City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World)

by Barbara J. Webb

  “Just call me if you need anything else,” our escort said, and left, closing the door behind him.

  “This situation’s going to hell,” Molly said once we three were alone.

  “More than you know.” Iris closed her eyes briefly, but that was the only sign she gave of just how upset she still was. “P&B’s been compromised. I can’t be any more specific, but I’m going to tell you to disregard any orders you receive that don’t come from me or from Amelia in person. Don’t trust any electronic communications—not even if you get a call from someone who sounds like Amelia. It isn’t her on the other end. The real Amelia will bring you instructions in person if she needs to rearrange the security from what I’m about to tell you.”

  Molly nodded, attentive. While she was focused on Iris, I took the opportunity to study her as deep as I could. If a shadow was inside her and left any trace of itself visible, I would see.

  Pointing at the screens as she talked, Iris explained the changes she wanted, the new patrol patterns, the new schedules. The fact no employee, no matter how trusted, was to be left alone. “There’s magic at work here. It’s nothing we’ve seen before, but in short, any single person can be compromised. Anyone. Even Amelia or me—don’t trust either of us unless we’re accompanied by at least one other person from P&B.” This was our ace in the hole. Shadow-Amelia might travel down here herself—it wasn’t like they had to worry about her safety—but she wouldn’t know we’d given Molly these instructions. “If you see any of us alone, we are to be put under guard—multiple guards—and you are to hold us no matter what we say.”

  Another of the many signs I’d ignored while I was sleepwalking through my life—signs that P&B was more than the simple investigation firm we advertised—Molly nodded, accepting Iris’s instructions without question.

  Or maybe she didn’t have to question because the shadow inside her already knew exactly what was going on.

  But hopefully, with these new instructions, even if Molly herself was compromised, this would slow the shadows down. Certainly Iris and I had no plans to go anywhere until we’d seen these new instructions put into action.

  Molly tapped a button on her earpiece and started talking through the new orders. On the wall, I was able to watch the men and women of her security teams rearrange into the new patterns with reassuring efficiency. As I scanned across the screens, activity at the front gate caught my eye. “Who’s that?” I asked, pointing to the tall, long-haired man who had drawn the crowd in around himself as he was speaking.

  Molly tapped her earpiece again, so she was talking just to us. “One of the lead protesters. There’s about half a dozen of them who periodically get up and give little speeches. Keep the people nice and angry.” She rolled her eyes. “’Cause sleep deprivation is everyone’s best friend.”

  It was like a new game—what would happen if this person was the missing shadow? “It looks like he’s trying to get the mob riled up.”

  “They do that.” She sighed and turned her headset back on. “HQ to gate—anything going on out there we should know about?”

  She listened, head tilted, then said, “Thanks. Keep me posted.” She tapped off her mic. “Like I said, nothing we haven’t heard before.”

  Iris, too, was watching the man. “How riled has the crowd gotten so far? What happens if they try to storm the gates?”

  “Then they’re running straight into a line of automatic rifles. We’re fortified and well-supplied. They’re unarmed civilians. They’d have to be suicidal to try it, and I think we’d discourage them pretty fast.”

  Mob mentality. These people were desperate, scared, and they knew they were running out of time. The right trigger at the right time—“We need to get out there,” I said to Iris.

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  The people on the screen were shouting, cheering, yelling. We had no sound, only the images of mouths moving and fists pumping into the air. And the tall man in the center, shouting with them, pointing at the gate.

  “Oh no no no,” Molly said, leaning forward. “Gate, what’s happening?”

  I couldn’t hear their response, but I saw guns being raised towards the crowd. “Shit,” Molly hissed. “He can’t be—” She turned back at us. “He’s yelling about sacrifice, death for the greater good, crazy nonsense. He’s going to march them right into our guns.”

  “And if he falls, someone else will take up where he left off.” Exhaustion filled Iris’s voice. “And another after that. Until they’ve killed—”

  I couldn’t bear the thought. “Tell them not to shoot.”

  “I can’t do that,” Molly said.

  Of course. Why would she listen to me? “Iris,” I pleaded.

  “Ash, we can’t—”

  “We can’t stand here and watch these people die.”

  “Without this water, the whole city dies!”

  “The city’s dying! The city has one chance, and only once chance, and you and I both know what that is. If we minimize short-term bloodshed by letting these people get in here and just take the water they need—”

  The distinct sound of an automatic pistol being cocked interrupted me. Molly had a weapon in her hand. It wasn’t pointed at me, not yet, but her expression was wary. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I was given my instructions by Amelia Price, and her orders came from the city council. We’re defending this water. That’s the end of it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Watching through the Glass

  I saw what was coming. And I had no idea how to stop it.

  Through the video screen, I couldn’t search the man’s eyes for signs of possession, but I could imagine the scenario if he was, and that scenario was pretty much playing out in front of me. He yelled, pumping his fist in the air, driving the crowd around him into a frenzy. Molly was back on the line with the guards, ordering them to hold their positions, to ready their weapons. And, gods help us, to fire upon anyone who got too close.

  To anyone who didn’t know, he probably looked brave. This man, this firebrand who took the lead. He seemed to have no fear of death, and why should he when he was already dead? But Iris and I were the only ones who knew that.

  I watched, paralyzed, as he ran forward. We had no sound from the video feeds, couldn’t hear the gunshot, but I saw his body jerk and fall.

  The crowd went mad. They surged forward in a suicidal madness. The guards in front of the barriers fell back as the guards on the wall opened fire.

  It would have been enough. Amelia knew her business. The security teams knew their business. They had the arms and the position to turn back even this crowd. Hundreds were about to die, but they weren’t going to break the reservoir’s defenses.

  Except for the shadows.

  I saw it move. For the first time since my original vision of Eddis’s death, I saw one move outside the flesh. Darkness incarnate, flowing out from the fallen body of the dead instigator. In the crowd, in the chaos, I would have missed it if I hadn’t been watching for it.

  “Iris—” was all I had time to say as the shadow flicked across the open space and up the wall and flowed into the body of an unsuspecting guard. How did no one see that? How could no one—

  The newly possessed guard lifted his gun away from the crowd and turned it on the man beside him. Four members of the security team fell in succession. Molly’s volume escalated as she demanded an explanation of what was happening. Iris and I stood silent, watching. We knew.

  “We need to get out there.” Iris said, her calm voice a surreal counterpoint to Molly’s yelling. “We’re the only ones who can stop it.”

  I knew she was right. I tried to nod, to agree with her, but my body felt like stone. Impossible to breathe, much less move or speak. Trapped in my own nightmare, where once again I was a helpless witness to a horror I couldn’t fix.

  Amelia’s people were the best, but no one could have prepared them for this. For their own people turning against them with n
o logic or warning. The first possessed guard was shot down, but his executioner was the next to be taken, the next to turn against her own people. The shadow-created chaos was enough to give the protesters a chance to make the gate. Giants reached up, grabbed guards off the wall, and pulled them down into the rabid crowd. Weapons changed hands. Now the shooting came from both sides and I’d lost track of the shadow.

  “Ash!” Iris said, sharper. She grabbed my arm and dragged me to the door.

  The open ground around the security building had become a warzone. Except I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t hear it.

  I stood on a balcony at Kaifail’s temple, looking out on the chanting crowd. Demanding we come out, demanding we let them in, demanding we bring back the rain, demanding we bring back the gods.

  I lay in a hospital bed, immobile from the bandages and the drugs and the pain that the first two couldn’t stop, smelling smoke as the city burned.

  I ran through a dark alley. Never fast enough. Never far enough. Felt hands catch me. Felt the first blow of a wooden board against the side of my face. Felt the first burning lash of a knife in my side.

  “Ash!” Those hands on my shoulder. I struggled, fought back, the terror a bitter taste in my mouth.

  “Ash!”

  My ribs cracked. Kick after kick in my sides. Coughing blood. I couldn’t breathe.

  “God-dammit, Ash!” Shaking me. “I need you with me.”

  Iris’s voice was my lifeline. I clung to it, an anchor against the waking nightmares trying to smother me.

  Gunshots and screams. Real or imagined? Happening now or echoes of before? “Iris,” I gasped against the weight on my chest.

  “Faster, Ash,” she snapped. “No time right now for you to flip out.”

  Iris, the irritation in her voice a thin mask over her own fear. That was real. That was now.

  I closed my eyes, forced air through my lungs, focused on Iris, on her voice, her presence, her reality. I willed, I prayed that when I opened my eyes again the world would be real again.

  For good or ill, it was. Iris had pulled us back against the security building, out of the worst of the fight that surrounded us. “I’m here,” I tried to say, but I couldn’t make any noise.

  Iris nodded at the shape my lips made, searched my face. “Hold it together just a little longer. Then we’ll go have a breakdown together.”

  “Right.” My throat croaked around the word, but at least the sound came out. “Where is it?”

  “How should I know? You’re the one who can see it.”

  The calm I needed for magic was out of the question at this moment. I scanned around us, the pockets of fighting. A lizard bleeding from the shoulder wrestling with one of the guards for his gun. A giant carrying a rifle that looked like a toy in her hands, swinging it around her like a bludgeon. Three human civilians with a guard on the ground before them, kicking her over and over—

  My throat threatened to close again and I jerked back against the wall. “Everything’s falling apart. They don’t care about any of these people. He’s done what he came to do.”

  “No he hasn’t.” Iris shifted with the speed of breath. In one liquid motion, a bear lunged in front of me to deflect two rushing men carrying broken pieces from the gate barriers. She knocked them aside, then melted back into herself. “Come on.”

  I got it. Slower than Iris, but I understood. These people—these desperate people—they wanted in. They wanted the water, and they’d take it. But not all of it. There was still enough water in the reservoir, they couldn’t take all of it. This mob, once they’d won their way through, would reduce the water supply, but they wouldn’t destroy it. The shadows wanted it destroyed.

  Iris dove into the fray, towards the tunnel that led into the heart of the dam. She needed me to follow. She wouldn’t be able to see the monster until it was crawling its way inside her.

  The first step forward, away from the wall, into the madness, was the hardest thing I ever had to do.

  I made that step. Then another. Then another. And I was running after her.

  #

  Iris had studied the security plans, so I hoped that meant she knew where she was going. I followed her through the red-lit maintenance-ways, up narrow staircases, higher and higher. We weren’t the first to make it into the tunnels; the floors were wet with blood and littered with bodies. Some shot, some bludgeoned to death, and a few with no visible wounds. From the shadow we hunted? If so, we were on the right track, but with no idea how far we were behind.

  Voices, shouts, screams echoed around us. In a better life, this would have been a nightmare, but my bar for terrifying had been pushed pretty high these last few days and after making it through the fight outside in the courtyard, my mind seemed to have settled into a middle-gear, adrenaline-smoothed dread.

  At the top of a metal staircase, Iris banged open a heavy metal door that led us back outside. We both raced onto the starlit walkway at the top of the dam. Far below, I could see the struggle continuing in the street and courtyard.

  Up here, we were not alone.

  A woman in a tattered robe stood about a hundred feet away, in the control booth that looked out over the much-diminished lake of the reservoir. Through the glass, I could see her frowning at the panel of flashing lights before her. As the door closed behind us with a loud ca-thunk, she looked up at Iris and me and smiled.

  Oh how I knew that smile. “It’s the shadow.”

  “Give me your gun.”

  I passed the gun to Iris as the shadow-possessed woman started pressing buttons and turning dials. It was obvious she didn’t know what she was doing, but the longer she stayed in there the more likely she was to cause problems.

  Iris fired a shot at the window. It cracked, but didn’t shatter. The shadow-woman laughed. “You’ll have to come and get me,” she singsonged without looking up, safe behind the bullet-proof glass.

  No. Not this time. I pushed my hand forward, the gesture a focus as I willed the cracks to grow, to spread, to separate. Energy into the fractures begun by Iris’s bullet.

  The glass exploded inward, turning the shadow’s laugh into a shriek. Then five more deafening shots as Iris emptied the gun.

  The woman slumped forward, her head and shoulders a pulpy mess. I watched the inky darkness float up and braced myself. I’d fought this creature off in the warehouse. I could do it again.

  Except it didn’t advance on us. It zipped away into the greater darkness of the night. “It’s running away.” I grabbed Iris’s arm, relief so intense it made my hand shake. “We did it. We saved—”

  An alarm sounded all around us, an echoing klaxon from speakers both here and at the dam’s base. The people far below stopped their fighting, staring up. Iris ran for the booth as I stared down, over the reservoir side of the damn.

  The shadow ran because it had accomplished its goal. The release gates were opening. As I leaned over the railing, a sound floated up that I hadn’t heard for months. A sound I hadn’t been sure I would ever in my life hear again.

  The sound of rushing water.

  #

  Iris couldn’t stop it. We didn’t know how the controls worked any more than the shadow had. And luck was not on our side.

  As the gates opened, the water filled the channels that led down from the reservoir and out around the edge of the city, into the desert. Designed to relieve pressure if the water got too high, the canals weren’t designed to carry the full rushing weight of water from fully opened gates. First a stream, then a flood, the water filled the little canals, then flooded over the side, splashing into the courtyard, the street, and the thirsty thirsty ground.

  The uncontrolled deluge of water stopped everything happening below. Greeted first by cheers, then by horrified shouts as they realized all the water was running away, soaking into the sand. All the water, Miroc’s last hope, would be gone—irretrievably gone—in minutes.

  I knew enough—I’d seen enough to realize what that meant. Miroc�
�s lifespan from here would be measured in hours. Fires, riots, fights—the city would tear itself apart before the sun could rise and desiccate what was left. We had one chance and one chance alone—one last shot at averting the end of the world.

  “Fly back to the temple,” I yelled at Iris. “You’ll be able to get across the city faster than I can. Get Spark and Vogg and Syed. Meet me at the Web. At our entry point into the Crescent.”

  “What if they aren’t ready?” she shouted back.

  I didn’t answer. She knew we’d run out of time as well as I did. She hesitated only a moment longer, then ran and jumped off the edge of the damn, changing into a falcon as she hit the air. I went to the booth to retrieve the gun she’d left. We were going to need it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Breaking In

  Kaifail was an asshole.

  He was a liar and a cheat. He stacked the deck against people and then punished them when they failed to live up to his expectations. He was manipulative. He was uncaring.

  And he was gone.

  I thought I’d already faced the end of the world. With the Abandon, with the deaths of the Favored Children, when the people turned against the priesthoods, when they rioted, when they tore down everything and everyone I had known.

  But if these last few days had taught me anything, it was that there was always more to lose. Always more people trying to take those things away.

  I’d let so much be taken. I’d run, I’d hidden, I’d compromised, hoping at some point the universe would be sated, that I would wake up one morning to a world that said I’ve taken enough and then left me alone. That it would all just go away.

  Stupid. Because this was what it looked like when the world went away. It was all going—really going. My friends, my city, and the people within it.

  I’d been so angry at those people, sitting around and waiting for the gods to save them, but how had I been any better? I wasn’t hoping for rescue, just indifference. Hoping the bad things would stop if I lay low enough and quiet enough and didn’t ever think about it too much.