by Rachel Rener
As we all labored feverishly, the surrounding lake of lava began to darken and solidify to black obsidian rock; smoke and ash inverted on themselves, slithering back into the cracks from whence they came; the plume of lava slowed to a spurt, and then a squirt, and then, finally, to a pitiful sputter. We airborne Terramancers were floated lower and lower to the cooling earth until our feet touched steaming black rock, leaving prints of melted rubber soles in our wake. Once the dwindling hole was finally sealed, we merged into a large semi-circle and knelt to the ground, feeding the underground rivers of magma back to their proper chambers by feel and will, then sealing the channels above them.
The earth shuddered and shook, but she accepted our healing touch, eventually allowing herself to be lulled back to sleep. When Hydromantic rain began to fall upon the blackened tar of the plateau, cooling the ground while sending pillars of white steam into the clean air, we wept and cheered, hugging each other in the ashes of what we’d conquered. Horns sounded as the second wave of Asterians began to arrive, all of them sprinting from their vehicles to witness the miracle we’d achieved. I looked up and saw Aiden’s family had rushed over to join him. Sophia and Ted were with them, throwing their fists in the air in triumph. As more and more Elementalists joined in, the roar of their exultant cheers mingled with ours, sending jubilant echoes scattering across the valley.
As rain turned to gentle snow, Sophia glided down on a gust of Wind, landing beside me with the nimble elegance of a ballerina. Shy as she’d always been about public displays of affection, she threw her arms around me and kissed me in earnest, prompting an invigorated round of cheers and applause from everyone standing in the vicinity.
We were all delirious and dehydrated, and more than likely prematurely celebrating since there would no doubt be aftershocks – but who could say? None of us had any idea what might happen next. Maybe our second-degree burns and singed eyebrows had all been for naught – after all, there was still a Global Summit to defend and a potential nuclear bomb to defuse. Hell, a massive comet could smash into the earth and kill us all before dinner. Life offers no guarantees. Nevertheless, our combined efforts had managed to bequeath the human race another precious moment of life, and in that beautiful moment, we rejoiced in our sweaty, sooty triumph.
It was up to Ori and our beloved Pentamancer to take it from there.
Chapter 28
can’t believe this is working,” Frank muttered as we sailed through the fourth security checkpoint like total pros, right past the bomb-sniffing dogs and metal detectors, which I myself had rigged to blinking green silence.
“I told you,” I grinned. “Easy squeezy.”
“Peasy.”
“Easy squeezy peasy?” I frowned as a hypnotized security guard waved us through the corridor, where armed secret service guys were standing at the ready every other meter. “That seems excessive.”
“Ori, please,” Elizabeth whispered. “My powers can only work so many miracles.”
“Meaning?” I glanced at her over my shoulder.
“Meaning, ‘shut the hell up,’” Frank hissed from behind me.
“Shut the hell up, Commander,” I corrected as we were patted down one final time, just outside the fancy double doors leading into the Summit. I sighed. Why couldn’t any of these groping security guards be sexy ladies wearing low cut shirts like in the movies?
Because this isn’t Cinemax, Dr. Shirvani’s voice rumbled in my head.
I jabbed my pinky in my ear to try and rub out the icky intrusion.
If your thoughts weren’t so damn loud, I wouldn’t be forced to eavesdrop.
Ugh! Empathic Electromancers could be such drips.
Heard that, too.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, but could you please display your security badges outside of your shirts?” the man patting us down asked. Elizabeth narrowed her eyes in concentration, probably erasing the thought from his mind.
Despite it being my brilliant idea, even I couldn’t believe we’d empathically BS-ed all the way into a Global Summit, which had more security than all of the Kardashian sisters combined. To think of all the bars I could have gotten into as a teenager, if only I too had been granted with such a superpower. But no, I rolled my eyes, all I can do is shoot lethal bolts of Lightning from my fingertips. So lame.
Speaking of Lightning.
“Do you smell that?” I whispered as the doors to the Great Hall swung open for us.
The others nodded, all five of their faces scrunched with concern.
“Don’t let your guard down,” I reminded everyone, more for myself than for them.
As we stepped through the doors, I was expecting some cheese-wizard display of miniature buildings – after all, this was the National Building Museum. But boy oh freaking boy was I wrong. I tried not to gasp as the biggest, baddest, tallest, fanciest room I’d ever seen rose up in front of us like a Saudi prince’s dining room. Instead of solid walls, hundreds of arches layered on top of each other like the Roman Colosseum. Massive columns that would have needed three of me to circle with my arms supported a thirty-meter ceiling that had crystal chandeliers hanging all over the place. A huge fountain stood in the middle of the room spouting water halfway to said fancy ceiling. There were enough round tables with white tableclothes (tableclothes = clothes for a table, right?) and silver tablewear (Eatingwear? Meal jewelry?) to support two-thousand people. And there must have been nearly that many people in the room, all of them with their heads turned to the three giant screens hanging from the crazy tall ceiling. And all of those displayed drone images of a volcanic eruption. Or, rather, the volcanic eruption. Since this was an environmental summit, it would make sense that they’d be discussing the volcano that may or may not currently be in the process of erasing human beings out of existence.
Elohim adirim, I reeaally hoped our friends had a decent handle on that.
The speaker guy standing at the podium located beneath the middle screen looked like some sort of scientist, and he was going on about the “highly unusual activities” that happened – or maybe were still happening, I wasn’t sure – at the volcanic site, which science couldn’t seem to explain. That was pretty bad. But when the images on the digital screens were replaced with new ones, I cursed out loud. Because the next images had zoomed in on a fuzzy line of people standing dangerously close to the lava-hurling rim of the volcano. And I was pretty sure one of them had platinum blonde and green hair.
Before I could say “Ha-matzav khara,” the screens blinked out.
“Nice work,” I whispered to Elizabeth.
She bit her lip. “That wasn’t me.”
“Frank?” I asked. “Jeff, buddy?”
They shook their heads warily.
“Kevin?” I practically squeaked.
The entire room plunged into darkness.
When the screams started, my training immediately kicked in. “Jeff, get the lights working again. Target the back-up generators, those have more resistant circuits. Elizabeth and Kevin, calm the room, Electromancer-style. Frank, help me find the source of the attack.” I checked my earpiece. “Zhang, buddy, you there?” Silence. “Zhang, do you copy?” The earpiece was dead. I tried zapping it back to life, but nothing happened.
A strange feeling was beginning to creep into my head. It started as a tingle, then quickly became an ache. As a bright blinding light filled my vision, a terrible pain began shooting through my brain. It was like chewing on aluminum foil while getting shocked by the shopping cart over and over. I gripped the sides of my head, gasping. And it wasn’t just me. Within the darkness of the chamber, horrible screams rose from every corner and every table.
“Elizabeth!” I gasped.
“I’m coming!”
A moment later, I felt a cool hand press against my forehead, followed by a warm tingling that poured from her palm and into my mind. As soon as it had come, the light and pain were gone, leaving me with a dull throb that hung around like an arak hangover.
<
br /> “Thank you,” I moaned, rubbing my forehead with my knuckles. The memory of the pain was enough to make me want to vomit. “Can you and Kevin do that for the rest of the room?”
“I can’t shield an entire room of this size,” she shouted. It was hard to hear her over the sounds of screaming and scraping chairs. “We have to get to the source!”
I could see the dim outline of Frank pointing toward the center of the room. “It’s there.”
As Jeffries got the emergency lights back up, the Great Hall was washed in pale orange light, illuminating the horrifying chaos inside as leaders and aides and secret service guys rolled around on the floor, clutching their heads. In the center of the banquet hall, a blond, middle-aged man was standing on top of a round table – the same freaky Australian Electromancer from the debate-turned-mutiny. Surrounded by a circle of ten people, he was grinning wildly, his eyes squeezed shut and hands raised at his sides, palms facing the ceiling. The people – all women, I quickly realized – appeared to be both shielding and boosting him, if their rippling electrical signatures were any indication. As we got closer, the intensity of their combined power made me feel like we were approaching a literal bolt of lightning. Sizzling Electricity rolled off them in ripples, exciting every electron in the room. Even with Elizabeth shielding our group, every hair on my body was standing up. My teeth tingled uncomfortably. It felt like one dragged sock across the carpet might set off a chain of static build-up that would bring the entire building down.
“Zhang will be bringing in backup by now,” I shouted once we were within five meters of our target. “In the meantime, we’ve got to neutralize these guys!”
A hand latched onto my ankle. Horrified, I looked down to find the President of the United States hanging onto me, pain scribbled across his face. The rest of his party had collapsed to the floor, seizing violently. “Make it stop!” he gasped. “He’s… in… my head!”
Kevin dropped to the ground and pressed his hands against the president’s forehead. A moment later, his patient shook his head violently, then awkwardly pulled himself up to sit with his legs spread out in front of him like a little kid. His body swayed like he’d just gotten off a rolling coaster. Roller toaster?
“What the hell is going on here?” he yelled in a really high voice. “Hallucinogens? Sonic weapons?”
“Elementalists, sir!” I yelled, pointing at the table of crazies. “The bad kind!”
“Elem—” he started, eyes growing as wide as teacups.
“Sir, just get down, please!” I pushed him down gently.
“The voice in my head was telling me to kill someone in the room and then kill myself!” he screamed at me, wild-eyed.
It was only then that I noticed the other people in the room staggering to their feet like zombies. Horrified screams were replaced by a different kind of screaming as well-dressed ladies and gentlemen started lunging for each other’s throats.
I muttered a curse under my breath. “Kevin! Stay with the president but focus all your mental energy on countering that dude’s signal! Frank, Jeff, target his followers – Electricity or punches, I don’t care!”
“What about you?” Frank hollered.
“Elizabeth, cover me!” I yelled, grabbing a handful of silver rings from my right pocket and shoving them onto all ten fingers. Without another word, I saluted our ruffled president with an impressively bedazzled and highly conductive hand. Then I charged towards our evil human signal scrambler with both of my hands flung into the air, calling Lightning to my fingers. One by one, the glass coverings on the ceiling emergency lights shattered, raining broken fragments onto the floor as I stole the electricity from their filaments. Oy, was it happy to be free! The sparks shot to my fingers like hyperactive gachliliyot (You know, the little flying bugs with glowing butts), merging into a sizzling ball of blinding white Lightning that crackled like shattering glass.
The man standing on the table opened his eyes and shot me a glare of hatred, only now snapping out of his trance. His irises were glowing a freaky shade of purple – not pretty and lovely like Aspen’s, but weird and creepy like an alien’s. Around and between us, dozens of heads of state and their envoys were coming to blows, screaming and spitting and closed-hand slapping one another around like only prissy politicians could. The French prime minister, for example, had the British prime minister wedged in an undignified head lock, giving his toupee a spirited noogie.
Funny as it might have been, I couldn’t concentrate on that. The ball of Lightning I was feeding between my palms was growing too unruly for me and I wasn’t going to last much longer, not with this much raw power surging against my skin. As the scary blond guy raised a hand to attack me from across the room, I froze. The electricity I’d gathered wasn’t enough. Not for this guy.
Elizabeth flung out her hand beside me, sending a shower of Lightning bolts toward the dude, which he easily deflected. He did have ten lovely assistants lending him power, after all. But Elizabeth wasn’t fazed. She flung bolt after bolt at him, keeping him on the defensive.
Meanwhile, I was developing an acute case of heart arrhythmia. “Kevin, old pal,” I croaked, feeling my heart racing unevenly. We were getting dangerously close to self-electrocution territory, but I still needed more power. “…Kevin!”
“I’m coming!” he shouted, leaping over some sort of dog pile that had started between the King of Thailand and the German prime minister. His hands slammed into my chest right as my heart felt like it was going to pop like a balloon. “Let it go buddy,” he wheezed. “Otherwise I’ll have to haul a defibrillator in here to resuscitate you.”
“What, you don’t carry one with you?”
“Ori, watch out!” Elizabeth shouted.
Jagged bolts of purple Lightning flung across the room, wielded by the creepy guy and his creepy blonde entourage. Seriously. Every single one of them – all tan, tall, and blonde. Not that I was checking them out while I was on the brink of heart failure.
It took every last gram of strength I had, but I somehow managed to squish their Lightning attack into the ball I was already stowing and growing. I mean, it was probably because Liz and Kev were there to help, but at the moment I was happy to believe it had all been me.
“Let it go, Ori!” Kevin shouted. “Let it go or you’ll kill yourself!”
With a nod and a grunt, I flung it away from me like the world’s unruliest hot potato. It hurtled across the room like a psychotic comet. Creepy blond guy scrunched his face into a constipated look of death, preparing his counterattack. But good old Jeffries – in the most regal and graceful fashion I’d ever seen – took that split-second opportunity to fling a silver banquet platter straight into the guy’s face, Frisbee-style. It sailed into his nose with the most satisfying clang ever, a split second before my volley of Lightning slammed into him, illuminating the skeleton beneath his skin like a flashing neon sign.
His team of tan, blonde women (seriously, what the hell?) flung themselves away from his body-turned-bug-zapper, shielding their heads on the floor. When the smoking lump that used to be a dude thudded against the upended table, they yelped and scattered like little black and white golf course chickens (Edit: I’ve been informed that they’re actually called “geese”) trying to avoid a golf cart. And maybe I was just imagining it, but it certainly looked like relief spreading on some of their faces as they did. The rest of the room faded into frozen silence as the majority of the fighting stopped, though some of the leaders still wordlessly gripped one another’s torn collars as they stared at me, which was pretty awkward.
Panting to catch my breath, I could feel my shoulders heaving up and down. My chest hurt like hell, the hair on my arms had been singe-d(?) away, and my vision had a permanent neon green stamp burned into it from staring at Lightning for so long. I also couldn’t help but wonder what prison was going to be like, since everyone in that room had just witnessed me turn a man into a burnt French fry.
A voice from below shook me o
ut of my defeated stupification. The president, still on the floor, but now dog-piled by six anxious-looking security guys, was tugging on my pant leg. He looked up at me with wide eyes, his face scuffed, his gray comb-over askew, and his white bow tie hanging off his tuxedo like a broken daisy.
“Excuse me, sir, but… what in the hell are you?”
I shrugged helplessly and was still trying to figure out how to reply when the doors to the Great Hall once more flew open. Three dozen SWAT-style Electromancers flooded the room, initiating the world’s longest, most awkward staring contest as scores of magic and mundane openly stared each other down for the first time in human history.
I reached into my left pocket, where a small flask of arak was safely tucked. Unscrewing the lid, I took a long drink and then offered the rest to the president, who was still staring up at me in silent horror. “Here, Mr. President… You’re probably gonna need this.”
Chapter 29