Cloak and Daggers

by Katerina Martinez

  I turned around on the spot and looked out for the glowing orbs. “Please,” I said, “I need help.”

  “You must help us,” a weak voice called out from within the mist. “Help us.”

  “No.”

  “No?” thunder rolled within the dome. The white mist turned grey, and sinister. “You will not help us, human?”

  “Not until you tell me what I need to know.”

  “Ask your questions.”

  I kept my eyes sharp, watching my surroundings, noticing how the vibe in here was much different to what it had been the last time I had been brought to this place of mist and light. I could feel their anticipation, their eagerness to be free, oozing around me like a cloud of choking gas, could see it darkening the mist itself, could hear it on the cold, frustrated voice speaking to me from within the aether, but I had to push through.

  “I need to know what’s outside the Angel Dome,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Guardians, please, I need to know!”

  “Death,” came a voice, different this time; harsh and croaky, like a smoker’s voice. “Destruction, desolation. A world ruined by human hands.”

  “What would happen to the people living in this city if the shield went down?”

  “I can’t answer that question.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “What makes you worthy of receiving the answer?”

  “You called me, remember? I’m the one who answered the call, and right now I’m the only one who can get you out of here.”

  “Perhaps, but you only think you have leverage. We have survived here many hundreds of years. We will survive many more. You, on the other hand, will not.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to the Guardian I spoke to the last time I was here.”

  “Why not? Have I offended you, human?”

  Four minutes, I thought, only, was that true? The last time I had been in here it seemed like no time at all had passed outside. Maybe that strange time warp still applied, and only a few milliseconds had passed since I was brought in here. But that thought didn’t bring me any comfort. Eventually those four minutes would run out, and then what would happen to Spider? The Order?

  “Why won’t you answer my question?” I asked.

  “Because you have lost your faith,” the same voice said.

  “My faith? What faith?”

  “We know you,” another voice came in, softer this time, and almost, almost, familiar. “We have been there through every moment of your life. We know your soul. Your convictions died the instant you were betrayed by your own people, now you have lost your way; you do not believe in your own decisions, or in the people you fight for.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it?” the harsh voice returned, “Even now you’re unsure about freeing us, even after everything we have told you.”

  “I want to know if freeing you means death for the people living here!”

  “We aren’t going to give you that answer. This is a decision you will need to make on your own, and then you must live with the consequences.”

  “Why am I being punished? I came here to free you!”

  “Did you? Or did you come here to free yourself?”

  The Guardian’s last word hit my chest like a sack of bricks, and shocked me back into my own body. I was on the cold, metal floor again. Shaking my head, I forced myself to stand, still hearing the Guardians’ words repeating in my ears. This whole situation had been entirely different to what it had been last time; everything had changed, and they were right, I was lost. I could feel the seconds, real seconds, ebbing away as I stared blankly around at the computers, at the cables, and at the dome itself, with the four large clamps bearing down on it.

  I felt like I literally had the weight of the world on my shoulders, and with the seconds ticking away, I knew I had to make a decision one way or another.

  “God dammit,” I said, and I raised my gun, aimed it at one of the clamps, and unloaded three rounds into it. Sparks flew as the bullets dug into cables and mechanisms, and when I saw the dome begin to shimmer I realized it wasn’t made of cold glass at all, but pure energy; the dome was a force field, and the clamps were powering it.

  I took aim at another one of the clamps and the gun spat more bullets into it. The thing shuddered and stuttered, arcs of lightning began to flash, and the dome continued to flicker and shimmer. With my other, blazing hand, I pulled my second pistol out of its holster and put bullets into the third clamp, and finally the fourth, feeling my heart pound with every depression of my fingers against the triggers until the energy field powering the dome disappeared, releasing not only the fine white mist into the air, but also seven beautiful, glowing orbs.

  I watched them float, mesmerized by the way they danced within the mist. A smile swept across my face as their cool light touched my skin, and then they were gone—evaporated into the walls and ceiling, leaving nothing but a room with stuttering machines, whizzing and sparking and smoking, but empty. The Guardians were gone.

  Having lost track of how many minutes I had left, I turned around and started dashing for the door, but the ground beneath my feet lurched, and I went sideways, catching my foot on a cable and flying into a wall. I had barely enough time to stop my head from hitting the wall first, but my arms afforded only a slight protection against the inevitable impact to my head.

  The blow was so intense, each one of my senses seemed to fall away. I could hear nothing but a muted rumble, could see the world as if through water, and could feel the ground shaking beneath me even though I was laying on the ground. I touched the side of my face, and my hand came away red. Slowly I blinked, fighting to get back on my feet despite the tremors making the floor feel uneven, difficult to walk on.

  I pulled myself through the open door, then staggered along the hallway, aware only in a disassociated kind of way that the tremors had gotten heavier, more intense. The walls were shaking and cracking, bits of concrete were falling, and the rumble in my chest was rising higher and higher to the point that breathing was becoming almost impossible.

  Still, I dragged myself through doorway after doorway, stumbled through hallways, climbed crumbling stairwells, and made it to the roof access, where I was immediately pushed back and away from the broken open exit by a powerful, shrieking gust of wind. Breathing without sucking in dust and ash was impossible, but I quickly put my blazing hand up and conjured a magic shield to protect myself from the deep brown cloud pushing into the building and took a moment to recover, spitting out clods of brown saliva.

  When I pushed through, against the wind holding me back, and stepped out into the open, and saw the monolithic brown cloud racing toward me from across the horizon, I knew, I had made the biggest mistake of my entire life. My heart began to pound, drowning out even the terrible roar of the wind. In the distance I saw the cloud bowling over trees, swallowing buildings, and then pushing through skyscrapers with so much force it seemed to almost rip them right off their foundations and send them crashing to the ground.

  My chest tightened. I tried gasping for air but could take only shallow breaths. Then I heard Spider speaking into my mind, but his voice was erratic, he was screaming, and the sound was like nails being drawn across my brain. I heard a whirring turbine engine and looked up, almost relieved to see the Ace still flying, but it wasn’t flying—it was on fire, spinning wildly out of control, and heading straight for the triple smokestacks.

  Lightning whipped above me, red and terrible. I screamed for Spider, but the Ace smashed through one of the smokestacks and erupted in a blinding flash of white light. The force of the explosion hit me in the chest and sent me to the floor, exhausted and in pain without and within. As I looked up, vision swimming and darkening, I saw the cloud getting closer and closer, and watched it open its mouth as it drew nearer.

  I’m sorry, I thought, I’m sorry…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Max… Max! W
ake up! You have to get up!

  My body ached, my head was spinning, and I had no idea where I was. The world was bright, almost too bright. I put my hand out in front of my eyes to shield them from the light and waited for them to adjust, blinking away the drowsiness. Warm, dry wind was licking at my face, pulling my hair, and all I could hear was a loud whine, but I was alive, and above me, the sun was shining.

  Though my arms felt like jelly, I got myself to my feet and looked around expecting to see the devastation I had just witnessed, but that wasn’t the case. The clouds in the sky were dark, and brown, but behind them was a large patch of sunlight trying to get through. The air tasted different, dustier and dryer, nothing like what I had come to grow up with, but it wasn’t toxic, and more importantly, a giant cloud hadn’t eaten New Seattle and killed everything and everyone inside.

  Then my ears popped, and the dull whine I could hear became the roar of two turbine engines. I turned around, my heart leaping into my throat, and saw the Avenging Ace circling the rooftop I was standing on, the sun gleaming off its grey hull. I waved, and the Ace began a rapid descent toward me, switching to its hover mode only a few feet above the roof.

  I ran toward it and threw myself into the back, then Spider immediately hit the throttle and began pulling up and away from the rooftop, but something was wrong. The consoles in front of him were bleeping, some of them were flashing red, forcing dread to still my heart and wipe the smile off my face. I hurried into the cockpit and looked first out of the front windshield and then at Spider.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “Did I pass out?”

  “I saw you run onto the rooftop like you’d been injured, then you collapsed and you didn’t move.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Too long. We need to get out of here fast.”

  I turned my eyes down to the monitors and even though I didn’t know how to operate one of these VTOL aircraft, I knew what a radar display looked like, and understood what six red dots approaching our green dot meant. The Faction isn’t done with us yet. I strapped myself into the co-pilot seat and braced myself.

  In front of me, six black dots came into view on the horizon, quickly growing to become black aircraft made of chrome. The dots began to flash, and I saw the smoke trails of missiles heading right toward us—dozens of them. My heart skipped a beat, my breath hitched. I put my hand up and tried my hardest to will a magic shield into existence, something powerful enough to halt the brunt of the attack about to hit us.

  I should have noticed my hand wasn’t glowing nearly as brightly as I had thought.

  Black dots trailing smoke exploded into orange clouds of fire and light, each explosion triggering another nearby missile to explode in a similar fashion. My chest vibrated with each detonation as my body reacted through the magic. But the shield hadn’t stopped every missile. The magic wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t complete; something was different, and the missiles came.

  “Hold onto something!” Spider yelled, and he pulled the Ace hard right, skimming out of the path of two missiles, but a third one hit us hard, exploding with an almost deafening boom against one of the Ace’s turbines and causing the aircraft to spin out of control. Alarms blared, the world in front of me was spinning again, wildly, blindly. Spider kept pulling on the controls to try and get the Ace to respond, but with only one working engine keeping us up, there was almost no chance of that happening.

  “C’mon!” I said, unbuckling myself and going to stand.

  “No! I can do it!”

  “Spider, she’s gone! We have to go now or we’ll die!”

  Spider’s face, grimacing as he wrestled for control of the Ace’s mad descent, changed to an expression of pure fear. We weren’t just going down—we were going to collide with the side of a half-finished building and bowl through an entire construction site. I reached for Spider’s seatbelt, pressed the button to release him, and yanked him out of the seat by his collar. When we reached the door on the side of the Ace that wasn’t on fire, I pulled it open and threw myself out, dragging Spider with me. I wasn’t sure why my magic hadn’t worked to stop the missiles from hitting us, but I also hadn’t hesitated in jumping out and using magic to control our descent, allowing us to land safely on one of the buildings beneath us.

  I turned around in a wide circle and watched the Ace fly overhead, spinning wildly as it came down. The aircraft hit the building with an earth-shattering crash and a blinding flash of white light. The force of the impact was strong enough to knock me back, though not off my feet. Not this time. Concrete and metal went flying in all directions from the point of impact, but the Ace continued its descent, now a flaming ball of burnt and broken metal, until finally it came to rest on the ground, taking three cranes down with it.

  “Holy hell,” Spider said. He had stood up, he had a cut on his cheek and blood running down his dusty face, but otherwise he was fine.

  “Yeah,” I said. I turned to look at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Little banged up, but otherwise okay,” he said.

  “We should get off this roof. They’ll be looking for us.”

  Spider nodded. “I’m not going to argue with that.”

  I looked around. We hadn’t fallen right in the center of the city, but we were in the city, and even I knew we were far, far away from the rendezvous point, but I wasn’t the walking map Spider was. “Do you know how to get us where we need to go?” I asked.

  Spider took a breath, then looked up at the brown sky. “I think so, but my senses are a little frazzled, and it’ll take us a while to get there; that is if we don’t get caught first.”

  “Yeah, my magic is too. We need to get out of sight if we want to pull this off.”

  “I know just the place.”

  We moved off the building, climbing down a gantry running along the left side. Distantly I heard sirens singing away. Above us, several aircraft made a flying pass of the crash site while others hovered around the area, trying to get a bead on where we had gone; at least that’s what I had assumed. For all I knew they hadn’t seen us jump out of the Ace, and if that was the case, it would have taken them a while to figure out we weren’t in the cockpit when the Ace went down.

  As soon as we hit ground level, I moved quickly out of the alley and toward the street. Cars were stopped in the middle of the road, their drivers standing outside, watching the pillar of smoke rise into a sky they hadn’t seen before. I hadn’t seen it before either, so I knew how they felt, but I couldn’t let that distract me.

  The first sewer entry I found, I lifted with magic, and slipped into. Spider followed, climbing down behind me and follow me as if I knew where I was going. I didn’t, and I couldn’t bring my mind to bear on finding our way out even if I had wanted to. I kept thinking of Jamie, of what had happened to him and his father, Abel, Aisha.

  I stopped, and Spider pushed ahead in front of me, his platinum blond hair shining as he passed beneath a beam of light from an overhead sewer grate. He turned around to look at me. “You okay, Max?” he asked.

  “I… don’t know,” I said. “I thought I’d killed everyone.”

  He tilted his head to the side. “What? When?”

  “When I freed the Guardians. I don’t know what happened. Maybe I hallucinated it, but I thought I had destroyed the world. I saw this massive cloud swallow the city up, tear down skyscrapers, heard people scream. I watched the Ace go down in flames—with you in it.”

  “Hey,” he said, approaching. He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not dead,” he said, “Neither are you, and neither is anyone else. When the shield went down I felt a… like a surge inside of my chest, and then the sky changed color. Grey became brown. Rain became dust. But the air was breathable, it still is. You didn’t kill anyone, and the Guardians are free.”

  “Yeah… but where are they?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, but maybe you shouldn’t expect anything f
rom them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if what you told me about them was true, then they probably feel like they don’t owe you anything. Maybe that vision you had was them lashing out somehow, all of their rage venting out and hitting you since you were the closest person around.”

  I sighed. “The price of being a hero,” I said, allowing the smile to form on my face.

  Spider’s face brightened in turn. “Exactly,” he said.

  “Sometimes I forget just how young you actually are, you know that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a fucking smartass, that’s why.”

  “C’mon,” Spider said, “Let’s just concentrate on getting out of here. It’ll take us a few hours to get to the rendezvous point, we’re gonna be late, but we’ll get there.”

  “No,” I said, “Not the rendezvous point…”

  “No?” Spider asked.

  I shook my head. “They’re going to be looking for us, and if they find us and we don’t know about it, we don’t want to risk the Faction following us right to the Order. We need to go somewhere else.”

  Spider looked around. “Where?”

  “We need to get out of the city. Out of the shield.”

  “But… the shield is down.”

  “I know.”

  “Max, this doesn’t sound right.”

  “Just listen to me. They saw us go down, which means they’ll be looking for us inside the city.”

  “Right.”

  “So, if we get as far away from the city as possible, and then keep going until we reach the edge of the shield and keep going… that’s our safest bet.”

  “Do you have any idea how far we have to go to get to the edge of the shield?”

  “Yeah, I do. We’re going to be tired, hungry, and thirsty, but we’ll make it.”