by Marc Zicree
“You again. You’re annoying. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Protection. Isn’t that why you’ve enslaved the flares… and the musicians?” Goldie pressed.
“There are no slaves here. The flares, as you call them, are my guests. The musicians… are in protective custody.” “Why?” I asked.
“Their music is dangerous—to themselves and to others. Surely you’ve realized that. You’ve seen what Enid’s music does. It not only depletes him, it bends things. Reshapes them. Makes them hideous. I don’t like hideous things.” He rolled a glance toward Howard, who bared his teeth. “I bring the musicians here and I channel their abilities. So they can’t hurt themselves or anyone else. A noble cause, don’t you “You use them to imprison the flares,” Goldie accused.
I put a hand on his arm and squeezed, my eyes on Primal.
“The music only feeds back because of the contract.” Primal’s perfect head moved slowly back and forth. “Because of the Source.”
“No. The Source gave the music power; the contract made it dangerous.”
For the first time, Primal’s lips moved, showing teeth that might have been made of diamonds. “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”
I ignored the question. “No one’s going to cut a deal with you.”
“Oh, Howard will. Howard’s always ready to make a deal. And Howard wants what’s best for his client… and for himself. He’ll convince Enid to stay under contract.”
“Fuck you,” said Howard, then turned and shuffled toward the door.
“You haven’t heard what I’m offering you in return.”
Howard wheeled, beating at his chest with balled fists. “Can you take this back? Make me human? You can’t do that. Nobody can do that.” He flipped Primal a pointed gesture and trundled away.
“I think we got what we came for,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Goldie shook himself as if we were waking from sleep. “What we came for,” he murmured. “No, no, we don’t have that.” He stepped in front of me and looked up into the full blast of Primal’s gaze. “The seventh floor.”
Primal seemed to freeze, and Clay said, “There’s nothing on the seventh floor.”
“Yes, there is,” Goldie insisted. “There is.”
I tried to pull him back. “Goldie, come on. We’re done here.” I ignored the wraiths hovering around us. Ignored what leaving them here in this state might mean. We had to go on. If we could break the Source, this trap, too, might be sprung.
Goldie shook me off. “There’s something on the seventh floor, Cal. Something he doesn’t want us to see.”
Primal opened his mouth and an earthquake rolled out. “GET OUT!”
Goldie’s aura was suddenly bright enough to make me blink. There was an even more dazzling concentration of light building up in his hands. I lunged at him, grabbing his forearms, desperate to keep him from doing something deadly. He turned his head to look at me. The moment our eyes touched, I was struck with the stark, horrific image of Tina, floating like a Lorelei in an aquarium, listless, almost lifeless, her eyes empty, her fine, pale hair fanned out on the ether. One prisoner among many.
The seventh floor.
I let go of Goldie. His lightning went off like a fragment of Armageddon, filling the room with stark white flash-fire. I was blinded. He shoved me toward the door.
I heard Colleen shouting behind us, heard Primal roaring, Clay shrieking. Then we were in the hall and the doors closed, shutting the cacophony out. Through the sparks that danced in front of my eyes I expected to see guards, armed and ready to bring us down. What I saw was a guard’s boot just visible around the corner to the main corridor.
Howard, standing at the corner, looked down and nudged it out of sight with one foot, then straightened his sweats. “Not dead,” he told me pointedly. “Just… inconvenienced.”
Goldie shoved past me, heading for the fire escape. “We don’t have time,” he said. “We’ve got to go.”
I snagged his jacket. “Not that way.”
He swung around to face me, eyes desperate. “Tina.”
“Not now.” I redoubled my grip on his arm and started moving him toward the intersecting corridor where Howard waited impatiently.
He struggled in my grasp. “Cal, for God’s sake! He’s got Tina!”
“How, Goldie?” I kept him moving. “How’d he get her? The Source has Tina. This isn’t the Source. “
“You don’t know that! None of us knows that!”
“This is not the Source,” I repeated, and told myself I believed it, though I found I didn’t want to.
I’d just marched him around the corner when Howard looked up and said, “Where’s the girl?”
I spun around. Colleen was nowhere in sight. We’d left her behind.
Goldie picked that moment to bolt. He caught me completely by surprise, bowling Howard and me both over and onto the floor. From the darkness of the hallway I watched him disappear around the corner. A second later there was a wash of red light and the fire door slammed.
I scrambled to my feet, pulling Howard up after me. I took a step toward the cross corridor, then realized I didn’t know which direction I should go. Colleen was still in Pri-mal’s lair. Goldie … and maybe Tina…
Goldie’s vision washed back over me, making my legs quake.
Howard tugged on my jacket. “I’ll get the girl,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the throne room. “You go for the crazy guy.”
Hesitation gone, I flew around the corner after Goldie, through the fire door, and out onto the escape. I felt the cadence of Goldie’s frantic steps as a dull vibration in the concrete and steel. I looked up. The stairs seemed to zigzag into infinity; I only needed to go as far as the seventh floor. I sprinted, taking two steps at a time.
On the seventh-floor landing the fire door hung open. I didn’t stop to think. I dove into the gloom and dodged swiftly down the hall to the left, guided only by the tentative light from the open fire exit. Within seconds that had dwindled to nothing. I slowed, put my back to the inner wall, and listened.
Nothing.
I moved cautiously along, keeping my back to the wall. When I’d sidled about ten feet I paused again to listen. Still nothing.
“Goldie?”
Behind me the fire door slammed shut, leaving me in total darkness. Someone was behind me in the hallway. My heart rate spiked. I turned back the way I’d come, slipping my sword from its sheath.
“Goldie?”
The building around me seemed to moan softly. Hair rose up on the back of my neck and I was overwhelmed by the sudden conviction that something very unlike Goldie faced me down the hallway. The darkness stirred and shifted. I pivoted and ran, keeping one hand on the inner wall.
Three doors slipped by beneath my trailing fingers. Then the wall fell suddenly away. I turned right. Remembering the escalator core, I shifted to the opposite side of the hall. Four more doors slid by before the wall fell away again. I turned left and stopped.
Ahead of me the corridor glowed a strange, dim green, like light through many layers of thick glass. The walls themselves were black and seemed to be dripping with some kind of viscous fluid that flowed in every direction, unconstrained by gravity. Just beneath the surface, gleaming green runnels of light wriggled as if sentient. Like the veins beneath Primal’s skin.
Behind the walls, or maybe trapped within the walls, amorphous shapes moved languorously and gave up a light of their own. Flares, caught like butterflies in a giant’s display case. There seemed to be dozens of them.
I stood immobile in the middle of my own nightmare—a dreamscape I’d walked right into, in spite of the steps I had taken (or thought I had taken) to avoid it. Colleen was four floors down in God knew what kind of predicament. Goldie was somewhere ahead of me in this maze. My thoughts eddied there, floating with the disembodied shapes behind the thick, translucent walls.
A great sigh breathed over me. I looked ahead, my eyes filling to the b
rim with the glow of fey light. Without meaning to, I moved forward, feeling a horrible, palpable sense of déja vu.
My worst nightmare.
I moved deeper into the labyrinth, reached another juncture, turned another corner. I heard my name called again, only this time it sounded in my head.
“Cal…”
A gleaming shape wavered behind the wall just ahead of me. It seemed to draw nearer to the barrier, taking on more and more definition. The shape was human, but every limb gleamed with spectral light, and the hair, so white it was almost blue, floated in a bright banner from the head. It moved with the grace of a swan, closer and closer to the barrier.
I moved closer, too, until I had nowhere to go. I pressed my hands against the icy wall and looked into a delicate face with huge, azure eyes, the features blurred by the glass but still recognizable.
“Oh, God,” I sighed, and wept.
TWENTY-FIVE
COLLEEN
One thing I’ll say for Goldman—he doesn’t do things by halves. He’d let loose the fireball to end all fireballs and then skeedaddled. In the flash of white light, I saw everyone around me frozen in the act of shielding their eyes. All except Primal. He was just frozen, staring into the blast as if it were no brighter than a candle.
In the speckled darkness after, I did a full 180 and headed for the doors. But there were people in the way, milling, shoving. I pinballed off of them, trying to stay upright and moving toward the doors. I shouted for Cal, for Goldie, even for Russo, but I was drowned out.
I was somewhere near the doors (I thought) when a pair of hands took hold of my shoulder and spun me around. “Cal?”
“Sorry,” said a voice in my ear. “But your friends seem to have left you behind.”
Clay. I turned my head, trying to see him through the purple and green blotches in front of my eyes. In the flare light, his whiteface gleamed moonlike. The eyes were black craters.
“They’ll come back for me,” I said.
Painted lips curved upward into an exaggerated smile.
“Of course they will. And when they do …” He cocked his head back toward the far corner of the room, toward Primal.
Primal was still sitting godlike in his throne, while his toadies milled around him and his flares floated above him on their neon tethers. His head was turning from side to side, the wolf-yellow eyes raking the walls of the place as if he could see through them.
God. Maybe he could.
Clay leaned in, bringing his face close to mine. He was sweating, little beads of perspiration standing out all over his face, making him look like he was wearing a veneer of gleaming bubble bath. “You want to save your friends, don’t you?”
“Duh.”
“I could help you persuade Primal to let them go—at least your lawyer friend and the little gnome. That Goldman fellow’s behavior was just plain insulting. Primal will have to deal with him. He can’t afford to appear soft or weak, after all.”
“What can I do? I’m not a deva or a tweaked musician. I don’t have anything Primal would want.”
“No, but Primal’s not the only one here with… wants.”
I glanced at him sharply. His eyes, still trained on me, had a glassy, intent look that suddenly and uncomfortably reminded me of the look Rory used to get when we …
I shit-canned the thought. “Oh, really? And exactly what would you get me? You’re just a bootlicker—and a fashion disaster, I might add.”
His hand bit into my upper arm, right through the leather. “I lick no one’s boots. There are other centers of power in this place. One of them is right down the hall… in my rooms.” He gestured with his head.
Following his eyes, I realized we were literally on top of the exit. If I could get out into the hall…
“Yeah, right. Look, you’re a grunt.” I flicked my gaze toward the far corner of the room. “Primal’s the power in this place. If I want to save anybody’s ass, I’ll kiss his, not yours.”
I brought my eyes back to his face and got the shock of my life. The whiteface was running. Little rivers meandered down his cheeks, leaving trails of naked flesh that were green-white and glowing.
He realized I was staring at him and raised a hand to his cheek. His white gloves came back smudged with paint. Beneath the translucent gleam of his cheek, I could see the fine tracery of blue-green veins.
Clay was a flare.
But he didn’t fly, I argued with myself, and his eyes were wrong. He seemed more like an attempted flare, as if the Change had lost interest before it was done with him.
“You glow in the dark,” I observed, and licked my lips. I wasn’t trying to be sexy. They were just suddenly parched.
Clay smiled, no smirked, and pulled off one of his gloves. The hand gleamed like moonlit snow. The next second, he shocked the hell out of me by putting the shining hand over my left breast.
Flesh crawling, I knocked it away.
Rage contorted the mime face before he slammed the door open and dragged me out into the hall. The guards were gone. I imagined they were in pursuit of Goldie and Cal. Clay didn’t seem to notice their absence. I coiled to run, but he yanked me off balance and shoved me against the wall, his face only inches from mine. The crossbow bit into my hip.
“Here’s the deal: Primal’s a little touchy about… the seventh floor. If he catches your boys—and he will— they’re toast. Literally. Unless I intercede for them. Now, why don’t you slip down to my rooms with me for a while? I’m sure we can negotiate something.”
I thought of Viktor and suddenly wanted out of this madhouse so badly I could taste it. At that moment I would’ve cut off a finger or an ear or gotten a tattoo to be back in the Preserve. Anything to send us all back.
“What’ll it be … Colleen?” he murmured, and my skin crept at the sound of my name.
Damn me, I considered it, but I knew better than to believe the creep had any real influence with Primal. He was a pet. “What’ll it be? Well, it won’t be you, glow-boy.”
Anger, sudden, dark, and real, twisted the whitewashed face. There was surprise under the rage, as if he hadn’t expected me to reject him. He grabbed at my breast again, but I twisted sideways and his fingers clawed the thick denim of my shirt, wringing it. His fingernails dug painfully into my skin.
“You stupid bitch.” His voice was soft, velvety, the whole outrage of rejection boiled down to a sticky syrup. “You just threw away your only bargaining chip, you know that? You want out of here, I’m the one you have to go through, not Primal. He doesn’t give a shit about your kind.” He gave me a fierce, feral grin and shook me so hard my head thumped the wall. “I do.”
His face was too close, his eyes too hot. I brought my hand up in a defensive chop, twisting sideways. He released me for a split second, then grabbed again, catching skin, fabric, and a fistful of lucky charms. Blue and green static shot up in front of my eyes, nearly blinding me. Clay was suddenly crawling with eerie blue-green static—a fishnet made of Northern Lights. He shrieked and flung himself away from me.
Something quick and low to the ground slipped behind him and he toppled over the sudden obstacle, dragging me after him. Dad’s old chain broke. The charms scattered, dog tags and weird guitar pick thing flying away into the gloom of the hall. Clay ended up in an awkward heap on the floor.
Howard straightened from a crouch and grinned at me. “Thud,” he said.
I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from Clay. Strange static still crept over him. And in the whiteface, leotard, and tights he looked like a marionette with its strings cut. If we couldn’t find Cal and Goldie and get out of here, Primal might just have a whole troop of marionette mimes. A dream come true.
I put a hand to my throat. Viktor’s cross on its silver chain was still there. I thanked God for that and looked around for the other stuff. In the dim light of the hallway it wasn’t going to be easy to find, but I wasn’t about to leave it behind. I’d worn Dad’s tags since the day he was buri
ed, and I suspected Papa Sky’s lucky chip had just saved my bacon.
Something tugged at my jacket. I spun, going for my knife.
It was only Howard. He held out my missing charms. “Yours.”
Dad’s Air Force–issue links were totaled. I slid the tags and the leather chip onto the chain with the cross. Then I tugged my shirt back into place and glanced down at myself. I had lost a couple of buttons and some skin; beads of blood stood up in a row of angry-looking welts across my chest. This wasn’t going to play well in Kiev. Ripping my knife out of its belt sheath, I headed for the fire exit.
Howard shadowed me so close I almost tripped over him. “What’d you do to him?” he asked.
“Just a little something I picked up.” I kicked the fire door open.
“But you’re a normal!”
I threw myself out onto the fire escape and came face-to-face with Viktor. I stared at him stupidly for a moment. “What’re you doing here? You shouldn’t be here.” I grabbed him and tried to force him down the stairs; he swung me around and headed up instead. I had no choice but to follow.
“The contract is broken,” he told me over his shoulder. “We came in through the garage as Papa Sky’s friend suggested. But then… something happened. Magritte flew off up there and Enid went after her.” He nodded at the layers of building above us.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Goldie and Cal are up there, too. There’s something about the seventh floor.” I snatched at him again, trying to slow him down. “Look, I’ll go. You take Howard and get—”
He shrugged me off, taking the stairs two at a time. I leapt after him, using every foul word I could think of.
Climbing four floors takes time. In this case, it took enough time for me to do the math. We were no surprise to Primal. How could we have been after weeks of wretched dreams, hours spent burrowing our way into the Loop, minutes ticking by under his hot eyes? I suspected he’d connected with us through Enid, found out what made us tick, and used it to pull us here like moths to a flame. If that was true, could Goldie’s taking off to the mysterious seventh floor be unexpected? For all we knew, Papa Sky might’ve been a mole.