Stolen

by Melissa de la Cruz

  “Repeat, I need clearance for a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde,” the guard said into his radio, waiting.

  Shakes rolled his eyes. Wes tried not to smile. They were two of his favorite aliases. No one read books anymore, so no one would get the joke.

  The guard’s radio buzzed.

  “Turn around,” he said. “Turn around, the domes are closed for today.” He made a spinning motion with his index finger, indicating the act of turning the limo in a circle.

  “Are you serious? I can’t turn this beast around.” Farouk gestured to the limo.

  “Turn around now.” The guard stepped back, a hand resting on the grip of his sidearm.

  In the distance, sirens boomed, and red and blue strobe lights reflected off the dome. Wes turned around to see as emergency vehicles approached from behind, blocking the causeway. Even if Farouk could turn around, the fire trucks and ambulances were blocking the bridge. There was no going back. A convoy of high-tech Humvees carrying armed soldiers rolled behind them as well.

  Why would a fire draw military vehicles? Something else was happening, something bigger than a crack in the dome and a plume of smoke.

  Maybe something as big as a drakon on the streets of New Vegas, Wes thought. Something unstoppable.

  “Come on, man, I’ll get in trouble if I don’t deliver,” Farouk said, pleading with the guard.

  The guard shook his head. “Pull to the side, please.”

  Farouk sighed, shifted the car into drive, and angled the limo to the right. “Bad luck, boss,” he said. “Looks like no one’s getting into Dorado today.”

  “We’ll wait it out,” Wes said. “Try again when they open back up.”

  “There’s a way station not too far—I guess we can stay there. Godfreezeit, I was looking forward to the domes,” Farouk replied.

  They watched as the conclave of emergency and military vehicles made their way inside, when a group of guards suddenly surrounded the limousine, and the young security officer led the pack, holding his gun. “Out of the car,” he yelled over the sirens. “Out of the car now!”

  “What the ice?” Farouk cursed and shot an accusatory glance at Wes.

  “Out of the car!” the guard ordered.

  “Stay in the limo,” Wes growled, picking up his own weapon.

  Farouk rolled down the window. “What’s this about?”

  “Your passengers aren’t on any manifest. No one’s expecting them. Out of the car now.”

  “No way, man. It’s a mistake. Ask your people to check the roster again. Can you get Rolf out here? The man knows me. Help me out—you know I’m going to lose my job if I don’t drop off these iceholes. Come on, man.”

  “Hold on,” the security officer said, looking annoyed and confused.

  When the guard left, Farouk turned to Wes. “What’s going on, boss? Looks like we’re getting screwed by your guys—they bungle the job or something? Why aren’t you on the manifest?” Then realization hit. “You’re not on the freezing manifest, are you?” He cursed. “You could have told me.”

  “I didn’t have the watts,” Wes mumbled. “Sorry. I thought we’d be able to talk our way in. Thought you wouldn’t take us here if you knew.”

  “I wouldn’t take you here? Of course I wouldn’t take you here—” Farouk began to argue, but the rest of his words were muffled by the sound of more ambulances rushing past.

  Wes watched as they sped through the gate, pulling the smoke behind it, leaving the gate clear for an instant. A girl stood in the archway, dressed in a blue hospital gown, shivering in the street, her hair a mess, her eyes flashing scarlet. Shards of gold littered the street, and gunfire mixed with the sounds of shattering glass. Smoke billowed through the air.

  “Was that a girl?” Shakes stared at the surreal scene.

  “What the . . . ?” Farouk said as a shiny new car shot through the face of the dome, arcing through the sky, and crashing into the guard booth, exploding in a giant burst of glass and steel and flame.

  The guards left the limo and ran toward the booth, yelling and cursing.

  “Hit it!” Wes yelled. “Go! Now, Farouk.”

  Farouk didn’t hesitate; he jammed the accelerator, spinning the wheels, careening past the stunned guards who were still staring at the burning booth, and blasting into the entrance of the smoke-filled city.

  They were inside.

  Farouk slid into a tangle of alleyways, turning deeper and deeper off the main road and into the heart of the city. As far away from anything like law enforcement as possible. Only then did he slow down and choke a few words out. “You both can go to hell.”

  “Think we just did, brother.” Wes clapped him on the shoulder.

  Shakes looked like he was going to puke, which was just another way Wes could rationalize the positive side of having no watts for breakfast today.

  “See,” Wes said, nudging Shakes. “Told you we’d make it.”

  “What he said,” Shakes muttered back.

  Wes smiled.

  But getting inside was one thing, and getting Eliza out was something else entirely.

  Chapter 11

  HER PARALYSIS MADE EVERYTHING harder—and Faix more exasperated.

  So Nat stood at the edge of the cliff, trying to shape the ether, to sculpt something from nothing, to use her power to control the void. She closed her eyes and tried to find the voice of her drakon. Its voice in her head had guided her all her life, and she needed to hear it now. Where are you? In her mind’s eye she saw the forests of the Blue, she explored the clouds and trees, the mountains and the gorges, and from there she traveled to the ruined Pacific, to Garbage Country, New Vegas, Ashes, and everywhere in between. She searched and she listened, hearing the buzz of a honeybee, the rush of river below, but she could not hear her drakon. Its voice had gone silent, resting somewhere underneath the earth, somewhere she would not be able to feel its pain.

  Imagine a bridge, Faix had told her. Build a wooden plank. The nothingness is as real as the stone you stand on. In Vallonis we see what cannot be seen.

  I need you, she called to her drakon. Can you hear me?

  Hear me, hear me, came an echo. Nat startled. That wasn’t her voice but someone else’s she heard.

  Nat opened her eyes with a start. She had heard the voice earlier when she had crossed the gate of Afal.

  “Do not be distracted,” Faix scolded. “There is no voice. I hear nothing.” Stop stalling, he sent.

  Nat frowned. “I can’t do this. I don’t see anything.”

  Faix sighed. “I had hoped that since you were able to ride your drakon you would know a little more than you do.”

  “How about you try to ride my drakon and then we’ll talk?”

  Enough, he sent. The look he gave her was particularly piercing. Then he tried again. “The children of Vallonis begin when we are young. From the time we are three or four years of age, when we first sense our power, our lessons begin. We learn through games and play, we discover our power as naturally as a young child who learns to imitate the voices of her parents.”

  “Is there a point here?”

  “When we are older, we learn focus and concentration. Control doesn’t come from emotion, my father once told me. We have noticed that the uninitiated—people your world call marked—have discovered that strong emotions can access their powers, but it is not the correct way to do so. Emotions are a crude and unpredictable way to access one’s power. Emotion can be overwhelming, and ultimately destructive,” said Faix.

  Nat nodded. She knew from experience that Faix was right. She recalled the slave ships, how she had torn the mast and toppled the slave crates. She had lost control; she’d nearly sunk the boat and killed all of them. But here was the thing—she had enjoyed it. There was a thrill to giving into the rage and fury inside her.

  “Once you lo
se your sense of self, you allow the corruption to take over. It happens to everyone.”

  She looked sharply at Faix, who sounded as if he was speaking from experience.

  Yes, I am, he sent. But he did not elaborate. She only sensed a brief flash of grief, and then it was gone.

  You cannot let the darkness overcome the light.

  Faix continued, “In art, there is always emotion, but we cannot sculpt from emotion alone. If we did, our work would be chaotic; it would lack focus.”

  “I’m not an artist,” she said. And for good reason. Chaos was all she knew. When she was a prisoner at MacArthur Med, the doctors and her superior officers had told her to use her emotions, to let her hatred build. They’d turned her into a weapon—their weapon. She hunted her own people, used her power to bring in those who were just like her, marked by magic, marked for death. Her mentors had bred that fear, that pain, and like a bomb they’d primed her to explode.

  But now Faix was telling her that she needed to forget what she had learned. “They lied to you. They tortured you. They wanted your power, but they did not know how to teach you to control it. They only knew how to make a fire, but not how to keep it burning steadily. It will take time to move past what you have learned.”

  Nat tried again. Nothing. “I can’t . . . I can’t do it without . . . ,” she said.

  Faix raised his voice and bellowed into the air, something she never thought she’d hear, especially not spoken aloud. “You think you are the only one to have lost a drakon?”

  She stared at him. He came from a line of drakon herders, the mighty clans of drakonborn. She should have remembered.

  “Yes, I was born a rydder. I have felt the same pain you have, the grief that comes from separation,” he told her, his voice now once again as calm as ever.

  “Where is your drakon?” she asked, her voice trembling, afraid of the answer.

  “Gone from this world,” he said, touching his necklace again. “During the first breaking, when Vallonis fell the first time.”

  Gone? But then . . . how is it that you live? Her drakon had gone into the ground; the creature was wounded, but alive. Its temporary absence pained her, but they would be rejoined one day, whereas Faix had lost that bond forever. The possibility of losing her drakon seemed suddenly very real. She had thought she was invincible as she soared through the sky, as she battled the drone army astride her great drakon. Now, she felt foolish. Perhaps she had been in far greater danger than she suspected.

  I live because I have to. You will hurt, you will bleed, you will be betrayed as I have been betrayed. You will survive. And you must learn to control your power.

  “Teach me,” she said. Now that she knew Faix understood her pain, had experienced it himself, she felt closer to him.

  She believed him.

  He nodded. “We will start with my father’s exercise. A practice I learned as a child. Pick an object.”

  “Any object?” she asked. What does he want me to say?

  Say anything. This is not a test.

  “A violin?” she said. It sounded like something a sylph would picture.

  “Good enough. Picture the instrument. The strings, the neck, the scroll at one end, the chin rest at the other.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Now take a piece of the object, the scroll at the tip of the neck. Picture the spiral, the grain of the wood, the fibers within that wood.”

  She was trying, but she couldn’t see the point of his father’s exercise.

  “Go deeper. Within those wooden fibers, try to see the cells that make up the strands, and the molecules that compose the next layer. Imagine each step, smaller and smaller until there is nothing, just the void left within all things, the atoms whizzing through space. Imagine the thing until you’ve exhausted its essence, until you’ve reduced it to nothing, to the void, the ether. Only then can you shape it into anything you want—you can turn a violin into a cello, or a bridge.”

  “I’m trying,” Nat said.

  “It’s not about trying. It’s about repetition. Don’t expect results. Expect to fail and fail and fail. Once you are accustomed to failing, once you’ve made a habit of it, then you can shape.”

  Nat pictured the violin, the wood, the fibers, the molecules, electrons swirling in the void. Nothing happened. She understood the idea: All things are made from the void, so reduce each object to the void and she could shape that void. “I don’t know, I can’t do it, I can’t make something out of nothing.”

  “It is not nothing; that is what you don’t understand,” said Faix sadly.

  As if a light had turned on inside her head, Nat gasped. She understood. The void was not a void at all, not nothing—and all at once, there, right in front of her, was a wooden bridge that stretched from the cliff to the city entry.

  She’d done it!

  She’d willed it into being.

  Nat took a step on the wooden plank, and as Faix had promised, it was as real as the stone behind her. She took another step, her confidence growing—she could do this, she could harness the ether, control her power—she took a third step—

  And fell, screaming, into the void.

  Chapter 12

  EL DORADO WAS BURNING AND THE whole city was in chaos. From the marginal safety of the car, Wes stared at what should have been a beautiful metropolis. He’d never seen a city that was intact like this, with sidewalks and trees, manicured storefronts, even if today it was on fire. If not for the billowing black smoke, the whole place would look like a photo snapped in the time before—the days before the ice and the snow came, before the world froze. Shiny condominiums stretched ten, twelve stories above the street, sprouting upward between cinemas and restaurants, sidewalk cafés and fancy clothing stores. There were even flower shops and supermarkets—two things Wes hadn’t seen in years, at least not with actual flowers or food to sell. It was a snapshot stolen from paradise.

  Or it had been, before the fire and the shattered glass. And the people—so many people—running around in a panic, but Wes hardly noticed their stricken expressions; he was staring at them because they were running around bare-legged, dressed in what the typical New Vegas resident wore as underclothes. It was so hot here in the dome, he was sweating already.

  Farouk pulled out of the alleyway and zigzagged down the main thoroughfare. “Which way?” he yelled.

  “Take your time. Apparently we’re just here to see the sights,” Shakes said, elbowing Wes as hard as he could.

  “Ow.” Wes snapped out of his reverie. He scrolled through his phone and found what he had paid for with the last of his watts: a map to the facility where Eliza was being held.

  “Left,” he said, and the limo squealed left. “Now straight,” he said, looking out the window to the street, trying to orient himself. “Up ahead, turn at the next light.”

  “Left?” Farouk asked.

  “Right!”

  “Which one?” yelled Farouk, confused.

  “Left!”

  The limo turned just as a shower of glass hit the street, tinkling like bells, like broken music. The scene was even more confusing, more people running out of their houses, out of office buildings, away from the smoke and the flames.

  But not everyone was running.

  “Look!” Farouk pointed. Scattered throughout the crowds were kids in hospital gowns, in white robes or orange jumpsuits. They walked slowly, deliberately, and their faces were set, concentrating, focused. They were marked, all of them.

  A boy in a half-zippered jumpsuit pushed past the car. His eyes were flashing yellow. He stared into the window of the limo.

  “What are you looking at?” Farouk growled, pressing the gas pedal.

  Wes watched out the rear window as the boy turned to the car immediately behind them.

  The boy picked it up in his arms and hurle
d it into the air, as effortlessly as if he were tossing a toy.

  “Maybe I’d drive a little faster,” Shakes said, his eyes fixed on a girl across the street who was blowing fire down the street with the wave of two bare hands.

  Wes watched as a child with glowing purple eyes in a torn robe raised two hands upward to the dome, forcing the panels to shatter, one by one. She seemed indifferent to the rain of glass all around her.

  Even in the chaos, one thing seemed increasingly clear. The marked prisoners had escaped, and now they were having their revenge.

  But where’s Eliza? Has she escaped, too? Was she one of these silent, angry children? He would never find her in this crowd. He had to check the hospital first.

  “Turn right, turn right,” Wes ordered, and Farouk swerved hard to avoid the burning cars in the intersection, and the limousine skidded on its side; if they had been going any faster, it would have flipped over.

  “There!” Wes said. A few blocks ahead stood a white building with rows of black windows. It was nearly as tall as the dome’s golden ceiling, with a sign in front that proclaimed it the Eisenhower Medical Facility. Typical. The RSA liked to hide in plain sight, to call their prisons “hospitals,” their military bases “peace centers.” The hospital’s street-level windows were cracked and smoke poured out of its open glass doors.

  Steel barricades blocked the street entrance to the hospital, so Wes told Farouk to pull into the alley and park. The limousine crashed into a pile of trash cans before stopping. Wes grabbed the pack that held his equipment. He might need it if they lost the limo. He kicked aside the cans and was out on the street, the boys right behind him. Wes didn’t even bother to look over his shoulder when he heard two sets of footsteps. “You can stay in the car, ’Rouk. You didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Screw you, icehole,” Farouk panted. Shakes shoved him as he ran beside him.

  They ran toward the hospital, the smoke darker and thicker as they neared it. Looking up, Wes saw enormous fans built into the dome’s structure, the massive blades drawing waves of smoke toward the vents. It was a clever system, but it wasn’t enough to clear the air entirely, and soon, everyone in this section of the city would perish from smoke inhalation.