Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “You’re dead meat, pal! You hear me?” Spittle flew from his mouth, punctuating the curses and questions.

  John had had enough. He didn’t know what the glove did, but he didn’t like the ominous hum it was emitting. With all of the techno-gizmo-whatever junk floating around nowadays, it could be part of some new bit of power armor, or some meta’s arsenal. Or it could be a toaster for all you know, idiot. He looked at the driver, then the glove, then the last remaining looter. The driver would probably get killed as soon as John did anything. The greaseball knew it, too.

  Except for one small fact…

  “Screw it.” The first lance of flame from John bit into the thug’s uninjured arm at the elbow, severing it cleanly. Al fell backwards, his mouth wide in an O of silent agony. He waved the stump around in the air, unable to clutch at it with his other arm.

  John walked forward, watching the thug push himself away from the driver and John with his legs. John seethed and raged on the inside. More fire answered that rage, sweeping up the thug’s body in slow, measured waves. John took his time, hating everything about the man, about the world, this city, the invasion, and more than anything, himself.

  John finally stopped when there was hardly anything left of Al to burn. There was a scorched silhouette of a person against the asphalt. John felt sick looking at it, thinking of the “shadows” against a brick wall in Hiroshima. He turned away in disgust, facing the driver. John kicked Al’s gloved hand into the gutter—the armor on the glove had kept the hand intact—as he walked up to the driver. “Are you all right?”

  The driver was clearly in a bad way. He was dying. John knew the look in those eyes, that gray face. But dying or not, he was afraid. Scared to death of John. He tried to drag himself away from John, dying eyes fixed on John’s face, horror transfixing his own.

  That look drained everything from John in an instant. The rage, the high from the fresh kills, the power—all of it gone, except for the disgust. It came back and redoubled, stronger than ever. John started for the man, to try to help him, get him to a hospital. But then he thought better of it. This guy was going to do himself more damage trying to get away from John. Leave him alone. Maybe he can get to a radio and call for help before he passes out. He walked back to the corner of the brick factory, stepping over the bodies in the intersection.

  Shouldering his backpack, he started down the street again. He made sure to fix his eyes intently on his own feet.

  He couldn’t, wouldn’t, look at the driver again.

  And then—

  It was a flash of light, a wash of fire in the sky. Instinctively, he ducked; instinctively, he looked up.

  Instinctively, he felt himself ramping up inside again. Fight or flight. But with him…it was always fight. Right down to the end of the road, it was always fight.

  But what alighted beside the driver was…not what he expected.

  His mind flashed back to that moment in New York when that poor, poor kid had exploded all over the sky. The wash of flames, and bursting through them, that…being, that fabulous winged creature cradling the kid’s still form in its arms.

  She…it was a she this time, oh yes. She stood beside the wreck of the truck, a flawless body clothed in flame. She had scooped up the driver in her arms as effortlessly as if he weighed nothing. Her flames licked harmlessly at the driver; his eyes were closed, but his chest was still moving. And the expression on his face had gone from pain and terror to—impossibly—peace. He even smiled a little.

  Huge wings of flame stretched out behind them, poised as she was to launch into the air again. And only after taking all that in, did John raise his eyes to hers, to look into her face.

  Beautiful. Terribly beautiful. Inhumanly beautiful. He looked into her eyes, and felt her gaze lock with his, and the impact of that drove him to his knees as his insides went to water. He felt all that he was being laid out in front of her, felt her examining it in that nanosecond of time. All of his self-loathing was a flood of thin, filthy water gushing from him to evaporate at her feet.

  A pair of tears, like crystal pearls, slowly moved down her cheeks. She was sorry for him.

  And then, the great wings cupped air, thundered, flashed, and she was an arrow of fire across the sky, the driver still held in her arms.

  John got slowly to his feet, then stood stock-still for a couple of beats before he finally came back to life. He shook his head, then cupped a palm over his eyebrows to look at the sky. Insane. You have to be. He shook his head again to clear it, before setting on back down the street, but it didn’t work at all.

  Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Seraphym

  Seraphym returned to her perch only minutes after she had left it. Metas with the power of flight came up to her perch, some to try and speak with her, to convince her to help them. But she had her own path to follow this day, and it was not theirs. As always, some could see what she was, and some could not. She ignored them. Not one who came to her was one who had any great part in the web of futures as she saw them.

  The same futures Matthew had seen.

  Then came one she could not ignore, purely because of his persistence. The face and body of a god, and the name of one too, if not the power. Tesla’s Messenger trod up the air to her, and stared. Why had he come to her? He had seen her flames. He had heard about her and he did not know her. And he was passionate in his loyalty to Echo and Tesla, and he would, if there was any chance, lure her to them.

  “Who are you?” he asked, finally.

  I am what you see.

  He started, his head jerking a little, to hear her voice in his mind. “I mean, are you a meta? Is this all some sort of illusion?”

  The only illusions here are those that come from within you, and prevent you from seeing me truly.

  “Echo needs you—”

  Echo must go on needing. I am not Tesla’s property. I serve another Power.

  “But—” She sensed his anger, his frustration. She couldn’t blame him. Echo did need, with so many dead, so much in ruins. Echo needed.

  Tesla would have to find his answers elsewhere.

  “You can’t—” he began, his voice rising a little.

  She raised her eyes at last, and Looked at him. Saw all of him laid out bare before her. Every memory. Every thought. Everything he was ashamed of, everything he dreamed of. She felt him understand what she was doing; sensed him recoiling from the things he would never, ever have revealed to another living soul—

  —of course, she was not, precisely, living. In a way, she was more. Superliving.

  She saw his immediate future, the ship come to take him to a place he had not even dreamed of, to a new course for his life. That she did not allow him to be aware of. Only a few, a very few, mortals would be permitted to know their possible futures, and this time, he was not among that select few.

  He was aware of all else though. Aware that she was nothing like he had thought. Aware of what she truly was. It was he that cried out, turned away, and fled, running along the paths of air with terror chasing him.

  Fear not, she sent after him. But of course it was a little too late. Her kind almost always said something like “Be not afraid” to mortals, but honestly, they never had been very good at making that work.

  * * *

  The immediate future became present, then past, and she gazed. Days and nights, seen as blended frames, and she acted as best she could to steer a course to that place that was more a hope than a destination. And then, one afternoon, she sensed a clear calling. One mortal was dying who would be needed. She could scoop him up and take him to those who would heal his broken body before it was too late. She should do that. If he lived, his power would bloom. He would be indispensable, not because he would be powerful, but because of who he would save with his power. One tiny keystone to the arch…

  She launched from her perch and dove for the spot. The man, now a simple transport driver—though that would change the moment she touched him and became th
e catalyst to bring out his power—lay in a broken, bleeding heap on the asphalt. There had been a fight, and a bloody, terrible one. The driver had been ambushed, but someone had taken on his ambushers and left nothing of them. But…

  But there was a blank here. She could not See who had come to the man’s rescue.

  Startled by the sound of someone nearby, she looked up, and into the gray eyes of a single man who, until that moment, had not existed for her. He had been a blank spot in the canvas of the present. She was seldom surprised by—anything, really, but this surprised, shocked her.

  And she Looked at him. And his pain, pain even he did not really understand properly, struck her like a blow to the face. Here was loss, betrayal, the death of all hope. Here were tragic flaws, great courage, and a yawning chasm of desperation. Here was one who could have been, and could be, noble—as noble as the angels…or a terrible, soulless creature. Or he might simply lie down in despair and die.

  She Saw what he was, much of his past, and what he might become—

  With a shock, she realized that much about all the futures around him was…undefined. And not because the futures themselves had not settled. Because there was information being withheld from her, things about this man that the Infinite did not want her to know.

  Curiosity sparked in her. She opened herself to what knowledge the Infinite would give her.

  His name was John Murdock. She noted him in her mind, but curiosity became more than a spark, it became a flame.

  But also, there was fear. For the first time, Seraphym knew fear. Why would the Infinite keep knowledge from her?

  A soft moan woke her to the present again. The man she held needed help. And the world would need him.

  She broke off eye contact with Murdock, realizing only at that moment that his pain had made its way into her heart, calling two slow tears from her eyes. Shaking her head with an inaudible sob, she spread her great wings and took to the sky, trailing fire behind her.

  Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Mercurye

  Mercurye slapped two twenties on the counter of the roadside bar. “Whiskey. Line ’em up.”

  The bartender, a gaunt man with frown lines entrenched in a drawn face, took a step back. His gaze moved from Mercurye’s face to the body bag flung over the meta’s shoulder.

  Mercurye hunched over the bar. “I swear to God, my friend, if a man ever needed a drink, it’s right now.”

  This was language the barkeep understood. His hand moved across the bottles on the wall and settled on Bushmills Irish. He set five tumblers on the bar with the wooden clatter that ordinarily soothed anxious customers. The only other sound in the bar emanated from the jukebox—an old Aerosmith song. Old men and tattered women stared at the muscular, bare-chested metahuman and his morbid cargo.

  The meta slammed back two drinks in as many seconds.

  “Tough times,” the bartender said with a raised eyebrow. “Hell of a thing.”

  “Hell’s the right word for it,” Mercurye said. The whiskey distracted him from the whirl of emotions tearing his head apart. He downed two more as if he’d come from the desert. “Keep ’em coming.”

  “No problem.”

  An ancient man limped up to the bar with his wallet in his hand. “You’re not paying while I’m in this room, son.” Mercurye turned his head wearily. He forced himself to smile in thanks, but the man sought no reassurance. He pushed Mercurye’s money back to him and replaced it with his own.

  A second man, younger but still gray of hair, reached over with another bill. “ ’Nam, sixty-eight,” he said, and jerked a thumb at the old man. “Korea.”

  The blowsy woman at the bar added to the pile. “My son was in Kuwait,” she said.

  Five belts later, Mercurye felt his back relax. He looked to each of his patrons. “Thank you,” he said. “Stay away from the city if you can. It’s a mess.”

  The Vietnam vet shook his head. “Driving in tomorrow with water and food. I ain’t afraid of a war zone.”

  The meta nodded.

  “That a friend?” With his chin, the vet indicated the body bag, now propped against the bar.

  “Never met him.” Mercurye remembered Eisenfaust’s face, blackened by bruises. Ramona had filled him in on the man’s role in the invasion, which led him to believe that Alex had a special plan for the body. “Sorry I brought him in, but…”

  “Don’t suppose you could have left him in the car,” the bartender said.

  “I’m on foot,” Mercurye said with a weary grin. “I won’t be long.”

  The Korean war vet unexpectedly laid a hand on Mercurye’s shoulder. “It ain’t my place to speak for what any man thinks or feels after coming out of war, but if this is your first time, listen. I remember the faces of the men I killed every day, just as good as I remember my friends that died.” His rheumy eyes bore into Mercurye’s. “You just got to make it through each day. No one will understand, even when they say they do. It’s a part of your heart now.”

  The hand moved from his shoulder and waited, outstretched. Mercurye took it, wondering what this man had to muster up to survive his war, half a century ago, without metahuman powers or stamina. Just courage.

  Braver than we are.

  “We’ll do our best,” he said, feeling ineloquent.

  “Well, now, you got to, don’t you?” The old-timer showed his rotting teeth in a smile. “We’re too old and tired to kick your asses.”

  Mercurye finished his whiskey and asked for directions to Ten Falls Road, where Tesla’s remote lab lay hidden from the world. The locals all knew it as a cinder-block building distinguished only by the electric fence at its perimeter. He hoisted the body bag to his shoulder and left the bar with a wave.

  Striding through the air, high above the sporadically lit rural highway, the farms, the swamps reflecting moonlight, and the carpet of firs, he tried to resist the thoughts that burrowed up from his subconscious. That woman—that entity—had frightened him more than the Nazis had when they slaughtered his friends. Violence, hatred, death—these were human experiences, grounded in the natural world. Mercurye had encountered telepaths as well, who could rifle through his mind like a customer in a record store, yet he had been taught techniques to resist their intrusions: the mental version of hiding around the corners of your own house from an intruder.

  Yet the woman—what could he call her anyway?—the angel had ripped open reality itself to spread his entire consciousness out before him. As a child he had believed angels would show up on one’s doorstep with bland good tidings; so were they depicted in his mother’s surfeit of Christmas imagery. He had expected to see them at the mall, placid and mild, handing out presents or inviting hobos to soup kitchens.

  The fiery woman atop the Suntrust building had been neither bland nor mild. As though a star had come to life, she had regarded him as if he was an ant. He could appear on worldwide television, address a stadium full of screaming fans, face down superhuman monsters, but after contact with her, had there been a nearby cave, he would have huddled in it like a Neanderthal terrified of lightning. His face ached from forcing a stoic expression ever since.

  Mercurye concentrated on the resilience of the air beneath his feet. Ramona’s wry grin welled up in his consciousness like a remembered candy in his pocket. The plump detective had become a beacon of sanity for him during this miserable time. Glamorous women pursued him relentlessly. Once he dropped off this corpse, he could be in one of their beds within the hour. Yet Ramona blotted out their faces; her voice drowned out the professional coos of groupies as famous as he was.

  She was a comrade. He could call her. He knew she would welcome it.

  On a night like this, he wanted to share the darkness and the misery with comrades who understood pain and loss, not sympathizers whose caresses were intended to make his grief disappear as if no one had died.

  He shouldn’t have kissed her. A stupid mistake—and not the first time he’d acted without thought around women. A call f
rom him at so late an hour had connotations he didn’t want to tangle with, not today.

  All at once, he spotted sodium lamps illuminating gray brick with pale orange light. The Echo lab building. From his vantage point, it resembled an abandoned gas station.

  Mercurye landed in the overgrown yard, crunching gravel and dried weeds under his boots.

  “Last stop,” he said, lowering the body bag containing the dead German metahuman. Crickets chirped in the grasses; bats flew overhead. Nothing indicated that the lab had been used in the last five years. The blue paint on the metal front door had succumbed to rust. A deadbolt held the door against his tugs. He could have knocked it down with a good rush, but what was the point? There was no one here.

  I must have made a mistake, he thought, until he glanced at the side of the building and saw the correct address in tarnished brass numbers bolted to the wall. A small plaque with the alchemical symbol for air, Echo’s adopted logo, declared it for authorized personnel only.

  He fished out the pay-per-call cell phone they had handed out at the campus. Alex had programmed into it the number for his emergency crisis center in the Omega Airlines complex. Mercurye felt too foolish to interrupt Alex in his efforts to rescue the database from the Thule virus.

  I could call Ramona, he mused. She might have an idea…or at least commiserate with me.

  A subsonic hum roiled his guts. Could the disrepair of the building be a sham? He might be standing on top of a massive hidden complex. Jumpsuited Echo Ops with clipboards could be waiting for him to find the concealed switch to activate a giant elevator…or something equally absurd.

  I’m too tired and drunk for subtlety, he decided. He pounded on the metal door, which rung with a satisfying clangor. “Hey! It’s Mercurye! Open up, will ya?”

  The hum increased in volume, accompanied by a rush of air. He scanned the yard for some indication of elevators, platforms, anything. In the nighttime dark, he could only barely make out the grasses waving.

  Above him, a black circular shape blotted out the stars; it was at least fifty feet across, larger than the war machines that had attacked Echo earlier. No details were visible, just a deeper black than the night sky. The descending object lacked the wicked orange glow of the Thule crafts’ propulsion system.