by Shaun Barger
Nikolai’s barrel-chested friend looked at Jem, then back at Nik, blood draining from his face as he appeared to realize what they were discussing. “Wait, what?”
“Shut up, Joseph,” Nikolai whispered tersely, eyes never leaving hers. “Please, Jem. If it has to be done, let me. I’ll seal it, to drop the Veil, then I’ll unseal it—that way, not only will they have a chance to survive and fight back, but I’ll also be more powerful. I’ll get us out of here.”
The Disc floated there, emitting silver light through the great black chains holding it in place—softly luminescent droplets trickling into the glassy surface of the pool below.
Staring at it, Jem nodded. She tossed the blade and baton into the chamber, indicating with a wave of her revolver that Nikolai could retrieve them. “Fine. Do it. Now.”
Wan, Nikolai sheathed the baton, picked up the dagger, and gracefully leaped through the air to land where the shackles met the wall. Perching on an immense link, he began striking at the anchor, sparks flying as he cut with his white-hot blade.
“You can’t do this,” Joseph said, face taut with sickened disbelief. “Y-y-you can’t! Why—”
Jem pressed a finger against the tragus of her ear to block out the sound, crooking her neck to press the other ear against her hunched shoulder, and casually snapped out a shot past the navy-clad boy’s head—a puff of hot dust exploding from the slick white wall behind him as it burrowed deeply into the stone.
“Another word from you,” Jem said as Joseph bit back a terrified yelp, falling to his knees, “and the next shot won’t miss.”
Nikolai swung his blade to strike with one final explosion of sparks, and the chains fell away, smashing down with an unbearable cacophony of iron against stone.
The Disc seemed to pulse, free of the great, black bindings. It began to spin slowly, impossible pearly depths glowing somehow brighter.
Nikolai dropped down into a neat landing.
Swapping his blade for the baton, Nikolai summoned a wafer-thin sheet of mirror and leaped back into the air—trailing it behind him as he methodically bounded from floor to ceiling around the Disc. The reflective skeleton of a sphere quickly began to take shape, like ribbons of polished steel being wound across the surface of an invisible globe.
The blond man’s face had gone a purplish red in his strain to remain silent as he followed the progress of Nikolai’s graceful leaping form.
Though nearly finished with the sphere, Nikolai’s momentum was brought to a halt when he botched a landing—twisting, almost falling, then catching himself in a stagger.
The Disc’s pale radiance shone through what few slender gaps remained in the looping mirror ribbons.
Chest heaving, Nikolai steadied himself, impatiently whipping his baton in a quick motion to unfurl another sheet of silver. But then, as he positioned himself to jump, the sheet fizzled out, crumbling to ashes.
“What’s the fucking problem?” Jem growled, impatient. How much longer could it possibly be before Nikolai’s former comrades burst through that door to eviscerate them with those concentrated threads of fire?
“It’s fine!” he insisted, repeating the motion with his baton to summon another ribbon, with the same result. “Gimme a sec, I just need . . .”
“There’s no time, Nikolai!”
“I know!” he said, trying again, then again, increasingly desperate as each mercurial burst seemed to crumble more quickly than the last. “It’s not as easy as it looks!”
“Are you fucking with me right now?” Jem raised the gun, grip slick with perspiration. “Is this some sort of trick?”
“No!” he cried, through another puff of ash. “I’m not! I swear! I just—”
“You’ve got ten more seconds!” she barked, taking aim at the center of the dazzling ribbon globe. “Then I’m taking the shot.”
“Please!”
“Ten. Nine . . .”
“Goddamnit, Jem! That isn’t helping!”
“Eight. Seven.”
“I can do this! Just . . .”
But then, as even the quantity of ashes he could produce began to lessen, Nikolai gave up—his shoulders slumping, baton drooping as his arm fell limply to his side. He looked at her, the baton in his hand. “I . . .”
“Six.”
“I always hated it here,” Nikolai said, sounding unfathomably tired. “Hated almost everyone who lives here.”
“Five!”
“But I know them. Understand them. And because of that, I can really feel it. How horrible this is going to be. I didn’t feel it with the humans. Not like this. But I get it now. Get what a stupid, selfish piece of shit that makes me. And now . . . I can’t even get this right.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, tears spilling over onto the bloody filth that caked his cheeks. “I wish I’d let you kill me. Wish I’d . . .”
Jem had ceased counting—trigger finger trembling with a newfound hesitance as Nikolai trailed off.
The icy shell of Jem’s detachment began to crack—the hopelessness and self-loathing of Nikolai’s words stabbing through her with such surprising intensity that she had to take a step back and steady herself with a hand against the sloping wall.
For the first time, it wasn’t Eva that Nikolai reminded her of. Instead she saw herself, pleading desperately for the other woman to consider the cruelty of her plans. The woman who might as well have been her sister. The woman who damned herself by damning the world to suffer as hideously as she had—all for the greater good.
How many times had devastation and sorrow been imposed on strangers from another race, gender, class, or other, using that very phrase? And of those times, how often had there actually been a better way?
Slowly, Jem lowered the revolver.
“I . . . I can’t do it,” she said, the words flooding her with a great, gasping relief, as if she’d just narrowly avoided plummeting headfirst over a cliff in the dark. “You’re right, Nikolai. This is wrong.”
Taking an unsteady step toward the light of the Disc, which seemed to pulse through the gaps in Nikolai’s steely ribbons with a newfound brightness, Jem allowed the revolver to slip from her grasp—malicious whispers replaced by the faint notes of a distant song as the murderous steel clattered mutely across the floor.
Taking another step, she could hear the song more clearly—the aching beauty of its call seeping through her like blessed honey.
She sank to her knees, hands clasped before her.
“That . . . song,” she whispered. “Do you hear it? It’s beautiful. And so . . . sad.”
Nikolai stared at her blankly, seeming to struggle with accepting the reality of Jem’s change of heart.
“Song?”
“I understand now,” she said, feeling a warmth she imagined might be like that of an infant falling asleep in its mother’s arms. “I’m not in Torment. All this—it is real. And you aren’t wizards. This isn’t really magic. That’s just what you call yourselves.”
She stared up at the Disc, hands clasped in front of her face.
“We’ll have to fight,” she said. “But there’s a way. Better than this. We just have to find it. Just have to—”
Pain exploded as a navy blur crashed into Jem, slamming her onto the ground. Her chin cracked against the slick stone floor, blood filling her mouth as the much larger man dug his navy-clad knee into her back—her arms straining painfully in their sockets as he twisted them behind her.
She tried to cry out, but could barely breathe through the crushing pressure.
“That’s enough out of you, half-mage,” the cop spat in the tone that she’d only heard white men use when angrily reminding someone they deemed lesser than to remember their place.
“Wait—” she choked, but he shoved her face back down onto the tile, the icy weight of his scepter pressing against the back of her skull.
“I said that’s enough!”
A powerful electric shock cracked through Jem’s body from the icy weight. She co
uldn’t scream. Couldn’t breathe. She could hear Nikolai shouting—could hear the cop shouting back—but as she struggled to twist free Joseph hit her with another shock, and all at once the floor seemed to close around her.
Jem welcomed the darkness.
XIV.
THE WOMAN IN THE REVOLVER
“Get—the fuck—off her!”
Nikolai’s baton crackled with energy, his eyes lit with wrath as he closed the distance between himself and the privileged buffoon who’d subdued the unarmed Jem with excessive force.
Joseph rose to his full height, towering over the comatose, bloody-faced Jem. “Stand down, Nikolai. This woman is dangerous.”
“She stopped!” Nikolai shouted, overwhelmed with a new and profound disgust for this mage. “She gave up her weapon! You didn’t need to do that! She’s a human, Joseph! The Unraveling—the chaos outside the Veils—it’s all LIES! But Jem—both of us! We need your help, not this!”
But Joseph wasn’t listening. He shot through the air with blasts of akro from his golden flyball boots. Zigzagging, twisting, impossibly quick as Joseph jetted toward him, gracefully dodging around Nikolai’s frantic bursts of akro.
With a roar, Joseph closed the distance between them and slammed a tentacle of akro into Nikolai’s side.
Nikolai grunted, spinning away from the blow and throwing his arms up to protect his head as he tumbled.
“Joseph, stop!” Nikolai screamed, sending out a more powerful blast of akro, but Joseph moved in an impossible corkscrew circle around the column, dodging even as Nikolai turned it toward him and then Joseph was on him, bearing down with an enormous plume of fire from his scepter, great jets of akro shooting from his boots as he flew at Nikolai.
One-handed, it was all Nikolai could do to unravel the flames before they engulfed him, heat blasting around him in waves.
And then Joseph passed Nikolai, an akro tentacle replacing the flames, looping around Nikolai’s baton as Joseph yanked it after him, free from his grasp.
Baton flung across the cavernous chamber, Nikolai drew his blade.
“Stop!” he screamed as Joseph landed in a turn, muscles bulging as he prepared to launch himself at Nikolai—face twisted up with animal ferocity. “Please! Just listen!”
“What could you possibly have to say to me?” Joseph sneered, and he was airborne, too fast to see, and in a moment of desperation Nikolai featherweighted himself and launched into the air, out of his trajectory.
Joseph chased him through the air, and Nikolai was flying—fleeing desperately around the floating Disc as Joseph pursued him with murderous intent, twisting around and smashing down with akro-coated boots against the wall hard enough to send out shards of shattered marble.
But Nikolai couldn’t stop running—couldn’t stop fleeing. Thane—the Edge Guard—they’d be here any minute. Any moment! But if Nikolai stopped running—if he turned to fight—then he knew—knew with certainty—that one of them was going to die. Maybe Nikolai. Maybe Joseph. And killing Joseph . . .
“You don’t understand!” Nikolai pleaded, slicing away another plume of fire with his blade. “The humans, they’re all going to die! The king doesn’t care, he’s just waiting—letting them die out! He’s been lying to us—lying to everyone for a century. I can prove it, I can show you, just please—”
“You’re full of shit, Nikolai!” Joseph roared, whips of flame cutting through the air inches from Nikolai’s face as he changed his trajectory, desperately trying to get away. “You’re a liar! A terrorist!”
“NO! The king is the liar! I know his secrets, and soon there’ll be others here. They’ll kill me and take Jem, for Disc knows what kind of horrible shit!”
Another explosion of tile. Another near miss. “She’s a half-mage! A criminal!”
Another whip of fire—hair singeing on the side of Nikolai’s head as he barely managed to dodge.
“NO! She’s an innocent! And they were torturing her! Her and others! Humans and half-mages, experimenting on them!”
“You’re a LIAR!”
“Why! Why would I lie about that?”
“Because you’ve always hated us! Always been jealous and angry and violent! And now you’ve finally lost it—finally snapped, and now—”
“NO!” Nikolai said again. “I’m sorry for how I treated you! You, Astor, the others! Yes—I was jealous. Spiteful. Angry. It wasn’t right—wasn’t right! I was unhappy, I’ve always been SO fucking unhappy! But none of that matters now. Please!”
In his fury, Joseph slipped up, exposing himself to attack. In a moment that seemed to last forever, Nikolai had an opening, a brief instant in which he could blast Joseph with flames enough to reduce him to a cinder before he’d have a chance to negate the spell. Killing Joseph. Finishing this.
But as he leveled the blade with Joseph’s slowly widening eyes, the killing spell faltered in his wrist at the threshold of casting. The opportunity passed, and it dawned on Nikolai with sick realization that he couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it!
Joseph used Nikolai’s hesitation to his advantage and hit him in the chest with such incredible force that it sent Nikolai sprawling, his blade Focal slipping from his grip and the air knocked from his lungs despite his uniform’s protection as he tumbled.
Nikolai curled up into a ball, wheezing as Joseph walked over to him with his nostrils flaring. Joseph drew a pair of golden handcuffs from the navy breast of his uniform—Watchman spell-blockers.
“It’s over, Nikolai,” he said. “You lost. I’m taking you in.”
“Please,” Nikolai begged, crawling backward as he struggled to catch his breath. “Don’t let it all have been for nothing. They’ll be here soon. Be here any moment. And the humans—Joseph, the humans! If we don’t help them, they’ll all—they’ll all . . .”
“Even if what you say is true,” Joseph said. “I can’t let you go. I promise that I’ll do everything in my power to look into your accusations, but I’m sorry, Nikolai—you’ve given me very little reason to trust you.”
Joseph was almost upon him. Nikolai looked around, frantically searching for his Focals, but they were too far—he’d never be able to reach them. He continued to crawl backward, knowing that Joseph would pounce the instant Nikolai turned his back on him, knowing that there was nowhere he could go, nothing he could—
Nikolai’s hand came down upon cool, rune-etched steel.
The Disc chamber began to morph, scorched white marble fading to vibrant greens. The slick domed walls turned to vine-tangled trees around him, the floor to mossy soil.
Nikolai was in a forest. He whipped his head back and forth, baffled. Where—? How—?
A dark-haired little boy burst into the clearing, gasping ragged breaths as he half limped, half ran. A root caught his foot and he tumbled, sprawling. He struggled to rise, arms trembling with effort, but then he collapsed onto his side. Wracked with quiet sobs, too weak to stand, the side of his face bloody and raw from where he’d fallen.
Heart pounding hard enough to resonate in the soles of his sweating feet, Nikolai went over to help the child, but froze as an eerie whistled tune issued from the shadows of the forest from where the boy had come. The boy’s head jerked up at the sound, and his sobs became panicked. Terrified.
Nikolai couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. That whistle. It had been so long since he’d heard that horrible whistle.
Struggling with renewed desperation, the little boy pushed himself onto his hands and knees. Then, with agonizing slowness, he stood.
A whip of flame lashed out from the darkness, striking the child in the back, sending him to his knees. The boy screamed, his shirt lightly scorched to reveal blistered red skin underneath. Nikolai let out a cry, reaching for the child, but found himself unable to move.
A woman wearing the sheer black uniform of the Edge Guard entered the clearing. On one hand, she wore a golden medi-glove Focal. In her other, a slender sword.
Ashley Strauss.
Her face was a blurry aberration—like a hole in reality of which he couldn’t find the center, no matter how he tried.
“Too slow, Nikolai,” his mother said. Her voice horribly distorted. “You can do better.”
“Mom,” the child croaked. “It hurts. It huuurrrrttts . . .”
“You’ve got another mile. “
“Mom, please . . .”
Her golden fingers began to pulse with yellow flames. She raised her hand, threatening. “One more mile, then I’ll heal you. Otherwise . . .”
The younger Nikolai whimpered, silent tears rolling down his face as he forced himself to stand. Shaking visibly, he staggered out of the clearing, off to finish his morning run.
Ashley Strauss sighed and walked after him. As she disappeared into the shadows, she once again began to whistle that horrible eerie tune.
“Seven years old,” came a voice. Nikolai spun around, finally free from his paralysis.
A woman wearing bloodred formal robes and a conical, wide-brimmed hat stood behind him. A filmy veil hung across the brim of her hat, hiding her face. And though Nikolai couldn’t see her face, he knew that, without a doubt, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
“You were seven years old when your mother began to train you. Began to forge you into the mage you’ve become.”
“You . . .” he breathed, terrified realization dawning on him. “You’re the woman in the revolver.” Nikolai sank to the mossy floor and squeezed his eyes shut, clutching his skull. “This isn’t real. You’re in my mind. Get out. Get out, get out, get out!”
He could feel it now, those creeping tendrils squirming in his pools of magic. He had to fight, had to break free, had to—
“Peace, Nikolai,” she said, her voice soothing and musical. “I mean you no harm. I was a friend to your mother, and you rescued me from my prison at great personal cost. My purpose, like your own, is to aid humanity. I’m here to help you.”
Nikolai realized that he had both of his hands again, and opened his eyes to look down at them. For a moment his left hand was gone, his stump a blistered horror streaked with molten gold. But then, they were normal. Whole.