Nessa managed a thin smile.
“You’re an imitation witch,” she gasped, “with an imitation knight. Marie never gives up. She’s just doing what she’s good at.”
“Which is?”
Nessa’s gaze flicked over Savannah’s shoulder.
“Changing the rules of engagement.”
Scottie loomed over Daniel. The shadow of his boot heel fell across Daniel’s face. Just before he could bring it down, a sound caught his attention.
Engines.
Standing in the corridor between the geodesic tents, a suit of white armor assumed a battle stance. Plumes of steam rose from the shoulder exhausts, rippling in the salty, musty air.
* * *
Streams of data flooded across the inside of Marie’s helmet. Valkyrie Prototype 1.4, it read. Property of Talon Armaments Group. A woman’s electronic voice echoed over tinny speakers.
“System integrity is at forty-eight percent. Would you like to engage the emergency-return protocol?”
Marie knew this armor. She knew the feel of servos translating her movements into power, backing her footsteps with titanium-plate and piston-driven force. The suit was battered, broken in spots, but it wasn’t finished. Just like her.
“Negative,” she said. “Engage war mode.”
Her visor painted the targets, highlighting them in boxes of neon green. Her armored hands clenched into fists.
“Afterburners,” she said.
Blue flames erupted from the shoulder pipes and her boots lifted from the ground. She hurtled across the cavern like a runaway train and plowed into Scottie at full speed. The two armored titans hit the ground, clinched and rolling together, shattering dead coral and kicking up a cloud of dust. He landed on his back. She straddled him and pulled her fists back one after the other, raining down punches with sledgehammer force. His ink-armor began to crack, jarring loose, oozing black mucus mingled with blood.
Scottie got his knees bent beneath her. He shoved hard with both feet, kicking her off, sending her sprawling a few feet away. She jumped to her feet as he came after her again, lashing out with his blade. The katana carved through the outer skin of the suit and dented the armored plate beneath.
Loose wires dangled from the armor’s torn shoulder, sparking. The automated voice echoed under her helmet: “Servo damage. Suit is at thirty-five percent effectiveness. Afterburners nearly depleted. Do you wish to engage the emergency-return protocol?”
“Negative,” Marie snapped. Her fist crashed into Scottie’s face and sent him staggering back.
Marie’s return distracted Savannah for one crucial second. In the space of a heartbeat, her control faltered.
That was all Nessa needed.
Her power surged in like a cyclone of hatred given razor-edged form, carving rents in Savannah’s rags, spattering the seabed with inky blood. Nessa rose to her feet, approaching her with both hands outstretched, hair plastered to her scalp and drenched in icy sweat as she poured everything she had into the onslaught. Savannah shrieked and the air around her shimmered—and then she was gone. Boiling away into nothingness, like an image made from vapor.
Nessa spun, hard-eyed and hunting. She hadn’t destroyed the woman; she’d fled, somehow, probably circling around to hit her from behind. Marie’s voice, amplified by a loudspeaker in her helmet, boomed across the cavern.
“Nessa, get everybody topside! I’ll hold him off!”
She and Scottie were wrestling now, hands clenched on each other’s shoulders, boots digging furrows in the seabed as they tried to shove each other off-balance. Marie’s knee fired up and slammed into Scottie’s gut, punching a dent in his armor and doubling him over.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Marie shouted. “Go!”
* * *
Savannah was a creature made of pure thought and pure agony. The dimensional boil ravaged what was left of her physical form, every nerve and the memory of every nerve searing like lit gasoline. She had been sure one more world shift would kill her. Now she was only ninety-eight percent certain, and she was going to have to try. As she struggled to right herself, bouncing bodiless, twisted and torn on the winds of magic, she measured the remnants of her life in seconds.
Her ghost traced a power line, racing along its scarlet tether.
If she couldn’t salvage a victory, at least she could take revenge. She felt the screaming winds pulling her away from this endless ocean, but before she faded across the wheel of worlds, she found just enough strength for a single spark of power.
The spark sizzled through an ancient cable, laid by alien hands, and burned it out. The line went dead. Fail-safe devices dormant for eons failed to activate, their gears rusted shut long ago.
Out in the drowning deep, the line of beacons that protected Deep Six strobed yellow one final time. Then they went dark.
* * *
Nessa led the charge along a corridor lined with chained-off bulkheads, with Carolyn and Daniel on her heels. Behind her, the empty lift whirred its way back down to the seabed. Ezra and Rosales were nowhere to be seen; they’d gotten a head start, and for all she knew, they were already on the other side of the portal.
“If he shuts that gateway from the other side—” Daniel said.
She knew. They’d be trapped here, left to starve and die on a distant world. Safe bet that Savannah and her pet monster had carved a bloody swathe through Ezra’s mercenaries. If Hedy had been smart and kept her people in hiding, they’d be out there right now, ready to stop Ezra from cutting off their escape route. And if not…
Hedy is fine. Nessa’s lips pursed as her steps rang off the steel floor. She’s fine. Marie’s fine. We’re going to survive this.
Metal screamed as the corridor lurched sideways, throwing her into the wall. One of the bulkheads behind them rattled, bulging, the tortured steel bending outward.
Then it burst open. Saltwater brimmed with seaweed blasted free in a fire-hose torrent and washed in a rolling wave along the deck.
“Move,” Daniel shouted. They raced ahead of the flood as the water rose, lapping around their ankles and sucking at their shoes. Then they rounded the final bend, emerged into the great glass-walled concourse, and saw what had caused the breach.
A tentacle coiled over the glass, lashed to the outer hull of the station. They couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended. Only that it was wide as a building, studded with suckers the size of manhole covers that kissed the glass as it squeezed. A second mammoth tentacle cut like a shadow through the dark ocean and slammed down on the opposite end of the concourse hard enough to make the floor shake.
There was something in the distance, a vast and shapeless blot at the end of the tentacles. A behemoth slowly dragging its way closer in a storm of silt. One of the tentacles tightened its grip. Ceiling struts groaned, shifting out of place. Droplets of water pattered down. Nessa stared in horror at the rubbery bulk against the glass. The suckers weren’t just clinging to the towering windows; they were moving.
They had faces.
Each fleshy indentation was a crater around a living, eyeless human face. They twisted, contorting in unimaginable agony, bubbles rising from their straining mouths as they screamed in watery silence.
* * *
“Warning,” the electronic voice chimed in Marie’s ear. “Suit is at eighteen percent—”
She ducked left as Scottie bull-rushed her. Then she brought down both fists in a pile-driver punch, slamming them between his shoulders. More cracks erupted in his armor, drooling ink and blood. He staggered but wouldn’t go down. She ducked one frenzied sweep of his blade, then jumped backward as he lunged for her heart.
A stream of water poured down the lift shaft. It pooled along the stony floor, slowly spreading, turning the ancient rock dark and slick. The lift console spat a shower of sparks as it shorted out.
Scottie’s fist smashed into her helmet, snapping her skull back. A spiderweb of cracks shot through the onyx faceplate and her data readout
turned into a smudge of blurry neon. As she skidded backward, salty brine sloshing around the soles of her boots, she realized she couldn’t beat him: he’d hold out longer than her armor’s power could, and then he’d peel her out of her useless shell and tear her to pieces.
But maybe she didn’t have to beat him.
She fell back, dodging his scything blade, pretending to retreat to the frozen lift platform. The water came down fast and hard, a waterfall at her back. Sparks shimmered in the air and bounced off the ravaged arm of her suit. His prey cornered at last, Scottie raised his sword high and charged in for the kill. Marie squared her footing and braced herself.
“Afterburners,” she said.
Her suit spat a gout of blue-hot flame and fired her into the air like a cannon. She soared up through the shaft, streaking for the top floor as Scottie crashed into the waterfall and rammed his blade into the wall point-first, snapping it in half.
He tossed the shattered sword aside. It melted as it hit the floor, dissolving into a puddle of ink. His fingers twined in the wire cage. He looked up as Marie soared out of reach, almost out of sight.
Then he started to climb.
Marie flung herself out of the shaft just before she hit the roof, landing bent-kneed with a splash. “Afterburners depleted,” the suit’s voice told her.
Didn’t matter. She was almost home free. The flood was ankle-deep now, two more bulkheads ruptured and billowing ocean water from the wounded station’s hull. The walls groaned and leaned as another support pylon snapped. Her suit thundered through the flood, kicking up water in her wake as she followed the colored corridors back to the main concourse. She almost froze when she saw the mammoth tentacles wrapped around the walls of glass, and a curtain of water rippling down from tortured seams about to break.
“Marie!” Nessa shouted.
She was fifty feet away, standing at the edge of the shimmering doorway. Carolyn was already gone, a blurry shadow on the other side, and Daniel was trying to drag Nessa out with him.
“I waited for you,” Nessa called out. “Come on, let’s go!”
Marie turned toward Nessa’s voice—and Scottie barreled into her from behind, hitting her with the force of a shotgun blast as he slammed her up against the glass. The strained window rattled in its frame under their combined weight, already squeezed to the breaking point—
—and shattered. The entire wall buckled and gave way, cascading down in a tidal wave of glass shards and roaring water. Marie saw Scottie’s eyes go wide as the pull of the ocean yanked him loose and out into the frigid depths. The deluge swept her off her feet. Suddenly she was spinning, head over heels, sucked out into the dark.
“Switching to auxiliary oxygen,” the suit told her. “Five minutes of air remaining. Suit power at seven percent. Depth pressure critical. Would you like to engage the emergency-return protocol?”
She twisted her hips, trying to right herself. She saw the lights of Deep Six through her blurry, cracked faceplate. She swam, kicking her legs, raging against the current, but the station slipped farther and farther away. Then the lights flickered and died as the station drowned.
Emergency return. Carlo Sosa’s last bookmark, the one he’d fused into the armor in case of emergency. A one-way trip to the world he came from.
She kicked harder. Swam faster, as her arms ached and her broken rib burned like the blade of a hacksaw against her chest. She was going home to her world. To Nessa. All she had to do was reach the station, then the gateway. All she had to—
The current spun her around as she slid through a storm of silt and seaweed. As she turned, she saw what was sucking her in.
The tentacles crushing the station ended in a massive lump of rubbery flesh. A living mountain, in the ocean depths. The mountain stirred, lifting up.
It had a face. The face of a wizened old man, impossibly ancient, impossibly vast, with blind white moons for eyes. As the current dragged Marie closer, its maw erupted open, sprouting teeth like curving spears. Scottie dangled from one of them in his ruptured armor, impaled through the chest.
“Engage emergency return,” Marie said, “now!”
“Emergency return failed,” the suit replied. “Power conduit failed. Suit is at four percent—”
A swarm of tentacles billowed from the creature’s mouth like starving tongues. They coiled around her suit, squeezing as they dragged her down. A sucker latched onto her faceplate, acidic secretions slowly burning against the visor as a face blossomed in the rubbery flesh. Its horrified expression mimicked Marie’s, air bubbles escaping its screaming mouth. An emergency buzzer shrilled inside her helmet.
“Emergency return!” Marie shouted. “Try it again!”
“Emergency return failed. Suit is at two percent—”
Fifty-Two
Daniel ran along the glass catwalk over Pyramid Lake, dragging Nessa at his side. They’d seen Marie get blindsided. Then they saw the window break and the ocean surge in.
Water erupted from the portal at their back, blasting in all directions as the alien flood burst across worlds. The torrent of salty brine surged over the control panel in a wave. It shorted out with a flash and a plume of foul smoke.
The gateway collapsed.
Nessa was screaming, punching Daniel’s chest while he tried to cling onto her. His words—there’s nothing we can do, she’s gone—washed over her and dragged her down, but she couldn’t drown. She wanted to drown, with Marie, but her lungs kept breathing air and her heart refused to stop beating.
She came back to sanity, eventually. The world hauled her back against her will. She stared out at a beach littered with dead bodies and fallen guns. Ezra’s men, torn to shreds by Savannah’s attack. Ezra and Rosales were down on their knees with knives to their throats. Hedy stood by, in silent judgment, as her coven-mates stood guard over the captives.
Nessa locked eyes with Hedy. She didn’t have to say anything. Hedy put on her mouse mask and bowed her head. Gazelle looked between them. Then she had to turn away, biting down on her knuckles as her eyes glistened in the dark.
“Go home,” Nessa told Daniel. “Take Carolyn with you. Go back to Las Vegas. There’s nothing for you to do here.”
“I’m…still supposed to bring you with—”
“Go. Home.” Her jaw trembled as she fought to find her voice. “My knight is dead. Silly Marie. I’m supposed to die first. That’s how the story goes, right?”
“Nessa—”
“I guess there’s only one thing left for me to do.”
She turned her back on them and stared out across the lake.
“Mother?” Hedy asked. Nessa looked back at her. She gestured to the prisoners.
“I’m—I’m sorry for what happened,” Ezra said, “but none of this was my fault, you understand that—”
Nessa walked away.
She found some space all alone, on the far side of the camp. No one followed her. She looked up at the canopy of stars, endless and shining. The ghost of a memory came back to her. Another life, lying on bedrolls under the open sky beside the embers of a campfire, as she taught Marie the constellations.
Her lover was everywhere. And somewhere, across the wheel of worlds, she was being reborn. A bright-eyed baby with her memories burned away. All of this, their adventures, their love, reduced to ashes and half-remembered dreams. Nessa would join her soon enough, when her tonic ran out and the Shadow infecting her veins caught up with her.
She took out her phone. There was a number on her old contact list, one she hadn’t bothered to purge yet. It rang four times before it picked up, and a man’s sleepy voice answered.
“Yes?”
“Alton,” she said. “It’s Nessa.”
The senator was awake now. She heard his breath go tight.
“You got half of what you wanted,” she said.
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about, but—”
“Please. I’m not recording this, or trying to entrap you. We’re well
beyond the point of games. Marie is dead. And I’m dying. Incurable illness.”
“Don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nothing,” Nessa replied. “I want you to listen. She’s dead. So is everything we aspired to accomplish, everything we wanted to be in this life. All of my hopes, all of my dreams. Dead. I don’t really have anything left to live for. And that’s bad news for you. Do you understand?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m coming to kill you, Alton.”
More silence on the other end of the line. She heard him fumbling, bedsheets rustling back.
“I’m coming to kill a lot of people,” she said. “I’ve decided, frankly, that I’m going to do as much damage as I possibly can with the time I have left. I’ll burn this entire world to ashes if I can manage it. But you’re at the top of my list.”
“You’re insane,” he breathed.
“The first storyteller who ever lived wrote me to life. He gave me a role, a part to play. I wonder…do you think dangling true love before me and then tearing it away was meant to be a punishment for my wicked heart? Or was love meant to change me, to make me a better person? Well.” She chuckled, long and deep. “Moot point. Marie’s gone. And there’s nothing left but to see just how wicked I can be.”
“Don’t do anything rash,” Alton said. “We can talk about this—”
“We’ll talk when I arrive. Well, I’ll talk. You’ll mostly beg, whimper, scream. Etcetera.”
Nessa tilted her head back and held out her open arm, fingers spread wide to catch the cold desert wind.
“So gather your armies, Alton. Your demons, your bounty hunters, your hired guns. Gather your allies and tell them to get ready. The Owl is coming.”
She hung up on him. Tears stung her eyes and she squeezed them shut. If she imagined it hard enough, she could almost feel Marie’s soft shoulders against her hands, their bodies close as they danced in the hotel room back in Ohio. She heard the brass horns of the big-band music, felt her heels lift—and then her toes, her body hovering above the desert flats.
Detonation Boulevard Page 36
