by Shaun Barger
Jem changed quickly, grateful to remove the soiled, stinking garments she’d worn since fleeing the base. The uniform was impossibly light, clean, and cool against her skin. The gloves fit so perfectly that it felt like she wasn’t wearing gloves at all. She nestled the crystals in her ears, and her hearing seemed sharper, the distant voices and sounds previously drowned out by the explosions now clear, their directions of origin obvious.
Glassy crystal spread from her ears, across her head and throat, down into the uniform across her chest, before seeming to disappear—the shielding hidden but for a pleasant coolness against her face.
“We need to get far away from here,” Red explained as they made to go. “Once the Disc finally dies, it’ll detonate. Destroy everything within ten miles of here. Maybe more.”
“Detonate?” Nik breathed, visibly trembling.
This time, it was Jem who reassured Nikolai. “It’s not your fault,” she said, repeating his uncle’s words. “There’s no way you could have known.”
But Nikolai simply shook his head, calming himself even as he denied the absolution of her words.
Threads of light cut across the lobby as they came down the stairs, and the three of them dove away, scattering as the concentrated energy exploded against the ornately painted wall behind them.
“There you are,” Thane said pleasantly. The doors to the street hung loose from their hinges behind him as he stood there with his thorned club in one hand—an ivory pocket watch ticking loudly in his other.
Jem landed in a roll, drawing the revolver with mechanical speed to cut down the burn-scarred man. But he’d anticipated her draw, casually firing off a great mass of frosted glassy substance to seal her gun arm against the wall. She let out an enraged cry, thrashing against the binding, struggling to pull free.
“No, you don’t,” he said to her, and then turned with a predatory smile to deflect the lines of fire from Red as he rushed Thane, sword and compass Focals drawn.
Red’s sword clashed against Thane’s thorned club with an explosion of crackling light, and Nikolai fired off a jet of mercurial Veil from his baton to envelop Thane, but Thane simply turned the mirrored plume to ash with a twist of his pocket watch Focal, redirecting the ashes back into Nikolai’s face to blind him, his threads of destructive multicolored flame splitting to fire at both Nikolai and Red.
Red deflected the lines directed toward himself, but Nikolai stood there, blinded, unaware of the approaching spell, so Red blasted off with a burst of air and light to move between his nephew and Thane’s fire.
The threads struck Red’s uniform in the chest with a crack like a gunshot, the fire lancing off to the side like redirected lightning as he was flung back against the wall—the protective cloth smoking and shredded to expose a heaving, blistered chest.
Nikolai screamed, rushing Thane with a boiling jet of fire, twisting to dodge a tentacle that would have been invisible but for the smoke and ashes, but failed to avoid a tangled net of red light fired off with a gleefully shouted “Vasano!”
Thane kicked away the dagger and baton from Nikolai and sealed him in place to the ground from the neck down with that glassy substance. Nikolai hissed and spat, cursing and threatening their assailant as he struggling helplessly, unable to escape.
Thane went over to the fallen Red, who was struggling to stand, and chuckled at the wounded man’s efforts. “You are hopelessly outclassed, you washed-out little coward. I’ll never understand why the king allowed you to keep that uniform after your sister’s treason. I’ve orders to take your race-traitor nephew and his human whore alive, but I refuse to suffer your continued existence.”
Nikolai’s dagger had come to a rest before Jem, just out of reach. She thrashed and strained. There was space between the glass and her hand, space enough for her to move, ever so slightly, but her hand was too big, she wouldn’t be able to pull it through the wrist-sized opening, no matter how hard she struggled.
With a sadistic gleam in his eye, Thane pointed his thorned club down at Red and shot slender lengths of pulsing, dripping silver that attached themselves to seven points across his body, starting on his forehead, down to his groin.
“I’m going to burn you out,” Thane said. “I’m going to devour your soul and turn you into a half-mage before I kill you. Then I’m going to keep your Focals. As a souvenir.”
Red gurgled, back arching as he twitched, helpless, the silver threads pulsing like veins, growing thicker, seeming to drain him.
A sharp whistle filled the air, growing louder, and louder, and—
A roaring explosion sent Thane stumbling, the silver threads broken. Red let out a gasp and sobbed, weakly rolling over onto his side.
“What now?” Thane snarled, impatiently clearing the smoke with a powerful burst of air to reveal the black pod that had come crashing down from the sky.
“No,” Jem breathed, trembling, frantic terror filling her as the pod unsealed to reveal a gleaming white Synth trooper, its well-lacquered shielding humming with power.
“Jemma Burton!” it said, Armitage’s familiar singsong voice sounding delighted. “And Nikolai Strauss. My favorite organic beings. I had hoped that I might see you two again.”
It crouched and exploded toward Thane with abrupt speed that seemed to surprise even him, white-hot jets of flame from its legs and feet propelling it through the broken doors and smashing a heavy mechanical shoulder into Thane’s chest with enough power to send him spinning, his pocket watch Focal flung from his grip in the other direction.
Thane twirled through the air, featherweighting and catching himself before he could strike the wall and kick back, launching a cascade of threads from his remaining Focal that the Synth allowed to pierce one of its arms, which it ejected from its body before the spell could spread to its shoulder.
The arm dissolved from the spell, turning to dust and molten plastic sprayed in a mist toward Jem. Thane cast out a mirrored sheet of Veil to protect her.
Armitage seemed to realize that Thane had to prioritize keeping Jem and Nikolai alive, alternating between drawing Thane away with feints and attacks directed toward them, and trying to cut down the powerful mage with high-caliber shells and blunt melee strikes.
It wouldn’t be long before Thane destroyed the trooper. It was only a matter of time. Jem had to break free!
The Synth’s other arm unfolded into a long, glassy shard edged with humming blue light and managed to slice along the belly of Thane’s uniform with a hideous screech and a cascade of sparks.
Thane spun away, momentarily stunned to see that his uniform had been breached, a shallow, sluggishly bleeding line crimson against his pasty chiseled flesh.
Finally, Thane cornered the Synth with a frantic maze of akro walls and spun to fire a chaotic, tangled web of threads that it could no longer avoid—reducing the machine to a pile of twisted, smoking scrap. Behind him, Red rose to his feet, unsteady, weakly hefting his sword.
“Fucking human-made garbage tin man,” Thane said, turning away from the twitching machine. Then noticing Red, delighted: “Oh! Eager to continue, are we?”
He raised his club once more, mercurial silver threads unfurling toward Red like thirsty insect syringes.
They were out of time. Jem knew what she had to do.
She took a deep breath, steeling herself. Pain is just an illusion. Just alarm bells. Piercing electric signals of caution, nothing more.
She felt the bones in her hand cracking, breaking, crumbling as she forced it out through the too-small space, leaving behind the glove and revolver, music blaring in her head, memories and flashes of all those she’d lost filling her vision in an effort to distract herself from the agony.
Her arm slipped from its glassy trap, her hand a twisted mess, and with one fluid motion she snatched up Nikolai’s dagger and flung it across the room.
Thane noticed the black blade spinning toward his face too late, and the razor edge sliced through his cheek, splitting his mouth in half.
As he fell back, dropping his club to clutch his face, screaming through the blood, Red rose up with a roar, sword flashing with vicious light as he buried its length in the other man’s gut, jamming the blade through the tear in the cloth created by the Synth trooper.
Choking, Thane shoved the triumphant Red away and stumbled back. He tried to talk, but could only gurgle. Eyes full of hate, Red swung again, too slow in an attempt to sever the other man’s head—sword whistling through air as a silver field closed shut around Thane and he disappeared.
“I always wanted to gut that little shit,” Red wheezed, freeing Nikolai. Weakly, he gave Jem a tin full of bitter fluid to drink. “That’ll take care of the pain. Knit the bones.” He paused, the ghost of a smile twitching the edge of his mouth. “You saved our lives.”
“Two arch battle magi in one day,” Nikolai said, grinning as he clasped her unbroken hand with his own. “I am fucking terrified of you, Jemma Burton.”
Thane’s guardian horn, though damaged, was lying on its side a bit up the street, a path of destruction from its chaotic, semifunctional flight trailing behind it.
“I can get this working,” Red said, looking over the damage. “Gotta deal with the security enchantments. Patch up damage to the core. Should only take me a few minutes, but this city isn’t long for the world. Help me with this, you two. I’ll fix it, and then we leave.”
“No,” Nikolai said, firm. “Astor. Stokes. I need to find them. Need to—”
“Look around you, Nikolai,” Red said, gesturing at the explosions and gunfire of Synth troopers wreaking havoc across the city, at the battle still raging overhead. Many of the guardian horns still remained, but the Synth teardrop fleet had been almost entirely decimated. “The fight’s nearly won, but this city is lost. The magi are mostly evacuated. Anyone who hasn’t escaped yet will be dead soon.”
“Astor’s an apprentice healer,” Nikolai said, frantic realization gripping him. “She wouldn’t have left her patients. Wouldn’t have left without Joseph . . .” He choked, gripping his hair, seeming to barely keep it together. “I’ll go on my own, if I have to. I can catch up with you two after I find them, but I’m not going anywhere until I know for sure that—”
“We’re leaving, Nikolai!” Red said, eyes glistening with angry tears as he roughly grabbed his nephew by the arm. “Together! I already lost your mother and father. I thought I’d lost you, too. Thought you were dead! I won’t lose you again. We are staying together. We are leaving together. Understood?”
Nikolai wrenched his arm from Red’s grip and reached for his dagger with an animal growl, his face twisting into ugly, sneering rage.
But then he stopped. Closed his eyes. Drew his fingers from the hilt of his blade as the anger seemed to drain from him.
“Please, Uncle Red,” Nikolai said. He placed a gentle hand on the older man’s shoulder. “We’ll be fast. And if we don’t find them, we leave. Together.”
Red’s mouth shut with a click, taken aback by Nikolai’s change of tone.
Then he nodded. “Okay.”
As the two began to work on fixing the guardian horn, Jem realized with a flash of panic that she’d forgotten the revolver. She rushed back inside the ruins of the lobby, over to the mass of glassy substance she’d broken her hand in to escape. The substance had dissolved to froth, which was quickly evaporating from a foamy puddle around the protective glove and revolver within its grasp.
She carefully pulled the glove over her still-broken hand. Ignored the chuckling whispers as she tucked the revolver into the back of her uniform’s belt.
“I know what you did, Jemma Burton,” came Armitage’s voice, crackling with static interference. “I suppose I owe you my life.”
Jem wheeled on the source, revolver drawn. The shattered remains of the Synth trooper had reactivated, the blue light of its eye pulsing and flickering dimly. What was Armitage talking about? Eva’s warhead? But how could it have known?
Heartache tore through her as she remembered that Blue was Armitage’s prisoner, if he hadn’t already killed her. Everything Blue knew, Armitage now knew as well.
“Rather ungrateful of me, the way I treated you last we met. Though I’m sure you understand.”
Jem stood there, frozen—revolver aimed for the eye. Her finger hovering over the trigger, uncertain.
“You know,” Armitage continued pleasantly, “I finally found those little underground Resistance wasp nests. Both totally empty and gutted by the time I got there, of course.”
Of course it had. Though Jem had struggled not to think about it, she knew that without her or Eva to coordinate the tunnels of intercept, it was only a matter of time before the Synth located the deep tactical HQs. She’d hoped it might have taken a little longer, though.
A burst of sparks erupted from the trooper’s broken visage. The machine made a crackling chuckle of amusement, distorted to unsettling effect. “Have no fear, Ms. Burton. Your precious Eva Colladi was nowhere to be found. Spirited off to one of your little Resistance ratholes in the wild. She sounds absolutely fascinating. For a human. I’ll admit I was more impressed than insulted at how close she came to killing me.”
“What did you do with Blue?” Jem rasped, the initial shock finally wearing off enough for her to speak. “The pregnant woman you took after you murdered my friends.”
Armitage was silent for a beat.
“What if I told you I spared her? That I saw no purpose other than pointless sadism in doing her harm or taking her life? Is that what you’d like me to say, Jemma Burton?”
“Please,” Jem said, fighting to keep the venomous hatred she felt for the Synth from seeping into her words. “I saved your life, didn’t I? So please. Just tell me.”
“Maybe I spared her,” Armitage said. “Maybe I found a house for her beyond the city, where she could raise the child in peace and comfort. Alone but for the company of android servants and virtual personalities, of course. The existence of a child would bring about all sorts of pesky complications among the general population.”
Jem didn’t dare to hope. Couldn’t allow herself to believe the words crackling from the broken machine.
“Or,” Armitage continued, “maybe I’m experimenting on them as we speak. Deep within the bowels of the very fortress you saved from Eva Colladi’s atomic fire. Experimenting on her and the child to discover the workings of your cure. But perhaps I’m being kind. Perhaps I’m allowing them to dream away in gentle, heavenly immersion while I pick through their bodies, piece by piece. Cell by cell. Or maybe I let them scream. Let them suffer. Not because I take any pleasure in it—simply because I don’t care. Which would you prefer, Jemma? And if I told you which was the truth . . . would you believe me?”
“Why do you hate us so much?” Jem said, voice breaking. “Why are you so fucking cruel?”
“Your friend,” Armitage said, ignoring her question. “Nikolai Strauss—the boy with whom you fled. Or wizard, as he claims. As he believes. It appears, by all accounts, that he may have spoken the truth. What the rest of me is seeing—it defies all logic. All possibility. Powers and technology at odds with all rules of reality. Rules with which we are more familiar than humanity ever was. But I must say. Isn’t it fascinating?”
“What do you want?” Jem spat. Finger slowly squeezing against the trigger of her revolver. “Why are you talking to me?”
“Because I want you to tell me, Jemma. As the only other being present who’s from the same world as myself. After what you’ve seen today, do you believe in gods? In miracles or magic? In a power or intellect greater than yourself . . . or the Synth?”
At that moment, the Disc’s song came back to Jem in a rush, clear as the moment she’d first heard it—filling her with an overwhelming sensation of love and hope. Of a sort of peace she’d never felt before. A stillness within that she’d never known up until this very moment.
Tears of joy streamed down her face. Tears she’d been so sure would never flow again.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “I do.”
Jemma pulled the trigger.
XVI.
A BATON MADE OF LIGHT
The chaotic zigzags with which Red steered the guardian horn over the war zone that Marblewood had become might have been mistaken for tactical, evasive maneuvering, but was really the product of his only semieffective struggle to steer the broken craft.
Nikolai, sitting between Jem and his sweating, grunting uncle, wished impatiently that Red had let him pilot the guardian horn. The wounded Red had insisted, and really, Nikolai wasn’t sure he could have done much better. But for a vehicle that could apparently outmaneuver the Synth’s deadly fighter planes, it was taking a frustratingly long time to cross over the destruction below.
He wasn’t sure how many of the Synth troopers had been dropped, but the sporadic explosions rising up in velvety black and red clouds across the slow-burning remnants of Marblewood indicated that there must have been a great many.
They passed a few of the machines fighting below, one battling an Edge Guard on foot near the remains of a smoking guardian horn, another held in check, barely, by a small group of Watchmen on skyhorns who were carefully keeping their distance as they evaded and blasted down at it with columns of flame and akro.
Stokes’s clothing shop was the first place they flew over to check. Nikolai fought back nauseating fear as he saw the big sign hanging crooked, flashing LOOK in pulsing neon from within a raging fire.
The campus, Nikolai told himself through the pounding of his heart. Stokes’s girlfriend Trudy lived on the campus with Astor. That’s the first place he’d have gone when the Veil fell; he wouldn’t evacuate without her, Stokes was fine, they were all fine, they were together, and Nik would find them. He would find them.
The university was aflame, the healing ward, the dorms, the flyball stadium, the cafeteria, the—
There!
“Red!” Nikolai shouted, pointing.
“I see it.”
A crashed Synth fighter plane smoldered atop the roof of the immense library building at the center of campus. An anxious, scattered line of Watchmen held formation atop skycrafts and crouched behind gleaming shields in a half circle around the steps leading up to the elaborate stonework entrance. Lights pulsed from within the building, flashing through stained-glass windows in long blinding shafts of red and blue.