by Shaun Barger
Nikolai reached into his pocket for his tracking spectacles, but realized with a pang of annoyance that he’d left them in his room in Marblewood.
“Anyone got tracking specs?”
Albert and Ilyana looked at each other, then Nikolai, and shook their heads.
He trailed his real hand across the blank wall in the oddly undecorated corner, feeling for the telltale tingling of enchantments on his fingertips.
“I can feel her through this wall. There’s something else. Something I can’t . . .”
He pressed the Moonwatch insignia against the wall and began to drag it along the cement, until . . .
There was a gentle hum, and a shimmer as the stone became a large, metal door.
“Well,” Albert said nervously, coming up to stand beside him. “Good job, Strauss. Aces and charms.”
Steeling himself, Nikolai turned the handle, and pushed.
The stink was what hit him first. Then the screams. Oh Disc, the screams.
Down a small flight of stairs they came into an immense warehouse. Gigantic lights hung from a ceiling of rough, wooden timbers—each light hanging down over glass-walled tanks the size of rooms.
There were dozens of tanks, in two rows. A path went down the center between them.
And within the tanks?
“No,” Ilyana whimpered, hugging herself and sinking to the floor beside Nikolai. “No, no, no . . .”
There, a pair of naked men, clinging to one another for warmth as they slowly froze to death amid piles of snow. There, a row of men and women—wizards and sorceresses? Being vivisected alive by dozens of enchanted mechanical arms.
Moaning, Nikolai ran down the aisle, desperately trying to get to Jem. She was close now.
Albert muttered terrified curses to himself behind Nikolai as he pulled Ilyana to her feet and scrambled to keep pace.
Nikolai stumbled, faltering with shock as he found himself confronted with two familiar faces.
Thin Mage. Fat Mage. The half-magi who’d attacked him in the Noir district—the half-magi who’d almost murdered him.
There was a shining, ruby monolith at the center of their glass room. Fat Mage was hanging upside down, strapped against the monolith. His eyes were open, bloody and full of madness.
Thin Mage was trapped in the tank with him, though he wasn’t tied down. He wore filthy rags and was missing one of his eyes. “Help us!” he screeched through crooked yellow teeth, clawing at the glass. “HELP US, PLEASE!”
The monolith began to glow. Thin Mage shrank away from it with a mewling cry. The glow spread across the Fat Mage and he seemed to blur—seemed to become a fleshy, glowing phantom, a secondary image stretching and pulling away from his body as his agonized wails ceased to be human—becoming almost musical—like an incredibly out-of-tune violin.
Ruby light arced from Fat Mage to Thin Mage and his cries for help ceased as he fell thrashing on the floor—his body melting away until only an electric skeleton remained. But somehow the skeleton was still alive, and screaming.
Albert retched. Ilyana was silent, expressionless. Nikolai pulled himself away from the two—Thin Mage’s skeletal hand pitifully reaching after him as he went.
Nikolai tried not to look into the other tanks as he ran, eyes on the filthy cement floor ahead of him as he followed the gentle tug of Jem’s tracer. But occasionally, no matter how he struggled to keep his eyes downcast, he’d catch a hellish glimpse. There, a room full of kneeling men and women being shot in the head by a floating tube, execution style, one after the other. There, an extra-large tank, full of water, full of enormous, toothy eels, hungrily snapping at a man with a knife as he desperately tried to fight them off, clinging to a small raft slowly being picked apart by the creatures.
Then—there she was. Jem. Trapped inside the final tank to the left.
She was wearing the same filthy clothes she’d been wearing on the beach, and she was strapped to a large chair—like something a Victorian-era surgeon would use, awful and archaic. There was a metallic, wheeled arch over the chair, and she was screaming, bloodshot eyes wild as she tried to look up at it, frantically struggling and kicking against her bindings, but there was a white band around her head and she couldn’t seem to turn her neck.
“Jem!” Nikolai screamed, pounding his fists against the glass. “Oh Disc, JEM!”
Her eyes meet his. For a moment, she stopped screaming. For a moment her expression lit up with hope. She moved her lips.
Nik.
A glint of steel. A flash as a blade came out of the arch in a blur.
There was an emerald shimmer across her retinas, and her eyes went dull. A line of red formed on her neck. Then, in a moment that stretched out with impossible slowness, her head toppled from her neck, bouncing across the floor.
Nikolai quietly sank to his knees. Jem’s dead eyes stared up at him from the floor, blood pooling around the cheek of her severed head.
The arch flashed and began to spin around her corpse, glowing and humming, occasionally stopping to make a loud clicking noise, accompanied by another flash.
Ilyana stood beside him, silent. Frozen.
But Albert was freaking out, pulling at Nikolai, trying to get him to stand.
“I’m sorry, Nikolai, I’m SO sorry but we need to go we need to go, we need to get out of here, we need to—”
And Nikolai knew he should listen to him. Knew he should get up, go with them. Go tell people about this place. About Jubal. About the humans. He knew it’s what Jem would have wanted.
But he was done. He was just . . . done.
Then there was an odd thud that Nikolai didn’t quite hear, didn’t quite feel.
Jem’s head rose off the ground and flew in an impossible arc back up to her neck. As the red line around her throat began to seal up, blade pulling away, Nikolai was convinced that he’d lost it—convinced that he’d gone utterly insane.
“An Elasti-Room!” Albert was shouting, fingers digging into Nikolai’s shoulders, laughing and gasping with relief. “All these people, they’re in Elasti-Rooms! Just like they use in hospitals! She’s alive, Nik, she’s alive!”
“Dying, over and over again,” Ilyana said, almost with wonder. “He keeps killing them. In different ways. Then he rewinds time inside the chambers to do it all over again. Never-ending. Like hell.”
“That arch,” Albert said. “There’s some approximation of it in each of these rooms. That clicking, and the flashing? I think they’re taking some sort of reading. When he kills them—he’s taking measurements! This is a laboratory!”
“Torture laboratory?” Jubal had said, laughing at Nikolai’s suspicion. “Some sort of evil Necromancer lair?”
Murderer, Hazeal had promised. MURDERER!
But no. This was worse than murder. So much worse.
Albert was saying something, but Nikolai was already up, he wasn’t listening. As Jem stared at him, still fighting against her restraints, Nikolai’s Focals were ablaze, and he was striking, striking—again and again and again—spiderweb cracks slowly forming across the thick wall of glass as he alternated blasting it with icy cold winds and white-hot flame.
“Nikolai, WAIT!” Albert screamed, pulling at him. “The arch—look how it’s moving! I think it’s about to kill her again! If you destroy the glass, you’ll break the enchantments! It won’t be able to reverse time within the chamber—she’ll be dead for good this time! NIK!”
But he wouldn’t let her die again. Not even once.
With a roar, he blasted through the wall, desperately lunging to throw out a great swath of Veil to surround Jem in her chair—to close around her like the great Veil domes of their cities, hiding the magi from the humans. Hiding them from the Synth.
The smooth, mirrored surface sealed around her, and just as the blade began to flash—cutting through the air almost too quickly to see—she disappeared. Hidden in a pocket of space-time just beyond this plane.
Nikolai sent out a tentacle of akro to wrap
around the arch and flung it away. It toppled over, falling onto the ground with a whirr of broken machinery.
Nikolai dismissed the Veil. It fell away from Jem in crumbling papery ashes.
She stared up at Nikolai, shaking, silent as he cut away the straps and pulled her away with a sob of relief.
“Hey, you’re okay,” he said, pulling her into an embrace. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
She was limp and unmoving in his arms, and when he released her she slowly sank to the floor, staring into nothingness.
“What is she doing?” Albert hissed. “We need to go—NOW!”
“I know!” Nikolai snapped. Then he gently urged Jem to her feet. “Come on. We need to go. I’ll explain everything later—I’ll fix this, I promise I’ll fix this, but right now we need to—”
“Oh Disc,” Albert moaned, going pale.
Nikolai stopped, looking up to follow his gaze, and there, not twenty paces away, stood Jubal. Eyes wild, like a demon. Like the demon he was.
Without a word, Jubal raised his candy cane Focal.
A tangled net of red light slammed into Albert, crackling through his body as he fell to the ground, spasming, screaming.
Ilyana raised her ruby dagger, firing a line of blue—identical to the ones Jubal, Thane, and Uncle Red had destroyed Armitage with, identical to the one she’d used mere weeks before to turn Hazeal to dust. It snaked through the air, almost too fast to see as it went straight for Jubal’s heart.
Jubal caught the thread of light in his bare palm with an almost casual wave, and the thread disappeared. Flicking his cane, he flung two more of the nets at Ilyana and Nikolai, watching them fall with an expression of grim annoyance as the light passed through their uniforms, sinking into their skin. Nikolai was wracked with excruciating pain—like every nerve had been plunged into acid—like every inch of his flesh had been torn free, ripped away by thousands of hungry little mouths.
Nikolai screamed and screamed, arching his back, unable to resist, unable to do anything but fight for breath. Ilyana wailed beside him, Albert choking and gasping.
Jubal cast a quick glance at Jem, but she just sat there among their twisting bodies, staring into nothingness.
“Ilyana. Albert,” Jubal said. “I’m disappointed in you. I expected better than this sort of blatant mutiny. This betrayal. Freeing a criminal? Invading my home?” he shook his head. “An hour from now, you won’t have the faintest recollection of what’s happened here. Won’t remember finding Nikolai—Disc knows how you did that. Though I’ll be damned if you don’t tell me before then.”
He looked at Nikolai, face tight with sorrow and rage.
“And you! How could you do this to me, you ungrateful little wretch?” He gritted his teeth, eyes glistening with angry, heartbroken tears. “I had to beg the Mage King to spare you! BEG! On hands and knees! And THIS is how you repay me?”
His expression hardened and he raised the cane, pointing it at Nikolai. But Nikolai couldn’t move. Even with the drugs, he couldn’t move. The pain was just too much.
“No more,” Jubal breathed. “No more chances. Time to do what—”
Ilyana made a noise, a strange, croaking moan. Brief, jagged lines of red still crackling sporadically from her body, she began to rise—arms and head hanging like a rag doll as she pulled herself to her feet. With a trembling hand, she lifted the crystal flask to her mouth, taking a pull.
“When you found me,” she said. “When you took me on, began training me as an Edge Guard . . . I found meaning. Purpose.”
“Stand down, Ilyana!” Jubal barked, pointing his cane. “Stand down!”
“A reason to live,” she continued, taking a step toward him. “A reason to not just be numb all the time.”
Snarling, Jubal fired off another net of tangled red light.
She arched her back, grunting, stumbling. But then she caught herself. She didn’t fall. Wheezing, she took another swig from the flask. Took another step.
“When Nik told me what you’d done to him—I lost myself for a moment.”
With a roar, Jubal fired another net, and the red light seemed to explode from her body—branching out onto the floor, onto the glass.
Her scream was bloodcurdling—terrible. She clutched herself, weaving, staggering.
And yet she stood.
She looked back at Nikolai. Blood poured from her eyes. Her nostrils, her ears. She tried to smile, lips peaking up for a brief instant despite her obvious agony, then turned to face Jubal.
Nikolai struggled to make his hands reach down for the Titan’s Tears in his pocket, straining desperately for control over his fingers. Slowly, he was able to steady the shaking. Slowly, he was able to reach inside, fingers uselessly digging into the pile of beads as he tried to force them into scoops, as weak and useless as an infant.
“Stop this, Ilyana!” Jubal pleaded, disbelieving. “I don’t want to kill you!”
“But seeing this,” she continued, panting, “seeing what kind of mage you really are, you’ve given me purpose again. You’ve shown the kind of evil that I didn’t think existed anymore. And I want to thank you for that.”
“Ilyana! LIEUTENANT! This is your last warning! Please—don’t make me do this!”
“Does it get you off? Make you hard when you cut into them? When you watch them die, over and over again?” She laughed bitterly, trailing into pained, wet coughs. “I bet it does. Especially when you cut into the girls. Isn’t that right, Captain?”
Jubal’s face hardened, lips firming into a solid line.
“So be it,” he said, and pointed his cane at her.
With a snarl, Ilyana pointed her dagger at him and cast another fiery line of light.
Lips twisting with annoyance, he raised his hand to stop it, just like before.
Only just before it struck him, the thread turned sharply—going into the thick glass wall beside him instead. The tank—full of water and monstrosities.
His eyes widened.
The wall exploded, disintegrating into dust, and Jubal disappeared as he was engulfed by an immense torrent of murky water full of shifting forms—of monstrous, toothy eels snapping and biting at the air.
Nikolai bit down on a fistful of the Titan’s Tears, the drug hitting him like an icy blast as it washed the pain of Jubal’s spell from his body. The wall of water surged toward them in what seemed like a crawl as he lunged to his feet, bringing up his baton in a rainbow wave of light as he created a barrier of Veil between themselves and the flood—sealing the gap.
Howling with laughter, Ilyana threw back her head and poured a small, glittering cascade of Titan’s Tears into her mouth.
Nikolai featherweighted himself and Jem, reveling in how much easier it was to cast and maintain spells in a Veil, when he could draw on a Disc.
Ilyana featherweighted herself and Albert, and soon they were flying through the air, jets of akro in their wake as they passed over the other tanks—no sign of Jubal in the churning waters below.
One arm wrapped around Albert as she propelled them through the air, Ilyana pulled the crystal flask free from her hip and released a cloud of vicious red smoke that rose across the wooden beams overhead. She stopped propelling herself and Albert with the jet of akro for a brief instant, quickly casting off a line of blue into the gas. The gas ignited with a hissing shriek—flame spreading out across the warehouse ceiling like a hellish sky.
“What are you doing?” Albert shouted as they flew. “The others—you’ll kill them! You’ll kill them all!”
“What do you suggest?” she said. “That we leave them here, to this? Better they die—that they stay dead!”
By the time they landed at the base of the stairwell up to the shooting range, the entire warehouse was aflame. Jem was walking now, though Nikolai had to pull her along after him. Albert was finally able to stand on his own, limping up the stairs as he shook off the residual shock of the pain spell.
“Do you think he’s dead?” Albert a
sked, glancing back into the smoke.
Nobody replied.
Jem didn’t even seem to notice her surroundings as Nikolai led her across the room. Ilyana was the first one to the door.
“Shit!” she said, yanking at the handle. “It’s locked. He locked it—locked us in!”
“Here,” Nikolai said, reaching into his pocket for the Moonwatch medallion. “I’ll—”
The pocket was empty. Nikolai began to panic, searching his other pockets. “No! No, no, no, no, no—”
It was gone.
“The medallion—I must have dropped it! Back in the—”
“Perhaps setting the building ablaze before we’re free of the place wasn’t your most inspired decision, Xue!” Albert said, rapier Focal drawn, slashing at the door with bright licks of fire. He stood back, sending out a thin line of flame. It melted against the frosted glass.
He kicked, it, snarling something in German. “Enchanted! Enforced! Might as well be a damned bank vault!”
Ilyana took a few vicious slices at the door with her ruby dagger, blasts of neon erupting from its surface. Soon, both she and Albert were attacking the door with blinding ferocity.
Shit. Shit!
A glitter caught Nikolai’s eye, and he found himself staring at the revolver turning sluggishly within its translucent bubbles.
A bullet from this will pass right through those enchantments in your uniform like butter. It’d pass right through any sort of armor or shielding.
He leaned closer, gaze fixed on the patterns of gentle yellow light coursing sluggishly around the revolver.
Only a mage’s bare hand can pass through the barrier. The enchantment can sense the millions of little flow channels in your palm and fingertips. Each mage’s channel pattern is different—like a fingerprint.
Nikolai looked at his golden hand, then back at the burn bubble.
The nerves, muscle memory, and unique magical channels of your original hand have all been replicated perfectly within the prosthetic.