by Nina D'Aleo
Eli blinked, two glowing orbs hung before his eyes from where the light had burned into his vision. He looked around at the wreckage of the cell block. The Skreaf were gone and ash covered everything. Survivors from the captives and the gangsters were starting to rise shakily from the ground. Eli turned to Kry. He had dragged himself up, white blood dripping from the wounds in his wrists. As Eli watched, the wounds began to close over. Caesar and his lion shadow were helping the gangsters. Luther and the wolf had vanished. They reminded him.
‘Ev’r!’ he cried out.
He scrambled up and used the last of his energy to run out of the cell block and stumble over the books. He pushed back into the dark room with the cages. Blue light shone through the partially destroyed opposite wall. Eli rushed to it and clambered over the bricks and into the laboratory. It was a complete wreck with nothing intact. His boots crunched on glass as he picked his way through the rubble, lifting boards and looking under rocks, searching for any sign of Ev’r.
He found his way to where the doorway had stood, now just a ragged hole in the fractured wall. As he stepped through, his boots kicked against something that rattled. He looked down. Ev’r’s black blade, the Morsus Ictus, lay on the ground, and beside that, a ripped and discarded pile of clothes. Eli dropped to his knees and sifted through the rags until he felt something hard. He grabbed out an object wrapped in fabric and found it was Solace, Oren Harvey’s knife.
A draught from above made Eli look up. A rift had been torn in the concrete ceiling, struck with so much raw power that a jagged outline of the form that had made it remained in the crumbling rock – something huge with wings. Ravien.
‘No, Ev’r,’ Eli breathed. He closed his eyes and his head sank forward to the ground. He didn’t have the strength to lift it. He had failed her. The legendary treasure hunter Ev’r Keets, Zingara Ohavor, was gone. He felt Nelly nuzzling his cheek. He blinked and collapsed.
45
Copernicus lunged at the falling skeleton of the Mazurus Machine and grabbed hold of Silho’s charcoaled form. It burned his skin, but he held tight, refusing to let her go. He lurched forward as the rock crumbled out from underneath him, and he, Silho and the Mazurus fell into the abyss. Jude’s metal hand locked onto Copernicus’ ankle and held him and Silho as the machine dropped from around them into the blackness below. As Jude hauled them back up onto the central pillar, the whole chamber began to quake. Rocks pelted them from above and lava spewed up from the abyss. The desperate screams of Morsmalus shook the air.
‘The whole place is sinking!’ Diega yelled.
The central pillar rocked, unstable, and Copernicus ordered, ‘Jump across!’
With Silho in his arms, he sprinted the length of the plateau and leapt over the chasm to the other side where the Skreaf hordes had been gathered. He landed in the ash that now covered the ground, the only remnants of the demons. Diega and Jude skidded in beside him.
‘Head for the wall!’ he instructed and took off towards the base of the rocky cliff below where he and Silho had entered the chamber. He held Silho close to him. She was burned black and unrecognisable. It was completely unimaginable that anyone could survive such injuries, but he could feel her faint breath against his neck. He didn’t allow himself to hope; he just ran. Diega and Jude stayed close, the Fen morphing falling boulders into pebbles that rained down on their heads. Behind and all around them, freed spectral-breeds drifted in the same direction, using Cos magics to divert the rock projectiles.
‘Where’s Shawe?’ Jude yelled to Copernicus.
The commander glanced back and sent out his senses. They locked onto the gangster’s body-heat. Shawe was hauling himself out of the abyss, a red-haired boy – his brother, Stacy – slung over one shoulder. The spectral-breeds drifted up and around the brothers, their magics keeping the caving roof from crushing the pair, but the spectrals were dispersing quickly and soon their protection would lift.
‘Shawe!’ Copernicus yelled back to him. ‘Get out!’
Shawe didn’t hear him, but noticed the danger and felt the ground sinking. Carrying his brother, he bolted for the closest cliff face.
The commander reached the wall and ran upwards on the quaking rocks. The ground was sinking fast below them. He forced his muscles to move to absolute overload and made it to the top. He clambered over the edge and kept moving, running along the tunnel where the Wraith had led them. He sensed Jude and Diega close behind. They passed back through the chambers, the magics now broken and ineffectual, and up the staircase into the carnival land. Everywhere deep chasms split the ground, dragging down screaming demons.
Copernicus ran towards a light up ahead. He looked over his shoulder and saw Shawe among the hordes of spectral-breeds following them. They made it to the light and leapt through the portal. Copernicus crashed to the ground on the other side. Diega and Jude landed beside him. Shawe smashed down on top of him. The spectral-breeds rushed through in a flood of flowing bodies. They vanished into the walls and ceiling.
All of a sudden the flow stopped as the portal closed on the other side. Copernicus stared up at the ceiling of Chrisholm’s cell. The concrete was blank, the painting gone. He looked around at the prison block, a disaster zone covered in ash and blood and bodies. Silho shivered in his arms. Jude dragged off his cloak and laid it over her. The Ar Antarian’s eyes misted over.
‘He’s not waking up,’ Shawe muttered beside them. He cradled his younger brother in his arms. The boy’s face was a disturbing pale grey.
‘We have to get them help, now,’ Copernicus said. He stood and carried Silho from the prison area. As he reached the open door, he registered voices up ahead and followed the sound through the crumbling walls of two wrecked rooms to where a group of people, of all different races, stood gathered around someone lying on the ground. Copernicus shouldered through the small crowd and found Eli struggling to sit up. The commander crouched down and gripped Eli’s shoulder. Eli stared at him in confusion at first then threw his arms around Copernicus and hugged tight.
‘I couldn’t save her,’ Eli whispered. ‘She’s gone.’ Copernicus saw the imp-breed was clutching two blades, Solace and the Morsus Ictus.
‘Eli,’ Copernicus said to him. ‘Silho needs help.’
Eli raised his head and the commander nodded to the cloak covering Silho. Eli peeked under it and horror widened his eyes.
‘She may still be able to regenerate,’ Copernicus said. ‘But we have to get her out of here.’
Eli nodded and staggered to his feet. The gathered crowd stepped back to give him room. He grabbed an object out of the rubble and hauled it onto his back. Copernicus recognised Ev’r Keets’ backpack.
‘There’s a way out through there.’ Eli pointed then hesitated. He stared at something behind Copernicus. The commander turned.
Jude and Kry stood face-to-face. Other Androt survivors clustered around them. The brothers studied each other for several long moments before Kry said, ‘I always sensed you were out there. Did you?’
Jude considered the words. ‘Something was missing.’
‘Come with us,’ Kry said.
‘To where?’ Jude asked.
‘To war.’
‘I’ve just been to war.’ Jude clutched the pieces of SevenM against his chest.
‘Not a war,’ Kry said, ‘the war, for our people. You can help us. You’ve lived with the enemy. You know their secrets, their weaknesses. You would be a great asset. We’ll destroy everyone that has oppressed us.’
Jude narrowed his vivid blue eyes. ‘I don’t want to destroy anyone. I want to help our people more than anything, but in peaceful ways.’
Kry’s enthusiasm turned to a sneer. ‘You’re a soldier. There is nothing peaceful about you. Obviously you’re confused, but I can help you.’ He held out his hand. ‘Come to where you belong.’
Jude glanced at Diega standing beside him, then at Copernicus and Eli. ‘I am where I belong.’
Kry’s grey eyes hardened to st
one. ‘Then you’re dead to me,’ he said. He spoke to the Androts around them. ‘It’s our time.’
He turned and headed down the tunnel. The majority of Androts followed him. Some did not. Everyone moved to get out of their way. The shadows stirred in their wake and Caesar K-Ruz stepped into the light. He glanced at Kry’s retreating form, then back to the gathered group. His glowing golden eyes locked onto Shawe. Copernicus cursed silently. He was completely unarmed and carrying Silho. He wouldn’t be able to move fast enough before Caesar got a shot off. He looked to Diega, but she shook her head. Neither she nor Jude held any weapons. Copernicus spoke an enchant, vanishing himself and Silho from Caesar’s sight. It was the only thing he could do. The Pride boss stepped closer, his focus not diverting from Shawe. Shawe held his brother against him and watched Caesar move towards them. There was nowhere for him to run. Caesar drew his electrifier and aimed it at his rival. Shawe lifted his head, waiting for the shot. He didn’t bother begging for his brother’s life. He knew Caesar too well. A shadow crossed K-Ruz’s face. Copernicus noticed his gaze flickering towards Eli. He hesitated, then, to Copernicus’ genuine shock, lowered the weapon and turned away. He headed along the tunnel, stalking after Kry. Shawe stared at the vanishing figure in disbelief.
A powerful tremor shook the tunnel, almost knocking them to the ground.
‘The whole Galleria’s going.’ Diega stared up at the cracks spreading across the ceiling.
‘This way,’ Eli urged. He led the team and the survivors up into a tunnel, towards a distant light.
46
Eli knew it wasn’t exactly luxury accommodation, with no lighting, no heating, no running water – no chance to work in peace without the couple in the apartment above either screaming obscenities at each other or bringing a dust storm of ceiling plaster down with the neverending squeaky thud of bedsprings. Still it wasn’t that bad. It was, so far, safe, he had all his equipment at hand, Nelly had plenty of free-range cockroaches to hunt and crunch on and Eli was sure the smell of the place was improving with time. And best of all, the team was together, a bit cramped, but they were surviving – and that was the word of the day – survival. It really said something when the safest place in the city was a decrepit bordello-slash-boarding house in the centre of Moris-Isles.
In the aftermath of the Skreaf attack, King Miron XI had vanished. No one knew if he was alive or dead, only that he was gone. The Standard and the United Regiment had also fallen, their lines of command going down like dominoes, owing to the large number of governmentals, officials and soldiers who were either Skreaf, being possessed by them or in their pocket.
What followed was a rush to fill the power void. A war between the two main contenders erupted – machine-breeds against the gangs, Kry 939993 versus Caesar K-Ruz. Eli knew Kry’s original plan was to have the machine-breeds against everyone else, but the Androt leader had been so occupied trying to keep Caesar from ripping out his throat that he hadn’t really progressed that far. While the two sides were throwing everything they had at each other, everyone else was just trying not to get killed – not such an easy feat with the daily deluge of bombs and with both sides recruiting by force anyone they thought might be useful to their cause. At this stage of the fighting, Eli’s bets were on Caesar K-Ruz, due to the simple fact that, unlike Kry, he wasn’t crazy. He was just as fanatical and fixated on his overall plan of gang rule, but within the plan he was flexible and changing, constantly shifting the shape of his attacks. The Androt leader’s rigid logic patterns struggled to predict Caesar’s moves. Despite all the technology at his fingertips, Kry failed on a daily basis to hunt down the gangland boss. Kry had made the fatal war error of not knowing his enemy, while Caesar had stepped into his time, gathering increasing support from inside and outside the gangs. Now he was known as the King, not King of the Gangland or King Caesar K-Ruz, just the King – as if he were the first and only of all time.
Of course the minor distraction of leading a war hadn’t faded Caesar’s memory of Eli’s promised elixir of anti-love. To Eli’s relief, he had been able to deliver – effectively halting Smudge’s affection for Caesar, without turning it to hate. Eli had questioned the morality of tinkering with someone else’s primal biological wiring, but as the commander had pointed out, it wasn’t as though he’d had much choice. Breaking a promise to the King was tantamount to suicide these days. So Caesar had collected, been impressed and been hunting Eli ever since to acquire his skills for the gangs. The payment for such services would be not getting killed – at least not by the gangsters. Not really an exciting offer. So far the tracker team had managed to evade K-Ruz, though Eli suspected it wasn’t their ingenious hiding places that kept Caesar back as much as the fact that Copernicus was watching over them. Eli sensed that Caesar was apprehensive about pushing the commander – he still wasn’t sure he could defeat him.
While the fighting continued, what was left of the soldiers of the United Regiment had formed a new coalition known as the United Resistance. Their position in the war was still a little fuzzy, since they didn’t want to back either side. From what he’d heard, the general consensus was to let Kry and Caesar fight it out, and then to block whoever won from taking control. Exactly how they’d do this was still a contentious issue. Apparently there had been a lot of heated, passionate discussions on the topic, all of which were completely pointless.
The fact was that a new era was dawning, not based on a passing of time, but on a changing of events. Scorpia was shifting: to what was uncertain, but it would definitely never be the same again – which was why the commander and the team had made the decision not to join the United Resistance. They had agreed that they would remain trackers, but now they answered only to themselves. And since becoming his own boss, Eli hadn’t had a break from work.
He rubbed his blurry eyes and stared at the hologram in front of him full of formulae. There were so many figures and numbers – endless possibilities – but only one answer to the question that plagued his mind. Over time imp-breeds had been called many things – tricksters, pranksters, eavesdroppers and stealers, annoyers, liars, flyers and players, cheaters, meddlers, mess-makers and risk-takers and the list could go on. One sour old scholar with his britches in a twist had long ago scripted the now infamous line – And what can be said for Imp-breeds? These fickle, silly twitterbrains flitter about like overgrown mosquitoes, giving nothing and taking everything that isn’t nailed down! Given that this was the pigeonhole into which his kind had been stuffed, Eli found it, for want of a better word, amusing, that over the last three day-cycles he had been told that he was being obsessive on at least five separate occasions by five different people – luckily no one whose opinion mattered to him in the least – but what did this mean? Was he living proof of his race’s gradual evolution from fickle to fanatic or could it be that the dusty old scholar had seen it all wrong and misjudged an entire race based on an unfortunately annoying and transient few?
Eli smiled. It wasn’t a trick question. He wasn’t some new breed of imp-breed. He was just himself – warts and all, obsessions and all, though he didn’t see his ongoing determination to save his friend as an obsession as such. He didn’t think about it all day and every night – just most of the all day and every night. It was a thin line, he knew that, but who could give him an honest answer to the question of when it was the right time to abandon all hope? No one he’d spoken to so far. At least no one who was intelligent enough to understand that the more they knew the less they knew. The universe was miraculous and inside it miracles happened – like finding Ev’r Keets and restoring her from Ravien to human-breed. He’d given a promise to a friend that he didn’t intend to break, even with bombs exploding all around him and close and distant electro-fire zapping in his ears, even though his otter, Nelly, had angrily gnawed a hole in his pocket and now had her sharp little teeth imbedded in the soft flesh of his upper thigh. He dragged her out and held her up to his face.
‘What is it?’ he
asked.
Nelly looked longingly at the window.
‘We can’t go out. You know that,’ he said. Her whiskers drooped and he felt guilty and added, ‘But soon.’
He sighed and lowered his little friend onto his desk. Words he had scripted by hand onto a sheet of paper caught his attention – Who is the Indemeus X? It was something Ev’r had asked him when he’d revived her with the Venus Lily potion. It was a question that had replayed every night in his dreams. So far he’d found no clues to the answer.
Eli’s security system sparked up and he turned to the hologram footage of the I-eyes monitoring the hallways. Silho was back. She and the rest of the team had gone out to replenish their supplies and, as always, for security reasons, they had taken separate routes back to the hide – and, as always, Silho had returned first. No one could deny Brabel’s skills. Eli knew there were other people who could invent like him, morph like Diega, think like Jude and sense like the commander – but there was no one anywhere that could match Silho. She was unique, an original, and was only growing stronger and faster as time progressed.
Silho was a born leader like her mother, though it was clear to Eli that Silho Brabel would never lead – at least not while she stayed with the trackers. A saying Oren Harvey herself had once quoted in one of her famous speeches always played in Eli’s mind when he thought of Silho. Oren had said that women could never win the battle of the sexes because they kept sleeping with the enemy. Silho would never take the title of commander while Copernicus owned it.