Raining Fire

by Rajan Khanna

  There’s no time to spare. None. But things slow down and part of me, the pilot I’ve been trained to be all of my life, takes over.

  I reach for the ballast controls and vent gas from the forward part of the envelope. The panels on the dash protest, but I ignore them. I jam the controls to tilt us downward, making sure I line the nose up just right. Then I run for the cargo hold.

  The White Wolf plummets at an angle, and I’m suddenly climbing up toward its rear. The stitches in my leg pull at the effort, and it’s all I can do pull myself into the cargo bay. The Firestorms are sliding toward the front of the bay, one already butting up against the wall there, the others sliding into it. I tense as I climb past, hoping that they don’t explode and burn me to a cinder.

  I hit the door release and then grab for the parachute. I strap it on. I have no way of knowing whether it’s intact, whether it will work, but I’m close enough and high enough that I should be able to coast to the city.

  Should be.

  If I miss the city, there are the buildings below.

  Unless the chute doesn’t work and I splatter against the ground.

  Fucking ground.

  No time to think. To plan.

  I snap the harness closed around my chest, pull myself up to the door, and then out.

  The wind grabs me and pulls, like Claudia pulling back her bowstring, and the cold shocks me senseless. Then the bowstring is released, and the stinging cold becomes clarity, and for an instant I’m flying. Beautiful, glorious flight.

  Then gravity gets hold of me and yanks.

  I fall.

  A feeling of terror so deep and so keen grips me, and for a second I forget. Everything.

  Then sense returns, and I reach for the chute release and pull.

  Nothing happens.

  I’m going to die. I’m going to splatter. I’m going to—

  Once more I’m grabbed and pulled, only this time I’m jerked upward. Above me the chute unfurls, and I thank gods I don’t even believe in. Ganesh jumps into my mind, his outstretched hand waving.

  Then I’m gliding. I pull on the ropes holding me to the chute, try to angle them toward Valhalla. I’m above the city, but still far from its edge. I’m moving toward it, but I can’t tell if I have the right angle.

  I try to shift myself.

  Gunfire cuts through the roar of the sky.

  Bullets whiz past, close enough that I can hear them.

  Then I see the tracer fire, burning bright lines all around me. One glowing trail tears though my chute, leaving the edges flaming. Then another joins it. I start to spin, descending faster than I need to.

  As I plummet, I know that I’m going to miss the edge of the city.

  I’m not going to make it to Miranda.

  * * *

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  I start spinning, and falling, and there’s the city, its balloons, then its edge, and they’re close enough that I can see buildings, see some of the people, and then I’m falling below the level of the city. As I spin, I see the White Wolf descending, headed straight for Bifröst, bullets tearing into it as it flies.

  What will get me first? I wonder. The ground? The bullets? The explosion?

  I slam into something. Hard, but not hard enough to crush myself. The air goes out of me and I roll instinctively, one of my legs screaming in pain.

  What the fuck?

  I don’t see anything beneath me, but I’m on top of something. Something that’s rising. I put my hand down, look at it.

  It’s the envelope of an airship. The material is strange, partly reflective.

  I lay flat against it, stretching out to keep myself from rolling or blowing off, and I shrug myself free of the chute. It’s too tattered anyway. No point in getting torn off into the Blue.

  We rise, the ship and me, and soon we’re above the side of the city. I see the railing of metal and rope and wood that hems it. Then we’re above Valhalla, and I’m still wondering where we’re headed.

  We move forward to the edge of the city.

  Then blinding light blots everything out and the sound of the world ending sends everything tumbling through the air.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  MIRANDA

  The ground shudders.

  One moment I’m thinking about using heat to denature proteins, and the next I’m steadying myself against the table. A shock wave ripples through me. All around me, bottles fall over, some crashing to the ground, shattering pieces of glass everywhere.

  I look at the others. Dimitri. Maya. The rest.

  An attack? Here? On Valhalla?

  I steady myself against the desk. Something feels different. The floor feels different.

  “What’s happening?” I ask Maya.

  “I don’t know,” she says, in a tone that sounds honest. Maya is a consummate liar, but I believe she’s in the dark. “Stay here,” she says, before ducking out the door.

  I move to Dimitri. “What do you think it is?” he asks.

  There’s the slightest bit of alarm in his usually impassive face. “Nothing good.”

  Maya reappears a few minutes later. “Some kind of explosion,” she says. “People seem to think that something happened to Bifröst.”

  “The tether? How?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” She sounds frantic, worried.

  Bifröst. Without the tether to the ground below, the city will be unstable. But what could sever that connection? What kind of firepower would it take? And how? The city is protected with guns, ships.

  “We need to evacuate,” I say. “The city is unstable.”

  “It’s too early for that,” she says. “We don’t know exactly what’s happening.”

  “When will we find out?” I ask. “It might be too late by then. We should leave. And take the data with us. Just in case. If it’s nothing, we can just come back.”

  “Really?” She sighs. “There’s no way out for you, Miranda. Not on a ship. Not even in an evacuation.” She smiles. “And don’t worry about the data. We have that well in hand.”

  Another shudder runs through the building and some creaking as something pulls at the city. Rudimentary physics diagrams run through my head. Without the tether, the city will be moving. If there was an explosion, there will be structural damage to the city’s architecture. It’s only a matter of time before pieces of it start breaking off.

  “We need to go.” I repeat. “Now.”

  Maya opens her mouth, about to fight me again, but before she can, Blaze walks in. “She’s right.” Her voice cuts through the room. “Evacuation is the prudent thing to do.”

  “But the labs,” Maya says. “The equipment.”

  “Are not worth anything if we all go down with the city. We knew the day was going to come when we would have to abandon this place. Set up our own base of operations. This just accelerates things. We can take the data. We have it all backed up. We can rebuild everything else.”

  “It will take years,” Maya says.

  “Yes,” Blaze says. “But we have time.”

  “Do you know who did this?” Maya asks.

  “No,” Blaze says. But she looks at me as she says it. Gears turn behind her eyes. “Gather up everything valuable, and get them to a ship. You.” She points to Dimitri. “Come with me.”

  Then she takes Dimitri with her, heading deeper into the building.

  “You heard Blaze,” Maya says. “Grab your data and follow me.”

  I reach for my notebook and the portable drives on which we store our compiled data. But as we’re moving for the front doors, Valhallans enter, led by Surtr. Suddenly, I wish I had a weapon, something to make him hurt. But I don’t, and he’s flanked by his guards.

  “We need to leave,” Maya says.

  Surtr shakes his head slowly at Maya. “No. You both need to stay right here.”

  “But the city’s falling apart.”

 
; He turns those cold eyes on me. “This is because of her,” he says. “Your friend, he said he sent a message.”

  Clay? He was trying to get a message out. But I didn’t think he had been able to before . . .

  “They’re here for her,” he says to Maya. “And I intend to be here when they come.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I cling as tightly as I can to the envelope of the ship as we’re tossed forward into the city. At the same time, the city seems to rise toward us, the ground accelerating to meet us. I slide forward, rolling over the envelope and down to the ground. I try to halt my skid, my descent, hands grasping for any hold, but there’s nothing and I fall, spinning out into space. Again.

  I hit the ground hard. And I think for a moment that at least I hit something solid, but it’s not. It’s moving, tilting, shuddering and writhing beneath me.

  Get up, Ben.

  Miranda.

  I push myself to my knees, then my feet, my whole body screaming out, my bones feeling brittle and close to breaking. The wound in my leg burns, and it’s a miracle if the stitches haven’t ripped open. I’m not even sure I can put my weight on it.

  Now that I’m no longer astride it, I have a better view of the airship I had landed on. In front of me is a ship I recognize. I called it the Dumah. Mal called it the Argus. Fast. Quiet. Really hard to see. A beautiful ship no matter what the name. Or at least it used to be. Right now its front end is crumpled, smashed into Valhalla’s edge.

  All around me, Valhalla is shifting. The clouds in the distance are speeding past faster than they should be. The city is moving. The White Wolf and its bombs must have burned through Bifröst, and now the whole city is careening in the sky. Who knows how long it can handle the stresses.

  I turn my attention back to the Dumah, pushing the pain away. Rosie must have taken it. If so, she’s still in there. Miranda is waiting, but I won’t leave Rosie to die here. Not after she came all this way. I run to the gondola.

  Someone smashes through one of the gondola windows as I get there. Rosie climbs out. “Are you okay?” I ask, moving toward her.

  “Yes.” She nods. She turns back to the window and reaches in to pull another person out, struggling to squeeze them through the opening. It’s Diego. Of course.

  Diego gives me the slightest of nods, then reaches back in the window. Who else did they bring?

  Diego brings out two rifles, then a third. Then he reaches in and helps someone else out. I go cold when I see who it is. Mal exits the window as if he does it all the time. He shakes some glass off of his clothes and looks at me.

  My hand instinctively reaches down for the revolver, but of course it’s gone.

  Mal casually slings one of the rifles around his chest.

  Neither of us says anything for a moment.

  “I’m not here for you, Benjamin,” Mal says.

  “Miranda?”

  He nods.

  “We need to get out of here,” Rosie says. “Now.”

  I look back to see Valhallans exiting from buildings, collecting in the streets. Rosie, Diego, and Mal move to take shelter behind one of the nearest buildings. I follow. Not knowing if it’s the right thing to do, but knowing that I’m in a hostile territory and these people don’t seem to want to kill me at the moment.

  I duck behind the wall and turn to Mal. “Miranda drugged you and stole your ship.”

  He smiles. “I know. I like her.”

  I keep staring at him.

  He meets my eyes and sighs. “I spent time on the island, Benjamin. I saw her work. I saw her virus detection test. It’s obvious that she’s our best chance for a real future.”

  The city shudders beneath us.

  “We have to move quickly,” Mal says.

  “Where?” I ask.

  He pulls out a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolds it. It has a simple sketch on it. A rough shape that I take to be Valhalla, a few buildings marked in its interior, and an X on one area that I take is where Miranda is being held. The good news is that it’s not on the other side of the city. The bad news is that it’s pretty close to the center.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “We don’t have much time,” Mal says. “But if you must know, I interrogated one of the prisoners back at the helium plant.”

  “Then you took the plant.”

  He meets my eyes with a cold, hard stare. “Of course I did.”

  “How are we going to get to there?” I ask, pointing at the X.

  In response, he starts unbuttoning his coat, and Diego and Rosie do the same. I’m about to ask them what the hell they’re doing when I catch sight of what Mal is wearing underneath his coat. It’s a leather and fur-coated shirt. Diego is wearing something similar, a vest decorated with bones, sleeveless to reveal his massive arms. Rosie’s wearing a leather outfit with a stag’s head over the chest.

  She catches me looking at her. “We took these off of some people at the plant.”

  “Smart,” I say. Only I don’t have camouflage like they do. As if reading my mind, Mal shrugs himself out of what he’s wearing and holds it out to me. Mal’s chest is marked up with scars, many of them thick and dark. They climb up his arms, too. So many of them. That I think I know where they came from makes the whole sight more terrible.

  “No,” I say. “I’ll make do on my own.”

  His arm remains outstretched. “Benjamin,” he says. “I am here for one reason, and I do not intend to let you interfere with that. Take it. Time is wasting.”

  He’s right about that, so I wriggle out of my own coat, letting it fall to the ground, then strip off my shirt. As I do, the bandages pull from the gash in my chest and I gasp. After a moment, though, I press them back and tug the shirt over my head. Mal’s eyes flick to my wound, but he doesn’t say anything.

  Mal stands there, shirtless. “Aren’t you cold?” I ask. I’m cold, despite the leather and fur on me right now.

  “Yes, Benjamin. I’m cold. I choose not to let it bother me.”

  He stalks off through the city. I follow behind him, noting the scars all over his back as well. More accounts never come due.

  I follow Mal, and Diego and Rosie come with me.

  “What happened?” I ask Rosie. “How did you find out?”

  “Miranda managed to get a message out of here to Tamoanchan. It arrived after we left to assault the plant, but the island relayed the message to us. Miranda’s people even verified her handwriting. I told Malik you had flown off, so he took the Argus and flew us straight here.”

  “But how is she alive?” I ask. “I saw her house on the island. It was completely destroyed. And she was dying—Enigma.”

  “The message said that they smuggled her out before they blew it,” Diego says. “They sent a team in for her.”

  “So they wanted her?” I almost ask why, but it’s obvious. Miranda is smart. She’s spent her life working on the Bug. Either she was a threat or she was a resource that they could use. They had spies on the island for weeks. Enough to know where she’d be.

  Yet I still can’t believe it. I’ve been living with her death for so long. Feeling it, every day. How can I just accept this?

  “C’mon,” Rosie says. “Chew on it as we move.”

  The streets around us, such as they are, are filled with Valhallans and some that I take for Cabal. Without Bifröst, the city is shifting and the wind from the west is pushing the whole bulk of Valhalla to the east. I can’t imagine it was constructed to take such forces.

  The city’s skeleton groans around us, the structure of it flexing and warping as the wind shifts it, untethered for the first time since its construction. People emerge from buildings, running this way and that. Everything is chaos as they try to determine what to do. It doesn’t take long for people to start running for their ships, abandoning the city to save themselves. It’s what I would do if I were them, but stripping away the tethered airships will make the city even more unstable.

  Mal,
Diego, Rosie, and I continue on our path, though. We’re here for Miranda, and we’re not leaving until we get her out.

  “How far?” I ask.

  “It’s difficult to tell with all these people and this chaos,” Mal says.

  “Let me see.”

  “Patience, Benjamin.” There’s a sharp edge to his voice that prevents me from grabbing the map from his hands. It’s true he’s probably doing a better job than I would. He takes a moment, his keen eyes almost piercing the map. Then he says, “This way,” and sets off at a fast walk.

  “We need to go faster,” I say.

  “We don’t want to alert the Valhallans,” Diego says. “If they see us running, it might attract their attention.”

  “And if we don’t, this place might tear itself apart.” I feel this pressure, all over me. This need to get to Miranda in time.

  “Diego is right,” Mal says. “But . . .” He looks around. Valhallans are moving at speed now. “We can certainly increase our pace.”

  I stare at Mal, amazed at how he, too, has come around to Miranda’s vision for the future. Her message of hope. Together we’re two of the most cynical people you’ll find and yet now, with her, we’re like moths to the flame.

  We move. I follow Mal and try not to look around at the world falling apart on us, or the heavily armed and violent men and women who live on this city.

  Until one of them slams into me. His hands grip my shoulders. He has bright-red hair and pale skin and faint blue tattoos in swirls over his skin. He looks into my eyes, then at Diego and Rosie and Mal. “Good,” he says. “I need your help,” he says. “Come with me.” He has two other people with them, a tall bald woman and a short squat man.

  “No.”

  I’m thinking it’s Mal who should be talking, but it’s me who says the word.

  Red Hair looks at me questioningly.

  “We have orders,” I say, keeping my face grim.

  Red Hair frowns. “From who?”

  I don’t know what to say here. Who to use as my bluff.

  Mal steps forward. “From Surtr,” he says.

  Red Hair continues to frown. I can see it on his face, that he wants to ask what we’re doing and why. But Mal meets his eyes, cool and confident, and Red Hair doesn’t have the nerve to press him on it.