by Derek Landy
“Assuming they don’t kill me.”
China smiled at her. “They won’t kill you. You’re Valkyrie Cain. You’ll outlive us all. After that, we’ll get in a car and we’ll drive right out of here.”
Valkyrie hesitated, then hunkered down and peered into the shaft. It was dark, and looked small.
“Oh, God,” she said, and started crawling.
The vent was just up ahead, so the first part wasn’t so bad. She just focused on the fact that in a few seconds she’d be able to stand. Her breathing was calm. Her heart wasn’t hammering at her chest. She was doing good.
She got to the vent. It was narrow – scarily so – but it did, as China had said, go straight up. Unfortunately, it also went straight down, too, servicing the floors below. Something China had neglected to mention.
Grumbling to herself, Valkyrie inched forward, reaching out to lay her hands flat against the far wall of the vent. Her head and shoulders emerged next, and cold air hit the perspiration on her brow. She leaned out further, bringing her knee out from under her, bracing the sole of her boot against the outer edge of the shaft.
She shifted her body forwards and upwards, straightening her leg, bracing the other foot now, too, until she was standing at an angle. She looked up, saw the opening of the next shaft.
She bent her knees, was about to take off, but chickened out at the last moment. She’d never done it like this before. If she did something wrong and ended up falling, it was going to hurt like hell.
She took a breath, raised her head, charged up her magic – and jumped.
Her magic kicked in immediately, white energy bouncing off the four walls of the vent like she was in a microwave about to explode, and she shot upwards, ricocheting all the way, speeding past the first opening and the second opening and then reaching madly for the third while she cut the jets. She managed to get both arms into the shaft and she hung there for a moment, legs dangling, before she pulled herself in. Her clothes were smouldering again.
Valkyrie crawled on. Her shoulders brushed the sides of the shaft. That was getting to her. Her hair was in her eyes. That was getting to her, too. She stopped. This was the third opening, wasn’t it? She’d been going so fast, she could easily have missed one. If she was in the wrong shaft, then maybe there was no way out. Her hands curled into fists. She might crawl and crawl and it’d get hotter and hotter and her panic would rise and keep rising and there’d be no way out.
Her skin sparked.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no.”
Energy crackled along her arm.
She bit her lip. Bit it hard and focused on the pain. She needed to calm down, to reduce her panic, to understand that she was going to be fine and she was going to find the way out and she’d be standing up and free to move and everything would be—
Her anxiety spiked again and lightning crackled up and down her body.
She lay down flat, resting her forehead on the backs of her hands. She closed her eyes. She forced herself to breathe slowly, and reached out with her mind.
She found Abyssinia.
Valkyrie slipped into Abyssinia’s mind, just like she’d done before – quietly and without fuss.
Like a thief in a museum, she trod carefully, avoiding the thoughts that roared like thunder all around her.
A section of Abyssinia’s memories lay open, brought to the surface by the return of Caisson. Valkyrie sneaked in and let herself go, let herself fall between moments. She saw the moment Abyssinia found him, experienced the joy, the sheer happiness that came with it. Then there was nothing – no sight, no sound – and she knew these were the years Abyssinia spent in that box, deep in the bowels of Coldheart Prison.
She fell beyond them, out of the darkness and back into the warmth of the light, of Caisson as a young boy, laughing, and Abyssinia caring for him, loving him, raising him. And Caisson was a baby now, bundled in animal hide, and Valkyrie fell further, and further …
And she saw Caisson’s father.
Valkyrie opened her eyes. She was back in the ventilation shaft. For almost a full minute, she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
Then she said, “Oh, wow.”
Slowly, she got to her hands and knees and started crawling again, following the shaft round a corner. She heard voices and slowed down, making sure she was as quiet as she could be.
Light spilled from a grate ahead of her. She reached it, looked down, saw nothing but a concrete floor below her. No voices nearby.
She tried lifting the grate, but had to drop her elbow on to it – heavily – to get it to swing open.
She dropped into the car park, immediately ducked behind a car and took a deep, shuddering breath. This was better, out in the open like this. This was much better.
There was a sign for the stairwell, pointing to her left. Keeping low and scuttling from car to car, she followed it. She stopped moving when two convicts strolled by. When they were gone, she moved again.
Valkyrie was almost to the stairwell when she realised her car was parked nearby. She took a detour, found her car and opened the boot. She grabbed her phone to call Skulduggery, but the signal was being blocked. Right then. She pressed the amulet to her chest and the necronaut suit flowed over her own bloodstained clothes. She fixed her shock sticks in place, and then she opened the music box.
She closed her eyes, let the delicate tune wash over her.
Ohh, this was better. This was what she needed. Just a little bit of calm. Just a little bit of confidence.
Not too long, though. She couldn’t afford to lose much time here. This was an urgent situation and it required her to be at her sharpest. Just five more seconds. Five more.
That’s all.
She opened her eyes and flicked the lid down. That was dangerous. Valkyrie laughed. She’d have to be careful of that in the future.
She hurried off. The gunmen. Yes, she had to take out the squad of shooters on the stairs.
She found the door to the stairwell, opened it quietly. She heard whispers, and took a peek. They were a little below her, peering down. She grinned, and readied her pistol.
She burst in, leaping over the stairs as she fired downwards. She got most of them before she even hit the wall, then fell on to the two shooters left conscious. There was a lot of cursing and yelling and a scramble, but their rifles were too big to manoeuvre and Valkyrie shot them point-blank.
She lay there for a moment, a grin on her face.
“Valkyrie?” China called up.
Valkyrie poked her head over the edge, and waved, and China hurried up to her.
“I’ve changed my mind,” China said.
“About what?”
“We can’t leave. I can’t leave. You go if you want.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
China nodded. “This is my home. I can’t run from my home just because I have uninvited guests. What do you do when you have uninvited guests in your house, Valkyrie?”
“Oh, I never have any guests,” Valkyrie answered. “I have very few friends.”
China sighed. “You kick them out,” she said. “The answer is, you kick them out.”
They kept going up. They got to ground level and found Fletcher slamming a golf club into a convict’s shin. The convict went down, screaming, and Fletcher sent him to sleep with another swing.
“You should yell fore when you do that,” Valkyrie said, walking over. “Makes for a cool story you can tell at parties.”
“Oh, I’m glad to see you two,” Fletcher responded. “What’s the plan? Do we have a plan? I need a plan.”
“Take us to my quarters,” China said.
Fletcher looked apologetic. “Ah – I can only teleport to places I’ve been before. The highest I’ve ever been in this place is the twenty-seventh floor.”
“That will have to do,” said China.
Fletcher nodded, and vanished for a moment. When he reappeared, he was shrugging. “OK, looks clear from what I can see.” He held out his han
ds. Valkyrie and China both took one, and an eyeblink later they were on the twenty-seventh floor, at the elevators. There were voices – shouts, in fact – coming from somewhere, but they were too far away to make out what was being said.
“This way,” China said, walking quickly. “There’s an elevator that they might not know about.”
“What’s it like on other floors?” Valkyrie asked Fletcher as they followed.
“Pretty scary,” he replied, “but it could be worse. Our side is putting up a fight, as you’d imagine.”
They got to a corner and Valkyrie peered round, then motioned for them to keep following.
“Nero’s working overtime,” Fletcher continued. “I can feel it in the air whenever he teleports. He’s moving the – well, the troops, I suppose, wherever they’re needed before our guys can react.”
“Can you take him?” China asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Can you find Nero and can you kill him?”
Fletcher hesitated. “Supreme Mage, I’m a teacher. I’m not a killer.”
China turned suddenly and Fletcher almost walked into her. “We can’t let him continue,” she said. “They’re here because Nero teleported them here. They’re winning because of him. Teleporters are the most valuable sorcerers in any battle. They have Nero. We have you.”
“Nero’s a Neoteric,” said Fletcher. “He can do things I can’t.”
China turned on her heel and they resumed walking. “Because he cheats,” she said. “Because he doesn’t have the training you do. He doesn’t have the discipline. He has tricks that you don’t, this is true – but his power is unstable. You just need to push him.”
“I really don’t think I’m the guy for this,” said Fletcher.
“You’re telling me,” someone said from behind them. Valkyrie and China whirled, firing, but Nero, wearing a black trench coat, simply teleported to their right, and grinned.
“I thought I sensed you nearby,” he said to Fletcher. “Old man Renn, come to spoil the fun.”
“Old?” Fletcher said, appalled. “I’m twenty-seven.” He disappeared, and reappeared a moment later, carrying a baseball bat.
Nero laughed, teleported away, and returned with an axe.
They walked towards each other.
“I owe you one,” Fletcher said.
“You mean that time I stuck that knife in your back?” Nero asked. “You didn’t find that funny? I know I did.”
“Your coat is ridiculous.”
Nero laughed again. “No, it isn’t.”
“You look like you read Catcher in the Rye and then raided your parents’ wardrobe. Yeah,” Fletcher said, hefting the bat, “I read books now.”
He swung the bat and Nero blocked and teleported behind him and Fletcher whirled, teleporting to his right as he did so, the bat crunching into Nero’s leg.
Nero roared in anger and was suddenly dropping down from above, but Fletcher vanished, the axe barely missing him, and charged into Nero as he landed. The bat skittered away and they tumbled to the floor, wrestling for the axe, appearing and disappearing faster than Valkyrie could process.
“Let’s go,” said China.
Valkyrie grabbed her arm. “We can’t just leave him here.”
“Do you want to get involved in that? Do you have any idea where they’re teleporting to? They could drop us into a volcano and they wouldn’t even notice. Come on, Valkyrie. This is Fletcher’s fight. Not ours.”
China continued on.
After a moment, Valkyrie followed.
Up they went.
They reached the thirty-third floor and stepped into a corridor littered with dead convicts, with Serafina Dey standing there in another weirdly awesome dress.
“Finally,” Serafina said, “some decent conversation. These people have not been helpful in the slightest. They kept trying to kill me, and then had the gall to protest when I started killing them. These are Abyssinia’s people, aren’t they? Is she here? With the boy?”
“Yes,” said China.
“They’ve come to kill you, haven’t they?”
“I would expect so.”
“And to think,” Serafina said, “I was going to waste my time hunting for him when all I needed to do was wait for him to come here to murder you.”
“I’m glad my predicament has been of benefit to you,” China said. “It means this day is not a total waste.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic,” Serafina responded, “but I can’t help but agree. So, you’re going to confront them, are you?”
“If you want to accompany us—”
“Oh, I do.”
Doors opened behind them and shooters came through, filling the air with those lethal red bolts. China dropped her rifle and tapped her shoulders, then flung her arms wide and a blue wave took the closest convicts off their feet. Valkyrie threw lightning at the others. When they were down, she realised Serafina was appraising her.
“You have power,” she said. “Excellent.”
Valkyrie didn’t like the way she was looking at her. She preferred it when she was being ignored.
Two more shooters stormed in. Valkyrie raised a shield and China crouched behind her, but Serafina was exposed. It didn’t seem to worry her all that much.
With bolts of red sizzling all around her, Serafina held her hands up like she was praying, then flicked them apart. The shooters slammed into the walls on either side of the corridor.
The first to recover grabbed his rifle. Serafina pinched her thumb and forefinger together and raised her hand, and the shooter was picked up off his feet. He struggled, eyes wide, grasping at whatever was holding him, but Serafina flicked her hand again and he hit the ground with enough force to break every bone in his body.
The second shooter tried to run. Serafina closed her hand and he jerked to a stop, his arms and legs pressing into each other, his body twisting. He screamed as Serafina squeezed, and then the scream was cut off and he dropped like a sack of broken twigs.
China brushed at something on her dress. “We’re trying not to kill them,” she said.
“Are we?” Serafina asked. “Whyever are we doing that? Is that your idea, girl?”
“The name’s Valkyrie.”
“Is it your idea, I asked?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a silly one,” Serafina said, walking onwards. “I shan’t be doing it.”
“And you thought I was bad,” China muttered, and followed.
They continued like this, floor after floor, getting shot at, shooting back, Serafina making arch comments. Valkyrie lost her pistol somewhere along the way and just started hurling lightning at people. It was more satisfying anyway.
On the forty-sixth floor there was the crash of a door opening, some startled cries, and then the unmistakable sounds of people getting punched. Valkyrie hurried to the corner, looked round, watched Skulduggery beat the hell out of four shooters who were panicking too much to offer any kind of challenge.
When he’d stomped the last one’s head into the floor, Valkyrie made herself known. “Where have you been?”
“Trapped,” he responded, adjusting his hat slightly as he came over, “in an ingenious device that slows time. A truly remarkable feat of engineering, if I’m being honest. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a more impressive trap in all my years of being trapped in things. It really was quite something. I would have been held there for a full week if I hadn’t managed to escape.”
“And how did you escape?”
“I’m not sure. I think it broke down, actually.”
“Hmm,” said Valkyrie. “So not all that impressive, then.”
“It was very impressive at the time,” Skulduggery countered. “You know, before it stopped working. I came straight here to convince China to release you, and found the whole place overrun with killers. But you managed to get out of your cell, which is a nice surprise. How did you manage that?”
“We’ll have time for ex
planations later,” said China, as she and Serafina came round the corner. “We’ve been caught off guard, but I believe we have retaken the initiative. By now, Nero has hopefully been neutralised, which means Abyssinia’s army has lost its manoeuvring capability. It also means that Abyssinia is stuck here.”
Skulduggery tilted his head. “And do we know where she is?”
“We do,” said China. “Would you like to come with us?”
“By all means, lead on.”
Valkyrie was expecting an ambush.
The doors to China’s apartment were wide open. Two Cleavers lay dead outside. China discarded the rifle like it was a toy she’d grown bored of, and led the way in. Serafina was to her left, Valkyrie and Skulduggery to her right.
But there was no ambush. Instead, Razzia and Caisson were standing there, waiting for them.
China froze when she saw them. Caisson stared at her.
“My boy,” China said softly.
Caisson said, “No. You don’t get to call me that.” He was different to when Valkyrie had last seen him. Calmer. A lot calmer.
“You don’t have to be a part of this,” China said. “You can walk away. I’ll see to it that nothing bad happens to you ever again.”
Caisson’s eyes flickered to Serafina. “You’ll protect me from her, will you?”
“I’ll protect you from everyone,” said China.
“And who, I wonder, will protect me from you?”
Before China could answer, Abyssinia walked in from another room, examining the ceilings and the walls as she did so. She had a smile on her face until she saw Skulduggery. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, dismayed. “How did you free yourself?”
Skulduggery shrugged. “I think the Eternity Gate needs a little fine-tuning before it’s ready for the mass market. It still has a few bugs in its system.”
“This is … unfortunate,” Abyssinia said. “I didn’t want to have to kill you. That’s why I trapped you there. To save you.”
“Thank you, Abyssinia,” Skulduggery said, “but I’m long past saving.”
Abyssinia shook her head, like she was ridding herself of sad thoughts. A smile reappeared as her eyes settled on China. “You have a lovely home,” she said. “It’s not necessarily to my taste, but lovely, even so. Naturally, I’d have to change the colour scheme, replace the furniture, generally make it fit for royalty before I move in.”
