by Jasmine Walt
“Fuck the Law Division,” I said. “A wyvern just attacked us. Ms Weston thinks she knows who did it. We’re next.”
The centaur’s mouth fell open. “You what?”
“You think I’d joke about something like that?”
“I think you look slightly mad. Okay, I’m coming.”
“Where’s Ellen? And everyone else?”
“I was the only person here. People think our office is haunted, funnily enough.” But he clip-clopped after me into the corridor.
“Oh, for crying out loud, do you think I’m getting in that bloody elevator after Alan died in there?” I said, seeing which direction he headed in.
“Centaurs,” said Markos, with a great deal of dignity, “don’t get along with stairs.”
That figured.
Someone shouted, “Where the hell are you two going?” Damn. I’d forgotten Aric.
“Out,” I said. “We’re next on the killer’s hit list.”
“A likely story.” Aric stepped in to block our path.
“For God’s sake, we don’t have time for this!” I glanced at Markos. “Lenny’s dead back there. The killer’s targeting our department—hell, they’re probably somewhere in here right now.”
Aric looked around, like he couldn’t help himself. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Like I’m going to fall for that one, Walker.”
“Does the blood and carnage not speak for itself?”
“You know,” said Aric, taking a step towards me so he blocked the exit, “I think you’re the one behaving suspiciously. If anyone has the potential to be the killer, it’s you, Walker.”
That was it. “Out of the way, Aric.”
“What, or you’ll try to kill me again?”
“Are you still not over that? Get a goddamned life.”
“Enough!” Markos’s hooves shot out, sending Aric sprawling to the ground. “I’ll trample both of you if we don’t get the hell out of here.”
Aric got to his feet, glaring at Markos. “You’ll pay for that.”
“He says that a lot,” I said. “C’mon.” And despite it going against all instinct, I followed him into the elevator.
“Well, that wasn’t how I expected to find out the damage,” said Markos, glancing at me, as the glass lift descended. “You tried to kill him?”
“Let’s just say I got a taste of magic, and got burned. He conveniently left out the part where he set a wyvern loose in the Passages and almost got me and my friends killed.”
“Ah,” said Markos. “Magic-wielder, are you?”
“Unfortunately.” But I’d had no choice in the matter, and running away from it hadn’t done me any good lately.
The elevator emitted a screeching sound, and began to slow down.
“Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me,” I said. The screeching continued, until the lift ground to a halt, the entrance hall glittering below, blurred by the glass doors.
“I think we’re in trouble, Kay,” said Markos, tapping a hoof against the glass.
“You don’t say?”
Lights flickered, and the power went out.
17
Ada
I couldn’t believe Ms Weston had let me walk away free. But she was preoccupied talking to the other Alliance members and hardly seemed to see me. I walked towards the gate at first, then broke into a run. I jogged the length of the fence and stopped at the corner to figure out my next move.
“Ada!” someone called from behind me.
I turned around. “Skyla?” She was dressed in her work gear, hair pulled into a messy bun, dishevelled, like she’d run from her office.
“I thought it was you, but... What happened?”
“I—this isn’t a good place.” Around the corner, half the Alliance’s guard was still dealing with the wyvern. “I just left the Alliance, but I was supposed to…” My phone buzzed again. “Delta keeps calling me.”
“He won’t know about the Alliance taking you in, right?”
“Guess not. I need to talk to him anyway.” I answered the call. “Delta?
“Red! You’re alive?”
“I’m okay,” I said, quickly. “I got arrested. The Alliance had my phone. But they couldn’t hack it.”
I gave him a quick rundown of what had happened, for Skyla’s benefit too. But I didn’t mention Kay’s promise to open the New York Alliance’s Passage for offworlders. I still didn’t quite believe it.
“Red, you rock. You know that?”
“I do my best.” I grinned, despite the lingering worry for Kay, who might be in the same building as a killer.
“Wanna come meet me in the Passages now?”
“I—I can’t. There’s someone I have to meet. Later. I’ll come to the Passages later. There’s this guy, Kay, he’s going to help, uh, with the refugees… it’s too hard to explain.”
“What? Who’s Kay?”
“Kay Walker. He works for the Alliance, but well, he helped me.”
“Wait, you met Walker?”
“Yes…” I frowned. “Do you know him?”
“Do I–? Ada, it was someone called Walker who cut Enzar off from the Passages twenty years ago. A high council member. The son of the Alliance’s founder!”
“No.” I stopped, my heart plummeting. “It wasn’t him. Kay’s only been there a week.”
“Must be his son.”
“I don’t…” Walker. Why hadn’t I made the connection before? Nell had probably mentioned the name, but with everything that had happened lately, I hadn’t thought about it. I’d mostly tuned out her rants against the Alliance, really.
Now it came back to hit me. Kay was the son of the eminent council member who’d opposed interference, even to help the millions of people dying.
I didn’t even know what to think about that. But he’d said not to call him “Walker”, I remembered.
“Anyway. Seriously, come to the Passages, if you can. There’s a family coming through. Soon.”
“What?”
“That’s why I’ve been calling. Rumours, man. I didn’t believe you’d really been taken in.”
Skyla mouthed, What?
Someone needs me in the Passages, I mouthed back.
“It’s sort of difficult,” I said. “I’m outside Central, but there’s been a wyvern attack by the road where their Passage entrance is.”
“A wyvern? You serious?”
“Not sure the Passages are the safest place at the moment,” I said. “Is there—is there no other way?”
“I can do it alone, but Valeria’s temporarily closed its borders because of all the spawn of Cethrax rampaging around the Passages lately.”
“Damn.” Guess I should have expected the impact to spill offworld. “Look, half the Alliance’s guard’s gathered in the street. They’re dealing with the wyvern. It’s dead, but there are terrified ordinary people about, and the other Alliance employees.”
“They’re distracted?”
“Yes, but…” I chewed on my bottom lip. This was all too much to process. I needed to think, and there was no time to do that right now.
“I’ll come with you,” said Skyla. “Tell you what. I’ll create a diversion.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” Skyla nodded. “It’d be my pleasure.”
There was nothing to do about Kay now and no way to help Nell, either—and this family needed me, especially with the Passages even more dangerous than usual. So I turned and headed back towards Central. The gleaming exterior of the skyscraper revealed nothing of the chaos that was happening inside, but on the outside, the world had ground to a standstill. Traffic had stopped, and people were leaving the offices opposite Central and driving or just running away. Around the corner, the wyvern had been dragged out of the rubble and guards surrounded it, clearly trying to figure out how to get it back into the Passages. I could see the gleam of the open door at the street’s end.
Drawing in a deep breath, I hurried past the guards and the wyvern and the bus
ted, broken-down houses.
I’d almost made it when a shout rang out. “Hey, you can’t go that way!”
I ran, glancing over my shoulder to see where Skyla was. She’d disappeared. But a blond woman was arguing with the guards who’d called after me.
Something seemed odd about that, but I had to take the opportunity. I reached the entrance to the Passages. The magic charge was so strong, the air lit up inside with lightning, red as blood.
“I’m here, Delta,” I said into the phone. “Which door?”
“This door.”
I spun around. There was a door opposite, one that hadn’t been in use—but now it was wide open. Delta stood in the entrance. Smiling.
Two dreyverns stood on either side of him.
“Sorry, Red,” he said.
“Delta,” I said, hardly acknowledging the stupid nickname. “What—what the hell are you doing with them?”
My heart beat loud in my ears, and even the magic seemed to be telling me to get the hell out of there.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said. “But my family needs you.”
The two dreyverns advanced. Two against one, and I had only one weapon.
I turned around, and ran.
Hands grabbed me around the waist and lifted me into the air. Delta locked something metal around my arms. Twisting my head, I saw that my arms were locked onto his hands, and before I could process that, he’d pulled me back through the door and the world dropped away as we soared into a cloudy sky.
I screamed, squirming in his grip. Below, a city unfolded, skyscrapers piercing the heavens, hover cars swarming the roads between like ants. Next to us, a car hovered in midair, on a level with the rooftops, and as we spun around, I saw the door we’d come through, literally at the edge of a skyscraper. We weren’t standing on the ground, but floating. It just had to be effing hover boots, I thought.
Another world. At last. But wrong, so wrong. The grid-like city below, crisscrossed by four-lane roads on three levels, the glass skyscrapers, the monoliths set at the four map points of the biggest city in Valeria—I’d only seen it in photos, pictures Delta had showed me.
“Let me go!” I screamed—possibly a bad idea under the circumstances. But whatever held my arms was like a magnet. It probably was, considering Valeria’s technology—the boots, as Delta had boasted, also came with oxygen shields. We could fly ten thousand feet and still breathe. And scream, as I did when the pair of us shot into the sky, through a damp mass of cloud. The wind rushed past, making my ears pop.
“Stop! Put me down!”
We wove among the skyscrapers, no one looking twice at us from the offices within or the cars on the high skyways, like this was a normal sight. No one heard my screams.
“Sorry, Ada,” Delta said, again, his voice muffled by the roaring wind. “I always wondered what the big deal was with you. Why my family kept sending me out to meet you. I thought it was odd that you could use magic when you weren’t mageblood, but I didn’t know you were a freaking Royal. To be honest, I didn’t know much about Enzar, but my family’s very interested in you.”
“What the hell?” I gasped. We’d slowed down, the cold air stinging my face. “I’m not going anywhere with you!” And how the hell does he know I’m Royal?
“Skyla told me,” he said, like he’d read my mind. “She’s a bug, an implant in the Alliance.”
“You what? Skyla doesn’t work for…”
“The Alliance tried an experiment once,” he said, his voice slamming into me along with the stinging breeze. “They tried injecting dormant magic sources into humans. Stopped after the council beat them down. At first, it looked like they were unsuccessful. None of the experimental subjects responded. They didn’t realise they needed to take the subject into a high-magic world, or the Passages.”
“What the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“Skyla was one of them,” said Delta. “She was an experiment. And when she first came into the Passages, she almost killed herself. Third level magic took her over. But she can control it now. It’s pretty impressive.”
I shook my head, the best I could. Skyla was a magic-wielder, I knew that, but I always assumed she was sensitive to it like some people on Earth were. I’d never had reason to suspect she might be capable of anything more than what I could do—though she had used second level magic to distract the Alliance when I’d broken out…
“You don’t believe me, do you?” He dropped in the air so suddenly that my head spun and windows rushed past in a blur. “That Skyla’s been in the Alliance as a spy? I think she enjoyed it. She’s been working there two years, trying to figure out what they did to her. But she was working for my family, too. She gave us information, in exchange for a shot at revenge. Turns out you were that information. You have a potent magic source inside you, implanted inside you when you were just a baby. You’re what we need. You can give us the Multiverse. Never mind Skyla’s petty revenge plan.”
I was silent. My heart hammered, like I was free-falling all over again.
“Turns out my foster dad’s pretty pissed at the Alliance for putting up restrictions on offworld trade. He thinks they need a reminder that they’re not the only people with power. We needed a weapon, and now we have one. We have you.”
“You don’t have me,” I gasped, my mind roiling. He was mad, totally insane, and so was his father by the sound of it. A weapon? Me? And Skyla—she had a life, a job, she’d helped us for years. She didn’t have anything to do with the Alliance. Sure, I’d always known Delta’s family weren’t exactly law-abiding citizens, but this…
We were slowing down, heading for the ground. We hovered alongside the cars on a crowded street where people swarmed in and out of a glass-fronted shopping arcade alight with bright-coloured holographic images. A few people whistled and waved; clearly, hover boots were still a novelty. Delta waved back. I tried to elbow him, but couldn’t move my arm. I was stuck to him, a reluctant passenger. Let go! Anger burned through me, potent and sizzling. Like static. Like magic.
Wait. Valeria had a higher level of magic than Earth. I braced myself, and pushed. Delta didn’t seem affected by the shot, though it was second level and should have shocked him, but I pitched forwards. Delta swore as my feet hit the pavement. I staggered forwards but kept my balance. Magic tingled through me.
Now I had another weapon.
“Oh no, you don’t!” he shouted after me, as I whirled around and ran. Stupid, stupid idea. I heard Delta curse behind me. There was a whirring sound, then he was at my side. “Super speed, Red. You can’t run away.”
I felt for the magic pulsing in the air. It was thick as smoke here on the main road; they used magic-based engines to power their vehicles. There was no shortage of power to draw on. Problem: too many people, swarming in and out of the arcade, waiting in traffic while a series of lights flashed overhead and every hover car glided to a stop. Our altercation went unnoticed for now, but if I used magic, anyone could get caught in the backlash. Plus, the obvious problem. I had no idea how to get back to Earth, and the Passage Delta had used was miles up in the air.
Delta grabbed for me again, and I punched him in the face. The impact bruised my knuckles, but Delta almost flipped over in the air, his hover boots knocking him off balance into a group of shoppers. As they scattered, exclaiming in shock, I lunged and grabbed his foot.
“Stars, Red!”
I tugged, hard, ducking as he righted himself and tried to hit me back.
“Bastard!”
The boot came free, and I stumbled back, turned, and ran for a gap in the traffic, Delta swearing colourfully as a gleaming blue hover-car zoomed across his path. With only one boot, he was forced to hobble, while I pelted through three lanes of hover cars in a zigzag, feet skidding on the odd metal they used in place of tarmac. I reached the other side of the road, tugging my laces undone, and slid my foot out of my own shoe and into the loose metal-plated hover-boot.
Damn, h
ow does this thing work? I fumbled and found a switch on the back. And screamed as the world dropped away, pavements shrinking to grey rivers, Delta to a tiny dot. I let go of the switch and dropped, my yelp drawing stares from passers-by when I flipped over in midair.
Somehow, I managed to right myself before my foot slipped out of the shoe, and laughed at Delta’s incredulous expression on the other side of the road, past rows of gleaming hover cars. The boot was a couple of sizes too big, but I could feel a switch under the heel. I pressed down, and accelerated. Now this was more like it. I took control, steering myself away from the arcade, past the green expanse of a city park, and into a cluster of towering office buildings. Think, Ada. Swooping around the city at random wasn’t the best plan, but I did have my phone back, and it had built-in offworld GPS. Ironically, that had been Delta’s idea.
I should never have trusted him. Nell trusted no one at all, and no one ever blindsided her. Lesson learned. Even Kay Walker had lied to me. His father had ruled against helping Enzar. I should have made the connection.
Cursing the Multiverse, I slowed enough to fire up the ‘Maps’ tab on my phone and wait for it to connect. A birds-eye view of the city not unlike my own view from the sky appeared on the screen.
Where Delta had brought me in was a platform on the roof of one of the skyscrapers, labelled “Landing Dock.” Odd place for a door to the Passages, I thought, turning in that direction. I flew lopsidedly above the crowded roads, like a particularly ungraceful bird. But at least I was moving. It took everything I had to stay upright, and the boot was so loose around my foot that if I performed any crazy acrobatics, I was pretty sure it’d fall off.
Speaking of birds… several black shapes were rising between the buildings, dots growing bigger by the second. Not birds. People. Flying up. Flying right at me.
I hit the switch on the back and sped up, rising higher. Where the hell is this supersonic switch? I groped with one hand and pressed another indentation in the heel. The world zipped by so fast my ears popped and my hair streamed back, my eyes aching, a scream jammed in my throat. I’d lost all track of the direction, and when my hand fumbled the switch, I stopped so abruptly I nearly went careening into an office window.