by Amy Braun
So when he closed up about telling us about the Hellions, I didn’t blame him. Back then, I trusted Riley. I thought of him as someone I could be with.
I would never forget the bland, distant look in his eyes as he stood with Davin and the Vesper, holding a knife to my little sister’s throat.
I felt my fingers loosen on the coupling, cursing under my breath as I nearly dropped it. I looked away from the window and down at what I was doing. The half-made device sat in my palm, spring loaded couplings, and a tightly packed network of pronged conductors all sat over a self-powering battery designed to retain a massive amount of energy. The battery would re-charge after every pulse of energy was emitted, clinging to the magnetic residue thriving inside the device. I took another plate of scrap metal, cut to match the flat bottom of the device, and began to lock it in place. Once it was secured, I clipped a black button into place on the surface.
I gently pressed the button on the top. The device hadn’t been charged, so there was no power surge and therefore no danger. I was still on edge when I heard the gentle clicks of the gears winding up in search of electricity.
Having completed my project, I lifted my gaze up to the window again.
Every time I looked through that thick glass, my mind wandered to the others. If I closed my eyes and concentrated hard enough, the black ash would turn white, and the staggering mountains would become broken white towers and desolated shops.
I wondered how my friends were. If they were all right. Was Nash busy talking Gemma out of a crazy, reckless scheme? Was Abby still having nightmares? And Sawyer… what was he doing?
He’d never been completely predictable. One minute he would be distant, the next he would be confessing his deepest thoughts and secrets to me without realizing it.
Of all my friends, he was the one I worried about the most. I knew that the crew would take care of Abby. But Sawyer wasn’t a ten year old child. He was a stubborn, headstrong fighter who would die for his crew, but do little to protect himself. His heart was heavy with guilt for faults not his own. And when he thought something was his fault…
I’ll save you.
The words echoed through my mind and struck pain into my heart. I didn’t want him to blame himself for what happened to me. It was my choice, the only way I could think to get ahead of the Hellions and keep my loved ones safe. It was the right choice.
I love you, Claire.
Sawyer hadn’t intended to say it, but he meant it. There was no mistaking the sincerity in his eyes that night a month ago.
A month. How could I have stayed away so long?
I needed to get back to them. My days were getting worse here. The pain and torment I suffered from the Vesper and Davin was getting more difficult to endure. The constant blood-letting to keep me weak, the violation of my mind to torture my heart, the constant threat of physical abuse by Davin, who was keeping his distance because he wasn’t allowed to kill me… it was all becoming too much.
I had to get out of here.
I knew that, more than I knew anything else, but I knew that any plan, no matter how well it was conceived, could fail.
At least I finished my backup plan. Part of it, anyway.
I slipped my legs out from under me and stood up. I staggered from the dizziness that swept through my skull. I was still recovering from the Vesper’s last feeding, and the meager food shoved through my door didn’t give me a lot of energy.
I stood in place, closed my eyes, and took a few steady breaths. When I was sure I wouldn’t pass out, I slipped the condensed silver disk into the pocket of my work pants, grabbed a portable generator about the size of a toolbox, and walked for the door.
Davin was still my master jailer, but his duty as the Vesper’s general meant he had to make trips to Aon. For what, I never knew, and didn’t want to know. I was just grateful for any day he wasn’t around to leer or hit me.
He hadn’t come back since my last meeting with the Vesper, so I was taking a gamble and hoping he was still gone. Taking his place outside my door were two Hellions tasked to escort me when I needed something beyond my room’s confines.
Because there was one thing that was simply too big– and too dangerous– to be stored in my room.
When I reached the door, I rapped my knuckles against the cold metal three times.
“I need to use the power source,” I called.
I stepped back just as the door was jerked open with an aggravated shriek.
Two Hellions appeared in the doorway, hissing and spitting their annoyance. I had to force myself not to turn and run into the darkest corner I could find. I wanted to be as far from these red-eyed monsters as I could. Only the Vesper was allowed to feed from me– a weak consolation if there ever was one– but what was stopping these Hellions from going back on their word? I was fresh meat, ripe in their eyes.
The Vesper is their leader, I reminded myself. They respect him. Fear him. They won’t touch me.
Holding onto that hope with everything I had, I raised my chin and looked at the razor-fanged creatures.
“I need to refill my generator,” I said, lifting the box at my side.
The Hellions narrowed their eyes to slits and snarled. A shiver went down my spine, but I didn’t move with it. These two couldn’t talk to me, but they understood me. Davin was their instructor. I could only imagine what those lessons were like. I was willing to believe a lot of bloodshed had been involved.
The Hellions gave me one sharp, final growl, saw I wouldn’t be intimidated, then lunged for me.
A scream built in my throat, dying only when the Hellions grabbed the chain between my shackles. I was dragged forward, stumbling to keep up with the fast-paced monster. The second Hellion slipped behind my back and hovered too close.
They marched me into the dark hallway again. Rather than turn right, they took me left.
An elevator with a collapsible door stood against the far wall. The Hellion at my back swerved around to open the door with a series of rattling clangs. My wrists were tugged again, and then I was pressed into a small metal box with one exit, two monsters squeezed on either side of me. The Hellion who opened the door reached up to the shiny black panel bolted to the wall. A series of sixteen deep red buttons with slashes for numbers stared back like dozens of bloody cuts. The Hellion punched a button on the left side, second row from the bottom. I had no idea where the other buttons stopped at, but I didn’t need to know. Everything I needed would be in the power room.
The elevator jerked sharply. My breath hitched as the cage began its rough descent.
In seconds we were swallowed by darkness. I was blind yet surrounded by noise. Screeching gears and groaning wire-ropes came from outside the cage. Raspy breathing and rattling bars came from inside. The air smelled musty and old. There wasn’t a shred of light to be seen. Even when I held my eyes closed and opened them again, all I saw was pitch-blackness.
I stood perfectly still, letting that blackness enfold me as if it could shield me from the Hellions and their angry sounds. It seemed like hours before the elevator cage ground to a jolting stop. I snapped my eyes open and was grateful that I could see again.
I just wish it had been a better image.
A fiery red glow spilled out from a room of shining, black onyx. In the heart of the room was a massive ghostly red pillar that dwarfed both Palisade towers stacked together. Thirty feet tall and half as wide, the pillar reminded me of a lightning bolt trapped in a constant strike. Little zaps of energy danced along its siding. Ringing the pillar were sharp black stalagmites with a matching circle of stalactites above, making it seem like the red pillar was a lashing tongue holding up a mouth of jagged teeth.
Even the Hellions froze at the sight of the pillar. They feared it as much as I did. No effort was made to stop me as I stepped away from them and made my way across the room.
The air was cold and dry. I could almost taste the static in my throat. A heavy, pulsing thump came from the freestandi
ng power, as though it was one massive heartbeat. I clutched the box tightly to my chest, still staring in amazement as I got closer. I’d only seen this energy once before, the violent red lighting that shuddered behind the massive gears of the Hellion man-o’-war called the Behemoth. It powered the ship, but I’d never put much thought into the how or why.
That changed when I was brought here, and saw it with my own eyes. When I began to understand what it could do.
My mind replayed the Vesper’s words when I told him that I needed electricity to power the Palisade, and he explained they had something better.
A calamitous storm, the likes of which your kind has never seen, struck the ground here. A violent combination of wind, lightning, and conductive earth trapped it in place. The initial blast killed dozens of my kind, but we found solace in the destruction. A constant swirl of energy from the never-ending storm that resides here. We learned that the bolt could be contained, and began to transport it in carefully designed crates. We magnetized the bolt, contained it within a similar environment, nurtured it. The pillar is a renewable self-sustaining source of energy, a tiny drop of it capable of fuelling even the most complex machine. It is not something to be used lightly. In a way, this pillar was much like the tubes that contained the crackling blue electricity in my former employer’s electric substation. Garnet would have literally killed for power this size. He’d killed for a lot less.
I turned my gaze down from the thumping pillar to the stalagmites at the base. Thick black cables were drilled into the pointed rocks, an open coupling on the end to suck in minimal amounts of energy from the pillar. That energy snaked through the cable to a transference machine set up on the far left of the room. I walked toward it.
The transference machine was a ten foot long construction of glass and steel, looking almost like a needle without the sharp point. The cables from the stalagmites were connected to the base of the glass tube, allowing the energy to exit into a carefully contained space. From there, it was funneled into the steel half of the transference machine. It darted into various slots that snapped closed when they were at full capacity. Past the slots, thick vials of the pillar’s energy were pushed out of the top and set against a cavity in the onyx wall. Where the filled vials went from there, I had no idea. The only reason I knew how the transference machine worked was because the Vesper explained it to me so I could use it to power the Palisade.
Some of this power went to the storm-maker, turning it even more violent. Some of it powered massive warships. I didn’t know what the rest of it was used for. The thought of what this kind of power would do in a Palisade, which was deadly enough in its own right… I shuddered. If the pillar’s energy replaced the electromagnetic power in a Palisade, there wouldn’t be anything left to save. Westraven would be obliterated, its crumbling structures reduced to ash. The people caught in its path would be vaporized, as if they’d never been there at all.
My stomach twisted as I stood by the transference machine, watching the red lightning dance violently in the glass tube. It wasn’t the first time I’d used the pillar’s energy, but every time I raised my fingers to collect a vial from the wall, my hands shook.
It was worse this time around, because a heavy wrench was loose on my belt. I swung my hips as I reached up, feeling the weight disappear from my side. The wrench clanged loudly against the top of the steel machine, crashing nosily on the ground.
At the entrance of the power room, the Hellions hissed and stomped over. I held up my hand.
“It’s okay,” I called. “It’s okay, a piece of the siding snapped off, but I can fix it.”
The Hellions shrieked again, but I was already crouching out of sight to get the wrench.
I hadn’t completely been lying when I said a piece of the siding snapped off. Part of it was dented, but nothing I couldn’t hammer out.
Though that was the last thing I intended to do.
Working quickly, I unscrewed a panel that connected to the slots. Once it was opened, I grabbed the silver device from my pocket.
The device that I used to help bring down the Behemoth.
The device that nearly killed me.
I was shaking just holding the damn thing, but I knew I had to use it again. Once it was charged, the Volt would contain an enormous electro-magnetic charge capable of disrupting any machine I placed it against. A brilliant idea, except that I had no way to activate it properly. The last time I did, I had to hold the button down and allow the sidings to pop open. Like all contained power, the Volt was positively deadly when released. If I didn’t find another way to set off the Volt, I would have to discharge it myself.
There was no way I would survive electrocution from the pillar’s energy.
My only option was to buy more time and make a remote transmitter that would activate on command. I’d already placed a small radio receiver inside the base of the Volt. Once I finished the transmitter, all I had to do was hope I was far enough from the blast radius when I used to against the Vesper.
After putting on the pair of electrician’s gloves that were looped around my belt, I carefully slipped the Volt inside the transference machine and peeled off the magnetized strip at the back. The slim disk jolted to the inside of the steel barrel, eager to be filled with energy. I tapped the black button the surface to let the sidings ease open, then quickly grabbed a couple power couplings and attached them to the back of the slots. After a couple adjustments, the energy from the glass tube began to shift its trajectory. It still moved into the slots, but rather than going into the vial, it slipped into the Volt. I jerked my hands back and watched the transfer for a moment.
I designed the Volt to contain unlimited energy. The more it held, the stronger the blast would be when I used it. But I’d never seen any kind of power like the electricity that came from the pillar. I had no idea if the Volt’s capacity would be able to handle this kind of force.
I didn’t know what I would do if it couldn’t.
Pushing doubt to the back of my mind, I took off my gloves and quickly re-screwed the panel on the side of the transference machine, leaving it loose so I could pull it free if I needed to quickly retrieve the Volt or make an adjustment to it. I was the only one who did any work to the transference machine, so it was doubtful my secret compartment would be discovered.
And now it was too late anyway. What was done was done. I couldn’t change anything about it now.
***
I thought that sitting there, waiting for the generator I’d brought to charge with two aggressive Hellions staring at me like I was the gourmet meal they weren’t allowed to touch, would be the worst part of my day.
I should have known better.
Really, there was no reason for me to be surprised by the sight of Davin Kendric stretched out on my bed, his feet crossed at the ankles and his hands laced behind his head. Even the crimson smear of blood along his mouth and chin shouldn’t have shocked me.
But I was on edge. I’d just placed a bomb– the most unpredictable and deadliest kind I knew how to make– in a machine that could just barely contain the energy of a restrained supernatural lightning bolt. I was more than a little twitchy at the moment.
Of course, Davin assumed my wide, fear-filled eyes were courtesy of his presence. He grinned, stretching the bloodstain wider across his face.
“I’m home, honey. You should come over and welcome me.”
I shuddered and looked away, clutching the refueled generator to my chest. A vial of the pillar’s energy was safely locked and contained inside. It couldn’t be released until it was plugged into something. But it was heavy enough to put a dent in Davin’s head if he tried to touch me.
The door slammed shut behind me, the Hellions signaling their exit, leaving me alone with a bloodthirsty sadist.