City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World)

by Barbara J. Webb

  Syed kept popping up around me. The street outside the temple, my house, the warehouse near the Crescent. Like he was following me. And unlike the shadow in Micah last night, Syed hadn’t yet tried to kill me. It was almost like he wanted to talk. Or at least, like it was information he wanted from me, rather than my death. Which worked out fine; there was information I wanted from him. Time to offer up a trade.

  But if he really was looking for me, that limited the places he was likely to be. He couldn’t get into the Crescent, and with Iris on watch, I didn’t think he could sneak into Amelia’s house either. I had to presume he didn’t know where Spark’s safehouse was. I’d seen no signs of him in the Web. Which only left the office and my apartment.

  I rode up to find a half-dozen lizards in the street in front of my building. All armed. Two of them I recognized as upstairs neighbors. I nodded cautiously to them as I swung off the bike.

  “Priest Drake,” the taller one said. I’d never gotten their names. Only now was I realizing the numb, self-absorbed state in which I’d been living the last few months.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, hoping my informality wouldn’t be seen as rude.

  A shorter lizard with scales of bright bronze and black-painted horns said, “Any of us who have ever served with the city defenders are being called in to work.”

  “Have there been riots?” I thought the idea would terrify me. But I’d been living the past few days in such a constant state of fear the idea of open violence was almost comforting in its familiarity.

  “Not yet,” my other neighbor said. “But they lack the manpower to both patrol the streets and protect the reservoir.”

  The reservoir. So many things to worry about, I’d forgotten Amelia’s meeting, the worry about an attack on the city’s dwindling water supply.

  “You could join us,” the bronze one said. “Any help would be welcome.”

  Among their people, the priests were the most militant, the greatest warriors. These weren’t the first lizards to assume that because of my profession, I must be capable in a fight. “I am helping. I hope.”

  He nodded, accepting my words as easily as the little girl in the Web had. The lizards had always been one of the more devout races, and had somehow survived the Abandon with a great deal of their faith intact.

  I left them to their preparations and went inside to find, again, a dark hallway. Of course it was. If Syed had knocked out the lights before, who had the time or the resources to repair them?

  I walked forward through the darkness, feigning confidence and inwardly alert for the slightest brush of cold, the first sign of a shadow’s touch. Nothing happened, and I made it to my door.

  Which was closed and locked. I certainly hadn’t bothered to lock it when I’d fled yesterday. I fumbled in the darkness, making more noise than I wanted working the key. My door opened into more darkness. “Light,” I whispered, calling on the power in my sconces.

  They flared up to reveal Syed seated in the center of the room. Waiting for me as I’d hoped. And what a strange turn my life had taken when I could say that.

  “Joshua Drake, you return.” His words were low, even. I felt none of the grayness, his hypnotic push on my mind.

  I stepped in and closed the door behind me. “Expecting me?”

  “I had hoped.”

  Face to face and so far, he’d made no aggressive moves. “I need to know what’s going on.”

  A thin smile cracked his pale face. A predator’s smile. “What makes you think I am here to tell you anything?”

  My pulse quickened, but I held my ground. “Because I think you need my help as badly as I need yours.”

  He laughed. An edgy, eerie laugh, not at all human. It cut off as quickly as it had started. “You still have no idea. No sense of what you’re dealing with. Need your help?”

  He stood, his black suit rustling like gathered darkness. “Your life to me is the brief flicker of a candle’s flame. This time, this city, this world will pass. You will pass. And it is your own fault; you have brought this chaos on yourselves. It doesn’t touch me. None of this touches me. Your flame will go out and I will continue on as I always have.”

  I couldn’t let myself be intimidated. I forced my feet to take the few steps forward that put me face-to-face with the monster. By now, it took hardly any effort to work the magic that let me see the dark, inhuman shadow flickering in his cold blue eyes. “You need my help,” I repeated firmly. “Or you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t keep following me. You wouldn’t keep talking to me.” I willed my voice steady through the next words. “If you didn’t need my help, you would have killed me.”

  “Kill you?” The shadow danced in his eyes, like it was laughing at me again. “You’re a blind fool, Joshua Drake, like all your kind. And you continue to speak of things you do not understand.”

  Syed was playing games with me. My friends were dying and he stood there, laughing. “I know there’s more than one of you. And I know the other one wants you dead.” If nothing else in that fight had been clear, that much I knew—Micah really had wanted me to kill Syed.

  And not just that. “When you told me you were hunting the people hunting Spark. You didn’t mean the Jansynians. You meant the other creature like you. The other shadow. It wants Spark dead.” Things snapping into place. Copper suddenly wanting to be taken to her sister. That was after the shadow had been inside her. It wanted Spark.

  Of course it wanted Spark. “It wants to destroy the satellite. That’s what all this is about.”

  “They,” Syed corrected me.

  It was the first piece of information he’d volunteered. “How many?”

  “Three of them in the city. Besides myself.”

  Three. Three monsters in addition to Syed. Fuck. “Do you know where they are? Who they are?”

  He shook his head. “I know them when I see them. I feel it when they kill—that’s how I tracked them to Miroc. But once they are inside their new host, they can bury themselves deep enough I can’t sense them. I can’t find them.”

  “But I can.” I thought I understood why he had sought me out.

  But he smiled and shook his head again. “You have, through this rare set of circumstances, gained some resistance to our gifts. But if it were truly that easy to find us, don’t you think someone else would have done it before now?”

  Micah’s shadow had hidden from me. “Why can I see them sometimes and not others?”

  “In the same way they hide from me, they hide from you, sliding deep within their hosts. You see them when they rise to the surface, ready to strike, but there is no guarantee any other time.”

  I’d been so sure of myself, so sure of the people around me. But there were three of those things out there, three of them after Spark, after me. “What—”

  My wireless buzzed against my leg. Three quick bursts. Amelia’s ring.

  I answered without breaking eye contact with the monster in front of me. “Amelia?”

  “Ash.” Iris’s voice. “Where are you?”

  “At home. Trying to…it’s complicated.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” Impatience in Iris’s voice, and a quiver of something else. “I need you at the safehouse. Soon as you can get there.”

  Syed stood perfectly still before me. Listening. Nothing I could do about that. “Did something happen?”

  “Not yet.” There it was, the tone I couldn’t identify. Accusation. “But Amelia isn’t listening when I tell her what a terrible idea this is.”

  No time to be coy. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No? This wasn’t your idea?”

  “Iris, what—”

  “Jansynians, Ash! Your girlfriend. Director Seana. She called Amelia a little while ago, said they should meet. So now they’ve decided we’re all working together and Seana’s sending her security folks to pick up Spark and bring her someplace safer.”

  So Amelia had agreed to Seana’s plan. It was honestly re
assuring. It validated the time I’d spent with Seana. Without my involvement, I couldn’t see Seana being any more willing to work with us than we would have been to work with her. “This all sounds good to me. What’s the problem?”

  “The safehouse, Ash. They’ve been on high alert. On edge for days. Seana’s sending armed Jansynians in to take Spark away. You really think that’s going to go smooth?”

  “Are you going?” I asked.

  “I’ll be there, but I’m only one person. And the Jansynians don’t know me at all.”

  True. Even if Iris could keep our guys calm, the Jansynian security people had no reason to listen to her. And if they tried to bully their way in with their usual arrogance and expectation that everyone else had to do what they said…

  “I’ll get there soon as I can.” I hung up.

  Syed made no pretense that he hadn’t heard both sides of the conversation. “Stay away from this, Joshua Drake. This will be a perfect opportunity for them.”

  “The sun’s up. They’re not going to sneak up on me.”

  “Such the expert,” Syed sneered. “You think we cannot do what we do in the light as easily as in the dark?”

  This was getting tiresome. “You can’t hide in the light. Moving shadows are pretty obvious on a sunlit street.”

  “Just because we cannot move about in our trueforms doesn’t mean we cannot attack. What would it take to provoke a fight between the two sides? What small amount of trickery is needed? If a shootout begins, how easy for the Fyean to die?”

  “All the more reason I need to be there. If I know what’s coming—”

  “You cannot know what’s coming.” Syed sliced his hand through the air in a gesture of denial. “You think you know, and that makes you doubly blind.”

  I didn’t have time for this. “Then come with me. Help me find them. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To find them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Spark is who they’re after. If we let them kill her, then won’t they just disappear again, run off somewhere else? You’ll have lost your chance.”

  Once more he gave that eerie, inhuman smile. “Not at all, Joshua Drake. Even after they have killed the Fyean, they cannot leave the city. You’ve created one more loose end for them. One more person they must kill.”

  “Seana?” I asked, thinking of her continuing work to get the satellite functional.

  “You.”

  His soft, flat tone sent a chill through me. “I’m not the only one who knows about them. Amelia and Iris and Seana—”

  “You are the one who can see them. You are the one who has touched them with magic. You are a threat to them. And you’ve proven yourself unwilling to do their bidding.”

  Shadow-Micah had told me to attack Syed, and instead I’d turned on him. Or was it more than that? Could I trust anything that had happened to me since Micah first came to P&B? The Jansynian security chasing us in the car. The bird-man and his gang attacking Iris and me outside Kaifail’s temple. Copper trying to kill me…

  But Copper had only tried to shoot me. And then we’d gone back to the Web to talk. If she’d been one of the shadows, why hadn’t she struck then? “You’re right. I don’t understand what’s going on.” And I didn’t have time for a lesson, not if I wanted to get to the safehouse before something terrible happened—and it wouldn’t take shadow prompting for something terrible to happen.

  I needed Syed’s help. One monster on my side to help keep me safe from the rest. “Work with me. Help me keep things calm while we move Spark to safety. Help me not get killed.”

  “I will not follow you into stupidity.”

  I tried again with the one gruesome leverage I had. “If they kill Spark and me both…”

  The leverage I thought I had. Syed shrugged and sank back into his chair. “Then it will slow me down. But I will find them, one way or another.”

  With or without me, he meant.

  I couldn’t waste any more time arguing. “I’m going to go look after my friends. This was fun, though. We’ll have to do it again.”

  I felt, or thought I felt, the cold chill of his stare between my shoulderblades all the way out into the street.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Safehouse

  The lizards were gone, off to keep the city safe. Safer. But even an army of lizards would only be a stopgap. Miroc was poised to explode. I could feel it in the air. All it needed was one final push, one match lit at the wrong time and place.

  Smoke. I could taste the gritty, bitter edge of it in the air. I couldn’t see it, not yet. But if this kept on, soon the air would be thick with it. The fires from the bombings yesterday still burned. Miroc barely had the resources to keep them contained; dousing them was too much to ask. I remembered this smell, this taste, this tension. Miroc had survived the first round of riots. As had I, barely. I didn’t imagine either of us would make it through two.

  I leaned forward, pushed my bike as fast as I dared. Spark might be the one person left who could change things, who could stop this march towards destruction. Syed might believe I was heading into a trap, but what could he know for sure? He’d already fled when I fought the creature inside Micah. Fought and won. The fact I was still in this meant they didn’t know everything, that they weren’t as powerful, as inescapable as he had implied.

  Cutting across downtown would have been the most direct route to Spark, but that would have taken me by the university fires and possibly other bomb sites. I circled wide, dodging my way through outer-city streets clogged with derelict vehicles and shanty towns. Decaying neighborhoods where I had to pull up my scarf to protect my face from the blowing sand that had claimed nearly everything.

  My city. My home. Even if Seana could keep me safe, give me shelter in the Crescent that would doubtless survive any chaos down below, I couldn’t turn my back on Miroc. I couldn’t stand to the side and watch it die. The gods had abandoned these people. I wouldn’t.

  Which would all be a moot point if the shadows killed me.

  I slowed down just enough I wouldn’t die as I pulled out my wireless and called Iris back. “I’m almost there. Where are you?”

  “In place. Spark and Vogg are packing up, but nobody here’s happy with the news.”

  Just because we’d run out of good options didn’t mean any of us were thrilled about the bad ones. “Who came with you?”

  Iris’s voice got softer, muffled. I could envision her talking behind her hand, trying to keep anyone else from hearing. “It’s just me. P&B security won’t add anything but trouble, and with the…situation…Amelia thought it was best to limit the number of people involved.”

  Limit our chance of betrayal, limit the number of potentially possessed people in the room. Amelia was on top of things and thank the gods for that. “Try to keep the safehouse guards inside. The less contact they have with the Jansynians—”

  “Yes, Ash,” Iris cut me off. “I never would have thought of that because, after all, I’m an idiot who’s never done this before.”

  In some strange way, it was reassuring to hear Iris snapping at me. “Just…be careful, okay? We can assume none of the guards there are possessed—”

  “Because Spark’s still alive.”

  “Right. And since Amelia went to Seana, and no one’s talked about the location over open airways, or outside closed doors…”

  “It’s possible the monster’s still a step behind us.”

  Monsters, plural. And Syed had made it sound like a given they would know, like he knew they had inside information. But then he’d also seemed pretty dismissive of all of us that weren’t like him.

  I turned into the neighborhood at the same time two Desavris hovercars came flying over a cluster of old, wrecked vehicles. “Incoming,” I said, and slid the wireless into my pocket as I leaned forward to keep pace with them.

  I didn’t recognize any faces in the security team. Not that that meant anything. We pulled up in front of the safehouse together. E
ight of them, with guns out and ready, climbed out of their cars. The one who had been driving the lead car held up a scanner, swept it around in a circle, then looked at me. “Ash Drake.”

  I was still wearing the security dot. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. It had to give me some sort of status in their eyes. I hoped. “I’m here to make sure this goes smoothly.”

  “Director Seana gave us no instruction regarding your status.” He nodded to two of his men, who took up the easily recognizable position of watching me. “I must ask that you not involve yourself.”

  I had to trust Seana, trust that she knew what she was doing. That she’d sent the right men to deal with this volatile situation. And ultimately, trust that she really had called off the hunt against Spark. Not out of the goodness of her heart, but because she wanted that satellite to work. She wanted Desavris to have the technology that would change everything.

  I held up my hands to show they were empty, that I wasn’t a threat, at the same time that I willed the now-familiar pattern of power into my mind that let me see the presence of shadows. Just because Syed said it didn’t work all the time—and honestly, was I all-in ready to trust him?—it made me feel better when all I saw were eight identical sets of icy gray eyes. “The men inside are armed and jumpy,” I said. “They know me. Let me help.”

  He glanced at his scanner again. Checking my clearance? Looking for something else? For all I knew, he had a readout on every gun in that building. “You’re an outside consultant. Not active security.”

  “I’m not asking for a gun. I’m just asking you to let me talk to them.”

  I couldn’t tell if my words were persuasive or if he’d somehow asked for and received new orders on his device. His expression showed no change. “Very well. You will go inside and you will bring out the Fyean and her bodyguard. No one else.”

  “I can do that.”

  He twitched his hand and the Jansynians took up a defensive arrangement around their cars, watching all directions. Good for Seana and Amelia for warning them there might be outside interference.

  Except even as I was relieved they were letting me help, I was beginning to realize the true terror of what we were dealing with. Did these men know about the shadows, about the fact anyone could be possessed? They couldn’t know I wasn’t one of the bad guys. Just because I’d been fine when I left Seana this morning didn’t mean I wasn’t…compromised.