by Kai O'Connal
“We’re not on the astral,” Cao pointed out.
“Yes—but if we can get to her tattoo, I can use it to draw us toward the rest of the Alephs.”
Leung gestured with his pistol. “So there’s just the matter of all this to deal with?” He indicated the wrecked truck, the dust, everything.
Elijah sighed. “Kyrie and Pineapple will have dealt with the worst of it by now.”
“How can they see anything?” Cao asked.
“And what about the part they haven’t dealt with?” Leung put in.
“I don’t think Kyrie always needs her eyes to kill people,” Elijah said. If he knew his mouth curled in distaste, he didn’t show it. “Pineapple, either.” He drew in a deep breath and raised his hands. “And as for the rest…”
The air crackled with summoning.
Kyrie took two steps back and grabbed Pineapple’s elbow. The troll was cleaning his knife on the vest of an idiot who’d tried to sneak through a dust cloud wearing four kilos of jangling jewelry. She pulled the troll back against the wall and let the rifle drop to its sling. The butt was covered with blood and bits of hair.
“Get ready,” she said, and drew her Manhunter.
There was a rush of air.
Bizet was chewing her lower lip, something that her tusks made far more interesting than when the average human did it. She stood alongside the driver’s-side door of the SUV with her hand on the handle.
There hadn’t been any more shots after the first one, and no one had pinged Hearn’s AR. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
Maybe it could. Maybe he could still stay out of the line of fire and still make the rendezvous.
Grit and dust and smoke blew into his face, as if a typhoon had appeared at the end of the street. He threw up his hand to cover his eyes and leaned back. His other hand opened the SUV’s door halfway—and stopped.
The smoke was gone. He blinked grit out of his eyes. It was in his nose, he knew. His mouth—
What the hell?
The street was covered with bodies. Hearn had expected that, of course. There’d been people in the buildings when Tempest’s people mined them. Some of them hadn’t wanted to run away. They’d been dead when the bombs went off, but they were still there. Most of them were pulped by the overpressure wave. Some were torn apart.
These bodies were fresh. A couple of them still writhed out their last seconds as they bled from slashed necks or crushed temples.
They were his men, the guns she’d sent in after the runner team.
A pistol barked. Bizet grunted. He looked over at her—
—she was bleeding from the shoulder—
—But something at the far end of the road made him look up. He saw the crashed truck. His lips curled back into the beginnings of a grin, but something was moving in the dirt track in front of it. Hearn saw a trio of people cowering behind the half-open door. Some of them lived—
A thing rose from the street.
It started toward him.
It was faster than he’d ever imagined dirt could move.
He knew what spirits were, knew how they were summoned. His cold, rational brain told him that it was an earth spirit coming toward him, gravel-filled hand outstretched like a child chasing after its parent. He knew all of that, intellectually.
But intelligence didn’t prepare Hearn for the sight of a man-shaped mountain of dirt charging toward him. He clutched at the car door, yanking, wrenching, forgetting it was already open—
—so fast!—
The pistol fired again. The bullet sparked off the pavement in front of the SUV. Hearn ducked down, looking. Two people—a troll and a woman—were crouched three-quarters of the way down the street toward her. Just two of them, and they killed all of my people?
The ground shook beneath the earth spirit’s gait.
Get in the car!
He stood. Bizet looked at him drunkenly, half-sprawled across the front bench seat. She was bleeding all over the interior—blood puddled on the floorboard, stained the fabric seat covers. I’m not dying here! Hearn leaned across, shoved at her shoulders. She slid out of the SUV like a sandbag.
Hearn climbed into the driver’s side—or tried to. His left foot wouldn’t move. He looked down, saw his ankle covered in swirling dirt and dust. It wouldn’t come loose, as if it were embedded in rock.
He looked out the windshield—the elemental spirit was at the front of the car.
Hearn reached for his pistol in its holster beneath his armpit.
The dirt on his foot yanked.
He had just enough time to see the frayed seam on the fabric cover of the door before his head struck it.
He saw stars. He could feel consciousness sliding away, but he knew what would happen if he let it. The door of the SUV had opened at some point, so he fell out of it like a small avalanche.
The spirit no longer had his ankle. Hearn couldn’t see anything but bright pinpricks, but he could move. He crawled, and hoped it was in the right direction.
Kyrie put her Manhunter away as Elijah’s spirit tore through the SUV. She straightened up out of her firing crouch and looked over her shoulder at Pineapple.
“What’s he need us for, with that thing?”
Kyrie smiled. “Finesse.”
That made the troll laugh.
Elijah was walking quickly down the street toward the spirit. The monster had stopped moving. It stood, rocky shoulders hunched, like a toddler waiting to be paddled. Or like a golem. Elijah walked right past them, stepping over bodies and bits of debris without looking down. His entire focus was on the spirit.
“Come on,” Kyrie said. She started to follow the mage, but pain in her leg made her look down. There was a gash in her pants, limned with blood. She frowned. I didn’t even feel it. She probed the wound with her fingertip, but the blood had already clotted. A shallow slash, probably. A limp would slow her down, so she didn’t allow her leg to hesitate.
Elijah had reached the SUV and the spirit. He looked up at it and said some words Kyrie didn’t understand. Words she hadn’t heard him use before, any of the times he’d summoned an earth spirit. Then he gestured past the beast.
The spirit dissolved into a cloud of dust and blew away.
Elijah stalked toward the SUV. He went around the driver’s side and stuck his head in, then turned and beckoned toward Leung and Cao, who were still huddled near their truck.
The duo started moving. Not running, but not walking slowly, either.
“I don’t fit in that thing,” Pineapple muttered. But he turned back toward their wrecked vehicle.
Kyrie was walking around the front of the SUV when Elijah brushed past her. She turned to watch him, leaning against the hood for support. The mage went to one of the bodies and crouched beside it. First he checked her throat. Then he pushed her sleeve up to show her forearm. Kyrie heard him suck in his breath from where she stood.
Kyrie walked over. He looked up at her when she reached him. “See that?” He pointed to a tattoo of a black moon on her forearm. “She’s an Aleph. I mean, one of the mages. Untrained, I think. She didn’t put up much of a fight.”
“How’re we going to find her friends?”
“With that.” He pointed to her arm again.
“Her tattoo.”
“Yes.” Elijah’s patrician face was distinctly green. Kyrie stifled a chuckle. The man could hem and haw, then send a damned earth spirit tearing through obstacles, but ask him to get his own hands dirty …
“I’m not dragging a body along with us.” Kyrie crossed her arms. “You want to peel that sucker off, be my guest.”
Elijah chewed his lip. “Couldn’t you …?”
“No.”
“Why not?
”
This time Kyrie did chuckle. “Because I don’t get off on chopping people up.”
“Do you get off on getting paid? Because they’re getting away.”
“I just kill things, remember?” She knew her smile was false—felt her lips drawn back into thin, bloodless lines across her teeth, and that her eyes were flashing. Right then she didn’t care. “You want it, you do it.”
“I—” He looked down. She watched his head move back and forth, between her face and her arm. Elijah looked at her, stared at her. She met his stare. Held it. Didn’t back down.
He sighed. “Fine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The troll in the soft leather seat turned from the window when Douglas quietly cleared his throat. He’d been watching a young woman, a local selling dyed t-shirts from a cart on the other side of the road. She couldn’t be more than eighteen or twenty. Tempest was entranced; if she wasn’t an elf, one of her parents might have been…
“What?”
“I haven’t heard from Hearn or Bizet,” Douglas said. He was meshed with the car’s AR, which was tied into the nearest node they could reach. “I’ve got reports of heavy fighting along the ambush route.”
“So, at least they hit them.” Tempest turned back to the window.
“Or got hit.” Douglas spoke quietly, evenly. Tempest heard the hesitation in his voice.
The girl held up a yellow-green dyed shirt for a man in chinos and a safari hat. His hat barely concealed the gentle points to his ears. I wonder if he sees it, too. The troll didn’t have the angle to see, but it didn’t look like Chino was paying much attention to the shirt.
“Send someone to check,” he said, distracted.
“Who?”
“A local, I don’t care. Somebody expendable.”
“And if Bizet and Hearn are dead?”
Tempest looked forward. Traffic had stalled, but they were close to their destination. As soon as the cars and tricycles began to clear out ahead, they’d be there in fifteen minutes or so. “We’re almost out of here.” He looked back out of the window.
A gust of wind blew brown dust and grit across the small square. The girl covered her face with the shirt she’d been holding up, while the tall man just turned his back to the wind and ducked his chin. It passed in seconds.
There was complete and total chaos out there. Tempest, though, was calm. It was all part of the process. Different people wanted different things, and that put them on crash courses. He believed, though, that the people he had aligned himself with wanted it more, and that would make them come out on top in the end.
The SUV hopped the curb and cut the corner. Pineapple swore and kicked the back of the seat. The troll was curled up in half of the rear cargo area. The rest was piled high with small cases and weapons and everything else he’d thought to grab from the truck.
Cao drove, with Leung sitting in the bucket seat behind her and Kyrie next to him. Elijah sat on the other side of the front bench seat, a cloth-wrapped bundle nestled between his knees. He was very careful not to touch it. His eyes were half-closed, his head cocked to the side. As if he were listening to something faint.
“That way,” he whispered, pointing.
Cao made the turn. Thumps announced pedestrians’ displeasure with her usurpation of the sidewalk as they threw drinks, rocks, shopping bags—whatever was in reach—at the hood. The goblin jerked the wheel back as the right fender screamed against brick for half-a-second.
“Sorry,” she said. “Not used to doing this the old-fashioned way.”
“They’re close,” Elijah whispered.
“I swear to god, I’m never leaving civilization again—” Leung’s complaint stopped in mid-rant. “Wait—I’ve got something—it’s them.”
Kyrie leaned over, looking out his window. “Where?”
“Four blocks ahead. There’s a square. Four black armored SUVs.”
She leaned back. “You’re jacked in.”
“If you can call it that. It’s like logging into a fax machine.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.” He blinked and shook his head, then leaned forward with his hand on the seat near Cao’s head. “Keep going. Traffic has them stopped, but it’s flowing around the square. We can get in behind them.”
“Then what?” Cao asked.
“Elijah?”
“He’s right.” Sweat beaded on the mage’s forehead. Whatever communing he was doing with his spirits or the astral or whatever was taking a lot out of him. Kyrie couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him look this haggard. He sighed abruptly and his whole body went slack, as if he’d been holding on to something for a long time and let it go.
“No plan?” Cao maneuvered around a sidewalk cafe full of tables, but she still managed to glare into the rear-view mirror. “This is it? ‘Go get ’em’?”
“I like it,” Pineapple called from the back.
“Four trucks,” Elijah whispered. Kyrie leaned forward to listen. “The map is in the third truck. In the back.”
“How can you know that?” Cao demanded.
“It glows, on the astral,” Elijah said.
“We can’t just drive up on four trucks of goons.” Leung was right. Kyrie looked around, watching the buildings flash past. This wasn’t her kind of operation—she needed time, time to plan, time to snoop. Time to see what the opposition had.
But they were out of time.
“It’s going to be rough.” She tapped Elijah on the shoulder. He turned to look at her. “I mean it.”
“We cannot damage the map.” He looked at her, then past her toward the cargo compartment. “I mean it—we blow up the map, and we came down here for nothing.”
“It’s in the third truck.” She raised her eyebrows. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Can you hack it?”
“Depends on how much attention you want me to pay to driving.”
“All of it. Good point. We’ll try something else.”
Kyrie twisted around in her seat. “Third truck?”
Pineapple grinned. His head was half-twisted to the side by the low ceiling. It almost—almost—gave him a comical look. “We don’t care about the other trucks?”
“You didn’t notice all the people trying to kill us since we got here?”
He let out the gravel laugh again.
Douglas concentrated. The nodes around the square were a mishmash of old and new, secure and open, and many were outright dissonant. Every time he hacked a camera it was pointing the wrong way; every ARO he co-opted did something other than it was tagged for. He was getting frustrated.
A blip.
He looked—it was a city mapping subroutine, pinging vehicle transponders as they passed sensor posts. He almost ignored it—how could this rat-hole have any working sensor posts?—but then his agent fed him the ID. He dove for his body. The shivering, icy-hot transition shook him, and he came awake.
“It’s them,” he blurted.
“What?”
“Hearn and Bizet—I got a hit on their truck. It’s coming up behind us.”
“So they got the runners.”
“It looks like it.”
The glare he got was both penetrating and foreboding. Douglas didn’t enjoy being the object of that attention. “‘Looks like’?”
“They haven’t called.”
A sigh. “Did you try calling them?”
He almost blurted, “No, I didn’t think of using the fucking comm,” but his control held. A deep breath let him speak with more unction. “Yes. They’re not answering.”
Another sigh.
“How long?”
“Any minute now.”
Tempest looked away from Douglas. His left hand was caressing his right forearm through the sleeve of his charcoal-gray jacket. Douglas knew what that meant, and he didn’t want to be in the man’s awareness when his magery finally came out.
“Get out and watch for them,” the troll said.
“Tell them to fall in behind us. I want this finished.”
Douglas reached for the door latch. I’m not getting enough money for this.
“There they are.”
Kyrie looked where Leung pointed. Four black armored SUVs, just like he’d said. They were midway through the queue of vehicles waiting to get out of the square. The parade or whatever was blocking them was nearly done. A few more minutes, and they’d have missed them.
She touched her weapons. The Manhunter was in its thigh holster; the Ingram at her back. She wore a wraparound sheath on her leg opposite the pistol, with four balanced knives. Pineapple touched her shoulder and handed her two small grenades.
“Thanks.”
The troll shrugged, as much as he was able. “Better to have and not need, right?” Kyrie grinned at him.
Cao slowed down, edging around the queue to creep toward the trucks. Kyrie looked at her. She didn’t know how the goblin would react to combat without being wired to the truck. Rigging a drone was like being the truck—she’d spoken to enough riggers to know that. It wasn’t like driving one.
Cao’s fingers, gray-skinned and veiny, tightened on the steering wheel. “Someone’s getting out.”
Elijah closed his eyes and touched the bundle wrapped between his knees.
“Bizet is alive,” Douglas said.
“Wonderful. Did she call in?”
“No. But another member of her group said she attempted to signal him in, ah, an arcane manner.”
Tempest nodded. He wasn’t clear exactly how the signal worked, but it had something to do with the members’ tattoos. His knowledge of qi foci was limited, but it seemed risky to use them. The mage with the runners might notice, and of course there were always the prying eyes of the dragon that might be drawn to this particular affair. It seemed like too big of a risk. Foolishness, really.
Unless …
“Douglas,” he said. “We have a problem.”
Elijah said one word, a vile word, and he said it like a man trying to vomit poison from his own mouth. The cloth-wrapped bundle between his knees began to smoke. He grunted and flung his hands toward the third truck.