by Rachel Aaron
He ended with a deadly glare at me, but all I could do was gape. My god, I thought, he still doesn’t know. Kauffman had only come after me when his goons had seen me Cleaning Dr. Lyle’s robbed house, but he’d never found out about the first apartment. I’d thought for sure he must have figured it out by now, but apparently he hadn’t done much digging into my past, because he still didn’t know Dr. Lyle was dead. He thought the poor man was still cowering in his basement safe house, guiding us by remote.
I snapped my mouth shut, holding Kauffman’s eyes as I scrambled to think this through. I couldn’t do as Kauffman wanted because Dr. Lyle was dead. If I told him that, though, it would only take a few educated guesses for him to figure out Nik was using Dr. Lyle’s hand. Once he knew that, he’d just take it for himself. We’d already done the hard work of cracking the security, and while Kauffman probably didn’t have any cybernetics as a mage, one of his mercs almost certainly did. He’d take everything if I let him, but unlike Nik, I wasn’t in this for the big score. I just needed enough money to pay my dad, which meant I had room to bluff.
“How about this?” I said, giving Kauffman a sweet smile from under the merc’s boot. “Dr. Lyle is never going to tell you where he hid his ritual because he hates you, but if you get your guys off us, I will. Let Nik and me go, and we’ll guide you straight to the ritual site, where we’ll split what we find fifty-fifty. That way everyone gets a piece, and no one has to get nasty. Deal?”
“No deal!” Nik yelled, shooting me a furious look. “Don’t offer him my money!”
“Why would I split anything with you?” Kauffman said at the same time. “I have all the power, and that ritual was financed by my employer, which means everything it created belongs to us. You had your chance to cash out, but you threw it away. Your window for negotiation ended yesterday. The only options left to you now are my way…or that way.”
He pointed over the edge of his rock down at the swirling abyss, and my stomach curled into a knot. Before I could think of another angle, though, Nik spoke over me.
“So what you’re saying is it’s all or nothing.”
“You get to keep your lives,” Kauffman said with a shrug. “That’s not nothing. But if you keep trying to stall, I’m not above killing someone to speed things along. Probably you, since if Theo Lyle was going to entrust a stranger with his life’s work, he’d be far more likely to pick the pretty mage.” He smiled at Nik. “Nothing personal, Nikola. Just business. You know how it is.”
The look Nik gave him then made me sink into the ground. I’d seen him get angry plenty of times now, mostly at me, but I’d never see him look like that.
“I do know,” Nik said in a voice so cold even Kauffman flinched. “Glad we have an understanding.”
“Yes,” Kauffman said, reaching up to wipe away the drop of sweat sliding down his temple. “But this can all be avoided if you’ll just—”
He never got to finish. He’d barely started talking when Nik ripped his right arm out from under the mercenary’s metal-toed boot and swung it up, rotating his shoulder an inhuman ninety degrees in its socket to shoot the man holding him.
Since Nik’s gun was still on the grass beside him, I didn’t see how that was possible. Then I saw Dr. Lyle’s hand hit the dirt, and I understood. Nik had a secret gun inside his false arm. He’d ejected Dr. Lyle’s hand so he wouldn’t destroy it, and then he’d shot the man holding him down by surprise.
I could still see the wisp of smoke rising from the stump of his wrist as the merc fell sideways, screaming and clutching his shoulder, which was bleeding from the bottom where Nik had nailed him in the armpit, threading the needle through the tiny gap where the chest and the arm portions of his body armor came together. It was a perfect shot, one I couldn’t have made if I’d had an hour to aim, let alone in a snap shot from the ground while I was trapped on my stomach. I was still marveling at it when Nik kicked straight up off the ground like it was nothing to plant his boot in the second guard’s knee, dislocating the joint with a sickening pop.
Again, it was perfect. He’d done the whole thing in one lightning-fast motion, ending up on his feet before either of the men who’d been holding him could hit the ground. I’d never seen anyone move that fast aside from my father, but Nik was no dragon. He was worse. The Dragon of Korea fought with dignity and grace, always giving his opponents at least the pretense of a chance. Nik didn’t even give the guard on my back time to gasp before he launched forward and punched him in the throat, sliding his left hand deftly between the man’s helmet and chestplate to nail him in the windpipe.
The weight on my back vanished as the merc holding me down flew backward. To my left, the man who’d had his gun pointed at my face snatched it up in an effort to catch Nik. He must have been wired something fierce, because he almost managed to get a shot off before Nik slammed the stump of his cybernetic arm into the merc’s clear plexiglass faceplate, crushing it into the man’s nose.
By this point, I was shaking all over from a cocktail of emotions. Fear was there, definitely, and triumph, but what I felt most was awe. I’d known Nik was good, but I’d had no idea he was that good. What I’d witnessed went way beyond street-tough Cleaner. I didn’t even have words for the way Nik moved. “Beauty” almost fit, as did “grace.” But those words were too clean, too nice for the savage, tyrannical efficiency of the way he continued the punch past its natural end, slamming the man into the ground beside me with so much force that the whole floating island tilted.
But even that wasn’t enough. When the last merc dropped his gun, Nik snatched it off the ground with his remaining left hand and fired, planting a bullet in the mercenary’s dominant hand before he could even get it to his bleeding face. He did the others next, turning and shooting the soldiers-for-hire in the hands they’d used to hold their guns so they couldn’t pick them back up again. He’d just finished the last one when something fell over me.
It felt like an avalanche. We’d been in the Gnarls for a while now, and while my body would never get used to the constant pounding magic here, it had stopped taking up all of my attention. Watching Nik during the fight, I’d been too awestruck to even think about it. A stupid blunder, in hindsight, because there was one enemy Nik’s perfect storm of violence couldn’t reach, and his magic grabbed me like a giant hand, yanking me off the ground and ten feet straight up, where Kauffman was waiting with a gun of his own.
“Stop,” he ordered, shoving the short pistol’s steel barrel into the hollow below my chin. “Now.”
The words cut through the violence like knives, and Nik stopped, kicking the groaning merc at his feet one last time before craning his head back to glare at Kauffman.
“You don’t want to play this game with me,” he said quietly, slinging the blood off his fingers. “Let her go.”
“I’m not the one playing,” Kauffman snarled back, grimacing at the soldiers Nik had so efficiently taken out. “It seems the rumors were wrong. You haven’t gone soft at all, have you, Mad Dog?”
“Don’t call me that,” Nik snarled. “And your hired muscle is still alive. I’d say that’s pretty soft.”
“Maybe by your standards,” Kauffman said, his gun shaking against my skin. “But you’re not the only one after a big score.”
His eyes flicked down to Dr. Lyle’s hand on the ground. Nik’s did, too, and his body tensed. For the first time, though, he wasn’t fast enough. I barely had time to recognize the suffocating feel of Kauffman’s magic before it reached out and crushed the hand on the ground, breaking it into a million pieces.
“No!” I screamed, lurching against his hold.
Kauffman yanked me right back. “The next one will be your head,” he said, keeping his gun on me while his eyes watched Nik, who was staring at the destroyed hand as if he couldn’t believe what had just happened. “Are you listening to me? Let me talk to Dr. Lyle now.”
“You idiot!” I yelled, kicking him in the shins as hard as I could. “That was Dr.
Lyle!”
He dug the pistol harder into the underside of my jaw. “Shut. Up,” he growled. “I have more riding on this job than you can possibly know.”
“Then you should have paid more attention to current events,” Nik said furiously. “Your doctor is dead. We’ve been following what’s left of his location spell, which was inside the hand you just destroyed!”
I felt Kauffman’s body stiffen, and then he squeezed my neck so hard he almost choked me out. “You’re lying!”
“When have I ever needed to lie to you?” Nik demanded, crossing his arms over his chest. “You just played yourself, jackass! Now we’re all screwed!”
“We’ll see about that,” Kauffman said, his voice taking on a final, lethal-sounding edge. “I’m not going to be led around by the two of you again.” I felt the gun click as Kauffman tightened his finger on the trigger. “Even you’re not fast enough to beat a bullet,” he growled at Nik. “So if you care about the well-being of your new partner in petty crime, you’re going to drop the act and take me to Dr. Lyle’s ritual site. You have five seconds.”
Nik’s jaw tightened. Mine did, too, but not for the same reason. He looked frustrated and scared, but I was furious. Furious at these idiots for attacking us. Furious at Kauffman for destroying my only shot at getting free of my dad. Furious at this whole stupid situation.
Most of all, though, I was furious at myself. I’d been doing nothing but screw up since yesterday when Nik had had to save me from getting shot. I’d lost all my money, been played by my dad, and sacrificed my very last penny only to lose it all because Kauffman was too stupid to know when a bluff wasn’t a bluff. Now he was princessing me to get back the very thing he’d just destroyed, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I was the weakest link in this whole fiasco, the reason Kauffman had found us in the first place. I hadn’t felt this powerless since I’d left my father’s house. Unlike back then, though, I was free to do something about it here. The only question was what.
Even shaking with rage, I wasn’t stupid. Kauffman had a gun, and he was hands down the better mage. Now that I was inside his circles, I could feel why he’d yet to leave his floating rock. In addition to the inherent advantage of height, he’d ringed this thing with a fortress’s worth of wards. Even if Nik decided I wasn’t worth the trouble and shot at him, the bullets would never get through. So long as he stayed inside his circles, Kauffman could probably take a missile to the face and come out okay. But though he’d outmaneuvered, outgunned, and outmaged me in every possible way, there was still one place where I was still champion. One thing no one could beat me at.
I could outcrazy anybody.
“Opal,” Sibyl whispered in my ear. “Opal, don’t!”
Opal did.
With zero concern for my body or the gun pushing into it, I threw myself forward and reached with everything I had, diving into the roaring magic like I was diving off a cliff. The resulting shock of power nearly fried me on the spot. If I’d been trying to channel it or grab it or any of the things mages normally did, it would have, but I wasn’t. I’d given up even the pretense of proper magic. I had no circle, no spellwork, no careful logical system to bend the magic to my will. All I cared about was volume, so I turned my soul into a conduit, letting the magic flow through my soul as fast as it liked into the carefully constructed circles Kauffman had been stupid enough to bring me inside.
As it happened, my only regret was that, due to the way I’d lunged forward, I couldn’t see Kauffman’s face anymore. I would have given anything to see his expression as the uncontrolled magic crashed into his circles like a fire hose into a teacup. If they’d been my circles, they would have popped instantly, but Kauffman was a legitimately skilled mage. His finely wrought chain of interwoven circles lasted a good five seconds before the whole thing blew apart, sending out a shockwave that set every island in the Gnarls spinning.
Including the one we were standing on.
Reeling from the backlash, I dropped to the ground, clinging to the rough cement as the rock Kauffman had made into his battle station whirled like a top. Normally, that would have been enough to make me lose my pancakes, but what was going on inside me hurt so much I didn’t have space for anything else. I’d never had that much power through me before. It had only been a few seconds, but my magic still felt like a snapped rubber band. I hadn’t known it was possible to hurt in so many ways. From the darkness dripping into my eyes and the distant clamor of Sibyl screaming into my ears, I knew I had to be bleeding bad, but that felt like the least of my worries at the moment. I’d deal with the blood loss later, if there was a later. Right now, it was taking everything I had to keep myself together. Not my body, but what lived inside it.
It was funny. I’d been aware of magic for all of my life that I could remember. Most mages didn’t come into their power until nine or ten, but my parents had been determined to breed a prodigy. They’d packed me full of the best genetics and hired a fleet of experts to train me in how to recognize and grasp magic before I could speak. I hadn’t been able to actually cast anything until I was six, but there wasn’t a time in my life when the power hadn’t been there. Until this moment, though, when it was closer than ever to sputtering out, I’d never realized that the power I could feel constantly inside my head wasn’t just part of being a mage. It was me. My magic, my soul.
That should have made me feel even worse about being so bad at using it, but I was too drained to work up the usual bitterness. All I felt was relief that it was still there, flickering inside me. I was cupping my mental hands around it to keep it safe when another pair of hands—real, crushing ones—grabbed me by the shoulders.
Even dulled, the pain was enough to knock me out of my stupor. Groggy and reeling, I got my head up just in time to see Kauffman. He was as bloody as I was. His handsome face was a mess, and his whole body was heaving with the aftershocks of the backlash I’d brought down on us both. But even though he had to be as out of it as I was, there was hatred burning in his bloodshot eyes—real, killing fury that had nothing to do with the business he was always going on about.
“Go to hell,” he whispered, the words coming out in a spray of blood and spittle as he shoved me with all his might, sending me sliding off the still-spinning rock and into the void beyond.
Chapter 13
I fell like a stone.
There was magic rushing past me, but I couldn’t grab it. My soul was too weak, too battered to reach out.
“This is why I told you not to do it!” Sibyl screamed in my ear. “You idiot! It’s not winning if you blow yourself up too!”
She was probably right, but I was having a hard time regretting it. It had felt good to backlash Kauffman, to finally hit back at even one of the things that was constantly shoving me down. I was powerless against my father, no more respected than the little yapping dog he was always comparing me to, but for five seconds there, I’d been a nuclear weapon. A true force to be reckoned with.
Too bad it was probably going to cost me my life.
“There’s no ‘probably’ about it!” Sibyl yelled as the backstage view of the bottom of the DFZ grew smaller and smaller above us. “You are going to fall into the abyss if you don’t do. Something. Now!”
For all that she was an AI, Sibyl’s voice programming had always been top notch at conveying emotion. Her design team had won all kinds of awards for it, which was the big reason I’d purchased her over the more practical virtual assistants. I’d liked that she’d sounded alive, like a real guardian angel sitting on my shoulder. Listening to her now, I could almost forget that her concern was part of a learning algorithm designed to make her more sensitive to my needs. All I heard was the fear, the terror and sadness over what was about to happen. Happen to me.
That was finally enough to snap me out of my backlashed stupor. I came to with a gasp, my whole body going rigid as my physical state finally caught up with my mental one and realized what was happening. I was falling. Falling to m
y death if I didn’t take Sibyl’s advice and do something.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much for me to do. I was well below any of the islands, and I couldn’t even see Nik or Kauffman anymore. My poor abused magic was as useless as a broken limb. I couldn’t even flex it, let alone reach out and grab something. That should have been cause for panic, but I was too busy to care right now, so I shoved it down and moved on to my next option, which was flipping myself around.
Folding my arms and legs tight against my body, I rolled in midair, flipping my body to look down rather than up. I was hoping that there were more floating islands down here that I hadn’t been able to see from above. If I could catch one, I could break my fall. Or my arm, but that was still a step up. But while the plan was good, the reality was very much not, because the moment I rolled over, I came face to face with the void.
It was a lot scarier when you were falling into it. There was no cathedral holding me up anymore, no islands or paths. Just yawning blackness so dark and vast, the only way I knew my eyes were open was because of the wind that was stinging them. There was nothing to cling to, nothing to catch. Just the dark and the cold, hard understanding that I was going to die. I was going to die.
I did start to panic then. Truly panic like I never had before in my life. I was vaguely aware of Sibyl saying something soothing and reasonable in my ear, but I was past processing words. The animal part of my brain had taken over, leaving me clawing the air as I fell and fell and fell into magic that got thicker and thicker and thicker.