City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World)

by Barbara J. Webb

  The downtown station was packed. Late afternoon and people were on their way to their twilight destinations. I welcomed the camouflage, did my best to move with the crowd and keep my head down.

  I made it safely to my building and waved hello to the security guard who was just closing down for the day. “Anyone still upstairs?” I asked him, hoping the cheer in my voice didn’t sound forced.

  “Most’re out for the day, Mr. Drake,” he answered with only a brief glance in my direction. “But Ms. Price went up a while ago, so you’re likely to catch her.”

  So not all my luck was bad today. I thanked…no, I didn’t.

  I went straight for Amelia’s office. Walked in without knocking. She sat at her desk, frowning at her computer. I didn’t know how to start. “Amelia—”

  She stood. Her hand came up. She held a gun. Pointed it in my direction.

  “Amelia! It’s me! It’s still me!” The words tumbled out as my mind froze. Too many shocks today to manage any cleverness. “Don’t shoot, I promise it’s me.”

  “I know,” she said, and as her thumb flicked back the safety catch, I saw it.

  The shadow swimming in her eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  No Escape

  “Stop!”

  The voice came from behind me. Seana’s voice. I scrambled to the side, put my back to the wall. Amelia’s gun followed my movements, but she didn’t pull the trigger.

  Seana stood in the door. And beside her…

  Shadow number three, and the final piece of the puzzle. I recognized his face. I’d seen it on the news yesterday morning. They’d flashed through several videos of protestors outside the city council building, the protesters outside the reservoir, and the crowd gathered watching the fire at the university.

  Too late, I saw the whole of what the shadows had been doing. How they’d played both sides. One shadow whipping the citizens into a wild, desperate frenzy. The others working the city council, making sure the leadership gave no response to the city’s pleas. And Miroc slowly pulling apart. Until Spark came along with a chance to save the city and disrupt all their plans.

  None of the shadows were trying to hide from me. I saw the truth in all their eyes. I was alone in the room with three monsters.

  “He had his chance,” Amelia—not-Amelia—said, her voice cold.

  “And I’m giving him another,” Seana answered. “Put the gun down.”

  I got it now. I understood. Iris had said, hadn’t she? Amelia went to the Crescent, met with Seana in person. After that, she’d agreed to the Jansynians taking Spark. I hadn’t made anything of it at the time because I hadn’t known Seana—

  And when I saw Seana had been taken, everything else happened so fast, I hadn’t taken the leap. A stupid mistake, and possibly the last one I was going to get to make.

  Amelia hadn’t lowered the gun. “He hurt me,” she whispered, unmistakable hatred in her voice. No, this wasn’t Amelia at all.

  “You tried to kill him,” Seana countered, her voice as cool as ever. “Against my orders. What was he supposed to do?”

  Amelia hadn’t…no, this was the shadow talking. The shadow…the shadow that had been in Micah. In Copper before that.

  The third shadow, who’d been silent all this time, spoke. His words were soft, reasonable. “He sees us. He knows us. He’s too dangerous.”

  Seana approached me, placing herself between me and Amelia’s gun. I pressed back against the wall, but couldn’t get away. I was long past any of the calm I needed to mount some magic defense. When her hand came up to stroke my cheek, all I could do was stand there and let her.

  “I know this is hard,” she said. “And maybe I should have told you sooner, but you must understand how much that goes against our nature.”

  “Sooner?” I whispered, my mind spinning around the implications of that one simple word.

  “That first night, when you pushed me from Eddis—”

  I closed my eyes against the sudden gray that fell across my vision. My knees had no strength. I slid down the wall to the floor.

  “Leave us.” Seana’s voice seemed to echo from a great distance. I sat on the floor, my face in my hands, waiting. Waiting for everything to stop. Waiting for the gunshot. Waiting for the cold touch of a shadow invading my body. Waiting to wake up from this horrible nightmare.

  None of that happened, and when I finally opened my eyes and lifted my head, I saw Seana kneeling in front of me, watching me. We were alone in the room.

  “It isn’t surprising you have the wrong idea about us,” she said. “These are extraordinary circumstances and they’ve forced us to extreme measures. We don’t like to kill, truly. There’s no change greater than death, which makes it abhorrent, but what choice did we have?”

  “You killed her. You killed Seana.”

  “I am Seana. You don’t understand, Ash. All this time, I’ve been her. All this time we’ve been together—”

  I held up a hand, shook my head. I couldn’t hear any more of this.

  But the creature didn’t stop. “It’s not death, not like you understand. Death happens when we leave our host, not when we join them. Everything she knew, everything she thought, everything she was, I am her. And she loved you. Very much. I love you. I never lied about that. Not once. I don’t want to lose you.”

  She took my hand. I didn’t have the strength to pull away. “This city is dying. The world is dying. The gods are gone and it’s time for the world to end. Can you blame us for trying to see it happens quickly, cleanly? The Fyean technology won’t save the world. It only drags out the inevitable.

  “We wanted this to be quiet, simple. I took Eddis because he was the key. Without him, the project failed and the city collapsed as it should have. You took us by surprise, love, and I’m sorry, truly sorry, about what followed. I’ve tried to keep you safe, but…” She glanced back towards the still-open door. “I couldn’t be everywhere. I couldn’t control what happened.”

  I shook my head again, denying everything. It couldn’t be true. I couldn’t believe, couldn’t accept her words. “You’re not her.”

  “You were happy enough with us, before you knew. It’s true I made a couple decisions of my own. She never would have invited you to stay that first night. She would have wanted to, but even at the pinnacle of her career she worried about appearances. But she would have regretted sending you away. I made a better decision for both of us. She loves you. I love you—”

  “Stop saying that!”

  The creature wasn’t alarmed by my shout. Only squeezed my hand and kept talking in that soft, soothing tone. “You’ve seen the worst of us, and you’ve had Syed filling your ear with poisonous whispers. It’s no wonder you’re confused. But I want you with us, Ash. You see us and you know us and, yes, you are learning how to fight us. The others want you dead for that, but I see potential. You’d be an incredible ally for us. And we could be together.”

  I shuddered as a chill ran through me. This thing speaking now had murdered the woman I loved. How could she propose—how could she think I could stomach—“What if I refuse?”

  She sighed, squeezed my hand, then released it. “I would be sad to hear it, but if there’s one thing Seana and I have always been in agreement on, it’s the fact that you cannot let sentiment command your decisions. If you are not our friend, then I’m afraid you are our enemy.”

  The safest course would be to lie, to pretend I was with her until the opportunity arose when I could stop them. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t look into the face of Seana’s killer, of Amelia’s killer, and pretend I felt anything but revulsion.

  I stood up and she stood with me, a look of concern on the face I knew so well. Thought I’d known. She’d been taken by a monster and I never noticed the difference. “I need some coffee.”

  “Of course,” she said with a curt nod. “You’ve had quite a day.”

  She followed me out into the main office. I wished I dared ask for time alone to t
hink, but Seana had been a brilliant woman and this creature had shown no sign of being any dumber. She might claim to love me, but at no point had she said she trusted me.

  The other two were elsewhere. I saw a light on in the library. Amelia had always enjoyed spending time in there. Even more than her office, it was—

  The thought broke me. I fought back the sob that threatened to close my throat and ran for the stairway door.

  “Ash!”

  I kept running. Down the stairs. Fast as I could. In the echoing stairwell, I heard the door open again and footsteps running in counterpoint to mine. I risked a look up. The third shadow, the man whose name I never knew, was chasing.

  Three floors above me and gaining. I tried the door out of the stairwell. Locked. One floor down, I tried the next. This one opened to my hand. I slammed it shut behind me, locked it, and grabbed a chair from whoever’s office I just invaded to brace it.

  I cut through the office, heard the door rattling behind me. On the other side of the building, the fire escape provided another way down. Hopefully I’d delayed my pursuer enough to give me a head start.

  I pushed my exhausted body faster. And for the second time today, I ran for my life.

  #

  I stayed ahead of my pursuer, made it down to the street without seeing him again. I aimed for the tube station. If I could just get on a train without him following, I could disappear into the city.

  I couldn’t keep this up much longer. I’d pushed my body long past endurance. I stumbled as I ran, cursing every bit of trash or drift of sand that no one had bothered to clean from the streets in months. I didn’t dare look back. He would catch me or he wouldn’t, and I couldn’t waste the energy to find out which was most likely.

  I’d been in the office hardly any time at all, and the station was still packed with people. Good for me. I shoved my way through the crowd, yanking my collar open. Gaps formed as people shied away from me, so there was an advantage after all to being anathema. Lucky me.

  I made it to the boarding platform and only then dared to stop, dared to look around. Time to assess my situation and figure out if I was going to live through the next few minutes.

  In the crowd of dark human faces, green and brown lizards, and a smattering of other races, my pale pursuer was easy to spot. He stood three steps up from the floor, staring at me, heedless of the people trying to push by him.

  No question he saw me. So much for hiding in the crowd. But the crowd was packed between us and the flashing lights above my head told me the next train would be here in moments. And with the train so close, there was no way my fellow commuters would let him through ahead of them to make the train.

  I smiled and waved.

  He returned the smile. And the wave. And then reached out so his hand brushed the arm of the woman slipping past him on the stairs.

  I didn’t understand when he collapsed. I didn’t understand when she grabbed the hand of the lizard next to her and then also fell to the ground. It wasn’t until the lizard touched the back of the head of the man standing in front of him, then fell over on top of two other commuters, that I realized what was happening.

  The shadow was moving body by body, death by death. Coming for me. The people were no obstacle to this monster. One touch and it moved from one victim into the next, leaving a line of the dead in its wake.

  A line pointing towards me.

  The train wouldn’t be here soon enough. Not before this horror would catch me.

  A scream. Another scream. People starting to notice the growing number of dead in their midst. Any moment the panic would start. Invisible death moved through them and I was the only one who knew why or how. I was trapped, people pressed tight around me, with the shadow between me and the exit. With every breath, another person fell to the ground. More screams. People tried to get away, but they didn’t know what they were running from. They had nowhere to go.

  The waves of terror spread. People around me struggled and shouted and shoved. I shoved with them, my panic different from theirs only because I knew what was happening. I had to get away, but how? The people around were a barrier to me, but not to the thing that chased me.

  Red light flashed, turned the station full of screaming, terrified people into some new version of hell. The emergency lights—someone official had noticed a problem. But as long as the red emergency lights were on, it meant no train was coming. My last hope of rescue dashed.

  A shoulder slammed into my arm. Someone stepped on my foot. The crowd pushed back, away from the approaching line of deaths, but there was nowhere to go. Behind me was the edge of the platform and a five-foot fall to the electrified rails.

  More screams and I couldn’t tell from where. From everywhere. I’d lost track of the chain of death in the mad press of bodies all around. How close was it? People pushed and tried to run and fell and scrabbled at those around them. The panic shielded the monster, covered its tracks. It could be in anyone. In any of these people around me. I jerked back from a reaching hand. Yelped as an elbow ground against my spine. Where was it? Who was it?

  I took one step back. Another. But the crowd followed, trying to get away. Except there was nowhere to go.

  Trapped, I was trapped and what did it matter with Amelia dead, with Seana dead. What could I do? What was left? Seana had said it—the world was ending. The gods had left us to this—to madness and death, to chaos and terror, and no one seemed willing to do anything about it except the ones trying to drag us down faster.

  The fear that had driven me this far was draining with the last of my energy. In its place, a wellspring of despair that leadened my body and dulled my mind. When the hand reached for me, I closed my eyes. I’d run out of energy to fight. It was over. Everything was over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Too Close to the Edge

  The hand didn’t belong to the monster. For all the good that did me.

  A man, pushed off balance by the rioting crowd. He grabbed the shoulder of my robe. Spinning me around.

  Too close to the edge. I fell.

  Past the thick yellow caution paint. Over the concrete lip, towards the electrified rails below.

  Instinct kicked in. Turned out I wasn’t ready to die after all. All the practice I’d had lately meant my mind could snap into the pattern it needed. As my body curled and twisted away from the rails—as I knew it wouldn’t be enough—I pushed out with magic, grabbed the energy of my fall and angled it.

  It was enough. Barely. I hit the ground, bashing my head against the gravel rather than the electrified metal line that would have meant instant death. I pulled in my arms, rolled further away. My head throbbed and when I touched where it had struck the ground, it felt wet.

  The good news this minute was the trains had been stopped. No immediate threat there. But I didn’t think I could climb back up. Even if I wanted to. Now I was down on the tracks, an avenue of escape had opened up. If I could steel myself to take it.

  The tunnel stood before me, cavernous and dark. So dark. The shadow would be invisible in there.

  I ran before I could think about it too much, before I could frighten myself into immobilization again. Behind me, a closer scream and the sudden sharp smell of ozone and burning flesh. I turned, despite myself, in time to see a woman lying dead on the rails as a third person pushed off the platform landed with a sizzling jerk right next to her.

  Seana had asked me to join her—to join them. They didn’t like to kill, she’d said. The evidence of her lie was before me. The two bodies down here and countless above. More death than I’d seen since the madness that followed the Abandon. And if they had their way, it was only going to get worse.

  If they had their way, my body would be among these. Nothing I could do for the dead. With one hand on the wall to help me stay clear of the rails, I ran into the darkness.

  The noise from the platform followed me. Screams and trampling footsteps and chaos so loud I couldn’t hear if anyone followed me. I c
ouldn’t see what was in front of me. I could only stumble forward, pressed close to the wall, with no idea where I was going or where I would emerge.

  I had no idea how long I ran. I’d lost all sense of time, of space, of reality. There was only the darkness, the echoing screams, the crunchy feel of the gravel, step after step, and the cool concrete of the wall beneath my hand. I couldn’t focus enough to count my breaths or my steps. After a time, I stopped caring.

  I’d been down here forever. It was like there’d never been a time before this darkness, this surreal horror. Maybe I’d died after all. Maybe this was my purgatory. Maybe I was slated to go on like this forever.

  I had all but resigned myself to that fate when a sudden light ahead blinded me and a voice called out, “Stop where you are!”

  #

  I raised my arm to shield my eyes against the glare. I said nothing, a mix of confusion and caution keeping me silent.

  “Are you all right?” the voice asked. Harsh, despite the question. “What’s your name?”

  I blinked, trying to see past the light shining in my eyes. A flashlight—no, two—pointed at my face. Behind them, the light of an open door. A maintenance entrance.

  As my eyes adjusted, the blurs resolved into three men and a woman—two maintenance workers and two station security. “You’ll have to come with us,” one of the security men said.

  No way to tell if one of them was a shadow. Since I’d lost track of it back on the platform, it could be anywhere.

  One of the guards reached for me. I jerked back. My back pressed against the wall, wedging the gun in my pocket painfully against my side.

  The gun. Useless in the fight with the Jansynians. Useless against the shadows. But here, now…

  I pulled it free, pointed it at the closest man. “Stay back.”

  All four pulled back away from me, hands lifted. “Easy, buddy,” the maintenance woman said.

  “Put the gun down,” the guard who’d been reaching for me said. “You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”