Stillbringer

by Zile Elliven

  “How about this one?” Helen was saying to her companions, putting her left hand over her right wrist, grasping it and pulling it sharply to the left.

  Aeyli threw herself to the ground on top of Fourteen as several rows of tombstones had their top halves sheared away. She was showered with shrapnel and felt small cuts peppering her exposed skin. “Stop that!” Her voice rang out over what was left of the cemetery. “There’s a norm here—an innocent! Just let me get him out of here, and I’ll go with you.”

  “No . . .” Came a groan underneath her.

  “You hush. I’m in charge right now.” She patted his cheek gently.

  “I think it’s just adorable that our Sunny thinks she is in any position to bargain right now, don’t you, dears?” Stella put her hands together as if she were about to say a prayer, then drew them up to the sky, parted them and brought them out in a half circle to rest by her side.

  Nothing happened.

  “Maybe if we do one together?” Helen suggested. The three came together in a huddle.

  Aeyli couldn’t keep relying on whatever miracle was keeping them safe. She had to do something right now. She spied Fourteen’s pack and pulled it out from under his body, hoping it contained something that could help her. Inside, she found a few chunks of a gray, clay-like material, so very many guns, several different types of ammo—bullets and clips—that she didn’t know how to install even if she did manage to figure out which guns they went with. When she got to a wicked-looking knife she paused. She could probably manage to poke it into someone if she could get close enough.

  Then she got an idea. It was probably a terrible one, but it was all she had. Just because she had never been trained to do magic, didn’t mean she couldn’t do magic. She had often done things accidentally when she was little. She couldn’t count the number of times she suddenly turned the contents of her entire room red from anger or knocked chairs over during a tantrum. The only reason the building she’d been kept in hadn’t burned down from her accidental fires was because it had dampening spells built into the walls.

  Over the years she had begun to fugue out when her emotions got the better of her, rather than explode with accidental magic. Once she escaped, it had been a pain to discard the habit, but she had done it—becoming senseless under stress was the worst thing that could happen to a woman on the run. She went to the closest library and found a book on stress relief. It suggested methods like meditation or joining a yoga class—something she rejected immediately. Who would want to take a yoga class with her in the room? So she got a book on meditation and learned how to calm her breathing and heart rate. It was hard work, but eventually she got good enough that she stopped blanking out or having random magical outbursts. What would happen if she didn’t use meditation techniques to stop her magic? Or better yet, what if she actually tried to cast a spell?

  She watched her brother as his hands moved in a complicated pattern while he argued with his aunt, trying to explain a spell he thought they should try. It looked too hard for Aeyli to recreate, though she had just seen a very easy-looking spell performed twice.

  Peering around the headstone in front of her, Aeyli pointed her right hand at her family. She took a deep breath, circled her right index finger, flattened her hand, and pushed it out. The only thing that happened was her family looked like they had come to a decision.

  Joining hands, they broke out of the huddle with Stella standing in the lead.

  Her brother stepped away from their aunt and Helen, his face uncertain. “I don’t think this is a good idea. This is exactly the sort of thing that will bring their attention down on us. Mother told us to be careful!”

  With a scornful glance at Sterling, Stella joined hands with Helen and threw her right hand toward the sky. She barked out a sharp, unintelligible sound and reached her left hand out to point toward the buildings behind the cemetery on Aeyli’s side.

  What was she missing? Maybe she had to think really hard about wanting it to happen. She tried again and felt a roiling of something pink inside her chest, but still nothing happened.

  Perhaps pointing wasn’t enough—in a lot of the fantasy books she had read, there had been several components to casting. What were they? Focus seemed important, direction too. She thought she had the hand gesture down, so what else?

  The building behind her came down with a deafening screech. Dust billowed everywhere and bricks and chunks of gods-knew-what began pelting her. She tried to throw herself over Fourteen to shelter him, but he rolled away from her as soon as she touched him.

  “Don’t . . . touch . . . me,” he slurred and scrambled backward, banging up against a broken headstone.

  Stung, she crawled away as far as she dared. “S . . . sorry. The building exploded, and now there’s stuff falling. Bad stuff.” With one hand, she gestured toward the debris currently pelting them, while trying to protect her face with the other.

  Fourteen stayed conscious, but he didn’t look good. If she didn’t know any better she’d say he looked drunk. He lay against the broken stone and pressed his face against it, then gazed at his hand like he’d never seen it before. When a brick bounced off his shoulder, he didn’t even react.

  She had to get them out of here. She focused as hard as she could on making her family go away and made the hand gesture. The roiling feeling rose up again, and it felt pinker than it had before, but her attackers remained unmolested.

  “I’m going to enjoy playing with your champion, Girl. I wonder how long I can get him to scream for me?” Helen’s little girl voice was at odds with her words. “He looks durable, I’ll bet I can make him last a few weeks before I break him.”

  Rage swept through her, and Aeyli’s hands moved on their own as a giant pink fireball of emotion bloomed in her body, radiating outward from her chest. She felt hollowed out by its passage, and when she looked down at her front, she was surprised to see it was whole and her hoodie unscathed.

  A trailing scream caught her attention, and she looked up to see a gaping hole had replaced half of the cemetery and the entire street behind it. Her family was nowhere to be seen. She blinked dumbly at the results of her work.

  “Please tell me you missed my SUV.” Fourteen’s expressionless voice came from beside her. He stood up slowly, but looked more lucid than he had a moment ago.

  Aeyli’s mouth worked as she tried to find her voice again. Once she remastered it, she said, “I didn’t get that part of the street, see?” She pointed toward where they had parked.

  He grunted. “Do you have your bag?”

  She pointed to her shoulder straps and nodded.

  “Let’s go.” He motioned for her to go first.

  Skirting around the hole she’d made, Aeyli looked inside, expecting to see ancient and possibly not-so-ancient dead bodies, but there was nothing but a seemingly endless dirt-lined abyss. The ground shook under her feet, and she backed away as the edge started caving in. “I don’t think the hole is done yet.” She reached back for Fourteen’s hand to urge him to run with her, but he dodged her grasp. He understood her intent though and managed to keep pace with her back to the SUV.

  They both looked back at the cemetery to see the rest of it crumble and vanish into the hole she’d made. Fourteen unlocked the car with his key fob as they ran toward it. “Get in.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  “Do you know how to drive?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then it doesn’t matter if I am or not. Get in the car.” His tone was even, but his words were clipped.

  She chose not to push the matter and got in on the passenger side. At the moment, alacrity was more important than establishing good boundaries.

  The ground in front of them continued to give way at an alarming rate, and she wasn’t sure if they were going to make it. Fourteen threw the SUV into reverse the second her butt hit the seat and took the bumper off the car parked behind them. As they took off backward down the road, Aeyli had a c
lear view of the bumperless car falling into the hole she’d created.

  When she noticed a light on inside one of the buildings they sped by, she realized how badly things had gone wrong.

  “Stop the car!”

  “Negative.” If anything, he drove faster.

  “There are people in there, we have to go back right now.” Her voice was laced with hysteria.

  “There were probably people in the building your family blew up too, but we aren’t going back for them either.” Having gained several yards between them and the hole, Fourteen made a terrifying three-point turn and continued driving in the same direction, only forward this time.

  “But they’re innocent bystanders, and it’s my fault they got hurt.” Aeyli dug her hands into her arms painfully as the realization sank in. “What if someone got killed?”

  “You didn’t make your family blow up that building, Aeyli, that’s on them. You were just trying to survive.” Sirens filled the air as a rescue vehicle raced toward the scene. “Let the authorities take care of it. Right now our job is getting someplace safe. No doubt your family is sending more people here as we speak.”

  “What about the hole I made?” Aeyli tugged on her backpack, trying to get it off, but only managed to get it tangled with the seatbelt she’d forgotten to put on. Would Fourteen let her borrow a knife to cut the belt loose? She glanced at the shiny, well-kept interior of the SUV and decided not to ask.

  “From what I observed, the hole stopped growing by the time it reached the buildings. People were inconvenienced, not hurt.”

  She frowned at his callused response and continued the fight to separate her backpack from the seatbelt. Eventually she had to remove the plastic buckle on her pack to set it free and cursed when she bent a fingernail backward trying to put it back on again.

  When she had finally sorted herself, the seatbelt, and her backpack into their rightful places, she looked up and realized they were almost to the warehouse. She dug through her bag and put on her shoes. They were tight over the now-dirty bandages Fourteen had wrapped around them, but it worked. It seemed silly, but with shoes on, she felt more capable of dealing with the garbage life was throwing her way.

  Once they were inside the warehouse, she made a show of looking around for a moment, then asked, “Um, is there a bathroom here I can use?”

  Fourteen nodded and gestured for her to follow him toward the opposite side of the building she had stayed in last night.

  “Your bathroom is that far from where you sleep?” She imagined getting up to go pee in the middle of the night and having to go down two flights of stairs and across a creepy, drafty warehouse. Pass.

  He shrugged. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Says the guy,” she whispered under her breath.

  “Right through there.” He ushered her towards a shabby closet in the back of a small office. “I’ll be upstairs when you are done, and we’ll talk.”

  She pulled on the change of clothes as quickly as possible—she should have done it in the car to throw off potential tracking spells, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to get undressed in front of Fourteen. Her face burned at the very idea, and she rubbed at her cheeks furiously.

  She dug through the bag and was glad to see a pair of jeans, but the pink tank top made her wince. It might be spring, but in New England that could mean anything from snow in the morning to a toasty seventy-five degrees in the afternoon. It looked like a visit to a thrift shop was going to be in order so she could get some warmer clothes. She would have to get as much as she could afford to buy—the more clothes she had, the longer she could avoid detection.

  She shucked off her torn hoodie and sneezed when the dust and debris embedded in it filled the air. Her pants followed, making even more dust for her to choke on, and she jammed them hastily into her bag. Tattered as they were, in a pinch they could still help her throw off a tracking spell. As she was stuffing them in, she found the small tin that held her money.

  When she opened it, she was pleasantly surprised to find a hundred-dollar bill instead of a fifty—past her had been very generous when packing this bag. Now she could afford an actual jacket.

  She straightened and caught her reflection in the mirror.

  Aeyli had never thought much about her appearance. Having no contact with the outside world made worrying about what other people thought of her seem silly. She examined her face in the dingy, spotted mirror. Her hair was thick—something fashion magazines harped about constantly—so that was a point in her favor. She brushed a chunk of plaster out of her hair and finger-combed through the tangles.

  Most of her features were delicate enough to appease even the harshest celebrity critics, with the exception of her square jaw. It gave her the appearance of being stubborn—something that had gotten her into trouble a lot when she was little. It was currently streaked with soot, so she wet her fingers from the faucet and did her best to clean it off.

  She looked up into her eyes, blue as the summer sky, and wondered if Fourteen liked the color blue.

  Realizing what she was doing, she backed away from the sink and jerked her bag up off the floor. It was long past time for her to go.

  As she opened the window to the bathroom, she thought about what would be the best use for the money she had left after her shopping trip. She could use the money to gain distance and just improvise once she got far enough, or she could see how far she could get walking, maybe even hitch and use the money to make herself look presentable enough to find a job.

  Hoisting herself over the windowsill, she decided on the latter. But first she had to go check on something.

  Chapter Six

  Fourteen

  His equipment bag was a mess. He always made a point of checking all his equipment after a mission, so it didn’t take long for him to discover Aeyli had systematically vanquished any semblance of order he once had. Everything was going to have to come out so he could fix it. He appreciated that she’d gone through all her options during the time he had been compromised, but it was his equipment bag. As far as he was concerned, she might as well have rifled through his underwear. He was going to have to talk to her about it.

  After that he was going to sleep. Steve and Frank had been adamant that he stay awake and stand guard while they slept, so he had been awake for over forty-eight hours by the time he met Aeyli. Then, of course, he’d been too wired to sleep after being confronted with the mystery she presented.

  He hadn’t been thinking clearly then, he could see that now. The first few times Aeyli had touched him had been a blur. He had known something important was happening, but he couldn’t have said what it was. It wasn’t until the battle at the cemetery that he’d understood what was happening. The unexpected and prolonged contact with Aeyli had done something to the blocks the Company had put on his mind.

  They were crumbling, brittle things now, with gaping holes that allowed him access to things and people long forgotten. While Aeyli was fighting for their lives he’d been swamped with repressed memories—filled with horrors no human should have to face. He remembered the faces of his parents. And equally as clear, he remembered the face of the man who had sentenced his father to death. It was a face he was well acquainted with. He—the Colonel—would be expecting to debrief Fourteen any minute now.

  His fingers tightened painfully around the clip he had been about to stow in his bag. Slowly and deliberately, he loosened his grip and placed it in a side pocket with the other clips. He couldn’t think about it right now, any of it. Inside his mind, he felt a thousand memories battling for his attention, and he knew, if he gave in to any of them, he would become useless. Memories and emotions were so far outside his wheelhouse, he wouldn’t know what to do with them. So he dug into his training and stilled his mind, forcing the memories back behind those crumbling walls and back into the cold.

  Once he was certain the walls would hold for the time being, he hunted down a pair of black leather gloves to cut down h
is chances of accidental exposure—he had no idea what would happen if Aeyli touched him again. There was a tentative lid on his mind at the moment, but any more surprises like the one at the cemetery and he could become a liability. He couldn’t do that to Aeyli—whether she knew it or not, he owed her.

  With that in mind, he threw some tear gas in the bag, so he could show Aeyli how to use it in case he became compromised again.

  Now that his bag was repacked to his satisfaction, he paused, reaching into his pocket to finger the flash drive he retrieved from Steve’s jacket. His operating system. He had been programmed to recover it if he lost his handler and report immediately to the Company. Was Aeyli’s effect on him responsible for his ability to resist that compulsion?

  Fourteen frowned. He had chosen to ignore orders and follow Aeyli before the first time he touched her. Was it possible he was capable of resisting his conditioning without her help? When he got a chance, he would have to explore that thought further, but for now he would put it with the other confusing thoughts and emotions where it belonged.

  His phone chimed letting him know that a window had opened downstairs. Aeyli. He allowed himself a deep sigh and a longing glance at his bed before he made for the door, slinging his bag over his shoulder as he went.

  Instead of going to the window she exited, he left by the side entrance, guessing she would be heading out of the marina, rather than farther in. When he saw her pink, cat-encrusted backpack disappear around the corner of another building, he knew he had guessed correctly.

  He had been expecting something like this from her eventually. In less than twelve hours, she had consistently exhibited the sort of self-sacrificing behavior that would lead toward such an action.

  Instead of catching up to her and confronting her immediately, he decided to observe her habits, so that the next time she ran out on him, he’d have a better idea of where to look in case she managed to vanish completely.