Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Stealing BlueLeaf and her group had helped immeasurably with communication and diplomacy, but it had pissed off the Tokyo Nest. So good on one hand, and bad on the other.

  Working with BlueLeaf had taught me all sorts of things, like how dragon hands worked, how they organized themselves into “nests” of family-community groups sort of like tribes—and some about how their minds worked.

  A dragon mind was complex, to say the least. Making heads or tails of the Seraphim data alongside the living, breathing dragons kept me busy. I cataloged, photographed, answered dragon questions, asked human questions, and in general cared for the new Dracae Nest that was the seven dragons of The Dragons’ Legion.

  All this was why Ladon and AnnaBelinda had decided I was worthy.

  “I wish Leif was here,” I whispered. We didn’t talk about Leif much. Lara and Manu only spoke about him in more private times, and never when we were in the dragons’ home in the mountains. No one wanted to disrespect Ladon or his family.

  Daniel looked off into the distance. “Maria’s here.”

  The whole story about her being in the prison with another version of herself, and what happened around the closing of The Incursion, and this timeline’s Vivicus…. Well, I might have a good story with Stab, but damn, I wasn’t that much of a hero.

  And I was damned lucky that the Dracae felt I was worthy of being in their orbit.

  I leaned toward the window to get a better look. I shared my quarters in the more permanent part of the Cheyenne Refugee and Relocation Center with my brother Sean, two apartments down from my parents and Elijah, and I had a pretty good view of the parking area between the buildings.

  We were all going up to the Dracae’s cave together for the ceremony—Daniel, Marcus, Antonius, and my family; Nax, who had flown in from Portland especially for this; and Orel, whose mom had finally okayed non-supervised time with his dad. At fifteen, when and where to see Nax was mostly up to Orel now, anyway.

  They were getting along. Daisy never did press charges, and I’d heard that Tsar Pavlovich had officially revoked the bounty he’d had on Nax’s head, though part of me wanted to ask anyway. Not that a million U.S. dollars would do much good anymore.

  Still, each time Nax visited, I had a small, obnoxious desire to print up a certificate saying “No longer an enemy of Mother Russia,” get Orel to use the ring to mark it in wax, and hand it to Nax like some sort of filed-in-triplicate document. He could take it back to Portland to show Trajan as part of his official Burner-blooded sub-emperoring duties.

  “Come on,” I said, and pulled Daniel toward the door.

  The bus’s electric motor whined its way into the lot. Maria parked in the middle, in a way that took up a lot of space, which she tended to do. She’d also cut off her century’s worth of hair and replaced it with an old-school, truly punk, bright-pink mohawk.

  She usually used neon yellow, because it was the pigment we had the most access to here, but she’d just come back from Portland, so had gone with the pink while she could.

  She’d also lost the old-timey military clothes and had traded them in for new-timey Guard violet-indigo. I had no idea what she was training for—that was way above my pay grade—but I knew that like Antonius, and Daniel, and Orel, too, it was something major. I just hoped it wasn’t another raid on one of the spikes.

  Without Stab, I couldn’t ask the ships to behave.

  I’d been correct, back in Tokyo, about the Dragonslayer in orbit not being the exact Dragonslayer the Seraphim remembered. Well, she was some of the time. Some of the time she was something quite different.

  Maria bounced down the bus’s steps at the same time Daniel and I walked out into the early summer sunshine. “Hey, ya!” she called, then rolled out a lot of rapid-fire Russian I didn’t understand.

  Daniel, though, laughed. “She says Nax brought us something special from Portland.”

  Nax ducked down the steps. “Del!” He threw wide his arms. “Look at you!”

  I gave him a quick hug. Maria, too. I looked around them. “Is Orel with you?” He’d gone off to the airport to meet Nax, so I figured he’d be with them.

  Orel knocked on the window. “Hi, Del!” He held up a large tablet. “Look at this.”

  Maria patted my arm. “Dmitri’s people launched three satellites.”

  Daniel tapped on his phone. “Marcus and Antonius are on their way.” He walked over to Nax, probably to have a Portland conversation. I paid enough attention to know where the major fighting continued, or when Portland planned to release the first new suit prototypes, or if the Fates were concerned about new waves of refugees. I left the rest of the politics to the political types.

  Maria breathed in the warming air and turned her face to the sun. “I will never lose my thankfulness for your help.”

  “Orel did the heavy lifting.” I watched him maneuver the tablet around the electric bus’s door. Good thing we didn’t have dragons with us, because that door was smallish and humans-only. Nax had to duck and twist the way Orel was ducking and twisting his new toy.

  Two years ago, days after his family arrived at the Cheyenne camp, he’d gone out into the scrub by himself. No coat. No protection from the roaming hellhounds. Just him and what Daniel called his umbra obscura.

  And Orel Doroshenko, Nax’s then-thirteen-year-old son, reached out at the same time I handed Maria the Tsar’s ring.

  He’d pulled her—and his new talisman—out of her prison cage. She’d moved four months forward, as opposed to our eight, which was what had given them the time they needed to plan the rescue.

  He’d be ducking and twisting with his shoulders soon enough and wearing that ring on his finger. Daniel was certain that Orel was going to be as tall as Nax.

  He held out his toy. “Satellite images! It’s going to change any second.”

  The tablet was a good seventeen inches and big enough for a dragon. I took it and looked down at the surprisingly clear image of the Dragonslayer.

  No one had yet worked out the math behind her phase changes. What we did know was that when I’d opened the door between her timeline and ours, she wasn’t the only multiverse version of the ship to come through.

  And they were both in orbit, superimposed and phase-changing in and out of each other at what-seemed-random-but-weren’t intervals.

  “Watch.” Orel tapped the screen.

  She had the scorch marks along her side, just as Leif had described, though she wasn’t listing, not in this orbit. She had the armament, and the visible weapons. And she had her name painted along her underbelly, a literal three-mile-long word spelling out Dragonslayer in English, but if you looked closely, every human language was represented inside the letters—all of us, or everyone who had been in the timeline from whence she came—were part of that massive name.

  This was the ship of May you and Odin save us all. This was the ship of the commander I saw. This ship had literal dragon skulls mounted on her exterior to warn the invaders just exactly how terrifying humans could be. And yes, her AI was as dead as the Seraphim had said she was.

  But I hadn’t been talking to this ship.

  I blinked. We all blinked. The universe blinked and what had been the Dragonslayer became the Intrepid.

  Same ship, different timeline. This ship was the fearless and the bold.

  The Intrepid wasn’t armed to the teeth like her war version. She was the exploratory version of herself, and when she’d first appeared in orbit, her AI had been looking for a way to connect. She’d found Stab.

  Without Stab, we were cut off from her systems. Up there, in that ship, was all the targeting data Janus stole. All of it. We just needed to get her stabilized enough someone could get on board.

  The Emperor had promised that the science of this timeline would move carefully. We were to fully understand new-space physics before any new incursion or Trinzi-Bower cage testing. There’d been adamant declarations about how special we were because we had a phase-shifting version of
the Dragonslayer that had not nuked us, and that there was no reason to pull a Seraphim and go trekking across the universe.

  “Cool, huh?” Orel said.

  “Yeah.” I handed him back the tablet.

  “Logistics from the new satellites should let us get exact timestamps on the changes, down to the microsecond.” He swiped at the screen. “The data will help test some of the newer theories about incursion and cage physics.”

  He’d grown just in the last week and was now eye-to-eye with me. Yeah, he was going to be tall—and one day worthy of being called Captain.

  “I swear I hear the Fate Progenitor scream every time the ship changes,” he muttered.

  There were theories about where Janus went when he dove into the incursion. One of them was that the ships trapped him up there, on purpose. No one knew for sure.

  Orel made the same little tic he displayed whenever he stopped himself from verbalizing another of his obsessions.

  “You’ll find them,” I said.

  He had no better understanding of what he’d done when he pulled Maria from her prison than I’d had when I opened the door for the Dragonslayer. It was all part of the indistinguishable magic. But Orel was a Fate, and a powerful one at that. And his talisman was all about targeting.

  Which meant he was going to find the Trinzi and the Bower of Maria’s cage. We were going to get access to the math and the physics and the engineering that allowed such fine control of incursion bubbles. And we were going to fix the damage to the Earth.

  Marcus and Harold, Antonius between them, rounded the corner of the apartments. Harold waved. Antonius looked better even if after two years, his resurrection still haunted his body.

  One evening, in hushed tones, they’d admitted how long he’d been dead before one of the scary-powerful healers laid on hands. Antonius had stared at the floor, and we all sat in reverent silence until Maria cracked a Stephen King joke. But Daniel was certain Antonius would eventually fully heal, even if it took another year.

  Maria clapped her hands. “As your guide today,” she called, “I ask that everyone keep their heads and hands inside the vehicle at all times. There are trees on the way to the home of the dragons, people!”

  Daniel chuckled and helped Antonius up the steps.

  Harold stuck his hands into his pockets as he walked over. “Look at you,” he said. “They going to give you a real suit?”

  Everyone knew he, not I, was on the short list for a “real suit.” I shook my head.

  He watched everyone else board the bus. “Hey.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Livia wanted me to show you this.”

  Livia Sisto, the enthraller who had breathed calm at the dragons on the bridge in Tokyo, was Legion Second. Livia had access to information that was yet another level above my pay grade.

  I was looking at the blackness of space. “More satellite images?”

  He looked over his shoulder at the bus. “Remember the launch six months ago?”

  “The one from Texas that the dragons almost shot down?” The American South was still dragon-controlled territory.

  “Praesagio repurposed one of the planet-finder telescopes that had been planned before The Incursion happened.”

  I scrolled through the star fields. “Oh?”

  “Repurposed with data stolen from the Tokyo Spike.”

  I looked up at his face. “Praesagio has access to that data?”

  “Some of it.” He nodded. “It’s the Imperium now, Del. Portland’s all abuzz.”

  He reached to the phone and did one last swipe.

  I inhaled. Two years I’d been living in the Cheyenne Camp. I’d been helping the normal people streaming in from all ends of the Earth. I’d been working with the Dracae Nest and the scientists and the Fates and Shifters. I’d even had a hand in some of the new programs meant to help the few Burners who wandered in.

  I’d come home. I’d vanquished the despair. I’d helped and I’d reestablished a small bit of hope.

  This photo made all that buzz in the back of my head again. It wasn’t a bunch of starlight pinpricks, like the others. I zoomed in.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Offense, defense—I hated sports analogies but I was pretty sure I was looking at a picture of the football.

  “It’s not another Intrepid, if that’s what you’re thinking. Portland thinks it’s at least twenty times the size of our ship up there. It’s almost Denver-sized.” He nodded toward the sky. “Estimates have it moving at about thirty-eight percent lightspeed. Can you imagine something that big moving at seven thousand miles per second? Look at this.”

  He tapped the screen to play a small frame-by-frame animation of the object growing in size against the starfield behind it.

  “It’s heading directly for us,” I said.

  “Yes. Watch.”

  One frame after another, a bubble of light grew on the side of the object, then burst like someone had pricked it with a pin.

  “They picked that up yesterday.” He looked jittery. “I need to show this to Daniel. Nax, too. Everyone needs to know.”

  What was I looking at? “Harold…”

  For the first time in the two years I’d known him, he looked genuinely frightened.

  “They’re coming home, Del.” He looked up at the sky. “We just don’t know who’s coming with them.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Leif…

  WARNING! CATASTROPHIC IMPACT IN FORTY-FIVE SECONDS!

  Leif blinked under his suit’s hood. He breathed but his suit wheezed and his air smelled recycled and blisteringly cold.

  WARNING! CATASTROPHIC IMPACT IN FORTY SECONDS!

  “What the hell?” he muttered. He couldn’t see anything other than the countdown, and his onboard heaters were screaming as much as the suit’s warning system. And…

  WARNING!

  “Stop yelling!” He was weightless. Deep space, in hard vacuum, far enough from the sun that it was pitch black and… another suit bumped into his thigh.

  He slapped his arm and turned on the suit’s external lights. “Vick!” Leif grabbed the other man and reeled him in.

  Vick had locked his hand around Stab’s hilt. Leif wrapped his fingers around the blade guard, just in case.

  Warning! Catastrophic Impact in Thirty Seconds!

  “Where? What?” There was literally nothing around them. No objects. Nothing. Only open empty void. “Vick! Hey! Wake up!”

  The incursion had dumped them into deep space. Not at another spike, or their own timeline or anyplace with gravity. Not Wyoming. In deep fucking space.

  And they were about to get hit by something he could not see.

  “Vick!” he yelled.

  Ten…

  What the hell was he supposed to do?

  Nine…

  “Stab!” he yelled. “Get us out of here!”

  Eight…

  Do something, you stupid AI, he thought.

  Seven…

  Maybe she was asleep like Vick. “Pulse the sword!” His suit sent a jolt into the sword’s hilt.

  Six…

  He jolted Vick’s suit, too.

  Five…

  This was not the way he wanted to die. Not after a thousand years of his Dracae life. Not when he was so close to being able to see his family again. Not after he’d found Del.

  Four…

  “Del wouldn’t want you to let us die!” he yelled.

  Three…

  “The hell?” Vick groaned.

  Stab pulsed back.

  ACTIVATING LOCALIZED TRINZI-BOWER CAGE, his suit screamed.

  Vick let go of Stab and grabbed onto Leif.

  MATCHING VELOCITY.

  The ship appeared under their feet. It wasn’t there, then it was, with its gravity.

  “Fuck!” Vick yelled.

  They dropped toward the surface, and toward an array of spines and fins and rounded tanks, but they were all gone by the time their feet hit the surface, moved so far down the sid
e of the ship Leif’s sensors lost track of where they’d been.

  Vick howled. Leif gasped and slammed Stab into the ship’s smooth, blackened surface.

  Sparks flew. Leif’s insides bounced against his rib cage, but he held on to Stab—and Vick held on to him.

  The universe turned white. Leif held on and the cage popped like a balloon and they were clinging to the surface of a spaceship moving so fast the stars smeared out.

  “How did we survive that,” Vick panted.

  Breathe, Leif thought. His suit was damaged. He was running out of air.

  If they didn’t find a way in, that how wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference….

  Saving the world means understanding the gifts given to humanity by the multiverse. We need scientists. We need engineers. We need Fates, Shifters, and Burners. We need The Dragons’ Legion.

  We need heroes.

  And it’s going to be up to Orel Doroshenko to find the only people who can solve the puzzle of new-space physics and a phase-changing spaceship called Intrepid—an unknown named Trinzi and the missing younger brother of one of the Legion’s own….

  * * *

  Join the people of World on Fire for the universe’s final endgame trilogy, coming soon.

  Learn more about Daniel, Nax, and the rest of the World on Fire universe with Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories:

  * * *

  Five stories. Five formative sparks before fire takes the world. One World on Fire anthology. Includes:

  Dragon’s Fate

  Conpulsio

  Pop Rocks

  Dmitri and the Mad Monk

  Scent of a Dragon

  Interested in the World on Fire universe? Start at the very beginning with Games of Fate…

  When Rysa Torres glimpses a future where her lover and his dragon set fire to everything she knows, she crashes headlong into supernatural powers she cannot battle alone. But Rysa is Dragons’ Legion, and as the Legion discovers the science of their universe, they discover what might be the only way for Rysa to save the world…