by TS Ward
I held my breath and pressed my hand over the ring that burned away in my pocket. James is here. “Where's Percy?”
“Ellie said she sent him up with Roam,” he said. He settled onto the step beside me. “He's okay here, Soren. None of these people would do anything to hurt him. I promise.”
Except James.
I bit my tongue, heart pounding inside my chest.
No. He gave me time. Time to reach Redbird.
Unless—unless he saw Jack this close to me, unless he saw us this morning when I saw the navy blues of his memory.
My worry made me irritable. “Are you just going to breathe on me or did you have something to say?”
He nodded and looked down at me with those meadow green eyes.
Maybe they were safe, like that dream. Safer than smoke.
“I wanted you to know that I told Rabbit about the weapon I thought we were getting. I didn't know it was you. But I only told him because I was terrified of a weapon being used against these people—and not just them. The rest of the Empire.” He sank onto his forearm, head lowered as he sighed. His breath brushed over my collarbone. “I've seen a lot as a soldier, Soren, and not one person I have met deserves a weapon turned against them.”
The man in the alley was clear in my mind. Avi on his beach.
I nodded, throat tight. “You don't have to explain that to me.”
He smiled, a sparkle in his eyes as he rolled to his back and stared up at the underside of the stairs. “I thought you would be angry. And I know it's not a good idea to let you walk away angry.”
I shrugged, but the action barely translated. I was tense, sitting there, with him so close. It didn’t bother me the way that James bothered me and made me queasy, only that he wouldn’t be happy.
I hooked a hand around the railing, pulled myself up, and offered a hand to him.
My chest tightened at his touch. Please don’t be watching.
“Maybe I am angry. But I understand. You thought you were helping the people, but doing that brought the Empire to Percy.” I didn’t let go of his hand as I smiled, to let him know I wasn’t serious. “I'll forgive you if he gets out of this okay.”
“Is the Empire here?” He stood just below me. His hand gripped mine hard. “Or is it just that Lumen?”
He was serious.
It was hard to breathe suddenly. He had that look in his eyes that he had in the Embassy, that question that rested in his furrowed brows and the creases of his eyes. He knew. He knew about James.
Or, at least, he suspected there was something.
“What do you mean?” I questioned him, staring straight into that green meadow. “I am the Empire.”
He pulled his hand away and staggered down a step. “That’s not you.”
“But it comes with me.”
I continued up the stairs, walked slow so I could catch my breath. We were almost to the top. The light glowed bright above, poured down between the stairs in a column of sand and dust, and the heat came down with it.
Jack was quiet for a floor as he bounded up the steps to catch up to me.
“That memory I had,” he said, his hand on my back. “It was you. You told me you wanted to be you. You told me you wanted to forget the Empire and leave your name behind. You wanted to leave it all and start new.”
Don’t ask, my mind screamed, don’t ask—
“Why is that your happy memory?”
“Because,” he said quietly, an ache in his voice, and my heart thundered. “You said you wanted to do it with me.”
No. No, no, no, no.
“Soren—”
I ran up the last few steps.
My breath came hard as I stumbled out onto the orange sand and squinted against the brightness of the blue sky. The Wastes burned hot compared to the shadows of the city, hot and dry and dizzying.
Pucks sat on a crate with his eyes bright and rounded cheeks red. Roam was thin and tired, curled up against her father’s legs. Relief brought the copper colour back to her skin when she looked at me.
I stood still as I looked around them, around the Sailer and the strange flat levels of the desert above Warren.
My heart nearly stopped when I didn’t find the blue eyes I searched for.
My voice was a ghost of itself. “Where’s Percy?”
20
I shook with worry and panic. Tried to stay put instead of turning and running back down those stairs, instead of barrelling headfirst into the city full of those who would do worse to me than hurl insults and gnawed on fruits.
It was those softly uttered words that nearly dropped me to my knees. A feather dropped from Roam’s mouth. The ones that tossed fear like a coin into a fountain with a hopeful wish.
Her words that tumbled from numb lips, “Wasn’t he with you?”
Of course he wasn’t with me. None of you were. None of you stayed. Where were you? Where is he? Where is Percy?
I swallowed my lungs whole—they were small and empty and made for a poor meal in the churning sea that was my stomach. I closed my eyes and breathed out the stars that burst behind them. My hands reached up to dredge up the lakebed of these dark curls that spilled down my shoulders, and stopped just before they reached the surface.
“Where would he be?” I breathed out, and my words were the calmest parts of me for once.
“With Tiger,” Pucks didn’t hesitate to say as he rose from his perch with a wince of effort. He waved a hand to dismiss my panic. “Relax, sweetie. It’s the only place he would be. He’s safe here. These people won’t let anything happen to kids, even those with… Beckett blood.”
Jack, cautiously and carefully, put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll find him.”
Please, I wanted to beg him. Let me, I wanted to demand.
It wasn’t the people I was worried about, and it wasn’t the city being buried further with each gust of wind over the tops of these dunes and the creaked warning of these buildings underfoot that waxed and waned.
It was the sparkle of the broken glass from a skylight in the distance, several street chasms over, and the building that hid half of it from view.
If something was wrong, Tiger would hear it, wouldn’t she? She would tell someone.
I let Pucks move past me, let him climb back down into Warren without me chasing at his heels. I stood there, frozen in place with my eyes locked on that shimmer.
“Soren?” A small voice whispered behind me.
I spun.
Sand stirred around my feet as I searched the shadow of the stairwell. Arden’s daughter peered out into the sun.
Tiger, without Percy to tag along and excitedly chatter about whatever’s captured his interest most recently. Tiger, alone and nervous.
“Percy said to tell you it is real, and he’s going to prove it,” she breathed. Her eyes flicked toward that sparkling glass. “It’s… the scary man—”
No hesitation anchored me now.
I was not weighed down by a single thing, but propelled by a single fear.
James has Percy. The Empire has my little bear cub boy. They have him and they’re going to take him.
My gait was unhampered by the sand, not slowed by vertigo as my boots hammered against wooden planks spread hazardously between the roofs of the buildings and the terrifying distance below.
It was like jumping out of that plane, without any choice but to cross that distance in whatever way possible. This time, I wasn’t strapped to a soldier.
He had Percy. Percy went to him, found him waiting there for his chance to strike without fear of any fight against him.
I felt pale and flushed at the same time.
Each step brought me closer to something that I dreaded. The man who would take a child and use him against me just to make me wear that ring and his name, just so he could take my father’s crown. Never. Never, ever, ever—my head was a rush of fire. I wanted to scream it all out.
I won’t marry you, I wanted to tell him, but take me back.
>
I will dream.
I will dream right, like Emma, better than Emma, for him.
For him to be free of this. Please.
Please, James.
The heat of the sun beat down on me, drew beads of sweat from my skin, and dried out my mouth and my throat and everything inside until I was a husk.
Nothing was left of me but I felt heavy.
My bones were filled with air but they were weighed down by a heavy static gathered somewhere in front of me, a burst of energy that ruptured through an invisible wall.
I slid to a stop on the edge of the building.
The precipice loomed over a street that was steep with copper-tinged sand. My stomach took the leap of faith but I stood firm, searched the air in front of me for that shine, that gleam, because it was there. I knew it was.
He didn’t walk to Redbird and back. Those two Lumen he was with didn’t fly like the silver one, only equipped with small burst rockets. Prometheus couldn’t carry enough fuel for a large man like him.
I let him slip past me. I let him follow us, our every move. I brought him here.
I gave him Percy.
“Soren,” Jack spoke my name on a breath. He caught up only when I stopped.
“Shh. Do you feel it?” I whispered.
I reached my hand out and dipped my fingers into the pool of magnetic resonance, shivering as I broke the surface like water. Jack did the same. His hand found the edge and swiped at the cotton candy thickness of the air.
He nodded before he choked out the quiet words. “By the stars.”
“I’ve felt it before,” I muttered. “It covered the outer walls of the sim room, the ones that didn’t move. It was how we knew where the edge of the playing field was. That’s why I ran, when I saw Percy, I thought it was a simulation and I’d… Stealth tech, developed by Vulta. It was for the Fraxinus War, so the normal sapiens could sneak up on the Sceptres. Didn’t work, but we’ve changed a few things since then.”
He looked at me as a frown shadowed his face. “Yeah. I’ve heard of it. Never uh… never touched it before.”
“You’re not.”
I pressed my foot against the lip of the roof and leaned forward, stomach flipping, until my hand connected with something solid and warm. The air around my hand rippled outward. The static closed around my arm and pulled my nerves into a soldered connection that pulsed with my blood and kick-started my heart into a faster, stronger rhythm.
The shape of it came alive behind my eyes.
The outer shell burned with the projected image of the land on the other side, one of the tiny cameras burrowed like specks between the shimmering panels pressed beneath my palm. On the other side, there was a broken darkness stretched across the plane. It was a plane—an autopilot.
Okay.
The muscles in my hand contracted as I shoved the static with a pulsed shock. It cracked the screens like a wall of glass with a fist run through it, and the image collapsed on itself until there was nothing but the black hull of a stealth plane and the shine of the Vulta logo stretched across the thing that rested nose first over the street far below, the leg pressed right to the edge.
“Anyone inside?” Jack asked, and dropped his hand.
“Autopilot,” I muttered.
To the left, where the wing rested only a few feet from it, the last two floors of a building stretched above the mall.
The windows were shattered and the walls cracked to reveal the structure underneath, filled with a sea of orange and a clear path between here and there. I didn’t wait to catch my breath any longer—there was a boy in there. A boy and a monster.
A real monster.
I raced across the remainder of this roof, hollow thunder underfoot, the quake of a city that bore the weight of the Wastes.
The empty windows were narrow but tall and I leapt through them with elbows and knees tucked in. I caught myself with a stumble on the uneven floor of sand, the ceiling a little low but high enough for me to reach the opposite side without ducking.
The skylight was a long dome iced with orange, shattered in the center but intact at the ends—the center, with footprints in the sand.
I breathed out slowly.
He was down there, with Percy, and I knew what he wanted out of this. He wanted me to give myself up for the kid, because he knew I would. He knew I didn’t have a choice. But—he gave me time, didn’t he? Why the hell was he still here?
He saw you talk to Jack, my mind whispered. He’s jealous.
I could talk to anyone and he would find a reason to be jealous.
Sand was piled high enough to jump down on.
“Jack,” I said as I stepped up to the edge and looked back at his worried green eyes. Green, like the sweet grass meadow. “He—he’s going to take Percy and I can’t let that happen.”
He shook his head. “You’re not doing that again—”
I stepped off the edge to plummet like a rock untethered to any parachute, dropped hard against the sand below in a huff of breath, and a tucked roll.
As much as my eyes were shut and my lips clamped together the taste of copper and the sting of iron still filled my mouth, still got in my eyes. I spat it out like tooth and blood.
It was everywhere, this desert. It was invasive. If there was one thing I was glad to be rid of, it was the grains that got inside the clothes and itched the skin and dyed it orange with the salt of sweat.
Let me leave this desert and leave my little bear here.
The surrounding rooms were hidden in shadow, the hall and the balustrade hit with an ominous glow that circled the drop to the bottom floor.
I didn’t see Percy or James or those two Lumen or Prometheus—
“Argh!”
A small voiced roar echoed sharply around the silence of this empty and sand plagued mall. A matching shadow leapt out from the left with something shiny outstretched and swinging.
I twisted around, caught the golf club against my elbow, rolled my arm against it until my palm connected and I could tug him into me.
My hand wrapped over his mouth and my arm pinned his against his body.
“Percy,” I breathed against his ear. “It’s me. Be quiet. Be still.”
He stopped struggling immediately, let go of the silver club, and twisted his head back to look at me and at Jack, where he leaned over the edge above us.
He was pale and his freckles were dark and fear turned his blue eyes to oceans. I wanted him to stay with Jack, tucked under his arm below the starry sky with their own constellations across their cheeks and noses.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me. Is he down here?” I tried my hardest to keep my voice as soft as the wind that whispered through this hollow place. I waited for his nod. “We’re going to do something, alright? But not a sound. Not one sound. You’re going to fly up to Jack like a plane, but I need you to climb up on my shoulders first.”
The static in my veins warped and leaped, searched like a magnet for the next source.
The Lumen marched on the floor below. Their metal boots collided with cracked tile where the sand didn’t protect it.
I let Percy go, slowly, carefully, and took his hand to lead him as high up the sand as I could. I knelt, patted a hand against my shoulder, and offered my hands to steady him.
He was bony and sharp and weighed a hell of a lot more than I thought just looking at him, but it didn’t matter. I bore it with clenched teeth until he was ready and pushed up on the steadiest legs I had so far in this mission.
Jack reached down for him. He grimaced against the sharp edge of the skylight.
Careful, I wanted to tell him, the glass, Jack.
A creak on the bottom floor was like thunder in the silence, the creak of the rusted hinges of the main doors, and then— “Percy? Are you in here?”
The Lumen below us turned.
Their boots crunched shattered glass as their movements reverberated through the entire structure. I felt it in my bones. I fe
lt them aware of Pucks and Fitz as they entered the building.
“No!” Percy cried out and wobbled from his perch on my shoulders.
My hands shot up to steady him but we were both off balance. He was fell forward through the air, and his arms stretched up.
A frightened noise escaping the wild boy—and then he was caught, hanging. His legs dangled in the air as Jack leaned halfway over the edge.
I caught his feet and pushed him up as high as I could stretch, until he was up in Jack’s arms and pulled over the edge.
“Percy!” Fitz’s voice called. “Come on, kid, come down—bloody hell.”
The Lumen marched up the dead metal stairs, two of them with their steps in perfect unison, and two more that flanked Mercury as he walked up the sandy white steps at the center of the mall.
The three of them were highlighted by the strip of golden sunlight that washed through the open ceiling. Dark shadows carried them.
James looked at me across his squared shoulders, sharp lines in his face. His coat tails drifted in his wake, hands tucked into the pockets of his pants. Confident, even as Fitz shouted up the stairs after him.
“Mercury!”
The click of his boot heels was undiminished until he came to a stop at the very top and the sound was replaced by a casual whistle.
I crouched slowly and curled my fingers around the metal neck of the golf club and rose again. I chewed up the fear that grew in me and swallowed it as anger.
He waited with a cruel smile. and I walked to him with lightning ready in my palms.
“Don’t worry, Talon!” James called down the stairs, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. “He’s been rescued. And here’s the princess, the Empire’s Duchess, coming to sacrifice herself on his behalf, again. Isn’t that noble, Talon?” He lowered his voice to speak to me instead of the soldier. “Is it really such a sacrifice? What the hell have I done wrong, Soren? What was it, did I not keep you warm enough? Did I not break you out of that box often enough? I thought we had this conversation already. Or—maybe I haven’t disrespected my uniform enough for your disobedient little heart. Is that it?”
My blood curdled with rage. I swore this club was going to melt under the heat of my hands.