by K A Riley
“Is that true?” Cardyn asks.
Branwynne gives him a slow nod. Her expressionless black eyes make her seem somehow…soulless. “If you want to get to the twins—”
“And we’re assuming you do,” her father interrupts.
“You need to get into St. Paul’s.”
“Which I wouldn’t recommend,” he chimes in again.
“Branwynne nearly lost her life trying to get out,” Penarddunne says.
“But I’m the only one who can get them back in.”
Llyr shakes his head. “Out of the question. Too dangerous. Noxia and the Hawkers will be looking for these five.”
Rain’s eyebrows go up. “Noxia?”
For a second, I consider telling them what Render told me, but I stop myself. That’s a king-sized can of worms to open up. Besides, I don’t know for sure I even totally understood him in the chaos of that moment back in the courtyard.
Either way, Branwynne answers Rain before I have time to figure out what to do. “She’s a freelancer. A bounty-hunter.”
“Working for Harah?” I ask.
Branwynne shrugs. “Probably. All I know is that she started out as a scientist and an Emergent. Or maybe a Hypnagogic. She specialized in dreams before the Order. And…” Branwynne pauses. She looks away toward the door then down at the floor, and I wonder if she’s going to cry. But she doesn’t. She lifts her head. “And she claims to have broken through.”
“Broken through what?” Brohn asks. When she doesn’t answer, Brohn swivels around to lock eyes with Llyr and Penarddunne.
The two of them turn in unison to face their daughter.
“I don’t know for sure,” Branwynne says at last. “It’s all I heard. I wasn’t going to stick around and ask questions.”
“Personally,” Penarddunne confesses, “And this is just what I heard…I think that woman figured out what dreams are.”
Llyr plants both hands on his knees. “Bollocks. She did more than that. From what Branwynne says, that Noxia slapper found a way to manipulate dreams. And not just the sleepytime kind. I mean the ones in your heart. Your wishes. Your desires.”
“Wait!” Brohn interjects, his palms out. “Tall woman?”
“Your height at least, I’d say. Right, Bran?”
Branwynne sizes Brohn up before offering a reluctant nod.
“Did she wear a cloak? Green and black in a camouflage pattern?”
Branwynne and her parents pass a look of surprise and suspicion back and forth between them.
“Um…yeah,” Branwynne admits at last.
Rain nearly bursts up from her seat. “We know her! It’s that woman who messed with Brohn.”
“The one who pulled the disappearing act on us back in Buckingham Palace!” Cardyn snarls.
Into the stunned silence that follows, I add, barely raising my voice above a steely, even tempo, “The one I’m going to kill.”
Cardyn leaps to his feet first. Then Brohn and I stand up with Rain and Terk following suit.
Cardyn strides over and picks up his two tomahawk axes from where he left them leaning by the door when we first came in.
As if he’s somehow summoned Terk’s strength, he grips Brohn’s hefty arbalest with one hand and tosses it over the couch to Brohn, who catches it and slings it around his shoulders in a single motion. Cardyn does the same with Terk’s flail.
Terk catches the weapon by the handle and gives Cardyn a nod of approval.
Rain and I already have our gauntlets on.
“This is the only mission that matters,” Cardyn says to the rest of us in the room.
“You can’t get into St. Paul’s without me,” Branwynne reminds him.
Cardyn doesn’t hesitate. “That’s why you’re coming with us.” It’s not a suggestion.
I expect Llyr and Penarddunne to object to their daughter going out at night with five Emergents on a perilous, life-or-death mission to rescue two kids who might not even exist anymore from the leftover husk of a semi-abandoned and probably supremely well-protected Processor.
I look back and forth between Branwynne and her parents, waiting for something, for a vote of confidence, a good luck wish. This seriously could be the last time they see their daughter.
Penarddunne taps her finger to her temple. “Forget outer space and the deep blue sea. This. This right here. This is the real final frontier.”
“Even if we don’t see you after tonight,” Llyr says, giving his daughter a water-eyed smile and burly hug, “you’ll always be part of our legends.”
Other than that, they don’t say a word.
With Branwynne in the lead and our weapons in hand, we give our own round of “Thanks” and “Goodbyes” to Llyr and Penarddunne, and then we head out into the night.
46
Underground
The moon is fighting a losing battle against a pretty thick nighttime cover of clouds, so we spend the journey skipping through some very dark, very bleak streets and laneways.
That’s fine with us. Even though every groan and creak from the rubble and collapsed buildings we pass or hike through makes me jump, nothing comes rushing out at us, and we arrive at the outskirts of the church in less than half an hour.
Like most of the other buildings in the nearly flattened city, St. Paul’s is just a shell of what it apparently once was.
What Llyr and Penarddunne described as an awe-inspiring, skyscraping monument is now not much more than a defeated mass of soot-covered marble.
The central structure is still there, but the parts around the perimeter are basically landfill.
Getting my bearings, I realize this must be one of the structures I saw from the top of Harah Tower. Up close, it’s a terrifying monstrosity: half beautiful, half horrible, and all disheartening.
It’s bad enough that such an obviously once-impressive structure has been ravaged like this. But it’s even worse knowing its broken body might now be home to a handful of rogue geneticists determined to overthrow the natural flow of human evolution for their own selfish purposes.
Branwynne shakes her head as we gaze through the bleak night at the wrecked mess of timber and marble. “I’ll never forgive them for this.”
“It must have been something before…” Rain’s voice trails off as she kneels with the rest of us behind a long pile of dirt and bricks.
Branwynne tells us not to let appearances fool us. “There’s more here than just ruins.”
As we sneak around toward the back of the church, I begin to see what she means.
From this angle, we can just make out where the original dome has been sheared off and partly replaced by glass like Llyr and Penarddunne described. Most of the spires holding up the half-glass dome at the top are missing and have been replaced with thin struts of synth-steel.
But there are hints of life here, too. And technology.
Here and there in the dark as we make our way around the building, we catch a glimpse of tiny red lights and wispy strips of polished carrier-cable. I’m convinced I spot movement inside at one point.
Brohn squints into the darkness and points to a stretch of ripples in the sand-covered laneway between the church and a line of demolished buildings and storefronts behind it. “Those are from a mag-tram. And they’re recent.”
Branwynne tells him he’s right. “They’ve made it out to be abandoned, but trust me, this place is still active.”
The Auditor starts to tell us the history of the cathedral, but Terk and Cardyn shush her at the same time. She offers up a meek, “Maybe later?” before joining us in silent stealth mode.
That silence doesn’t last long, though.
A hail of arrows whistles at us through the weak light.
Brohn has just enough time to throw himself over us. The arrows ricochet off his back with a rapid-fire succession of metallic plinks.
We stay down, our backs pressed hard against the concrete barrier between us and the road.
“It’s the Hawkers!” Br
anwynne shouts. “And Noxia.”
“What do we do?” Terk gasps.
“Run!”
We don’t need any more of an invitation. Branwynne bolts to her feet and sprints down the cluttered laneway with the rest of us sprinting after her as fast as we can.
It’s a nearly blind dash in and out of a long string of abandoned buildings that ends with us bolting down a scrap-filled alley and Brohn crashing into a wooden door that explodes into splinters and dust as we burst through behind him.
“This way!” Branwynne calls out.
She races through the building until we come to a hallway with another door—this one a thick rectangle of dented steel—at the end. She pushes it open and drags us in with Brohn closing the door hard behind us.
Branwynne has her jaw set and her eyes glued to the cathedral, whose spectral form we can just make out between wooden slats covering the bank of glass-less window frames.
“Are they gone?” Terk asks.
We sit in silence for a full minute until we figure we have our answer.
Branwynne looks agitated but, unlike the rest of us, she isn’t straining to catch her breath. “I’ve been in there. I’ve gotten out. I can get us back in.”
She puts a finger to her lips and crouches down, urging us with a frantic wave to do the same as five shadowy forms pass by the window.
When the figures are out of sight, Branwynne jogs in a crouch down the hallway.
Cardyn asks me, “Where’s she going?”
“I don’t know. But we better keep up.”
“This is Moorgate,” she says, stopping at another steel door. “We can get in through here.”
On the other side of the door is a slanted dark opening like one of those tornado storm doors leading down into the darkness.
Branwynne takes us down a hill of rubble that we need to slide along feet first. We arrive in the gloom of an underground tunnel, which, thankfully, opens up high enough for even Terk to stand up.
Branwynne slips a holo-illuminator out of her jacket pocket and snaps it to her temple.
The device projects a glow for about ten feet all around us. We walk along, engulfed in the dome of weak, white light.
At first, I can’t make out much more than what’s right in front of us. But as the tunnel curves and narrows, I’m able to see details in the concrete floor beneath our feet and the chipped black and white tiles covering the walls. Built into the walls are curved steel ribs with ping pong ball sized rivets, rusted and fragile with age.
“People used this as shelter during the blitz,” Branwynne whispers. Or, at least, she tries to whisper. Her voice sounds way too loud in this long-dead tunnel.
From the wide part of the passageway, she guides us into a narrow hallway. Brohn and Terk have to turn sideways to fit through it.
The ceiling is low, musty, and coated with some kind of translucent purple mold.
Cardyn says he’s feeling dizzy, and Rain points out the lack of oxygen down here.
I wasn’t having trouble breathing before, but now that Rain’s been kind enough to point out that we’re on the verge of suffocating, my lungs have gone into anxiety mode, and I have to suppress a bout of choking panic-gasps.
I send Rain a mental, Thanks a lot.
We continue edging along, single file, with Branwynne in the front and me in the back. I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting to see Noxia and her Hawkers bearing down on us again, but there’s nothing behind us but darkness and the occasional plink of condensation falling from the ceiling into small puddles on the floor.
I expect the tunnel to end in a door, but it doesn’t. Instead, we arrive at a stone wall with a rusted steel grate embedded in it about five feet above the floor.
At Branwynne’s request, Terk locks the jointed metal fingers of his clamp-hand onto the grate. The gears tucked into his ribcage give off a high-pitched whir as he draws his arm back and the grate along with it.
There’s a creak and a mini rust-cloud explosion, and Terk lets the grate clatter to the stone floor.
The opening can’t be much bigger than a foot high and two feet across, max.
“We need to go through here,” Branwynne says.
Brohn reaches up to put his hands on the frame of the open vent and glares down at Branwynne. “How are we supposed to get through this?”
I can’t tell if Branwynne is angry, embarrassed, or something else entirely. Either way, there’s no way Brohn, Terk, or even Cardyn is getting into that small duct.
Rain steps forward. “We’ll go. Me, Kress, and Branwynne.”
“No way you’re going in there without us,” Brohn half-orders, half-laughs.
“There’s no other way in,” Branwynne says. “Not that I know of, anyway.”
“What about a frontal assault?” Cardyn suggests. “We can go back out to the church and, you know, try the front door.”
“Noxia’s still out there,” Rain reminds him.
“And the Hawkers,” I add.
“They’re right,” Branwynne says. “It’s here or nowhere. This is how I got out. It’s the only way I know to get back in.”
Brohn exchanges a look with Terk and Cardyn. The three boys seem to come to an unspoken agreement and step back to allow me, Rain, and Branwynne to approach the vent opening.
“There’s a hotel near here,” Branwynne says.
Cardyn’s ears perk up. “Luxury?”
“Only if you find looters and radioactive rubble luxurious.”
“I guess not,” Cardyn responds, making sad little twists of his toe on the floor.
Branwynne points back the way we came. “Across from the hotel is an old museum. Remember the window where we saw the Hawkers?” Brohn, Cardyn, and Terk all nod. “There’s a doorway opposite that. It leads down a flight of stairs. That’ll open up into a footpath leading between what’s left of two old pubs, the Hoof and Trotter and the Bishop’s Middle Finger. Take that to the end. Make a left. In one block, there’ll be a bunch of steel letters on the ground.”
“Letters?”
“They’re from the old Museum of London. There’s not much left. But there is a lobby in the front. If you see Squatters, don’t worry. They won’t bother you. Not at night.” Branwynne takes a deep breath. “Stay in the lobby. Wait for us. If it starts to get light out, it means we didn’t make it, and you need to go.”
“Go?” Brohn asks. “Go where?”
“Anywhere. Tower of London if you can make it. Back to the Banters. Just don’t be there when the sun comes up.”
“Is it not safe?”
“Roguers used to hang out there. But not anymore. Most of them have moved North.”
“Most of them?”
“Let’s hope so.”
Rain scans the boys, who are all standing in front of us in various states of nervousness. “You guys getting all this?”
“We got it,” Brohn reassures her. “I don’t like splitting up, but…”
“It’s what we have to do,” I say, taking his hands in mine. “For now, at least.”
With that, we turn back to the elevated opening in the wall.
Boosted by Brohn, Branwynne climbs through first, with me and Rain scooching in after her.
47
Infiltration
After what feels like an eternity of crawling on our elbows and knees, the tight, dirty vent actually opens up as it connects to a set of clean silver ducts.
The warped, reflective surface is strong. After scuttling along for a few minutes, I stop worrying about the three of us plunging down into whatever space might be below.
The duct ends and drops down at a right angle. Branwynne manages to turn herself around so she can slide down feet-first into the vertical space. Rain and I follow, and we inch along for a few more minutes until we come to a dead end.
At the end of this metal conduit is a steel grate, which Branwynne pushes out and then twists sideways to pull it back into the duct without making a sound.
&nb
sp; We climb out to find ourselves tucked behind a long white cabinet in a white-tiled atrium.
On the far side, at a sleek and oddly out of place desk, are two adult men.
“Guards,” Branwynne whispers.
Rain and I exchange a look. We’ve done this before.
Sliding around a curved wall, we approach the guards in a crouch. Without a sound, Rain rises up and fires her dart-drivers. One of the guards goes down in a heap, but Rain’s dart misses the second guard. His hand is halfway to an input panel on the wall when I leap over the desk and drive the heel of my boot into the side of his head. He smashes against the wall and slumps down on top of his partner. I snap out my Talons, just in case, but Rain grabs my arm.
“It’s okay. They’re down.”
Branwynne, her eyes wide, skips over on quiet feet. “Nice.”
Rain gives her a wink. “That was nothing.”
Branwynne probably thinks Rain is being modest, but the truth is, disabling two guards in the middle of the night is a piece of cake compared to obstacles we’ve faced in the past.
“Security’s fallen off,” Branwynne says. “When I was here a few years ago, this place was a fortress.”
“Which way?” I ask.
Branwynne pauses for a second to get her bearings. “This way.”
We follow her down an immaculately clean corridor before sliding to a stop and slamming our backs against the wall.
“There didn’t used to be a security-post there,” Branwynne whispers.
I take a peek around the corner. Sure enough, there’s a guard, bigger than the two we just dispatched, sitting hunched over in an old office chair and playing some kind of game on the holo-image projected from a band on his wrist.
I duck back, but not in time.
The burly security guard heaves himself out of his chair and reaches for his gun. His hand isn’t even halfway to his holster before the flurry of silver spines from Rain’s dart-driver are lodged in his cheek and forehead, and he’s not even on the ground before Rain’s got the edge of her boot pressed hard against his neck—just to make sure.