by TS Ward
“You’ve done enough,” I hissed, and my voice quaked with thunder. “Don’t touch him. Don’t go near him.”
“That’s the thing, dear,” he chided. “I don’t have to.”
I stood the perfect distance away, but those Lumen watched me so goddamn closely—that doesn’t matter.
It didn’t matter what they would do to me.
I swung the golf club as hard as I could, aimed low, wielded the thing like it was a baseball bat.
He caught it in his palm and I screamed a bolt of electricity through the connection between us. It singed his skin, tore into his muscles, shoved him backwards.
He stumbled with a gasp and I stood my ground, the club held like Rabbit’s staff. Anger brewed like a storm in the dark hollows around his eyes.
“James,” I breathed out, readied the thing in my hands as he took a step forward. “James, I—I’ll go back. I’ll go back with you, I’ll do what they want, just… just please, leave him. Leave him alone. Leave him alone, James, please!”
He crooked his head and watched me with eyes like the sky above a forest fire—suffocating and turbulent. He leaned on a leg and tapped his toes against the tile as he held a hand out to me with hooked fingers, beckoning me to him.
He spoke quietly, voice hoarse in the tense silence surrounding us. “What about us?”
“Us?” I croaked out, stepped back.
He cursed under his breath and rolled his head in a stretch.
Those words felt like slugs to my ears, slimy and fat and chewing up the leaves of hope that had just started to sprout.
He pinched the bridge of his nose as he smiled and laughed. “Hell, Soren. You thought I cared. Everything according to plan, after all.”
A scream above made my knees weak.
I felt the strange wires of the silver Lumen in my blood as it stirred to wake from wherever the hell it was hidden. Felt it as it landed heavy against the ceiling of the mall.
I shook my head slowly. My fingers twitched as I tried to tug at those electrical impulses above. The connection was weak and ethereal and far too sparse between here and there.
Prometheus was just a thought on the horizon of my mind and I couldn’t grasp it.
The mall doors croaked open again.
Rabbit’s people spilled in on steady and quiet feet, large black guns clutched in their hands. They lined the edges of the entrance hall. Some formed a line behind Fitz where the soldier stood with his pistol ready and aimed somewhere between Mercury and Ganymede.
I doubted he would hesitate to shoot.
“Touch him and they shoot,” I told James, but I looked at the Talon soldier halfway up the stairs and my words fell flat because—because fuck if they didn’t build that thing with weapons, they sure as hell gave it the capability to hold one.
I saw the faint blue in the back of my mind, its metal fingers curved the way Fitz’s were, its arm held up and pointed straight at a target. The other arm hooked around its objective.
James rolled his shoulders and held his hands up as if in surrender, but a sly smile crept across his face. “I don’t have a choice, and neither do you. We don’t get to choose, Soren, we don’t get that. Your delay is only making it worse. You should have agreed and moved on like everyone else.”
I eyed the dark ring on his finger, aware of the Lumen with their weapons at the ready, aware of the temperature of the air as it grew cold under the light of the sun above. That ring commanded Prometheus, and I didn’t have to take it off to use it against him. I just needed to touch him.
I just needed to touch him and make him think about it, just like I practiced with Arden, just like I showed Jack.
“He won’t be able to do it,” I pleaded with him. “He won’t make it through those trials. He can’t do what I can do. Please, James, take me and forget about him and you can have whatever you want. Let me show them that I can be their Genesis. Not him. He can’t. He’s a child, he can’t—”
“I think that’s the point, that he’s a child. More malleable.” He waved the Lumen behind him closer, and I moved with it.
My skin grew cold as panic spread through me in a flood. He looked down at me with a frown.
“What are you doing?”
Touch him, I screamed at myself, but the closer I got the shorter my stride got until I froze only a foot from him. My hands clutched the golf club weakly as ice worked its way through my veins.
Just touch him, touch the ring, something, anything!
But my voice came through on a defeated whisper. “Don’t take him from me. At least—at least take me, too. Both of us.”
I’m going to lose him again. He’ll be just another dream.
“I want to. Believe me, I want to. You have your perks. But Pilot and Asa want you here for some fucked reason, some certain path they want you on. At least his plans always bring you back to me,” he murmured, and then he stepped back into the hands of the Lumen, let them close around him as they burst blue fire from their backs and crystallized the sand under them.
He smiled as Percy’s screams chilled me further.
I heard Jack tell him it was going to be alright, and suddenly the anger I searched for pulsed, alive, and I surged forward.
The static around me dampened the air into a thick cloud, enveloping both of us into it. His hair stood straight up and I was sure mine did too. I was sure I must have looked like a siren underwater for the way he looked at me with both hunger and fear.
The golf club clattered to the floor between our toes.
“There you are,” he murmured, and I wanted to feed him his own teeth for it. “There’s the monster they came to see. That’s what they think you are, isn’t it?”
My hands caught his forearms and my bones crackled to the fingertips with blue. The colour sparked up his skin and pricked into his nerves.
It hurt. This one hurt.
It wasn’t just a slight tickle that raised goosebumps. This one tensed the wire of his muscles and shot pain straight through his nerves and mine. I wanted to let go and scream it out of me, but I grit my teeth and took the pain.
“Prometheus,” I growled through the cracks.
The image of a silver Lumen was clear against a backdrop of pure black, one hand curled and one arm wrapped tight, and behind it James held the puppeteer strings.
In my own hands, each fragile yarn was tied loosely around each frail finger. I tugged against his control but he had the leverage of chain.
Around me the air was so cold that my breath stabbed icicles into my chest. Frost formed around us and coated the Lumen.
Anger coiled around my heart to warm it, but my hands grew numb and my head lost its hold.
Let go, I told the robot, but James said hold on. Its fingers twitched.
The Lumen released James, and his hands shoved me off him and pushed me back into the waiting arms of another.
He formed a gun with his fingers and pointed straight at Fitz, held my gaze with his cold rage leaving snowflakes on his eyelashes. The Lumen behind him pointed its weapon to the soldier and just as it got the signal to fire, I focused on the static to form a barrier—not impenetrable but at least a shock barrier for the bullets to burst against.
I felt each one as if it tore through my own skin.
Fitz stumbled away, shot back, but it worked just as well going the other way. His pistol was muffled behind the ripple of the blue wall. Sparks shot outward where every miniscule thing collided and ruptured.
“Come on, Soren, dear,” James laughed. “You know that’s too much for you.”
My head felt the way the air looked. Thick and fuzzy and blurry. It hurt, almost as bad as the fiery pain of the real thing. Needles in my brain stabbed repeatedly, weaving yarn in the pinholes they left behind. But I held on.
I held on, because I had to, because there was a little boy up there and the Lumen’s hands twitched and if I could just tug—
It dropped the gun.
I felt it in the a
ir, a shockwave of the motion through the static, and then Jack dove forward and buried his knife into the soft silicon of Prometheus’ neck.
I could barely stand, but James was distracted and the golf club was at my feet and I reached for it, pulled it from the sand, raised it to swing.
I didn’t get the chance.
The second Lumen grabbed my wrist and twisted my arm down behind my back, until I was knelt on the ground in front of it. I tried to twist to get away. Tried to focus on the barrier between Fitz and Rabbit’s people and the Lumen that shot at them, tried to help Jack with Prometheus and Percy all at the same time.
The silver Lumen dropped Percy.
It dropped him and stalked forward, boots reverberating throughout the building as it moved toward a new objective. I looked at James as he eyed the remaining glass of the skylight.
The sun gleamed through the smoke of his eyes.
The Lumen ceased fire to take him topside again.
Something pierced the hull of Prometheus, and another, and another, but it didn’t stop it. Its hands wrapped around Jack’s throat and lifted him. Its collision sensors picked up something against its leg—Percy was wrapped around it with a war cry.
I let a bolt connect between my fingertips and my elbow like a guard. The shock of lightning burst through the Lumen’s outer hull and found the important components to fry it.
I fell forward, pinned beneath it as it collapsed on top of me, and squirmed to snake my way out, to get to James and that Lumen before—the robots rockets burst again, lifted him above me.
I looked up just in time to hear Percy’s scream and saw Jack dropped through the glass above me. Without a second thought, that static barrier was under him. It lessened his fall just enough to protect his bones from the hard floor, but the impact broke my control.
I scrambled to my feet, unsteady, and stumbled, searching desperately for a way back up, for a way to chase those screams and the cries for help. Bullets from the Sailer continued to fire at the plane as the engine roared to life.
My nose dripped with sanguine blood.
He was gone.
He was gone, my little bear was gone, Percy was gone.
I grabbed the golf club again and filled it with all the electric fire I had left, smashed it into the Lumen at my feet, over and over and over until the rage spilled out of my mouth. The taste of iron fell over my teeth and tongue and I screamed into the tense air.
He’s gone.
He’s gone.
He’s gone.
21
Jack sat up with a grunt, his hand pressed to his side as he spit a curse out.
Fitz raced up the stairs and hooked an arm around him. He hauled him to his feet as he coughed and wheezed, throat red from the Lumen’s grip.
I knelt over the dead Lumen, straddled it as I tried to pry open its chest.
They were connected. All of them were connected to a source that controlled and relayed and commanded and if I could find the transponder, if it still worked, if I could just break into this thing—I could follow them. I could find a signal and speak to my father. I could—
“Soren,” Jack’s voice was hoarse. “Stop.”
My hands ached, but this thing was just a tin can and all I needed was—
“Soren,” he said again.
Hands grabbed me and tugged and pulled and dug into my skin. I struggled against them, grabbed the Lumen, and twisted away from them.
Someone nearly three times the size of me peeled my hands from it. Their boot slammed into my chest and sent me sprawling backwards onto the ground. I already felt the weight of gravity in the wake of the static, but with that I was stuck.
Jack knelt next to me and held a hand out to Rabbit’s people. “Stop! Stop.”
“Listen, soldier,” someone growled. “For all we know, you’re in on it.”
“Fuck you,” he told them, and I swore I felt the earth quake for the venom in his mouth.
I curled on the ground to feel it better because right then only numbness softened every little part of my body. I wanted to feel angry, I wanted to feel scared, I wanted to say the same words with the same power, but I didn’t and I couldn’t. Jack’s words were enough, for now.
His hand was on my shoulder. “I want to talk to Rabbit. Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
“He’s busy worrying about Tiger,” the one who kicked me said.
Jack pushed himself off the floor with a grunt and stood over me as I tried to focus on the shifting plates of the earth and the creak of the buildings instead of the shifting glances and the way his voice rasped. “I’m not negotiating this. You help us get him back, or you lose her. You lose your weapon, you lose your leverage, you lose your fight.”
I slowly climbed to my feet and caught his hand to steady myself, to stand up next to him.
“You think you can keep us from—”
He stepped between me and the man who moved closer, a hand raised in warning. “You lose your life if you so much as try to go near her.”
“Come on, Jack,” Fitz said.
Caution dripped from his mouth as he came to rest between the crowd of Rabbit’s people. They blocked the stairs and the two of us who stood against them. He was trying to keep order between us but he only had one eye to see both sides.
He tucked his chin down to look at his nephew. “We don’t want to start a war over a child. We’ll get him back ourselves.”
“That kid is worth a war,” Jack choked out, and I felt the pain in his words.
I remembered Percy chanting a rhyme of Jack’s name in excitement and I remembered the two of them soundly asleep together and how my little bear talked about the stories that the soldier told him.
I knew that he loved that kid deeply. I knew that there wasn’t a breath of a lie in the things he said and felt. If he wanted to start a war to bring him back then there nothing was going to stand in his way.
I didn’t want a war, but I loved him for it. For loving Percy.
“Tell Rabbit to meet us in the garden,” I ordered them.
———
Do you remember the darkness? Do you remember the nothingness of it? Do you remember waking from a dream of nothing into nothing, into darkness that surrounds and swells and swallows you whole? Do you remember trying to remember your own name, who you are, what you are, where you are?
I sat cross legged in the sand and stared at the empty chair before me.
Do you remember the voice that spoke, the gentle and quiet music that filled the void of silence, the dull light flashing that symbol of the fox and Vulta across the darkness? Do you remember thinking hell was run by Astra?
A crowd gathered like crows to carnage.
Do you remember the light of the room coming through slowly as the sen-dep tank let you go free from its void space? Do you remember the man who stood above you with smoke gray eyes, who asked if you remembered him? Do you remember your hands finding a shaved head and a fresh scar behind your ear?
My hands gripped my knees and I tried to breathe normally.
Do you remember the fear? The panic? Do you remember what it was like to wake into a white hell stamped with Vulta’s name, with Mercury the demon to welcome you with all the kindness of an angel? Do you remember asking for your mom?
Roam was with Fitz and Ellie and Pucks, as still and as patient and as dead eyed as me.
Do you remember begging for her, collapsing to the white floor, dripping salt water off your skin and being wrapped in a white robe? Do you remember how cold that room was? Do you remember your father and the anger in him when you kept begging to see her, when you couldn’t remember a thing, when you couldn’t even remember how old you were? Do you remember the plane ride to Redbird and the statue of Romana in the garden?
I was conscious of Jack as he paced impatiently behind me, his hair a mess from anxious hands that he kept tucked under his arms.
Do you remember how he insisted she was dead?
If he tri
ed to do the same to Percy—hell. The Emperor dug a grave for the Empress. He would find himself sleeping there in her place for it, if he tried to hurt that kid.
Do you remember the dark room and how it felt like years until that door opened again? Do you remember that dark room and Astra backing you into the corner with a cattle prod in hand? Do you remember how she tried to wake your Sceptre blood by drawing it from your skin on the sharpened edge of a delicate sword, by drowning you in the salt water, by locking you away for days in the dark, by shocking you until the pain left you unconscious and battered?
If they did the same to him there would be an army at their doorstep like I wished there had been for me. If she was so desperate for a Sceptre like Emma then I would kneel at her feet and let her sword leave red on my skin and I swallow the salt water and I welcome the electric shock like an old friend. I would show her the Genesis that she desired so much and make her regret ever finding that journal.
Do you remember, Rabbit? Do you remember these things? Did you sleep in your own dark room or in the concrete cells with the scent of the ocean coming through the barred window at the very end of the hall? Just like Arden.
He was here. There was a shift in the air, a rustle in the clothes of the people who stood there, a blanket of silence that fell over their murmurings.
He was here, finally, and I was almost angry at how long it took for him to arrive. When he stepped into view he had Tiger in his arms, her eyes puffy and wet and her cheeks coated in orange sand. She and Percy were friends, and the only children either of them knew, and with ears like her mother’s I knew she had heard more than anyone else did.
Moon Rabbit stood before me. He rocked the girl with a hand pressed to her curly hair and looked at me with a raised brow as his guard, Salt, came to speak for him.
“Whose side are you on now, Princess? After someone you love so dearly has been taken from you, and you abandoned and left behind, whose side are you on?”
I worked my jaw. The words were in my head but it was hard to say them out loud.
Rabbit looked around at his people and a grim look fell over his face. “We’ve all made sacrifices in this fight. Little Percy has become a part of our family in these past few years, but to lay down our lives for one child, to do this—going after him as branded rebels and criminals and threats to the Empire, it’s a fight that won’t go down easy, and for one child?”