Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  She remembered Marie’s surprise, her delight, and heard her own voice. Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Witches can fly.

  Nessa touched back down to earth. She stalked into one of the supply tents. She rummaged through stacks of cleaning supplies and emerged with her prize. The broom was a modern model, of course, synthetic and sleek, but it would do the job.

  Sometimes you just needed to send a message.

  The Shadow raged under her hot skin and she welcomed it, inviting more in. More raw power, a flame to ignite the gasoline in her veins. She thought about Daniel’s warnings, his admonition that the so-called “occult underground” wouldn’t tolerate the revelation of magic to the sleeping world.

  She held out the broom and let go. It hovered there, suspended by magical thread, inviting her to the dance.

  “I came to break the rules,” she said to the night.

  She sat sidesaddle on the broom and a lopsided smile rose to her lips.

  “Let them see. Let them all see.”

  She spoke a forgotten word and the broom kicked beneath her. Then she was soaring, a burning comet in the desert sky.

  Interlude

  The interrogator stared across the stainless-steel table at Carolyn. His pencil rapped against his legal pad. He’d been taking fervent notes, scribbling line after line, folding pages back as he worked. She couldn’t read what he’d written from where she was sitting, but she saw that his last note ended in a pair of scrawled question marks.

  Carolyn reached with her cuffed hands and picked up her glass. The tepid half-inch of water swirled at the bottom as she lifted it. Then she set it back down without taking a sip.

  “And there,” she said, “ends the second part of Nessa’s journey to the end of all worlds.”

  The interrogator gave her a bemused look.

  “Really? That’s where you’d end it? With all hope lost? Perhaps you’re more like us than I thought.”

  “You don’t get it,” Carolyn said. “This is a trilogy, and trilogies have rules. The second part always has to end in the heroines’ darkest hour. Didn’t you see The Empire Strikes Back?”

  He squinted at her. “Which empire?”

  “Never mind. The point is, it’s always darkest before the dawn.”

  “There is no dawn,” he told her.

  “How do you know?”

  He took in the pea-soup walls with a lazy sweep of his hand.

  “You’re here, aren’t you? You said it yourself: this is your last story. And you die at the end.”

  “True.” Carolyn stared across the table at him. “I do hope you’re paying close attention. I’m giving you all the clues.”

  “Clues?”

  Her hands rested on her lap. “Like I told you back when we began, I try to play fair with my readers. And on that note, before we continue, I think you owe me something.”

  “Another glass of water?”

  “No,” she said. “A bigger audience for the grand finale. I want to meet the King of Rust.”

  He tried to stare her down. She held his gaze in steely silence. He nodded slowly, deliberating.

  “As you wish,” he said.

  The metal door behind Carolyn’s chair rattled as the lock turned. Then it slowly groaned wide.

  Fifty-Three

  Hedy cleared some space for herself in one of the domes on the shore. A stretch of table, her satchel, her notebook. Normally she would have been in paradise; Ezra’s technicians had left a treasure drove of devices, gadgets, measuring tools, so many new things to study and understand.

  It all felt pointless now.

  Marie was dead, and Nessa was dying. They’d come back into her life just long enough to save it. And she couldn’t do the same for either of them.

  She rummaged in the supply crates and found a cache of plastic water bottles. She uncapped four of them, stood them in a tight square, and balanced a fifth on their open nozzles. Returning to her studies felt like the most useless thing she could do right now—but it was the only thing she could do. A retreat into repetition. She was ninety percent numb, and diving into the numbers lining her notebook felt like it might take her the rest of the way.

  She slapped her tuning fork against one of the plastic bottles. She stared at it and set it down. Useless. She slumped back in her chair.

  A thin vial poked from the edge of her open satchel, with a few drops of scarlet inside. The last of Marie’s blood, from the samples she’d taken back on her own world. Hedy shrugged. She uncorked it, then poured it into the bottle at the top of her makeshift pyramid. The blood hit the water and billowed, turning it to cherry-red ink.

  Her tuning fork rattled.

  Hedy sat bolt upright, perched on the edge of her chair. The fork began to hum, ringing out on its own, striking an invisible chord. The plastic bottle responded, shivering—and then it burst. It exploded like a water balloon with a gunshot bang. Drenched, wide-eyed, Hedy kicked her chair back and ripped open the tent flap, running out into the night. She could barely find her breath, and she let it out in a single shout.

  “She’s alive!” she bellowed. “Marie is alive!”

  Her coven flocked around her. She grabbed Gazelle’s arm and yanked her close.

  “Where’s Nessa?”

  Gazelle shook her head. “She’s gone. She just left without telling anyone—”

  “Find her. Take a hunting party, catch up with her, and stop her before she does anything rash. The rest of you are with me.”

  Hedy flung her hand upward, pointing to the stars above.

  “Marie is out there, somewhere. We’re going to bring her home.”

  * * *

  Marie woke up to find herself staring at a blurry brick wall through the cracked and half-melted slab of her helmet’s faceplate. Everything hurt. She groaned, and the suit groaned with her, servos whining and fighting against her as she fumbled for the armor’s emergency-release catch.

  Buckles snapped as the suit—ravaged, padding shredded, half of its cables dangling loose and torn—opened piece by piece. Marie stepped out onto cracked pavement, then nearly fell as her knees buckled beneath her. She steadied herself with her palms against the rough brick wall until she could walk again.

  Her eyes adjusted to the dark as she took stock of her surroundings. She was in an alley. No stars in the sky, just the constant electric glow of a city by night. The air smelled like cooked onions. Warm, humid enough to draw a trickle of sweat down the back of her spine. Somewhere in the tropics? She looked left and right, picked a random direction, and started walking.

  Up ahead, a newspaper blanket rustled over the huddled shape of a man. He sat with his back to the wall and a hip bottle of whiskey in his hand, clutching it to his filthy shirt like a life preserver. Marie edged close, uncertain, and cleared her throat.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “This is a weird question, but can you tell me what city I’m in?”

  He chortled and tossed back a swig from the bottle. The bristle around his lips glistened.

  “You kiddin’ me? It’s Miami, chica. How can you not know—”

  He froze as he looked up at her. His eyes went wide.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  The bottle fell from his fingers and smashed on the broken concrete. He scrambled back on his hands, shaking his head wildly. Then he turned, got to his feet, and bolted like hell was on his heels. Marie watched him slip around a corner and vanish.

  She crouched over the fallen newspaper, squinting in the dark as she read the headline.

  “Miami Herald,” she murmured aloud, “June 16, 2038.”

  The headline blared Victory in War with Eurasia ‘A Certainty’ before Winter Solstice.

  Engines rumbled in the sky and harsh white light blazed down. Marie pressed herself against the brick wall as the spotlight swept past her, up the alley, and out onto the streets beyond. A zeppelin carved through the night sky, its hull painted black with swirls of venomous green. She held her breath until it
was gone.

  Then she eased along the alley and poked her head out. And looked up. And up. Miami was a forest of concrete and blazing purple neon, studded with mammoth skyscrapers. Bridges and tunnels created a spiderweb fifty floors above the street, a second network of roads suspended in the air. And in the distance, more zeppelins floated on a vigilant watch, their floodlights painting glowing white shafts across the night sky.

  The street was empty. No pedestrians, no traffic on the road. Too empty for any city this size, any hour of the night.

  Marie walked along a sidewalk lined with palmetto trees, their fronds swaying in a hot night wind. She was drawn like a sleepwalker toward a small park on the corner. A trio of bronze statues, larger than life, posed victorious upon raised plinths. Marie stood before them and an electrical chill rippled down her spine.

  Two of the statues were hard-edged figures in insect-like metal carapaces, keeping a stern watch with bulbous, organic rifles in their arms. The third, leading them, didn’t wear a helmet. Long curls spilled over the shoulders of her powered armor.

  The hair wasn’t Marie’s. Neither was the jagged scar carefully sculpted along one cheek. Every other detail was so close she could have been looking into a mirror.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. “What did I do?”

  The inscription on the plinth was stark, in bold block letters.

  Even in Death, She Watches Over You.

  Even in Death, She Watches You.

  OBEY.

  Marie backed away as a loudspeaker on the corner squawked to life.

  “Citywide curfew is now in effect,” announced a recorded voice over a crackle of static. “Anyone found outside their designated habitation block is subject to arrest. Your cooperation is mandatory.”

  Marie turned on her heel and ran, alone, with no direction and no map for this strange new world. Deeper into the urban sprawl, and deeper into the dark.

  Afterword

  I feel guilty about closing the door at this point in the story, but like the lady said, trilogies have rules. If it’s any consolation, you won’t be waiting forever for the conclusion; I decided early on that I needed to write books two and three back-to-back. The finale, Bring the Fire, is well underway as I write these words. Trilogies are scary things to write, and I won’t deny that “what if you botch the ending and screw the whole thing up?” is a constant voice in the back of my mind.

  But that’s my problem, and I’m going to do everything in my power to craft a real barn-burner of a climax for you. And thankfully, I won’t be doing it alone. Special thanks to my ever-patient editor, Kira Rubenthaler; my ace cover designer, James T. Egan; my stunning audiobook narrator, Susannah Jones; and my steadfast assistant, Morgan Faid. And thanks to the great staff at the Hotel LeVeque, who helped me with research and the logistics of my own real-life journey as I moved cross-country while writing this book.

  Want to know what’s coming next? Head over to http://www.craigschaeferbooks.com/mailing-list/ and hop onto my mailing list. Once-a-month newsletters, zero spam. Want to reach out? You can find me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CraigSchaeferBooks, on Twitter as @craig_schaefer, or just drop me an email at craig@craigschaeferbooks.com.

  Also by Craig Schaefer

  The Revanche Cycle

  Winter’s Reach

  The Instruments of Control

  Terms of Surrender

  Queen of the Night

  The Daniel Faust Series

  The Long Way Down

  The White Gold Score

  Redemption Song

  The Harmony Black Series

  Harmony Black

  Red Knight Falling

  Glass Predator