by K. M. Ruiz
“Kristen,” Samantha said sharply.
“You’re no fun, Sammy-girl,” Kristen complained as she stepped over Gideon’s still body and back to her sister’s side.
“Is he dead?” Quinton asked carefully after a few seconds.
“No.” Samantha sounded as if the word hurt her. “I don’t have enough strength left in me to kill him.”
Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Maybe her reluctance was due to the nine months they floated together in an artificial womb and the eighteen years since that they had stood side by side beneath Nathan’s judging eyes. It didn’t matter. This was where her loyalty ended—with Gideon still breathing.
Quinton leaned against the other chair, staring at Lucas’s sisters while blood dripped down onto the floor from his fingers and his face. “What are you doing?”
“What you couldn’t,” Samantha explained as she worked her way through the power plant’s control system using access codes instead of a hack. “I stripped everything we’d need to bring this place back online out of the minds of the engineers and scientists before killing them.”
“You do it on Lucas’s order?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t. Why isn’t he here?”
“Because he and that other telepath are busy holding off what’s left of the Strykers and Warhounds that are still on the field. We’ve got maybe five minutes, if we’re lucky, to lock in the codes before the military reaches this place.”
“Jin Li went after Threnody.”
“I know. They both have their parts to play.”
“What do you mean?” Quinton demanded, jerking himself up straight again. “You’re not going to try and help her?”
Samantha didn’t look away from the vidscreen. “I can bring this plant online, but it’s going to take time to generate the amount of electricity Lucas needs to reach where it has to go. Threnody’s an electrokinetic. So is Jin Li. There is a derecho storm raging outside. Do the math, Stryker.”
Quinton didn’t need to. He was already staggering out of the control room on shaky legs, heart pounding in his chest as he raced against time, knowing it was already too late even as the first hint of sound started to come from the machines around him.
The power plant was starting to come online again.
[THIRTY-TWO]
AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA
There was a service door—locked, of course—that she had to fry before she could shove it open. It took all her strength against the crushing weight of the wind to move it. Threnody stood in the doorway, braced against the fury of the storm while acid rain lashed her body.
The transformer and transmission lines weren’t housed in a separate building. They were outside, maybe twenty meters from the door and farther than that from the cooling tower. Located in the back, far from where the Strykers and the Warhounds were fighting Lucas and Kerr, they were cold, most of the city running off strained backup generators during the storm. Even if they weren’t running at full power, they were still capable of transmuting electricity, of carrying it forward.
“I must be losing my mind,” Threnody muttered under her breath as she stepped out into the storm.
Getting soaked wasn’t new. The ground between the main building and the tall transmission towers was covered in cement, rain flooding the place. It sloshed over her boots, making it slippery to walk, much less run, as she made her way to the bulky transformer.
After the Border Wars, when many of America’s and the rest of the world’s electrical grids had been destroyed, rebuilding them had been a top priority for the survivors. They were limited, though, built specifically to support small pockets of survivors and expanding no farther than that. The government had controlled the output of electricity back then and still did now, because controlling the resources that everyone needed kept the population in check.
A wire fence surrounded the transformer block, more for safety than to keep anyone out, but it was still a restricted space. The door was locked, the mechanism easy to fry to gain entrance. Shoving the door open as wide as she could, Threnody stumbled toward her goal.
The transformer block was a three-phase system, with heavy wires pulled taut between the transformer and the transmission tower that they fed into. Even with the light coming from the single spotlight focused on the area inside the fence, it was almost impossible to see where those transmission lines disappeared to in the storm.
Swiping water out of her eyes, blinking against the sting it left behind, Threnody maneuvered her way back around the transformer block to the front, running through her options. Walking around that last corner, she came face-to-face with Jin Li. Threnody jerked back out of instinct, her feet nearly sliding out from beneath her. Jin Li followed her with electricity sparking in long arcs between his fingers.
“Your partner’s being torn to pieces by Gideon,” Jin Li shouted over the noise of the storm as Threnody twisted around the corner.
“He knew the risks,” Threnody yelled back. “We all did.”
“Those risks are gonna get you dead, girl.”
Jin Li lunged forward, aiming his fist at her face. Threnody ducked, twisting her body against his attack and the wind. Her hand hit the ground for balance as she lashed out with a sharp kick to Jin Li’s knee that he avoided by jumping out of reach. Threnody hauled herself back to a standing position, sliding her feet farther apart for balance as she tapped into her power.
Blue electricity wrapped around her fists, a match for the power that sparked around Jin Li’s. He grinned at her, face eerily lit by the lightning exploding through the sky above them. Threnody could feel the charge in the air, could feel it in her skin all the way down to her bones. Her body practically hummed with the power that the derecho storm was generating.
Jin Li moved over the slick surface of the ground, one hand stabbing forward. Electricity danced through the air between them, crackling against Threnody’s power, over her skin. She returned the gesture with a wide arc of electricity that cut through his attack and slammed into him. Blue sparks lit up the air around them, tiny Vesuvius flares that would have blinded anyone who didn’t have their power.
It wasn’t often that electrokinetics fought like this, electricity cutting through the air from body to body like lightning did from sky to earth, cloud to cloud. Their power wasn’t meant to function like that; they needed a conduit to keep the electricity flowing. The storm above had charged the very air they breathed enough to be that bridge.
This wasn’t like Johannesburg. It wasn’t even like the Slums. Threnody knew what she was fighting for this time and she couldn’t afford to lose. That desperation drove her forward, forcing her inside Jin Li’s defenses to take the blows he gave her and pound her own against his body. They used their fists, feet, and knees, the crackling burn of their power, but when it came right down to it, Jin Li was a Class II and she wasn’t. He would always have the upper hand, and Threnody still wasn’t fully recovered from everything she’d gone through over the past few months.
His foot caught the edge of her knee in a hard kick, knocking her legs out from under her. Threnody grunted as she fell, pain stabbing up her left thigh. Jin Li pinned her to the ground, his weight heavy on her chest, but not as heavy as the hands around her throat. Threnody wrapped her own hands around his wrists, choking against the pressure of his fingers and the bright sparks of his power.
“Lucas was never worth shit,” Jin Li said around gritted teeth, electricity crawling over his face in sharp lines that had no pattern. “You chose the wrong side, Stryker. All that’s left for you to do is die.”
Black spots ate into her vision, the brightness fading. She couldn’t breathe, lungs burning beneath her ribs and her heart beating so fast that she could feel its speed. Threnody stared up past Jin Li’s determined face, at the swirling blackness of the storm, and thought about everyone in the underground hangars, waiting to launch in scavenged shuttles. About the peop
le who would be left behind when the government chose only those they considered worthy to be human enough to leave this world. She thought about Lucas and Aisling, and wondered how that little girl had died, if she had died like this, with the life choked out of her as the world went to hell.
No, Threnody thought as lightning cut through the sky.
She was a Stryker, a psion. A Class III electrokinetic. Threnody Corwin at your fucking service. But more than that, at the most basic level, she was a living, breathing battery with a brain. It’s what her power was, it’s how her body functioned, charged from the inside out.
She let Jin Li’s wrist go, lifting one hand past his head for the sky above them. Electricity sparked dully at her fingertips, the world narrowing to tunnel vision that was all black clouds and white lightning. She could feel the charge in her nerve endings, the way it set her hair standing on end. The smell of ozone as the world got suddenly brighter, a blinding whiteness that exploded through her, running down her arm into her body, through Jin Li’s hands, and straight into him.
Jin Li screamed when the bolt of lightning hit them, propelled backward from the harsh shock of a near system overload. Threnody forced herself off the ground. Electricity was jumping between them, flowing over the water-soaked ground and across the metal fence, the transformers, everything, flinging back through her and him in a loop that would kill them both soon enough. She wrapped her burning, bleeding hands over Jin Li’s shoulders and pushed the momentarily stunned man backward with all her strength until he hit the side of the transformer.
His brown eyes had a blue-white sheen over them when they focused on her. He spoke, but Threnody didn’t hear what he said. She doubted he heard her either.
“You’re never getting off this planet,” she promised.
Threnody kept her eyes wide-open, the world becoming a flash image in her brain as she sucked up every last bit of electric power into her body and channeled it through Jin Li’s, forcing it farther into the transformer behind him. The smell of burning flesh reached her nose; her nerves never noticed the damage. Threnody held on, driving the electricity farther, down coils and wires, through conductors, and into the transmission lines, up into the towers that sparked and popped beneath the sudden heavy load.
The power had no place to go except out.
Threnody pried her fingers off Jin Li long seconds later, the man still connected to the transformer by way of burned and melting flesh, his body still jerking from the electricity that was running through him, killing him by quick degrees. Threnody left all the skin of her fingers and palms on his shoulders, blackened strips peeling off as she collapsed to the ground.
Lying there, in the hot water beneath the storm, with acid rain pelting her body and her heart beating jaggedly in her chest, Threnody let the world fade away.
The electricity she had called down out of the sky still burned through the transformer, funneled with precision through the transmission lines as it scattered to the substations that existed throughout Buffalo. It only took seconds for that power to reach through kilometers of power lines and feed a city starved for energy.
That night, Buffalo lit up as if it were on fire for the first time in decades, in centuries, a brightly glowing sprawl that burned defiantly beneath the storm.
PART EIGHT
DELIVERANCE
SESSION DATE: 2128.07.13
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 638
“We know you have the answers,” the doctor says as she picks up a white card from the deck on the table. One side is blank, the other side holds a shape viewable only by the doctor.
“They aren’t your answers. Purple star,” Aisling says as the EEG and supporting machines click and whine, spikes reading across the screen. She is kneeling on the chair, attention elsewhere, yellow dress twisted around her legs.
The doctor places the card down and marks something in her notes before picking up another. “Your track record for being right is unmatched.”
“With the cards? Orange square.”
Another card gets set aside. “With where the bombs fall.”
“They’re not done falling. I’ve told you that. This is reeducation on a worldwide level. This is how we start over. Everyone will say the same thing eventually.”
“By killing ourselves?” The expression on the doctor’s face is angry, but the grief in her voice is what makes the girl finally glance at her. The look in Aisling’s bleached-out violet eyes is startlingly adult.
“You kill us without regret. You’re killing me.”
“Aisling, we’re not … we’re not killing you. You’ve just been a little sick, that’s all. We’re treating you for it.”
“No, you’re not,” the girl whispers, shoulders slumping. “You can’t fix me and I can’t see the world how you want me to.”
For once, in a long, long while, the machines are quiet.
[THIRTY-THREE]
AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA
The lights in the hangar snapped on with a startling, loud hum, blinding everyone who had been sitting in the flight decks of the shuttles. Jason leaned forward, jerked out of the middle another diagnostic test, and stared at the hangar.
“Fuck, they did it,” Jason said as he cut the diagnostics short. He started to upload the destination coordinates that Lucas had given him hours ago into the corresponding shuttles through the hive connection in the computer.
Beside him, Matron opened an uplink on her terminal even as she started to kick the shuttle into full flight readiness. “Alpha shuttle to Beta and all others, do you copy, over?”
She got a multitude of responses, all calling in their status as she strapped into her flight harness. When all thirty-five shuttles came back with positive identification, Matron said, “Do you have power at the launch sites, over?”
More affirmatives.
“Then get the hell into the air, out.” Matron cut the uplink and turned her head to look at Jason. “You ready?”
“Already powering up the launch silo,” Jason said, his hands flying over the controls in front of him.
Outside the confines of the shuttles, the control terminals to the side of the launchpad were picking up Jason’s signals. Computers switched out of power-save mode into full activation as Jason plugged in the commands remotely. Above them, in that wide, round launch silo, lights came on in a continuous line. The blast doors at the top of that long open space responded to the orders currently driving its system and began to open. A hole appeared high above, quickly getting larger, allowing rain and mud to drop down onto the shuttles below.
In Alpha shuttle, Jason was trying to contact Lucas or Kerr telepathically, but no one was responding on the shared psi link. Swearing, Jason shook his head. “They’re not answering my call.”
“They dead?” Matron asked.
“No. I’d have felt the psi link sever if that was the case. Hurts like a bitch when it happens.”
“We can’t wait here. Not for much longer.” Matron switched to an uplink with the other two shuttles in the hangar with them. “Grady, Torrance, get the hell out of here. We’re holding for the main cargo, out.”
Jason ground his teeth and dropped his head into his hands. Lucas, Kerr, I need a response, damn it.
The roar of the first shuttle activating its vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) function nearly drowned out Jason’s thoughts and the faint, telepathic voice that finally crawled through the psi link.
We need a pickup, Lucas said, mental voice strained and distant, almost fractured. At power plant two. Teleportation isn’t possible.
Understood.
Jason opened his eyes in time to see the first shuttle launching out of the silo and the second already lifting into the air. “They need a pickup.”
“Fuck,” Matron swore as she stabbed a finger at Jason. “Blow the charges.”
; Jason picked up the remote detonator from the control panel and unlocked the device. He gripped it tightly as the second shuttle cleared the launch silo, and then it was their turn. Matron was a scavenger, born and bred, part of a people who possessed any number of skills in order to survive. That she could pilot a shuttle wasn’t surprising; he just hoped she was good at it. Matron activated the VTOL, and Jason felt the shuttle shake as it lifted into the air. It rose higher and faster through the launch silo, the storm rushing down to meet them.
They cleared the blast doors and Jason pressed his thumb down hard on the detonator’s red button. It sent out a limited-range signal, picked up by the receivers far below. The charge coursed through the C-4, and the resulting explosions rocked the stormy air, buffeting the shuttle with shocking intensity. Despite the wind and the rain, the fire they left behind wasn’t going to go out anytime soon.
Matron was already pulling away, banking hard to the left, struggling to keep the shuttle steady in the face of turbulent winds. When she spoke, she sounded almost in awe. “Holy mother of God.”
Below them, every street filled with light, was the city of Buffalo. The sprawl stretched from Lake Erie all the way to the east, where it faded into emptiness. The city towers were like burning fingers to the north, a misguided crowning glory.
“Never saw it like this before,” Matron murmured, her sharp eyes studying the shuttle’s instruments as well as the view.
“Never going to again,” Jason said as he plotted a course and uploaded the vector onto Matron’s hologrid for her to see.
On their radar, they were picking up thirty-five other bogeys—shuttles scattered around the southern edge of the city—and about a hundred more coming out of Toronto.