by K. Gorman
Meese laughed. “Don’t let them hear that.”
“If they start moving, you’ll burn them, right?”
“What, and have flaming dolls coming after us? Are you crazy?”
“Shush. Plastic melts.”
“Flaming, molten, attacking dolls. Great.”
Robin smacked her friend’s shoulder. “You said you needed one of these?”
Meese paused by another doll, touching its outstretched hand with the tip of her fingers. Its skin bounced the light back, highlighting the ridge of her nose, her eyes, the pale skin of her cheeks. The dimness cast her orange hair in a subdued, coppery tint.
“Yeah. This one will do, I think.”
Robin sized him up. The doll was a head taller than her—but they could take that head off. “Cool. So… how—?”
Footsteps sounded behind them, tapping with the same metallic echo as theirs had on the escalator. They looked back to see a second flashlight sweep over the first few lines of dolls, its beam catching the dust in the air. When it swept Robin’s way, she squinted against the light.
“This place just gets creepier and creepier, don’t it?”
A woman’s voice. It sounded familiar.
“They keep adding new ones,” Meese said.
“Like I said, fucking creepy.”
The woman came closer, her boots thumping against the floor. Robin caught the outline of a gun at her hip. Its metal gleamed dully in the backsplash of the flashlight. Her skin was dark. White teeth flashed in a grin.
Yep, definitely Jo.
Robin remembered her now. She’d been the one who had taken Meese away on a stretcher, after the raid on Cyprios. They’d spoken briefly in the hospital.
“Hey,” Robin said.
“Hey—I remember you. You got some deal with Roger, right?”
“Er.” How many people knew about that? “Yes?”
Jo gave her an appraising look. “You’ve got some stones. First time I saw that fucker, I wanted to shoot him. With something big. Like a rocket. He’s like a spider that way.”
“You shoot spiders?” Meese asked.
“Yes. Once. I might have been drunk. It ran across my floor at the speed of light.” Jo paused. “They’re fast, man.”
“They are.”
“So…” Jo sauntered around Robin, her flashlight aimed at the doll next to Meese. “This one?”
“Yeah.”
Jo prodded its chest. The doll swayed, wobbled. “We shooting men now?”
“The last one was female. I thought it only fair.”
Another grin flashed across Jo’s face. “Equality of the sexes, and all that?”
“And all that.”
“Well, we’re all ladies here. Who wants to take him home?”
Silence followed her comment. Robin’s mouth dropped open.
Jo turned and saw the look on their faces. “To the range. For shooting at. Jesus.”
“I’ll carry him,” Robin offered. She gave the doll a second appraisal, sizing him up. Yep, they could definitely take the head off.
“Cool. Let’s go.”
*
The doll was heavier than she’d thought. Its arms draped over her shoulders, chest crushing her backpack into her spine. It kept slipping, though she could occasionally catch its fake pectoral muscles on the upper edge of her pack. The gun, which had sunk to the bottom of the pack, dug into her lower back.
And the legs stuck out at a weird angle. Whenever they smacked against the narrow tunnel’s walls, the doll’s neck jerked into the back of her head.
It smelled like dust, rubber, and, very faintly, citrus. Her hair made quiet whooshing sounds when it moved over the plastic.
“So, you wanna learn to shoot?” Jo carried the head. She tossed it back and forth like a basketball, her fingers making soft taps on the plastic. Ahead of both of them, Meese took the lead.
“Yes.”
Jo tossed the head. It twirled in the air, flipped over, and fell back into her hands. “Cool. I think more ladies need to learn guns. The military’s still a big sausage fest.”
The doll slipped. She caught its plastic thighs and adjusted it back up again. “I thought there were more than there used to be…”
“There are. It’s up to thirty percent women rather than ten percent. I suppose the war changed that—countries get desperate when they’re losing. I’m surprised they haven’t started conscription.”
“Con…scription?”
“The draft. That’s where they force people to fight.”
“They can do that?”
“Yeah. Anyone eighteen and above.”
She turned seventeen next month. “I’ve got a brother fighting.”
“Yeah? What division?”
“Twelfth Armored Corps.”
“Border guards. He’ll be fine. They won’t see action ’til Terremain falls.”
Meese’s light bobbed up ahead. Gray brick and concrete flashed under its beam. She’d gotten further away during Robin’s last adjustment.
“I hope so. Did Meese tell you about her eyes?”
“She sent a picture. You saw them?”
“Yeah. Roger, too.”
“Hmm.”
They walked in silence for the next few minutes; only the sound of their boots and Jo’s fingers on the doll head echoed off the concrete. Robin’s wrists had begun to ache. Maybe if she grabbed the doll another way…
Its arm popped off when she adjusted, and the whole thing slumped to the right. Its heels grated against the wall. The empty plastic neck jerked into her spine. The arm dropped to the floor with a hollow thunk, tripping her next step.
She stopped. “Fuck.”
A flashlight swept back, illuminating the fallen arm. She frowned down at it. Her legs ached, stiff from all the walking. Jo bent down, put her flashlight in her other hand, and picked up the limb. She grinned.
“You sure are rough on your menfolk.”
Up ahead, Meese had paused, too, looking back at them. A circle of light marked her place several meters up the tunnel, illuminating her from the knees down and pooling on the ground. She waited without a word, watching.
Someone moved into Meese’s light. Behind her.
Robin squinted. “Who’s that?”
He looked familiar. But it wasn’t until Meese started running that Robin recognized him.
The Earth Mage.
Jo turned back, swearing. The arm dropped to the ground again, hitting with the sound of a hollow tube. It bumped into Robin’s shoe. The floor rumbled.
Jo sprinted up the tunnel, gun in hand.
A shot rang out.
Green light flashed behind Meese.
The floor buckled and reared up. A great spike stabbed up from the ground, making Jo stop short. Robin stumbled as the tunnel quaked. Dust filled the air, crowded close to her eyes, smothered her nose. She coughed. Everything shook. The earth rumbled around her.
Then, Jo was there, grabbing her arm, pushing her back.
She tripped and caught herself, then felt the earth snap and shiver under her feet. A chunk of concrete smacked into her shoulder. Others rained down on the mannequin, big as baseballs. Jo dragged her farther and farther down the tunnel, her grip like iron on Robin’s wrist.
Then, everything stopped.
The earth settled, stilled.
The tunnel quieted.
She could hear her sneakers smack against the concrete. Her breath sounded heavy in the silence.
Jo pulled her a ways more, then stopped. Dust and dirt swirled in the beam of the flashlight. The mercenary whipped it back, illuminating the path they’d just run from.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, fuck!”
A mound of dirt and broken concrete blocked the tunnel from floor to ceiling—at least three meters thick, if the length of their run was anything to go by.
And Meese was on the other side.
With the Earth Mage.
“Fuck!” Jo threw the doll head. It winged
off the mound and clunked to the floor. Its vacant eyes rolled toward Robin. “Fuck!”
Jo’s face was a grim snarl. She pulled out her phone, muscles flexing with the movement. The sleeves of her shirt were covered in dirt.
“Can you get help?” Robin dropped the mannequin. It collapsed to the floor.
“No signal.” Jo straightened, gripped the phone in her fist. “I need to run for it. Fuck.” She glanced to Robin, hesitating. “I’m sorry. I gotta run.”
“Yes, yes—go!”
After one last look, Jo sprinted away. Her boots echoed back down, fast, furious, and growing swiftly fainter.
It wasn’t until she’d gone that Robin realized she was without a light. And very alone. Silence closed in around her. The air smelled of earth. Dust still hung in the air.
Behind her, a tiny amount of dirt fell off the mound, making a quiet hiss in the silence. She turned toward it, squinting to see something—anything.
But there was nothing.
“Crap.”
Chapter 10
“What did you do to them?”
Dust invaded Mieshka’s mouth as she spoke. It hung in the air like a cloud, churning in her flashlight’s beam. Dirt fell from the ceiling. She backed up until she hit the wall behind her, squinting to see. The tunnel had stopped buckling around them, returning to a silence that raised the hairs on her arms. It had a muffled feeling to it, like someone had filled the walls with cotton.
Her heart sank as she pointed her flashlight toward the way she’d come. Dust and darkness swallowed her light.
The Earth Mage moved alongside her, his skin still alive with the magic he wielded. Green symbols shivered on his knuckles, forming neat, organized lines on the back of his hand. The dust gave them a slight haloed effect.
He lifted a finger and flicked a rune into the air.
The dust cleared instantly. Her flashlight pierced the darkness.
Mieshka’s blood stopped.
A wall of rubble filled in the space where Robin and Jo had been.
Her hands shook. Cold seeped into her bones. She took a breath, forced the panic down.
“What did you do to them?” she repeated.
The Earth Mage paused, considering her. His irises were dark—close to black, though that might have been an effect from her flashlight’s pale bulb. It was the only source of light in the tunnel.
“They are alive,” he said.
There were many different types of ‘alive.’ They could be alive and suffocating. They could be alive and trapped. They could be half-crushed, but still alive.
She coughed, the sound loud in the confined space. Her mouth tasted like dirt—or ash. Sickness rose up in her. The room spun.
“One just ran off.” The Earth Mage smiled. “No honor among thieves, I suppose.”
Oh. Well, that was a better kind of alive. If they could run…
She straightened, forcing her nerves back down. “I’m not a thief.”
He thought she’d stolen the Phoenix and robbed his people of a power crystal. Sophia had said as much.
But it hadn’t been his crystal—it had been Aiden’s. Why did Michael care so much?
She opened her mouth, but he stepped closer.
His eyes glittered. “You are a thief. I can see it in your eyes.”
That’s when she realized that the light had changed somewhat. Her flashlight was pointed down at the ground, with only a small backsplash illuminating Michael. But the light on his chest had a golden aura to it.
And there was a warmth behind her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Hell.
“Come,” he said. “I have questions for you.”
He walked off into the dark, his footsteps soft in the silence. Dust shivered from the ceiling. Behind her, the wall of rubble shifted, kicking up more debris into the air. Her Element burned close to her skin, gold light fragmenting on the tunnel walls where it spilled from her eyes.
That was something she’d have to ask Aiden about—provided she survived this encounter.
With no other choice, she followed the Mage into the dark.
*
They walked in silence, Mieshka trailing a few steps behind Michael’s lead. They’d passed two intersections of tunnels, but the Earth Mage never turned. He didn’t speak, either.
After the second turn-off, the tunnel sloped down. It grew noticeably rougher, walls of fresh cinder-block changing to broken brickwork, stairs buckling down from smooth concrete patches to old plywood platforms. Ancient timber beams framed the walls. The ceiling lowered. The tunnel narrowed.
Claustrophobia was normally not a problem for her, but she began to feel just how close the walls were. Michael carried on, as silent as before. If he could feel earth like she could feel fire, maybe claustrophobia wasn’t a problem for him. Maybe he didn’t need eyes to find his way around. Maybe Earth Mages made the most badass blind people.
She ducked under a low-hanging beam, gritting her teeth as she tripped over bare ground. The quiet was getting to her. Time to get some answers.
“How did you know they’d run off?”
It had been bothering her. After he’d collapsed the tunnel, they hadn’t been able to see Jo or Robin—so either he had lied about one of them running off, or…
“You haven’t met many Earth Mages.”
With his back turned to her, she couldn’t see his face—but she could hear the sneer in his voice.
“Nor Earth Elementals.”
Her light bounced ahead, catching on the walls. They’d turned a nice terra cotta tint over the last minute, threaded through with streaks of metal, tile, and the occasional chunk of concrete. The wooden supports had stopped a while back.
Michael kept on, not slowing his pace. Quiet returned. Their shoes made hollow sounds when they crossed another board. Maybe he wouldn’t deign her with an answer.
“I’ve met Fire, Water, and Electric—” she started.
“Kitty is not a Mage.”
Disgust cut through his voice. For a second, she saw a flash of green light as an errant symbol burst over his skin.
Whoa. Wonder what Kitty did to get on his shit list.
Silence resumed. The tunnel turned, dropped down another flight of brick stairs. After a minute, he turned back to her.
“I can feel anything that’s connected to Earth. Any Earth user can, if they’re competent enough.”
“Anything?” she asked.
“I have a range of twelve miles.”
Miles. That was—if she remembered her math right—twenty kilometers? By his tone, he seemed proud of the fact.
“Is that… radius?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The tunnel narrowed again, and he ducked under a beam. Mieshka flicked the wood with her finger.
“Where are we going?”
“My lab.”
Lab? Her throat tightened. That sounded… not fun.
“You said you had questions for me?”
“My diagnostics can answer them.” He stopped short, head turned to the left wall. Like a dog fixing on a scent. Green flashed in his palm.
“What—?”
Crack. The tunnel shuddered. Mieshka crouched down, spreading her weight as Jo had taught her. The wooden board shifted beneath her, sliding over the earthen floor. Dust and dirt fell down, a couple of heavier clods hitting her shoulders. She coughed, covered her nose and mouth with the collar of her hoodie, and squinted her eyes shut.
It finished as quickly as it had begun. The Earth Mage looked down at her, black eyes glittering in the light like beetles. “Come.”
She peeked out. A new, human-sized hole had opened in the wall. The sides of it looked rippled, as if someone had rolled them together out of dough.
Mieshka stood. Dust and dirt shook free from her clothes. His clothes, she noticed, didn’t have a speck on them. He gestured for her to go first.
Great.
She stepped closer, pointing the flashlight into th
e new tunnel. Dried, dirty roots hung from the ceiling. The floor sank under her feet. Up ahead, the light caught on something shiny. Was that tile? Glass?
“Your lab?” she guessed.
“Yes.” Michael fell in step behind her. Symbols still lit his fingers, vibrating like restrained insects.
Another spell, ready to use.
She dropped down into the lab. Her dusty feet slipped over the tiles. When Michael dropped in behind her, she wasn’t surprised when the floor shivered.
She turned, watching the hole close up in the wall behind her.
Guess she’d have to find another way out.
With a flick of his hand, Michael turned on the lights.
Glass glinted to her left—a table full of tubes and bottles. Labels lined their tops, unreadable in the scripted, Asiatic-Cyrillic font of the Mage’s old language. The floor’s tidy white tiles made up the walls, too, forming something akin to a backsplash between the counters and the higher cupboards. More bottles glinted behind the sliding glass of a display unit in the corner.
“Nicer than any I’ve seen,” she commented. “Except on TV.”
The lab gave her hope. She was a Fire Elemental, right? Fire was bad in any lab.
The Earth Mage ignored her, moving past a steel sink to another storage unit on the wall. Pieces of Lost Tech shone dully when he opened the door, green light shivering to life on their surfaces as he reached past. He pulled out a large, flat piece, about the size of a computer screen.
It looked like Sophia’s tablet from yesterday, except bigger.
Maybe he was compensating for something.
She shifted closer to the table to get a better look at what was strewn about. A notebook lay open on the opposite end. Michael reached it before her.
“Give me your hand.” He didn’t wait, catching her wrist in a grip like iron and pressing her palm to the Lost Tech piece. Green light lit up under her fingers. A series of lines—in the same old-world text as the bottles—jumped down the device's left side. Part of his diagnostics?
The device warmed under her touch. His hand remained on her wrist, pinning hers down. With his other hand, he grabbed a scalpel.
She tensed. “What are you—?”