Captain Marvel

by Tess Sharpe

  They raced out of the archive room, the night-vision contacts helping them guide Jella and Fern through the darkness. They’d almost reached the end of the corridor when Carol’s comm switched on.

  “Two guards coming up the stairs!” Scott was out of breath. “If you haven’t got out yet, you’re gonna need to go another way!”

  Carol skidded to a halt, the rest of them stopping behind her. “Back up,” she hissed. “Get Fern in one of the rooms—now!”

  Amadeus pressed a heat-gloved hand to the sensor, and the door clicked open. They hurried Fern and Mantis inside while Carol remained on watch in the corridor. “Amadeus, go inside with them,” she said. “Jella—” She held her hand out. “Can you use your power? Will you hide us?”

  Jella looked down at her palm as if the idea of being asked instead of ordered was alien. Then she placed her hand in Carol’s as the guards’ footsteps pounded onto the second floor.

  They winked out of sight just moments before the guards rounded the corner at the end of the hall. It was a strange feeling to be present, but not visibly. Carol’s skin felt wobbly, as if her very cells were a little scrambled by the transformation.

  “Check the rooms,” one of the guards ordered.

  “Wait for it,” Carol muttered in an undertone to Jella. The guards began sweeps of the rooms, methodically criss-crossing the hall, door by door, clearing each one. Carol raised the hand that wasn’t holding Jella’s, and her palm began to glow red hot. As the guards crossed the hall, she aimed at the string of ember bombs strapped to their belts. Two short blasts and the gel inside splattered all over the guards’ skin, sizzling and smoking as they screamed, rolling on the ground.

  “Go!” Carol yelled, and the door burst open, her team scrambling out. They raced away from the stairs, knowing more guards would be heading up the stairwell. They couldn’t get lost in the panicked crowd that filled the gallery below—they’d stand out and Jella couldn’t hide all of them—but there had to be another way out. Carol searched ahead of her as she galloped through the corridor, her being narrowed down to find, protect, and escape— her heart thrumming with it as Fern’s panicked breathing and Jella’s rushed, soothing words punctuated their footsteps along the red-stone floor.

  Making a sharp right at the end of the archives corridor, Carol almost let out a cheer of relief when she saw the stairwell. Amadeus opened the door, and they dashed down the empty stairs and through a door marked exit at the landing that led out of the building into the night.

  “The gardens!” Mantis said, pulling up the hood on her jacket to hide her antennae. “Scott’s waiting for us.”

  Suspended in the air by Keepers below, fireballs hovered in the sky above the trees to illuminate the darkened courtyard and gardens. Guards were trying to keep the guests controlled— and failing. People were stalking through the courtyard, men yanking women by the arms behind them, yelling, shouting orders to their own personal security. Others were pushing at the now-locked gates, demanding to be let out as guards held them back. More guards streamed into the courtyard, pushing through the crowd, trying to part them for questioning. Their uniforms glinted in the firelight as more charged inside the dome to search further and others began to hotly confront the various politicians’ private security details.

  “We’re going to head into the gardens. Hide Fern and yourself,” Carol whispered to Jella, who disappeared before her eyes as someone clipped Carol’s shoulder hard as they ran past her. The edge of the gardens were just fifty feet ahead, but that felt like a mile in this crowd, the angry voices of privileged men not used to hearing no rising. She could feel it in the air, almost taste it—one wrong move, one wrong word, and they were going to spill into a full-blown riot.

  A scream rang out, shrill and female, followed by another voice—How dare you touch my wife!—and that was all it took. Chaos erupted behind them, cresting like a wave toward them as fire raced along the ground near the gates and the president’s guests turned on the museum guards.

  “Run!” Carol shouted, her hand hooking under Mantis’s elbow in case she needed to pick her up and run. In front of them, the air wavered just a little if you knew where to look. Jella’s power manipulated the atmosphere around her as she and Fern hurried ahead.

  Move them forward. Keep the team together. Get to the rendezvous point.

  Carol had never expected their mission tonight would end up with a kid on someone’s hip. And, God, Umbra. Her chest tightened every time she thought of the monumental sacrifice the girl had made, without a moment’s hesitation. And how was she going to tell Rhi?

  “Hey!”

  Yep… someone was definitely shouting at them. Carol’s skin prickled in anticipation as she hustled everyone ahead, darting around a few older women grouped together, looking anxious and lost. But Carol couldn’t stop to help them. They needed to get to the gardens, where there were more places to hide… and attack.

  “Keep going,” Carol directed, as they plunged into the thick foliage of the botanical gardens. The temperature was oppressive, a sticky heat that had sweat rolling down her cheeks in seconds. The alien plants—some gray and stinking of rot, others brightly colored like birds—cast shadows all around them, their leaves and fronds rustling in the heated breeze and the smoke billowing off the fireballs in the sky.

  Boom. An ember bomb flew over their heads, smashing in the dirt just feet away, igniting the thick bed of bright orange ferns in front of them. Carol spun around, rushing to cover her team’s back, just as another bomb arced through the air. This one struck her chest, the sphere shattering in bits, the gel singeing the fabric of her dress, exposing the Hala Star on the suit she wore beneath it. But the flames couldn’t burn her, and she brushed the specks of gel and charred fabric away.

  There was movement in the trees ahead; she blasted energy across the thicket, slicing through the trunks so fast and neat they fell like dominos against each other, making the ground shudder as they landed. She heard muffled yelling in the distance—like someone had gotten pinned by a falling branch. Good.

  “Hurry,” Carol urged as Jella and Fern flickered back into view. Even with the implant deactivated, the girl’s face was sweating from the effort of fighting the weapon’s effects.

  “Guys!”

  Carol whirled, her hands at the ready, relaxing when she realized it was Scott emerging from the spiky swath of brush ahead.

  “Everyone okay?” he asked, scanning the group, doing a double take when he saw Fern. “Where’s Umbra?”

  “She’s still under Keeper control,” Carol said. “We need to move. There are guards on our tail.”

  “I did a loop of the gardens, and I can’t find a way out.” His eyes narrowed as he peered into the distance, and Carol heard it, too—voices… a whole squad. Light darted between the trees, seeking, searching, growing. The air tightened, a strange whistling filling their ears, the moisture in the younger trees sizzling out. Carol backed up, the team following her lead.

  “Run!” Carol ordered, just as a tunnel of fire soared above even the tallest trees, heading directly for them.

  “Is that… that’s a freaking fire tornado!” Scott yelled, scrambling backward and grabbing Jella’s arm in the process, dragging her and Fern with him. “Amadeus! Get out of the way!”

  Amadeus tried, but the warning came a moment too late. The spinning column of fire sped toward him, rising higher and growing stronger with each second. Suddenly, there was fire at his back and his sides, with no way out. Carol darted forward, plunging into the flames as the team scattered. A roar was wrenched from Amadeus’s lungs as he was engulfed and carried upward in the flames. Carol grabbed his hand at the last second, bracing herself in the center of the fire, trying to tug him downward and out. Amadeus’s body rippled, his right arm streaking a mottled green, muscles bulging in the wrong places as three of his fingers went Brawn-sized and the rest stayed human. Carol almost lost hold of him as he changed and then snapped back to human, but she twi
sted at the last second, locking her fingers around two of his Brawn-sized ones.

  “Hold on!”

  What the flame wants, the flame will have. The inscription beneath that awful statue.

  But not this time.

  Carol’s muscles strained, and her joints popped against the powerful upward draft of the flames as she reached out and yanked Amadeus downward. They both fell to earth and tumbled through the undergrowth. The column of fire was still speeding toward them, expanding with each spin, setting the gardens alight everywhere it touched.

  “Time to go!” Mantis grabbed Amadeus, and Carol heaved herself up, doing a quick check—yep, all here, all okay—before they raced through the deepening gardens. The fire was spreading almost as fast as they could run.

  “What are we going to do?” Jella coughed as waves of heat rolled over their backs, each more intense than the last. Smoke filled the air, acrid and bitter from all the plant matter reduced to ash in seconds.

  Before Carol could answer, a group of spheres—at least a dozen—arced over their heads: more ember bombs.

  “Take cover!” she yelled. But when the bombs smashed to the ground behind them, instead of the explosive blue gel, the area was blanketed in an expanding purple foam that rose to form a wall against the fire. Though Carol could see the heat and light through it, it was holding back the fire, now slowing its deadly centrifugal tornado.

  “What the—” Amadeus said.

  “Hey! Over here!”

  Carol spun, searching for the source of the voice but not finding it—until she looked down. A woman’s head, goggles pushed up onto her forehead, peeked out of the ground like a gopher just ten feet ahead of her. Perched half inside what looked like an irrigation grate overgrown with ferns and debris, she was watching them warily, a gun—the one she’d used to shoot the retardant balls at the fire—in her hand.

  “Who are you?” Carol demanded.

  “The person who’s here to rescue you,” she said. “Come on— the foam won’t hold for long, and they’ve got you surrounded.”

  “Mantis?” Carol questioned.

  Eyes narrowing, Mantis stared at the woman, who held her gaze steadily, as if she knew the empath was reading her emotions and thoughts for truth. Then Mantis nodded.

  Carol barked, “Quick!”

  Set in a fern bed, the irrigation grate was covered with a pile of dead plants and fallen branches. Carol waited until Scott shouted the all-clear from below before she let Jella and Fern climb inside, followed by Mantis and Amadeus. Looking over her shoulder as she hurried below ground, Carol saw the purple foam crumbling and the fire roaring toward them.

  Carol quickly ducked into the safety of the irrigation shaft and slammed the grate over her head. It was a tight squeeze, her shoulders scraping the edges as she climbed down into the dimly lit tunnel in the earth, her feet splashing into a pool of murky water.

  “This way,” the woman said, flipping on a torch and lifting it to show the tunnel stretching as far as the beam of light.

  “Wait a second,” Carol held out a hand. “Who are you?”

  The woman looked over her shoulder. In this light, Carol realized she was younger than she’d thought—nearer Rhi’s age, but with the same eyes that had seen too much. Her red hair was like the fading suns, her skin so pale Carol wondered whether she’d ever seen them.

  “My name is Sona,” she said, placing her right hand on her heart and extending her arm toward Carol, palm open. “I’m the leader of the Resistance.”

  25

  RHI’S FALL from the president’s office into the sea was a shocking drop through the air followed by a freezing impact when she plunged into the bay. Thrashing in the water, she kicked out, desperate for air. Hepzibah’s arms tightened around her waist as they surged up to the choppy surface. Rhi gasped, coughing up bitter water as Hepzibah tugged her toward the shuttle bobbing in the waves.

  “I cannot believe you did that!” Rhi shouted as soon as Hepzibah helped her out of the water and unceremoniously dumped her onto the shuttle floor outside the cockpit.

  “I wouldn’t have let you drown,” Hepzibah scoffed, disengaging the sonic anchor and powering up the shuttle’s thrusters. Within a minute, they were soaring out of the water and into the sky. But instead of flying away from the island, Hepzibah circled up and around it, so they were hovering right above the dome.

  “What are you doing?” Rhi rose to her feet and climbed into the cockpit to take the co-pilot’s chair.

  Hepzibah flipped open the top of the bag of ember bombs that Mantis had apparently not hidden well enough from her. “Sending a message.” She pressed a button on her control panel, and the window to Rhi’s right slid open, cold air whipping inside.

  “Would you like to do the honors?” Hepzibah asked. “We don’t have to hit the guards. Just the house. And his beloved garden.”

  Rhi’s gloved hand closed over the handle of the bag of ember bombs. She could feel the heat, even from here. She stared into their blue depths and thought of the twins, of the screaming and the smell… and of how the Damarians had cheered.

  She didn’t even throw the bag—they weren’t worth her strength—she just loosened her fingers, the bag dropping from her hand and the bombs scattering downward until they shattered on the surface, where the gel ignited and raced along the mansion’s roof with such force that the Keepers and guards below had no hope of controlling it. The fire consumed the dome within minutes, the ember gel eating through it as flames whipped through Ansel’s belongings, his library, all his precious artifacts.

  Well, not all. The book was still tucked in Rhi’s jacket, still safe.

  Still something to use against him.

  As they flew off, the guards suitably too distracted by the fires to mount a search for them, laughter filled the air, and it took Rhi a moment before she realized it was hers.

  * * *

  THEY WERE almost back to the warehouse by the docks when Hepzibah’s pocket started beeping. She frowned, fished a comm out of it and read something on the screen. “It’s a message from Carol,” she said. “The rendezvous point’s changed.”

  Rhi’s heart skipped a beat. “Is everyone okay? Did they rescue Umbra and Jella?”

  “She doesn’t say.” Hepzibah typed a set of coordinates into her computer, and a map appeared onscreen. Rhi recognized the rocky spires that made up the Field of Fire.

  “How did they get so far out of the city?” Rhi asked, confused.

  “We’ll ask them when we arrive.” Hepzibah made a hard turn over the bay, heading north instead of south, and the city receded beneath them as they left it behind. The night felt oppressive, closing in on them as the city faded in their wake. Hepzibah flew without lights, trusting her radar to guide her through the labyrinths of stone.

  By the time they approached the new rendezvous point, Rhi was on the edge of her seat, gripping the armrests tightly, her mind racing. She hadn’t seen Jella in years, and she hadn’t spoken to Umbra in months. She didn’t know what to say… how to act. She was terrified she might burst into tears. She was even more terrified something might have happened, and that they wouldn’t be there.

  Hepzibah sent her radar scanning the area, squinting at the screen and searching for signs of life. “Ah, there!” She pointed to the formation dead ahead. “There’s an opening in the rock.”

  She flipped on the lights and flew the ship through a narrow crevice that opened up into a deep cavern bolstered by metal brackets that looked like ancient mining equipment. Hepzibah set down the shuttle at the bottom of the cavern, and Rhi leapt to her feet, paying Hepzibah no heed when she yelled after her to wait. She slammed through the shuttle door without even waiting for the stairs to unfold and leaped down to the ground with a painful jolt, Hepzibah following her at a slower pace.

  The cavern was enormous, the red-stone walls shining crystalline far above their heads. The air was so cold this deep beneath the planet’s surface it made Rhi shiver in her still
-damp clothes. She squinted in the dim light, looking at the shadowy figures emerging into the cavern from a tunnel to greet them. She saw Carol first, and then Amadeus, whose arm was smeared with a bright green chalky substance that healed burns.

  “Rhi!”

  One of the sweetest sounds she’d ever heard, Jella’s voice— had she forgotten it until now?—echoed through the cavern. Her friends parted, and Rhi raced across the cavern floor, splashing through puddles and dodging stalagmites as Jella rushed toward her. Meeting in the middle, each reached out for an enveloping embrace.

  Rhi sagged in Jella’s arms, relief surging through her in synch with her pounding heartbeat.

  “It’s been so long! You did it, you really did it!” Jella murmured, clutching Rhi as if she wasn’t sure she was real. “Rhi, how is Mazz? Tarin? Do you—”

  “They’re fine. We’ll free them next,” Rhi assured her, though she could not be sure, pulling back, staring into her beloved face. “I missed you so much,” she choked out.

  “I knew you’d come!” Jella said, tears trickling down her cheeks as she pressed her forehead against Rhi’s. Jella, who had always been so strong… so defiant. Rhi pulled back, looking over Jella’s shoulder expectantly, searching the group of people approaching for her distinctive hair. But then, her stomach sinking, she realized.

  Her eyes flew to Jella, who looked down. “Rhi—” she began.

  “She’s not here,” Rhi said flatly, because she had to say it out loud.

  She is mine. It echoed in her head, the utter confidence in Ansel’s tone. She tried to shake it out, but she couldn’t.

  “Do not worry,” Hepzibah began, but Rhi shook her head, refusing to believe what she could see in their faces.

  “Rhi, I’m so sorry,” Carol came forward, soot still smeared across her forehead. Gone was the evening gown, replaced by the red-and-blue suit that was like a beacon of hope, the Hala Star shining there on her chest.

  “She sacrificed her freedom for Fern’s,” Jella said softly, gesturing behind her, where the little girl was standing next to Mantis.