by Carter Roy
“We have the deadlier weapon, Ronan—let’s see how they handle this.” A Tesla bolt struck the rotors dead-on and was deflected, lavender crackles of light arcing away on all sides.
“You’re going to crash!” Agatha shouted.
“No, I am not,” Dawkins replied. “Trust me.”
“Hold tight!” Dawkins goosed the throttle, and the copter surged forward, rotors-first.
All four Dobermans began howling.
Greta and Sammy shrieked with what sounded like their last breaths.
I would have joined them, but I was too busy throwing up.
CHAPTER 2
THE BIZ WITH DIZ
I didn’t see what happened next: I was too busy filling the paper sack Dawkins had given to me. But I heard and felt everything.
At the last moment, Dawkins must have yanked on the joystick so that the copter—and its deadly spinning blades—tilted back. In a split second, we went from dangling forward in our harnesses to slamming against the rear bulkhead. Through the front window, I glimpsed the brand-new Freedom Tower.
The engine coughed once, then conked out.
We fell.
And then we crashed.
The impact shook us all—the bruises from my harness were going to last for weeks—but what really shocked me was how loud it was. Dropping three tons of metal and glass onto a concrete helipad from fifty feet in the air makes a lot of noise. All the windows shattered, the supports for one of the skids thrust up through the dash just inches from Agatha, and the cabin walls crunched inward like the sides of an accordion.
Warm rain blew into the cabin through the smashed canopy.
One of the dogs whined in the sudden silence.
And then Agatha cried, “You ruined my helicopter!”
“Sorry,” Dawkins said. “I’d tell you I’ll pay you for it, but we both know I haven’t got the scratch.”
Greta shrugged off her helmet. “Why are we so crooked?”
“Two of the Bend Sinister agents softened our landing,” Dawkins said, slipping between the pilot seats. He released the dogs and wrenched open the left-hand door. The cabin rocked back and forth. “And clearly they’re not quite out for the count.” Stooping, Dawkins withdrew a cutlass from a duffel bag on the floor. “See that bunker yonder?” Back toward the water was a cinder block building as big as a two-car garage. “Leg it over there. The dogs and I will take care of our welcoming party.” The steel came clear of its scabbard with a crisp metallic hum.
“After me,” Agatha said. She leaped down out of the open door, Greta and Sammy right behind her.
I was about to join them when Dawkins handed me a sword. “Drop that sack and take this.”
I looked at my hand—I was still holding the airsickness bag. I threw it to the floor, grabbed the weapon, and climbed down to the tarmac.
Within moments, we were all soaked to our skin.
“Enough gadding about,” Dawkins said, pointing with his blade. “Run!”
Greta, Sammy, and Agatha splashed away into the dark, but Dawkins’ hand held me back. “Not you, Ronan. I need you here.”
Sure, I’d just puked out my guts, survived a helicopter crash, and was now so wet that I could feel water squishing in my socks, but suddenly none of that mattered.
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“We’ve squashed two agents, but three or four are still out there. I’ll draw their attention so the dogs can do their thing, and then, once everyone is busy, see if you can’t sneak around and take out the closest agent.” He whistled low, and then he and the dogs flowed around the front of the cabin and out of sight.
I went the other way, edging around the rear of the helicopter until I could see three agents through the rain. One woman with long black hair held a Tesla rifle in her arms. Another woman, a redhead, was armed with a saber. The third figure, a bald guy, had his head thrown back and was slowly moving his hands in the air like he was conducting a symphony—directing the rainstorm, I guessed.
“Why don’t you two put down your weapons,” Dawkins said, walking toward them, “and no one else will have to get hurt.”
The woman with the black hair growled and leveled her gun.
“Was afraid that’d be your response,” Dawkins said, dropping into a squat as she fired.
He disappeared.
I didn’t know he could do that! I’d seen my mom make huge leaps while she was running, but vanishing into thin air?
The Tesla bolt crackled across the empty space where Dawkins had been, rain sizzling off the beam. Then the woman swung the muzzle of her gun in my direction.
She’d seen me.
That was when Dawkins hurtled down from the sky, his knees tucked to his chest like a kid cannonballing into a swimming pool—right onto the bald man who was conducting the storm.
Dawkins had jumped, I realized—straight up into the rainy dark.
The impact of Dawkins’ body knocked the man unconscious. And just like that, the storm stopped, like someone had flipped a switch.
Dawkins sprang to his feet, cutlass raised, in time to block the blow of the swordswoman.
The black-haired woman with the rifle glanced at them but didn’t seem in a hurry to help. She smiled and turned back to aiming her gun. At me.
I can’t jump like Dawkins—I’m not even a Blood Guard yet, and I don’t have the skills he and my mom do. I threw myself to the ground and covered my head with my hands.
The shot never came.
Instead, there was an explosion of furious growling and angry shrieks.
The dogs.
Four black-and-tan shadows swarmed over the woman, pulling her down, nipping at her arms and legs. They looked like they were wrestling. Every time the agent managed to work an arm or leg free from one dog’s jaws, another dog lunged across her and caught the limb between its teeth. She never stopped bucking and thrashing and fighting them, not even after they dragged her into the heavy shadows at the edge of the landing pad.
The woman’s shouts covered the sound of my sword coming free of its scabbard. Crouching low, I went to help Dawkins.
He and the swordswoman hadn’t paused in their duel. She grinned crazily the whole time.
“You’ll never escape,” the woman said, gleeful. “I’ve alerted everyone to your arrival! The Bend Sinister are all over New York City.”
“Oh, please,” Dawkins said. With a flurry of swift attacks, he drove her back toward the copter. And me. “That’s a lie. You don’t have near enough people to cover the city.”
“The truth,” she said, lowering her weapon. “Hundreds of teams. More than enough to overwhelm one Blood Guard Overseer and a handful of children.”
I was nearly within range. I lifted the point of my weapon, readying my attack.
Dawkins lunged.
With a laugh, the redheaded woman dodged him. She swung around and slammed the hilt of her blade against his head as he stumbled past.
He sprawled face-first on the ground, stunned, his sword spinning away across the wet pavement.
“And I will take care of those kids as easily as I have taken care of you.” Standing over him, the woman clasped her sword between both hands and raised it overhead. She glanced over her shoulder at me and winked. “You’re next, little boy.”
There was no way I could close the thirty feet between us in time, no way to stop her from sticking her blade through Dawkins’ back.
But I had to do something.
So I shouted “No!” and ran at her.
Before I’d gone even six steps, the piercing shriek of a car horn stopped me dead. With a shrill scrape of metal, a boxy little yellow cab leaped the curb. It was the jazziest cab I’d ever seen, with glowing flat screens on the sides and hood and across the top like a high-tech dorsal fin.
And it was totally out of control.
The cab whirled around on the rain-slicked concrete—once, twice, its tires squealing, water fanning behind it, momentum carrying it past t
wenty feet to my right. But the third time it spun, the car abruptly stopped. Still poised with her blade raised above her head, the swordswoman was caught dead center in the headlights.
Then the cab roared straight at her.
The swordswoman jumped back, but the driver was ready for that. As the cab shot between the Bend Sinister agent and Dawkins, the cabbie kicked open his door and knocked the swordswoman right off her feet. She bounced against the fender and fell to the ground.
“What happened?” Dawkins asked, getting to his knees.
“An insane cab driver,” I said, giving him a hand.
At the far end of the heliport, the cab did the bootlegger maneuver my mom had shown me back at the start of the summer—using the emergency brake to swing the back end of the car around 180 degrees. And then slowly rolled back our way.
As the taxi pulled up, Dawkins wrenched down the jacket of the unconscious swordswoman and did some complicated knotting of the sleeves so that the woman’s arms were pinned. “Our ride. Just in the nick of time.”
“That crazy cabbie—he’s our ride?” I asked.
“She,” said the cabbie, opening her door. She was tall, and made even taller by her piles of upswept pink hair. “And I’d be a little more complimentary, considering this ‘crazy cabbie’ just saved your life.” She tugged down her dress, adjusted a chunky silver necklace, and pulled an umbrella from her cab. Like her dress, it was patterned with big flowers. I couldn’t be sure, because of her dark cat’s-eye shades, but she seemed to be sizing me up. Apparently satisfied, she flipped up the lenses of her sunglasses. “You’re okay,” she said. “But you should stop staring. Might make a girl self-conscious.”
“Um, sure,” I said. “I mean, I was just looking at your hair.”
Her red lips parted into a smile. “Do you like it? It’s called a beehive.” She pointed at the unconscious bald man. “That’s one, and the woman is two. Where are the others?”
“Two are under that crashed helicopter—”
“Let me guess,” said the cabbie, tilting her head and squinting at Dawkins. “You were the pilot?”
“Yes, but I took out two of them, so it was a strategic crash.” Dawkins put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. “There was a fifth agent, with a gun, but the dogs carried her off.”
The Dobermans trotted toward us, towing the female agent across the pavement, each latched on to a wrist or pant leg or, in the case of Pestilence, a muzzle’s worth of suit coat. We met them halfway, the cabbie stooping to bind the woman’s hands with thin plastic strips from her car. “Zip ties,” she said when she saw me staring. “It’s what the police use instead of handcuffs nowadays.”
Dawkins leaned over to scratch the dogs’ ears, their wagging tails thumping his legs. “Good work, my fearsome four!”
“This woman makes five,” said the cabbie as she stood up again. “But where’s their Hand?” She flipped her shades back down and turned a slow circle. As she did I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: one lens was thicker than the other.
I walked up close to get a better look. “Is that a Verity Glass?” I whispered. “Built into your sunglasses?”
“Works almost like night-vision goggles,” she quietly replied. Then to Dawkins, she said, “I don’t see any other Bend Sinister nearby.”
“Oh, but you will soon enough!” cried our captive. The rain had slicked her long dark hair across her face so that I couldn’t see her eyes, but the crazy menace in her voice was clear enough. “I am legion, and I will come for you!”
“You’re a pleasant one,” Dawkins said as Greta, Sammy, and Agatha ran up, breathless.
“You two okay?” Greta asked.
Sammy said, “We saw that jump, Jack—you shot like fifty feet into the air!”
Just then, a black sedan pulled up along the curb on the West Side Highway. A man in a cap climbed out and waved.
Agatha waved back. “My driver. Since everything here’s under control, I’ll make good my escape and—”
“You will never escape!” The Bend Sinister agent couldn’t see us through the wet blanket of her hair, but she clearly had no trouble hearing. Or talking. “I told that lousy swordsman, the Bend Sinister will soon be here in force.”
“Then we should get moving, too, Jack,” said the cabbie.
“Just a moment,” Dawkins replied, crouching and pulling the woman’s hair away from her face. She snapped her teeth at his fingers. “First,” he said, “I am an excellent swordsman. Second, it wasn’t you I fought, so how do you know what that agent said to me? Are you the Hand?”
“Yes! No!” said the woman, thrashing on the ground. “I am and am not who you are looking for.” She craned her head around until she could see the helicopter. “Why don’t you ask them.”
From beneath the helicopter, the trapped agents gurgled out insults. “I am legion!”
“I’m here! I’m there! I’m everywhere!”
“This is pointless, Jack,” said the cabbie. “You heard her—other agents are on their way. These games of hers are a delaying tactic.”
But Dawkins had one last question. “Was it Head Truelove who warned you we were coming?”
I flinched. Yes, my dad is a bad guy and his name is my name, too. Some things you just never get over.
“Truelove?” The agent broke into high-pitched witchy laughter. “That cowardly failure? That shameful outcast? That witless charlatan? That—”
“We get it,” Dawkins said. “You don’t like him.”
“Truelove is out! He’s done! He’s washed up! He’s good as dead!”
“That’s enough.” Dawkins stood. “Okay, everyone—we’re going now.”
“Tell me about the cabbie,” Agatha said, nodding at the taxi. The driver, her umbrella tucked under an arm, was looking at her reflection in her windshield and reapplying her lipstick.
“Her real name is Darlene, but the last person to call her that …” Dawkins shivered. “She goes by Diz.”
Agatha smiled. “See you again at the meet-up.” And then she jogged toward the waiting car.
“Meter’s ticking, kids!” Diz popped her lipstick into a tiny pink clutch. “It’s time to run.”
From behind her, the bald man roused, sat up, and announced, “Run run run, just as fast as you can!” He laughed—raspier and deeper than the black-haired woman, but somehow sounding exactly the same.
“Quiet, you,” said Diz, twirling her umbrella. The brass handle caught the man’s head with a loud crack and he slumped down again.
“The Hand can’t be all these Bend Sinister agents,” Dawkins said as he climbed into the front passenger seat. “And yet they all speak like a Hand.”
“Strap in, everyone,” Diz said, watching us in the rearview mirror.
Greta, Sammy, and I clicked our seat belts into place just as Diz stabbed the gas. The car gunned across the tarmac toward the highway. At the last moment, she hooked the wheel hard right.
Tires shrieking, the back end swung around behind us as the cab slid sideways, right into an open slot between two speeding cars. And just like that, we were part of the flow of traffic heading south.
“Nice maneuver,” Greta said.
“Thanks!” Diz studied Greta in the rearview mirror. I wondered how Diz could even stay on the road while staring at the brilliance of a Pure through her Verity Glass. Whenever I looked at Greta through mine, I was practically blinded.
Which reminded me of someone. “Maybe this Hand is like Patch Steiner,” I said to Dawkins. Beside me, Sammy and Greta tensed at the mention of the enormous blind Hand we’d run into only days before, who was able to steal the senses—vision, hearing, balance, and more—of anyone he chose. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of having to face another Patch Steiner. One had been bad enough. “Except instead of swiping a person’s eyesight or whatever, he takes over their entire bodies.”
“But can this mysterious Hand possess just any soft-brained yahoo?” Dawkins wondered. “Or only Bend
Sinister agents?”
“He didn’t take over any of us, did he?” Diz pointed out. “He only switched between the five agents back there.”
“Hmm, good point,” Dawkins said. And then he reached toward three silver buttons set in a row where most cars would have a radio. “What are all these shiny new things?”
Diz slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch! It’s no picnic being a woman cab driver in a nasty old city like New York. So I’ve added some protective measures to my ride.” She grinned, and I saw a bit of dark red lipstick on her front teeth.
“Ejector seats?” Dawkins said, clasping his hands together. “Flamethrowers? Please tell me there are flamethrowers.”
“Oh, stop,” Diz said. “Nothing so ridiculous.”
“Is that why you have a Verity Glass built into your sunglasses?” I asked.
She tapped her glasses. “No, this is so I can monitor the movements of the Bend Sinister.”
The Verity Glass didn’t just reveal the radiance of a Pure soul, I knew from experience. It also unmasked agents of the Bend Sinister. Through the Glass, they appeared as outlines, shimmery shadows of real people. They’d given up that deep something that made them human, and the Glass showed that they walked the world as mere husks of who they’d been before.
“Have new teams of agents shown up in the city?” Dawkins asked.
“Tons,” Diz said. “It’s bad, Jack. Their numbers started increasing late last spring, and now they’re everywhere, blending in with regular folks—businesspeople and police officers and students and the homeless—you name it.”
“So that Hand wasn’t lying.” Dawkins drummed his fingers on the dash. “He said there were more than a hundred teams here.”
“But why? What are they doing here?” Sammy wondered.
Greta clutched the back of Dawkins’ seat. “Is this because of us? Are they here to stop us from rescuing my mom?”
“Not if they started showing up last spring.” Dawkins shook his head. “No, this is about something else, something bigger.”
Late last spring. That was when the Bend Sinister captured a Pure named Flavia. And also when my dad finally blew his cover and took off. I said as much. “But what does all of that have to do with this?”
