Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle

by Lackey, Mercedes

  Her real weapons were on stands in her work area, being…worked on.

  It was after dark, and as usual, the Kriegers had transferred their attacks to other parts of the world—though they were definitely concentrating things on the North American continent. By this time, Vickie was pretty certain this meant that their base, wherever it was, was closer to the Western Hemisphere than the Eastern. Of course, that was a lot of territory to search, and so far she didn’t have anything to help narrow it all down.

  But Eight could handle most of what was going on now, and she could be in her chair in seconds if he called, so she was taking some time to imagine Doppelgaenger’s face in front of her as she progressed through the workout.

  She heard the elevator behind her hum after she’d been at it for about ten minutes. That elevator went straight from this floor to the heavily guarded “entrance floor” of Top Hold, so whoever was coming down had permission to be here. There was one elevator per floor in Top Hold, and they each ended at that same entrance area, which was a bulletproof, heavily armored room in the middle of that floor, with the elevators on the walls around it. The only way out was via the elevator in that room. That meant if there was ever a successful prison break, there would be a minimum number of prisoners that would get that far. And it was vanishingly unlikely that Doppelgaenger would get down here.

  And if she does…gods, I actually hope she does. I can have what I need in my hands before she could get out of the elevator. She’d have to take me on here, in my space, deep in the earth, where I am strongest.

  So she didn’t stop working, not now especially, not when she was in her groove and focused anger had replaced anguish for the moment.

  The door swished open. “Can I come in, Miz Vickie?” said a soft, childish treble.

  “Sure, Penny,” Vickie replied. “I’m” whack “in the” whack “middle” whack “of ex-” whack “-er-” whack “-cising.” whackety-whack-whackety-whack-whack-SPIN-whack.

  “I’ll go set,” the little girl replied, not at all disturbed by the sight of Vickie beating the hell out of a padded man-shaped dummy with a pair of sticks. “I c’n pet Grey.”

 

  “You do that, kiddo.” She concentrated on the perfection of every move. It wasn’t enough to make her forget, but it was enough to hold her attention. And when she was dripping with sweat, she called it, racked the practice rapier and dagger, and saw that Penny had been watching her the whole time, intently.

  “Is that like sword fightin’?” she asked. “Like Game of Thrones?”

  She blinked at that. She almost asked, “They’re letting you kids watch that stuff?” incredulously—but then she realized that for the kids who’d been rescued from her uncle and the Project, Game of Thrones was “just Tuesday.” They were no more “innocent children” than she had been at their age, with just as much experience in “man’s inhumanity to man.” More, really. She had only been the witness to that inhumanity. They had been the victims.

  “Sort of,” she said. “It’s a different style than most of the fighters in that series use. Well, except for Arya. I guess I’m water dancing.” She snagged a towel and wiped her face. “It’s better suited to someone little, like me or her.”

  Penny nodded solemnly. “You do look like a dancer.”

  “I’ve been doing it a long time,” she replied. And then…the odd choice of words struck her. I look like a dancer?

  It had been years since she’d been graceful enough at swordwork to have that said of her. And yet, it hit her—since she’d begun her practices here, she hadn’t been fighting with a body that hurt and hitched and caught at the wrong times. It hadn’t felt any different, just now, than when she’d been at her top form. Before Bela had turned her into a scarred and damaged monster.

  And her brain suddenly caught on a memory and froze for a second.

  …my hand…

  There had been something odd about her hand when she’d pulled off her glove to place it against Red’s face. She’d felt his face; felt the warmth, the texture, everything, not just the old sense of nothing more than pressure from mostly destroyed nerves. But what did that mean?

  She pulled off her glove, and stared at her hand in disbelief.

  It…looked like a hand. A scarred and calloused hand, certainly, but not the monstrous claw it had been. She pulled her cuff up over her arm and stared at what was revealed.

  Faint scars traced their way all over skin—but it was skin that was skin and not hideous, ropey keloid scarring. Not muscles distorted from burns that had gone catastrophically deep.

  She’d been healing. All this time. Slowly, like she’d suggested to Red so long ago, working from the inside out. How? Well, maybe the same way Bell had gone from a “good healer” to a High OpThree, Bull had become more powerful with his enhanced skeleton, Spoonbender had gone from bending wires to bending Bull’s bones, to ripping open the Georgia Dome. They’d all been improving under the stress of facing the Kriegers, all of them. And…so had she.

  Bell had said she was a meta, and one thing most metas had was enhanced healing. But she’d had no pressure to kick it off. That healing wouldn’t have shown itself until she started fighting the Kriegers herself. Mastery of magic was something inherent to her that depended on study, analysis, things the meta part of her couldn’t affect. So maybe this was how she had improved when challenged—by returning to what she had once been.

  I haven’t taken a pain pill in weeks…

  Her brain was putting together the data as soon as the possibility occurred to her.

  The evidence was there in front of her eyes; however it had happened, why it had happened, all that mattered was she’d been healing. She wasn’t a deformed monster anymore. She probably hadn’t been since she stopped hurting all the time when she moved. And if she hadn’t been too afraid to look at herself, she’d have known this a long time before now.

  And the one person she would have wanted to see her…healed…was gone.

  Rage filled her again: rage at the universe; rage at Doppelgaenger; rage, maybe, at herself, that she’d remained oblivious to the changes all this time. That maybe things would have been different with Red if…if she’d known. Maybe that would have given her the courage to make a move before Mel did.

  But she hadn’t. And now it was forever too late. Now all she had was rage.

  The only outlet for that rage was to grab the practice sword and dagger again, and attack the pells like a fury incarnate, until she had to stop when the ironwood rapier snapped. And she stood there, trembling with exhaustion, while the rage finally drained out of her, dropping the weapons from nerveless hands. They landed on the carpet of the floor with dull thuds.

  “You all right, Miz Vickie?” came a soft little voice to her left.

  She took a long, slow breath, and turned her head just enough to see that Penny, although her eyes were big, did not appear to be afraid, and her hands were steadily petting Grey.

  “I’ll never hurt you, Penny,” she said, answering the unspoken question. Because surely, that was what Penny had asked her abusive mother, time after time. Are you all right, Mama? And the answer would have told her whether it was safe to stay or time to hide.

  Penny didn’t smile, but she did visibly relax. “What made you so mad?”

  “Nothing that anything can change, kiddo. And…maybe that’s part of why I was mad.” She walked over to where the piece of sword had landed, picked it up, and dropped the two pieces into a trash can. Fortunately she had more than one set—but this was the first time, ever, she had broken one. “I’m going to go take a shower. If you’re hungry, ask Eight to call for something from upstairs.” I think I need to wire the kid for Overwatch Two. There had been time to make more sets, but no time to implant more than a few more people. Merc, for starters.

  “Okay,” Penny relaxed more. “What c’n I have?”

  “Anything you want. Just re
member not to ask for more than you can eat, because that’s bad manners and greedy.” She pushed her dripping hair out of her eyes and headed for the “bathroom” area.

  And this time, before she undressed, she turned on the lights. For the first time in…years.

  What she found under her clothing made her sit in the bottom of the shower and sob silently until she couldn’t cry anymore. At some point during her crying jag, she heard the elevator again, but it really didn’t register except to wonder if that was Penny’s food, or Penny leaving.

  She felt as limp as boiled spaghetti when she emerged, dry and clothed in a clean outfit—but without the gloves—to find Penny sharing a plate of jumbo shrimp with Grey. There was an empty sundae cup on the table that looked like it had held ice cream. She got a can of dinner and threw herself down into a chair across from the little girl. “Don’t stop,” she cautioned, when it looked as if Penny was about to put the plate down. “Finish your dinner. Then you can tell me why you came down here.”

  Penny nodded, and took her words at face value. When the shrimp were nothing but tails, she put the plate beside the sundae cup and pulled her legs up, wrapping her arms around them. “We keep lookin’ an’ lookin’, Miz Vickie, but we ain’t found Red nowhere.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms anxiously. “It—it ain’t easy t’ find people if they ain’t moved on. It’s like bein’ in a fog, that’s what Mister Stone says, an’ you don’t actually find someone: either they come t’you, like Riley come to Miz Mel, or you pass word amongst everyone an’ hope someone knows ’em an’ can pass word back. And ain’t nobody seems t’know Red, at all.”

  Vickie closed her eyes for a moment to stop the burning. “Which probably means he’s moved…on.” She didn’t want to think what that meant. Sera said people went to heavens—or hells—that they expected. And given how he’d been after his arrest, she was horribly, horribly afraid he expected a hell…“All right, kiddo, there’s no point in wearing yourself out over this. I think it’s time you stopped looking.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and opened them. “How are you and Stone getting along?”

  Once Riley was done with Mel, he’d—moved on. And it was clear at that point that until Penny was able to protect herself, she’d need a protector. She’d also need a teacher. Vickie was no expert in mediumship, but she had remembered from the couple of classes that had touched on the subject she’d taken back at Merlin College, that there was a spell to entreat a wise and compassionate spirit to come and serve as the classical “spirit guide.” Entreat, and not summon, and certainly not compel; you wanted cooperation, not coercion, from such a guide.

  When Vickie had performed the spell, she had gotten more than she’d hoped for—the entity that had volunteered for the job of being Penny’s protector, mentor, and teacher was “Tomb” Stone’s grandfather, Jacob—the magician who had helped safeguard the ECHO Charter.

  In retrospect, it made sense. Jacob had plenty of reasons to turn up when she cast the spell. He’d been a founding member of ECHO, the only magician in ECHO at the time—or ever, so far as she could tell. His grandson was in ECHO now, and Vickie had been the one that magically decrypted the Charter. And on top of that, much of voudoun magic was based in the spirit world. A houngan was as much medium as magician. If she’d been able to ask for someone in particular, she couldn’t have chosen better herself.

  It seemed Penny felt that way as well, because her face lit up with one of her rare smiles. “He’s nice. He don’ ever get tired of me askin’ questions.” She sucked on her lower lip for a moment. “He’s worrit ’bout you, Miz Vickie.”

  “Well, I’m worried about all of us,” she temporized. And before she had to lie (which was generally not a good idea around spirits) or come up with some sort of evasion, she got the blat of a private message from her computer. And there was only one person that could be.

  True to his promise, Jack had been feeding her tiny bursts of information as he could. Thanks to him, they now knew how to detect and intercept incoming Kriegers while they were still over the ocean, keeping them from making landfall, among other things. Every bit of what he’d sent was useful, but none of it told her where these damned things were coming from. Probably because he himself did not know…

  But this time the message was shorter than usual. “N27.132481 W73.086548”

  Nothing else. And she stared at the letters and numbers on the screen for a full minute before it dawned on her. “Coordinates…” she breathed. “Eight, where is that? Latitude 27.132481 North. Longitude 73.086548 West. Why does that sound familiar?”

  “Because it is the middle of what is called the ‘Bermuda Triangle,’ Vickie,” Eight replied.

  “Holy crap…isn’t that about where the ‘Lost Squadron’ vanished at the end of the War?” she gasped. “Spitfire, Brumby, La Faucon Blanc, Corsair, and Belaya Liliya. Petrograd wanted to go, but they wouldn’t let him and Lily went in his place—”

  “Yes, it is. On a secret mission to destroy a rumored Nazi aircraft carrier or other important ship of some sort that was supposed to be sailing there. They reported encountering Eisenfaust, Valkyria and other fascist meta-flyers, but their transmissions broke up, they vanished, and nothing was ever found of them.”

  “Wait a minute—Eisenfaust said something about that in those prison interviews—Eight, pull that up—”

  Eight already had, and in a moment, Vickie was listening to the dead man describe something that made absolutely no sense.

  Had made no sense at the time, that is, and no one had bothered looking into it since. But—

  “But we already know the Thulians can fold space,” she said, thinking out loud. “And we know they have superior stealthing characteristics. They can hide entire cities. What if they hid their mothership, something bigger than a city, something big enough to qualify as a world ship, in the middle of the ocean? That spot’s not on any shipping lanes. What if the Lost Squadron and Eisenfaust’s squadron happened to run into each other right on top of it? What if they breached the stealth curtain? Hell, what if the captain of that craft the Lost Squadron was looking for was actually sailing under secret orders to rendezvous with it? What if—” She shook her head. “I can’t take a bunch of speculation to Bella and Pride. I need some confirmation. I—”

  “I can tell Tesla and Marconi. They may know of some Metisian technology or application of Metisian technology that would permit detection of such a thing, now that we know where to look.”

  “Do that,” she replied, clenching her fist in her hair, as if she could encourage ideas to come faster that way. “This—this is—”

  “Mister Stone says—” Penny gulped. “Mister Stone says y’all are right. An’ when you go, you gotta take me with you.”

  Vickie wrenched her head around to stare at the little girl. “Mister Stone had better have a damned good reason!” she snapped.

  Penny’s eyes were closed, and she was shaking a little, but her voice was steady. “Mister Stone says the ghosts of his friends are still there. He says they can’t rest until they done their duty. He says they c’n help us, an’ then they c’n go on, but y’all need me t’talk to ’em.”

  “Penny, look at me,” Vickie ordered. The girl’s eyes opened and she stared steadily into Vickie’s. “Is this something you feel you have to do?”

  Penny’s eyes brightened a little—there was fear in them, but also determination, and she nodded slowly. “Ain’t nobody c’n do it but me. An’ Mister Stone says my not goin’ could mean ever’thin’ goes t’heck. I’m scared, but…I gotta go.”

  “Then you go,” Vickie told her. After all, when she’d been Penny’s age, she’d been helping her folks on cases. The kid might not know how great the risk was, but she sure as hell knew the stakes, and so far as Vickie was concerned, she was old enough to understand them. Still. Sweet baby Jesus. Bella is going to kill me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  * * *

  I’ll Keep Coming

/>   Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

  I had made the acquaintance of the “Eggheads,” and they and I were working together on many things. Unfortunately, they didn’t tell me everything they were working on…

  Red Saviour felt deep sympathy for Victoria Victrix—after all it is a terrible thing to lose someone you love right before your eyes, as she knew all too bitterly well—but she approved of the little mage’s method of coping. Work. Because the world did not stop when one was in mourning, and the Thulians did not stop trying to crush everyone on the planet.

  And the mother country does not stop demanding that we do the impossible with nothing, and the United States government does not stop sniffing at us when they should be focusing only on tending the Thulian menace. Always wanting “situation reports” on the walking firebombs, Murdock and his winged woman. What is there to report? They are either sleeping, or out fighting the fascists. Not to mention my people do not stop needing me. They are all so tired; there is just too much that needs to be done, and I do not have enough to do it all. It will only be so long until something gives; the mission, or one of them. Another one of them…bozhe moi, Moji, I have not even had time to mourn you, much less avenge you…

  The flare of grief and anger brought Natalya back to the present. Her cigarette was burned down almost to the filter, forgotten in her hand. She flicked off the long ash that had collected at the tip, then turned her attention to Victrix.

  The witch was bent over the three keyboards at her workstation in the CCCP HQ, typing at a feverish pace, her eyes flitting from screen to screen. Normally, she would be in her new secure space in ECHO HQ, but ECHO was making alterations related to both her comfort and her security—and she said the noise was driving her insane. Beside her sat a gray cat the size of a lynx, and a little earthen creature Nat had taken for a crude statue until it had moved.

  “You are sure this is to be working?” Nat mashed another cigarette butt into the bottom of a coffee cup, chewing her lip as she did so.