by Azalea Ellis
A crimson wedge formed below us, a kind of simple glider stabilizing our descent.
Torliam's Skill rushed around below it, pushing upward to give us lift again, and Birch's yowl continued on, the wind turned to our aid.
We weren't going to fall to our deaths.
I wrenched my arm out from under Sam’s bike, hoping the bone wasn’t broken, and threw myself toward the front of the glider, which was now rushing toward the side of the faceted, glasslike wall instead of the roof. We were about to careen uncontrollably into the side of a building for the second time in two days.
Like before, I lashed out with Chaos, drilling into the wall. Chunks of clear material blasted outward at the force, but we were moving too fast for me to drill all the way through.
The nose of the glider slammed into the jagged remains of the wall and crumpled like aluminum, dissolving from the tip backward.
The force of Torliam's protective power and the impact from the glider, along with another desperate surge of Chaos, finally broke through.
We hurtled forward, stabilized only by the remainder of Torliam's Skill and a few wisps of red blood. Globules of water from the decorative waterfall outside and chunks of broken glass flew with us, fracturing the sunlight. I watched as if in slow motion as the sunlight played through the glass shards and across the surface of the pool that fed the waterfalls below us, which sparkled like a living diamond.
We slammed into the surface of water with enough force to knock half the air out of me and whip me around like a tossed stone. Water crashed up and outward from the impact of both our bikes and us, then swept back in on us, pushing us further down. We sank, buffeted by the currents as the motors fed water up from below and the vacuum pulled it down from above.
I regained my bearings with the help of Wraith, pushing it sluggishly through the water, hoping against all odds that Torliam had managed to protect everyone with his wonderful Skill, and that the rest of the team was alright.
Zed's helmet had cracked, and blood mixed with the water near his head. His limbs moved weakly.
Jacky had Chanelle tucked under one arm and was shooting through the water like a superhero, the buoyancy combining with her Gravitational Autonomy Skill’s effect.
Sam had ahold of the back of Adam's shirt, and was dragging him upward.
Adam trailed along limply, blood from his arms seeping into the water.
Gregor had transformed with his Shadow Skill and was floating through the water like a slow-moving ghost, catching one of the currents to push his ephemeral body upward.
Torliam pushed out the glowing blue mist of his Skill yet again, reaching out to Kris and Gregor and helping to force them upward as he swam in my direction.
I swam to Zed and grabbed him by the shirt with my good arm, then thrust him upward, hoping to help him get his head above water till we could drag him out of the pool.
I grabbed the edge of the pool with my aching left arm and heaved Zed upward with the other, then dragged myself out of the water, my claws scrabbling at the tile floor for purchase.
Zed fumbled with his helmet and ripped it off, coughing out water.
I placed my hand on the back of his neck and forced my awareness through the barrier of his skin, searching for injuries. He was a little bruised, had breathed in a little water, and had a slice on his forehead that had probably happened when the visor broke off from his helmet, but seemed otherwise unharmed.
I let out a sigh of relief, blinking my burning eyes against the chlorine in the water as I climbed to my hands and knees.
Birch bounded over to me, only his paws wet, as he had somehow escaped being plunged into the pool.
I ripped off my helmet and pushed my hair away from my face, stilling as I looked up into the shocked face of a stranger.
My eyes traveled up from the woman’s impractical heeled shoes, to the microphone held in her hand, to the auto-recording orb floating over her shoulder, sporting the logo of a local news team. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said aloud.
She'd been staring at us, her eyes trailing over the odd group as we struggled out of the water. At my words, her gaze turned to me. "It's you," she said.
I threw a glance toward the skyrail and the buildings beyond it before speaking. "We are being chased by aliens," I said. "I doubt they're friendly, and I doubt they're going to care if you get squished as collateral damage. We can't protect you. Run away if you want to live."
She stood still, her arm slowly stretching out to hold the microphone in my direction. Was she in shock?
I turned to the hole in the wall we'd created, pushing Wraith out through the open air.
Zed stepped forward and slapped her lightly across the face. "Run away!" he snapped. "They're coming!"
She lifted a hand to her face, looked at the remains of the wall, and turned, clattering away on her high heels with surprising speed.
I watched as a couple of the Estreyans came into view, one moving along the skyrail, and one atop the roof of a building.
Torliam streamed water as he climbed up beside me, looking like Poseidon. “Some of them may be warriors from the downed ships. I doubt they all perished due to a small crash like that, and it’s equally doubtful that NIX’s warriors were able to kill them off before the reinforcements arrived.”
“Did they come to get revenge on us for crashing their ship?" Gregor muttered, sidling closer to me and squinting out into the distance.
"We've got to go," I said.
Jacky coughed hard, clearing water from her lungs. “The bikes aren’t gonna run now that we drowned them. How are we gonna get away?”
I hesitated. “It’s better without them, anyway. The Estreyans won’t be able to use Perception to follow us by sound later. I’m hoping, if we can just erase any sign of a trail, we can lose them. Can everyone still run?”
Adam was panting on the ground, but the wounds on his arms were healing under Sam's touch. He reached into his belt and pulled out one of the few remaining ink cartridges to form the familiar harness and octopus-spider legs, lifting himself up. "I can't do much more," he said. "I've got maybe fifteen minutes of simple use of my Animus Skill left, and then I'm going to pass out."
"If that," Sam said, shaking his head. "He lost a good amount of blood with that stunt."
"You're welcome," Adam grunted. "Since that stunt just saved everyone's lives."
I clenched my jaw. He was right. If not for him, it's likely everyone except for maybe Torliam and Birch would have just died, splattered like little bugs on the ground. "You did great," I said. "My plan doesn't need you to do anything else. Just stay with us a little while longer." I started running, and the others followed.
Another sweep of Torliam's Skill stripped the water from us and our clothes. "The water would leave a trail," he said.
I nodded gratefully, too preoccupied to respond verbally.
My Wraith Skill quickly searched the mall for what we needed, then I returned it to trying to keep track of our pursuers.
The Estreyans that had come into view of the building had moved, one climbing down their building with frightening speed, the other moving into the distance, probably to the nearest skylift. I couldn't sense the others yet, but I knew they must still be after us. Maybe circling around to enclose the mall.
The shop I wanted, a winter sports store, was closed, the glass doors reinforced by a metal grate. A surge of twisting Chaos drilled forward, dark tendrils breaking right through with a crash of glass and screaming metal, which left a hole for us to duck through.
"Get into the warmest clothes you can find," I said, tearing a pair of thick snow pants off one of the racks.
Zed looked to me, his eyebrows raised in a silent question.
I nodded.
"Make sure you get gloves and hats, too," he said. "However cold you think we're about to be, multiply that by three and then add a weird depression that makes you just want to lie down and die."
"We're going through
the Veil?" Gregor said, pulling a furred cap down over his ears.
"Yes," I said, words rushing out as I stuffed gloves into my pockets and ran to grab some glow sticks and heavy duty hand-warmers. "But we have to hurry. They're almost here, right outside the building." Even as I spoke, I heard the faint sounds of destruction down below, as our pursuers broke through one of the windows on the ground floor, moving fast.
Torliam ripped a pack of thermal blankets out of a box from the back of the store. Kris' little wooden puppet helped her to lace snow boots on over her own shoes.
Torliam was too big to fit into any of the clothing, but he'd slipped a heavy sleeping back over himself and ripped arm and head holes through the sides and bottom.
Zed dug his hands into the air and opened a rip. He waved us through. "Go, go, go!"
Sam jumped through with Chanelle, followed by Jacky and the kids.
“Hurry!” I urged, as an Estreyan rushed up the stairs, floor after floor, while other points of power converged around the building down below, cutting off any normal escape routes.
I watched as the others went through, then leapt through myself as the closest Estreyan burst out of the stairwell less than fifty feet away.
Just as they blurred into view through the hole in the shop’s front door, Zed closed the portal, cutting us off from the normal world and our pursuers.
As before, the cold was aggressively biting, and despite the lack of sun or manmade light source in the room, a tepid grey light washed everything out. The front glass doors and metal grate in the shop were both gone, and half the inventory had disappeared. “If we can get far enough away, we should be able to lose them,” I said, already moving.
I picked Gregor up, setting him atop my shoulders so his little legs wouldn’t slow us down, and Jacky did the same for Kris.
“Urgh,” Chanelle said, sidling closer to Torliam. “Why is it so cold?”
“We’re in my Skill,” Zed said, the least affected by the Other Place out of all of us.
Torliam stooped down and picked Chanelle up, carrying her like a princess.
Birch whined and jumped into Sam’s arms, wriggling frantically to get inside the boy’s thermal suit.
“So what happened?" Jacky said, at the same time as Zed asked, "Why did we suddenly need to escape?”
Sam ducked his head till half his face disappeared in Birch’s fur. "Kilburn's dead."
Adam looked at me. Then he looked at Chanelle. "You didn't kill him," he said, looking back at me.
I grimaced. In some ways, it would have been better if it were me. "No. Chanelle attacked him."
Sam let out a deep sigh, the air hissing between his clenched teeth as we ran down the emergency stairs. "I know we all hated him, but he may have been a spark of hope for humanity, and a way for us to buy time for ourselves."
Gregor scoffed. "So she should have kept him alive for the greater good? You can't trust someone like him to do the right thing. Chanelle may have just saved the world."
"She didn't kill him on purpose. At least not…” I trailed off as we came to the bottom of the staircase and found the emergency exit door. It was one of the few still in place on this side of reality. I slammed it open, and we spilled into the street, where the ash-like flakes of the Other Place floated down, dissolving as soon as they touched anything.
Chanelle’s face was full of despair, and her usually rosy cheeks had gone pale. “The Sickness pushed me to it. I’m losing my sense of self, and it wants things to destroy.”
Sam reached over and grabbed Chanelle’s hand as we ran, squeezing for a moment before letting go. “Just hold on a little longer,” he said.
“We need to hurry,” Jacky said. “Look at them.”
Gregor's eyes were drooping, and Kris's lips were blue, frost crusting in her eyelashes. "I'm fine," she murmured, but her eyes were vacant, and she sounded half drunk.
Chanelle was taking short, rapid breaths and her teeth chattered, even as her eyes rolled back in her head, the Other Place draining her fragile body of heat and energy.
Torliam jostled her and smacked lightly at her face, but though her eyelids fluttered, they didn’t open.
I pinched Gregor’s thigh, and he gasped. His fists dug into my hair, grabbing to stabilize himself.
Jacky imitated me, and though Kris protested, she was able to enunciate her words this time around.
We made it quite a few blocks away before it got too dangerous to continue, and managed to stumble into an old office building. We moved to one of the interior offices on the ground floor, adjacent to both a room with a large window and the stairwell in case we needed to escape. We tumbled back out into the normal world, shockingly bright and warm.
YOUR RESILIENCE HAS INCREASED!
YOUR CHARISMA HAS INCREASED!
Chanelle’s cheeks quickly regained their rosy hue and her breathing returned to normal, but even as she opened her eyes they lost their lucidity, and she stared vacantly around, then started nibbling at her knuckles.
After a minute, I went out to the hallway and leaned against the wall, hoping the others wouldn’t notice the tremors in my fingers and the flutter of my eyelids. I tilted my head back and bit the inside of my lip, letting the pain increase till it distracted my brain from how tired and fragile I felt.
At that point, I thought back on what had just happened, and realized I should have simply killed Vaughn. He’d already been an enemy and resented us, but now he would hate us. Something subconscious, maybe guilt, had kept me from considering it, though, and now it was too late.
Once my hands had stopped shaking, I reentered the large room, swinging off my pack and setting it in the corner.
Torliam crouched next to Chanelle, holding her hands within his own. Her eyes had gone vacant once again. Blue mist wafted out between his fingers, spreading into the lines in her palms and digging underneath her nails. It spread to her shirt, then her face and hair, and where it went, the remnants of blood disappeared.
He took the flask of water from her hip and uncapped it so she could drink, and then settled down beside her, back against the wall.
I walked over and slid down next to him. "How long do we have?" Despite the fact she was right beside me, I knew she wasn’t aware of our conversation and wouldn’t remember it when she became lucid again.
He understood what I meant. "It progresses faster, once the symptoms begin to show like this. However, every person is different, and even the symptoms will vary slightly. Perhaps two or three Earth moons remain for Chanelle. In the case of the children, I do not know. Longer than that."
I nodded. "Any other information out of your Tracker Skill yet?"
He looked down at his hands. "North. That is all I know." We were silent for a moment, and I watched as our other teammates shot the three of us worried looks from across the room.
"This is different from the Sickness of my sister," he said.
I tilted my head slightly to look at him.
"There was nothing we could do. My mother called healers from all across the land, pushed even more funding into research than she had before. She called in favors, indebted herself to other bloodlines. We tried everything. Even so, even though I refused to give up hope until the end, I knew. We all knew that Tonila would die, and that along the way she would turn into something monstrous. She would not be any different from the myriad of others who had gone before her. We knew that, one day, it would very likely be us following her to her fate. I kept searching, even after she was gone, because I hated the Sickness enough to burn my life away fighting against it." He touched the crystal mark on the back of his hand almost wonderingly, and then looked up at me. "This is different. There is hope. There is hope for all of us."
I swallowed against the lump in my throat and leaned my head backward.
After a few minutes, Jacky and I used plastine rope to tie Chanelle loosely to one of the desks that was bolted into the floor. Like an animal on a leash. Guilt burned in my throat, b
ut I swallowed that down, too.
"What are the chances that this is actually gonna work?" Jacky said.
I examined the loose harness around Chanelle's torso and the bolts securing the table to the floor. "She could probably get free, if she was willing to hurt herself to do so," I said. "But it'll slow her down, give us time to respond. Honestly, I almost hope she just sleeps or stays in the fugue state. If she becomes lucid and sees herself like this, realizes what we had to do… It'll hurt her."
Jacky shook her head. "No. I mean… Are we actually gonna be able to fix her? Save her, and the kiddos?" She secured the last knot and tugged on it, then stood and looked up at me. "Are you just trying to give us hope?"
I looked down into her dark eyes. "I need hope just as much as anyone. I don't know what we're going to find. But I think Torliam's Skill is real. And even if I have to crush this Champion into the ground to get him to help us, or pull him up from the depths of hell, I'm going to. Because I have to. I can't let the Sickness win."
"And you don't lose, right?" she frowned at me, hands clenched into fists.
"I won't lose. But I'm probably going to need some help." I quirked one side of my mouth up wryly.
Her mouth slowly stretched into a grin. "Good thing I'm here to protect you, then." She punched me in the arm, and I didn't even regret the bruise that would surely form there. My Resilience levels could deal with it in a few hours, anyway.
Chapter 21
I looked up and saw Night, this world’s defeat.
— Ilium Troia
We decided to stay hidden until night and escape from the city under cover of darkness. Sam tended to our wounds, partially healing the arm that had been injured by his bike. When he was finished, it was still tender, but it didn't throb and ache every time I moved it, and leaving some of the healing for our own bodies to do helped increase our Resilience and conserve his limited healing ability.