“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, then, that’s the central question,” Nero said. “You will never be able to do magic unless you find a way to want to.” He got to his feet with a groan, his knees creaking. “I’m a little too old to sit on the floor, I’m afraid. I’ll talk to a doctor about your medicine once the world is awake.”
“Thanks again,” she said.
Nero walked down the hallway, humming.
25
SLOANE STOPPED on the corner and looked up, trying to see the corkscrew spire on top of the tallest building in Genetrix’s Chicago, Warner Tower. It was the one with two faces, one flat, the other undulating. It had been made, according to Cyrielle, “without magic, but influenced by the Unrealist school nonetheless.”
If Sloane had believed in souls, she would have hoped that Cameron’s existed in Genetrix, that he was an architect building houses that defied logic and sense. But she didn’t.
Sometimes she still hoped anyway.
Cyrielle was walking with Matt at the front of the group. Esther was teaching Edda and their third chaperone, Perun, how to say something in Korean. Kyros saw Sloane lingering by Warner Tower and stayed behind to wait for her, his hands in his coat pockets.
“Did you have any luck today?” he asked.
“As far as I’m concerned, my siphon is just a really expensive paperweight,” Sloane said. She glanced over her shoulder, sure she had just heard something buzzing. But the street behind her was empty.
Kyros smiled grimly. “Well, at least you know you can do something. Some people don’t have the ability at all.”
“What do they do?” She jogged a little to catch up to him. The streets were packed with cars, some as old-fashioned as the taxi she had taken with Esther and some that looked like little bubbles with wheels. “Move to haven cities?”
“Oh, so you know about those?”
“Mox—you know, that bartender friend I made?—said he was from one.” She had stayed away from Mox since that conversation, sensing that she had made a critical misstep but not understanding what. It hadn’t occurred to her that she could just ask Kyros what she had done wrong. “He said he had to learn not to destroy things with magic as a kid, so he moved up here.”
Kyros raised his eyebrows. “Oh.”
“I don’t understand,” Sloane said. “He seemed to be expecting me to react in a particular way, and I . . . didn’t. That’s why I haven’t been back.”
“That’s probably a wise decision,” he said. “Children having uncontrollable magic is quite rare. If it were more common, we might not need siphons to channel magic at all. So those few talented children were the ones they summoned when they were looking for the Chosen One of Genetrix. If you didn’t react to that information, it’s an indicator that you aren’t from around here.”
“He wouldn’t suspect the truth, though, right?” she said. She felt an odd pressure against the sides of her head, like she had just dived to the bottom of a swimming pool.
“Unlikely,” Kyros said. “People here know there are other dimensions, but they don’t know that they are accessible.”
Sloane pressed her fingers to her temples. The pressure still hadn’t gone away.
“What is it?” Kyros said, setting a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t know. I just feel like something is wrong,” Sloane said.
And that was when something behind them exploded.
The onset of the Drain was sudden. A change in pressure, and then, in the space of a blink: the tornado. A wall of opaque debris from street to sky. Only it wasn’t wind, it was something else, whipcords of energy that dragged everything in their path into the center of the funnel. And while people were moving toward that point—the core of the destructive force—they came apart, piece by piece, vivisected by magic. Sometimes too quickly for the body to catch up and die, so a person’s last moments were spent in segments.
The first time Sloane had gotten close to a Drain, she had turned and run away. All of them had. There were no thoughts of bravery when the Drain was coming. There were no thoughts at all; there was only survival. She had considered running away from ARIS, fleeing the country and the Dark One. But the prophecy had tied her to him, and when her own honor failed her, that fact kept her in ARIS’s employ. If she fled the Dark One, he would find her, because she was Chosen.
So, because escape was not possible, Sloane learned not to turn and run.
She ducked under Kyros’s outstretched hand and grabbed Esther’s arm right below the elbow. Esther’s arm twisted as she grasped Sloane in the same place, locking them together. Cyrielle was screaming, her hair askew and her cape blown back, the mandarin-size gold pin now up against her throat.
“Retreat! Three groups!” Matt shouted. “Perun and Cyrielle! Sloane, Esther, and Kyros! Me and Edda! Sloane, you there?”
The question made her chest ache. Sloane nodded. It was a familiar procedure: Never go near a Drain with more people than you had weapons. Don’t rush into a fight—live to fight again. They were tenets she had worked into her muscles, mapped into her brain.
“Eyes open. Meet back at the Camel.”
Matt cast a wild look over his shoulder as the group split into thirds. Sloane couldn’t think of him—couldn’t think of anything except the rush of concrete and steel and flesh and earth ahead of them.
Sloane’s grip on Esther shifted as she took the lead. She bent low, pressing against the power that tried to throw her back. She had learned the way the Drain felt, how it pushed you until it pulled you, how the pressure in her head would release when she had gotten too close, how it smelled like ozone and dust at first, then wet earth and blood. She checked behind her for Kyros, who had his siphon outstretched, fingers spread wide.
Eyes open. The only real thing they had known about the Drains before they encountered one was that the Dark One had been spotted at each one—meaning he likely had to be present to control them. And though he was a being of great magical power, he was also still a man. Where their own magic failed, they had reasoned, knives and bullets would do the job just as well. If they looked for him, maybe they could find him. Maybe they could kill him.
Sloane rounded a corner and ran down an alley toward the funnel. As she watched, the Drain inhaled a huge wave of water from Lake Michigan and sent it scattering. Some of it escaped the thrust of the Drain’s power and splattered out, wetting the street, the brick walls of buildings that hadn’t yet crumbled, and Sloane’s cheeks. She took one step too far, and the Drain’s magnetism tugged at her legs and arms; she lurched away, knocking Esther back.
“Left!” she shouted. She could hardly hear herself over the roar of magic and power, the screams of those caught in the Drain’s grasp, the hooting of car alarms and the wail of sirens. She jerked Esther to the side, back to the street, and Kyros tumbled after them both. She still couldn’t see the Drain’s center, where the Resurrectionist likely was, grounded by his own magic. He would be the eye of the storm, and to find him, to kill him, she would need to go somewhere open. One of the wider roads, where she could see farther, unobstructed.
Clark, Wells, Franklin, Wacker, she thought. The last street sign she had seen had been ripped from its moorings, but Warner Tower had been on Franklin, so it was only one block north to Wacker Drive. It was the smarter path to take whether she saw the Resurrectionist or not—small streets were crowded, hard to navigate.
She bent low and ran, pulling Esther behind her. The air was thick with dust; Sloane pulled the collar of her shirt up over her mouth and nose to keep from breathing it in. The sidewalks were now full of people running away from the Drain, their faces in grimaces of horror, soot-stained and tear-streaked. The crowd was too dense to penetrate; Sloane led them to the middle of the street instead, where cars stood abandoned. She climbed over two taxis crushed nose to nose and sidestepped the back of a bus, the front of which had collided with a brick building. The seats inside were all empty, purses an
d briefcases abandoned on the floor.
“Slo!” Esther said between coughs.
“Wacker!” Sloane answered, and she almost laughed at the word despite herself.
Her shirt clung to her back, soaked with sweat, and her legs burned as she climbed over another car. As she stepped on the hood, she saw that the driver was still behind the wheel, blood bubbling from his mouth. She stood for a moment, watching him. His chest was still.
Move on. She jumped down and found herself at the junction of Monroe and Wacker. Wacker Drive, the great double-decker confusion of Chicago, with its upper layer and its lower. Here it was wide with a landscaped, raised median, and tall buildings, titans of glass and steel, bracketed the road. Behind her was the spiral horn of Warner Tower and the twin prongs of the Sears Tower, and in front of her the Drain. As she watched, a woman in one shoe, hobbling away from a building entrance, stepped too close to the inexorable pull of the Drain’s power. A whipcord of energy upended her and dragged her, screaming, into the gray wall of destruction.
But moving away from all the people and cars and uprooted trees and massive bricks of concrete was a solitary figure.
The weight of inevitability settled on Sloane’s shoulders. Cold crept up her spine. Through the cloud of dust and dirt, she saw a face plated with metal siphons with only thin strips of pale skin visible at their seams. The hands that hung heavy at his sides were also metal-plated, as well as what she could see of his throat above the high collar of his robes. A hood covered his hair, and the rest of him was shrouded in the bulk of fabric.
The Resurrectionist.
“Retreat!” Esther screamed, her voice hoarse.
But Sloane couldn’t move. If the theory she had proposed to Esther and Matt after visiting Evan Kowalczyk—that the Resurrectionist was the parallel version of the Dark One—was correct, this was the man she had lived her entire life to kill. This was the man who had painstakingly broken Albie’s body. This was the man who had tested Sloane’s heart.
It’s a simple choice, my dear.
“Sloane!”
She was barefoot, in the Dark One’s house. He had taken her boots.
She had to find something heavy or something sharp. She saw a rock the size of her fist, a crumpled soda can. And in the planter, in the median, an old metal rod, the kind used for street signs. She picked it up. It was flaky, rusty in her palm. Two feet long. She would need to be closer. She would need to swing hard, at his head—just to stun him, so she could escape—
She couldn’t breathe. He was coming toward her, his steps confident. Hand raised, as if in greeting. Head cocked like a bird’s.
She was barefoot, in the Dark One’s house, and Albie was screaming.
“Sloane!”
Sloane screamed and charged, drawing the metal rod back like a baseball player with a bat. She swung, putting the full weight of her body behind it, and waited for the crack, the feeling of metal connecting with metal—
But all she heard was a low, tinny note coming from the Resurrectionist’s facemask. He flicked his fingers as if dismissing her, and the rod burst into a cloud that covered her palms with silver dust. Then his hand was lifting, closing into a fist—she remembered Kyros telling her the Resurrectionist’s favored method of execution, collapsed lungs that wouldn’t reinflate—
Something heavy hit her from the side, sending her headfirst into the median. She saw dirt between her palms and used the momentum to propel herself over the planter and into the street on the other side of the barrier. Before diving into an alley, she looked over her shoulder. Kyros had taken her place in the street, his siphon hand held out and the air rippling in front of him as he let out a sharp, high whistle. But the Resurrectionist hissed through his mask, batted the barrier aside, and clenched a hand into a fist.
Kyros choked. And fell.
“Es—es!” Sloane tried to scream, but her throat felt like it was coated with sand. Esther was in the street, bent over Kyros’s body.
Sloane turned back with a strangled scream, but the Resurrectionist was already walking away from Kyros and Esther and toward her.
If there was one thing she had learned from her day of captivity, it was that when it came to the Dark One, she was the only bait he wouldn’t fail to take. And it seemed to be the same with the Resurrectionist.
She forced one foot back, then the other. Stepping backward over abandoned high heels. A briefcase that had fallen open, its papers spilling all over the street. A half-eaten hot dog covered in relish, still in its wrapper. She stepped back faster, making sure the Resurrectionist was still moving toward her and away from Esther and Kyros—
Kyros, who was probably dead—
She took another step back and ran into something solid. Sloane turned and saw—a person. But the greenish skin had peeled away from its jaw, revealing a white streak of bone and the clench of teeth. Sloane watched a tongue work between them as the thing licked its pale, purplish lips.
Not a person.
“Is this the one?” A raspy, metallic voice.
“Yes.” The answer came from a distance with the same tinny sound as the note the Resurrectionist had emitted to turn steel into dust.
The dead thing moved fast, forcing a white cloth against Sloane’s nose and mouth. She struggled against the inhumanly strong grip, but only for a moment. Then she passed out.
Chicago Post
CHOSEN ONE: STILL ALIVE?
by Alexander Marshall
CHICAGO, MARCH 3: are we doomed? reads a sign propped against the City Hall building. A “Chosen Truther”—a member of a movement demanding transparency from the Department of Magical Oversight in Chicago regarding the Chosen One—has stopped for a cigarette. Chosen Truthers have been protesting outside Cordus Center since Tuesday. Why? Because they think the Chosen One is dead.
The nation celebrated the day Cordus announced it had found the Chosen One, destined to save humankind. But ever since the massacre of the Army of Flickering three years ago, the Chosen One has remained under lock and key. Perhaps it’s not surprising that people are starting to speculate.
“What if he’s dead?” asks Eleanor Green, mother of two from the Chicago suburb of Deer Grove. She’s the founder of the Chosen Truth movement, though she reminds me several times that she’s not the first one to want proof of the Chosen One’s life. “What if he died in the massacre and they just don’t want to tell us? Has anyone seen him since then?”
Most of the Chosen Truthers hold signs that bear the illustration of the Chosen One that was released after he was discovered. Or “allegedly discovered,” as the Chosen Truthers would say.
“They told us they found him,” says Althea Grange, a self-described “neighborhood grandma” from Rockford. “And then they told us he was too young to have his picture in the paper, and we should just trust them? I don’t think they ever found him. They’re just trying to avoid a mass panic.”
The Chosen Truthers have just begun to chant. “Chosen One, Hidden One!” is the refrain of the hour. Two hours ago, they were singing a parody of the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World” with the lyrics “If it’s the end of the world, we should know it! We know you’re lying.” Last night, they even brought in a minister to lead a prayer begging God to spare Genetrix.
After days of protests in front of her office, DOMO deputy director Aelia Haddox finally issued a response to the Chosen Truthers’ concerns: “This isn’t some kind of conspiracy. After the massacre we increased security around the Chosen One for his safety. He is still only eighteen years old, and he deserves a little privacy until he’s ready to come forward. They need to go home and find something else to worry about.”
26
SLOANE WAS SWAYING her hips to the music. Her hands were caked with flour. Albie popped the top of the jar of sprinkles and tipped his head back to pour them in his mouth.
“Gross!” Sloane said, still swaying. But she was laughing. In front of her was a line of cookies shaped like Christm
as trees. She had dusted them with green sugar. “Decorate your damn cookies,” Sloane said. “We’re making a new tradition here.”
Albie’s cheek bulged with sprinkles. His lips were blue from the food coloring. Then the color drained from his face, leaving him ashen and pale. A blue-lipped corpse.
She woke up in waves. In the first, she noticed all the blood had rushed to her hands; her fingertips were pulsing. And in the second, she realized her stomach was pressed into something hard and faintly curved: a shoulder. In the third, she remembered the cloth against her face. And in the fourth, she opened her eyes.
There was fabric right in front of her. The hem of a shirt. She tipped her head up just a little to see the floor passing beneath her. It was checkerboard marble in taupe and white. Whoever—whatever—was carrying her wore brown work boots with untied purple laces.
With her ear against his back, she could hear his breaths rattling in and out. The hand clasping her leg felt unyielding as a vise. She thought of the rotten cheek, the gritted molars with the tongue undulating behind them that she had seen before she passed out. Aelia had told them how the Resurrectionist came by his name on Genetrix. His army was composed of the living dead.
Her instinct was to thrash and kick. Catch her captor by surprise, get away, and run as far as she could. But she didn’t move. She didn’t know enough about the one who was carrying her—did he feel pain? How strong was he?—and she didn’t know where she was. Escape would have to wait.
Instead of running, she took note of the direction of the light (coming from windows on her right) and its slant (they were facing east, and it was morning, just after sunrise). A sharp pain in her chest told her she was panicking. She had woken up a captive once before. It had gone badly.
She listened to the murmur of voices around her, each one airy and dry, like a gasp. The Resurrectionist’s army, surrounding her. The echoes and the reflection of high windows in the gleaming floor told her the space was large. The scent on the air was mildew and dust with a hint of the ozone the Drain carried in on her clothes, hair, and skin. She knew from experience that it would take days to fade, no matter how hard she scrubbed.
Chosen Ones Page 23