by L. J. Hatton
“Only if you consider being locked in a cell and used as a guinea pig to be relocation,” I told her.
Arcineaux and his men were getting closer. I needed to thin them out. Thankfully, we were far enough from Baba’s house that taking pieces off the Mile wouldn’t threaten that section of it. I stopped and conjured thoughts of Nim at her worst.
Churning tides and darkened seas. Maelstroms shattering ships upon the rocks.
“Water,” I said. “Flood. Rise. Rage.”
A deluge washed out of abandoned dwellings in schools of fish and running herds of water horses. Snatching hands rose from the ground to grab runners by the ankles and pull them down. I raised my hands in a “stop” motion and the water pooled, swelling into a wall that was taller than me.
The horrified unnoticeable asked, “What are you going to do?”
“Keep this between me and the warden,” I told her.
I dropped my hands, and the water dropped with them. When it settled, Arcineaux stood alone. His backup had been washed down the byways and side streets.
“Best two out of three?” I taunted and took off again.
I thickened the fog and made it deeper. I’d need it to pull off what I had in mind. I’d made him mad enough to follow me without thinking. I could lead him anywhere, and I knew exactly where I wanted to put him. I could run Arcineaux off the edge and borrow Vesper’s touch to keep myself aloft.
It wouldn’t be murder, I told myself. He was supposed to be dead. I was just putting him back in the ground.
Actually, I didn’t care that it was murder. I reminded myself that I was a monster. One more splash of blood didn’t really matter in the long run. My hands were stained already.
“How are you doing this?” the unnoticeable asked. “How can you control more than one element? How are you making them? That’s not possible.”
“Change careers,” I told her. “Now. You’re not cut out for the Commission.”
I saw my opening ten yards away, where the walkways were Swiss cheese.
“I can slow down!” I yelled over my shoulder to make sure that Arcineaux stayed with me. “I forgot how short you are!”
Bait offered and taken.
Arcineaux growled, put his head down like an angry bull, and charged.
I sprinted for the largest gap I could feel in the metal below the cement. All I had to do was stop halfway across and keep my feet in the fog, where he couldn’t see that nothing was below them. It was so simple it couldn’t fail.
And then I fell.
CHAPTER 17
“Vesper!” I screamed, but she didn’t answer me. The only wind I felt was what surrounded my body as I plummeted when my powers cut out again. Arcineaux and the unnoticeable peered down through the hole, but there was nothing either of them could do.
Calm, I told myself. Be calm. But calm wasn’t easy to come by. Wind wasn’t calm.
“Vesper!”
A sharp burst of air shoved me upward. Just as quickly, I was falling again.
I let myself feel the air, stretched my arms to see if I could skid to a stop on wind resistance.
Another puff tossed me up. This was some kind of short circuit, and it was making me motion sick.
The sudden intrusion of burnt cinnamon made it worse as the air around me turned rust red, and Dev appeared out of the cloud, falling with me.
“Gotcha,” he said.
He wrapped his arms around me, and we dematerialized. It felt exactly like traveling with Zavel’s rabbit holes or my father’s coat—minus the broken bones. We returned into being on Xerxes’ back, where Dev collapsed between Jermay and Birch, sound asleep.
“He only had one jump left in him,” Nola said. We’d acquired her as a passenger; Birdie was still on Bijou with Winnie, Anise, and Klok. “We decided not to wait.”
“Thanks for that,” I said weakly. My stomach was still spinning, and I was very happy that I hadn’t made it to breakfast that morning. “How did he find me in the middle of the sky?”
“I don’t know what you told that unnoticeable woman, but you made an impression,” Anise said. “She came back to the house.”
I hope the woman didn’t pay for that later.
“Guys, we’ve got incoming!” Winnie shouted. She pointed up to where Arcineaux was still watching. There was no way he’d missed seeing Dev in action. “Hummers!”
Someone on the Mile had fired another volley of the pests. A swarm of metal hornets was headed straight for us.
Of all the times to have a hiccup in my abilities . . .
I closed my eyes to block out the fear and doubt that showed on every face except Klok’s. Agitated ions churned in the clouds around us. I nudged them together to force a reaction that would grant me the spark I needed to short out the hummers. Aiming was out of the question, as was temperance; I just pointed the flow of electricity upward and let it fly.
Hummers buzzed and fizzled, streaking harmlessly past us on their way to the ground. The electric charge kept going. It hit the conductive metal lining the base of the Mile, overloading one of the few engines I’d left running. Losing that engine caused the others to roll, overheating them in sequence and sending each one into shutdown. Explosions went off from one side to the other, shaking the Mile loose from the spike’s green halo. It began to disintegrate on its way down.
A rush of heat roared over us, followed closely by a disruptive wave of turbulence from the energy released. Xerxes peeled off, but Bijou was forced into a barrel roll. Anise grabbed for Birdie out of habit; it cost her the grip she had on our dragon, and she tumbled down into a free fall. A stone that definitely couldn’t fly, she was what Nafiza had seen in her vision, and ours were the hands that couldn’t catch her.
“Dev!” Nola called. “Dev, wake up!”
I tried shaking him, but the poor kid was so deep asleep, his body had pulled rank on his mind. It didn’t matter what he wanted to do at this point; sleep was his only option. There weren’t many options open to Anise, either.
All falling bodies are subject to basic physics, even if those bodies are touched. Gravity pulls objects in motion toward the ground, but terrakinetics have one advantage: they can make the ground fall up to meet them.
“Dive!” I ordered Xerxes.
He pinned his wings close to his body and plunged beak-first after her. Catching up wasn’t the problem. We were dodging debris, and she kept drifting to the side. There was no way for the golems to steer in a nosedive without increasing their wind resistance and having her pull away again.
Rock and stone and sand and all manner of earthy ore answered Anise’s call to rise. I added my own voice to hers, breaking the clumps into smaller, softer pieces to minimize the damage to her body on impact. I pressed the air around her, slowing her descent, but the force at her velocity was too much for me to stop her completely without shattering her bones between solid walls of wind. She kept her head, tucking herself into a ball the way Bruno had taught us to take a fall, and didn’t let her body tense.
She and the upsurging pillar met in the middle of the sky with the power of a volcanic eruption. Bits of silt and dust and grit and grime blasted into the air, showering us all with a layer of cinder-colored clay. From the ground—once we’d reached the ground—she appeared to have disappeared into a freakishly large termite mound.
“Move!” I squawked to spur the mound into dispersing as I leapt from Xerxes’ back, spitting gravel to clear my mouth and throat.
Anise could control the ground; she couldn’t breathe it. She needed oxygen, and fast.
I was also acutely aware of the fact that we were directly below the still-crumbling Mile, and it wouldn’t take long for any surviving Commission officials to regroup and start looking for people on the ground. That first transport ship had never docked. It could land as soon as it had orders, and I didn’t want to think about Arcineaux surviving another crash.
I gave my grief and rage free rein. They grew legs and paws, a tufted he
ad and a tail. My lynx clawed its way out of the mound, fully formed and growing as fast as the sense of helplessness that made me wonder if I’d lost a second sister in less than a week. I needed Anise. Without her, I’d have nothing to ground me. There’d be no center to pull the rest of the Roma family together.
It seemed the harder I tried to put us back together, the more determined the universe was to keep us apart.
One swipe. Two swipes. My golem tore through layers of excavated sediment in seconds.
The mound trembled, quaking, so that pebbles bounced down the sides. Birdie squealed and hid behind one of Bijou’s wings.
“Easy with the earthquake!” Winnie said. “You might save Anise, but don’t forget the rest of us!”
“It’s not me!” I said.
Temblors cracked the ground below my feet, throwing me forward into the mound; they were too strong to stand against, and I couldn’t get up.
Anise was fighting for her life from inside the mound. And if she was fighting, the impact hadn’t killed her.
“She’s alive!” I cheered.
Everyone attacked the pile, dragging handfuls of dirt off the base while my lynx and I augmented Anise’s efforts to free herself. Something powerful roared up and out. The bulk of the mound stood up, rolling us off its sides.
Anise’s Kodiak, twenty feet tall, stood in the middle of what had been Anise’s tomb. It shook itself violently, losing inches as it cast off tons of detritus in each direction. It had shrunk to around eight feet when Klok beeped suddenly and flung himself at the remaining heap, his hands moving too quickly to see as he dug.
“Look! An arm!” Birch shouted. “He’s got her.”
One arm, so crusted over and filthy that it was identical to the color of the ground. Bent at the elbow and groping in the open air.
Klok grabbed Anise’s hand and she locked onto his, allowing him to drag her free. Her bear bowed in half and disintegrated.
I ran to her side, absently dismissing my lynx and telling the accumulated earth to scatter itself back to where it came from. There would be some odd mixtures for geology types to puzzle over if they took samples, but those anomalies wouldn’t be as easy to notice as a tower where one had never been before.
“Anise?” I touched her face lightly. She wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t speaking, so I didn’t know if I should hug her or not.
Klok knelt and cradled her head in his hands.
Detailed charts and lists scrolled across his voice screen. Heart rate, blood-oxygen, and body temp. There were equations involving the time she’d been underground and comparative analysis of her weight versus how much pressure had been directly on her body.
All set to the cacophonous sound of Birdie wailing beside Baba and Dev’s unconscious body. It wasn’t her fault that Anise fell, but she wouldn’t believe it.
“Birdie, so help me, if you blink out, I’ll have Birch tie you to Bijou so we can keep track of you!” Winnie warned her, and Birdie tried to stifle her crying down to a sniffle.
“Is Anise breathing?” I asked Klok. I didn’t have enough experience with mixing or separating air to allow me to focus pure oxygen around her face. I wanted to inflate her lungs to make sure they were working, but I was afraid my unsteady hands would overdo it and I’d blow them out.
The scrolling stopped, replaced by an all-caps, bright-blue “YES!” I wasn’t sure if the emphasis was triumph or annoyance at my question.
“Is she okay?” Birdie asked. She peeked out of her hiding spot but stayed mostly hidden behind the golem’s wings.
Klok held up one hand and crossed his fingers.
CHAPTER 18
“What can we do?” Nola asked.
This had felt so much like an “us” problem that I forgot about “them,” even though Nola, Ollie, and his wife had been right there with us, digging Anise out. Now Nola and Winnie were looking on, and Baba was brushing Dev’s forehead where he was laid out at Bijou’s feet beside Birdie and Wren. Ollie and his horde had their hands full with crying and scared little ones who wanted to return to the home still falling as cinder and ash. This was not a group that lent itself easily to being hidden.
“I . . . I might be able to help,” Birch offered. He shifted his focus to Winnie, then to me. “I’ve had some experience with triage, and there are plants that could help with her pain and potential fever. I’m sure Klok’s databases have more information than the books Nye gave me on the Center. I might be able to sprout a few things, if the descriptions are clear enough. I can’t promise it’ll work, but I can try.”
Jermay stepped in to block Birch’s path when he tried to get closer to Anise.
“You’ve done enough,” he growled.
“What?” Birch asked, honestly confused.
“Don’t you get it?” Jermay asked us. “Everything that woman said was true. Winnie and a warden at the end of the Mile, the stones falling up. It all happened, and if that all happened, then the rest of what she said has to be true, too. There’s no way they found us without help! You’re the false heart. You’re the one loyal to someone else,” he accused, staring Birch down.
“It wasn’t me!”
“Liar!” Jermay poked Birch in the chest. “Betrayer.” He shoved him.
“I’m not!”
“Stop it!” Birdie screamed, covering her ears. “Jermay, stop! He didn’t do anything!”
“This is what happens every time Nafiza opens her mouth,” Winnie said. “She gets in your head. You pick apart what she says and play with it until it fits. Both of you back away before I have to make you behave.”
The threat didn’t do much.
“How did you signal them?” Jermay demanded.
“I didn’t. I swear.” Birch was walking backward as fast as he could, but Jermay refused to let up.
Jermay shoved again, hard enough to land Birch on his back.
Birch flinched at most human contact under the best of conditions. Being knocked off his feet activated his panic responses. The fresh-turned soil Anise had used came alive a second time, releasing wiggly vines into view. They wrapped around Jermay’s ankles and pulled, leveling the field and leaving them both kicking-mad on the ground. But Jermay had always been a scrapper. He’d learned to hold his own against local boys in towns where they thought carnie kids made for a canned hunt; those fights had taught him the dangers of staying down.
He snapped the vines with his hands and was back on his feet in no time. Birch couldn’t outrun him. Jermay caught him from behind, pinning his arms.
“That was a coward move,” he said. “You’re all kinds of loser, aren’t you?”
Birdie was screaming again. Ollie’s kids were crying as their parents tried to keep them clear of the fight. I’d heard enough. I pushed the sharpest, most frigid wind at them to stop the fight, stinging their bare skin with frostbite.
Klok stepped in while they were off-balance, lifting Jermay off Birch’s body and holding him back.
“We should not be fighting,” he scolded. “We should be locating assistance for Anise. Her wounds are severe, and I cannot properly assess them if I am required to act as a restraint.”
The letters on his screen were large and flashing, toggling between a bold font and one in italics. He was too flustered to speak normally.
“This isn’t the time to work out your issues, Jermay,” I said. “I’m sorry, but keep this up and you’ll be the one responsible for getting us caught. Okay? Can you control yourself, or do I need to take Winnie up on her offer to put you in time-out?”
She wouldn’t really have done it. Winnie didn’t like using her touch when she didn’t have to, and I didn’t blame her. Forcing people to say and do things would have made her into exactly what Ollie accused her of being. Unlike the wardens, free will was precious to her specifically because she could override it.
“I’m telling you, this is his fault!” Jermay said. “Ask him where he went after breakfast that first morning on the Mile!”
> “To the garden!” Birch insisted.
“He was covered in dirt when he came home,” I said. “I saw him myself.”
“Well, I didn’t. I walked the entire Mile when I left the house. The garden. The park. All of it! I didn’t see him once. He wasn’t there. Maybe it’s not his fault any more than Winnie’s scars are hers. Maybe they did something to him, but the result is the same. He was off signaling the little Commission voices in his head, like a good brainwashed drone!”
“Birch?” Winnie asked.
“I didn’t do anything! I was exactly where I said I was. I went to the garden, and the soil was nearly dead, so I checked the neighborhoods to see if it was the same. That’s all. I swear!”
“Prove it,” Jermay challenged. “Winnie can ask you again and make you tell the truth.”
“I won’t do that,” Winnie said. “I trust him.”
“I agree,” I said. “We can’t start questioning each other.”
“If he didn’t lead them to the Mile, then how’d they know where we were?” Jermay asked. “The timing of that raid was too perfect.”
That logic I couldn’t argue with. I’d had the same thoughts myself. The raid came at the moment of peak energy expenditure: during the repair routine. Those vessels had to be in position, waiting for it, but I wasn’t ready to turn on Birch just because he was convenient. There were too many variables that he didn’t fit. He couldn’t have signaled anyone about the repairs beforehand because he didn’t know I’d be making them.
“Do you think he brought them to the Hollow, too?” I asked.
“That was Evie.”
“Dangerous ground, Jermay Baán. She didn’t have a choice. Birch did, and he didn’t choose to bring the Commission down on our heads. It would have been a lot easier while we were underground and alone.”
“Then what’s your explanation?” Jermay asked me.
“Maybe they’re tracking us.” We’d all been prisoners inside the Center, and Winnie had the scars to prove she’d been a test subject. I’d seen Arcineaux give her orders, even without the restriction bands usually required to keep a Level-Five in check. It was possible he’d found a way to implant devices or protocols that weren’t visible on the outside. “It’s like a cell phone. When you’re in a tunnel, the signal goes down, so they couldn’t see us inside the Hollow. Once we left, the signal came back.”