by Daniel Price
“Jonathan!”
He retreated into the nook as far as he could. “I’m all right! I’m okay!”
“Hang in there!” Hannah yelled. “The van’s coming!”
She pulled her phone from her pocket and saw that her connection had been terminated. She redialed Melissa’s number. “Come on, Theo . . .”
The phone lit up silently on Theo’s lap, far outside his notice. His eyes were locked on the giant Pelletiers while he listened intently to Melissa’s radio conversation.
“Sir, if you’d just hear me out—”
“Oh, I’m listening,” Butterfield told her. “All I hear is you dodging my questions.”
The Integrity fleet hovered four hundred feet below her—twelve gunships and ten cannon cycles, all loaded with enough firepower to level a city block. Though Butterfield was relieved that the Absence had finally stopped moving, the satellite images of Azral and Esis gave him cold pause. Nothing, not even his worst nightmares, could have prepared him for the sight of two building-size Eurotrashers.
He paced the aisle of the command shuttle, his armored fist smacking into his palm. “I’ll ask again, Masaad. How did a woman who’s not even part of this operation get here before us? Who’s your source?”
“There’s no time to explain,” Melissa said. “You and your people are in imminent danger.”
Butterfield frowned. “If you’re talking about those big floating yahoos, I bet they’re nothing but ghosts. The Dormer boy probably hung them up like scarecrows.”
“The illusions go far beyond David’s capabilities,” Melissa assured him. “The Pelletiers are here, and they’re extremely lethal. If you read my report—”
“I read your report. I know your whole damn history. And I’m wondering why the hell I should trust you when your own damn boss looks at you cockeyed.”
A thermal scan analyst muttered into Butterfield’s ear. His bushy eyebrows rose.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he told Melissa. “These Pelleh-teers aren’t giving off a scrap of heat. You, however, have two passengers with you, a man and a boy. Funny how Gingold’s missing one of each.”
Theo and Cain winced in unison. Melissa raised her handset. “If you want to interrogate me when this is over—”
“Oh, I’d say there’s a good chance of that.”
“—I’ll cooperate. But I’m begging you, sir, for the sake of your people—”
Butterfield cut off the transmission, then addressed his crew through the radio. “All right. Enough of this threep. Weapons ready. Everyone in position. I want a clock formation around that saucer. Nobody fire till I give you the signal.”
The ships rose. Butterfield clasped the arm of his chief weaponeer, then pointed to Melissa’s van on the targeting screen.
“That tub moves an inch, you blow it to hell.”
—
Amanda crouched on steel-hard tendons, only half aware of the chatter around her. Her heartbeat hammered loudly in her ears, and her mind wouldn’t stop screaming the obvious. Zack would be dead in a matter of seconds. There was nothing she could do about it.
“Are you listening, child?”
Though Amanda knew she should make eye contact with Esis, she couldn’t stop looking at Rebel. He wept in a corner with Ivy in his arms, a broken man in every way imaginable. For a moment, Amanda forgot that she was the one who’d smashed his nose, cracked his ribs, snapped his fingers of bone and metal. She would have run her tempis right through him if Ivy hadn’t stopped her.
Esis scowled. “We’re short on time, girl. If you seek our forgiveness—”
“Your what?”
Amanda looked up with hot green eyes. Her lips stammered with disbelief. “You took Zack from me. You tortured him and then handed him off to lunatics. He’s dying right now because of you.”
“You’re responsible for his every—”
“You did this!” Amanda yelled. “Nobody forced you! No one made you kill Ivy or murder her unborn children. That was all you!”
Azral scoffed. “You would have died as a child were it not for us.”
“Only because you need me for something. You need all of us, even Zack.”
“You overstate his importance,” said Esis.
“And understate his stubbornness,” Azral added. “We were fully prepared to release him. He had but to ask. Instead he chose to mock and obstruct us, as he’s done before. As he would no doubt do again.”
“It’s simply his nature,” Esis insisted. “There is no saving him.”
The blood rushed louder in Amanda’s ears, and she understood every bit of Ivy’s mania. These weren’t evolved creatures. They were small-minded and petty and utterly self-absorbed. They couldn’t be reasoned with, only threatened.
Amanda cast a tempic tendril at the .38 on the floor, the one that had blown a hole in Peter’s chest, the one that Amanda had knocked out of Ivy’s hand.
Azral watched her with a crinkled brow. “If you think you can hurt us—”
The gun retracted into Amanda’s hand. She pressed the muzzle against her temple.
Esis’s eyes opened wide. “No!”
“Don’t be foolish,” Azral snapped. Amanda could hear the new tension in his voice.
“Heal him,” she demanded.
As Amanda committed to her desperate ploy, she spared a thought for her other loved ones, especially Hannah and Mia. Should the worst come to pass, she could only pray they’d forgive her someday. God certainly wouldn’t.
“You see the future,” Amanda told them. “You know I’m not bluffing. You heal Zack right now or I swear to you . . .”
She saw new movement behind the Pelletiers, a smattering of black shapes. A fleet of armed vehicles rose around the Absence in a halo. A deep, gritty voice addressed them through the ship’s commandeered PA system.
“This is Noah Butterfield, Senior Commander of the National Integrity Commission. We have you surrounded, with enough ordnance here to tear you all to shreds. On behalf of the United States government, I order all survivors to get to the escape lift and surrender yourselves immediately. You have two minutes to comply.”
Rebel bared his teeth in a savage grin. Seems he didn’t need the Wild-9 after all.
“You know what?” Butterfield said. “Chuck that. You killed a bunch of my men back at Atropos and I’m still mad. So you all have thirty seconds to surrender yourselves. And I truly hope you don’t.”
One floor down, Hannah shared a fretful look with Mia and David. Even if they were foolish enough to throw themselves at the mercy of Integrity, there was no way they could get Jonathan in time.
Heath launched forward from the middle seat of the Griffin and shook Melissa’s shoulder. “We have to save them!”
Theo shook his head. “We can’t.”
“We can’t,” Melissa confirmed. While every other gunship aimed its weapons at the aerstraunt, the command shuttle had its turret locked on the van. It was obvious what would happen if they moved.
Melissa looked at the Pelletiers, the only wild cards left in the equation. Their attention remained hopelessly fixed on the Absence. Someone or something was making them nervous.
Azral held Esis’s arm and addressed her through their neural link. They spoke in a lightning-quick exchange of thoughts and images that were only loosely translatable.
Semerjean broke into the discussion, his consciousness filled with strain.
“Twenty seconds,” Butterfield announced.
Zack convulsed in Amanda’s lap. His breathing had stopped. He wouldn’t even last the countdown.
“Goddamn you, Esis! Heal him!”
“Mother—”
Esis vanished with a scream, leaving Azral alone in the sky and the terrace. She charged down the stairs in a hot, angry blur and stopped inches in front of Amanda.
“You threaten our life’s work? You threaten me?”
Amanda’s skin burned. Her heart felt close to bursting. The six-foot Esis was even more terrifying than the giant one, but Amanda could still see the fear in her eyes.
“Heal him.”
“Ten seconds.”
Azral hailed Esis again.
Esis yanked a silver disc from her pocket and hurled it at Zack. It burned through his shirt, attaching itself to his chest. He twitched on the floor like a man possessed. His skin glowed yellow, just as the veins in his neck turned a dark shade of gray.
Amanda kept the .38 against her head, her whole body trembling in anticipation. She half expected Zack to wither or burn or harden to stone, as punishment for her unmitigated gall. But the bruises on his face began to fade. The gash on his throat closed like a zipper.
She’s doing it, Amanda thought. She’s really doing it.
Esis pointed a long finger at her. “Do not try that a second time. You won’t like my reaction.”
Butterfield began the three-second countdown over the speakers. Azral vanquished his great lumic doppelgänger.
“I come!”
Esis re-shifted and fled back up the stairs, just as Butterfield reached the end of his timer.
“Okay then,” he said. “All weapons—”
“Sir!”
His pilot pointed out the windshield, at the spherical glow in the sky. Esis emerged from the light on glowing wings of aeris. Azral floated out on a paper-thin disc of gold.
Butterfield lowered his radio, stymied by this smaller, weirder version of the Pelletiers. “You got to be shitting me.”
Azral grinned at Esis. “They do not fear us. Shall we educate them?”
His mother didn’t smile back. She leveled a glare at Butterfield’s ship. Her fists grew thick and hard with tempis.
“Yes,” she said. “Let us.”
—
No one who saw it would ever dare call it a battle. Though the witnesses in the sky only managed to catch a fraction of the violence, the tiny bit they saw was enough. This wasn’t a fight. It was a massacre. Forty-four seconds was all it took for Azral and Esis to annihilate Integrity’s forces.
Butterfield unwittingly did most of the work himself. On his command, every gunship and cannon cycle fired thermobaric missiles. The projectiles corkscrewed toward the Pelletiers before vanishing into a network of portals. A half second later, the missiles reappeared and returned on their senders. Sixteen vessels perished immediately in the backfire. The rest were spared through dumb luck or Esis’s deliberate miscalculations. Her confrontation with Amanda had left her in the foulest of moods. She was determined to vent every ounce of her aggression.
She grabbed two cycles in giant claws of tempis and clapped them together like chalkboard erasers. Their payloads detonated in her grip.
As the charred remains drizzled from her palms, a gunship lined her up in its sights. Esis soared past it in a blur, her aeric wings slicing a razor path through the hull. The ship plummeted in two pieces, as did every soldier inside.
Azral de-shifted behind a gunship and aged it four centuries in the span of a breath. The vehicle came apart in a rain of rusty debris.
Butterfield watched the slaughter from the command ship, bug-eyed, quivering. These devils had torn through his unit like paper dolls. His few remaining soldiers were scattering in panic.
“Hold your positions,” he ordered. “Hold the line!”
Azral doused two ships in solis, sending them both spiraling back toward Earth. Esis threw long tempic vines around a fleeing aerocycle and then slung it in an underhanded arc. The vehicle hurled toward the Absence in a clumsy spin, then crashed against the underside.
The explosion rocked the entire saucer, toppling everyone who remained standing. By the time the ship righted itself, one of the liftplates had gone permanently dark.
Azral glared at his mother.
Esis impaled the last remaining cycle pilot on a tempic spike, then hurled his body toward Earth.
she sent.
Semerjean sighed in her thoughts.
Esis looked over his shoulder and pointed in alarm. “Sehnsenn!”
Azral turned around to see a thermobaric missile flying at him. He aged it to a rusted husk, then shattered it with a burst of heat. A spinning piece of shrapnel nicked a shallow gash in his chin.
Esis flew to his side. “Love! Are you hurt?”
Azral touched the wound, then curiously examined his fingers. While his parents had both suffered brutal injuries on this world, he had yet to bleed until now. The pain was both fascinating and infuriating.
Butterfield watched them on the monitor. “Solic cannon! Now! Now!”
Four soldiers and a minister fell screaming through the bottom of the command ship. They passed through the floor like ghosts, and would continue to plummet long after they reached the ground.
Azral and Esis hovered in front of the windshield, their hard eyes fixed on their last remaining enemy. Butterfield reached for his sidearm, then immediately thought better of it. Instead, he took off his armored gauntlets and raised his huge pink hands in surrender.
“You made your point, all right? You win. Just let me go and I’ll keep the agency off your back. I-I’ll make up a cover story. We won’t give you any more trouble.”
The Pelletiers smiled mockingly. Their voices filtered into Butterfield’s ear as if they were standing right next to him.
“Trouble?” Esis asked. “Do we look troubled?”
Though no one on the Absence could see the Pelletiers from their vantage, the trio in the Griffin had an unobstructed view. Theo and Melissa watched from the front seat, their sweaty hands clasped together. Heath leaned forward far enough to form a third head on their shoulders.
“Something’s happening,” he said.
Theo looked at him. “What?”
He pointed at Esis. “Something’s happening with her tempis.”
Esis thrust her hands at Butterfield’s gunship. A black and inky substance spewed out of her fingertips, adhering to the hull in thick, gooey strands. Inch by inch, it spread across the surface of the vehicle, until every last part of it was covered.
“My God,” Melissa uttered. The gunship looked like an oily shadow, and the shape of it was changing right before her eyes. It was becoming smoother, rounder.
Smaller.
Heath screamed and looked away. Theo and Melissa twisted in their seats. “What—”
“It’s eating him!”
By the time they looked again, both the gunship and Butterfield had been completely dissolved.
Melissa gawked at Esis as she retracted the black tempis into her hands. “What was that stuff?”
Theo shook his head. He’d never seen it before in his life, though its name was dancing at the edge of his prescience. He could hear it in the future like a whisper in the wind.
Mortis.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I .
. .”
Theo looked to the distance and suddenly realized that Esis was alone. What happened to the other one? Where was—
“Look out!” yelled Heath.
Azral punched through the driver’s side window and gripped his hand around Melissa’s throat. Her oxygen mask fell off her face.
“No!” Theo yelled. “Not her!”
“Be quiet.”
Azral pulled Melissa toward him and spoke directly into her ear. “I have a message for your superiors in the United States government. Will you relay it?”
Wincing, gasping, Melissa nodded her head. The freezing air rushed in through the window, stinging every inch of her skin.
“Inform them that these ‘orphans,’ as you call them, are no longer their province,” Azral said. “Should any of them come to harm at the hands of your agency, we’ll slaughter your people by the hundreds. We won’t waste our time on expendable foot soldiers. Our hostility will be aimed at the highest-ranking members of your organization, as well as their families.”
Esis flew over to the passenger side of the van and gave Heath a crooked smile. He shrank away from her, cringing.
Azral pulled Melissa closer, until her cheek was touching the broken glass. “If your government needs an enemy, they’re perfectly free to come after us.”
His lip curled in a sardonic grin. “It’s no trouble at all.”
“Let her go!” Theo shouted. “Enough!”
Azral released his grip. Melissa lurched forward, red-faced and coughing. Theo slipped her oxygen mask back over her mouth.
“You didn’t have to hurt her,” he growled. “She—”
He glanced up to empty windows. Both Azral and Esis had disappeared in a blink.
Theo held Melissa’s arm. “You okay?”
She hacked a violent cough, then took a worried look at the Absence. It hadn’t fared well in the Pelletiers’ battle. Smoke billowed out from the underside. The three surviving liftplates flickered with strain. It wouldn’t stay afloat much longer, and neither would the Griffin. The engine battery was almost depleted.
“We need . . .” Melissa winced at the rough new scrape in her throat. “We need to get your friends.”