On the scaffold, Matteo laughed, turning towards Arial, who was still on the platform. She rose immediately to her feet, screaming as she threw herself at him, her fists a flurry of motion.
“Why?!” she screamed between the pummeling. “Why? Why?”
But fury proved a poor match for Matteo’s training, and he blocked each blow easily, absorbing one in the chest as he threw a quick jab. His fist caught her square across the jaw, her head whipping back as she stumbled, falling so she was half off the scaffold. From my position, I couldn’t tell if she was still conscious, and as he stepped towards her, preparing a nasty kick to her ribcage, I started running towards the base. I’d catch Arial first. I’d kill him after.
But I never had the chance.
Matteo swept his gaze around to each of us before nodding to Arial and the broken Francesca, who Slugger now crouched over.
“Overcome!” he yelled, jabbing a fist in the air, winding up his foot for the kick. “Overcome, and you’re the next Specials to fall. Over—”
Before he could finish his sentence, a flash of sparkling crystal collided with him, buckling his back and throwing him off the scaffold. Together, the two bodies twisted in the air, one now half diamond and half man, the other a mess of scrapes and tattoos. They turned once, twice, and landed with a thud on the obsidian, Matteo on the bottom to absorb the impact and Blake on the top.
Blake’s left arm hung broken as he punched Matteo’s face with his right. And with each blow, more crystal returned to cover his skin, more of his power returning as Matteo’s influence faltered. The punches turned to stabs of razor sharp diamond knives.
Matteo’s face and clothes shredded with no resistance. After two strikes from Blake, he was unrecognizable. After three, Blake’s fingers started shearing through bone. And by four, I’d turned away, unable to watch each landing blow. Blake an animal, and Matteo far, far beyond dead.
Slugger raced over to Francesca as Arial stirred, her body sliding off the side of the scaffold and fluttering down as she held her face in her hands. She worked her jaw, and I caught her as she reached the ground, setting her on her feet. I ran my fingers over her face, checking for broken bones, her eyes unable to meet mine as she turned away from Francesca.
“I’ll be fine,” Arial said before I could speak, pulling away, choking out the words. At the far end of the arena, I saw the police officers finally entering, skirting cautiously around the edge, throwing up forcefields that covered nearly the entire hole of where the Titan had arrived.
Slugger pulled up next to me, and for the first time since I had met him, he seemed at a loss of what to say. Shell shocked, and when he spoke, it came out slow and flat.
“Oi, SC, she’s not alive. No breathing, no heartrate.” He gestured back to Francesca, then to Blake and Matteo’s remains. “We need to get out of here before her father wakes up and sees what happened.”
“And the rest of the choir?” I asked, looking at the faces above.
“There will be more police than them here in minutes. Let them handle it. We won’t be able to pass them through the portal in time. But we don’t want to get caught here.”
“We failed,” whispered Arial. “We completely failed.”
“And unless we also want to be in Italian jail, we need to leave that behind. Let’s go home,” Slugger said, and took our hands, pulling us towards the exit, Lilac following with her ears pressed down over her head.
“There’s nothing left for us here.”
Chapter 69
“I told you not to get involved.” Roland enunciated each word, steel backing each word. I sat alone in his office, the lone fluorescent bulb the lone light in the building. It was three in the morning, as seemed to be routine with Roland, and the late hours weighed heavy on my shoulders. But not as heavy as the events over the last few days.
I remembered Blake’s screams behind us as we fled, then Arial lifting us back to the portal as Slugger decreased our weight.
“This is your fault!” Blake shouted, his diamond finger covered in blood as he pointed from the arena floor. “We had this handled! The fallout will be on your head, until I take that from you too! I’m coming, SC. I’m coming for you. I won’t sleep until I find you, until you’re in a million tiny pieces!”
I remembered sealing the portal behind me of Peregrine’s machine, the smoke, obsidian, and rubble still visible until it turned to static. The smell managed to leak into the subway before it closed, replacing musk with an acridity that followed us even as we walked away. We’d traveled back in silence, all knowing the routine, our packs singed from where Slugger had simply thrown them back through the portal in his haste. At least he’d had the foresight to make them lighter, or I suspected they would have turned into fireballs on reentry.
We’d snuck into the back end of the tunnel before my mother realized we had returned, taking the time to meet together. Sitting on the unused subway tracks, with Arial every so often jerking up to peer down the track as if she saw a train’s light coming where there was nothing but a dead end.
“I don’t see what we have to discuss,” she said, hollow, folding her arms across her chest as we waited for the first person to talk. “We lost. What else is there to it? I, I didn’t stop him. I knew Matteo’s goal and I didn’t stop him.”
She hid her eyes, though I knew the tears were coming. I responded before she had a chance to leave.
“It’s not our fault,” I said. “We can’t shove the blame around for this. We inherited a mess, and we did our best with it.”
“We’re still alive,” said Lucio. “Got that going for us.”
“Oi, that’s rubbish. Gibberish! Of course we’re to blame!” interjected Slugger, standing up before us and straddling the tracks, snapping to attention.
“Slugger, I don’t think—” I started, but he interrupted, waving it away with a flurry of his hands.
“Like I said, gibberish. Because you know what? We didn’t damn lose. He put up three fingers and ticked them off, his words coming rapidly and gaining strength with each passing second. “One. We saved the first lass, Amelia! Our original purpose, eh? Not just her, but how many others? I give us outstanding marks there.”
“And we let Francesca die,” Arial said, tracing a hand through the dirt, not seeming to care if it tracked onto her sleeve.
“Yes, we let her die. How many did we let live? That’s point two in this here lecture. We stopped a Titan. A Titan! Hell, we didn’t even know those baddies existed, and we took him on. Without us, without Lucio’s—dare I say it—quick thinking to get the choir assembled and ready, Dacil would have rampaged ‘til Rome became Pompeii. So that’s the choir, plus one city we got going for us.”
“He still transformed,” Arial said. “Didn’t you see the wreckage?”
Slugger squatted down next to her, coming eye to eye. “And you’ve got to stop focusing on the innings and start thinkin about the game. They’re gonna score some home runs. But we’ll damn well make them try hard for it. And now, point three. What would have happened if we never showed up, eh? Remember that other Titan at the dinner, that CEO, Renalt? There would have been two rampaging around the city. You can’t just judge us on whether anyone died, or if anything bad happened. Bad things happen all the damn time. We ain’t going to stop that. No one is. But we sure as Hell will make em a whole lot less bad, won’t we?”
The group hesitated, teetering on the edge of indecision, until I stood next to Slugger.
“He’s right,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We can’t judge ourselves for what the Instructors or Litious do.” I reached out to take Slugger’s hand and pulled him up from where he still crouched. Then Ennia, who still had a habit of sitting just outside the group, stood, joined by Lucio. But Arial continued looking out in space, her expression blank, and I spoke again, my words as much for myself as for her.
“Point is, if we give up now, there’s a lot worse that’s going to happen. Remember what Lynns said? H
e didn’t want to give us any more aid, because he knew that we’d need more after. More is coming. This is only the beginning, the start. And now it’s out in the open, the Instructors and the Litious can’t be ignored. This wasn’t an attack on a small academy or the middle of the Amazon. This was Rome! Everyone is going to notice. And we’ll be the ones to make the difference. All of us.”
Arial raised her eyes slowly, and I extended my hand, now speaking just to her.
“Arial, if every doctor stopped after their first patient died, how many would be left? We have to count who we save. Not who we lose.”
I waited, palm upwards, watching her think, watching her fight the guilt that she had known all her life transform into something new. Latching on to a fresh target. She hesitated, then nodded, fierce determination lighting her brown eyes, taking my hand with a strong grip. In the dim light of the tunnel, I could see the bruise that covered the left side of her face, making me tremble with rage, despite knowing many more were to come. And that Matteo had met his end.
But now, back at Roland’s office, he repeated the sentence, adding even more weight behind the words.
“I told you not to interfere.”
“Well, we did,” I answered stubbornly, squaring my shoulders to match his, and spoke the words that I had now come to believe. “And we sure as hell won.”
Then I told him everything since we had last left his office as he absorbed the information, and the lines of worry deepened across his temple.
Chapter 70
“That tape I showed you of Siri, she wasn’t talking about Silver Tongues then, was she?” asked Roland, gesturing to his computer as the words she had shouted from her jail cell echoed in my memory.
How many are missing now? How many have disappeared? They’re all like me, every one of them. But how you’ll wish you had me. See if you can contain them.
“No,” I answered. “Much worse. Titans that she realized would start coming free of the mental chains that the Instructors kept on them, through her.”
“Right. And how many of them do you think there are?” he pressed, tapping on his badge.
“Lynns seemed to think a dozen, but didn’t sound that confident. For someone who knows so much, he lets on very little. But the problem, Roland, isn’t how many there are. It’s where they are.”
My mind flitted back to after our meeting in the tunnel, when the first thing we had done was turn on the news. After greeting us, my mother immediately departed to pick up enough food for dinner, flustered that we had arrived without warning. We’d arrived back so quickly that news of Rome was just starting to filter into our channels, but beyond that, there were other stories that posed far more serious threats in my thoughts than they would have only days before.
Hurricanes that seemed to be striking the coasts at an alarming rate, befuddling the meteorologists. Natural? I wondered. Or the work of some Titan we don’t yet know, drawing them in to land or hurling them out from sea?
Fires that rampaged across the west, consuming entire forests and forcing evacuations. Governments bickering, strokes of unprecedented luck as the lottery surged to its highest years and a hundred separate individuals won, harvests of grapes so high that they threatened to undermine the entire industry.
Which of these were real, but simply outliers, unlikely events? And which of these were far more sinister, Titans breaking their chains, becoming the forces of nature that Lynns had warned us about?
Then the television flickered, surveying the scene of Rome, reporters dashing to interview tourists and citizens among the wreckage. All had fled beyond the caution tape barrier that the police erected, and in the background, I could just see the pillar where Francesca’s father had fallen unconscious, a firetruck’s ladder leading up to the barren top. In moments, they found a man willing to talk, identifying him as a tourist from America, his face covered with ash, his arms hidden behind long sleeves despite the heat.
But even through the ash, I could just barely make out the tattoos on his familiar face.
“A man did this!” Divi cried, pointing up and down the melted street before the reporter could talk. She paused, taken aback by his statement, then prompted with her own question.
“Early reports of seismic activity, similar to that which racked the Remus opera house—”
“No,” stated Divi, his voice flat, maneuvering himself in front of the microphone. “A man, one man, I saw it with my own eyes. And so did others.” He gestured behind him, to where many were being treated by ambulances.
The reporter laughed nervously, flicking a spot of ash off the head of the microphone.
“Perhaps a troop of men, but only one? I’m afraid that’s, well, that’s outlandish. Impossible. Can you clarify, sir?”
“Only one!” said Divi, raising a warning finger, his face grave. “One man had the power to do this, to destroy the entire city before he was stopped. Think about what would happen if they hadn’t stopped him? How many would have died, how many children? These people, they’re amongst you. Hiding!”
“I think that’s enough,” said the reporter, pulling away the microphone, but Divi took it before she could move far enough away, speaking into it rapidly.
“Don’t think that this will be the last incident. There’s something they aren’t telling us, those that register Specials. None of us are safe! None of us will be safe until they are overcome! Change is coming. More disasters are on the way! It’s us or them, and we will prevail. We will overcome, no matter the sacrifice.”
The reporter pulled her arm back, and a security officer moved forwards to sperate Divi. But he turned away on his own, walking away toward the coliseum to a group waiting for him under the ledge of a small restaurant. As the flustered reporter spoke to another tourist, he still showed in the back of the frame—each of them holding a cup and turning to face the coliseum. Stone faced, their attention focused on the coliseum, and as one they dumped the contents onto the ground, letting it drain slowly, the red wine looking like blood in the distance, several of their tattoos visible. Then they departed, leaving the reporter behind as she fought for facts she would never find.
Back in Roland’s office, he drummed his fingers on his desk as we neared the end of our discussion, sighing.
“So we don’t know how many Titans there are. We don’t know who they are. And we don’t know what they are capable of,” he said with a grimace.
“We know they’re at least capable of destroying a city, each,” I said. “And if we don’t find the answer to those questions, I expect we can see that happen. Roland, you have to find those answers for us. You know who might be involved.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But they’ll come sniffing soon enough. Not just them, but others as well—the government will be all over this one. This isn’t small anymore, SC. This isn’t contained—the Instructors created a plan, set the trap to spring, and it went off at the wrong moment. This is uncontrollable, beyond us. This has exploded to international proportions.”
“Then it’s time that we call in reinforcements,” I answered, standing to leave and looking to his computer, where the video of Siri rested on the hard drive. “We’ll be in touch, Roland. We need answers. And we’re not just going to sit back and watch the Instructors’ mistakes ruin our world.”
Chapter 71
The official report came one week after as Ennia, Lucio, Slugger, and I tuned in to the news. It received primetime attention as millions joined us, the destruction of Rome a major talking point all the way in the States over the last few days. Even my mother mentioned it over dinner, expressing disappointment she’d never seen the coliseum before the damage. Together, the world waited eagerly to hear the cause of the damages, estimated at several billion dollars, some of them not even able to be contained in price. Several monuments were destroyed, pieces of history that would never be repaired now that they were melted away, brought together in a single mass of obsidian never be separated again. Even by the hands o
f the most talented Specials.
The broadcast began with several aerial shots at the coliseum, with none able to explain the center pallor or why the destruction ended such a location. Then the cameras flickered to a podium, one that the Dacil himself stood behind. Subtitles filled the bottom of the screen as he spoke, while an audience filled the back, their expressions somber as he fulfilled his duty as senator.
“After an in-depth investigation to the cause of this incident,” he said as countless microphones pressed in front of him. “We have determined that this was no natural incident. Rather, this was an attack on Rome itself, led by none other than terrorists. We have every reason to suspect a foreign influence is attempting to spark fear in our country, to destabilize our way of life.”
His right hand shook and a bead of sweat formed on his temple, but other than that, there was no indication that he had been the cause of the damage. That he had escaped the battle entirely unscathed, leaving behind only a mass of wreckage. He cleared his throat then continued.
“Rest assured we're searching for those responsible. As you certainly know, I have a personal stake in the matter. My, my own daughter was killed by these people, these vile, evil people.”
He paused to bow his head, clenching the podium, fury in his eyes when he looked back at the camera once more, the tears real.
“I will not rest until they're found and punished. Should this be a conspiracy by a foreign government, they will feel our full wrath. Know they attack to destroy who we are, our art, our culture, and worst of all, our loved ones. Our response would be a full-on war without mercy.
“There is little that can be restored. What can be corrected will of course be preserved as we always have with our history, our rich history now that has been stolen. But for that which be cannot be repaired, we are seeking suggestions. Ways to build what we now call the New Roman Street, to become even greater than before. So whoever did this knows that we will not be trampled upon and will not be crushed. That we will rise against them.
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