by Alex White
The place where she thought she’d seen the movement was a black rectangle, thrown into stark relief by the emergency lights. She narrowed her eyes and jutted her head forward, expecting to see a soldier, the reflection of a mask, the flash of a slinger, something.
But she found only hard tile, and the distinct impression of burbling. The song grew louder. The shadow across the floor wavered like the slow roiling of water.
And something reached out of it.
Nilah pushed off her perch, silently landing back between her compatriots. She hadn’t been able to make out the exact form, but had glimpsed dripping blackness and a bony appendage, darker than any nanotube coating. She’d never seen a spell like that; it was like the old legends of ghosts and phantoms.
“There’s a problem, loves,” she whispered, keeping her voice as low as she could.
Boots eyed her. “Does it have anything to do with that creepy noise?”
The heavy shelf rocked behind them with the force of a massive blow, showering the trio with twinkling data cubes. Nilah ducked and covered her head, each crystal battering her back with sharp corners before bouncing harmlessly across the floor. Boots cried out as one of the crystals struck her. When the hail of cubes stopped, Nilah glanced up to find Boots clutching her hair, a rivulet of crimson running between her fingers.
Nilah backed away from the shelf, eyes darting from side to side, veins frigid with fear. With each step, she kicked crystals out of the way, almost stumbling. At the end of the aisle, long fingers, dripping with ink, wrapped around the endcap. A wicked claw tipped each finger, sharp enough to scar the metal shelving. It paused, as though sizing up a meal.
Lightning quick, it whipped itself around the corner and came at Nilah, gaunt arms spread wide like the wings of a bird of prey. She tried to leap out of the way, but her foot found purchase on a cube, and she went rolling to the ground.
A glimmering crystal thunked off the spot where the creature’s head might’ve been, and Nilah looked back to see Aisha snatching up another cube to throw. Boots had gotten a few steps of distance and was wildly gesturing for her to join them.
The shade craned its head and opened impossibly wide jaws, its long, curved teeth sprouting and snapping into place. Smoky, pitch-black liquid flowed from its skin and dripped onto Nilah’s legs.
She concentrated and cranked up her dermaluxes to full, sending blinding flashes in all directions. It recoiled from her visual assault, and she took the opportunity to kip up to her feet. This time, she watched her footing and found solid steps, dodging and weaving away from the creature.
It swung a claw at her, arms extending like a bullwhip crack, and Nilah leapt off one of the shelves to get clear. Her calf muscle seared with pain as knifelike claws grazed her skin, tearing her pant leg. She landed hard, but soundly, and dashed off after Boots and Aisha.
The song positively cooed with bloodlust.
“What the hell is that thing?” Boots huffed as they hurdled down aisle after aisle.
“I don’t know,” said Aisha, tracing another glyph, “but it didn’t like your lights.”
Nilah raced after them, not bothering to see how bad her leg might be. She could run on it, and that was good enough for her. “No, it didn’t … Have you ever seen a spell like that?”
Both women shook their heads no.
“Could be an illusion,” said Boots as they rounded another corner and tucked in, their backs flat against the wall.
Nilah crouched by her companions and reached down to touch the scratches on her leg. Her fingers came away wet with blood, a hard sensation to replicate with simple illusions. The shade was real, and it could really kill them with those talons. Taking a short breath, Nilah ducked out from behind cover.
She watched the shade slurp from shadow to shadow, pouring between them like carbon ink, its form flexing and changing with each leap, then she retreated.
“It can’t walk in the light,” she told the others, trying to keep her voice down.
“There are shadows everywhere,” said Aisha.
Boots jutted out her jaw, nodding at the room beyond. “The place is lousy with them.”
The emergency lights blinked over Nilah’s head, illuminating an exit she couldn’t use. Someone had shut off the power, knowing that the emergency lights would leave more shadows and make the spell work better.
Nilah gestured to a distant sifter workstation. “If I can hack one of these terminals, I can get the main lights back on.”
Boots shook her head. “It’s just going to sit there while you hack a classified terminal?”
“You’ll have to distract it. Get on top of the shelves, closer to the lights. That’s the brightest part of the room.”
A smoky black skull peered around the corner, and a hundred bony hands snaked toward them. It lashed out after Aisha, taking hold of her neck, so Nilah plunged forward with her tattoos ablaze, smashing her fists into the darkness. She brought to bear years of training in Flicker, the Taitutian art of dermalux fighting. Using her tattoos, she could distract and strike with pinpoint precision. Rising rocket. Her uppercut connected smoothly with the skull, but where Nilah had expected to feel bone, she felt slick flesh. The arms released Aisha, but the skull wormed toward Nilah, jaws clacking. Disrupted orbit. A spinning kick sent the creature off course and crashing into the shelf while Nilah danced away. It surged upright, completely unfazed by the attacks.
“Run!” shouted Nilah, and they split up.
Chapter Five
Staccato
Nilah thanked her lucky stars for all the years spent keeping herself in tip-top shape. Before long, she was out of sight from the shade. She flattened herself into a nook between two sconces and waited, shutting off her blaring dermaluxes.
“Over here, bucko!” came Boots’s shout over the mysterious song and the melodic crash of Aisha throwing data cubes.
The singing slowly diminished until it was barely audible, Boots and Aisha swearing loudly at the creature as they led it away. Instinct told Nilah to avoid the hard shadows, for fear that the thing could emerge beneath her at any moment. Then again, it appeared to see in the visible light spectrum, so maybe it was wiser to stick to the darkened areas.
On one of the endcaps, she spied her destination: an archive terminal with an open socket, its gold data contacts glimmering in the recess. It would be dangerous to hack a modern military system in the heart of Taitu’s capital, which was not at all like the outdated defenses of the Capricious. In addition to the network defense AI, there was the risk that the shadow would find her while she was distracted with the attack.
It’d have to do. She traced her mechanist’s glyph and crept toward the terminal.
When Nilah’s fingertips brushed the exposed data contacts, she closed her eyes and concentrated, winding her magic into the terminal, slinking across network pathways and into the adaptive logic of the system.
She found a house in ruins. Shattered fragments of defensive code floated through the aether like feathers. Most of the system’s core functions remained, but the defenses had been blown to bits. Judging from the clean wounds to the defense neurons, the attack had been swift and asymmetrical.
Nilah scanned the datascape for the strands that would lead her to the emergency lighting controls. A million darkened threads spread before her, and she sifted through for a glimmer of communication. At last, her queries touched upon a strong control signal.
At least, that’s what she thought until she touched it.
Images of the archives flooded her mind from a thousand different vantage points—high, low, down each and every aisle. The data packets blasted through her in rapid succession, and the dozens of views scrambled into one another. These were the video feeds for all the imagers inside the archives.
Nilah summoned a filter snippet and sorted the threads until she found her physical body hunched over the terminal, eyes flitting under their lids. Switching the filter, she found her friends: across the room
, Boots scrambled through the labyrinthine shelves as the hungry shadow slithered after. Aisha traced her glyph and tossed a data cube over her shoulder, landing it directly in the engorged jaws of the beast. The cube wedged into the creature’s mouth, so it grew three more pairs of oozing mandibles. It bore down on her friends, drawing closer with each passing second.
Nilah traced the feed route to a connection to the outside world. From the archives, the stream went to a government data center, then off into space to anyone with the right encryption codes. Someone out there was watching them—and perhaps controlling the shade.
Nilah summoned a spark of arcane energy and cut the data thread, burning out the external gateways to the world beyond so nothing else could connect. Without that connection, the facility would stop broadcasting video. If anyone wanted to watch them die, it’d have to be from inside the structure.
She reinitialized her filter, flipping through the imager feeds for her friends, but found nothing: no Boots, no Aisha, no shade.
“Nilah,” said a woman, low and urgent, entering Nilah’s mind through the dozen ears of the imagers. Was that Boots’s voice?
She twisted the filter this way and that across the thread, searching for the source of the noise. Then a heavy hand fell across her shoulder.
Nilah broke contact with the terminal and leapt like a startled cat, slamming her head into the side of the alcove and slapping ineffectively at the walls. She tumbled onto her rump and clambered backward before finally getting her bearings. Boots and Aisha stood over her, panting.
“It’s okay!” said Boots. “Just us.”
Aisha helped her up, palms slick with sweat. “That thing disappeared. What did you do?”
Nilah took a moment to catch her breath. “I cut the video feeds. It was a spell—godlike magic—but the bastard still had to see where he was casting. No video, no eyes.”
“Nick of time,” said Aisha, rubbing her temple. “My cardioid was about to pop if I had to cast one more mark.”
Nilah nodded. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
Boots doubled over, hands on her knees. Sprinting wasn’t her forte. “Still got those goons in the lobby.”
“I’ve got a plan for that,” said Nilah, tracing another glyph and pressing her fingers to the terminal contacts. “Just sit tight.”
Once again, she delved into the damaged network, sifting through the strands for the lobby imagers. Connecting her filter, she was able to flip through the video feeds until she found a good overhead shot of the glass cube above. She wished she had Armin’s power just then—she’d be able to view all the feeds at the same time and understand them.
At first glance, it appeared as though nothing was out of order. The security personnel were standing at their posts, automatic slingers strapped at their sides. Except Nilah spied a pair of legs sticking out from behind the scanning station desks. Judging from the make of the combat boots, the attackers had likely stashed the bodies of the real guards and taken their places.
Nilah sifted through the comm threads until she found the one that controlled the projections along the external glass of the building. She grabbed a few severed snippets of the decimated defense code and wove together a primitive motion-tracking algorithm.
She used the lobby’s display glass to draw targets around the guards’ heads and broadcasted a message: HOSTAGES INSIDE. POLICE SNIPERS SHOOT HERE.
Nilah opened her eyes and looked to her companions. She called up a projection so they could watch the action above.
“What if the police think it’s a trap?” asked Aisha. “They aren’t going to just start shooting.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Nilah. “They’ll still come and investigate. They can’t ignore it.”
“Nice,” said Boots.
“You might want to cover your ears,” said Nilah, and she triggered all the intruder alarms at maximum volume.
The police might not show up slingers blazing, but they couldn’t ignore a high-profile malfunction in the heart of the Justice District. A response team would be on them in under a minute.
When she broke away from the terminal, she found the archivist she’d met earlier, a tiny slinger in his trembling hands. At ten paces, he’d get off a shot before Nilah could ever close the gap to him.
“Oh, come on,” sighed Nilah. “Is everyone a spy for Henrick Witts?”
“The Children have ways of getting where we need to be,” he said with a weak smile.
Boots shook her head. “So the Children definitely work for Witts, then. Way to confirm a hunch, genius.”
Hawkworth blanched but said nothing.
Nilah snapped her fingers. “What was your name again? Hank, uh …”
“Hawkworth. You should beg,” said the agent, hands shaking. “I want to tell them you begged.”
“Listen, mate,” said Nilah, raising her hands. If she could get close enough, she might be able to take him down. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your bosses aren’t going to help you. The Gods of the Harrow don’t care one whit for you. Their original plan was to kill everyone in the galaxy, remember?”
“Only the weak,” said Hawkworth, redoubling his grip on his slinger.
“No offense, buddy,” said Boots, “but you probably shoot like an accountant. Your spell is datamancy and we’re a couple of badasses. Maybe consider switching sides.”
Hawkworth snarled. “Go to hell.”
His finger tensed around the trigger, and Nilah leapt clear as a bolt sailed past her face. He lined up for another shot, but a glittering data cube smashed into his forehead, corner first. He stumbled back a few steps, eyes crossed, lips mouthing some unformed word, and toppled over like a tool chest. Blood dribbled from a nasty head wound.
Nilah rushed to his side and kicked away his slinger before turning to see Aisha straightening from her throw. The pilot let out a long sigh as the magic subsided from her system.
Boots’s mechanical hand had ejected from her wrist, and Nilah spied the tip of the anti-ship slinger round locked into firing position. If she’d fired, Hawkworth would’ve been down, but so would most of one side of the archives.
“Okay, now I’m tapped out,” said Aisha, brushing off her hands.
Boots sauntered over to their downed adversary and checked for a pulse. “Crap. He’s flatlining.”
“Sorry,” said Aisha. “Wasn’t trying to brain him.”
Boots motioned to the projection, where the assassins were fleeing the premises. “At least Nilah spooked them. If we don’t get this guy some medical attention soon, he’s a goner.”
Nilah traced another glyph, wincing with strain as she connected again to the network. The elevator controls were burned out. Whoever those killers were, they’d done a good job of locking the trio inside.
“Damn,” she muttered, reconnecting to the exterior windows. “We’re not getting out of here without the police.”
She changed their message to read:
HELP. ALL TRAPPED INSIDE. SPECIAL BRANCH CASUALTIES LOBBY LEVEL.
“Why am I looking at you again?” asked Cedric Weathers as he surveyed the shelves upon shelves of scattered data cubes.
Boots smacked her lips and glanced to where Nilah and Aisha were being wrapped in blankets as they drank rich Taitutian tea. The Special Branch agents were taking extra care of her camera-ready compatriots, but Boots was left out in the literal cold.
“Because your agency’s internal security is a disgrace?” she mused, crossing her arms. She’d never gotten accustomed to the feeling of her prosthetic limb, but the gesture was complete, and she’d be damned if she showed discomfort in front of Cedric.
He clucked his tongue. “You’ve got some cheek for a woman detained at a crime scene.”
“Oh, jeez, Agent Weathers, let me be the first to apologize for hurting your little feelings. Now that’s out of the way. Do you know why a shadow monster tried to kill everyone and one of your men pulled a weapon on us?”
&nb
sp; “For all we know, you people set this up somehow—so it looks like I should hold you three for questioning.”
Boots grimaced. “Cut the crap. You’ve got the imager feeds from upstairs. You know we were stuck down here when those bastards shot the guards up top.”
“The videos cut out after the assault was successful. There’s no footage of the three of you after that.”
“Yeah, but you know for a fact that we didn’t shoot anyone, so forget your harebrained theories.”
Cedric thrust his hands into his pockets. “We had this one case we trained on back at the academy—”
Boots waved him off. “Spare me. Are we being held or not? And before you answer, you might want to consult Prime Minister Bianchi.”
Cedric shifted uncomfortably on his heels for a moment, weighing his options. Finally, he said, “One of these days, that little trick isn’t going to work for you.”
“Cool. Until then, why don’t you try to remember that we did you, and the entire galaxy, a huge favor.” Boots rested her hands on her hips. “We’re the poor fools running down the leads you can’t be bothered to chase.”
“You’re not government operatives. You have no jurisdiction of any kind.”
Boots laughed. “That’s true. We’ve got a lot more morals and a lot fewer leaks.”
She pointed down at the anti-ship slinger round at Hawkworth’s feet. “Not sure what he was going to do with that, but if it’s as pleasant as he was …” Then she shrugged. “Have a nice day, Agent.”
Boots made her way to Nilah and Aisha, this crowd of Special Branch personnel being far less enthusiastic for autographs than the ones at headquarters, and motioned for them to go. “Let’s roll.”
They went up through the elevator, out into the street, into a hired flier, and across town to the Port of Aior, where the Capricious lay docked.
Cordell awaited them at the ship’s cargo loading ramp, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, its smoke crackling with eidolon dust. “Those government cats who stopped by were pissed, Bootsie,” he called out as she approached.
