A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  Which meant Scheherazade rewriting the intention shield’s control system felt a whole hell of a lot like someone was running an electrical current through all of my dense muscle tissue and my entire nervous system at the same time. Every single nerve ending I had, every single part of my body: they all felt like they were on fire.

  I did vomit this time; I couldn’t help it. That was part of why I’d chosen the counter to cling to—there was a sink right in front of me. Then it was done, and I was panting, still holding on to the cold metal for dear life, and Marus was removing the wire from the back of my neck and spraying me down with clotting foam—the cool gel would harden in the wound, stopping the blood loss immediately, and my own nanotech would start working on repairs.

  “Oh, god,” I moaned. “Ohhhh, god.” The shield was rebooting; it would take a moment, and in the meantime its connection to my nervous system was flooding my brain with all sorts of strange sensations. “I taste copper.”

  “No, that’s likely just blood dribbling out of your sinus cavity,” Marus said with a shaky laugh, his hand on my shoulder giving me a squeeze. “Go ahead and rinse your mouth out.”

  My comm buzzed to life. “Esa, Marus—he got past us,” Jane panted, a sliver of pain in her voice. “Those fucking wings of his—”

  A crash, just behind us—right behind us. I tried to turn, but the pain had been too overwhelming, I was too weak, and Marus had removed his hand from my back, the only thing that had been holding me upright, as it turned out. I slipped on the floor and almost fell, caught myself on the counter again. I couldn’t see anything but the floor beneath me—the thought of moving my head, of asking the muscles in my neck that had just been sliced open to work, made me want to puke again.

  The sound of Marus’s submachine guns opening up was deafening in the small room, even with his suppressors attached, and I still couldn’t even see what was happening. The bursts didn’t last long, though, and then something had knocked me to the ground, my grip on the counter finally pried away. Biting down on a scream, I managed to turn my head; my body still wasn’t obeying the way I wanted it to, the shield’s systems reboot scrambling my reactions, my responses.

  And I needed to be able to respond.

  The Cyn was just outside; he had Marus pinned up against the outer wall, right beside the doorway, Marus’s guns both smoking ruins on the floor. All I could see of my Tyll friend was a single six-fingered hand, grasping at nothing past the doorframe—convulsing, mangled, ruined. The Cyn had exploded the rounds still in the guns’ magazines while Marus was gripping the weapons. “Marus . . .” I tried to whisper, but I still couldn’t move, even as I watched the Cyn retract the armor from his free hand and reach up with the glowing fire of his skin to grip Marus around the face.

  “Defilers,” he whispered, even as Marus began to scream, beating at the Cyn’s armor with his ruined fists. The Cyn wasn’t burning his face off all at once; he was slowly increasing the temperature of the hand that held Marus’s head pressed against the wall. He wanted Marus in agony. “This galaxy has never belonged to you, yet you spread and you scheme and you gnaw at its worlds like vermin.”

  I tried to gather my teke, tried to do anything, but there was nothing I could do; I was still too weak, still gripped by muscle spasms. He was going to kill my friend, right in front of me, he was going to torture him to death, cause him so much pain that his heart would explode, and I was going to have to watch. No. No. No.

  God, the smell. Marus’s skin was beginning to scorch and char; smoke spread from between the Cyn’s outstretched fingers, smoke that had just been Marus. He wasn’t just screaming anymore—he was keening, a sound of utter agony unlike anything I’d ever heard. And it was coming from my friend.

  “Your reckoning is coming.” The Cyn had pressed his mask right up to Marus’s face, right behind his own hand, as though he wanted to whisper to him, even though his voice was coming through our comms, not through any vocal chords that he possessed. The snarling, impassive visage of steel stared with its dead eyes at the damage his grip was doing, even as he whispered: “The rise of the fallen empire will begin, built upon the corpses of those who sought to supplant it, and there is nothing—”

  I swallowed all my pain, swallowed all my fear, pushed past the convulsions of my nervous system and the lingering dizziness of the blood loss. I used the adrenaline pouring into my bloodstream to force my teke to snap into place, and I grabbed at the Cyn’s armor with it, grabbed him by one of his partially retracted wings, ripping him free of Marus and hurtling him backward as hard as I could.

  Which was pretty hard. He went through the far wall, all the way across the wide open area that made up the factory floor, and he didn’t come out.

  Tears that I couldn’t feel were streaming down my face as I forced my body to work, scrambling in a crouch to Marus’s side; I didn’t even know that I could stand, and I didn’t want to risk it—I just needed to get to him. He was terrifyingly still, crumpled on the floor up against the outer wall, but he moaned softly as I reached out and touched him; he was still alive.

  His hands were ruined, and his face was one terrible wound. I think . . . I couldn’t entirely tell through the damage, but I think both of his eyes were just . . . gone. The Cyn had boiled them out of his skull, superheating their own vitreous fluid around them until they’d just popped.

  Panting, I reached down and dragged him back into the medbay, scrabbling behind me until I found the half-used bottle of medical foam he’d just used on my neck. I sprayed down the wounds on his face, careful not to block his airways, then used what was left on his hands. He was already slipping into cort, an autonomic Tyll reaction to severe trauma—like a medically induced coma, only a natural occurrence in his species.

  Part of me wanted to seal the door, to huddle in the medbay with Marus and shut off the lights, whimpering in the dark. I knew the Cyn wouldn’t be dead—if the laser fire from a war satellite hadn’t stopped him, throwing him through a wall wouldn’t stop him. But the impulse to just hide—a mammalian holdover from the days when we weren’t anywhere near the apex predator of our homeworld, and pressing against the back of a darkened cave to pray that whatever thing stalked the shadows beyond would just go away was our best hope for survival—was almost overpowering.

  Almost. Jane and Javier were still out there. My intention shields had been rewired, the energy that coursed through them the same as what made up the Cyn’s body; by using my teke to twist the defensive energy of the shield into an offensive blow, I could hurt the motherfucker now, if I could get close enough. And he’d just done his damnedest to kill Marus, had maybe crippled him for life. All the kindnesses Marus had done me—not just saving my life on occasion, but the little ones: introducing me to my greatest guilty pleasure, romantic literature from the Reetha golden age; making sure there was a gift waiting for me at Sanctum when Jane and I returned from a long run and the anniversary of my official induction into the Justified had passed us both by; reminding Jane to restock Schaz’s supply of Tyllian fruits because she didn’t like them—too sweet—and I did.

  He’d held me, just an hour ago, when I’d seen the face of my mother for the first time and actually felt my heart breaking, a worse pain by far than what I’d just gone through under his steady hand. And the Cyn had ruined him.

  I was going to make the bastard pay for that.

  CHAPTER 13

  I got to my feet, using the counter for balance, ignoring the smell of Marus’s charred flesh and my own sick that choked the medbay air. I willed my limbs to stop trembling; willed my spine to straighten; gave myself just a moment to let my heartbeat stop pounding, forcing it to a slower drumbeat instead. There are limits to what you can accomplish just by doing your damnedest to want it to happen, but those limits are further out than most people think, especially when you have nanotechnology coursing through your bloodstream and telekinesis to stiffen your limbs.

  For the briefest of moments, I thought about
the Pax: their soldiers had a device built into their armor, one that could inject them with various chemical compounds at will. I wouldn’t have objected to a cocktail of something at the moment, something beyond the adrenaline already pouring into my system. But, no: I was on my own. And fuck that, anyway. I had everything I needed to tear this motherfucker apart. I was my own goddamned weapon.

  I stepped through the medbay door and sealed it behind me, locking Marus inside.

  There was a bright flash in the darkness beyond the hole the Cyn’s passage had made when I’d smashed him through the wall; then another. He must have been trapped by falling rubble, was disintegrating it piecemeal to pull himself out. The flashes were getting closer—he was almost clear.

  As I watched, gashes of light appeared in the dark hole itself: the tears in his armor where Jane and Javier had managed to expose his energetic skin. He stepped through and spread his wings, taking a monster’s posture, a silhouette of predatory form: a stance purposely designed to remind the beings he hunted of the winged apex predators that had terrified their ancestors on most of their homeworlds.

  I stood opposite, waiting for him to make the first move. As far as I knew, of the various threats that had tormented early humans, a giant raptor hadn’t been among them. But every second he postured was one more I had to get my breath back, to reexert control over my own body. The motherfucker could try to scare me all he wanted with brute-force base psychology and animistic shadow puppets; I was beyond being scared. I’d moved right into furious instead.

  One way or another, I was going to tear him apart.

  “You think I have come to claim you,” he said, and as always, despite the fact that he was well over a hundred feet away, the words sounded as though he were whispering them into my ear as he manipulated our own comms against us. “You think if you can hide in the dark, you will somehow be beyond the fire’s reach, beyond her reach. You are wrong. You look now upon the last face you will see before your fall; you look now upon your end. You will be sundered; you will be shattered. You will be severed from the very—”

  I reached up, very deliberately, and deactivated my comms. There was not a single thing he had to say that I gave a shit about.

  He didn’t like that, hadn’t expected it: took a single step forward. I didn’t move. When he saw that, he reached up and carefully removed his mask, the snapping connections behind it creating a small cloud of steam around his head as he dropped the metal visage to the floor, revealing the no-face he hid beneath it: no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no features, just a swirling void of light and fire with the vaguest semblance of form hidden within.

  I already knew what he looked like; that didn’t shake me either.

  He raised his arms above his head, the action stretching his wingspan out to full; more posturing, and I was getting sick of it. So I reached out with my teke—echoing the motion of my mind with both hands—and I grabbed at the tops of his wings, at the highest point, then I pulled straight down.

  I ripped his wings right the fuck off the rest of his exoskeleton, then I cast them aside, the steel throwing up sparks as they slid across the floor.

  Try flying now, you motherfucker.

  He raised up his hands—he might have been roaring with anger, but I couldn’t hear it, not with my comms deactivated, his only method of communication to create vibrations in radio waves that I couldn’t sense—and retracted the palms of his armor again, revealing the indigo glow of his not-quite-flesh. It began to swirl; he was preparing another burst of energy, to try and blast me apart. I readied my teke to catch it, just like I had on the asteroid, except I’d been training, and this was going to end very differently than that little debacle—it was going to end very poorly for him, he just didn’t know it yet.

  Except he never got a chance to try; the roar of a shotgun echoed across the wide room, and the Cyn was thrown forward, his armor hitting the ground with a clatter as he dropped, revealing Javier, standing behind him. He must have been crawling through the rubble, trying to finish the Cyn where I’d put him down, then lining up his shot when the asshole was distracted.

  I started forward, almost at a run. Javier pumped another round into the chamber, fired again into the Cyn’s back before he could start to stand. The ammunition in his cartridges wouldn’t pierce the heavy armor, but the force was still keeping our hunter on his knees. Javier racked in another round, then tossed the shotgun across to me, over the Cyn’s form—he didn’t have an angle on anything other than armor, but I did. I caught the flung gun and raised it up to my shoulder, aiming directly at the Cyn’s exposed face—more specifically, at the cowl of his exosuit behind his face—and fired the shell at almost point-blank range.

  The pellets didn’t strike the Cyn at all—they passed right through his energetic form as though through flame—but I’d been aiming through him, at the interior of his armor. The rounds ricocheted throughout the metal casing, doing all kinds of damage to the internal systems of his exosuit. I worked the pump, then put another round down through his head; I tried again, but the chamber was empty.

  “Jane?” I asked Javier, tossing the shotgun back to him.

  “Binding her wounds. She’ll be along.” He was reloading the weapon as he spoke, both of us still staring down at the kneeling enemy between us. “In the meantime, you wanted this asshole out of his armor? Then your wish is my command. Let’s—”

  The back of Cyn armor split open, all at once, right between the sparking stumps of the wings, and the Cyn flowed out, moving like gravity had no effect on him. Before either Javier or I could react, he had spun and smashed his glowing arm into Javi from the side; thankfully, Javi’s shield had been raised, and it converted the energy from the Cyn’s blow into kinetic force, instead, meaning Javier went flying.

  He smashed through the corpses hung on the great tree, then fell, followed by a dozen or so of the dead knocked loose from his passage.

  The Cyn swapped targets in an instant, came right at me. God, the motherfucker was quick. I danced backward, away from the lashing blows of his flowing limbs, in close quarters now, which is where I’d wanted to be, yeah, but I hadn’t had time to prep my intention shields, and—

  “Esa, get clear!” Jane’s voice cracked across the open area like a whip; we turned to look, the Cyn and I both. Standing just inside the medbay, she’d seen better days; whatever the brief fight between her and Javier and the Cyn had been like, it had taken its toll. Her guns were gone, to where, I didn’t know, and it took me a moment to register why she wanted me to break off: she was standing on a chair, holding something up just under the emergency sprinkler system on the lowered ceiling of the medical lab. “This is for Mo, you son of a bitch!”

  A lighter. That’s what she was gripping in her hand; the lighter she always carried, for when she wanted to smoke one of her nasty fucking cigarettes.

  She snapped the flint; the flame sprung out on the first try. Jane never used anything other than utterly dependable tools, even when it was just the thing she carried to feed her nicotine habit. The sprinkler system cut on immediately in response to the presence of the teardrop of fire.

  What did happen to a being made of energy when it was introduced to a veil of falling water? We were about to find out.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Cyn’s reaction was immediate, and spectacular. His being was stretched, spattered, the energy that made up his body trying to pull itself along every single drop of water all at once; it was like he’d become a pointillist projection of himself, whatever field or thought process he used to control his form overwhelmed by the natural inclination of energy to travel through a conductive fluid. If it hadn’t been so goddamned terrifying it almost would have been beautiful, in an abstract, avant-garde kind of way.

  For a brief moment, I saw something else through the downpour—I thought I saw something. Something quite literally at the heart of him, something revealed as the energy that made up most of his body was stripped away and pulled
apart. There was something there, something not energy, something firm and real and made of organic matter, a kind of pulsating organ at the center of where his chest used to be: not a brain, not a heart, not anything I recognized, but something, all the same. Then it, too, was gone as he tried to shift himself out of the flow of water, back toward the stairway and the arboretum, where the sprinklers hadn’t been triggered.

  Jane staggered off the chair toward me. I retreated in her direction, deeper into the downpour; there was strength in numbers, even if she could barely stand on her own. A blistering burn spread across one of her arms, and even as the water from the sprinklers washed over her I could see blood, pooling and spilling from a nasty gash on her side. I let her lean against me as she emptied a canister of medical foam into the gash, then I slipped her one of my handguns. She checked the action—of course she did—then we both turned to watch the Cyn as he slowly drew himself back together, just on the other side of the veil.

  In the middle of the fighting over Sanctum, during the war against the Pax, I’d watched one of the enemy frigates pulled into a black hole, part of the natural defenses of the Justified’s home system; this was like that, only in reverse, pieces of the light and heat and energy that made up the Cyn’s form drawing themselves together as he passed beyond the reach of the falling water. Kneeling on the landing of the stairs—even freed of his armor, he still took a bipedal form; two arms, two legs, feet and fists and a head at his extremities—he glared at us, safe from him behind the protective wash. He almost had a face this time, but not quite.