by K. Gorman
“Sure,” she said. “Where we going?”
Jo turned back around. “To Aiden’s ship. Gobardon’s digging a tunnel for us. Robin, you can leave your bag here.”
They turned into the rec room from before. Dad looked up from partway across the room, mid-step. By the tension in his face and the nervous hunch of his shoulders, she suspected he’d been pacing.
Their luggage stood at the end of the couch. Uncle Alex was nowhere in sight.
“Mieshka?”
Her name sounded strange to her ears. So many people had taken to calling her ‘Meese’ that she’d become rather used to it. Now, it was like her brain paid attention to the syllables, the distinct Russian tilt to it.
“Hi, Dad.”
But before she could say more, Jo took over. The mercenary strode across the room, slung a bag over her shoulder, and grabbed a second, smaller one. She offered it to Robin, dangling it from its strap in front of her while she shrugged her own backpack off and replaced it with that one.
McKay, in the corner, had already loaded up.
“Time to go,” the mercenary repeated.
And, as before, she swept them out the door.
The Society’s hallways were different than Mieshka remembered. Busier. Twice, they had to flatten themselves to the wall as someone ran past. And as she lagged behind, holding the group to a slower pace, it became obvious that she wasn’t up for this kind of movement yet.
She tried to hide it. She gritted her teeth and pushed past the pain. Her Element reacted to the focus, pushing fire into the places just under her skin. She could feel where every stitch bit into her skin, every tug and pull it made. Every new step was an effort of will, and each one was noticeably shorter than the one before it.
Then, her leg wouldn’t lift at all.
She sagged against the wall, letting her hair fall in front of her face like a curtain. Her breaths came in harsh, ragged gasps.
Not in front of Dad. Please, not in front of Dad.
But she felt him beside her. He touched her elbow, one of the few places on her body that didn’t hurt.
“She can’t go on like this.”
By the way his voice sounded, she could tell he wasn’t speaking to her. Anger laced his words. Anger, mixed in with a little bit of fear.
Jo moved in closer. Her shadow blocked out the light in front of them. She bent down and ran a careful hand through Mieshka’s hair.
“Meese?” she asked, her voice softer than before. “Honey?”
A new voice joined the party.
“I’ve got her.” Uncle Alex pushed his way through. In the corner of her eye, she saw her dad step aside. Hands took her shoulder, eased the crutch from under her arm. “Hang on, sweetie, I’ve got you. Remember the pony rides I used to give you? Just like that.”
Oh, God, he did not just say that.
Heat flushed her face, but it had very little to do with her Element. He knelt before her, his back hard and muscled under his stained shirt. She gritted her teeth and stumbled forward, a hand to the wall for balance. Jo caught her other hand, easing her into position.
When Uncle Alex stood, a fresh wave of pain roared from her joints.
But it subsided, and the world felt clearer. Fresh air hit her face. She blinked at the lights.
Gunfire rang out in the distance.
“Let’s go,” Jo said.
Chapter 44
Soldiers lay on the old, wooden floor, their skin bright with Fire magic. It traced bold lines across their face and neck, pressed into their wrists and ankles, dwindled to a point on each finger. Spider web-thin threads that glowed like a furnace.
They were not, Ketan realized, in pain. The fire did not hurt them.
Aiden walked ahead. They’d climbed into the old attic of the house, which had obviously been modified from its original structure. Timber beams, not unlike those found in the Underground tunnels and alleys, crisscrossed the space, reflecting the spell’s glow on their undersides.
A doorway had been cut into the attic’s roof, letting a half-flight of rickety stairs descend into the space. Light spilled in from the hallway beyond. He saw cream-colored concrete, a gritty gray ceiling. More soldiers slumped on the stairs, magic lining their joints, eyes wide, staring, alive.
Then, the light shifted.
Upstairs, someone moved.
A gun muzzle appeared in the door, aimed directly at the Mage.
Aiden didn’t look worried.
“Hello,” he said.
The soldier squatted down for a better angle, eyes never leaving Aiden’s face. Her winter camo, a mottled mix of blue, gray, and white, seemed out of place in the underground attic, like trying to hide television static in a tomb.
The soldier didn’t say anything. Her face remained impassive, unreadable.
“She’s upstairs, isn’t she? The president?”
Aiden’s voice was quiet. The hall light lit every whisker of stubble on his face, caught the blue of his eyes so that Ketan could make out every shift in their shade. His pupils were tiny spots of black in them.
“No.” The soldier’s voice held a bitterness that Ketan hadn’t gathered from her face, though it was obvious that Aiden had. “She wouldn’t come here. Too busy kissing enemy ass.”
“So, she sent you instead?” Aiden asked.
“That machine up there, you set it to stun?”
“To bind,” the Mage corrected.
“You could have killed us.”
“It would have been easier. Less programming. But that wouldn’t have been very nice of me, would it?”
Silence took the room. The two exchanged a long stare.
Then, she lowered her rifle. Its strap clicked as she swung it back into resting position. She stood, wood creaking under her boots, and stepped out of the way.
“They’re expecting you,” she said.
It wasn’t just a matter of expectation, as it turned out. When they hit the main stairwell, they couldn’t move without running into a soldier. Eyes tracked them as they wormed their way through the crowd. The soldiers parted for them, forming a single line on the stairs. They filled the gaps behind them as Ketan and Aiden ascended.
They didn’t go far. Aiden had hidden his engine barely two flights above the Underground’s access point.
Aiden was right. This wasn’t the most strategic place to hide a shield-generating engine. When Ketan got through to the landing and caught a look at the wall, he saw exactly what the Mage had only hinted at before.
A huge chunk of wall had been blasted away, the scorch marks still visible on the concrete and cinder-blocks. How long had it been? A month? Three? Rusted, bent rebar lined the hole like monsters’ teeth. Chunks of concrete leaned inside, as if stretching into the dim room beyond.
A single bulb burned on the inside, naked on the ceiling. Soldiers shifted inside. Their shadows danced on the walls—but they only stood in half the room. Exactly half the room.
A clear line marked the spot between them and the empty side that faced them. It was bare, except for a lump of black that huddled in the far corner.
Power shivered in the air. It called to Ketan as sweetly as his Element.
He stepped over the threshold.
Warmth flooded him. Whatever dampness had been left in his jacket vanished in that one step, making it feel like he’d just taken it out of the dryer. His Element stretched inside him like a lizard basking in the sun. His eyes snapped to the lump of black on the far wall. This time, it wasn’t just paranoia about the black crystal that caught his attention. He homed in on it like a beacon.
Ketan had never seen a shield engine before, but there was nothing else this thing could be. It hummed in the corner, its sleek black lines at once hulking and smooth, incongruent with the room’s bare concrete walls. It radiated energy like a star.
Silence engulfed the room. No one spoke. Only the click and rustle of uniforms and guns, the quiet squeak and thumps of boots. These soldiers were not do
wn. They were fully conscious, capable, and deadly. Ketan could feel their eyes as he walked. It seemed like the whole room held its breath.
And, as they came to the line dividing the room, he saw why.
Ten soldiers lay down, stone-still, faint lines of orange crossing their skin. Their light had a different tone to it than the ones downstairs. It was brighter, more gold than red. As he watched, it pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
Aiden stopped by one and knelt down, reaching a hand out to the man’s neck.
The room bristled.
“Relax. He’s going to be fine.” Aiden took a moment to check the man’s pulse, his brow furrowing as he focused on the soldier. After a minute, he looked up, meeting some of the others’ eyes. “He’s just bound. Same as you’d do with a rope, though magic is much more… effective.”
The Fire Mage stood stiffly, knee cracking. The room shifted around him.
“Stay there,” he told Ketan. “I haven’t programmed you into the engine. You’ll end up like them if you get too close.”
Then, stepping around the fallen soldiers, he crossed the invisible line into the empty section of the room. For a second, a faint light shuddered in the air, and the invisible shield glowed with a subtle translucence. It tinted the empty side of the room with an orange filter, distorting what color had been visible on the other side before it dissipated.
The engine thrummed to life as the Mage approached. Energy hummed and shivered. A screen flickered to life, unfolding out of the top of the machine like in a science fiction movie. It had a more obvious orange tint to it, its letters glowing like white-hot coals in a bed of fire, their spindly lines forming a succinct, unreadable phrase in what Ketan assumed was the Mage’s old language.
Aiden paused in front of it. His hand slid across the machine’s interface, almost like a caress.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s time.”
And then, he leaned in, his lips moving as he muttered something else.
The letters shifted, shivered. A new sentence reformed, glowing like a beacon in the room.
“Attagirl,” Aiden muttered, the words loud in the quiet room.
Then, using a mechanic’s crawler parked beside the machine, he slid underneath the engine and reached into its chassis.
People shifted around Ketan, uneasy. Two of the fallen had their eyes turned as far as they could in Aiden’s direction. Others had their eyes closed. Some of the unaffected soldiers knelt beside their fallen comrades, their rifles on the floor next to them as they murmured to their friends. Worn gun barrels gleamed, their lengths polished as much as practicality would allow. Now that he looked a bit closer, he could see the wear in the soldiers’ uniforms. They’d seen combat—and recently, too, judging by the stiffness with which they stood.
And now that Aiden was out of their main focus, they turned their attention to him. He’d been overlooked when he’d entered the room, all eyes on the Mage.
Now, they quietly sized him up.
With an audible click, the energy whooshed out of the air. As one, each bound soldier took a gasping breath, motion restored to their limbs. They staggered to their feet, legs shaking.
Aiden slid out from the machine, the wheels of his crawler clattering loudly against the uneven floor. The soldiers still toed the line where the shield had prevented them from crossing before, and Ketan realized something: They hadn’t felt the energy.
What had been obvious to him had been less than invisible to them. He’d felt the shield engine’s power like a flower felt light—radiant, powerful, full of energy.
But the soldiers?
Maybe they’d felt something, but certainly not the power he’d felt.
Which gave him an idea of just how out-powered people were against the Mages. If he, an Elemental, couldn’t stand up to one… what chance did the normals have?
What chance would they have had twenty years ago, when the Mages had first arrived?
He repressed a shiver. Whatever the case, it wasn’t his battle. He had no say in the government, and the die for this battle had been cast long ago.
A section of the engine opened with a hiss. Aiden bent over and reached inside.
When he brought his hand out, it was filled with fire.
Well, not really. That was what it looked like, but once Ketan’s eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that it was a crystal. Colors shifted inside it—the now familiar orange-yellow-red of the Fire Element, burning and glowing like hot embers in a stoked fire. The crystal’s facets sent spokes and fractals sparking off the walls, casting the room with the warmth of a campfire. Soldiers stood in the light, their faces a mix of awe, fear, and a strange blend of stoicism and uncertainty that Ketan recognized within himself.
They were drawn to the crystal like crows to silver.
Aiden cupped it in his hand, his fingers wrapping around the crystal’s base like shadowed claws.
Then, without ceremony, he dropped it into a bag, zipped it up, and put it over his shoulder.
The light vanished. In its absence, Ketan felt the cold creep in—as if a cloud had suddenly come between him and the sun.
Soldiers shifted under the naked bulb in the ceiling. He could hear whispers around him, was aware of more than one stare.
Aiden made his way out.
“The spell shouldn’t cause any permanent damage,” he said to the room in passing. “But you might want to get them checked out all the same.”
They left the same way they’d come.
No one stopped them.
“I like soldiers,” Aiden told him as they moved back to the tunnels. “They have a sense of honor that’s practically medieval.”
Chapter 45
“Heard you knocked off a bakery?”
Ketan cringed. Yeah, that was going to come back and bite him for a while. “It wasn’t my idea.”
They walked back through the tunnels, Aiden’s flashlight bouncing off the walls. It was nothing but bare brick patched with cinder-blocks and rough concrete. A string of vacant bulbs hung from a bundle of wires along the corner of the ceiling, their filaments dead and dusty. The place was starting to look familiar, even to his misguided sense of direction.
The walls here had a different feel from the ones close to the Core—they were aesthetically neglected, but solid. Practical. He could tell that people came this way often, but he suspected it was the same people every time, not a pile of different people like in the Core.
In the unlit tunnel, the crystal’s light was more visible. He had expected a better bag for something as important as the crystal, but Aiden carried it in the worn-out backpack. Orange outlined every worn spot and patch of the bag and highlighted the teeth of the zipper.
“That doesn’t make it right,” the Fire Mage said. He shifted the pack on his shoulder. Amber light strained at the seams.
Ketan ducked his head. “No, sir.”
It felt surreal, walking next to the Fire Mage. When he’d first come to Ryarne, he’d never thought he’d actually get to meet Aiden. Meese, maybe. She had a reputation, seemed more approachable, less busy. But Aiden?
The Fire Mage had seemed out of reach.
And now, it looked like he’d fucked up his first impression. Great.
He kept walking. The Mage’s face remained blank, an expression he had come to realize meant he was thinking. He kept quiet, their footsteps the only noise in the tunnels.
“Meese was defending you. Said you’d been looking for her?” Aiden asked.
“I thought she could help me. I’d never met another Fire Elemental before.”
“I see.”
Concrete steps appeared in the lights, and Aiden climbed them without missing a beat. A fresh smell of must wafted into the air as they continued, the tunnel floor sloping to an upward grade. Ketan’s toe stubbed on a piece of uneven floor, and the movement pulled at his muscles. He could already feel them stiffening from when he’d carried Meese.
“Meese can’t help you,” the Fir
e Mage continued. “She barely knows what she’s doing herself. In fact—” He paused as they climbed a second set of stairs. He sounded out of breath. “You probably know more about working the Fire Element than she does, at this point.”
“Really?”
“She’s only had it for a few months. More like three weeks, if we factor in the downtime.”
Huh. Perhaps he had been misguided in his attempts to find Meese. “But everyone says—”
“Yes, everyone says she’s a super powerful Elemental. I’ve heard the rumors. Some even say she’s a Mage—but she’s not. You were there when she fought Michael?”
“Yes.” ‘Fought’ was a bit of a stretch for what had happened between Meese and Michael. They’d been lucky to come out of that alive. If it hadn’t been for Roger and the other two…
“Then you saw how vulnerable she is.”
The sentence was a statement, not a question. Aiden stopped, turning toward him. Gritty walls hemmed them in. The flashlight illuminated a circle of stained pavement on the floor, where gray patches of concrete overlapped broken bricks. Pale puddles on the grime-covered floor.
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
Aiden shifted. His pupils dilated, making the blue in his eyes shrink. Flecks of lighter colors streaked through his iris, emphasized by the backsplash of the flashlight.
“She’s a baby Mage right now—really only an Elemental,” the Mage explained. “She can’t even do a shield.”
“But… what about the sky?”
Meese’s exploit for covering the sky with fire was famous in the underworld circuits. That much had at least been confirmed with his friends in the Underground. Even Meese had admitted to lighting it. How was that possible from someone who was so ‘vulnerable’?
“That was before,” Aiden said. “She used up an entire Fire crystal to do that, and she’s just now getting the power back. If she hadn’t done that, it would’ve been better for her. She’d be able to defend herself. But, of course, if she hadn’t done that, Ryarne would’ve been occupied well before now.”
Aiden turned back toward the end of the tunnel. The barest of lights shone from up ahead, just visible around a distant corner.