“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Just that we need to get the lay of the land and obviously a lot of stuff has happened since you left! Calm down.”
“What do you think we should do?” Noa asked Callum, trying to keep them on track.
“We should go into one of the buildings and talk to someone—”
Judah snorted. “Could you think of a stupider idea? We have no idea who’s in there—”
“Well, we’re not going to find anything out by going under the city like rats!”
“Stop arguing, both of you! Look,” Noa sighed, turning to Judah, “I agree with Callum. We should try the buildings, talk to someone, just to get some idea of how things are. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go to your Tunnels, okay?”
Judah rolled his eyes. “Whatever.” But he followed grudgingly, shoulders hunched, as they walked toward one of the buildings.
As they got closer, they passed by a series of poles, almost like power lines.
“Hey, what are these?” Noa asked. Instead of wires, the poles held aloft a network of raised tubes around the complex, a little like miniature aqueducts. The tubes were clear but held fluid of different colors: in some places they were red or green or blue, and in others three were stacked together, one of each. The network stretched all around the plaza and was clearly being extended inside the park, though the project wasn’t finished.
“I’m not sure,” Callum said, frowning as he looked up to study them. “Don’t touch them.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Judah mumbled, as they finally approached a block of three buildings, one next to another, forming a row. The power lines directed different ducts into each building: one building was fed and lined with blue tubes, the next with red, the last with green.
Judah turned to Noa, smirking. “Lady’s choice.”
Noa bit her lip and pointed at the middle one, with the red tubes. Judah looked surprised for a second; their eyes caught; he quickly looked away.
“Let’s go,” Callum said, reassuring hand on Noa’s back.
Using his gift, Callum parted the front-facing sliding doors without trouble, and they walked inside. Noa had expected a magnificent lobby, some ornate triumph of Fae magic, but there wasn’t one. Just a long, red hallway, lined with identical, shut-tight doors, lined by the red-tube ducts where mortals might have put crown molding. If Noa looked closely, she could see that the walls and floor were, like the facade, built from fire-leaves and red-clay stones, pressed flat, rather than building material and paint.
“Is everything … made like this?” she whispered, hand hovering by the wall. For some reason she didn’t quite want to touch it, didn’t want to talk too loudly, even though the hallway was deserted.
Callum nodded, lowering his voice as well. “With our gifts, we tend to manipulate what already exists in nature. We’ve never had the need to invent things like bricks or mortar. Or … tools.” He shivered at the word tools. “Thorn was particularly fascinated with that aspect of the mortal realm, the … inventiveness of humans without gifts.”
Noa put a steadying hand on Callum’s arm, knowing he was back, in that moment, in the shackles of the Clear Fae hunter who’d kidnapped him and tortured him with screwdrivers, electrodes, all manner of ‘human’ tools.
“Good thing we saved you, eh, Brother?” Judah whispered, eyes glinting darkly.
“Guess so, since you brought Thorn into Noa’s world in the first place,” Callum replied, acid for acid.
“There are those tubes again,” Noa interrupted, pointing at the ducts. “They almost look like fiber optics.”
“Maybe we should knock on a door,” Callum said, raising his fist toward the nearest door.
“Won’t that make too much noise?” Noa asked nervously.
Judah sighed dramatically. “You’ve really spent too much time with mortals. I’ll take care of it.” He walked up to the nearest door, closed his eyes and prepared to reach in silently with his Red gift—the gift to read and speak to minds—to probe the room.
Instantly—faster than instantly, somehow—a boy in filthy, gray-stained rags flung the door open, lunged at Judah and tackled him to the ground, hissing, “Are you insane?”
Judah struggled beneath his attacker, spitting and kicking; Callum yanked the boy off Judah and flung him into the wall. The boy yelped and grabbed his arm, swallowing a scream of pain; he winced backward as both brothers bore down on him.
“Look, look!” he whimpered, nodding his head upward. Above them, the red tubing was glowing faintly.
Judah scowled. “What the…”
“You’re lucky I stopped you before the alarm,” the boy spat, part sneer, part cry, as he rubbed a clearly dislocated shoulder.
“Alarm? Explain!” Callum whispered sharply.
The boy stopped rubbing his shoulder in shock. “The power alarm? The one that detects if you use your Red gift without authorization? I just saved your asses from Review—”
“Review?” Noa echoed, stomach falling.
“Is this some sort of test?” the boy asked, panicked now, eyes darting among them. Noa suddenly realized how young he was—no more than twelve.
And terrified.
“Please don’t report me—”
“Callum, heal him,” Noa urged Callum, suddenly desperate not to see someone so young in so much pain. The boy lurched backward into the wall.
“This is a test!” he cried. “Get out! You can’t be here! No!” he screeched at Callum’s outstretched hand. “Don’t touch me! No mixing! No mixing! Are there Blue detectors here now, too?” He looked frantically up at the walls, at the red tubes, then back at Callum, Noa, Judah. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!” he pleaded, grasping his hanging shoulder with his good arm, scrambling clumsily through them toward his door. He flung it open, hurled himself inside, and whipped it shut behind him.
Noa, Callum, and Judah stared at the door—which locked—and then at one another.
“What just happened?” Noa finally breathed.
Callum and Judah eyed each other. Callum clenched his jaw. “I have no idea. But I think it’s safe to say you shouldn’t use your power,” he said, studying the red tubes.
Judah’s lip curled angrily. He was about to retort, when a blaring alarm suddenly split the air, pulsing so loud Noa could feel it inside her, seizing her heart, shattering it with waves of paralyzing noise.
“Judah! What did you do?” Callum accused.
“Nothing!” Judah yelled in outrage, covering his ears.
Noa pointed up at the red tubes, which were not glowing. “It’s not them! It’s something else!”
She was right—it wasn’t an alarm so much as some sort of signal. All along the hallway, doors were opening, and Fae and pixies—all dressed in variations of the boy’s molded, grayish rags—marched out in a perfect single-file line. Judah tried to pull one pixie aside to ask what was going on, but she shook him off, glaring, and darted into place. Just like the boy, these Fae seemed edgy, scared. No one looked up, broke ranks, let alone dared to talk to them.
Judah and Callum looked at each other; Judah shrugged and Callum nodded. They lowered their heads and joined the line of Fae, Callum first. Judah steered Noa into line next and followed, keeping her between them. Their clothes had become so grimy and worn that they blended in, and Noa tried to feel safe bookended by the brothers—but as her feet matched the fearful, precise, percussive marching, deep foreboding melted icily down her bones.
The marching line, in perfect time, filed out of the building. Outside, the day had burst forth bright and glittering—too bright. It stung Noa’s eyes, blinding her for several moments. The air felt even thicker, warmer, moister, somehow more suffocating than in the dark. When she could see again, identical lines of marching Fae took shape around her, pouring from all the buildings. They were al
l converging in a central courtyard completely ringed by tube lines of every color.
Then Noa saw them—every few feet, separate from the marchers. Brawny, tall, clothed in shining white uniforms and suspicious eyes. Noa recognized the posture of these Fae, the feel. They reminded her of Thorn.
“Clear Guard,” Judah breathed behind her, confirming Noa’s intuition. These were Hunters, Darius’s special squad of Clear Fae enforcers. Noa quickly dropped her eyes to the ground, forced herself to continue marching despite every instinct to flee.
Eyes downward, Noa saw a flicker of movement between the lines: a small hand reaching toward her line from the line beside them. Then a larger hand—but narrow, a woman’s, or rather, a pixie’s—quickly reached back across the narrow space, caught and squeezed the tiny fingers. Noa didn’t need to see their faces to recognize the touch: a mother reaching toward her frightened child. How long had they waited for this moment, this split second of a second, when they might pass each other?
A screech split the air, and the marchers halted. Noa slammed into Callum’s back, Judah into hers. A kind of whimpering erupted all around them; Noa looked up to see the green tubes strobing, whistling above the place where the mother and child had touched. Immediately, the mother broke ranks with Noa’s line and ran to cover her child with her body, three Clear Guards descending like tornados upon them.
“Unauthorized Green use! Unauthorized Green use!” a tall and whippish Guard was screaming. His voice sliced around the plaza, sharp with clear authority; his fellow Guards were pure brawn, like Thorn, but this man—a Captain clearly—was razor thin, every feature edged and aquiline.
“Fayora’s son,” Judah hissed behind Noa. Noa’s stomach twisted; her mind reeled back through a hundred conversations, real and dreamed, for where she’d heard that name before….
So close, too close, the offending mother was begging the Captain, sobbing. She was barely taller than his waist; she wrung her hands and clutched for her child, a boy no more than eight. “Please have mercy! My son! He was frightened, he only sent me love—please Captain, Arik—”
Arik’s face didn’t even flicker. He twitched a hand, and two Guards pried the woman off him, peeled her back like a rotting skin of fruit. Her hands scratched and scrabbled at the air as they hurled her to the ground. The slam of her body finally shook loose the name Fayora in Noa’s mind: the Clear pixie Darius had married after Banishing Callum, disowning Judah, and casting out the Green pixie Lorelei, their mother. Judah had told Noa that Darius, overcome with Clear Fae zealotry, had quickly married Fayora and adopted her Clear son—now Captain Arik—to replace his blood family with one that shared his prized Clear gift. Noa had once thought it kind of cool that Colorlines were random, not genetic, but now she saw how it tore families apart.
Arik kicked the howling mother, who’d crawled to grasp his legs, with his silver boot. She flew back with a sickening crunch, face gushing blood.
“I’ll indenture him for life!” he threatened.
“No, take me instead—” the mother wailed thickly, through the blood.
In response, Arik shoved aside the henchman who held the woman’s son. The small boy looked surprised for a moment, finding himself suddenly free—but then Arik’s own hands were on him, and he was shreiking like he was being electrocuted. The shriek echoed sharply and then went silent as the boy slumped, eyes and mouth wide open, face frozen in a waking trance of terror.
“No!” the mother screamed as Arik spun to face her, whipping her son with him like a rag doll. Arik glared intently, and her crying abruptly stopped. Her eyes blinked sleepily; bits of drool ran into the blood still pouring from her nose. Her body relaxed absurdly: still alive, but paralyzed with a terrible kind of calm.
Noa shivered, realizing what had happened: Clear Fae Arik had Channeled the boy’s Green gift with emotions. He’d used the mother’s own son as a tool to paralyze her protest. Instead of modulating her emotions carefully, he’d overloaded her emotional system, fried her into numb oblivion.
Unconcerned, Arik left the mother mute and slumped upon the ground. He stepped over her carelessly, dragged her son to a contingent of six or seven Guards, who seemed to swallow him up and usher him away.
“Back in line!” Arik hissed, his beak-like nose sharp in profile. “And let that be a reminder! The Otec has ruled! No mixing! Power only with permission!” His spindly arm sliced toward a sign, one of many shining harshly every few feet of tubing: giant Ms with lines through them, stating Mixing Punishable by Review, by Order of the Otec.
Noa swallowed hard as the line in front of her resumed its march, stumbling to join in—then shuddered as she realized they were marching right toward Arik. Would he sense that she was flanked by Blue and Red brothers—pretty much the definition of “Mixing”—or worse, that she herself was not Fae at all? She kept her head down, panic swelling. Was being ordinary something you could see? Something someone could kill you for?
In front of Noa, Callum’s steps stayed even and steady, but behind her, Noa heard Judah’s breath quicken. But what could they do but follow?
Then it was already too late: they were passing Arik. Noa kept her eyes down, saw how his boots were lined with flecks of gold—and also spots of greenish spray. A sickly sweet smell thickened the air, like sweat but cloying. Noa bit her lip to keep from crying out; the four steps it took to pass Arik seemed the longest in the world—
Suddenly Noa was flying up into the air, a bony hand biting into her shoulder. Noa gasped, losing her wind, and looked frantically below her—right into the small, black eyes of Arik, searing into hers.
Up close, Arik’s face was even sharper: cheekbones deep and cavernous, stubble like tiny knives. He was so tall that Noa actually got vertigo as he hoisted her up to stare her down.
“What’s this, Red whore?” Arik yelled, shaking her so violently that blood rushed into her eyes. As her vision flickered, she saw Callum, trying to hold Judah back.
When Noa didn’t answer, Arik wrenched Noa by her arm toward the colored tubes above them. No alarm sounded, but the blue tubes began to glow faintly. Arik shook her by the arm, the wrist—where her talisman bracelet glittered in the sun.
“Blue Magic!” Arik yelled, livid. He whipped Noa to the ground and bent back her arm to rip the bracelet from her wrist. Noa’s shoulder shattered in a sickening, hideous crackle; she screamed as Arik twisted her arm back and tore the bracelet from its dead weight.
The pain was so intense, and it all happened so fast, that Noa barely saw what happened next. Suddenly, Judah and Callum together were knocking Arik forward onto the ground, Noa’s body crunched beneath him; the red and blue tubes above screamed in pulsing noise and strobing light; and the ordered lines of Fae erupted into chaos and pandemonium.
Judah, fierce and feral, shoved Arik from Noa and pinned him back, his face an inch from Arik’s face.
“It can’t be—” Arik hissed as Judah slapped his hands to Arik’s cheeks, glaring at him hard.
A sudden warmth filled Noa’s arm, making her vision rosy so she couldn’t see what happened next. She turned her head and saw Callum was beside her, his hands around her shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” he was murmuring. His words sounded fuzzy, like she was hearing them from underwater.
“We have to move! Now!” Judah cried from somewhere on Noa’s other side. “I can’t control all their minds at once!”
Callum said something to Judah then turned back to Noa, his face coming thickly into focus. “We have to run,” Callum told her, pulling her to her feet. She felt a distant sting of pain needle up her legs, but her muscles started easily, wrapped like her mind in Callum’s warm, gooey healing fog. Callum pulled her after Judah, who tore into the crowd, yelling, “Make way!” as the tubes above him screeched and flashed in red. The Fae in front parted easily under his command.
“Stop using your gift!” Callum called up to
him. “They’ll track us through the crowd!”
With each step, Noa’s body sharpened back into itself. But once Judah silenced his gift, she and Callum had to push and shove through the startled Fae in their path. Noa’s mind and senses focused with her body, whipping with adrenaline: she saw, from every corner, winks of white and silver closing in. Swarms of Guards were fighting toward them.
From the right, sharp, staccato screams sounded like rapid pops, and suddenly, three Fae right in front of Noa and Callum fell to their knees, sobbing uncontrollably. Noa tripped violently; only Callum’s grip on her arm kept her from plowing facefirst into the ground. To their left, another group of Fae collapsed in tears, and Callum zigzagged through them, narrowly avoiding crashing in their wake.
“They’re Channeling Greens, trying to flatten us with sadness!” Callum yelled to Noa as they ran. She didn’t need to look to know the green tubes on their right were strobing and screeching wildly. “Be ready—”
Suddenly Callum was in the air, flying face-forward over Judah, who had dropped to the ground and rolled into a ball. He wasn’t sobbing; he was shaking with a sadness even deeper, too profound for tears. As Callum stumbled back to his feet, Noa fell onto Judah, grasped his shoulders, tried fruitlessly to break through his pain.
“Judah, Judah, it’s not real—”
Callum whipped toward the section of the crowd where the green tubes were screaming wildly, the place where they now knew the Green lines were clustered and the Guards were Channeling. He closed his eyes, crouched and pressed his palms into the ground, facing their way; blue tubes directly above him erupted as a gale-force wind, like a hurricane, rose and swept the Greens and Channeling Guards backward. Callum breathed deeper and conjured spikes of hail within the wind; more Green Fae fell back, flattened, bringing down the Guards with them.
On the ground, Judah blinked and blinked, confused. Callum’s wind, it seemed, had knocked out whoever had been Channeling Green to incapacitate him. He stared at Noa, thunderstruck.
“You’re alive,” he said in shock. “You’re not dead?”
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