Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  My legs buckled and I dropped to the ground because someone, somewhere, had decided that Tokyo’s puppies, kitties, and tweeties were important enough to rescue.

  “Hey hey hey.” Nax sat on the dusty floor next to me. “There’s no one here. They got out.”

  Did they? “What are we supposed to do?” I had no idea. “We can’t stop Janus.” I sucked in my breath. “I should have made sure Maria took the sword.” Then Janus wouldn’t have it.

  “You tried.”

  He had no idea if I’d tried. He didn’t remember anything from Maria’s prison. “You’re just being nice.”

  Nax chuckled. He looked up at the ceiling, and the chuckle turned into a full laugh. “That’s me. I’m nice.”

  “None of the aides thought you were nice, Nax,” I panted through the yet-again resurging panic.

  He rubbed my back. “One could say I have an imperial attitude.”

  I groaned. “Stop.”

  “I went from battling Visigoth hordes to battling that cute nurse from Jamaica. What was her name?”

  “Wendy,” I said. She hadn’t been on duty the night The Incursion opened. She was petite, sweet, and a hardass who made Nax take his medications.

  “Wendy had a way.”

  I snorted. She did. “You’re too old to have battled Visigoths.”

  He shrugged. “Not Imperially. Or is it empirically?”

  I groaned this time. “You’re not funny.” He wasn’t. Everything he said was stupid and not even chuckle-worthy.

  “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” he said.

  “Stop it.” I pushed up so I was on my knees. “You’re worse than Elijah.” My little brother would make random dumb comments too, mostly to drive any thinking adult from the room so he could play his games in peace.

  “Your little brother?” Nax stood and offered his hand.

  I took it and he helped me stand. “The boys are with my mom and dad.” I inhaled, counted, and exhaled to settle myself. “Antonius said what was left of the government recruited my dad to run the Cheyenne refugee camp.”

  “Then I suspect they’ve met the good dragons,” Nax said.

  I looked up at him as he scanned the warehouse. “Antonius said something about Cheyenne being in proximity to the Dracae.”

  Nax nodded. “They live in the Wind River Range. Not many people know exactly where. I wonder what they’d think of our BlueLeaf friend.” He pointed at one of the tables. “Hey, look.”

  Someone had left out a stack of papers on top of a large map. It curled along the sides, rolling up against the random small objects used to hold it in place, but I could still see Japan’s outline under the dust. A pair of goggles held down one corner and a small transistor radio another. The Eiffel Tower trinket was pretty random, though.

  I held out the radio. “Did you see any batteries in the crates?”

  Nax took the radio but leaned over the table and carefully blew off the dust coating the map. “I’ll look.”

  The papers were all handwritten. I handed the top one to Nax. “Can you read it?”

  He scanned the writing and twisted to catch more of the light filtering in from the skylights above. “It’s more detailed than the instructions on the posters.” He pointed at the stack.

  I flipped through the sheets. “Spanish,” I said. “This one looks like Mandarin. Is this Korean?” I held up a sheet.

  “Yes,” Nax said. “That one there is Thai.”

  I rummaged deeper into the pile and found the one in English.

  According to the sheet, the worst earthquake in Japanese history struck immediately following the spike’s descent. This was followed by five to six major aftershocks. Between the debris falling with the spike and the quakes taking down the cities, Search and Rescue could not get in to help. When they finally did, the hellhounds had already killed everyone and everything wounded by the attacks.

  “Hounds,” Nax breathed.

  “The dragons didn’t come out of the spike until most everyone was dead.” More evidence they had a distaste for the actual killing part of the genocide. “The military set up the waystations and the route north to funnel any remaining survivors toward Russian-held territory.”

  Nax set down the paper and the radio. “No way were they happy about that.”

  “No way is anyone happy about having to rely on the Russians.” I picked up the little Eiffel Tower. “Or an American company run by one of you.” I pointed the bit of plastic at him. “An honest-to-Zeus actual old-school Roman.”

  “Jupiter.” He set the paper and the radio back on the table. “I’ll take Ancient Dudes Always Run the World for a thousand, Alex.”

  I snorted.

  “Trajan knows how to govern. We at least have that.”

  Not that it mattered anymore. Janus was about to make sure of that.

  I set the tower trinket on the table. Was the panic resurfacing? I couldn’t tell. Maybe I was getting used to hyperventilating.

  Or maybe this was like my terror when Addy’s brothers attacked. Maybe the panic was now just so much background noise.

  “I just want to go home.” Because that’s what all of this was about, right? Me going home. Me sitting on the porch with my little brothers as the world literally burned, all because the bad guys crested my terror and panic tolerance.

  But that terror and panic weren’t going away. Not ever. I’d be living with it for the rest of my life no matter how long that life was.

  Nax stared at the shipping containers framing the building’s entrance. “I don’t know what to say, Del.” He sighed and rubbed at his face. “I’ve watched many an apocalypse unfold. They’re all full of death and destruction. They’re all traumatic. They all end a civilization or two. It is what it is.”

  “You’re not helping,” I said.

  “I’m giving you perspective.” He waved his hand at the containers. “Humanity never destroys itself completely.”

  “We didn’t cause the destruction this time.”

  He laughed. “Oh, yes we did. I don’t know how, but I’ve been around humans long enough to understand that we are not a nice species. All this will come back to some guy’s hold-my-beer moment. That dragon in your video did say that humans started the war.” He extended his arms and did a spin. “All this could be because Janus decided to take matters into his own hands.” He stopped and stared up at the skylight. “Isn’t that what Daniel said? Why Leif and Antonius decided to go after Janus instead of staying with us? That Janus taking matters into his own hands will make—made, is making for some other timeline—things worse.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Humans like to destroy. Often that destruction came down to one guy on a banger, bingeing his way through breaking as much as he could before someone chopped off his head.

  Did working together make it any better? Maybe. The key wasn’t so much working together, but not being psycho about it in the first place.

  I opened another file of papers.

  “Nax,” I said. “Maps.”

  The map had tiny bits of English in parentheses under place names, and showed elevations, waterways, and other features I couldn’t quite make out.

  “Volcanoes.” Nax tapped the map along a line down Japan’s spine.

  I flipped the map up to find Italy underneath. The one under that was Iceland. The next, New Zealand. Then Indonesia. The final one on the bottom was Yellowstone.

  “Not just volcanoes,” I said. “Geologically unstable regions.”

  “They were worried about the bombardments triggering super-volcanoes.” Nax flipped to the Italian map, then back to the one of Japan.

  Had they? I had no idea. “We would have known if the attack set off Yellowstone,” I said.

  Earthquakes. Eruptions. The numbers written in red ink—and the exclamation points—around Mount Fuji and several other volcanoes suggested that the people who left the map were concerned. Quite concerned.

  The last thing the Earth needed was a volcanic winter—a fimb
ulwinter as Vivicus called it—on top of the ash and dust thrown up by the attacks. There might not be crops to feed the survivors. This timeline would die just like Alt-me’s. And my little brothers would die. Nax’s boy would die. I didn’t care about me anymore. I definitely didn’t care about the Fates. But the kids? They wouldn’t have a chance.

  All because Janus wanted us to hold his beer while he opened his escape route too close to the spike.

  “Why couldn’t he act like a grown-up?” Why couldn’t he take a “do the least amount of harm all the time” view? Because even with all the confusion, all the unknowns around future possibilities and timelines and how the Dragonslayer reacted to the world, a simple, “I don’t need to show off this once” could have been enough to save a lot of people.

  But no, Janus didn’t care. He wasn’t asking us to hold his beer. He was throwing Molotov cocktails.

  “He’s the Fate, therefore he knows what’s best for the world.” Nax peered at the maps. “Or the next world, as he claims.”

  What were we supposed to do? “I don’t know if I have it in me to fight anymore, Nax.”

  He didn’t respond right away. He watched me tap and shuffle the papers until I set the folders in a neat pile.

  “Maybe the Dragonslayer will listen to you,” he said gently.

  And there it was. The obvious. The ship in orbit talked to me. Only me. So I was the only one with the connection that might get it to not engage its autopilot and nuke the Tokyo Spike. “I won’t know unless I get Stab back.” I was insane.

  “No, you won’t.” he said.

  I was insane.

  He must have picked up something from my expression because he took a deep breath. “Are you sure about this?”

  He was worried about the panic attack. And my apathy. “I’m going to go home. Somehow. I don’t know. But Janus is going to kill us no matter what I do, so I might as well fight back.”

  I’d throw rocks at his head. Maybe get BlueLeaf to flame him the way that other dragon flamed Harold.

  Maybe figure out how to finally call the scary-ass Russians. “Hey,” I said. “Any of these crates have emergency cell phone chargers?”

  Nax shook his head. “I’ll look.”

  I pulled the phone out of my pocket. “All we need is one connection. One text message to go through. One call to the Tsar, right? That’s all we need. One call for help.”

  He still did not look convinced. “We need a plan.”

  Plan? “Since when did we go into any of this with a plan? What about the Fates?” Janus probably knew whatever plan we’d come up with already—that was, if he cared enough to spy on us.

  Nax began ripping covers off crates. “At least dress the part.” He held up a haze-camo uniform.

  I smoothed my hand over the folders one last time. We donned the uniforms and located backpacks for the water pouches. We found an emergency charger but the phone didn’t respond when I plugged it in. Maybe Leif’s interfacing had done something to it. I put it and the charger in my pack anyway. Nax loaded up on ammunition and I tucked in an extra mask for Daniel, just in case.

  He was an asshole, but he wouldn’t die of haze-lung if I could help it.

  After a meal and a rest, we found the promised mountain bikes and returned to the end of the world. The sun had dropped again, and we were back into the same low-light haze we’d been in when BlueLeaf brought us to the warehouse.

  “Do you think she’s here?” I asked as we closed the waystation door. We might not be the only humans left, and I wasn’t going to be the moron who let hellhounds into the supplies.

  Nax adjusted his new rifle. I carried the one he’d taken from the National Guardsman. I had no idea how to use it but we weren’t going to be the morons that left behind usable weapons, either.

  He peered at the rubble pile through which BlueLeaf had shepherded us, then stepped out into the open space in front of the door. Come with us, he signed as big and grand as he could. We are going to our home.

  Please, I signed. For the Captain.

  “We can only hope,” Nax said as we turned toward the glow on the horizon.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Leif…

  The Tokyo Spike’s top sat flush with the surface, which was why only its glow crested over the ruins. It, like all the other spikes, had drilled its length into the ground.

  Not a lot of video survived of the actual spike strikes. The dragons rained down debris first, and always at night. The teams working on infiltration strategies after the fact suspected that a lot of the bombardment was done specifically to conceal the spike’s actual shape, size, strength, and propulsion. No one stuck around to get pictures.

  The best footage Leif’s people had gotten had come from Paris CCTV cameras.

  The spikes were more drill bit than nail. Each was about as long as the Empire State Building was high. Each descended point-first, using the atmosphere to heat the impact end. Unlike the bombing debris, they slowed just above the surface, and burned-drilled their way counter-clockwise into the Earth.

  The Tokyo Spike was the largest and brightest, and the one that had done the most inbound damage.

  Leif’s suit measured its distance from their current position at about four kilometers inland, which matched with his timeline’s data. For the first of those kilometers they climbed over rough ruins, broken cars, and jagged glass. No humans. No dogs or rats or insects.

  The haze cleared, and Leif got a look at the sky. The stars were wrong. Eight months wrong—which meant they’d probably time-jumped. But months or years? He had no way to tell.

  Antonius noticed. The spike blocked radio communication, so they had no way to officially synchronize their timestamps, but alternative frequencies had been part of the information Lara and Manu had taken to Praesagio. If they had truly jumped, then perhaps Praesagio had launched new communications channels.

  Leif switched over to what for him were old channels, but for this timeline, would have been brand new—and caught the edge of someone’s call.

  No timestamp data but the active channel meant he was right. The tech the Seraphim had brought with them was being put to use.

  Daniel had not said anything. Neither had Janus, which meant either he didn’t care or had not yet used his seer to consider the possibility that they’d moved forward in time along with their movement in location. He might brag about having “experience” with incursions and whatever cage tech had made Maria’s prison but he didn’t. Other versions of him, yes, but him, not so much. Even with Fates, that not really impacted how they operated in the world.

  They were walking a tightrope with the date, and for some reason not acknowledging the jump seemed important, so Leif said nothing. Antonius caught the hint and also said nothing. Daniel made a point of making offhand comments about impact science, air flows, the haze—anything and everything that could explain the lack of humans without mentioning the actual lack.

  Vivicus figured it out about the same time as Leif, but he, too, kept quiet. Maybe he liked the idea of gaming the Fate Progenitor. Or maybe he wanted the likely chaos. Or maybe his allegiance was shifting back toward his Legion responsibilities.

  Most likely, Vivicus saw it as a way to get the upper hand. Such narcissistic behaviors were predictable, and thus useful.

  The second kilometer of their travels, the ruins had flattened out to the point where nothing they traversed came up higher than their thighs.

  When the land changed to cracks and maws, they ventured downward into what had to be the remains of Tokyo’s subway system. They passed the compacted remains of a train that had been squished like a soda can. They moved around massive open pipes dripping water, and circumvented the occasional still-live electrical conduit.

  And Leif wondered about Del. Was she too tired to be terrified? Too bone-weary and numbed to be angry? Would all this have turned out better if he hadn’t been such a dick when they first met?

  Janus did regular semi-touch maneuver
s with his seers, often alongside a full sweep meant to remind the group that he was, in fact, still the Fate Progenitor. Daniel always responded with a dissonant slap from his future-seer, one that added chaos and noise—and annoyed Leif and Vivicus—to Janus’s seeings.

  Daniel was showing off while at the same time making his petulance clear. Vivicus teetered between anger about the seer cacophony and showing Daniel the respect he deserved for continually poking at Janus.

  Janus’s semi-touching maneuvers resulted in a tic—he arched an eyebrow and made a small condescending face each time Leif thought about Del.

  After another quarter kilometer, the surface descended to meet the team.

  The heat hit first. It blew around the fallen beams and the crushed vending machines as if pushed by industrial fans. Blinding colors reflected off the broken tiles and the debris. Leif shielded his eyes and pressed his back against the remains of a wall.

  Antonius dropped into full camo and darted around the wall. Leif waited, Daniel to one side and Vivicus to the other, feeling the hum embedded in the droning echo of the massive dragon machinery on the other side of the concrete.

  A glow spread around the shattered wall like spears of color through the haze. A bright green burst of light cast a squiggle on the remains of white tile deeper in the tunnel. The squiggle wavered, then traveled along the floor like a spotlight. A neon purple blob appeared next to the green squiggle, then an orange line, then another, darker green squiggle. They blinked twice, then vanished.

  The vibrations, the roiling, bubbling, fairy-like colors, the mass, the blowing heat—they were yet more impossibilities like The Incursion and the baby incursions that came with it. There was nothing left but indistinguishable magic. No life. No living. Just a tunnel lined with robotic math and engineering.

  No wonder Del wanted to go home.

  Antonius manifested next to Daniel. “Clear,” he said.

  Janus pointed at Daniel. “Localized seer-waves only.” Then he and Vivicus moved to the other side of the wall.