Dying Day

by Kory M. Shrum

“You still need a coat,” Gabriel warns.

  The elements. Death by snow. Right.

  “Damn it. They distracted me with the harpooning! I’ll jump, you steer, got it?” I groan and jump right back into the South Pole station. I’m trusting Gabriel to use his omniscient presence to steer me toward a coat.

  When the darkness squeezes and spits me out again, I’m in what looks like a cafeteria. Ten tables with eight or nine seats each sit arranged in the open space. A silent TV is glued to the wall, its newsreel flashing. It’s news all right, but not about me, not at this very second anyway. A Ken doll is going on about some bombing in Afghanistan, followed by an orphanage fire in Germany. I don’t have time to stick around and see if I’m going to be the next exciting story.

  I’m searching the room, surveying the tables littered with stuff.

  Laptops sit open. Half-eaten meals are untouched, forks left on plates as if just put down. The room is bright because of a large window overlooking the tundra. It stretches as far as the eye can see.

  The room looks strangely apocalyptic. As if all the people that were just here eating and laughing and perhaps bitching about work just disappeared. Of course, it’s probably because everyone rushed to check on the machines that my shield messed up.

  “Should I leave a note?” I ask. “A simple, ‘I’m sorry that my shield rubbed your machine the wrong way?’”

  I look around the tables for a pen. I don’t see one. But maybe someone has one in a pocket?

  Coats hang on the back of chairs.

  Ah, coats. Right. It’s really hard for me to stay focused today. Is this how insanity starts? I mean, I knew taking all the powers was going to have its consequences but—

  “Coat!” I pluck a puffy, army-green coat with a tawny fur lining from the back of a plastic chair. It’s so fluffy I bet I could move into it. Oh, I’ll have a nest of chocolate! And coffee.

  “Take the backpack as well,” Gabriel says, his green eyes sparkling. When he looks up to meet my gaze, I see orange and gold flecks dance around his pupils. “It has food.”

  His wings twitch. The light from the big window makes his feathers shine. They’re sleek and black like crow feathers, as slick as oil.

  “You mean I’m going to need to eat? I thought I was going to ascend through that gate or something. You seem awfully concerned for my physical well-being, given the fact that I’m pretty sure you’re gonna blow me up by the end of the day.”

  “Take the pack,” he says, unsmiling. No sense of humor, this guy. I’m the one that’s gonna go boom. And yet I can find the time to make a joke. Geez.

  Screams make the hair on the back of my neck rise up. The screams are followed by shouts. The building rocks. Plaster dust rains down from the ceiling onto my head. Time to go! I snatch the green pack and step back, shifting the world under me.

  I’m squished by the darkness again, the air forced from my lungs the way toothpaste is pushed from a tube, and then poof! The bright white light of abundant snow again.

  I survey the landscape of endless white and blue. The cold air stings my cheeks, so I pull on the coat and zip it up to my chin. It falls past my knees, but the soft, furred collar covers my cheeks from the wind. I flip up the hood and complete my cocoon of warmth.

  I must be a mile away, but I can see the black smoke of the burning research station. Really big, black plumes roll toward the sky like ink in water. I sigh and snuggle deeper into my coat. “It’s like I got the reverse of Midas touch, you know? I’ve got Sadim’s touch.”

  Gabriel frowns the way he always does when he isn’t quite following.

  “You know, Midas touched stuff and it turned to gold. I touch stuff and it blows up. So it’s the opposite.”

  He says nothing. So I snuggle even deeper into the coat. It’s amazing. Purple shield or no, this walking blanket is hella comfy. I actually feel bad stealing such an awesome coat from someone. If this was my coat, I’d totally miss it.

  “Are they going to be okay?” I ask, eyes fixed on the rolling plume of smoke.

  He doesn’t answer, and somehow I know that someone died. Maybe more than someone.

  I take a moment to let that sink in.

  What horrifies me most isn’t the idea that I might have accidentally killed more people. It’s that I’m not sure I feel anything. Killing isn’t one of those things that is supposed to get “normal” over time. I should be just as horrified now as ever.

  But when I dig deep for those feelings, all I find is exhaustion—I’m so tired of it all. I’m tired of running. I’m tired of being hunted. I’m tired of being the bad guy. Just…tired.

  “They have come to test the gate,” Gabriel says. It’s his tone: part fear part…excitement? Whatever the emotion, it makes me look up. I follow his gaze toward the horizon, the opposite direction of the smoldering research base behind us.

  Something weird is happening.

  The glacial horizon bleeds into a beach horizon. One minute, I’m looking out over a tundra, snow and ice toward the blue sky above.

  Then it’s not ice. It’s ocean waves. Gray water ruffled with cresting white rolls beneath a turbulent, stormy sky. Ice and blue. Storms and ocean.

  “Uh, Gabriel?”

  “It will become harder for you now.”

  “Oh good! I was getting so bored. You know, watching one of my best friends die, murdering my last remaining parent, pulling my sister back from the brink of death, and saying goodbye to probably the only person I’ve ever loved. It’s just been so uneventful, you know?”

  He doesn’t do the big-eyed blink I’ve come to expect in the face of my sarcasm. His eyes remain fixed on the darkening horizon. The horizon that keeps flipping back and forth between baby blue sky and storm clouds.

  Shit. This is serious.

  “Hard how?” I ask, unable to hide the quiver in my voice. I tuck myself deeper into my stolen coat.

  “It will depend on how they move against us. Now you must be in two times at once. Possibly more.”

  So. Many. Questions. Starting with they.

  Prepare yourself, he says. We shift from the icy barrens to the ocean again, the smell of salt and sand stinging my nose.

  I stare at the approaching darkness and pull my stolen coat tighter around me. Prepare myself. Sure. Like darkness is ever something we can prepare for.

  I lick my lips and take a deep breath. “Does this battle have to do with my choice? You said I had to make a choice, and now you’re telling me I have to fight. Which is it?”

  Gabriel’s green eyes latch on mine. I see the tension in his shoulders. He is ready for this. At least one of us is.

  “You must fight for the right to choose. You mustn’t let them take that from you.”

  Chapter 3

  Ally

  “We have a helicopter on the roof that can transport Captain Jackson. I can’t make you, but I hope you’ll come with us?” Nikki makes the statement turn up at the end in a question.

  I glance down the hallway and see four nurses pushing Gloria’s bed out of her room. They turn the bed this way and that way, maneuvering around an elderly woman with an unlit cigarette between her fingers and an IV drip overhead. One nurse, with a harsh grimace on her spray-tanned face, pulls the old woman backwards into an adjacent room so the bed can get by.

  I wonder if I should stop them. Does Gloria even have family or friends? Someone to speak on her behalf and question the care she receives? I don’t think so.

  “What authority do you have to take her?” I ask Jeremiah. In my mind, the words are bitchy and accusatory. But on my lips, they’re just tired.

  “Al—” Nikki’s shoulders slump. “We aren’t kidnapping her, but we can’t leave her here. Until we know who is still loyal to Caldwell and what kind of reaction we can expect to his death, she’s still vulnerable. We need to keep her close for the same reason we want to keep you close. You’re not out of danger yet.”

  My mind understands the truth in her assessment. It
makes perfect sense that someone might want to kill Jesse, Gloria, or me, even more now that their leader has been murdered. Revenge can be more motivating than love or loyalty. But I’m not worried about me or Gloria, truth be told. I’m only worried about Jesse.

  She didn’t seem herself when she appeared in Gloria’s room. Gabriel had showed her something, scared her, and I’m absolutely sure that whatever she’s doing now, she isn’t doing it with a clear head. God, what I wouldn’t give to talk to her and find out what is going on.

  “I’ll come,” I say, because until I can get my ride to Antarctica sorted, I plan to stick close to Maisie and Gloria. And Jesse isn’t making it easy. The airspace over Antarctica is in temporary lock down for 24 hours pending investigation.

  Her shoulders slide away from her ears. “Thank you. Let’s get up to the roof.”

  She leans forward and mashes the elevator button just as Gloria’s hospital bed rolls up to meet us. The nurses pushing her each have long, exhausted faces. Dark circles, deep lines. The clear symptoms of chronic stress. What must I look like? I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t taxed by one peril or another. And yet—what would I change?

  What do you want, Al? I hear the question in Jesse’s panicked voice. And I remember my response clearly: You. Just you, Jess.

  I still want that. I want her safe. I want her out of all of this. I’d even take our old life of death replacing and my near-ulcer-causing frets about whether or not Jesse’s death replacing might result in her demise. But truth be told, settling for the old life is still settling.

  I’m done. Pure and simple. I’m tired, and I’m done.

  But you don’t have the luxury of being done, my mind says. This isn’t over yet.

  Nikki and I let Jeremiah and the nurses take the elevator to the roof first, then we ride up after. It isn’t until the chime dings, announcing our arrival, that I realize Nik has taken my hand. She squeezes it and then lets it go.

  “It’ll be okay,” she says. Her full lips tilt up at one side, a smile that’s meant to encourage more than seduce.

  You don’t know that, my mind bleats.

  I step out onto the roof and into the roaring wind. I push back the mass of blond hair covering my eyes, and there’s Jeremiah, one finger in his ear and yelling into the cell phone over the roar of the helicopter blades slicing the air at the edge of the rooftop.

  One of his black, polished shoes is propped on the lip of a low stone wall outlining the roof.

  Nikki reaches the helicopter first, covering her ears and dipping her head before using the handle on the outside of the aircraft to haul herself up into its cabin. She turns back and offers me a hand.

  Doubt washes over me again the moment before I reach out and take her hand. Again I think, what am I doing? I should be in Antarctica. I should be there now.

  But I can’t steal this helicopter. If Gloria was conscious, she could fly it, but I surely can’t. And I can’t simply charter one.

  I’m an outlaw. A fugitive from the government. And even if I weren’t being hunted for arrest, interrogation, or outright murder, I have no money on me. No car. And everyone I care about is right here.

  Almost everyone. Jess. Don’t you dare die on me.

  Nikki helps me into the black leather seat and starts working on my seatbelt. When we first began dating, I used to yell at Nik for this—her insistence that she do up my buckles: belt buckles, seat belts, harnesses…then I realized she can’t stop herself any more than I can stop fretting over Jesse.

  It’s strange, this role reversal. I’ve never had anyone who tried to take care of me except my mother and brother. And even now, I never know quite how to handle it.

  “Where’s Maisie?” I ask. I’m shouting. The back of my throat burns with the effort. Instead of answering, Nikki half turns from where she squats in front of me and inclines her head in that direction. I peer around her into the darkness and see Maisie, curled tight in a stiff white hospital blanket and scrubs. She gives me a small, weak wave.

  Relief washes over me. She’s okay. She’s really okay.

  She looks exhausted and run down. Of course, just hours ago she was dead, so this is an improvement. We’re all run down, and not only because the last few days have been crisis after crisis.

  Maisie deserves so much more. A steady, stable home for starters. And she’s never going to get it with us. But where would we even send her now that Jesse’s orphaned her?

  I shouldn’t think of it like that. But no matter how I frame it, Maisie’s mother and father are dead, and she is a minor for another year. What in the world will we do about that? More questions that I don’t have answers to.

  Winston sits in the seat beside her. His pug eyes wide and worried. At first, I think he’s shaking and that’s why she’s keeping him close to her side. Then I realize he’s barking, his dark chin wobbling. I just can’t hear him over the roaring blades.

  Nikki offers me the black headset that will muffle the noise and make it possible for us all to speak.

  I slip the earphones on.

  “I want to get Gloria and Maisie somewhere safe,” I say, hearing my voice echo back to me through the black headset squeezing my head.

  “That’s our agenda, too,” Nikki says, adjusting the microphone in front of her face. Her voice is mechanical and echoes like the voice on a CB radio.

  I wave to get Maisie’s attention and tap the side of my headset. She slips hers on and angles the microphone.

  “How are you holding up back there?” I ask her.

  Maisie turns from Gloria, whose hand she’d been stroking moments before, and laughs at me. It’s such a Jesse laugh—a short, sarcastic snort—that it hurts my heart.

  “My brains are still in my head,” she says. “That’s more than some can say right now.”

  The sad part is I don’t know if she’s referring to her parents or the boy who got murdered. I understand she befriended a boy, albeit briefly, when she was in the desert. Her mother had kidnapped her back from us and went on the run. Of course, Jesse tore apart a town and murdered her parents to get her back, but not without casualties.

  “Maze?” I tilt my head in question. If she’s anything like Jesse, this sarcasm is a front.

  “I’m okay,” she says. But her eyes are filling with tears that sparkle in the light. “Winnie Pug needs water. I think he’s going to bark himself sick. I think he’s traumatized from the last time he was in a helicopter.”

  Before I can issue a warning glare, Nikki already asks the dreaded question. “What happened last time?”

  Maisie’s mouth runs away with her before I can intervene. “Apparently Jesse and Ally jumped out of a helicopter into the city to look for you. And Winston saw it and tried to jump out after them. But Rachel caught him. She was still holding him when Caldwell took her and put her in that church with no doors.”

  Nikki’s fingers freeze on the last of her buckles. “You jumped out of a helicopter?”

  “Without parachutes!” Maisie adds, voice ringing with admiration. “I wish I could’ve seen it.”

  “Maisie.” I flash my own tight smile. “How do you even know what happened? You weren’t there.” Because Caldwell had already stolen her back from us.

  Our first of many failures, the frightened me says.

  But it worked out. And this will work out too, the assured me says.

  I wonder if it’s too late to call up my therapist and have an emergency session. It might be nice to talk to someone who isn’t involved in all of this—and someone who isn’t me.

  “You. Jumped. Out. Of. A. Helicopter,” Nikki says. Her face is turning red and her jaw is working. “Was this before or after you let Jesse push you out of a window thirty-four stories up?”

  “She didn’t push me,” I say. I cut Maisie a sharp look.

  Maisie mouths, sorry.

  “I don’t think you have any right to be angry. I survived. And it isn’t like I’m going to jump out of a helicopter again
,” I say, as if this will calm her. I should know better.

  Nikki looks ready to explode.

  “And I thought you were supposed to be the sensible one,” Nikki says. She slides the headset down to rest around her neck and watches Jeremiah give instructions to three or four people crowded around him on the roof. A clear dismissal.

  I don’t insist that she put her headset on so that I can explain myself. There is nothing I can say that will make her happy. Anytime I endanger my life, it makes her furious. I understand. I feel the same way about Jesse, but just as my concern has never deterred Jesse, Nikki’s will never deter me.

  Jeremiah reaches in and hefts himself up into the helicopter with a hand from Nikki. Then it’s the three of us strapped in and ready to go, with Maisie, Winston, and Gloria’s bed in the back end.

  Jeremiah’s voice booms over the headset a moment later. “We’re going to ground. Our closest base with full medical facilities is in Oklahoma. As soon as we situate Captain Jackson and Maisie, I’ll need to send you back with the helicopter, Tamsin. We need to break down all the Nashville units and move the equipment to the Oklahoma base. Parish and Unit 546 are already packing up. It will be an oversight mission more than anything.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nikki says.

  I think we’ll take off now. Instead, we only sit there until I ask, “What are we waiting for?”

  “One more,” Jeremiah says, and gestures to the open seat across from him.

  The door beside the staff elevator opens. Slate gray metal swings back and slams against the brick either with the force of the man exiting the building, or with help from the wind. Regardless, he moves toward the helicopter, bent forward at the waist with a hoodie over his head to protect him from the relentless roar of the blades.

  There is something in his walk that I recognize, though I can’t see his face beneath the hair and hood and flapping military jacket.

  Nikki reaches her hand out and offers it to the guy who hauls himself up into the black cabin with one pull. He slides into the empty seat across from Jeremiah and slips the black hood back from his face.