We keep walking, the majority of the group bunched in the dark middle, Enoch and Biyu carefully ranging out ahead while I bring up the rear. My ears prick for any sound, but all I hear is the drip of water.
Guilt thrums through me once more. How many times have I run, while people stayed behind to give me a chance? Papa, Professor Ekwensi, Amy and John. Perhaps others that I do not know about. And now I’m sneaking through the dark like a fugitive while they stay behind.
It doesn’t matter. It can’t be changed now.
Enoch pulls Aidan into the lead. He seems only too happy to be of use, brandishing the borrowed knife and walking with lithe, stealthy movements. I feel a sudden gratitude that he is with us.
Placing Chen and Biyu with their light in the middle, Enoch comes back to walk with me. We say nothing for a long time, and I let him put his arm around my shoulder. Eventually he pulls away and looks at me.
“Are you all right?” he asks quietly, too low for the others to hear.
I look back over my shoulder before answering. “I think so. I just feel so terrible for leaving.”
He nods. “Me too. Like abandoning Papa all over again.”
“Yes. It’s even worse to think that I handed the City to Doctor Black.”
“You didn’t hand it to him. It wasn’t a choice.”
“It felt like a choice. How else – ”
“But you can’t think that way. You can’t blame yourself.”
I do blame myself, though. I blame myself for what happened to all of them.
“If Papa hadn’t adopted me – ”
“Hey,” Enoch says softly, reaching over and turning my chin toward him. “It isn’t your fault that you are who you are. No one is sad you’re a part of our – our family, not then and not now. Okay?”
Family. The word usually has a warm, comforting ring, but when Enoch says it, all I feel is sad. Still.
“Okay,” I echo.
“Seriously, Naiya. If you let yourself take it personally every time someone gets hurt, or worse, you’ll never survive this. And we need you.”
I look at him again.
“We do,” he says softly. “People believe in you. In what you have to do.”
“Do you?”
“One hundred percent.” He grins. “Now stop fishing for compliments.”
“Ugh,” I roll my eyes. “You caught me.”
He hugs me once more, then releases me. We walk in silence for a long time before I notice the group is slowing.
Exchanging a glance with Enoch, who nods, I move to the front of the disorganized pack, where Aidan has come to a complete halt.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I’m not sure which way to go,” he says, gesturing forward into the dripping darkness.
Hugging my coat around me, I peer forward. Under the best of circumstances, it is hard to judge what a straight line is down here, but now there are several smaller tunnels branching off the main one. In a few places the path falls away precipitously, looking like a ridge more than a walkway.
I exhale. “Let’s take the middle one.”
The gentle patter of footsteps picks up once more, and we move into the small central tunnel, bunching together in the confinement. After a minute or so, we break through into a larger room once more. The small path continues through the center of it, carved across a chamber that looks at least partially manmade. The same ugly drop spans both sides of the path, and arching ceiling overhead magnifies the sound of our many feet.
“Wait,” I whisper, slowing, neck prickling with dread. I glance down at the screen of the power pack, but still see nothing. Still, the signal is weak down here and mine is old and not very sensitive. I glance back at Enoch, who pauses, staring at his screen with a kind of muted horror.
“Naiya,” he says, looking up at me.
Briefly I consider telling everyone to run, but instinctively know how poorly it will work out.
“Tate!” I snap, looking for her. I locate her in the middle of the crowd, where she quickly passes off the baby to an adolescent girl, pulling a knife from her belt. I stave off panic, fervently hoping the steps belong to Achilles and his people. In the huge, echoing cavern it is impossible to tell which way they’re coming from: from the unknown toward which we’re heading, or from the City back the way we came.
I pray it’s the former, but as they grow louder, I realize my hopes are in vain. They’re coming from behind us.
“Stay calm,” I order. “If you can’t fight, stand in the middle. If you can, fight hard.” I try to think of something else to say, but the fear is too distracting. Instead I take deep breaths, concentrate on wiping my face clean of emotion. I pull out yet another knife Tate has lent me, and reaching down, pick up a heavy stone, hefting it into a firmer grip. It makes me think of Papa.
An enemy with two weapons is more dangerous than an enemy with one, I remember. For some reason, the thought makes me smile. I can be an enemy too.
Someone screams in terror, a shrill, animal sound in the big room.
Turning, I see lights coming along the small passageway. Small yips accompany them as the guards burst forth, falling upon us like starving dogs.
A girl and a boy go down immediately, crumpling to the ground from wounds I never even see.
There are at least a dozen of them, more than enough for this pathetic, untrained crowd. Several more fall, and then, with dexterous ferocity, Enoch vaults into the fray. He fells a Home Guard with a knife thrust to the throat, pulling his blade free and whirling to plunge it into the chest of another.
A guard lunges for me, and I duck, using my momentum to throw him down the steep hill to my left. His wail ends abruptly, though the fall probably wasn’t enough to kill him. Another goes for my neck, and I dodge her too, cracking her on the head with the stone and sticking a knife in her back, not bothering to check whether she’s dead before I wrench it out. Still fighting, I look around quickly.
Tate is trying her best, but is struggling. Aidan is strong but undisciplined, probably the veteran of many schoolyard fights, which unfortunately don’t count for much against trained assassins. A knife wound to his leg causes him to stumble, and after that I can’t see him anymore.
Desperately I try to call forth the tingling, burning, snapping power. I shake my hands furiously, but like so many times before, they’re unresponsive. Crying out with rage, I whirl and stick the knife through a guard’s eye socket. He roars, the blade exploding his eyeball, leaving a long slit down his cheek as I pull it free. But it heals swiftly, the eye reforming instantly.
Grinning evilly, he moves like lightning, cracking my elbow with his baton. I manage to hang onto the knife, switching it to my other hand and favoring the arm, which now feels broken. He slashes at my cheek and I duck, narrowly saving my own eyes. Gritting my teeth, I feign injury, then bring the blade up into his chin, forcing it up into his brain. This time he falls, taking me with him.
From the ground I watch with a sickening swoop of dread as another young girl drops to her knees, a red gash across her windpipe. Then I hear it.
“Chen!”
It is Biyu’s scream, and her older sister’s answering cry as she plunges down the same slope I just sent one of the guards. I rise and run to Biyu, pull her from the fray and hide her behind a massive stone pillar, hoping no one has seen her in the confusion and the poor light.
“Stay there!” I order fiercely, taking her stricken face for assent before plunging over the side of the wall. Chen is easy to spot, a crippled sight that makes me almost vomit with grief. Her pretty face is contorted with pain and a pointed, heartless piece of rock extends right through her middle. Absurdly, I try to calculate the chances of her falling at exactly this angle, landing in this precise, deadly position.
“Chen!” I gasp.
“Naiya,” she manages, looking up the side of the wall fearfully, twelve feet up or so, I can hear that the fighting is only getting worse. “Don’t let them find me like th
is.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Please,” she gasps. “End it.” But before I can even begin to ponder what this means, to get a better grip on my blade and my determination, her eyes roll back in her head and she flops limply onto her grisly bier. Only the sick thrill of desperation, the thought of others who might be dying, wrenches me from the scene. I pull myself up the hill, the broken arm screaming in protest.
One of the Home Guard is on me almost immediately, his claws raking across my throat. They run deep, immediately drawing a massive amount of blood. I cry, a sick gurgle, no time to wonder how bad the damage is.
Instead I muster my fading strength, nearly exploding with violence and fury, for Papa, Amy, Chen, all of them, all of this.
Howling, I plunge the slippery knife into the guard’s groin, ripping upward until it lodges near his sternum. Contorting myself, I kick it in further, and he stiffens. A moment later he falls off the ledge, taking the knife with him.
“Damn!” I scream, then start in surprise. Swiftly I reach up to touch my throat, which has healed. There’s not even a scab. Moreover, the arm that moved was my good arm.
A strange feeling of invincibility rushes over me, and I begin to laugh, feeling for a moment truly insane. I look around, searching desperately for a weapon. Before I can find one, though, a lupine-looking guard vaults over the mass of bodies and grabs me.
Quick as a cat, she turns me around and sticks the point of her thick knife against my jugular with terrifying force. Even my berserk fury cannot save me now, and I fight the urge to struggle as her blade presses deeper. I wonder if she plans to kill me, or keep me alive after all the others have died. But the euphoria still pulses through me, and I refuse to give in to the inevitable yet.
Just then, lights erupt out of the darkness at the other end of the vast hall. Men come boiling along the passage, attempts at subtlety abandoned as they pelt toward the fray. The guard draws a sharp breath and her arm tenses to drive the blade home.
Instead her head explodes.
I scream, gazing horrorstruck at the arrow that protrudes from the mess of her brains and skull, scrabbling away from her. Just like that, the feeling of invulnerability fades into a cringing dismay.
Achilles, in the lead, has another arrow nocked to his bowstring, quickly loosing it at another guard. Behind him, eight or ten burly men and women finger their own weapons.
Growls erupt from the throats of the remaining guards, and they roar down the path in a blur. The cavern’s echoes combine with dizziness to blend all noise together. I tell myself I shouldn’t leave the fighting to them, but don’t move. When another guard descends on me, I shove her away with a desperate hand, and she falls, twitching and dead. Another guard comes, and he stops as though he’s hit a wall, glowing and twitching like his newly fallen comrade.
Gazing down at their still-crackling forms, I hear a ringing begin to build in my ears, replacing all other sound. Time seems to stagnate, then to suspend, then to lose meaning. I gaze around the scene, which has come to a complete standstill, faintly puzzled by the way it seems to be fading. Slowly the glinting weapons turn gray, then grayer, in the faint light of the giant room.
Enoch’s face, caught in a rictus of rage, darkens. Tate’s white-blond hair turns silver, then steel, then jet.
When the blackness finally claims me, I feel only relief.
TWENTY-EIGHT
My back aches, warm flames flicker, and I have been fed.
Sitting still, I can almost convince myself that nothing more momentous is happening than a trip to the Lower City, enjoying a rare fire and light rations.
But the pitifully few sleeping bodies piled around the firepit and the crystal clear night shining through branches overhead say otherwise. Before the Home Guard gave us up for lost, they killed all but four of the people we rescued from the lab. Of Achilles’ fighters, only five are left.
I slouch several yards away from the rest of the group, watching their silhouettes with my back against a fir.
The sheer quantity of bizarre thoughts in my head has had an almost numbing effect, and I breathe dumbly in and out, letting them swirl through my mind unfettered. Thoughts of my family and friends, Chen’s dying moan, are torturous. That my abilities again abandoned me when I needed them most is equally distressing. Sure, they reappeared at the end, but after so many were already dead … and then I just passed out while the rest died. I could have done so much more, and instead those boys and girls fell to the inhuman guards while I lay inert.
As for my newfound capacity to heal, so reminiscent of the Home Guard, it makes me almost sick. I can save myself, but no one else.
I’m a failure.
Periodically I experience an urge to speak with Tate or Enoch, but each time the thought quickly overwhelms me, so I merely turn the Bible’s thin pages, hoping for something, anything to distract me.
Its stories confuse me as much as they ever did, strange tales of betrayal, love and lust. What made it so dangerous, so threatening, when I cannot even figure out what it means?
More importantly, I wonder why Papa wanted me to have it. When first he’d handed it to me, panic in his eyes, I had assumed it held a greater significance. Now, after so many weeks of it yielding nothing, I’m forced to admit maybe that was just my hope. Papa, after all, might merely have wished to save a treasure, give me something to remember him by.
Irreverently I flick the translucent paper, one page after another, unable to focus on the words. Before I know it, I’ve flipped through the whole thing and am absently fingering the lining of the back cover. I run my hand over the paper, tracing its edges where it is glued to the leather, slowly worrying the seam until it begins to peel away. As if emerging from a trance, I suddenly look down, feeling guilty about causing damage to such a treasure.
My breath catches.
A hint of metal peeks up at me from underneath the paper I’ve peeled away. Slowly, carefully, I pull the paper back bit by bit, eventually exposing a small silver probe.
“Tate,” I say, then louder, “Enoch!”
Those by the fire look my way, Aidan’s brows knitting curiously over the brim of his metal cup. Tate and Enoch stand in unison, striding toward me and kneeling in the faint light cast by my power pack.
“What is that?” Enoch asks. “The Bible?”
I nod. “Look.”
They bend their heads closer. For a moment no one says anything.
“Have you ever seen something like this?” I ask Enoch.
He shakes his head. “Do you know what it is?” he asks Tate.
“I’ve only seen a few of them,” she breathes. “The construction was different, but I’ll bet anything this is a signal blocker,” she breathes. “That’s why they couldn’t find us. That explains everything.”
Everything. Dazed, I think back to every time we were caught, and every time we weren’t.
“Remember when Pip attacked you and you went ahead?” I ask Enoch, words tumbling out of my mouth. “You took my knapsack by accident, and I had yours – ”
“So I had the Bible with me,” he interrupts, understanding beginning to dawn. “It hid me, but – ”
“That’s why I found you,” Tate says to me, looking awed. “The dream knew that would happen. That’s why it pointed me toward you.”
I shake my head, turning back to Enoch. “And when you left to find Achilles, the guards found you right away. Because you walked out of range.”
“Just like when you went to the Upper City to talk to Amy, and left us down below,” Tate says.
A surge of guilt washes over me.
“She doesn’t mean that in a bad way,” Enoch corrects hurriedly. I try not to feel annoyed that he’s speaking for her now.
“No, I didn’t,” Tate concedes. “Sorry.”
“Then they couldn’t see us up above,” I say, ignoring them. “They must have known it was us simply from the alarm at our apartment.”
“Rig
ht,” Enoch concurs. “That’s why they were trying to sniff us out.”
“So what about the guard at the Painter’s Palace?” I ask, puzzled.
Tate shrugs. “That really was luck, just like he said.”
“So it was Papa all along,” Enoch says slowly. “Ekwensi wasn’t protecting us.”
“Actually,” a new voice corrects, “he was.”
We look up in unison. Achilles is towering over us, wearing his characteristic aura of friendliness and menace.
“He was?” Tate asks finally.
“Yes.” Achilles sits down with us, cross-legged. “He and a few others whose names I do not know. We work in cells, so that when we are caught we can only betray so many of our operatives at one time. I don’t know who else was keeping an eye on you, but there are at least three others who will remain in the City and try to keep things under control. Ekwensi was your first line of defense; every time one of your signals popped up, he was able to block it for at least a few minutes to give you a head start. Not enough, maybe, but he tried.” Achilles bows his head in respect for his colleague’s actions.
“Where – ” I falter, throat dry. I lick my lips. “Where is he now?”
The big man sighs. “He’s dead. But it was how he wanted to go.”
Tate makes a small sound in her throat. Though her face is still a mask, I can almost see the grief on it: She’d known him far better than I did.
“Wait,” Enoch says. “If this is a signal blocker, how did you find us? For that matter, how come we could see other signals?”
“It’s a one-way block,” Achilles answers, “otherwise it wouldn’t be much use, would it? And it’s rebel technology. We know our way around it.”
“But then, why wasn’t it interfering with the tracking system the whole time Papa had it at home?” Enoch asks. “That would have looked awfully suspicious, wouldn’t it?”
“It must have been programmed to activate when we left the apartment,” Tate says.
Achilles nods. “Must have. There was always the chance you would have to run at short notice.”
Broken Moon Page 27