Fate of Flames

by Sarah Raughley

  It injects specially engineered enzymes that’ll momentarily disrupt—

  Huh?

  All you need to know is that if our hunch about Saul is true, this might be your only chance to stop him from using his abilities.

  And if it’s not?

  I didn’t have time to think about it. Grabbing him by his collar, I heaved him against the window, flicked off the safety, and jammed the device into his neck. Saul’s wild eyes dulled, his lips twitching as he let out a soundless gasp.

  “It’s done!” I screamed.

  “Now get out of the way!” Rhys ordered through my earpiece.

  I dove. The gunshots blasted through the window, piercing Saul’s kneecaps. The objective was to capture, not kill. Saul’s mouth slacked open, too stunned to talk. His delicate features creased into a grimace, wrinkling his face. I could tell he was trying to vanish again, the same sideshow act he’d shown off in Brooklyn, but he couldn’t. He stayed right there, right in front of me, perfectly corporeal. Helpless.

  Not helpless.

  His malicious gaze shifted to his monsters, still on standby behind me. At his wordless command, they thundered out a crazed growl and leapt for me, but I’d already launched myself forward. With as much force as I could muster, I pushed Saul out of the cracked window, soaring into the air with him. As the wind whipped against my face, I held my breath.

  “I got you!”

  Lake. Charioted by the wind, she caught me before I could fall too far, grunting from the sudden shock of my weight. Her feet lightly tapped the brick and then, with one powerful leap, she boosted us both upward. After executing a wobbly landing on the balcony ledge beneath her, she dumped me onto the floor and tended to her arms.

  Saul, on the other hand, continued to fall, but he wasn’t out of tricks just yet.

  The streets rumbled and groaned.

  “Move out of the way,” I heard someone yell below, but it was too late. A phantom burst out of the street’s asphalt, black smoke clinging to its fleshy worm body. It was massive.

  “Jesus!” Lake swore, falling backward off the ledge from the shock alone. I kept her steady.

  The timing was perfect. The phantom’s jaws snapped open and swallowed Saul whole before arching its body and tearing back inside the earth.

  I gaped as the last bit of the phantom disappeared underneath the street with Saul’s body inside it. “It . . . it ate him.” I gripped the ledge. “It freaking ate him. I-is he dead?”

  More phantoms rocketed out of the ground, debris exploding off in different directions as reporters scrambled for cover.

  The police were in charge of getting the civilians to safety. The Sect agents had already assembled their arsenal and begun their assault. On the ceilings of adjacent buildings, agents mounted guns, aiming the barrels at phantoms too big to dispatch with ground tactics alone.

  “Rhys?” I peered through the chaotic battle, but I couldn’t find him. “Rhys?” My heart rattled against my chest. Where had he gone? Was he okay?

  I thought of his soft voice comforting me through the earpiece, of the wry smile he always wore whenever I made fun of his clothes. “Rhys,” I said again, though this time it was nothing more than a timid, fearful whisper. He was okay. He had to be okay.

  “Maia! Lake! Get down here!”

  Belle. She’d just finished dragging a barely conscious Chae Rin onto the hood of an abandoned news van. What the hell happened? Chae Rin was holding on to her head, her eyelids fluttering as she winced in pain.

  “Hurry!” Belle commanded.

  The street shifted, rocking the news van. Belle laid her back against the windshield to steady herself, keeping a tight hold on Chae Rin.

  Gripping the balcony ledge, I peered over it with bloodshot eyes. “Lake,” I said, “we have to—”

  “Go down there.” Lake was trembling; her words were barely the faintest of breaths. “But there are phantoms down there.” She backed away.

  Crouching in the corner, she buried her head in her knees. But the balcony was creaking, groaning. Too many phantoms crashing into the building, too much shuddering beneath the streets. I could see the steady stream of debris flowing down the bricks next to us.

  “Maia! Lake!” Belle’s frantic voice rose above the chaos. “Hurry!”

  If Lake was having a breakdown I couldn’t blame her, but I was so past the point of fear that the idea of leaping over bludgeoned bodies, bloodied blades, and terrifying monsters seemed like the obvious thing to do. Better than staying trapped on a precariously quivering balcony.

  I lifted Lake onto her feet and dragged her to the balcony railing. She fought the entire way, but despite her height, her waif frame and blank state of mind made the battle futile.

  “Come on!” I said. “We’re jumping!”

  Lake’s eyes welled with tears. She clung to me, refusing to look at the chaos below. “This is terrible. This is mad. I can’t!” Her fingers dug into my flesh. “I . . .” She inhaled a shaky breath. “I hate them,” she whispered.

  I thought of the phantoms in Brooklyn. The death they’d left in their wake. My own hands began to shake.

  “Me too,” I whispered back.

  I jumped, pulling Lake with me. I was right to believe in her: As if by basic instinct alone, the long-legged beauty ran across the sky, the wind caressing her cheeks, catching the tears as they fell. Carefully, we descended, lower and lower, toward the van, but that only took us closer to the phantoms below. One leapt for us, and Lake launched us up, just barely avoiding its sinkhole mouth.

  I gasped from each sharp tug of gravity hooking my stomach and throwing it up and down, but just when I thought I’d hurl on the street, Lake banished the wind and let us both fall. We landed painfully, but safely, next to the van.

  “Get inside the car,” ordered Belle as she sliced a phantom’s jaw with her sword and dragged Chae Rin inside with her.

  Lake went for the passenger door just as one of Saul’s wolves leapt at her. Screaming wildly, she kicked it, catching its nostril with her heel while my clammy hands fumbled the door open.

  “Get in, get in!” I cried.

  Lake dove inside and slammed the door behind her.

  I pulled her onto the bench. “Lake, you okay?”

  She wasn’t, and not just because of the bloody strips running down her leg. Unable to move, Lake responded only in belabored breaths, her beautiful face frozen in shock.

  “Goddamn it, this hurts.” Chae Rin was crumpled in the passenger seat, groaning and swearing as she kept a hand pressed against her temple. There wasn’t any blood, so she must have gotten bludgeoned by something amid the confusion.

  Belle dug something out of her jeans, cell phone–like, except for the metallic blue schematics bright on the screen.

  “The tracking device you forced into Saul. Look: He’s traveling underground. Inside the phantom.” Belle pointed at the blinking red dot moving through the diagram. “Sibyl’s orders.” She tapped her own earpiece. “We’ll catch him.”

  There were no windows in the back of the van. I twisted around anyway as if I could see Rhys fighting through the pounds of metal.

  Belle grabbed the keys abandoned in the ignition and started the van just as a massive force crashed into it, nearly lifting it off its wheels.

  “Allons-y!” Belle slammed on the gas and we were off down the ruined streets. “Wake up!” She jolted Chae Rin alert with a violent shake before tossing me the tracking device. “I can’t drive and watch it at the same time,” she said. “You tell me where to go.”

  I could barely handle the GPS in Uncle Nathan’s car, but with Chae Rin only semiconscious and Lake experiencing some form of post-traumatic stress, I tried my best. Following the blinking red on the screen, I directed Belle’s frenzied driving through the back roads instead.

  “Turn right,” I said as we swerved onto a barren street, but the earsplitting screech of ripping metal silenced my next words. A phantom crashed through the top of the van, t
earing the ceiling off. The tracking device shot out of my hands, hit the back of the driver’s seat, and rattled on the floor. I couldn’t tell which of us were screaming—maybe it was just me. We ducked for cover, but Belle kept hold of the steering wheel while the car spun out of control.

  “Get lost!” Chae Rin sharpened the earth into several terrible spikes that skewered the beast just as Belle reined the car back under her control.

  I peered into the open sky. A helicopter was chasing us from a safe distance above, the red logo of a news station painted across the side.

  Effigy car chase. News at eleven.

  “Maia!”

  I jumped at the sound of Belle’s voice. “R-right!” As the wind whipped my hair, I slid off the bench and frantically felt around the floor until I found the tracking device. “Keep going straight ahead!”

  Cordoba Avenue. Then Bouchard Street. We were getting near the waterfront. What was Saul planning? Would he burrow deeper underground? Burst into the neighborhood? Or escape underwater?

  “Chae Rin.” I was amazed at how calm Belle sounded. “Still with us?”

  “I just kebabbed a phantom not more than two minutes ago.”

  Despite Chae Rin’s indignation, her breathing was haggard, and her head dangled at an odd angle against the headrest. She was clearly struggling hard just to stay conscious.

  “We’ll lose the signal if he makes it to the river.”

  Chae Rin twisted in her chair. “So split the sea, Moses.”

  “I can’t. Not without flooding the place. We’ll have to get him before then.”

  There were docked boats, restaurants, and shops along the boardwalk, none of which were guaranteed to be empty. If we were going to stop Saul, Chae Rin would have to do something big, but it would also have to be as precise as possible.

  I watched the red dot draw closer to our position. Either Saul’s phantom was losing steam, or we were gaining on him. Whichever it was, it didn’t matter. “We’re almost right over him!”

  “Okay.” Chae Rin closed her eyes as if feeling the phantom slithering through the earth.

  “Just end it.” Lake held on to my arm for dear life. “Please, just finish it!”

  Yelling, Chae Rin raised both her arms. Belle slammed on the brakes. The phantom exploded out of the ground as if the earth, under Chae Rin’s command, were ridding itself of a toxin. It soared into the air toward the river, but its body found a jagged bed of ice instead. Belle made sure the edges were sharp enough to cut the phantom’s head clean off, stopping it dead.

  I stared into the deep hole where its head used to be: hollow, but for some flesh and bone lining the neck. Out of the phantom’s carcass climbed Saul, his hand clasping bone to pull himself out, his mouth rasping in the fresh air. He couldn’t disappear. Once he’d crawled all the way out, he collapsed onto the ice bed, resting there for a moment before pulling himself into sitting position. I saw no strength in his wicked face, but his eyes . . . his eyes stayed on me. And only me.

  After taking a moment to catch our breath, Belle and I got out of the car. Painfully, I dragged myself behind her along a freshly made ice walkway. Despite trying to look everywhere but Saul, inevitably my eyes would slide back to him. His gaze kept me fixed.

  “Am I under arrest?” he asked once we reached him. Even with his broken body propped against the phantom’s carcass, he still managed an evil little grin.

  Belle stood tall despite the strain and fatigue obvious on her face. “You’ll be taken in for questioning.”

  “Good. Question me. Search me. Dig as deeply as you wish. But Maia . . .” With an unsteady hand, he reached for me. “Will you be ready for what you’ll find?”

  Suddenly, he leaned over and gripped my ankle. Maybe it was because I just had nothing left, but the shock from his touch alone rocketed through my body. Even after Belle kicked his hand away, I continued to shudder.

  I gasped. My head was suddenly searing with pain like it’d just caught fire. I knew this feeling. I’d felt it before, in Brooklyn, in Quebec.

  Memories. So many memories.

  They tore through me like bloody talons; I couldn’t make sense of them all.

  I pressed my hands against my eyes, mind swirling, but the next time I opened them I was somewhere else entirely.

  It had become too dark too quickly. My eyes couldn’t adjust. But I knew that I was sitting in an armchair.

  Armchair?

  The art on the wall felt familiar even while cloaked in darkness. The scotch-filled decanter on the table. The red lipstick staining the rims of glasses. The bottles of alcohol.

  Natalya.

  I reached for it, but my hand found my throat instead.

  No. It wasn’t my hand at all.

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. Why couldn’t I breathe? Where was I? If this was Natalya’s memory, then which memory was this?

  I tried calling out a name, but I sputtered and coughed instead.

  Help me. It was Natalya desperately begging from the deep recesses of my mind. Please help me. . . .

  Pain sliced apart my chest from the inside as I toppled over the chair. I clawed at the rug because I couldn’t use my legs anymore. With the single goal of staying alive, I clung to a pair of feet standing by the table, but they didn’t budge, didn’t move to help me. Why? Please. Please!

  I would have cried out if I’d found my voice. I would have asked him why. Why was he just standing there letting me cling to him? Why was he calmly watching me die?

  But Natalya would die without ever knowing the answer.

  NATALYA FILIPOVA WAS MURDERED.

  It was more than a hypothesis. However fleeting and confusing the memory had been, it had given me something no one else could: insight into Natalya’s last moments.

  Natalya was murdered.

  Or was she?

  Groaning, I buried my head in my hands. It’d already been half a day since Sect agents dragged Saul off to the Division headquarters. Good. Mission accomplished. For a second I thought they’d finally let me go back to Brooklyn, but then Sibyl forced all four of us—me, Belle, Lake, and Chae Rin—to stick around. Why? She wouldn’t say. I wasn’t even allowed to call Uncle Nathan. Even stranger, Uncle Nathan wasn’t trying to call me.

  The Sect facility here wasn’t equipped for four emotionally and physically exhausted Effigies. After a battle like that? We needed R & R. We needed beds and showers and food that wasn’t bad coffee. After a lengthy bout of passionate lobbying led by Lake, the Sect had finally caved and put us up in a nice hotel on the edge of the city, far from the battle site. I’d managed to get four good hours of sleep before waking up to the sounds of helicopters outside my window. Helicopters. Reporters on the ground. Hollering locals. Maybe Effigy fans. Hell, I probably would have been right there with them, back in the day.

  Luckily, the Sect, anticipating the deluge of international reporters, had booked the entire eleventh floor of the hotel just for us, but while it helped with security, the media frenzy still found its way inside my comfy hotel room through various means.

  Meet Maia Finley: Natalya’s Successor. This was the title of a post on an online gossip site, which, to my endless delight, featured interviews from my classmates at Ashford High—like gymnastics queen Missy Stevenson, who didn’t waste a second telling the world about every embarrassing thing she’d ever seen me do. I wished I could say they were all lies.

  Can Finley Fill Filipova’s Shoes? From the Washington Post. Should have gone for “flippers,” what with the alliteration they already had going.

  The battle with Saul had already been dragged into the bloodthirsty arena of twenty-four-hour news television. Pundits cynically picked at the story from every angle. Some of the footage was online already: of me walking inside the bookstore, of Saul’s phantom leaping up to swallow him.

  “The Department of Defense is issuing an emergency assessment of every Needle and antiphantom device in the country,” said a CNN news anchor. Her
face was split-screened with a chubby, gross-looking man who blustered from his side of the TV. “According to a statement issued by the Sect press secretary, they have a suspect in custody. But, John, they’ve given no details on the nature of this suspect or the recent international phantom attacks.”

  “Wendy, what are you expecting? The Sect has proved time and time again that they are not only incapable of handling matters of international security, but utterly unwilling to fulfill their promises of transparency.” John’s bloated face reddened by the second. “What are they even good for nowadays? Aside from a few agents who aren’t nearly as well trained as our proud American military officers, they’ve got little girls with godlike abilities running around without any kind of supervision. I mean, should we really feel safe with that kind of power in the hands of a bunch of hormonal teens? Does anyone really believe they’re capable of protecting us?”

  Douche bag.

  “To be fair, John, they were instrumental in apprehending the suspected terrorist.”

  “Today. Think about it. If you were a young woman with incredible power at your fingertips, would you have the emotional stability to handle it?” He scoffed. “Even Natalya Filipova ended up killing herself.”

  I shut my eyes, trying to forget the sensation of Natalya’s rug in my fingernails.

  “And what’s stopping the Sect from using the Effigies against us?” John continued. “All this secrecy—what exactly are they trying to hide, Wendy?”

  “The hell are you watching?”

  I hadn’t even heard Chae Rin come in.

  I shut my laptop and I fluffed the pillow on my lap. “Feeling better?”

  “My head doesn’t feel like an omelet anymore, so I guess so.” After sitting on the bed next to me, Chae Rin pointed at the windows. “Distracting, isn’t it?”

  She was referring, of course, to the commotion beyond my shut blinds.

  “Chae Rin, what are you doing here?”

  “Just came to give you the update,” she answered before rummaging around in my minifridge. “They’re transporting Saul to the London headquarters.”