him. She let her eyes slide shut as she breathed him in for a moment—dust and sweat and hotel shampoo. Then she stepped back and saw smeared blood behind his ear and down the side of his neck, along with a nasty gash. “You made quite a mess with your AI2,” she said with raised eyebrows.

  “Yeah, well, I was desperate. I had to get the damn thing out and there was no time to be neat and tidy.” He looked back over his shoulder at Malachi, who’d just finished tying the second woman’s wrists with shoelaces. “After I got in, I found your father quite quickly.” He faced Ridley again. “We were looking for you, and even though there don’t seem to be many people around, those three found us and chased us back this way.”

  “We’ve seen a few others,” Malachi said, walking toward Callie. “Including the mayor. We should get out of here quickly.”

  “Yes,” Dad said. “Then we can take a closer look at Callie.”

  They hurried across the courtyard, and as they climbed through the hole in the wall, Ridley looked at Archer and asked, “Did you do this?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t find a way in, and I got impatient. I removed my AI2 and decided to just blast my way in. I wasn’t exactly concerned about being covert if it meant I might be too late to get you guys out.”

  Ridley looked forward as she stepped beyond the boundary of the Shadow Society’s base. Eric had told the truth about it being out in the wastelands, but it wasn’t as far from Lumina City as Ri
dley expected. Beyond the crumbling overgrown ruins, she could see tall buildings in the distance, glittering in the few rays of morning sun that peeked through the clouds. A shadow shifted over her, and she glanced up quickly, her heart beating faster. But it wasn’t a threat. It was a large metallic panel, one of several floating a short distance above the building. Presumably these panels were the same as the arxium ones that hovered high above Lumina City. Makes sense, Ridley thought. The mayor would want to keep himself and his base safe from the unpredictable magic out here.

  “Okay, I’m doing the air thing,” Malachi called back to Ridley. “We need to get far away from here.”

  “Yes, okay,” Ridley said, but something drew her gaze back toward the building. She thought of the laboratory, and those rooms with the operating equipment. Images of people tied up on beds flashed through her mind. “I have to go back,” she murmured.

  “What was that?” Archer asked.

  “Get far away from the building, okay? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Wait, what are you—”

  “We can’t leave this place standing, Archer.”

  “Ridley—” His hand flashed out to grab her arm, but she’d already moved beyond his reach.

  “I won’t be long!” she shouted as she took off. She ran, ignoring Archer’s voice, Dad’s voice. She breathed as evenly as possible, telling herself to relax. It’ll be okay. I don’t have to be in control. I don’t want to be in control. I want to be a racing wildfire. A raging inferno. I want to bring the entire place down.

  She dove forward, and by the time she hit the ground, she was fire. She sensed the heat, and yet she didn’t burn. She became the flames, licking, leaping, racing across the courtyard. Let go, let go, she told herself. And then, just like with the air, she felt herself drifting away, spreading out, until she was in every part of every flame that raced through the Shadow Society’s base. She sensed concrete, glass, chemicals, arxium—which she instinctively recoiled from—and people. Shadow Society members. Those who were convinced they needed to eradicate her kind from the world. She blazed further and further until sensing she’d reached the limits of the building. The flames grew, the heat intensified, and Ridley felt the crack and shudder of the structure as it began to come apart.