Travelers

by K A Riley

  Charging at the knight, Cardyn strikes him over and over—it’s got to be a dozen solid hits—with the axes chipping and pinging against the knight’s armor.

  The knight drops his shield and staggers back but somehow keeps his balance.

  Rain fires another flurry of her darts at him, but with his helmet on, the silver knight easily shakes them off.

  Holding his injured arm protectively against his side, Brohn joins Cardyn in pressing their attack.

  The knight isn’t going down without a major fight, though.

  Gathering himself together, he plants his boots in the ground, his heels digging in to stop Brohn and Cardyn from knocking him any farther back.

  He swings his sword again, striking Brohn in the same arm he hit before. Brohn cries out but still manages to shove Cardyn out of the way of the sword’s deadly follow-through.

  The sword makes contact, but at least it’s with Cardyn’s tomahawk axes and not with his head.

  I’m just now regaining my focus, but I know I’m not going to be much help. The knight’s armor is too strong, and, with his helmet still on, he doesn’t have any weak spots I could exploit with my Talons.

  After a quick glance over at his fallen partner, the silver knight bellows in a husky growl that he’s going to kill us all.

  Charging at us, his sword cocked in both hands like a golf club behind his head, he looks determined to make good on his promise.

  He heaves the massive sword around, and we all leap back, barely avoiding the slashing attack. The knight charges again, this time separating Rain out from the rest of us. Cornered, she tries to duck under the knight’s canon-sized arm, but he catches her by her shoulder, and she screams as the steel fingers clamp down, pressing hard around her neck. Brohn lunges at the knight, hitting him hard in the side with a shoulder charge. The knight staggers, but he doesn’t lose his grip on Rain, who might as well be a limp scrap of fabric in his relentless grasp.

  With no chance to reload her dart-drivers, she claws at the knight’s steel gauntlet as he lifts her off her feet.

  Wheezing, Cardyn slings me around next to him. “Let’s put this guy down.”

  Circling the knight, Cardyn and I tap into our Emergent abilities.

  I reach inside my mind to channel a different path than the one I use to reach Render.

  Across from me, Cardyn points out to the knight how heavy his sword must be. “And all that armor. You can’t even stand up.”

  The knight’s arm drops, but he doesn’t. He’s still got Rain, kicking and flailing and struggling to take a breath, locked in one hand.

  Doing my best to stay calm, I tell him, “Sleep.”

  He grunts and shakes his head, and I can feel my command bounce back to me, unused and unsuccessful.

  He pivots around to face me, and I take a huge step back, bumping into Brohn in the process. “Um…what now?” I ask.

  Brohn tells me to relax and try softer.

  “Don’t you mean try harder?”

  “No. Let Render in all the way,” he urges, his voice betraying his nervousness about the urgency of our situation as the knight gears up to take another swing at us.

  I take a deep breath and do the exact opposite of what I really want to do, which is run, panting and screaming, as fast as I can in the opposite direction. Instead, I close my eyes and tell the fear stomping its way toward my heart that I don’t have time for it right now.

  Come back later. There’s a time for fear. This isn’t it.

  With my eyes closed, my Talons sheathed, and my arms loose at my sides, I shift my full focus on the advancing knight.

  I say, “Sleep” again, more gently this time, and open my eyes.

  With the clamor of a heap of aluminum garbage cans tumbling down a hill, the silver knight crumbles to the ground, his helmet twisted halfway around his head, his layered shoulder-armor pressed up against the thorny wall of the hedge maze.

  He brings Rain down with him, and she slams, gasping, to the ground.

  I rush over to her, but she waves me off. “I’m okay. Just need to catch my breath.”

  “Impressive,” Brohn huffs while nursing his sore arm. He surveys our two downed adversaries, one bleeding and moaning on the ground, the other deeply unconscious at our feet. “Who needs weapons when you’ve got the power of persuasion?”

  “I can’t speak for Card,” I tell him, “But I’m not feeling very powerful at the moment.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I say, spreading my arms out wide. “I’ve just got a headache about this big.”

  “Rain?”

  Rain limps over, brushing herself off and rubbing the red marks on her neck. “I’ll be okay.”

  “And you’re pretty good with those axes,” Brohn says to Cardyn.

  Frowning, Cardyn picks up the two tomahawk axes from the ground and snaps them into their mag-holster on his back. “I’m not as good as Manthy was.”

  23

  Checkpoints

  We continue on our way without any more interruptions. In fact, with Rain in the lead, getting through the rest of the maze turns out to be pretty easy. The big knight fight seems to have jacked up her adrenaline, and she’s now a whirl of energy.

  Up ahead of us, she’s like a bloodhound, calling out, “Left, right, this way,” and “Follow me.”

  A few times, she stops and doubles back or pauses, mumbling to herself.

  “There’s a trap that way,” she says at one point. “No. Bad news down there.” A minute later, she tells us, “Stick close to me and stay away from that wall. Those thorns are poisonous.”

  She doesn’t elaborate, and we don’t ask her to.

  I have no sense of where we are in the maze. I keep expecting to turn a corner and run into another set of those giant knights.

  Or an exit. That would be nice.

  A small part of me wonders if we’re going to be stuck in this thing forever. I envision having to use my Talons, Cardyn’s axes, and Brohn’s brute strength to hack our way out, although, judging by the density of the vines and branches forming the ceiling and walls of the maze, that could take a lifetime by itself.

  And Terk doesn’t have a lifetime to wait. My guess is that he’s got less than ten hours.

  So I quiet my mind and put my trust in Rain.

  Like me and Cardyn, Rain’s Emergent abilities have a level of unpredictability to them. Sometimes, they don’t seem as strong, which causes her to get noticeably frustrated. Other times, like now, she’s spot on.

  She’s lucky that the occasional bout of frustration is all she has to worry about.

  Unlike me and Cardyn—and also Manthy when she was alive—Rain doesn’t get the excruciating, head-cracking migraines that plague the rest of us.

  Brohn doesn’t seem to get hit with the painful side effects of being an Emergent, either. I guess it stands to reason. He was always the rock of our group, the steady hand that could be counted on in times of crisis.

  It’s funny. We’ve been together for as long as any of us can remember. But now, at eighteen years old, after all we’ve been through and with all we’re becoming, it’s like we’re only now getting to really know each other.

  Back in the Valta, when we were just Juvens, Cardyn once asked me what it was like to have such a weird relationship with Render. I did my best to explain it to him, and he nodded and said he understood, but I know he didn’t. Not really. At the time, I didn’t either.

  Trying to imagine what’s happening in Rain’s head right now kind of feels like that. I wish I knew how she sees what she sees and how she can make confident, life-or-death decisions based on what are barely even scrappy wisps of information. No matter how many times she explains it to us, I just can’t seem to get my head around it.

  On the other hand, I tell myself, it doesn’t really matter...as long as she’s sure about what she’s doing and where she’s going. Which she seems to be.

  In less than ten minutes, we duck through an
other round opening carved into the maze wall and step out onto a cobblestone path.

  “See,” I tease Cardyn, as we all stop to catch our breath. “No Minotaur.”

  Cardyn tells Rain she’s our hero, but she reminds him that we’d have probably been hacked into bloody chunks by those two giant chess pieces back there if he and I hadn’t stopped them.

  Brohn points to a stone archway up ahead, and the mutual admiration society comes to a screeching halt. “It’s the Wellington Arch. That’s Buckingham Palace down past it.”

  Cardyn looks around at us before taking a hesitant step forward. “So…We made it, right?”

  “Let’s not break out the party favors just yet,” Rain warns. “If this is a checkpoint like All-to-Pot said...”

  “Yeah?”

  Rain flicks her thumb back toward the forest maze. “Just because we escaped from that thicket doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods.”

  Nodding our agreement, we all take a second to stare up at the archway.

  It is impressive. Unlike the many partial buildings and broken-down structures we’ve seen in London, this one, like Kensington Palace, seems to be relatively well cared for.

  Its Lego-like stacks of marble blocks, polished to a shining spectrum of grays, silvers, and whites, rise up at least thirty feet into the air.

  A few rough spots and spackled-in areas hint at a patch job, so I’m guessing this thing took at least some damage over the years along with the rest of the city.

  Facing us are four tapered columns, each crowned with a decorative design at the top. The whole monument is capped off by a polished bronze sculpture of four rearing horses pulling a winged woman in a chariot. She’s got a laurel of some kind in her raised hand and what looks from here like the figure of a small boy seated in front of her.

  I have no idea what it’s supposed to represent. I just like that it’s clean and intact.

  A wide trench extends to either side of the archway, forming a kind of moat set deep into the earth. Instead of water, though, it’s filled with a deep and deadly-looking mass of jagged scraps of steel.

  Two guards, a boy and a girl, step out from behind either side of the giant arch.

  I’m still not used to seeing teenagers everywhere like this and no grown-ups. At least not since the Valta.

  Strangely, neither of these teenagers seems especially startled by our appearance, so we follow Brohn as he walks up to them.

  “Got papers for them?” the girl asks.

  “Papers?”

  She points at the arbalest on Brohn’s back and at Cardyn’s twin axes. “Them weapons is unauthorized.”

  I lean over to Brohn. “The Banters didn’t tell us anything about papers.”

  When we don’t answer right away, the girl gives us a squint of suspicion.

  “Wait. You’re not the couriers. Where’d you come from?” She glances left and right before pointing past us in the direction of the hedge maze. “Not through there?”

  When we don’t answer, she tells the boy to signal to the next checkpoint—she calls it the Commonwealth Memorial Gates—for backup. “Tell ‘em we got unauthorizeds.”

  Backpedaling at first, his eyes locked on us, the boy whips around and starts to run underneath the arch, but he falls to the ground before he can take more than three strides.

  Next to me, Rain is standing with both arms fully extended and her fists clenched tight. Two silver barbs quiver from the back of the boy’s neck where they’re lodged, the paralytic agent on the tips shutting down his nervous system before he knows what’s hit him.

  Panic in her eyes, the girl draws a pair of daggers from under her tunic.

  Cardyn reaches to unsnap the tomahawk axes from his back. “This one’s mine.”

  In a blur, he swings the tomahawk axes in two wind-churning circles. The first strike knocks the dagger from the girl’s left hand. The second strike hacks a bloody groove in her forearm, slicing clean through her sleeve of protective leather armor. The second dagger clatters to the ground along with the girl who drops to her knees, her eyes wide with shock at the deep gash.

  Stepping forward, I snap a straight punch to the bridge of her nose, and those wide, crystal-blue eyes of hers drop closed as she slumps, unconscious, to the ground.

  “Come on!” Rain urges.

  After sprinting over the bridge spanning the moat of metal shards, we hop down into the dry weeds lining the side of the path and inch our way to a second checkpoint: a giant stone obelisk.

  “It’s the Commonwealth Memorial Gates,” Rain says. “Has to be. It was on the map All-to-Pot showed me.”

  The so-called “gates” are actually four rectangular shaped towers, each topped with a bronze bowl, rising up in pairs on either side of the beaten and buckled road.

  There’s also a smaller sculpture or monument—a stone dome and the leftover bases of six stone columns, but it’s all been terribly damaged. The dome is smashed in and is lying on the ground in the middle of a pile of rubble. It looks like it might have been a pavilion or some kind of stone gazebo at one point in its past.

  As we inch closer, we can see the names of countries etched into the huge stone towers. Inscribed on one of the obelisks is the phrase, “Our Future is Greater than Our Past.”

  Cardyn taps it with his finger as we sneak past. “I sure as frack hope so.”

  Up ahead, standing sleepily outside of a small kiosk of wood and glass in the middle of the road, there’s a pair of guards, two girls this time, in stiff red uniforms with gold sashes and furry black hats.

  Cardyn tugs me by the sleeve. “Got one more of those sleep tricks in you?”

  I wince, but I tell him, “Yes. One more.”

  “Come on.”

  Brohn grabs my arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know about you,” I whisper as I draw my arm away and start to follow Cardyn, “but I don’t think I can handle another full-on fight.”

  Brohn glances over to Rain, but she tells me and Cardyn to see what we can do. “But we’ll be right behind you if you need us.”

  “Thanks.”

  Cardyn and I slip out of the weeds and reeds lining the side of the road. Together, we sidle up to the two guards. Cardyn startles them with his friendly wave and happy greeting.

  They go to draw rapiers from belts on their side, but before the swords are even out of the scabbards, Cardyn has convinced the girls that we’re figments of their imagination and tells them to lower their weapons.

  In a haze, they do, and I tell them to “Sleep.”

  Like good soldiers, they follow our orders to the letter.

  Cardyn catches me wincing and gives my elbow a gentle tug. “Headaches?”

  I tell him, “Yeah,” and he says, “Me, too.”

  Brohn and Rain come running up, and Brohn tells me and Cardyn how amazing it is that we can do that.

  That’s when I throw up.

  The whole world goes into a tailspin, and I fall to my knees. Brohn crouches down next to me, his arm over my shoulders.

  I can’t see his face, but the panic in his voice when he asks if I’m okay rings in my ears as loud as church bells.

  “I’m fine,” I lie as Brohn helps me to my feet. I spit off to the side before dragging the sleeve of my dress across my mouth.

  Cardyn and Rain huddle around me, but I wave them away.

  Brohn tries to encourage me to sit back down, but I shake him off, too.

  “If we rest,” I remind him, “Terk dies.”

  Leaning over, he looks into my eyes for a long time before he says, “Okay. Let’s keep moving.”

  Using our abilities as Emergents has been necessary and occasionally painful. It’s never been easy. And it’s rarely been fun.

  It always took a lot out of Manthy, even more so than the rest of us. Now I’m starting to worry about long-term effects. While my connection with Render has grown smoother and more complete over time, the migraines, nausea, and pain in my gut have gotten
worse.

  I’ve spent most of my past just hoping to live to see the next day. Now that my Conspiracy and I are getting older and more experienced, I’m starting to think less about the past or present and more about the future.

  Mostly, about whether or not we’ll even have one.

  “Come on,” Rain urges. “We have to find a way into our second palace of the day.”

  Brohn scans the enormous building and runs his hand along the red mark on his neck and collarbone where the reminders of Ledge’s sword strike still linger. “Let’s hope they’re a bit more hospitable in this one.”

  24

  Inside

  Buckingham Palace turns out to be surprisingly easy to slip into.

  “They must rely on the maze and that razor-blade moat to keep people out,” Brohn guesses, looking around at the empty guard-stations flanking one of the many entranceways along the side of the extensive, intimidating complex. “I can’t imagine many people would be crazy enough to risk all that plus the knights and the guards at the checkpoints just to get this close to the palace.”

  “We did,” I remind him.

  Cardyn joins us in craning his neck to scan the empty rooftops and the railings at the top of the palace. “Why does ‘crazy’ have to be our thing?” he asks into the air before turning back to me and Brohn. “How about if we become known far and wide as the kids who make the sensible, responsible choices?”

  “That’s called being risk-averse,” Rain says. “And if we didn’t risk taking the crazy path from time to time, we’d be dead in the Valta with Krug dancing on our graves.”

  “Okay, fine,” Cardyn sighs. “Crazy it is.”

  Passing a few gold-trimmed, double-doored entranceways, Rain leads us up to one of the more ordinary looking single doors. She listens for a second before pushing down on the silver handle.

  Nothing happens.

  “I’ve got this,” I say, hitting the heel of one hand with the fist of the other.

  With a scratchy hiss, the single curved blade embedded in the glove above my index finger snaps open.