“Daisy, honey, we’ll go to Cheyenne. We’ll find you. I swear.”
She sniffled again. “Swear to me you’ll stay outside the blast radius, okay? I can’t do this if I know you’ll die. I can’t.”
He was her anchor to the normal world. He represented home and family and a normal life. All the things that the planet just lost.
Saving him meant saving the world.
“Okay, okay.” He stepped to the side.
The door fell away from his leg and clanged onto the ground. It caught the sheet and ripped it off Gavin’s shoulders.
He’d never felt so naked in his life. So devoid of purpose. So helpless.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you, too,” Gavin said.
Slowly, Gavin stepped away from his heap of sheet caught up in the thousand-dollar oven door. Nothing changed.
He knew why: His here wasn’t the house. His here was on the other end of his call.
“We’re coming,” he said.
“I know,” she said, sounding more resigned than enthusiastic.
“I promise not to get myself—or Ian or Radar and Ragnar—killed.” She needed him alive, and he would do anything for her.
Anything. Part of him wanted to scream because no one should love someone that much, but sometimes that’s what happened. You just had to pray you had the good fortune of loving someone who loved you the same.
Daisy did. He knew it in his bones. His here wanted him to be present.
“I swear, Daisy. This will not kill me. You are my home and I will come back to you.”
“I’ll be here.”
She would. He had to believe that. She’d survive this.
Gavin ended the call and stared at his phone screen. Cellular communication would end soon. No way around that. He tapped his screen. The GPS location sharing services were still functioning.
He called up Daisy’s phone first, then Rysa’s. The bus moved eastward along Interstate 80 toward a location that had to be the base.
He and Ian would drive right by them on their way to Cheyenne. Right by his here.
Gavin tucked his phone into his pocket. He kicked at the sheet and the oven door before looking up at Ian’s terrified face.
“Come on,” he said, as he walked away from the sheet and the door. “We need to go where we’re meant to be.”
Chapter Forty
Portugal…
Billy gripped the roll of duct tape the enthraller boy had handed him before they closed the containment unit door. He’d asked for the strongest, stickiest tape they could get their hands on. Anything to help keep Poke secured in his side now that they were about to blast off in the world’s fastest jet.
He’d never been to Portugal before. He’d always hoped that he would become famous enough to make Lisbon a tour stop.
“Too bad the world’s ending, huh, mein Sohn?” Terry’s damned cartoon chaos made the grey, sticky tape first into a diamond, then a vase of flowers, then a rock.
Billy spun the roll around in his hands and peered at its surface. The edge had to be here somewhere.
“Be quiet,” Billy said. He’d already spent six hours in the air with his Progenitor literally talking in his ear and had had his fill of German posturing.
Terry giggled. “No one is as bound to chaos as a Burner, Billy my boy.”
He’d become philosophical since the helicopter picked them up on the side of the mountain. Still as volatile and vitriolic, though. Still randomly rolling from the world’s nicest German tourist to the Devil himself.
Listening to the Devil blather on about post-apocalyptic philosophies was not a pleasant way to spend Billy’s first and only trip on a supersonic war machine.
He ripped off a long strip of the tape. Poke stuck out of his side like Excalibur in that fucking stone and would likely twist a bit once the new jet launched.
“You’re Prince Charming.” Terry chuckled his obnoxious German chuckle inside—next to, around, Billy didn’t know—Billy’s ear.
Billy wrapped the tape around his belly. The moment the enthraller kid realized Poke wasn’t leaving Billy’s abdomen, he’d pulled a crowbar from under one of the copter’s seats and gone into the containment unit. He’d stepped out moments later with foam padding stuck to his sweaty forehead.
Billy entered to find a Poke-accommodating-sized hole in the back of one of the module’s two seats.
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him, besides Rysa allowing him to take a bite out of her shoulder.
Billy secured the end of a new piece of tape to Poke, then wrapped a wad around his middle. Thankfully, his magic sword had slid in clean and had pierced through a rib without splintering it. Carrying around his chatty and psychotic Progenitor would have descended into a very special circle of Hell if he’d had to work his way out of the volcano’s tunnel with bone chips eating his gut from the inside out.
A copter had appeared just outside the tunnel entrance. Seemed Praesagio had GPS-tagged his clothing. For the first time in his life he’d been happy to be spied upon.
The copter had been a regular bird. No containment unit like the one he and Ismene had ridden in on the way over. The pilot had been visibly worried.
Their plane with the unit had been fueled and ready for takeoff the moment the copter landed on the airstrip. His handlers had literally carried him the fifty feet from the copter, to the plane, and into the fifteen-foot-long, reinforced, hermetically-sealed, enclosed containment unit. They set him gently in his modified seat, then handed him a magazine and a computer tablet, a full bottle of orange juice—fresh squeezed because he’d asked nicely—and an entire grocery bag full of those tiny airline bags of peanuts.
The containment unit would not save the craft or the crew if Poke wiggled just a little too much. It did, though, filter out his stink and protected the craft from Burner corrosion.
Unless Billy decided he wanted to bleed again. Then there’d be a boom and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
He’d secured Poke as best he could. His bone had healed around it, as had his flesh, and as long as it didn’t move in his side, they were safe.
Terry, he quickly learned, disliked peanuts. Seems in the “old days” he’d had an allergy. But these were no longer the “old days” and he was a fucking Progenitor, so Billy told him to shut up.
Terry had not been happy, nor did he shut up. Billy did his due diligence with his handlers and spoke out loud all his Maker’s ramblings, most of which were in German, and which Billy passed on phonetically. Terry could have been narrating some sweet Bavarian porn for all Billy knew.
They were not, strictly speaking, sharing a body. Terry’s presence felt more like someone brushed up against Billy’s skin in a perpendicular fashion, like a shoulder touching the middle of his back. Sort of like they only shared north, and each had their own personal east, west, and south.
Poke had somehow bound them, Billy suspected, by pinning their separate norths together as if they were on two different maps sitting on top of each other. They could rotate separately around the “tack”, but they were now two leaves stuck to the same board.
When Billy tried to explain it to the enthraller kid, the boy blinked and tried not to look stupid. Billy decided to shut up about Terry at that point, beyond relaying the random German words his Maker said.
The people of the Intrepid continued their tests and countdowns. Terry said nothing about hearing the chatter, or perhaps he didn’t care. Perhaps they, too, were on a separate page in the map book, and Billy was tacked to them by the glass shard in his shoulder and not by Poke. Perhaps they all needed to share the same thumbtack for communication to happen.
Or, Billy was beginning to wonder, maybe the chatter wasn’t real.
No, they were as real as the German psycho sharing his space. He pulled off one more strip of tape. He’d use the entire roll if he needed to. The last take-off had been… painful.
“Qualvo
ll.” Terry whistled. “Beyond excruciating.” He huffed.
Billy waited for Terry’s usual response about mistreatment and his Progenitor status and his need to mete out vengeance on their Shifter handlers.
Terry instead treated him to a cascade of lava-like heat.
Billy did his best not to shudder.
Their pilot’s matter-of-fact voice whistled through the containment unit’s speaker. “Prepare for takeoff.”
“Sure thing, mate,” Billy said, and buckled his seatbelt under Poke. He waved to his Shifter kid handler outside the unit—the new jet was too small to bring his entire entourage.
The kid, his face flat yet somehow still earnest, waved back before swiping his finger across the screen of his phone.
“This craft will continue acceleration until we reach our deceleration point. Do not leave your seat,” the pilot said.
“Great,” Billy said. So much for stretching his legs.
But the Shifter kid didn’t listen. He unbuckled and held up his phone.
“We are clear for takeoff,” said the pilot. The jet began rolling.
The visibly pale kid pressed his phone against the window. “It’s started,” he said into his headset.
An image moved across the phone’s little screen. An image Billy couldn’t quite make out, but understood anyway.
Cities burned.
“Sit down, Mr. Nelson,” the pilot said.
The kid backed away. “It’s real,” he said.
Billy leaned back against the containment unit’s gouged-out seat. Terry yelled something in German. He wiggled and thrashed and pulled against Poke’s pinning, but, like Billy, he stayed in the seat.
“We will have you in Denver in three hours and fifty minutes, Mr. Barston,” the pilot said.
Four hours until he brought his cargo to his princess so she could stop what had just started.
“My vessel,” Terry sang. “We will dance at the end of the world,” he twittered, “she and I.”
“You will not harm her,” Billy said.
The engines cycled up. G-force pushed Billy—but not Terry, it seemed—against the seat.
They lifted into the air.
“We are en-route to Denver International Airport,” the copilot said. “I repeat, we have the cargo and we are en-route.”
Their acceleration held Billy flat against the seat. Two hours of pressing back, then another two of pressing forward as the jet decelerated over America’s heartland, all because he carried “the cargo.”
“To my vessel!” Terry followed his chatter with another few bars of sung German.
Terry wasn’t getting anywhere near Billy’s princess. He didn’t tell his invisible buddy that—best to let him think everyone was on board with his bullshite. Better that way. Less of a chance of him deciding to deplane early.
How many of the people involved in the launching of Terry realized they were on a suicide mission? They were young people. Mostly young people. Not like Boyfriend and Scary Girlfriend. But the princess was young. Hell, he was young. Even Captain Russia was young.
Too young to have their lives cut short.
Billy braced his leg between his flight seat and the wall of the unit. As long as nothing or no one touched Poke, they were okay.
The pressure of the tape tingled against his skin. No matter how much control he had, he still popped just a bit, so he effervesced under his jacket and the gray wrapped around his gut and his magic sword.
He prayed he had the strength he needed to keep the Devil at bay.
Chapter Forty-One
Wyoming…
The invaders were focusing on cities and human structures easily visible from space, but people were fleeing any town larger than two hundred people. Some headed into the Rockies. Most took the easiest routes and headed north and east, into the open country of Wyoming and Nebraska.
Daisy stared out the window at the oncoming headlights.
The bus, along with their trooper escort, wove its way through the traffic toward the very deep barrel of a drilled-into-the-ground cannon.
They’d picked up another escort vehicle about half an hour outside Cheyenne. Seemed Officer Seaver called in his cousin, since all official first responders were dealing with the normals. The other big guy from the rest stop now tailed them in his equally big truck.
They were good men, even if Officer Seaver’s cousin was a bit of a dick, and they both took their call to service seriously even though it probably would get them killed.
Daisy felt stable for the moment—Rysa’s healing plus whatever her mother did to her from the other side seemed to be holding her in a sort of activation flux. No extra pains. No weird hot-to-cold-to-hot-again flashes. Just the achy sense that if she jostled herself a little too hard her candy shell of okay-ness would shatter and her insides would ooze out.
It’d happen soon enough. She’d liquefy and take the baby with her. Daisy Pavlovich, chewed up by the end of the world and vomited out as bits of corpse.
Building the cannon was going to kill her. How could it not? She was supposed to transmute metal with her bare hands. No forge. No hammer and anvil. Just her fingers and her brand-new Shifter ability.
Presto! A cage meant to focus the Burner Progenitor’s death explosion upward.
A cage built out of re-formed swords she was supposed to make “argue” with their counterparts in new-space. The “argument” should set up the oscillations between real- and new-space that should act as a sort of dimensional mag-lev driver that would shoot the Maker of Burners into space.
The cannon meant to save the Earth was to be powered by energy created by rapid switching between real- and new-space.
How the hell could being right next to such a machine not kill her? The Burner Progenitor would likely consume her whole the moment she finished anyway, and then move on to Rysa.
They were both going to die. Daisy was about to lose her baby. She’d never see Gavin again. Everyone on the bus was likely to be dead by noon tomorrow one way or another and all she felt was numb. At least they might stop the invasion.
Even with her Shifter life and the unreal terror of Aiden Blake, an invasion from space seemed surreal. How the hell was this happening? Was the entire planet enthralled?
How could it possibly be reality?
The bus crested a rise and Officer Seaver’s cruiser lights flashed red and blue into the bus. The colors jumped from the windshield to Brother-Dragon, who’d wedged himself between the seats near Ladon, who drove. They ran down his back to his tail before jumping to his sister’s tail and up her back.
Anna, too, stared out the window, though from her looking-at-distant-objects expression, she was talking to her beast. Rysa stared at her phone. She shouldn’t; Gavin was correct about the weight of death, yet she swiped through story after story anyway.
Andreas sat near Ladon and spent a good portion of his time conferring with various Important People, including Hadrian and, occasionally, Trajan himself.
They all acted as if enthralled. There was no other explanation for the quiet and the complacency. Why were they all just taking this?
Trajan cried war—Trajan and her mother and the Whispering One and…
Daisy rubbed her eyes. Every dead person in Asia and India and Eastern Europe cried out. Every single human being in Western Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa who, at this very moment, was running for his or her life. They all cried out.
The world cried havoc and the Legion was about to let slip their collars, not because they wanted to, but because they had to.
No one on the bus had any other choice.
Daisy had tried to call her father to say good-bye. With her dad, she could be honest. She could ask him about facing death. About what it was like to die. But no international calls were going through.
Gavin, at least, wasn’t heading into a large city. He and Ian were headed to Cheyenne. She’d almost asked Rysa if they would be okay. Almost. But Rysa’s forehead showe
d a lingering bead of sweat.
Daisy rubbed at her own forehead. She had one, too.
She placed her hand on her belly, closed her eyes, and fired another bolt of self-healing toward the baby.
Sister-Dragon lifted her head off the bus’s floor. Her dragon eyes closed slightly—not quite squinted or narrowed, but lost a little of their roundness in what Daisy had long suspected was the dragon equivalent of attentive concentration.
A wave of energy washed over Daisy. She sensed the connection between the Dracae. Not like Rysa; not in a way that showed her the ebb and flow, or the directionality of their connection. Her Shifter awareness reminded her of the sense of place you get from a memory, the way you know a friend is in the room next door and you know the room and know the friend, so your brain places them in its map. The room takes on a reality it shouldn’t have, complete with your dancing friend’s twirls and wiggles and flops onto the bed even though you have no actual sensory information of what’s happening behind that closed door.
Sensing other Shifters and Fates worked the same way. Burners, it seemed, were too chaotic to place anywhere on any map at all.
But the wave that moved from Sister-Dragon, over Daisy, across the seats to Anna, then over Rysa, had purpose and directionality. An extra layer of complexity wove through the patterns and colors on the beast’s side. Nothing changed. No circle became less or more circular. No red became less or more red. The beast’s patterns just fluxed to complex as if Daisy saw connections she’d never noticed before.
A second wave rolled toward the front of the bus, toward Ladon, Andreas, and Brother-Dragon. Then a third wave crested over her, this one from the front and Brother-Dragon.
Anna nodded. Rysa looked up from her phone. She leaned her head to the side as if listening to Sister-Dragon, and also nodded.
The two dragons just did full medical scans of the humans on the bus.
Anna wiggled in her seat. For a second, her double-braided ponytails and her clear, gold-and-green flecked brown eyes made her look younger than Rysa.
The Burning World Page 30