by Shaun Barger
The Veil had fallen.
XV.
THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES
Jem clung desperately to the memory of the song as she pulled Nikolai into the alleyway, away from the men—wizards, or magi, or—it didn’t matter. Away from the men and women in black uniforms like Nikolai’s. Away from the fleshy-faced man who’d murdered her. Again and again and again and—
But. This was real. This was real.
The song. It was fading now. Already she could only recall the barest shape of it. Which should have been impossible. But her mods had somehow—glitched? Had been unable to detect what her lowly organic brain had experienced so powerfully. Soon all that would remain would be the carefully documented emotional and physiological reactions that had occurred within her body as she basked in its light. And even that was somehow . . . incomplete.
Nikolai slumped against a brightly painted wall, shivering, hugging himself with his eyes squeezed shut as if trying to deny the reality of what he’d done.
Jem had never seen a city so clean as this, even with the papery ashes flitting down across it all. Not even before the Synth uprising. Even the alleyway smelled like gingerbread. What was this place?
“Nikolai!” she hissed, and when he didn’t respond she took him by the shoulders and shook him violently.
The stump of his wrist hung at his side, oozing. Bloody and hideously blistered. Distantly, she wondered if he could feel it through the drugs she could tell were still in effect from the dilation of his pupils.
“Come on, little buddy. Don’t fall to pieces on me. Don’t you dare!”
His eyes focused on hers, the delirium seeming to fade.
“That man—Thane,” she said. “The others. They’ll find us if we stay here.”
“My uncle,” he finally said. “He’s . . . he should be at the Watchman station. In lockup.”
“I don’t know where that is, Nikolai,” she said, releasing him. “All this. I have no context. No concept. I’ll carry you if you need me to, but I need you to tell me where to go. I’m lost without you.”
He stared at her for a moment, then through her, then at her again, seeming to fade in and out, before he finally stiffened and stood upright. “Okay. Come on.”
Nikolai darted to the mouth of the alley. Beyond him, men and women dressed in strange, sometimes impossible clothing fled in both directions, unsure of where to go, knowing only that they were under siege as thousands upon thousands of tiny Synth scouts buzzed through their midst like watchful insects.
Men and women in navy, brass-buttoned uniforms—Watchmen, Nikolai had called them—sporadically cut through the air above the mob on sleek obsidian horns with saddle space enough for two and a simple curved steering apparatus at the front. Their amplified voices shouted for civilian magi to seek out the nearest “emergency boxes” for “stasis crystals and evacuation.”
Nikolai waved for Jem to follow, and they went out onto the street, pressed back at the edge to avoid the mob. The gleaming dome of the town hall was visible up the street, from where they’d come—resting atop a gentle sloping hill at the center of Marblewood. From here, she could see the impossibly beautiful, antiquated city spread out before her.
Beyond that, the lake, and the woods—the border of Marblewood’s lush green forest defined in sharp contrast by the crimson autumnal leaves of the human and Synth world beyond.
Swarms of drones, big and small, darkened the autumn sky like pulsing shadows overhead.
Dozens of black Synth teardrop fighter planes hovered silently in a ring around the edges of the city. Waiting. Contemplating this place that had appeared, impossibly, as Armitage allowed the tiny scouts to make their sweeps and likely awaited orders from the Alpha AIs.
Jem knew this territory better than anyone but the Synth. Seeing it like this—seeing it so changed by the addition of this massive piece of land—it made her reel. Made her dizzy with the impossibility of it.
Nikolai hadn’t been hiding his ship in the lake. He’d been hiding a whole city.
How? What kind of incredibly advanced technology could just tuck away a city like this? Nikolai had explained it, but she’d disregarded his words as delusion, as a part of some Synth Torment fantasy, before the song had convinced her otherwise. Before the Disc had shown her that this was all too real.
There—at the fringes of her visions, at the crest of the hill—Jem noticed one of Jubal’s black-clad soldiers. A bald man, one of his ears melted like wax at the center of a burn scar. He looked right at them, and smiled.
“Is that him?” Jem asked. “Thane?”
“Yeah,” Nikolai hissed, and Jem recognized him as one of the men who’d taken her prisoner with Jubal on the beach after destroying the Armitage husk.
Another Watchman zipped through the air over Thane, coming toward them. Nikolai drew his blade and created a wall of akro in the air, blocking the way.
The Watchman pulled back in surprise, spun out and came to a hovering stop, and in that instant Nikolai was airborne, spinning through the air to slam a sneakered foot into the startled Watchman’s face before he could so much as raise his golden staff to defend himself.
As the Watchman plummeted, screaming, into the crowds below, the obsidian flyer spun and began to fall, but Nikolai quickly brought it under control and pulled it up before Jem with violent speed.
“Get on!”
She climbed on, looking back to see the man named Thane gesturing with his vicious thorned club for two other Watchmen atop flyers to follow them. Then, eyes never leaving them, he drew a white sphere from within his uniform and smashed it onto the ground.
A craft much like the obsidian flyers unfurled from within the sphere, only bigger—creamy white instead of black, every inch of it covered with intricate swirling runes and symbols that pulsed with multicolored light.
Nikolai glanced back, then leaned forward, picking up speed. “A guardian horn. Shit!”
“What’s that?” Jem shouted over the wind.
“A ride that’s a hell of a lot faster than ours.”
Her stomach lurched as they turned sharply around a corner, then another almost immediately after in an attempt to lose the two Watchmen tailing them—but they pursued, undeterred, slowly gaining.
Boiling heat seared through the air beside them as one woman emitted a cloud of flame from her golden staff. Jem clung desperately to Nikolai’s waist as they spun away in a roll, nearly flinging Jem from her seat.
As Jem squeezed, she felt the pommel of the revolver jabbing her through her pocket.
She yanked the gun out of her pocket as Nikolai spun and ducked the flyer to go under the Watchmen’s coordinated pair of glassy column blasts. Sparks flew with a hideous screech as their craft bounced and scraped down across the cobblestone street—the crowd screaming and diving aside before them as Nikolai roared for them to move before pulling up to fly just over their heads once again.
Ignoring the revolver’s ghostly whispers, Jem turned to aim at the pursuing Watchmen, checking to make sure the streets below were empty before snapping out four shots—two bullets for each of the obsidian crafts, piercing the flyers from stern to stem with explosions of crackling white light. The flyers spun away and smashed down onto the streets as the Watchmen frantically leaped away from the dying machines.
Nikolai swore, ducking his head and yelping as they passed through an especially thick cloud of tiny marble-sized Synth scouts, a rotor the size of an insect wing slicing a slender bloody line across Jem’s cheek before she could lean forward to press her face against Nikolai’s back.
On every other street corner below, men and women clawed and elbowed at one another amid blasts of blinding light and that frosted glassy substance as they fought for the contents of strange golden boxes shaped like telephone booths she’d seen in period films. Pulsing red crystals spilled out of the boxes like glittering gemstone entrails.
Across the city, thousands of shimmering pink bubbles full of frozen civi
lians rose up into the drone-clouded sky. Dozens of milky-white guardian horns like the one Thane had summoned from the shattered sphere zigzagged through their midst as fast as any Synth teardrop fighter plane—faster, even! Turns and acceleration that should have reduced any organic occupant to a slurry of flesh and organs—and yet, even from here, she could see tiny, black-clad soldiers riding the crafts in much the same manner as she and Nikolai rode their much slower vehicle.
There must have been some sort of g-force negation—some sort of time and space slowing field within the shimmering bubbles surrounding the ivory flyers to protect the occupants from acceleration, as well as slow down time for them to control the impossible speeds without the computational power of synthetic enhancements.
The black Synth teardrop fighter planes remained stationary in a ring around the city, but Jem knew it wouldn’t be long now.
The guardian horns moved in dizzying formation to create immense lengths of the reflective, paper-thin Veil substance into a great funnel in the sky over the center of the city. Other funneled tubes of Veil began to rise up to it across the city like glittering tornadoes, protecting the bubbles as they channeled them to the other end of a tube above a row of sleek black trains down by the lake.
The bubbles flowed into hatches atop the train. After the first had filled to capacity, the hatches sealed and the train streaked off across the water atop invisible tracks, toward a gate suspended over the water that issued into darkness beyond.
A hideous trumpeting siren pierced the air like needles through Jem’s skull. Nauseating terror filled her stomach in waves as Nikolai screamed in pain at the sound, struggling to hold on while those below fell to their knees, clutching their ears.
The Synth declaration of battle. No civilians would be escaping into that mysterious gate today, if the Synth had their way.
The sky became fire.
The guardian horns split off—the bulk of the force engaging the Synth teardrop fighters in the sky, the others moving to defend the funnels and trains from the teardrops jetting off to destroy the evacuating civilians.
Curving threads of blinding, multicolored light filled the sky, shooting off by the hundreds to pierce the hulls of the teardrops too slow or with too few of their light-sphere shield drones to block the magi’s lines of concentrated destruction.
The guardian horns, though outnumbered, were destroying far more than they lost, dodging and weaving with a controlled chaos at distinct odds with the orderly tactical patterns of Armitage’s singular control—patterns only someone with neurological enhancements as powerful as Jem’s could discern, and even then, only barely.
The guardians were almost impossible for the teardrops to pin down with their immense lasers and missile clusters—the streaks of pearl seeming to go out of focus whenever they came under fire, illusory copies splitting and spinning off into a dozen different directions, masking their true location.
Explosions of light and fire reflected off the water as a cluster of teardrops closed in on escaping trains protected by guardians, who were trailing more of the mirrored substance to create scattered shielding across the path to the gate. Their threads of light twisted to intercept Synth missiles, and coiled into dense spirals to reflect lasers that would then glance off into surrounding forests and buildings along the shore, creating immense plumes of fire and smoke.
Nikolai let out a wail as the guardians failed to block one of the pulsing lasers, which seared through the back of one of the trains—slicing it open. The wounded train continued on toward the gate, engulfed in flames as spheres of red funneled out of the back, bobbing atop the inky waters full of frozen civilians.
“We’re almost to the station!” Nikolai said. “We’re—”
A streak of white zoomed past them too fast to see, the drag of wind powerful enough to send them rocking like a boat struck by waves. The white blur smashed into a building a block beyond them, crossing the distance in a fraction of an instant—the cheery, candy-colored walls of a house cratering under the glowing spherical field surrounding Thane’s guardian horn.
He turned to face them, grinning and twitchy, and sped up within the protective time-space altering sphere atop his rune-lit flyer.
Thane zipped by them again, threads of light passing close enough for the searing lines to burn their illumination across Jem’s vision as she tried frantically to draw a bead on him.
The lines missed once again, just barely, cutting through a cluster of men, women, and children huddled up, terrified, against the walls of a building. Flashes of light, the brief outlines of skeletons, and then naught but ash remained.
“He’s smiling,” Jem snarled, snapping off another few shots as Thane zipped by and fired another bundle of threads. He missed again, dusting more civilians. “That fucking monster! He’s smiling!”
“He’s trying to take us alive,” Nikolai shouted back at her. “To shoot down our craft without killing us. Otherwise he’d have gotten us by now.”
Jem reloaded, awkwardly and frantically, gun and bullets in hand with her arms wrapped around Nikolai’s waist. “Get somewhere narrow! I’ll have a shot if he comes at us head on!”
“All right—Hold on!” Nikolai howled as he maneuvered a hard turn down a winding alleyway, smashing into a light post and almost crushing Jem’s leg in the process.
With somewhat less finesse, Thane knocked over the now-crooked light post entirely, following them down the tinier street.
“Sharp about face!” Jem commanded, and Nikolai leaned forward, spinning to confront their quickly approaching foe.
A single shot from Jem. A single thread of light from Thane.
Jem’s bullet cut through Thane’s craft, which trailed an immense plume of crackling blue flame as it smashed down onto the ground. The brief glimpse Jem caught of his shocked disbelief as he passed was immensely satisfying.
Jem let out a whooping cheer as Thane’s guardian horn bounced and arced, cutting through the roof of a distant building with an explosion of dusky tile.
Only then did she realize that Thane’s thread had also struck their craft, as white light exploded from the front of the obsidian flyer. Nikolai turned, wrapped his arms around her, and she could feel that strange electric cold pass through her flesh, sticking to her bones as he alleviated gravity’s pull on their bodies.
They tumbled away from the flyer just before it crashed, clinging to one another as they rolled across the street.
“We made it,” Nikolai breathed as Jem staggered to her feet, helping him stand.
The Watchman headquarters was a sturdy, well-fortified building painted blue and gold. The street before it was littered with ash and refuse, but otherwise abandoned.
Fighting raged overhead, both guardians and teardrops dwindling in number, though the ferocity of their battle had only seemed to intensify.
Smoke choked the air, new ashes from the recent destruction joining the papery shreds of the fallen Veil, Synth scouts still humming by the thousands amid it all like angry bees. The fighting had lessened over the lake, the trains too well defended for the teardrops as the guardians whittled away and slowly began to outnumber their ranks, though bursts of laser would still occasionally turn fresh bubbles to dust before they could rise to the safety of the funnels.
Another fleet of smaller Synth planes arrived and began dropping carpets of black pods across the city in multitudes too great for the guardians to intercept with a familiar whistling that froze Jem in her tracks.
Those weren’t bombs—no, inside those pods were Synth troopers, like the one she’d destroyed in her failed attempt to rescue Blue. Powerful humanoid soldier machines reserved for serious conflicts—firepower that hadn’t been necessary for the taking of Base Machado. Jem began to tremble uncontrollably as Nikolai guided her into the abandoned, partially destroyed Watchman headquarters.
Nobody guarded the cells below—all empty but for one, where a middle-aged man with rusty, gray-streaked hair pounded against
the bars of his cell, shouting.
He froze, stunned.
“Nikolai?” he said, with a disbelieving vulnerability at odds with his grisly, hardened features.
For the first time since before Jem had held him at gunpoint on Base Machado, Nikolai smiled. “Hey, Uncle Red.”
Nikolai told his uncle in a rush about what had happened, tears flooding his eyes yet again as he rapidly recounted how he’d killed Joseph and been tricked by the revolver into shooting the Disc.
“It’s not your fault,” the older man assured him, fretting over Nikolai’s missing hand. “And don’t worry about this. We’ll get you another prosthetic. You’ll be good as new.”
“You’re wrong,” Nikolai said numbly. “It is my fault.”
At a loss, Red led them to a stash of armor and supplies he’d hidden in the wall of his largely unadorned office.
“Here,” he grunted, giving Jem a dusty black uniform like Nikolai’s. “This was one of Ashley’s spares.” He winced, glancing quickly at Nikolai’s face for a reaction. Nikolai didn’t seem to care, teeth gritted as he busied himself applying medical salve to his oozing stump. “My sister,” Red said quietly. “Nikolai’s mother.”
The salve foamed, and Nikolai leaned back, eyes squeezed shut, tears of pain trickling down his cheeks as he pounded his clenched fist against the desk. Finally he leaned forward, gasping, and wiped the salve away to reveal smooth, healthy skin. He stared at the spot where his hand had once been, before shaking his head angrily and rolling up his uniform sleeve to close protectively over the now-healed stump.
In addition to the uniform, Red also gave them protective gloves, and crystals to place in their ears that would cover their heads and necks with an invisible barrier as powerfully shielded as the heavily enchanted cloth.
Red buckled a scabbard to his belt for his sword Focal, as Nikolai had called them—his other Focal a compass secured to his belt by a long, slender chain.