Liu kept looking up at her, momentarily dumbstruck. Whether flesh-and-blood or a figment of his imagination, she was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. Her face was angular and fine-featured with high cheekbones and dark brown eyes that slanted up a little at the corners. Somehow, the bulky animal skins in which she was wrapped only seemed to accentuate the long, seductive, length of her body.
She knelt beside him, her breechcloth riding up over her bare knee. Then she planted the staff in the snow and touched her hands to his shaking chest, sliding them under his shirt, sharing her warmth.
“This snow,” she said, “it falls from desert skies. Do you know why?”
“Yes,” he said. “There’s not much time left – the end of the world is near.”
She nodded. Her fingers were very soft moving over him.
“Of all the horrors darkness holds, to die alone, that it my worst fear,” she said.
One hand withdrew from him, went to a cord fastener on her jacket, opened it. She pulled him into its folds, pressed herself against him.
“With you, Liu Kang,” she said. “I am not afraid.”
He felt his heart racing. His throat was suddenly tight.
Her hands moved over him.
“I don’t even know who you are,” he said huskily.
“All you need to know is that I am here to help you,” she said. She stroked his hair, her breath moist and feathery against his neck. “Take my warmth. Let it give you strength for your battle.”
“You’re almost too good to be true,” he said, letting himself be drawn closer to her.
She moved against him, her lips parting.
“The same could be said about you,” she said, and tilted her head forward, and brushed her mouth against his own. “We can defy the darkness by creating the light of new life.”
His head swimming, Liu started to return her kiss, but suddenly hesitated.
“No,” he rasped. “I… I can’t.”
“Don’t say that.” She snaked her arms around his waist, moving, moving, pressing closer to him. “Together we could melt the snow, Liu Kang.”
Liu pushed away. “Stop–”
“Together we could live our final days–”
“No,” Liu said, struggling against her. Against himself. “My heart belongs to another.”
Her eyes lowered as he drew back from her.
Gently, he cupped her chin in his hand, raised her face until their eyes met.
“If you’re really here for me, Jade, help us defeat Shao Kahn.”
She looked at him a while, then smiled and kissed him again – but this time it was a quick, chaste peck on the cheek.
“You are even more pure and faithful than I heard,” she said. “You have passed the test, Liu Kang.”
He looked at her in bewilderment.
“A test? This was all just another of Nightwolf’s tests?”
She took hold of his hand.
“An enjoyable one for me,” she said. “And under different circumstances, I would not have wanted it to end just yet. But we must get to Mount Gaia. The others will be waiting.”
He shook his head. “No. If this was a test, it was only the second. I’m not ready.”
“Not ready to save Kitana? Because I can take you to the prison where she’s kept.”
He looked at her. “You’ve seen her? She’s alive?”
“For now, yes.” Jade fell momentarily silent. The sound of battle horns blared in the distance. “Kahn is near. We must go.”
Liu glanced in the general direction of the clamor, took a deep breath, then rose slowly to his feet and began following her across the icy tundra.
From his vantage atop a high, snowy precipice, Nightwolf watched Liu and Jade begin their journey across the storm-swept mesa and gazed toward the heavens.
“I tried, Rayden, but he’s not ready. He still doubts himself.”
His face troubled, he waited for some kind of response. But all that came was the senseless shrieking of the wind.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On Outworld, cobalt, a brittle metallic element essential to the production of plasma weapons, was a commodity valued above all else under the twin moons. Discoveries of natural deposits were claimed as personal property by the sovereign ruler, and anyone outside his government caught hoarding or black-marketing the mineral was shuttled off to one of the hellish cobalt mines across the land.
There, punishment and slave labor came together in unholy union as prisoners toiled under the watchful gaze of elite Shokan guards, mutant nomads with organic metal endoskeletons, and hundreds of rank-and-file Outworld warriors, all under the command of General Baraka. Insectile eight-legged grots, their shaggy thoraxes as long as five grown men standing in line, hauled cards full of raw ore up to the storage silos in a constantly moving train. Day and night without any lull, the underground mine shaft rang with the clamor of pick axes breaking sound, the moans of sick, starved, and exhausted inmates, and occasionally the screams of women who had been pulled from the work details to provide unspeakable amusements to their keepers.
Now Baraka leaned over the rail of an observation platform above the yard, his flat, batrachian eyes watching with interest as a prisoner trying to unload his heavy bushel of cobalt into a cart collapsed from weariness, his legs giving out underneath him.
Baring his sharklike teeth in a perverse approximation of a grin, the general descended from the platform and approached the man.
“Work harder, or you will pay for your laziness!” he said.
“I have paid all a man can,” the prisoner can.
Baraka studied him closely. His eyes were drab and recessed in their sockets. His legs were bowed. His skin hung from his face in pale, saggy wattles. He looked like a sack of loose bones.
“As long as you breathe, pain is the price I will exact,” he barked, and then backhanded the prisoner, who went down with a sound that was something between a wheeze and a moan.
His grin never fading, Baraka kicked him in the face, arms and chest, kicked him repeatedly and automatically until he went tumbling into the forsaken depths of the prison.
“You all work for the glory of His Magnificence Shao Kahn, World-Conquerer, Master of War,” Baraka announced to the prisoners around him, basking in their cowed attention and making sure his voice projected into a chamber at the back of the mine, where Kahn himself had trotted atop his winged black steed after arriving scant moments earlier. Those in the royal bloodline enjoyed having their egos massaged as much as anyone – more so, in fact, perhaps due to the expectations they felt obliged to live up to – and Baraka had not attained his high position without knowing how to curry favor with them.
This time, however, Kahn was oblivious to his general’s flattery. Though the massive doors of the chamber were still flung open behind him, allowing sounds from the mine to echo into its sweltering gloom, his attention was fixed on one of the many crude wooden cages hanging from supports high above.
Inside the cage, Kitana faced him in utter silence, her eyes showing no trace of fear or intimidation.
“All your past betrayals, I can forgive,” he said, holding out a ladle of water. “For you are my daughter, Kitana.”
She reached between the bars, took the offered ladle from his hand, and drank. When she passed it back to him, it was empty.
A grin started forming on Kahn’s lips… and froze there as she spat out the water, expelling it in a stream that hit him full in the face.
“You sorely test my patience,” he said, and wiped his cheek with his sleeve. His grin had become a rictus of suppressed anger.
“You destroyed my family,” Kitana said. Her voice was flat, without emotional content. “You drove my mother to kill herself. I am your enemy forever. So kill me now if you dare.”
Kahn chuckled. “Foolish child. A struggling worm on the hook lands a bigger catch than the dead one.”
He tugged sharply on his reins and the black mount reared underneath him,
then turned in a half circle, its ribbed, featherless wings rippling and flapping.
“Kitana does not need water, so let us honor her wishes!” he said, dipping the ladle in the water bucket again, then showing it to the other prisoners in the containment chamber.
There were thirsty grunts and smacking lips. Hands thrust out of the pens, their dirty, scabrous fingers groping.
Kahn displayed the ladle for another moment, letting the prisoners work themselves into a frenzy, savoring the power he held over them. Then he tipped it over and let the water splash to the ground.
“Today,” he said, “no one drinks.”
Hoarse moans of agony rising around him, Kahn flicked a look of cruel satisfaction over his shoulder at Kitana, then spurred his horse away without another word.
Sonya and Jax stood at the base of a high granite ridge, the darkness behind them roaring with the savage cries of an Extermination Squad in full pursuit.
“You know your plan about how our superior fitness and training would wear these guys out?” Jax said, glancing back over his shoulder.
“Yeah.”
“It ain’t working.”
“Then I guess you’d better push harder, my friend,” she said, squeezing his shoulder.
They scrambled up the escarpment, clawing for purchase, dirt and pebbles skittering away under their hands and feet, their muscles aching from exertion. After a while they paused to rest on a rocky prominence and snatched a quick look down into the depression far below.
What they saw stole their breath away.
Hauntingly beautiful, the vestiges of a lost civilization stretched off into the moon-washed distance. Masonry buildings, wide paved courts, and temples decorated with massive colonnades, statues, and reliefs lined both sides of the valley. Below them a staircase that had been carved right out of the mountainside made a winding descent into the ruins.
“This the Mount Gaia you been talking about?” Jax asked.
“I’ve got a feeling it is,” Sonya said.
“Well, the scenery aside, I hope comin’ here was worth it.” He examined his fingertips and frowned disapprovingly. They were badly skinned from the climb. “It’s–”
The strident braying of battle horns abruptly cut him off. They turned in unison, looked back from where they come, and saw Shao Kahn at the head of a roiling black cloud, the flanks of his winged mount encased in armor, Sindel beside him on her own airborne war horse. Trailing them both on the ground were legions of Centaurs and Extermination Squads.
“They’re about twenty minutes behind us,” Sonya said. “Let’s pray Rayden has a good plan.”
Jax had no argument with that.
Without wasting another minute, they started down the crumbling stone stairs.
“What is this place?” Jax asked, half rhetorically. “I don’t see no mailboxes tellin’ us which temple belongs to the Elder Gods.”
Sonya glanced from side to side. Majestic architectural remnants vaulted into the sky all around them. Up ahead was a structure made of perfectly square stone blocks, its archway guarded by statues that looked like helmeted gladiators.
Jax stepped up to one of the life-sized effigies, studying the hieroglyphs chiseled into its base.
“I’d bet anything this is some kinda memorial,” he said.
Sonya came over to take a look, but before she could respond they were both jumped by fighters leaping stealthily down from an outcropping above their heads.
Struggling to recover from their surprise, they traded a flurry of kicks and punches with the shadowy assailants. In the uncertain moonlight, it was hard to discern who was doing what to whom.
Then Sonya pulled one of their opponents toward her and her eyes suddenly widened in shock.
“Liu?” she said.
“Sonya?”
Jax halted in confusion. “You know this dude?”
While he was looking at them, a full on kick to his chin knocked Jax onto his bottom.
Liu regarded him as if nothing of the sort had happened. “Is that Jax?”
“Yeah,” she said. She tipped her chin at the woman who had kayoed Jax. “Who’s she?”
“Sonya, Jade. Jade, Sonya,” Liu said. “Sorry about the ambush. We thought you were Kahn’s advance team.”
“Major Jackson Briggs,” he said, a slightly dazed grin of admiration on his face. “You’ve got an incredible set of legs. For kicking, I mean.”
Sonya was in no frame of mind to watch a schoolboy crush in the making.
“Where’s Kitana?” she asked Liu.
He hesitated.
“Well…?”
“She was kidnapped. By Scorpion.”
“You lost Kitana? And then picked up some stranger?”
“Jade helped me to get here,” Liu said. “We can trust her.”
“You ask me, your judgement sucks.”
Liu looked at her, stung. As far as he was concerned, Sonya was the one who was judgement-impaired, and the war horns on the slopes behind them were all the proof anybody needed.
“Thanks to you we’ve got Kahn’s Extermination Squads on our tail,” he said.
Jax stepped closer to them. “Can I make a suggestion here? Let’s put this petty crap aside and worry about bigger things. Like stayin’ alive.”
Sonya was still looking directly at Liu. “Where’s Rayden? He’s the guy with the plan–”
“We looked,” Liu said. “He’s not here yet.”
“So we’re just gonna sit here and wait for this mook to show?”
Liu was shaking his head. “Sonya’s right. Without Rayden it’s hopeless.”
“Never give up hope–” said a voice from somewhere overhead.
Startled, they all looked up at once to see Rayden flip down from a cliffside temple and land right in the middle of their inner circle.
“–at least not so early in the game,” Rayden said, finishing the sentence he’d started on the ledge.
They gaped at him in stunned bewilderment. He had changed since they’d last seen him. Changed tremendously. His long hair had been shaved off, and his robes were gone, replaced by rugged leather battle gear.
He caught their wondering glances and shrugged.
“It’s a new look, courtesy of the Elder Gods, with whom I’ve recently met,” he said, and then thrust his chin at Jade. “Who’s the babe?”
Liu told him.
“Well, I hope she can scrap as good as she looks,” Rayden said. “Because I was expecting a team of fighters. Instead, I hear fighters at war with each other.”
“Give us a break,” Sonya said. “We’ve been through hell…”
“Compared to what lies ahead, you’ve been through nothing,” he broke in. “Where’s Kitana?”
There was an uneasy silence. All eyes shifted to Liu.
“Kahn took her,” he said, crestfallen. “It’s my fault.”
Rayden’s face was impassive as he digested the bad news.
“This is not about blame,” he said finally. “We are together in this. Each of us must help and support the others. Like a family.” He glanced briefly at Jax. “What’s the deal with your arms?”
Jax’s brow creased. “I’ve known you exactly one minute and already you’re dissin’ me?”
“I watched you fight back there,” Rayden said. “You have the skills, but your arms are not your strength. They are your weakness.”
Jax frowned. “Thanks for the tip, but these things are state-of-the-art.”
“Faith in yourself is all you need,” Rayden said, shaking his head. “And I say that to all of you, not just Jax.”
“Look, faith is fine but we’ve got to get Kitana back,” Liu said impatiently. “Without her we can’t close the Portal.”
“Liu is right,” Jade said. “If Kahn has her in Outworld, we must go there now.” “And how are we supposed to do that?” Sonya said.
“Follow me and you’ll see,” Rayden said.
And then he started down the chasm road, m
otioning for the others to fall in behind him, leading them between the grand stone structures.
Close outside the gates of the city, very close, the warlike shrieks of Kahn’s gathered forces leaped fiercely into the night.
They stood in a circular courtyard surrounded by stone colossi, figures of men and women with powerful, idealized proportions and looks of bold determination on their sculpted faces.
“These are the likenesses of champions who fell in Mortal Kombat in ages past,” Rayden said pointing to the sentinels. “They are also the friends I spoke of back when this all started.”
He walked to the center of the plaza, spread his arms out, and tilted his head toward the heavens.
“Who does this guy think he is?” Jax whispered. “Moses partin’ the Red Sea?”
Sonya watched Rayden without saying anything, her lips pressed together with trepidation. She knew his powers were leaving him. Knew their time was short.
The small band heard the martial blare of trumpets behind them, and turned toward the sound. Shao Kahn and his army were charging into the chasm.
Sonya glanced back at Rayden. His hands were still raised, tongues of current snaking around their outspread fingers.
“Whenever you’re ready, Rayden,” she said, one eye on the legions thundering toward them.
Rayden stole a glance at the advancing enemy and redoubled his efforts. The crackles of energy around his hand brightened, began throbbing with light, then suddenly concentrated into laserlike beams that shot out toward the statuary at the circumference of the plaza, connecting each figure to Rayden like spokes in an enormous wheel. The energy beams rapidly multiplies in number, crisscrossing, forming a dazzling blue-white web that linked Rayden to the statues and the statues to each other. Within seconds, the spaces between the strands had closed, surrounding Rayden and his companions in a swirling dome of power.
Less than a mile away, Shao Kahn pulled his horse to stop and looked over at Sindel.
“Use your death shriek!” he commanded. “Destroy everything!”
She was all too happy to oblige.
Climbing off her mount, she walked to the front ranks of the army, took a deep breath, and emitted an earsplitting wail that seemed to fill the night, a high-frequency bombardment that made the sides of the canyon shake and rumble.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation Page 7