by Kai O'Connal
Kyrie yanked the door latch and put her shoulder into it.
“Now!”
There was an armored SUV a half-kilometer away from Elijah, tearing heedlessly through the favela streets, rocking dangerously on its axles. It was a sturdy-looking thing—if it rolled over, it probably wouldn’t be hurt in the least, though it would take about a dozen strong trolls to set it right again. It was not built to look good, it was not built to move fast. It was built to be solid.
But despite that, when Elijah spoke, something tore through the vehicle’s armored floor like it wasn’t there. It screamed like Death and turned on the two men sitting in the front of the SUV. It ripped their spines out through the seat-backs. Blood and gore splashed against the inside of the window. The back of the van was filled with sudden muttering and hand waving as a half-dozen spells were cast. The voices of everyone in the back had the same three notes: surprise, desperation, and fear.
The spirit moved back. Gunshots ripped the air. The SUV was taking it on all sides.
Kyrie let herself roll away from the still-moving truck, concentrating on keeping her arms in and holding the shotgun she’d grabbed on the way out. By the time she rose to her knees she’d already fired twice, starring the armored glass of the rearmost truck. The doors were already opening.
It was time to move.
The guards were so slow.
Pineapple’s first thought when he popped the rear door was thankfulness for finally being freed from the back of the damn truck. His heels caught in the dusty street and tugged him right out of the SUV, and he rolled with the fall like a ball cast into a net. He heard Kyrie shoot twice with the big shotgun, and looked that way. She was on her knees, and then she wasn’t.
“Damn,” he whispered.
He’d seen her in action before. But never like this. He’d never seen an adept move that fast, that lethally. She was through the first guy out of the last truck before he even had the door all the way open. Her lithe body dove into the interior of the truck like a mongoose into a cobra’s nest.
Pineapple reached over his shoulder and brought his weapon around. “She’ll be fine,” he muttered.
Cao had cut away from the column of trucks as soon as Kyrie and Pineapple had exited. She was burning toward an alley, toward cover. If the other trucks got emptied and they had anything large enough, they’d take the SUV in the ass and all three people still inside would be toast.
Which meant he had a plan.
His hands clamped around the familiar grips of his Panther assault cannon and he strode to the side, trying to see past the third truck. That one was rocking on its axles like there was a hurricane inside—not a threat. He looked farther forward, where men in black body armor poured out of the second truck. One of them saw him and raised a machine pistol.
Pineapple laughed as he fired. The Panther’s awesome recoil knocked him back a step, but the concussion from the truck’s explosion was far stronger. He let it push him back a few steps, turning to give his shoulder to the blast. When he looked again, the second truck was in two pieces, both lying on their side and smoking. The black-armored men were all lying on the ground.
“Oh, thank you,” he whispered. “I’ve so been waiting to blow something up.”
“Dammit!” Tempest yelled. “What kind of magical defense is that?”
The SUV, the vaunted armored SUV with its magical guard, was crumbling under the pressure. Tish and his crew were not only still alive, but they were closing in on the prize. Douglas couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“We have to get there before them!” Tempest yelled.
The SUV was in front of them, and it was a sight. Whatever was inside had splashed blood across all the windows and was punching huge dents in the doors and roof. It was only a matter of time before it found a window and broke out. By then it would be too late.
Douglas got out, weapons ready, looking for a threat. It didn’t take him long to find it.
When he was near an alley about fifty meters from the SUV, an explosion crushed him against the wall and blew dust and grit into his nose and mouth. He blinked sand out of his eyes and looked around.
A woman slithered out of the window of the last truck. She was covered in blood and had knives in both hands. She wasn’t one of the Alephs. Douglas would have noticed that woman before. She stood still for half-an-instant, breathing. Then she saw him. Douglas stiffened.
Her hand flicked.
Something hit him in the shoulder. He looked down, saw the wire-wrapped hilt of some kind of knife sticking out of his shoulder. Pain hit as he saw it. He sat down, falling back off his feet against the wall. I have to get it out—
—more pain than he’d ever imagined—
—or I can leave it there.
He looked up, trying to find Tempest, hoping he would help him. Tempest, though, was still in the car. He wanted the map, but he also was too smart to expose himself to all this.
Douglas rolled back toward the woman. She looked past him, toward the man. Her eyes locked on him. Douglas watched her hand drop the knife it held on its way to her thigh. Saw her draw the big-ass pistol she carried there. Saw it rise, saw the bright light of the muzzle flash. Saw nothing else.
Pineapple stalked toward the wreck of the second truck. Bullets were cooking off in the fire. He heard them popping, then spanging in ricochets as they hit metal or sand. He worked the Panther’s action, cycling his last shell into the chamber. Smoke curled into the sky.
The lead truck was spinning its tires, all four of them, as it tried to shove the vehicles in front of it out of its way. Three tricycles and a ninety-year-old pickup were crushed into a narrow point of the street. They made a more effective barricade than anything Pineapple could have thought of, especially with the truck behind them, shoving them more tightly into the space.
The back window of the truck shattered as gunfire from the inside of the truck searched for him when he poked his head around the corner of one side of the hulk. He ducked back, swearing. Two or three rounds had hit his chest armor, and even little pistol bullets stung. If the bastards’ had aimed a little higher…
Well, that didn’t rate thinking about. They hadn’t. If they had, Pineapple told himself, I wouldn’t be having this thought.
He stepped out from behind the truck, Panther leveled.
“No!”
Elijah broke into a run as Pineapple stepped around the broken truck and fired. He’d never bothered to find out exactly what the myrmidon’s massive cannon fired, but whatever it was it was enough to blow the lead truck off its axles and flip it end for end to fall atop the vehicles it had been trying to shove aside.
Elijah stopped.
It was over.
The third truck was the only one still moving, and that only because Elijah knew his summoned spirit was trapped inside, trying to get out. He began the spell of banishment as he walked. By the time he reached the truck it was still.
“Wait for us, damn it,” Leung gasped. The hacker appeared at his side, a compact automatic pistol held down at his side. Elijah looked back. Cao stood beside their stolen SUV, arms crossed, watching.
“Us?”
“Wait for me, then.” The hacker looked around, at the two burning trucks. He pointed at the fourth truck. “What about that one?”
Elijah gestured. “Look closer.”
Leung squinted. Then he retched. “Ugh.”
Blood ran like water from the floorboards of the open door.
Pineapple came walking back, picking at several small, smoking dents in his body armor. He smiled broadly at Elijah, then spread his hands.
“Well?”
“Very flashy,” the mage said. “If you’ve damaged the map…”
Pineapple crossed his arms. “Hey. It was your beastie in that truck, pal.”
Kyrie came around from behind the third truck. She was half-staggering. She looked exhausted, but Elijah recognized the after-effects of her adept’s abilities. She’d be
all right in a bit. Her mind was still acclimating to normal time and normal senses.
She gestured behind her. “One more back there. Might have been someone important.”
“Might have?”
“Didn’t stop to ask.”
Elijah licked his lips. “Quite.” He turned. “Pineapple? Would you do the honors?” He gestured toward the third truck.
The troll ambled over and reached for the rear passenger door. He stopped. “You’re sure it’s gone?”
“Yes.”
“Because if I get bit—”
“We don’t have time for this.”
Pineapple shrugged and wrenched the door open. He jerked back at the smell that rolled out, but quickly ducked his head and shoulders inside. A moment later he came back out with an armored briefcase. “This it?”
“Set it down.”
After the troll had complied Elijah knelt in front of it and held his hands over it. Eyes closed, he murmured. A second later his eyes jolted open. He was shocked for an instant, that he couldn’t see any of the things he’d felt.
“This is it,” he said, reaching gingerly for the handle. “We’ve got it.”
Sirens cut the air behind them. Two engines revved. One was Cao; the other was a vehicle that had been on the chase, coming to life. Kyrie drew her guns, but the car was already moving away.
“It’s all right,” Elijah said. “We have what we came for.”
He turned toward their van, where Cao was waving from the driver’s window.
Kyrie leaned down and snatched the briefcase up. “Let’s go.”
Elijah half-reached for it, but the adept was already walking toward the waiting truck. He rose to follow. Leung waited for him, then fell into step beside him.
“That’s it?” the hacker asked.
“This is it.”
“What is it?”
Elijah looked around at the wreckage of the square. Faces looked down at him from every window, from around every corner. The people had mostly scurried out of the way when the gunfire began. Mostly.
The sirens were getting closer.
“Let’s get out of here,” Elijah said. “Then, hopefully, we’ll find out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When Cao was around, passers-by somehow managed to be both oblivious to her presence and horrified by it at the same time. It was quite a trick. They wouldn’t make eye contact; they’d pass her while holding a fixed stare at a point usually about a half-meter above her head, and often they would not change their course even if they were bearing right down on her, because moving out of the way meant acknowledging she was there.
She had gone through a period, maybe a year or so after she had turned, where she was determined to make people acknowledge her presence. If they wouldn’t move out of her way, she’d walk right into them.
That’s when she discovered that their aloofness was a thin veil over their horror. When she made contact with them, they would jump back, they would scowl, and often they would swat, swinging a wild blow in the direction of her head. Then they would say something she didn’t want to hear.
An old woman with two thin, sagging wattles shook her finger at her. “The virus should have killed you, instead of leaving you like that.” A tanned young man who looked like a bronze statue come to life sneered and said, “Nah, nah, nah, you ain’t getting no pieces of any of my meat.” And a young girl, a girl Cao’s age, with whom she had once made the trek out of the slums, across the traffic-filled streets of the rich and to the beach with the never-ending sand and the cool water, this girl had screamed and then run off, saying, “How dare you. How dare you!” over and over.
That was years ago. The way the favela worked, odds were at least one of the three, if not all three, were dead. But that didn’t matter. There were millions of people still alive here, people everywhere, but to Cao it was just the same three people, repeated over and over.
If she’d had a big truck back then, maybe she would’ve run a few of them over, just for fun. Maybe she could track them down and do it now. But until Cao found a safer place, the truck was the group’s base, and now that the map was in Elijah’s hands, he was pretty adamant about not running all over town if he could avoid it.
“Carrying this map all over town would be as bad as driving around with a big flag, saying ‘My parents have millions! Kidnap me!’” he had said. “If you try something like that in a place like this, it won’t be too long before someone took you up on it, no matter how tough you looked. Well, this thing lights up the astral. Anyone who has ever even tried to cast a spell would see it, and they’d know what it’s worth. Eventually, someone would go for it.”
“It’s the favela,” Cao had pointed out. “Not even one person out of every twenty thousand is Awakened.”
“That’s still about 100 poor, desperate wizards too many,” Elijah had said. So he and his map stayed in the truck, with Kyrie and a very reluctant Pineapple there to keep him company. Leung and Cao each got a jeepney so they could find a place where Elijah could do what he wanted to do. He hadn’t even looked at the item yet. He was going to spend as much energy as possible masking the damn thing and watching out for anyone who might want to take it from him until he thought it was safe to drop its disguise. That was smart—Cao didn’t know Elijah well, but she knew him well enough to know that once that map was open in front of him, everything else around him would disappear. They might need to be ready to give him mouth-to-mouth, just in case he forgot to breathe while he was looking at it.
So, she was driving around streets that turned, twisted, and ended where and when they felt like it, and she was supposed to be able to find a good place for Elijah to do his thing because she was from here. Except that the favela reinvented itself each week, each day, so that if you’re gone for years, the maps you carry in your head about narrow side streets and shortened and hidden alleys are completely obsolete. Cao was now as bad as a tourist on these streets—worse, in fact, because a tourist was not continuously distracted by things that were not where they were supposed to be.
She had one thing, though, that a tourist did not have. Something that did not change as frequently as the buildings did. She had names.
She knew better than to just grab someone off the street and ask where she could find the guy who called himself Kobold. That approach would only get her a knife in the belly, either from one of Kobold’s friends who didn’t like people being so public about seeking him out, or from one of his enemies who just plain didn’t like hearing his name. She couldn’t reach out over the Matrix, either—Kobold didn’t carry a commlink. With Matrix access in the favela being what it was, Cao couldn’t say she blamed him.
Despite his general isolationist stance, Kobold knew there would be times when people would want to contact him. So he left a way open for that to happen. You just had to know where the entry point was.
Cao must have driven back and forth over the same patch of dusty road five times before she figured out where she needed to go. The last time she’d been here, it had been a corner store, painted bright orange, with a wordless sign in front showing a picture of a macaw in flight. Now, the sign was gone, the paint was mostly chipped away, and a building had popped up immediately adjacent to the store. Eventually Cao recognized the store by its door, wrought iron bars with the spaces in between filled with filagree. How the owners had kept the door from being stolen, broken down, and turned into several dozen shivs spread across the favela was a minor miracle.
Cao exited the jeepney and engaged the best security system the piece-of-shit vehicle possessed—she licked the door handles. No one who saw her did that would touch it now, and they’d tell anyone who got near it what she had done. There was pretty much no chance in hell they’d catch the virus from touching the metal, but one thing she’d learned was how to use people’s ignorance against them.
The exterior of the former corner store had changed, but the interior, sadly, had not. The shopkeeper sat on a
stool in the corner, right next to a rusted shotgun whose barrel would probably shatter when it was fired. It wasn’t much of a deterrent, but then there wasn’t much inside to steal. There were two wire rack shelving units in the store, and between them they held two cans of Faygo, a dented can of lima beans, and a package of Rinky Dinks that looked to be testing theories about the snack cake’s immortal shelf life.
The shopkeeper didn’t look at Cao when she entered. He didn’t look at anything. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved slowly and ponderously up and down.
Cao sighed. This didn’t exactly seem like the kind of place where one would stand on protocol, but the simple fact was that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t get anywhere. There was a proper way to do things, an etiquette to be respected.
Cao grabbed the top of one of the shelves and yanked. A wire rack, along with the two cans of Faygo and a now-even-more-dented can of beans, clattered to the floor.
The shopkeeper didn’t flinch, but his eyes opened slightly. Cao couldn’t tell if those slits were trained on her.
“You’re paying for that.” His voice came out like a bubbling tar pit.
“Of course. Just give me your account info.”
The shopkeeper’s chest heaved twice in something that might have been sneezes, or might have been laughs. “No fancy shit. Cash.”
“Cash? I don’t have cash. What century do you think this is?”
The shopkeeper reached for his gun, moving so slowly and fumbling so much that Cao could have left the store, run around the block a few times, then come back in just as the keeper was getting it pointed at her chest. She stayed patient, held her ground, and waited. Finally, the gun was aimed in her general direction.
“You’re paying,” the shopkeeper said.