by K A Riley
Before I get too lost down my road of shock and self-pity, Rain yanks me down by my collar. And just in time, too, I realize, as an arrow goes whipping past where my head just was.
“Remember, that’s not Brohn!” Rain shouts over the clamor.
In an instant, I flash back to the Mill where Amani, the Emergent boy with the ability to make people see him as someone else, was brainwashed into making me think he was Brohn.
“I mean it is Brohn,” Rain clarifies. “But he’s being controlled.”
“Controlled? By who?”
I’m thinking she’s going to say it’s Harah. Instead, Rain points to where that tall, enigmatic woman in the black and camo cloak is tucked into a corner behind a pillar and well out of the field of battle.
“Her!”
His hands over his head, Cardyn presses up against me and Rain as a volley of arrows thunks into the overturned wooden table we’re using as shelter. Three of the arrows pierce the table slats and nearly impale us before coming to a screeching stop inside of the dry wood.
Still trying to blink his eyes back into focus, Cardyn promises through a wincing, tight-jawed stutter that he can use his Persuasion to stop the tall, cloaked woman, but Rain holds him back and points up at the turrets above our heads.
“You need to be close for that. And those archers up there will turn you into swiss cheese before you get halfway across the courtyard!” Rain turns to me as we all duck again to avoid a spear that sails over our heads and clatters off of the stone wall behind us. “It’s got to be you!”
“Great. And what stops me from getting swiss cheesed out there? I’m not exactly arrow-proof.”
“You’ve got Render and his gang.”
“His gang?”
Rain points up to where Render is circling overhead. Only, he’s not alone. There are six other ravens, glistening jet-black under the searing reddish-orange sun.
“It’s not exactly an army,” Rain confesses. “But do you think they can help?”
I give Rain a vigorous nod and an enthusiastic, “Yes! Definitely”
Swiping a pattern into my forearm tattoos, I connect—not just with Render—but with his impromptu second Conspiracy that’s banking and circling, vulture-like, overhead. It’s hard to concentrate with so much mayhem all around, but I manage to synch my mind with his as he synchs his with theirs, blending our eight consciousnesses, for a few seconds anyway, into one.
“Okay!” I shout. “I’m going to take her down!”
“We’ll be right behind you!” Rain calls through cupped hands.
And then Cardyn adds, “Try not to get killed!” as I dart out from behind the safety of the overturned table and sprint headlong into the mass of fighting and flailing kids.
The seven ravens stream down with three of them on one side of Render and three of them on the other.
Together, they form a wedge as they rise in a steep climb and then loop around to plummet down in front of me, kicking up a hail of dust that I dash through on my way to stop the tall woman and save Brohn.
The Banters and the Royal Fort Knights remain locked in battle—spinning, shuffling, punching, and clanging swords against each other’s leather and steel armor—but even they part way as the ravens and I surge forward.
The tall woman sees me coming and steps back, deeper into the shadows. But it’s too late.
With Render and his six friends breaking off to either side, I leap from the cloud of dust and debris and land in a sliding stop in front of her, my muscles tensed and ready to be unleashed.
She partly dodges my first strike—an uppercut to her mid-section—but she’s off balance, so I skip forward, pressing my advantage. I’m fully prepared to end this with a single slash of my Talons, preferably to her eyes or her jugular vein, but before I have a chance to launch the attack, I’m yanked backward by my jacket collar and tossed hard against one of the courtyard’s stone walls. My head cracks against a jagged rock, and I can already feel a goose-egg forming at the base of my skull.
That’s nothing, though, compared to the pain I feel when I lift my head to face my attacker.
It’s Brohn. Tossing aside the Banters and leaving Harah to be protected by what’s left of her royal guards, he’s jumped down from the stage to stop me.
And he looks mad.
38
Liberated
Feeling confused, humiliated, and dizzy, I scramble away from Brohn on my hands and knees.
He strides toward me, sliding like a protective pit-bull between me and the stage where Harah is crying out for him to get back up there and protect her.
“Come on, Kress,” he pleads as he stalks slowly forward. “This is where I was meant to live.” He makes a sweeping arc with his arm, gesturing up at the rickety, makeshift turrets where archers continue to shoot randomly into the deafening chaos of the courtyard. His eyes are soft and begging, but his fists are still balled up and in total attack mode.
My back against a stone column, I let my eyes go black, and in an instant, Render and his six new companions swarm around Brohn, beating their powerful wings and stabbing at him with their thick black beaks.
It doesn’t hurt him, of course, but it’s the distraction I need.
Cardyn and Rain have slipped through the battle to corner the tall woman in the shadows. I join them as Brohn swings and flails at the seven divebombing ravens whirling around him.
Cardyn calls out for the tall woman to surrender, but she shakes off his Persuasion. So Rain and I flank her, our weapons at the ready.
In perfect synchronization honed from living, fighting, and surviving together for our entire lives, Cardyn, Rain, and I launch a coordinated attack.
Cardyn’s tomahawk axes whip and whir around him.
Rain’s got her dart-drivers extended and primed to fire.
My ten Talons snap open, their six inches of curved, razor-edge steel flashing fire, and I practically fly at the woman.
With her back to the wall now and with me, Cardyn, and Rain closing in fast, she stretches her hands out toward us.
I can feel her somehow reaching into my mind, and I’m guessing she’s doing the same thing to Cardyn and Rain because, like me, they come to an abrupt stop right in the middle of our attack.
Disoriented and distracted, she must have lost her mental grip on Brohn, who is quick to shake off whatever spell she had him under.
“I’m okay!” he calls out, his voice surprisingly strong and thankfully, fully familiar. “She got inside my head.”
“Save the apologies,” I answer back through clenched teeth. Steeling my mind against the tall woman’s intrusion, I send a signal to Render and the other ravens to break off their attack and let Brohn go.
As the woman’s voice starts to resonate in my head, Render and the six ravens fly up, leaving Brohn free to help us.
Scooping up his arbalest, Brohn brushes past me and swings it hard at the woman. It’s a long-distance weapon, but it doubles as a pretty formidable club.
Struck hard in the ribcage just under her left arm, the tall woman drops down—first to one knee, then into a slump on the ground—defeated.
And then, just like that, she’s gone.
She doesn’t bolt up and run away, though. It’s like she’s literally disappeared. Like I blinked and the mysterious heap just…never was.
Cardyn looks up and around, snapping his head side to side as he scans the courtyard and the turrets above us. “Where’d she go?”
“Who cares?” Brohn says, loading up his arbalest and clutching it in his firm grip. “As long as she’s not here.”
I inch over to stand next to Brohn. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. And before you ask, I remember every second of it. Kress, I am so sorry! I can’t believe I—”
“I can handle a bump to the head if it means having you back.”
Brohn’s eyes well up, but he sets his jaw and steels himself against the burden of guilt I know must be crushing him from th
e inside out. “It’s like I was being controlled, but it felt…good. Like I wanted to be…manipulated, told what to do. Even though I didn’t. Trust me.”
Cardyn and Rain join us with Rain throwing her arms around Brohn’s waist in a tight hug. “We’re just glad you’re okay!”
“I thought I was doing the right thing, you know. Sacrificing myself for you guys. But then that tall woman came along and did something to me.”
Cardyn and Rain each clap Brohn on the shoulder and beam welcome-back smiles at him. Despite a red splotch and a swollen purple lump under his eye from where Brohn hit him, Cardyn looks relieved to have him fighting with us instead of against us.
“I really wish we could’ve caught that woman,” Rain pants. “If she’s a Hypnagogic, she could still be trouble for us down the road.”
~ She is a Hypnagogic.
I thought so. Rain was right. She was controlling Brohn with pheromones.
~ No.
What then?
~ Her name is Noxia. She channels desires. She makes people see what they suppress inside of themselves.
Wait. What?
Right now, I want to interrogate the hell out of Render. Does he mean Brohn wanted to hurt me, Cardyn, and Rain? Does Brohn secretly want the life Harah offered? Did he want to send me and the rest of our Conspiracy on our way to go on without him? Or was he just tired of being an Emergent with so much responsibility on his shoulders? Tired of leading, tired of fighting, tired of protecting us, tired of running…tired of…me?
Render? Render!
But it’s too late, Render has severed our connection and has flown off to lead the other six ravens in a swooping circle high above the palace.
The worry woven through Rain’s voice is contagious, and now, combined with Render’s potentially devastating revelation about the woman, I’m worried, too. On the one hand, Rain and Render are both right. If Noxia, this mystery woman, is really a Hypnagogic, we could be in big trouble. On the other hand, I don’t care at all. As nice as it would have been to catch and question her, it’s way better having Brohn back.
If he really is back, that is.
Turning to face the ongoing battle around us, Brohn runs his eyes around the courtyard, as if he’s seeing the two armies of combatants for the first time. He clenches his jaw and raises his arbalest. The weapon looks beyond deadly in his muscular grip, as though together, he and it can take on the world.
“Let’s end this,” he growls.
He’s back. He’s definitely back.
39
Takeover
Although I’m enjoying the relative safety of being tucked away under one of the balconies, the real fight is still filling the courtyard with screams, shouts, spurts of blood, and the unmistakable snap of broken bones.
It’s insane to want to get anywhere near it. Unfortunately, if we’re going to get out of this alive, we need to jump back into the fray.
With a back-and-forth look of pure understanding passing between me, Cardyn, and Rain, that’s exactly what we do.
Brohn is already out in the middle of it, and we sprint over to cluster around him, the four of us standing back to back to form a protective knot, tighter than the tightest sheepshank, while we get our bearings and assess the pandemonium.
The Banters aren’t great fighters, but they don’t have to be. The Royal Fort Knights have swords, spears, bows and arrows, and other assorted deadly weapons, but they’ve been taken by surprise in an enclosed space.
The Banters also aren’t especially strategic—not in Rain’s league, anyway—but, either by choice or by chance, they’ve cleverly left parts of their crew to block off the four double-doored exits on each side of the wide, square courtyard.
We’re trapped. But so are they. And that means a level playing field.
From what we’ve seen, these Royals have been good about protecting their palace. But now, with most of their eggs in this basket, they’ve left themselves wide open to attack. And the Banters are determined to take full advantage.
Plus, there’s us.
With Brohn calling out targets, we surge into the battle on the side of our new Banter allies.
Brohn raises up his loaded arbalest and, squinting down the sight, begins picking off the archers in the turrets one by one until, terrified and wounded, they drop their bows in surrender and duck down behind the stone walls with their empty hands extended high into the air.
Cardyn’s double axes blaze a path through the Fort Knights. Recognizing his skill and his steely-eyed determination, the Banters leap aside to let him pass.
It’s a wise move. I’m not a hundred-percent sure Cardyn has total control of his runaway weapons.
Some of the Fort Knights stage weak counterattacks. Others run screaming for their lives.
Cardyn doesn’t care one way or the other. He’s a man on a mission.
Rain also plunges in, her darts swarming through the courtyard like furious bees, plunging into the arms, backs, necks, and legs of the shrieking Fort Knights, who teeter and fall in twitching heaps to the ground as the toxin-filled dart tips work their magic.
A path forms between me and the stage where Harah is barking out orders and calling out to more of her guards to help stave off Ledge and Lost-the-Plot, who are still fighting as hard as they can to break through to her.
Vaulting up, I join Ledge and Lost-the-Plot on the stage. Still channeling traces of Render’s agility and predatory ferocity, I dash up to where three boys, rapiers in hand, have planted themselves, loyal but now quaking in their boots, between Harah and the Banters.
Determined but clearly out of their league, the boys swing their swords wildly, their eyes half closed, as they hope to connect with one of the encroaching Banters.
With my fingers curled into loose fists, I easily evade their blind slashes. I dispatch the last of Harah’s guards with a ballet of jeet-kune-do hook punches, hand traps, and a flurry of leg sweeps—borrowed from our Krav Maga martial arts lessons back on the Processor—that knock two of the boys clean off the stage and the third slamming back-first up against the solid post of the giant guillotine still looming large in the center of the stage.
Then, snapping my Talons out, with Ledge on one side of me and Lost-the-Plot on the other, I advance on the trembling queen.
“You turned Brohn against us,” I snarl. “You’re going to pay for that!”
Harah’s tidy braids are now a disheveled, undone mess. Her once-pristine royal robes are tattered and grimy. Cowering cross-legged on the floor in a corner of the stage, she’s rocking in place and teary-eyed as she clutches her crown to her chest like she’s protecting her baby from a pack of mass murderers.
My forearms tense as I rear my arm back, ready to end her royal highness once and for all.
A hand clamped onto my wrist stops me mid-swing.
It’s Ledge. He shakes his head. “Won’t be necessary, Love.”
“But she—”
“She was once one of us. And she can be again.”
“One of…”
“Us.” Ledge blushes. At first, I think I’m imagining it, but his curled lipped, barely-suppressed smile of embarrassment tells me otherwise. He taps his chest with his thumb and points to Harah. “Me and the queen, ‘ere…we used to be…together.”
Harah glances back and forth between me and Ledge before catching my eye. She drags a sleeve across her tear and dirt-streaked face and gives me a shrug of reluctant confession.
“It’s true,” she sighs through quivering lips. “Ledge and I used to be…um, shag bags.”
I must look baffled beyond belief because Harah and Ledge both grin as he helps her to her feet. Her crown clatters to the stage and rolls to a stop against the base of the guillotine.
“She means we used to be…intimate,” Ledge clarifies.
“You two?”
“I told you. I was once part o’ this whole rat-arsed, royal mess.”
“It’s not a mess,” Harah protests with a sn
iffle, but Ledge says he begs to differ.
“Every ‘ierarchy is just a swindle o’ control an’ order. Behind every one of ‘em is a dog’s breakfast waitin’ to ‘appen.”
“Does this mean—?” I start to ask, but Ledge cuts me off with a frown that melts into an optimistic smile of determination.
“That you can’t kill her? Of course you can’t kill her. We have ‘ierarchies to dismantle, humanitarianism to spread, an’ a world ta win.”
Harah gazes out over the carnage of the courtyard. A few Banters and Royals are still grappling in one corner. Otherwise, the fighting has more or less come to a stop. “Speaking of winning…I guess you won.”
“Rubbish. Wasn’t looking to win, Love,” Ledge says, taking her hand in his. “Just tryin’ to break even is all.”
All around us, the Banters stand in sweaty, bloody, and clothes-ripped-to-shreds triumph.
The red-clad mystery girl with the black eyes steps back as the liberated Banter kids pour past her, leaping into the arms of their older brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends.
There are laughs, tears, and tight hugs all around, and I feel my own eyes misting up at the sight of the frantic and obviously long-overdue reunion.
From the stage, and with an exhausted Harah next to him—her head down, her arms limp at her sides—Ledge raises a hand to quiet the rowdy crowd. “Thanks to Kress and her Conspiracy, we were finally able to make it through that bloody maze.”
The crowd of Banters unleashes an earsplitting cheer, and a wave of backslaps and congratulatory hugs ripples through the courtyard while I turn to Ledge. “Why thanks to us?”
Ledge directs my attention over the heads of the smaller kids to the black-eyed girl standing in the shadow of one of the balconies encircling the courtyard. “We had our friend over there follow you after you left the settlement.”
“I thought we were being followed.” I point to where the two red knights and the two silver knights, their helmets off and their scabbards empty, are being lugged to their feet by a group of the victorious Banters. “I just figured it was them. Or maybe that tall woman who pulled the disappearing act on us.”