Dawnbreaker

by Posey, Jay

  “Gamble, Sky,” Sky said in Cass’s head. “Finn and I are in position.”

  “Check,” Gamble said. Then to Cass, “I need a boost.”

  Cass nodded and went down on one knee, keeping her other foot flat on the floor so Gamble could use her thigh as a step. Gamble clambered up and started running what looked like a thin grey cord from one side of the window to the other. It clung to the flexiglass like putty.

  A low murmuration filtered in from the hall, the rustle of sand blown across rough concrete. Things were moving out there. A lot of things.

  “Sky, how good’s your angle?” Gamble asked while she continued laying the cord in a rectangle. She was working fast, but with precision.

  “Looking right at you, babe,” Sky said. He was doing a good job of keeping the concern out of his voice, but Cass could hear the intensity of his emotion. He was keyed up. They all were. Gamble finished attaching the cord. When she was done, it lay in a rectangle from the bottom of the window, up two and a half feet, and the full width of the flexiglass. She’d left a small gap at the bottom, maybe a half-inch wide. Gamble stepped off Cass’s leg.

  “This is gonna be a real pain,” she said. She was just crouching down next to Swoop again when one of the door handles rattled violently. Both women went still. One heartbeat. Two. Three. The handle fell silent.

  Seconds later, the handle at the other door shuddered. Cass held her breath. Time stretched. The blood pounded in her ears.

  A scrabbling sound came from the second door, the scrape of claws against the heavy steel. Gamble went back to work.

  “Back,” she said waving Cass away. When Cass had scooted a few feet away from the window, Gamble twitched something in her hand and the grey cord around the window smoked and glowed red, then orange, then white. The flexiglass hissed and deformed, and the rectangle section drooped slightly inward. It was still smoking when Gamble went to it and jammed her knife blade in one of the new seams on the side. She pried and the window sagged inward as the tiny remaining tab of softened flexiglass bent and gave way.

  “Help me,” Gamble said, as she caught the panel. Cass grabbed the other side and together they pulled the cut portion free. They laid it on the ground out of the way.

  The whispering rustle of the hall grew louder, or rather Cass became aware that it had become so. The same scraping started up at the other door, the sound of many hands clawing. Gamble snatched up one of the devices and began affixing it to the top of the wall where the window had just been. She wasn’t even trying to be quiet anymore. The piece of gear clamped on with a mechanical whine. There was a little wheel near the top, covered by a round metal housing.

  One of the doors to the room quaked in its frame. There was no doubt now. The Weir weren’t just testing; they were intent on getting in. Cass hoped that they’d tried it before and be unable to get through, but she knew better than to trust in optimism. Gamble glanced over at the door while she threaded one end of the rope through the housing on the device.

  “In the cage, far left,” Gamble said, her voice even but her words clipped. “Bottom shelf, near the front. There’s a stack, looks like little green wheels.”

  “OK,” Cass said.

  “Get four.”

  Cass nodded and bounded across the room to the cage. Both doors were rattling now. She forced herself to focus on the task. Far left, near the front, bottom shelf. She scanned over the gear. There. Green, round, five inches across, they looked like canisters that had been compressed. One, two, three, four, she gathered them up and rushed back to Gamble.

  “Mouse, almost ready,” Gamble said. When Cass reached her, she’d just finished tying an elaborate knot to a carabiner. She scooped the gear out of Cass’s hands, and then thrust the carabiner at her.

  “Check,” Mouse answered.

  “Hook Swoop up,” Gamble said, “Then get him up on the window ledge.”

  Cass bent down and looked for where exactly she was supposed to hook the carabiner on. Gamble went down on her knees near one of the doors, and started working with whatever it was Cass had just handed her. Cass searched the harness, the device on the front, everywhere, but it wasn’t obvious where she was supposed to hook in.

  “I don’t see it,” she said to Gamble.

  “What?”

  “The hook, where do I attach it?”

  “On the front, the runner.”

  Cass looked again, but she didn’t see any place that looked like it would hold.

  “Where?” she asked.

  Gamble let out an exasperated breath and practically leapt across the room. She snatched the carabiner from Cass’s hand and shouldered her aside. It was subtle, but there was a hitch in her movement when she went to hook Swoop in. She cursed wordlessly and grabbed the device on the harness. A twist of some hidden mechanism, and a metal ring flipped out.

  “There,” Gamble said, hooking the rope to it. “Right there. Get him up.”

  She left Cass’s side and rushed back to whatever she was doing by the door. Cass rolled Swoop over onto his stomach and wrestled him up into position so she could drape him across her shoulders. She’d seen Mouse do this maneuver a few times. It’d always looked effortless when he did it. The dead weight was almost more than she could manage, but she got him there. Once he was situated, she stood and struggled to get him on the ledge.

  Gamble reappeared and helped get Swoop placed with his legs dangling out into space. His back was bent awkwardly, but there wasn’t much they could do about that now.

  “Mouse, we’re sending him down,” Gamble said.

  “Check, ready,” he replied.

  “Hold him,” Gamble said to Cass. “When I say go, lower him out.”

  “All right,” Cass answered.

  Gamble grabbed another piece of gear and hooked it onto her own harness. Cass didn’t know when the woman had even had time to put it on. Gamble gathered the coil of rope and pulled it taut through the device on the window ledge.

  “Go,” she said. And Cass gently rolled Swoop out through the window, towards the edge. Even knowing he was securely fastened, her heart dropped as gravity took over and dragged his body over the side.

  Gamble sat back against the weight on the rope, anchoring as she fed the line through as quickly as she dared.

  “Harness is on the floor by the bags,” she said. “Get it on.” And then without waiting for a reply from Cass, she switched over to the channel. “Mouse, you see him?” she said.

  Cass scooped the harness up from next to the bags and started buckling in.

  “Yeah, I see him,” he said. “Keep him comin’, keep him comin’. Five meters.”

  Without warning or explanation, the clamor of the Weir at the door ceased. The room fell strangely quiet apart from the gentle whir of the rope running smoothly through its channel.

  “Three meters,” Mouse said. Then a moment later, “All right, slow it down, slow it down.”

  Cass looked at the doors then at Gamble. Maybe they’d given up after all.

  “OK, G, I got him,” said Mouse. “I got him, he’s unhooked. Line’s clear.”

  Rolling thunder filled the room as a heavy impact quivered the door with a dull report, as if someone had hammered the reinforced steel plating with a cinder block.

  “Go, Mouse,” Gamble said as she wound the line back in. “Go now.”

  “Talk to me, Ace,” Sky said.

  “No time, babe,” Gamble answered, and that’s when Cass realized just how scared Gamble actually was, and just how much trouble they were in. Gamble never called Sky babe when they were on mission.

  The end of the line flipped up over the edge of the window frame just as Cass was cinching the last buckle around her thigh. The door shivered from another powerful blow.

  “Bags, get the bags,” Gamble said.

  “Gamble–”

  “Move, Cass!”

  Cass snatched the rucks up off the floor, threw the straps over her shoulders so they hung across her bo
dy. There had to have been over a hundred pounds of gear in them. She was just fitting the second strap on when Gamble threaded the rope through the straps on her harness and clipped it.

  “That’s gotta do, go, go, go!” Gamble said.

  A third blow trembled the door and Cass heard the shriek of wrenching metal behind her as she flung herself up onto the ledge. The rucksacks dragged at her, pulled her off balance, threatened to take her the wrong way. She scissored her legs, scrambled for purchase. Gamble shoved her hard, and the world tumbled.

  A second later, the line snapped tight, jarred Cass to a sudden, agonizing halt as the weight and momentum of the gear threatened to splinter her spine. Disoriented, she spun on the rope and smashed her shoulder into the wall of the compound. Then she was falling again.

  No, not falling. Descending on the line, at a rate that felt barely controlled. Cass bumped and scraped the wall and scrabbled to get her feet around to keep herself off it. Above her, through the window, came the terrible banshee wail of flexing steel, followed by an inhuman roar. Unmistakably the cry of a Weir, but amplified, broader of sound, immense.

  “Ace!” Sky called through the channel.

  “I know, babe, I know!” Gamble said, and there was a note of panic in her voice that Cass had never heard before. “Cass, put your feet down, put your feet down!”

  Cass fought to position herself, but the rucksacks had both swung to one side and she couldn’t get her balance.

  “Sky,” Gamble spoke once more over the channel, eerily calm. “Love you, babe.”

  Cass was still fifteen feet up when the line went slack.

  Free fall.

  “Ace!” Sky cried out, “No! Ace! Ace!”

  For that frozen moment, it seemed to Cass as though she were floating, suspended, in the path of a wrecking ball the size of the world. She wasn’t moving; the planet was speeding towards her, intent on smashing her into oblivion. She snaked around, managed to twist in the air into a partial crouch, so that the balls of her feet would hit first. Her hands stretched out to intercept the collision.

  Futile.

  The shock of the impact was too sudden, too great to absorb. She catapulted to the concrete with a metallic crunch; a lightning strike of pain stole her breath and vision.

  When she came to, Sky was screaming over the channel, but she couldn’t make sense of the words. If they were words at all. They sounded more like animal cries; rage, despair.

  “Cass,” came Mouse’s voice; strong, insistent, punching through. “Cass, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” she struggled to answer, her voice was a ghost. It was a strain to get the air to move through her lungs. From far above her, a continuous stream of popping, like glass cracking in blistering heat.

  “Finn, get Sky off channel! Cass, do you read?”

  She’d forgotten to open the channel. Sky’s howls squelched, and she tried again. “Yeah, Mouse, I’m here.”

  “You need to move,” he said. “Can you?”

  Cass levered herself up and found she couldn’t push off with her left arm. When she looked at it, she saw her forearm was indented and bent outward at a shallow angle, as if she had another joint between wrist and elbow. She’d landed halfway on the rucksacks, which had absorbed some of the force of impact but not nearly enough for her to escape unharmed.

  “Finn,” Mouse said, “I’m droppin’ Swoop, I gotta go back for Cass.”

  “No,” Cass said, her senses coming back online. “No, Mouse, I’m OK. Don’t come back.”

  “I’ve got a marker set,” Finn said. “Can you see it?”

  Cass hauled herself to her feet, cradling her left arm close to her body. Finn’s beacon showed up superimposed on reality, a small blue circle, faintly pulsing.

  “Got it,” she answered. “Gamble’s not down yet. Gotta wait for her.”

  A pause.

  “No, Cass,” Mouse said. “You need to move now. Right now. On your own.”

  The popping sound from above dwindled away, replaced by clearer calls from the Weir. Their normal, white-noise screams. Not the thundering bellow she’d heard just before she fell. Cass bent and scooped the straps of the rucksacks up, reshouldered them with her good arm. There was no time to get them balanced. As she was standing, she realized she was still hooked in to the rope. How was Gamble getting down? She glanced back up at the window high above, but her friend wasn’t there. She couldn’t even see the line leading back up.

  It was there, on the ground, in a loose pile. And that’s when Cass understood that Gamble hadn’t fed the rope out at all. She’d cut it free.

  She was still in the room. Gamble was still in the room.

  “Cass!” Mouse called.

  Cass walked to the base of the compound and gathered up the rope. The end was fuzzed where it’d been cleanly severed. She looked back up at the window above. Listened to the mass of cries. They were filling the room. The room where Gamble was.

  “Cass!” Mouse barked. “Move! Now!”

  His commanding voice burned away the last of her daze and the magnitude of their danger crystallized.

  “Moving,” Cass said. She didn’t bother trying to unhook with one hand, just stuffed the remaining rope into the crook of her left arm, against her body. “Moving to you!”

  She took off, running as fast as she could, the rucks bouncing and threatening to overthrow her with every step, while a storm of Weir swirled and raged above and behind her. And as the gap widened and their cries faded, no matter how much she wanted to wake from this new nightmare, Cass knew there was nothing she could do to save her friend and sister now or ever.

  SEVENTEEN

  jCharles stared out the window of his apartment, watching the sun slide into the horizon, taking his spirits down with it. He hadn’t slept much in the past thirty-six hours, and time was dragging, either slowing him down or maybe making the world move faster. Either way, he felt like he was having trouble keeping up.

  Edda had said the trip would take her three days. It was now the fourth day since she’d set out for Morningside, and it was drawing to an end with no sign of her. jCharles had spent the day before anxiously expecting her arrival until nightfall, and then spent the night anxiously speculating about what her failure to show might mean. None of the possibilities were good. Maybe she’d just made off with the money. When he considered the idea of Edda being a talented con who’d just taken him for a big chunk of his limited funds, he actually felt a little relief. And when jCharles realized he was considering that the best case scenario, it made all the other options seem that much worse.

  He was going to have to talk with Hollander. Hollander was one of the top dogs in the Greenmen; the semi-official police force that kept Greenstone’s citizens in check and its many conflicts behind the scenes. Not quite a friend, maybe, but a professional with whom jCharles mostly had common cause. Mostly. If jCharles had any hope of defending Greenstone, Hollander was going to have to be part of the plan. But how could jCharles even begin to explain?

  A familiar knock at the apartment door interrupted his thoughts; Nimble. jCharles crossed to it.

  “Yeah, Nim,” he called through the door, before he reached it. And then, opening it, “What’s up?”

  “Edda’s back,” Nimble said. jCharles had gone so far down the rabbit hole of expecting never to see her again that it took a moment for him to understand what Nimble had just said.

  “Oh,” jCharles said. “Oh, great.”

  Nimble twitched his head to the side, like maybe it wasn’t so great.

  “Think maybe you oughta bring her up,” he said, “’stead a you goin’ down.”

  That wasn’t a good sign. Nimble knew jCharles didn’t like doing business anywhere but down in the bar. But jCharles never doubted his man’s instincts.

  “All right,” he said. Nimble headed back downstairs. jCharles left the door cracked, went to his private collection and poured two tumblers of the good stuff. As he was putting the bottle away, N
imble knocked again.

  “Yeah, come on,” jCharles said. The door pushed open slowly and Nimble ushered Edda in. jCharles could see in an instant she was a changed woman. The lazy self-assuredness was gone, replaced by a barely-restrained wildness about the eyes. He didn’t need to hear her story to know what Wren had told him was all true. He handed her the drink as she came in, and she downed it in one long pull. “Edda. I’m... relieved.”

  She nodded, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “You need another?” he asked, pointing to the empty tumbler. She nodded again. “Come in, have a seat,” jCharles said as he took the glass and went to pour her a second, fuller glass. Nimble hovered by the entrance, eyebrows raised while he waited for some direction from jCharles. jCharles gestured that he’d take it from here. Nimble nodded and pulled the door quietly closed behind him as he left.

  When jCharles turned around, Edda was still standing near the door, looking awkward.

  “Please,” he said, holding out a hand towards one of the chairs. She hesitated, then looked down at the clothes. They were grimy, travel-stained. She was worried about getting dirt in his home. The concern was unexpected, and touching. “Don’t worry, I track mud in here all the time.”

  She didn’t look convinced.

  “Anything gets on the furniture, I won’t make Mol clean it up, I promise.”

  She shrugged a little to herself, then nodded and took the offered seat, and the drink. He was glad to see her sip this one. They sat in silence for a few moments, while she gathered herself.

  “Took a day one more,” she said. “Sorry ’bout dat.”

  “It’s no problem, Edda.”

  “I did how you say,” she continued. “Morn’side, just for what I see.” She stopped, took another sip, stared at her hands. Disappeared into herself.

  “And what’d you see?” jCharles prompted. Edda came back to herself, but kept watching her hands.

  “Death,” she said. “Blood. Rubble.” Then she looked up at him. “Dat city, it gone.”