by Daniel Price
“Hold it.”
Amanda looked up in sudden alarm. She could feel strong hands on the most distant part of her tempis. Someone in the generator room was messing with her grapple.
“Shit. We’re in trouble.”
“What do you mean?”
The harness rippled in distress. Melissa hooked her arm around Amanda. “What’s happening? Are you all right?”
“They’re hurting me . . .”
“What?”
“They’re hurting the tempis!”
Melissa craned her neck, cursing. Reinforcements must have reached the generator room. She hoped that Hannah and Jonathan got out in time.
The temperature rose. A flickering glow filled the pit from above, a bright blue fireball at the top of the shaft.
Melissa recognized it immediately. “Magnite.”
“What?”
“They’re sending a heat drone after us.”
Four minutes before his untimely death, Oren Gingold had instructed his men to drop a torcher down the well. The remote-controlled flyer was the size of a vacuum cleaner, and packed enough magnesium thermite to burn a four-story building to the ground. Melissa had seen the British Army clear an entire cave of insurgents with just one of those things. Their screams still haunted her at night.
“You need to make a shield,” she urged Amanda. “At least six feet thick.”
“I’m doing everything I can just to keep us up!”
“Amanda, if that thing reaches us, we’ll know a whole new world of pain. There’s more than one reason they call it a torcher.”
“I’m trying! I . . .”
Amanda winced in agony. Her rope and harness began to lose their shape.
“Amanda!”
Her support line vanished, sending both women into free fall. Panicked, Amanda raised her arm and shot a geyser of tempis up the shaft. The pit became corked with nine and a half feet of solid white force. But the rock walls were smooth and the tempis was smoother. It slid seamlessly down the pit.
Melissa’s arm bumped painfully against the bedrock. She lost hold of the grenade belt.
“No!”
Amanda caught Melissa with her other hand’s tempis, just as Melissa caught the grenades with her foot. They continued to drop with the stopper in tow, all the way past the 450-foot marker.
“Friction!” Melissa yelled. “We need friction!”
Screaming, Amanda popped a dozen blades from the sides of the tempis. They scraped, then carved, then burrowed into the stone, until the whole mass came to a slow and grinding halt. Amanda and Melissa dangled on the underside, their bodies swinging on a thin tempic strand.
Melissa smacked against the stone and dropped her penlight in the process. She saw it tumble down the shaft before her vision went black.
“Damn it.”
“You still have the grenades?”
“Almost.” She struggled to lift the belt back into her hand. “Got them.”
She gripped their new harness and felt a strange softness to it, like clay. They must have reached the edge of the solic field.
“We have to stop here,” Melissa said. “We go any lower, we die.”
“Just throw the damn bombs already!”
A faint blue light filtered in through the tempic barrier. Amanda screamed in pain. The torcher had reached them in the lower depths of the pit. They couldn’t go up or down now, and Melissa feared it was just a matter of moments before Amanda lost her tempis.
She pulled a grenade out of its holster and balanced it in her hand. For half a moment, Melissa envied Amanda for having someone to pray to. All she could do was close her eyes, kiss her fist, and hope for the very best.
Melissa yanked the pin with her teeth, then hurled her first grenade at the disseminator.
—
The massacre began at 9:55, with only fourteen soldiers shooting at Gothams. They were the rasher minds of the National Integrity Commission: the nervous, the jaded, the vengeful, and the vicious. They were the ones who believed that orders were orders, and that any excuse to kill was a good one. The moment they heard Tomlinson say, “Shoot them all,” they aimed their rifles at the scattering crowd and they fired.
The rest of the gunmen simply froze, half of them staring at the children in the square.
Tomlinson raged at them through their headsets. “Goddamn it. Gingold’s dead, and these freaks have their own armory. This is an ‘us or them’ situation. So sack up and help us!”
Wave by wave, the soldiers joined the action. The underland became drowned in the rat-a-tat of gunfire, and nine hundred Gothams ran screaming for cover. They fled in every direction, tripping and trampling each other as they desperately held on to their loved ones.
Stan Bloom scooped his daughter into his arms and made a fevered dash for the municipal building. He thought he’d been smart by keeping Carrie in the center of the crowd—invisible, unreachable—but then the shooting started. Now his kinsmen on the fringes were escaping in droves while he was forced to run through fifty yards of battlefield.
Carrie watched over her father’s shoulder as gunmen cut down people she’d known since birth. Ripper Ballad, the only swifter in the guild she could even remotely tolerate, fell flat on his face and stayed there. Keiko Tam, Carrie’s ninth-grade nemesis and occasional lust object, took a fatal shot through the neck.
Most devastating of all was Jessica Groom: the primarch of the subthermics, the woman who’d trained Carrie and her mother in the art of wintercraft. She was running for the tunnel hatch when a bullet ripped through her chest and sent her tumbling to the ground. Her teenage daughter fell weeping at her side, shaking her shoulders, begging her to get up.
Carrie’s heart stopped as two armored soldiers closed in on the girl. “Oh God, Shell. Run. Run.”
Shoshanna Groom was a year older than Carrie. Everyone called her Shell because of the beautiful tempic skins that she made. She wore them so often, she almost looked naked without them.
The soldiers flanked her. Shell looked across the distance and locked her wet eyes with Carrie’s—a look of overwhelming sorrow, as if she’d scoured every inch of the multiverse and found nothing worth saving.
Carrie buried her face in her father’s shoulder as the soldiers gunned Shell down.
Several feet ahead of them, Elder Rubinek opened the front doors of the municipal building and waved a river of people inside.
“Hurry! Hurry! Stay close to your children! Don’t—”
The people around her screamed as a bullet pierced her temple. Her eyes rolled back and she fell dead to the floor.
Panicked, Stan doubled back from the entry and took his daughter another direction.
“Where are we going?” asked Carrie.
“I don’t know!” He held her close as more gunfire and shrieks erupted behind them. “I don’t know.”
Six seconds after the carnage started, Peter poked his head out of the interrogation tent and recoiled at the bloodshed in the square. His cuffed hands trembled behind his back.
“Butchers. Those goddamn butchers.”
Mia eyed him warily. “Don’t you dare go out there.”
“But Liam . . .”
“Peter, listen to me.”
A stray bullet tore through the tent wall, missing Mia by millimeters. She shrieked at the kiss of hot air on her thigh.
Mia watched with confusion as Peter kneeled to the ground and placed his shoulder under the front edge of the interrogation table.
“Wait. What are you doing?”
“Giving you cover,” said Peter. “Get ready.”
“Wait! Don’t—”
Grunting, he pressed his weight against the table until it tilted toward Mia. She stepped back as far as she could. This metal beast was about to flip onto its side.
“Peter!”
The table fell, and Mia fell with it. She struggled her way to a kneeling crouch.
“Stay there,” Peter told her. “Keep your head down.”
Mia didn’t have much choice in the matter. Her wrist was cuffed to the lowest part of the tabletop. She was practically chained to the floor.
“Please,” she begged Peter. “Your hands are tied. You can barely walk.”
“I’ll be back with my son.”
“No you won’t! Peter!”
He disappeared through the tent flap, then limped his way into the war zone.
—
Liam lay on his back in the northeast corner of the square, on a winding gravel walkway known as Founders’ Path. He wasn’t entirely sure how he got here. Last thing he remembered, he was hiding behind the guild directory with a whole bunch of clan leaders. Then a group of soldiers found them. A bright light flashed inside each of their helmets. Somebody—
Harold.
—had saved their lives. And then they all ran like hell. Yes. It was all coming back to him now. Everyone fled in different directions but Liam stayed with Mother Olga. She kept insisting that he leave her (“I’m too old. Too fat. I’ll just get you killed.”) but Liam refused to listen. He led her by the hand down Founders’ Path, ignoring the nagging voice in his head that wondered if maybe she was right.
Then he heard something loud at the roof of the dome—an explosion, like thunder. He looked up and saw the solic disseminator wobbling.
“Liam!”
That was when someone tackled him to the ground. The sounds of gunshots nearly made his eardrums burst. Liam blacked out for the briefest of moments and now here he was—his body pinned to the walkway, his ears ringing miserably. His lifted his head to view the person on top of him and saw her wide blue eyes staring back at him.
“Olga?”
He freed a hand and jostled her shoulder. Once, twice, three times. She didn’t respond. Liam couldn’t even get her to blink.
“Oh, God. No. Somebody help her! Please!”
Liam twisted his head and screamed. “Somebody help her!”
He heard heavy boots on the gravel. A squat and burly soldier crossed into his view. Liam brushed the tears from his face and glared at him.
“She healed people. That’s all she did and you killed her!”
The soldier stared at him inscrutably. Liam had no idea what was going on behind his face mask. He didn’t even know the man was a woman until he heard her voice.
“My brother was a field medic,” she told him. “He healed people too.”
The soldier aimed her rifle at his head. “You bastards killed him at Atropos.”
Another rumble of thunder. Liam looked up at the disseminator as it became engulfed in debris and yellow fire.
They did it, Liam realized. They did it.
Melissa had needed all four of her grenades. The first one cleared the hundreds of feet of electrical cable that had gathered at the bottom of the shaft. The second one destroyed the access hatch that separated the pit from the underland. The third one knocked the disseminator off five of its eight moorings, leaving it dangling from the ceiling like a loose baby tooth.
The last grenade finally set it free.
All the action in the village came to a stop as the Dalton crashed down into the clock tower. It tore through the roof, demolishing half the gearworks before breaking against a patch of hard wooden floor. Its dying sparks were bright enough to illuminate the two surviving clock faces. The glass shimmered with radiant waves of blue.
Within moments, the entire dome began to flicker. The undersky pulsated like a strobe light—black to white, black to white—until it finally settled on white. A thousand and six people looked up through shielded eyes as huge red letters flared down from the ceiling:
HEAVENSEND® II ELITE SKY LUMICASTER
(SYSTEM IV-454-211)
CONSOLE IS RESTARTING. PLEASE BE PATIENT . . .
In the center of the square, just a few yards away from the corpse of Oren Gingold, a young soldier exchanged a blank look with Winnie Whitten. He’d been just one rationalization away from shooting the girl when everything went crazy. Now all he could do was watch, bewildered, as she drew a comically deep breath.
“What—”
Winnie unleashed a mighty scream, one loud enough to crack his visor and send him flying off his feet. The sonic cry reverberated throughout the underland, shaking Gothams and soldiers alike out of their stupor.
Back on Founders’ Path, the soldier who’d killed Mother Olga aimed her rifle at Liam. He raised a desperate hand at her. The woman thought he was pleading for mercy until the palm of his glove split open. In a span of a gasp, the temperature inside her armor quintupled. She shrieked and flailed for seven seconds before collapsing in a smoking heap.
One by one, the Gothams began to retaliate. A swifter yanked the hunting knife from a soldier’s belt and jammed it straight into his visor. A turner waved his arm and aged Elder Rubinek’s killer to a skeleton. A traveler opened a portal directly beneath the feet of two invaders. They reappeared a hundred and fifty feet in the air, then fell screaming back to earth.
Tomlinson tripped backward over his heels, stammering as a tempic hurled a soldier over the roof of a building. None of the Gothams were running anymore. Many were starting to come back from the alleys and side streets, a look of sheer hatred on their faces.
“Shit. Shit . . .”
He reached for his headset and opened a subchannel to the contingency team. “Open the gates,” he told them. “Open the gates!”
Tomlinson caught movement in the corner of his eye. He had just enough time to turn his head and see the tempic fist of Victoria Chisholm. And then his whole world went from white to black.
FORTY-EIGHT
Heath paced the roof of the lumics’ guild building, his eyes roving anxiously around the violence in the village square. Everything had gone topsy-turvy in the last thirty seconds. The sky had turned from black to white and the victims had become the aggressors. Everywhere Heath looked, Integrity was suffering the wrath of Gothams. It didn’t matter if the soldiers fought or ran or raised their hands in surrender. They were all slaughtered. The situation hadn’t righted itself. It just became a whole different shade of wrong.
“They’re killing them,” Heath said. “They can’t do that.”
Harold and Bo shared the same jaded look. “Of course they can,” said the boy.
“Those dicklicks made their own bed,” said the tiger.
Heath shook his head. “They’ll just keep sending more people. They’ll keep sending them and sending them and it’ll never end.”
Bo narrowed his yellow eyes at Heath. “Bit of a nutbird, aren’t you?”
“Stop it,” Harold said. “He saved us.”
“Right. He also killed Squid.”
Flustered, Heath moved to the other side of the roof and saw a small group of soldiers at the end of Center Street. He’d noticed them earlier when he was sneaking around with Zack and Theo. They were completely removed from the greater conflict, their attention fixed on a pair of mysterious-looking doorframes. Dozens of wires connected them to generators. They were machines of some kind, but what did they do?
“Heath!”
He peeked over the roof’s edge and saw Theo at the intersection of Guild Street and Central, not far from where the snipers had shot him. His face was white and covered in sweat. He waved his hands frantically.
“Get off the roof! Get out of there!”
The doorframes came to life with a high-pitched hum. The air inside them crackled with static. Heath had no idea what was happening, but if the augur was panicked, then it was time to run.
Harold watched Heath as he bolted for the stairs. “Where are you—”
“We have to go!”
The hum grew louder. The doorframes pulsed with shimmering light. Every traveler in the village turned their head to the east. Something new and strange had appeared on the portal network: a cold, lifeless presence that none of them had ever felt before.
Peter took a few steps back and saw the two glowing doorframes in the distance. “You can’t be serious.”
Over the last four decades, as temporal technology gradually caught up to the Gothams, the teleporters of the clan had become increasingly smug. Unlike the turners, the lumics, the swifters, and the tempics, the travelers had no mechanical imitators. There wasn’t a single machine on God’s green Earth that could make a working portal.
Or so they believed.
In truth, spatial fold technology had already existed for five years, ever since Klaus and Edda Hilgendorf, a pair of middle-age physicists from the south German colonies, invented it by accident. They’d been working under contract for a European sex toy company, laboring night and day to develop a warm, pink version of tempis, when a miscalibration turned their homemade barrier into something else entirely. Without even trying, the siblings had created humanity’s first machine-generated teleport field.
Two months and countless experiments later, Klaus and Edda succeeded in sending their cat Vivian on a wormhole journey across the laboratory. Gobsmacked, the Hilgendorfs looked beyond the wealth and plaudits of the immediate future and realized, with some trepidation, that they were about to change the world.
Unfortunately for them, the world had other notions. Within minutes of announcing their discovery on EuroNet, the Hilgendorfs were murdered in their home by British secret agents, who erased every trace of their handiwork and then convinced the public, quite easily, that these daffy German dildomakers had not in fact invented a teleportation device.
Despite the Commonwealth’s best efforts to eradicate the machine, a high-ranking spy in British Intelligence sneaked a copy of the schematics to his Russian employers, one of whom was a Chinese mole. The mole’s mistress was a covert operative for the Republic of India, which Pakistan knew because it was tracking her every move. On and on the circus went, until twenty-nine countries had acquired step-by-step directions for building a Hilgendorf gate.