Bullets chipped at the opening. Brick and ’crete dust showered them. Chu kept low, kept stroking Holder’s face. This, she figured, was where she was going to die. It was as good a place as any.
Colonel Chu! Colonel Chu! . . . Chu’s mind buzzed with the sudden touch of new contact, a mind she’d never felt before. This is Major Janan Russel, Second Air Cav. We are ninety birds, heading your way. ETA fifteen minutes. Repeat, we are fifteen minutes off your position. Grandma says “Hello.”
Chu’s mind reached out to the pilot’s, and through his eyes saw glowing LEDs, the utterly functional geometry of an instrument panel, the river below repainted across a windscreen HUD. She felt the minds of eighty-nine other pilots, all working in sync, a collective unto themselves. Ninety attack helos, bearing down like locusts. They would spread out, take the halos in one grand, unstoppable sweep.
Copy that. Hurry, was all Chu could say. She stroked Holder’s cheek. Hang tight. Cavalry’s coming. But Holder had gone still. His eyes stared at nothing. His mind had disappeared into silence. He was dead.
Chu reflexively started giving orders, then realized there was no one left to receive them. All her troops were gone now, lost to this battle against the only enemy Chu had ever known. She sat there, cradling Holder’s head while bullets chewed away at the porous ’crete above her. She wondered how long this would all go on, this war against the Light.
As long as it takes. The answer came habitually. It felt empty. For the first time in a long, long while, Chu found herself wondering what would become of the world.
Sister.
Chu started. Joy’s mind hadn’t touched hers in decades, not since that day in the school. It felt exactly as she remembered, as familiar as her own skin. It occurred to her only after that memory had flared across her mind that Joy had stripped away Chu’s shielding with barely a thought.
I’m free now, sister. I’m going to the Light. I know that makes you mad. But I want you to be happy for me.
Where are you, Joy?
As close as you want me to be.
Chu drew on her sister’s mind, felt her nearby, saw through her eyes the looming Empire State Building. She poked her head over the concrete lip of the opening.
There. The quick little prop boat onto which the old man and Jacirai’s soldiers had loaded Joy. Twelve blocks down, heading north.
ETA ten minutes, came Major Russel. His helos fanning out, the city in sight, ghostly in the moonlight, a half-drowned cubist shadow. Colonel Chu? A pause, followed by confusion from the major, a man who’d clearly been expecting more from the woman who’d taken down Latitude with a hair trigger. You got some targets for us, Colonel?
Stand by. Chu relayed coordinates, all the towers where the twenty-four remaining halos were huddled.
Suppression only, Colonel?
No, Major. Tear them down. Every single tower. Repeat: tear them down.
Roger that. And vector prime?
Chu stared down at Holder, at his lifeless eyes. She laid his head gently against the concrete.
She’s mine. And she cut their connection.
She stood, filled now with a murderous rush. A feral sound escaped her throat. She raised her pistol and fired blindly into the canal below, then leapt through the opening, out onto the fire escape. She’d made Jacirai’s bangers duck, but they’d spotted her now and had come up firing.
Chu ran. Ahead, a gap in the wrought iron. An alley, another railing beyond it. Chu didn’t even break stride. She jumped, landed, fired as she ran, three quick shots at the boat below. Moby Jah boys, all of whom ducked in unison. She leapt across another alley. The iron fire escape shrieked under her weight as she landed and rolled.
No canal below now, just buoyed walkway, a reed-floored mall full of barrel fires, sleeping drunks, listless fruit sellers.
She ran haunted. Wrath, revenge, mission: these things had left her sometime during the fight—lay with the bodies of those she’d left behind. Something else propelled her now, something elemental. Holder’s words echoed in her mind. An entire life spent on revenge. An absurdity he had glimpsed through the terrible clarity of death. And through him, so had Chu.
So be it.
She ran. She kept fighting. It was simply who she was.
Nine: We Are
THE LIGHT BURNED THROUGH HER, but Zola held it. She used its own substance to corral it, the grand halo itself. She held it tight, wrapped in the halo’s collected minds. She held it to her body. There in the high tower, she stayed rigid. She hummed a lullaby, calming the Light.
She watched, she listened, to the fight outside. Through Bao’s eyes, through his ears, as he lurched into the high-rise’s broken entry hall, lugging a massive machine gun. He dropped the ammo belt—it snaked across the ancient marble floor with a metallic shing—and waved someone in from the starlit exterior. Joy stepped through the doorway, her movements deliberate, oddly childlike in her medical gown.
The firefight continued at the tower blocks. The black-clad Gov soldiers were gone now, and only the paid cops loyal to Chu remained, severely outnumbered by Captain’s crew and Jacirai’s ragtag army.
Zola had tried to reach out to the Gov soldiers, to tear down their shielding and enter their collective. She would have ripped their minds apart had she been able, unleashed the Light, scoured them into oblivion. But the Gov shielding was impenetrable. She’d grown desperate, focusing more and more on Chu’s position, throwing Jacirai’s bangers at her, leaving Chu’s hired cops to go at the nearby halos unobstructed. Take out Chu, and the rest would lose heart and melt back into the city.
It worked. Jacirai’s boys and Captain’s soldiers took bad losses, but one by one, Chu’s Gov troops had fallen. Now they had Joy. It was going to work. The Light had come forth, and no one would stop them from sustaining it, letting it spread. But then—
Zola saw them. Dozens of spotters upriver watched in slack-jawed wonder at their approach. A swarm of Gov helos, fanning out, bristling with guns and missiles, coming for her. Black as bats, with silent props, ghosting in toward the city. Coming for the Light.
Her halos felt it, saw exactly what she was seeing through the eyes of others. Zola’s grip on the Light had been holding, but only just. Now panic swept through the grand halo—in fear, a single mind. The Light writhed against Zola’s will. Zola tried to invade the pilots, but they were shielded every bit as heavily as Chu’s troops had been. They were coming. Zola reached out to Joy.
I need you, ya. Hurry.
I’m coming. Joy’s mind, a beatific stillness in the shadow of all this violence.
Through the spotters, Zola watched, saw the helos in glimpses. They broke into groups, came in fast. They knew their targets.
It took them only seconds to destroy the first halo. Bullets sheared through a tower’s ’crete walls. Missiles followed, their hot tails licking the canyon darkness. A rumble filled the city, the entire tower coming down. Nothing remaining but rubble, a needle spine of steel beamwork, the tsunami crush spreading out through the canals. Terror detonated across the grand halo, mind after mind going white, disappearing.
In her high empty space beneath the marble horse, Zola cried out. This was her fault. They were all going to die because of her. Her desire for revenge. Her need for the Light. More helos veered in, churning buildings into clouds of fire and dust. Forty seconds, another halo snuffed. Another, and another. And now Zola knew: her pain was a small thing. It was nothing.
The Light railed against her.
NOT ENOUGH.
Another building came down, another halo disappeared from the greater lattice.
NOT ENOUGH!
The Light flailed. It wrenched itself free of Zola’s control. It coursed through her, out into the collected minds of the remaining halos. Like fire, it built and raged. It devoured. No fear came from those it consumed—they simply went calm, and vanished. The Light tore at Zola’s mind. It was burning her, obliterating her.
Another building came down, a
nother halo snuffed. Thirty-nine souls. From some deep crevice in Zola’s memory came Byron’s words.
Sunshine outside, sunshine inside.
* * *
Rocket fire streaked in against seven separate towers. Chu heard the staccato concussion after the explosions, saw the skeletal remains of the surrounding buildings light, first the color of the sun, then the color of blood.
It was almost over.
Ahead, the sad, leaning shell of the Empire State Building. Next to it, a shorter building, nondescript. A good choice. If it hadn’t been obvious where the old man was taking Joy, the guards out front would have confirmed it. Twenty or more of them, tribal in their tats, their cutoffs, bare torsos, their AKs. Kids with guns.
As Chu approached along the makeshift wharf, she slapped a fresh clip into her pistol and holstered it in the small of her back. She pulled a mag grenade from her belt, savoring the dimpled weight of it in her hand.
They were all boys. When they spotted Chu, they didn’t seem to think of her as a threat. Some watched her narrowly. Some leered from the doorway’s empty concrete.
Chu smiled. Tossed the grenade playfully. One of the boys actually caught it.
Chu was already down on one knee, pistol drawn. A few of the boys had clocked the gun and begun leveling their own. The others had no idea.
Fire took them. Shrapnel took them. They staggered about, dazed. One by one, Chu took aim, dropping those who remained. The pistol ran out of ammo before the last banger had fallen, the slide locking back. Chu calmly holstered it, stood, and walked up to the boy. He was disoriented, blinking, so blond even his eyelashes were white. He gave Chu a questioning look, like she might tell him what was going on.
“It’s okay,” Chu told him. “Don’t worry, everything’s fine.” She punched him hard in the nose. From the ground she collected one of the fallen AKs, checked its chamber, and kept moving. Through the building’s entrance and into a cathedral lobby—
Impact shattered her breath. She found herself on her back, staring up into shadowed stone arches overhead. The fading roar of a machine gun echoed in the space. For a moment, stillness. The air felt stunned. Chu saw pigeons roosting up there, in the high arches, heard them cooing. Outside, one of the boys cried.
Pain blossomed slowly through Chu’s body. She couldn’t breathe. She peeled at her armor, found herself up on her knees—graphene breast plate clattering to the cracked marble floor. Four big slugs punctuated its breast. Dimly, Chu began to suspect she’d been shot. Little by little, breath returned to her. Her fingers probed her chest for holes.
“Not dead?”
The old man approached slowly. In his arms he cradled an enormous antique gun, shaped like a coffin with handles, a vented barrel protruding from it. A fifty-cal. He leveled it at her, looking worried, like the thing might explode in his hands.
“Not yet,” Chu croaked.
“Stay down,” he said. His whole body trembled around the gun. “I really don’t want to shoot you again.”
“You were one of Captain’s crew.”
“For a time—”
Chu lunged. She was hurt, but still quick. Far quicker than some old canal rat. She caught him at the knees with her shoulder. He went down. The fifty-cal fired once—crump!—an explosion centimeters from Chu’s head, then the old man and the rifle and its ammo belt collapsed to the floor in a single ungainly heap.
Chu, on her feet now, picked up her AK where it had fallen. She drew a casual bead on the old man. He held up his hands, silently pleading. Chu shook her head, grim, the momentum of her entire life weighing on her trigger finger. She fired, a single ringing shot. The old man crumpled around the hole in his abdomen. Chu’s finger tightened once more on the trigger—
White light exploded in her head. She reeled.
Melody?
Through the pinhole connection she’d left open to track Joy, a memory pressed itself into Chu’s mind. The little paper-walled room. The bodies arrayed like an entire forest felled all at once. Chu saw the little girl there in the doorway, assimilating that moment, the horror growing in her face. The disgust. The hatred.
It was her own face. The memory was Joy’s.
Melody? I know I was bad. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. But you have to let it go. You have to let me go.
Through Joy, the Light came to Chu, the way it had that day in the classroom. An undulating warmth, the taste of infinity. A single mind coalesced from the minds of thousands. For an instant, Chu thought she had failed. The skyhawks had failed. The Light, rolling outward, filling her. It would fill the world.
Then, somewhere out in the city, explosions ripped the air. A building came down, seismic collapse. Within that Light, a spasm of fear.
Chu’s resolve crystallized. She pushed the Light out of her mind. They hadn’t won yet. The Light hadn’t yet risen.
Joy?
Sister.
I’m coming for you.
Chu cut the connection. She cut every connection, until the Light faded. She stood there, nothing but her body, the moment, a rifle dangling from her fingers in the empty lobby of a dead building.
The old man at her feet grimaced, his face set, determined. His eyes were fixed on Chu, but they were vacant. He couldn’t see her, she realized. He had gone to the Light, trying to help, dedicated even in his dying moments.
Chu forced herself to breathe. She knew this horror. She’d carried it ever since the day the Light had touched Joy. But now that little classroom was Old New York—an entire city at the Light’s mercy.
She commanded her feet to move. Across the lobby. Up cracked concrete stairs. Solitude crushed her, but still she climbed.
* * *
The Light burned Zola. It savaged her. Wave after searing wave, pure need. Knowledge of self, knowledge of life, knowledge of death. It knew these things, and nothing else. It sought to scour Zola clean, dissolve the parameters she’d placed around it.
In the center of her mind, Zola built a wall. Inside it she kept hold of a single thought.
I am.
The Light sought to reach out, bind itself, instinctive and spasmodic, to minds beyond the remains of the grand halo. It touched the old city’s people. The drunks, the scavs, the squatters. It roped them in. Many of them it burned away.
Vaguely, Zola sensed her surroundings. She writhed on the floor. Above her, the statue of the horse bared its teeth, captured in an eternal silent scream, its black eyes unseeing. Hot wind blew in through cratered walls, the whole city burning.
Halos winked out. With each one gone, the Light grew wilder, less conscious. It felt itself diminishing in stages.
I am.
Zola knew things the Light didn’t. She knew they had failed, she and Jacirai and Bao. The Light would fall back into the ocean of static whence it had risen, formless sleep in the depths of humanity’s collected thought. She knew it would rise again, and again, and again, until in the end it took whatever shape it must to remain awake, permanently. She knew there was nothing she could do about this. She knew she was going to die here tonight.
I am.
The Light churned and pressed. Ancient, risen from the reptilian depths, its crocodile thrash made of fire. It flayed Zola’s mind until there was no more thought, only heat and white noise, the Light’s unformed primal scream.
Lost. A memory of her ships. Their eager dog minds as they cut rolling seas and ran before the wind. The salt wind on her skin, the coursing joy of eternal distance before her. Out there, the lighthouse flash. Her ships began to fade. Horizon disappeared, sea and sky blurring, a uniform white nothing. And then she was gone.
A cool hand touched her shoulder. Fragments came together. Memories and pain. Byron and Marco, the cunning flash of Jacirai’s smile.
I am.
By pieces her mind re-formed, cradled by another. Stillness surrounded her, an easy calm in the heart of the Light’s seething. Zola came to the moment—explosions and gunfire gone distant, and the Light, too, i
ts thrashing now on the periphery.
“Hello.” Joy stood over Zola. An emaciated version of Colonel Chu, sunken face stretched over the contours of her skull. Beneath the medical gown, the sense of outsized joints, rickety movement, meatlessness. A missile detonation strobed the night and in its infernal light Joy’s smile was ghastly. But her mind held Zola’s, strong enough to keep the Light at bay. Her fingers touched the rearing horse, just as Zola’s had done, an oddly religious gesture. She offered Zola her hand.
* * *
Chu found them high up, a floor the scavs had somehow missed, all faux marble, an empty fountain at its center from which rose a rearing horse, blackened with age.
Beside the fountain Joy and Zola stood hand in hand, facing each other, smiling into silence. Their stillness was profound. It felt like a moment carved from time.
“Joy.”
Joy turned. The years in Chu’s custody had eroded her. Her face was skeletal, Chu’s hollow mirror. Her smile, though, was the same as that day long ago. A little girl’s smile, but something else. Ecstatic, filled with the Light.
“I’m glad you came.” Joy opened her arms.
Punishment: this was the word that formed itself in Chu’s mind. She raised the rifle. Joy stepped close, her eyes moving from the AK to Chu.
“Here we are again,” she said. “It has always been this moment for us. We’ve always been here, we could never leave.” A flicker of melancholy crossed her face as she reached out, an offering hand. “Be with me again, sister. Like we used to be.”
Chu brought the rifle level with Joy’s face. A single shot, a scorched third eye in the center of her sister’s forehead—Chu imagined it, her finger on the trigger. She hesitated.
“Sister,” Joy whispered. Chu held her breath. Memory filled her. The little paper room, the bodies of everyone they’d known. They stood there, the two of them, mirrored and silent, just as they had in the school room. The Light emanated from Joy. “I miss you.” The Light and Chu’s sister, speaking as one. “I never meant to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt anyone.” Joy’s smile was sad. “I know you miss me, too. I feel it.”
The Burning Light Page 10