Buildings left and right collapsed with deafening roars. Powerlines began to fall, their lines swinging and snapping everywhere, threatening everything around them. There was a high, metallic screech, and then another. The stadium lights tumbled to the ground, crashing onto wreckage in the compound.
There was a loud explosion followed by a flash of light, and then the familiar crackling of flames. I peeked over the dirt and saw a tremendous inferno rising up from one of the stadium lights. Men everywhere were laying on the ground, trapped under fallen buildings.
“Sentinels! Now!” Dean’s deep voice had taken on a quality I’d never heard before—threatening and compelling at the same time.
The Sentinels regained their footing and expertly cleared the downed wall. They flooded into the spooky, dusty, half-lit compound, their weapons drawn. Shouted orders to surrender filled the night, followed by a steady barrage of gunfire. Bullets flew everywhere, ricocheting off the walls of buildings.
I ducked and twisted to avoid falling bricks, always searching for signs of the slaves. They were here. They had to be.
The flames spread to another building, and then another. The terrific whoosh they made began to overtake the sounds of warfare. I heard no screams from within, though. There were plenty of men within the compound, but where were the women and children? The slaves?
Beneath the din was another sound that I struggled to make out—a buzzing, perhaps. Yes, it was definitely buzzing, and growing louder. I pressed myself against the fractured wall of a house and focused on the strange noise. Electricity? Lawn mowers?
My heart began to pound harder. I knew the sound from my childhood, specifically the summer that the seventeen-year cicadas had crawled out of the ground and didn’t leave for weeks. Every day that they’d been out had been filled with the endless, brain-splitting drone of insect wings.
I looked up, my mouth falling open in horror.
What little light there was in the compound was extinguished as thousands—no, millions—of locusts descended from the pitch-black sky. Sentinel, superhero, and Westerner alike stopped their war, too busy batting and swinging at the enormous insects to worry about combatants.
I stumbled along the ruined street, nearly blind from the swarm. They landed on every inch of me and tried to climb into my mouth, but I kept it shut. I bumped into walls and tripped over a corpse, unable to focus on anything but the two-inch-long bugs and the endless din they made. What was going on? Why were locusts swarming in January? How?
After a minute, I walked into the closed door of one of the few standing buildings, which appeared to be a small shed. I groped around for a doorknob and turned it, forcing the lock. With a gasp I shoved it open and slammed it shut behind me. Without pausing to see what was inside I shook my limbs to rid myself of the locusts and frantically combed my hair.
“Don’t tell me you’re the whore that Ben turned traitor for. Gotta say, you’re hotter in your pictures than you are in real life.”
I jerked my head toward the speaker.
The shed, which was dimly illuminated by a camping lantern, contained just one folding table and chair. A young woman, probably in her mid-teens, sat on the chair, her legs up on the table and her arm draped over the back. She tossed her thick brown hair and smiled crookedly at me, though her eyes contained no mirth.
I straightened. Whoever she was, she wasn’t a Westerner. Her knowledge and dim opinion of Benjamin’s defection pointed to one conclusion: supervillain.
I suppressed the urge to hurl my knife into her throat. If supervillains were in the compound, then there was far more going on here than we knew. We needed this woman, whoever she was.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice like ice.
“As if I’d tell you.” As she spoke, a locust fluttered away from my hair and landed on her outstretched index finger. She made a cooing noise and raised her hand, from where it flew away to a darkened corner of the room.
Suddenly, she plunged her hand into her pocket and pulled out a tiny pink handgun.
I lunged at her and tackled her to the floor. “You just did,” I hissed, before punching her once in the temple. She crumpled like a paper bag and lay still. Her name wasn’t important to me, just her role in the fight.
I stood up and panted for a few moments. While I caught my breath, I reviewed the events of the raid thus far: Ember’s power disappearing, the Westerners knowing about our attack, the supervillain controlling the locusts. For the second time, I couldn’t help but feel that something was very wrong. Why was this young woman here? Her youth and sloppiness when attacking me hinted that she wasn’t a trained fighter.
Perhaps she’d been hired to provide a distraction. Yes, that made more sense. I could believe that evil had partnered with evil in the form of a Westerner-supervillain alliance. However, the locusts hadn’t discriminated against anyone outside, nor had they tried to harm me. If she had allied with the Westerners, she’d done a terrible job.
I needed to get the slaves, get my team, and get out of here. If supervillains were here, this fight was going to turn nasty in ways we hadn’t anticipated.
Outside, gunfire filled the night once more. I crouched as low as I could, cracked open the door, and peeked out into the darkness.
It wasn’t so dark anymore. Now that the locusts had no mistress, they’d either landed on the ground to be trampled or had flown away. Fires from the fallen stadium lights were spreading throughout the compound. Men ran here and there in the dark, smoky air, some waving weapons like madmen, but others ran with more intent. I had no idea where my team was.
Ember? Can you hear me?
I’m helping Benjamin find injured people. My powers just came back on.
I grinned. My guess about the locust woman had been correct. Where are the slaves?
I slipped out through the door and pressed myself against the wall of the shed, looking back and forth for anybody I recognized. Above the loud pounding of my heart, I could hear furious shouts from Sentinels as they battled their former captors.
The slaves are in a basement room!
A piece of wall exploded inches above my head as a bullet pierced it. After a quick dash, I ducked and huddled in a rocky corner of another destroyed building. Three corpses littered the floor inside, their weapons scattered around them. Ember, where’s the basement door?
I don’t know. They can hear the battle, though. They know the Sentinels are here for them and they want to join the fight. She slipped out of my mind, and then back in. The Westerners’ women and children are in another basement room. They’ve been told that the Sentinels will, uh, be indecent to them if they’re taken captive. Some of the women are thinking about killing themselves and their children.
I was going to liberate the slaves or die trying, and nobody was committing needless suicide if I could help it. I just had to figure out where everyone was. Still crouching, I peered past the crumbling edge of the wall and tried to find any building that looked as if it might be used for storing slaves.
A female figure walked through a wall and sprinted across the street. She disappeared through another wall.
I stood, suddenly unafraid of bullets.
Alysia Rowe was in the compound, and if she was here, then surely her brother Will was, too. My nails dug into my palms as I remembered how he’d used his lion puppets to play with me before they’d mauled me in Reid’s pit. Wherever Alysia was, Will was sure to be.
But why were they here? Possibilities raced through my mind, but none of them made sense. I was sure there was little of value in the compound for them to steal. Alysia wasn’t engaging anybody. The only scenario that made sense was Benjamin’s prediction weeks before that the supervillains were going to deliberately wreak havoc to harass, intimidate, and hinder my team. They’d probably somehow been alerted that we were aiding the Sentinels. God only knew how many supervillains had chomped at the bit to offer the Westerners aid in the fight.
They were going to pay, activ
e war zone be damned. I needed to take down the Rowe twins and all their cronies before I could successfully liberate anyone.
I sprinted down the street toward the building Alysia had entered. Bullets whizzed around me, and once I crashed to the ground, a grenade exploded nearby. After the stone and burning bits of material finished raining on me, I jumped up and kept running. I vaulted over an upturned car and skidded to a halt outside the building, which appeared to be a house. I crashed through the door and was greeted by the barrel of a handgun.
Alysia Rowe’s bullet collided with my bulletproof vest with the force of a truck, blasting me backwards into the wall. My head hit the bricks with an alarming thunk, but I kept my eyes open.
High on adrenaline, I threw my knife at her left leg without so much as a swear word. She screamed and dropped her handgun. I lurched toward her and kicked the gun across the room, then kneeled down and grabbed the lanky brunette by her neck. She gurgled a little and clawed at my gloved hands.
“Hello, Alysia.” I squeezed her throat as I picked her up. “I’m Jillian Trent. My husband has told me all about you.” I threw her across the room into a large television, which crashed to the ground. “Couldn’t quite make yourself go through that, eh?”
Alysia pulled out my knife and struggled to her feet. “Trent?” she said, disbelief coloring every line of her face. “He married a superhero? Oh, girl, you’ve made a big mistake.”
I threw another knife, but this time it sailed right through her.
I sized her up, calculating the best way to attack. Perhaps she was like Patrick, whose powers had required concentration to use. I’d surprised her with my first knife, and now I just had to figure out how to surprise her again.
Before I could attack, the door burst open and half a dozen Westerners rushed toward us. I screamed in fury and tackled them, much as I had the Sentinels in the shipping container not so long before. They fell to the floor in the same kind of confused pile.
I spun around to see if Alysia was there. She wasn’t. I punched each Westerner into unconsciousness, then jumped up and dashed out of the house.
The gun battle had ended. The fight to rescue people from the flames had just begun.
Fire engulfed half of the compound. All around me, men sprinted up and down the street with their injured comrades slung over their shoulders. Nearby, in a burning building, a man screamed in terror and agony as flames engulfed him. His screams grew more hysterical until they abruptly ceased.
I ran the other direction. If I could just reach Ember, I could tell her to ask the slaves to make noise. My sensitive ears would hear them. Ember Ember Ember Ember Ember…
There was no reply.
I skidded to a halt at a dead-end street. All around me, blazes raged and Westerners ran past me, either not noticing the superhero or not caring anymore. Tiny, floating sparks made my eyes water, and the air was becoming difficult to breathe despite the constant breeze that moved some of the smoke and fed the flames.
Ember Ember Ember Ember Ember Ember Ember…
Silence.
I wasn’t going to stand around and wonder what had happened to Ember—not while supervillains roamed around us. I turned and ran back the way I’d come, toward the fallen wall. As I ran, I scanned for anyone I recognized. In the smoky distance, I thought I saw Marco digging people out of wreckage, but the smoke thickened and hid him.
Ember Ember Ember Ember Ember Ember where are you? Please answer!
The ground shook for a moment and tossed me onto the rubble-strewn street. I crawled to my knees and then jumped up, wobbling slightly. I saw an overturned folding chair in the middle of the street and realized that the locust woman was probably awake and blocking Ember’s telepathy again. I rushed to the shed in which I’d left her.
The shed was completely engulfed in fire. I looked through the fiery doorway and saw no corpse. She was blocking Ember’s telepathy again, but I couldn’t make myself calm down. Something was very, very wrong.
In the distance, beyond the ruined walls of the compound, a man’s inhuman, terrified shrieks mixed with the rough barking of dogs. Cold fear sloshed in my stomach.
I reached the dirt blockade and ran up it. Without breaking stride, I jumped to the bottom, where I immediately tripped over a dead Sentinel. I squinted at the copse of trees in the distance.
“Ember!” The scream ripped out of my throat of its own volition.
I began to sprint.
Ember was pressing herself against a tree as two mangy, growling timber wolves surrounded her with their fangs bared. One of them had a strange protrusion jutting out of his head: her knife. Will Rowe was nearby.
In front of her, two more wolves were in the last stages of tearing Luke apart. His limbs and other body parts were scattered everywhere.
“Will! Show yourself!” I shouted into the darkness. “Come out so I can kick your ass like I did your sister’s!”
Ember looked up, her tearstained face visible in the darkness, and held out a hand. “No, Battlecry, don’t! They can’t die!”
All at once the four wolves turned and ran toward me. Hideous, deep barks ripped out of their muzzles. Instead of fear, a thrill of rage coursed through me. How dare Will terrorize Ember?
When the wolves reached me, I seized the closest one’s neck and swung it like a sack of potatoes into its pack mate. The two others jumped on me.
I fell backwards under their weight and shoved them off, kicking furiously at any wolf I could. Blood dripped down my forehead into my eyes, but I brushed off the remote pain in my scalp and swiped at one of the wolves’ legs with my largest knife.
The blade cut through muscle and sinew and stopped at the bone. Without hesitating, I grabbed the wolf’s leg and snapped off the rest, crippling it. Will would have a hard time using a three-legged puppet.
The wolf fell limp. The other sank their fangs into my arms and legs, tearing away chunks of cloth and the flesh beneath.
I screamed, but I did not stop slicing at the wolves. One by one, I removed paws or larger parts of legs. The last wolf, whose entire leg was bent like the letter L, let out a weak huff before falling to the ground, finally “dead.”
I limped to Ember, who was shaking violently. Blood flowed down my limbs, my face, and the back of my neck. Ember ran up to me and helped me to the base of the tree, where she forced me to sit.
“Get Benjamin,” I gasped.
“He’s beyond my reach right now. I can’t contact anyone in the compound. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” She wiped at her eyes. “The wolves came out of nowhere, and I couldn’t talk to them. I thought it was my telepathy failing, but I threw the knife and they just...” A sob wracked her body. “They just attacked Luke. I could hear his thoughts while he died.”
She covered her mouth with her hand to stifle a whimper, my blood dripping off her fingers.
I guided her hand back to my bleeding scalp. “It’s okay,” I murmured. “We’ll avenge all of them.”
While she tried to stop the bleeding, I leaned my head against the tree for a moment, then gazed out at the compound in the distance.
The Westerner compound was entirely in flames. Around the walls, men waged war with their weapons, but some with their bare hands. Small explosions threw burning debris in the air which rained down on them, leaving fiery trails in the fields where it landed. I could not tell if the raid was a success or a failure, nor could I make out any distinct person in the fray.
I closed my eyes, cool fatigue creeping up my legs. It had been a long time since I’d been this injured, but I wasn’t terribly concerned. We had Benjamin.
“Oh my God.”
Ember’s whisper made me open my eyes. She was staring behind the tree, wide-eyed and paler than I’d ever seen her. She took her hand off my head and reached for her knife. “Don’t speak,” she whispered, barely audible. “Close your eyes.”
She took my hand. Pretend to be dead. Beau Trent and another man are coming our way. They plan to kill
you and take me. Graham told them that I can help them find the JM-104.
It took every ounce of self-control I possessed to not jump to my feet.
So, Graham had been working for the supervillain families, not the Westerners. That made sense. A dozen Westerners had died at the sorting station from which he’d been “rescued,” and it was always the prerogative of the supervillains to look for the JM-104. And now the Trents were aware of Ember’s incredible power. I remembered Graham’s excited ramblings about how useful she’d be in the search. He wasn’t wrong.
Could it be that the entire supervillain mess during the battle was about capturing Ember?
Beau’s almost here. Slow your breathing. No matter what I say, do not move. Quiet footfalls in the forest behind us became louder, announcing the presence of a third person. I bowed my head and slowed my breathing, trying to remain as still and dead-looking as possible.
Ember stroked my face. “Jill, please wake up,” she begged. “Please.” She began to cry delicate tears. She gasped, then shook me. “Jill! Wake up! It’s Beau Trent!” She began to cry harder. I didn’t think she was acting anymore. “Wake up!” Oh my God. They have the vial of JM-104 that Graham stole. They’re going to use it on me.
“Good job, Will. She’s finally dead.”
Beau’s deep voice came from behind us. I remained as limp as possible, straining to hear any sound that would help me when I finally attacked. A little beyond him, another person approached. Will Rowe, I recalled, was Beau’s best friend. What a team.
Beau came to a halt, just to my left. “Hello, pretty.” His voice was low and even.
Ember scrambled backwards. “What do you want?”
“If Graham was telling the truth about you, you already know.” He was still quiet. He stopped walking next to me. “You’re coming with us.”
“The hell I am,” Ember growled.
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