A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  Schaz was gone; Jane was gone; Marus and Javier were both badly hurt.

  And I was alone with the Cyn.

  CHAPTER 16

  The shattered window had finally sunk beneath the storm; the blue clouds spilled across the slick deck, a low fog swallowing and reflecting the light of the Cyn as it stalked across the factory floor, looking for me.

  I slid backward, soundless, tracking his motion by the glow that spread through the shadows. A burst of lightning lit the room, and the whole station shook: the lower levels might even now be crushing themselves apart as the gravity of the gas giant pulled at the depths of Odessa.

  “Don’t be afraid, child.” The menace in his voice was a tactile thing, belying the intention of his words. “It is not your fault you were born as you were. This is simply your fate, coming to find you. The way of all matter is entropy; the way of all flesh is to fear the inevitable. The pain will be fleeting, and then you will be as you were always meant to—you will be not. Your purpose was only ever to—”

  Jane had told me to keep my comms on, because that’s what she would have done: always a soldier, reading her opponent, always keeping an eye on the tactical ground, the psychological lay of the land. I switched mine off again. I didn’t need to hear his threats. I already knew he was here to kill me, and I was already plenty afraid.

  Letting him feed that fear served nothing. He’d kill me if I was afraid or not; the fear would just make it easier. I needed to not be afraid. Needing a thing didn’t make it so. But my fear was a part of me, a reaction, and I could control it, the same way I controlled my teke, and so little by little, I pushed it down—didn’t banish it, but locked it away, made it quiet. The others were gone; I was alone. It was up to me now.

  I was huddled behind a ruined stack of useless mechanical detritus, blood flowing freely from a nose I wasn’t even sure when I’d broken; ignoring the sticky wash for the moment, I reached out and started pulling myself up onto the unstable pile of wiring and plating, moving up out of the rolling fog hand-hold by handhold until I was crouched on top of the scrap, well above head height. I looked down and out, across the factory floor—the Cyn was hunting me, and I was hunting him. But only one of us was lit up like a fucking glow stick.

  That made the Cyn easy to find, a bright figure in the dark, searching for me among the still monuments of the broken machinery and the torn-apart decking where Schaz’s fusillade had ripped across the factory floor. Maybe he was still whispering threats, probably he was still whispering threats, and a good soldier would have listened, would have shouted back arguments and insults, tried to throw him off-balance.

  Jane was a good soldier; consciously or not, just like the Preacher had said, that’s what she was teaching me to be. But I wasn’t a soldier, and I never would be—there was something different inside me, something that wouldn’t ever be able to see the world that way. Besides, I’d seen what the Cyn did to soldiers. They didn’t last. Soldiers of the sect wars, soldiers of the old orders—they were what he had trained himself to fight.

  If I wanted to beat him, I needed to be something new, something different, something he couldn’t see coming. A force of nature, a creation wholly of this galaxy, not the old orders he’d built himself to bring down. The pulse and the power and the purgatory worlds where I’d been born and raised: they were all a whirlwind inside me, a whirlwind trying to coalesce into something else, something he’d never seen before. Looking down on him, hunting me—he never looked up, assumed I’d be crouched low somewhere, trying to use the creeping fog for cover—I knew what that new thing would have to be, what I already was, and had just never known the name for.

  I dove into the rad-soaked worlds, into battlefields and war-torn cities and the chaos of the new; the Cyn and the Pax and all the other threats of this clawing, terrifying universe didn’t faze me at all, because all of their power and all of their violence would never be able to stop me. The glowing figure below wasn’t going to stop me. He might have been able to stop a leader, a leader like the Preacher wanted me to be, because all leaders failed, eventually. And he might have been able to stop a soldier, a soldier like Jane was trying to train me into, because that’s what he did. But I wasn’t either of those things, nor any of the others he might have expected, fighting old wars begun on older worlds, the same worlds that had created whatever long-ago schism that had twisted inside the Cyn until he became the zealot I saw before me, willing to do anything to satisfy his hate.

  I was different from all of that. I had a purpose, and I had a will, and I used whatever tools at my disposal I needed to in order to fulfill that goal: to take those chosen from the chaos of the post-pulse universe and to ferry them safely to where they could change the galaxy, for the better. That’s what I was, that’s what the whirlwind inside me was telling me I’d long ago become, even if I hadn’t known it: a thing that saved the children of the pulse, that delivered them, even out of the chaos of war.

  I was a goddamned valkyrie.

  And not one he knew how to fight.

  I took a slow, even breath, ignoring the taste of my own blood as I watched the Cyn stalk below. I narrowed my eyes and summoned my intention shield into being; didn’t focus it on the threat before me—focused it on myself, instead. I reached out with my teke toward the edges of the shield—took the shimmering, vibrating energy and narrowed it, pulling it into place, manipulating the current until it was concentrated, not covering the whole front of my body like normal, but compacting it instead, locking it into place like a sheath. For a moment, the energy leapt against me—this was not where it was meant to be, and it wanted to rebel, to fulfill its purpose, but I held it down, wrestled it into submission by will and by the strength of my gift, forcing the energy of my shield through the channels of my telekinesis, and then it was done: I had my weapon.

  My hands and arms were covered by a faintly shimmering field of blue, matching the rolling fog and the azure fire of the Cyn beneath me, held in place by my gifts. I pressed one thumb up against my broken nose; blew the blood out of my sinuses so I could breathe again, then pushed, hard, into the pain, until the break was reset. I spat the resulting wash of blood from my mouth, and wiped it off my lips, the crimson sizzling against the electric field of my shielded, teke-enforced gauntlets.

  Somewhere in all of that, the Cyn had seen me, or heard me; he was staring up, out of the fog, his swirling no-face raised to stare at me. I stared back, my expression just as blank as his—no hate, no fear, no pain—and I raised up my fists.

  I’m sure he was saying something—something about my death and my destiny and how linked they were and how fucked I was. He knew nothing about what I was. But he was about to find out.

  Another crack of lightning spat through the storm that was even now flowing into the factory floor from the broken window—I think it was just outside the station itself, the electricity drawn to all that falling metal. The Cyn flinched back from it, just a little bit—a being made of energy was especially attuned to electrostatic discharges, I suppose—but I didn’t.

  I dove forward instead.

  CHAPTER 17

  I hit him hard and fast, and I didn’t let up.

  He hadn’t expected it—not even when he’d seen my arms, wreathed in the crackling energy of my intention shield like a street fighter’s knuckles wrapped in the tape and barbed wire of my telekinetic gifts. The first hit was absolutely clean, heavy with the drop of my descent, and if he’d been made of flesh and bone it would have broken his motherfucking jaw, but he wasn’t, and he just staggered back from the force and the crackling discharge, the void that was his face shifting and flickering. I didn’t give him time to react.

  I shifted my shield to the sole of my boot and kicked him in the chest with a motion almost like a stomp; as he reeled back from that, I spun the electricity around my form like I was wreathed in ribbons of light, using my teke like a hurricane pull until the glow was focused along my left arm, shrouding it in pale fire from
the shoulder down. I closed with him, landing two hits, quick, both in his face—first an elbow, then a backfist—then I spun the light again, this time to cover my right hand and left leg, driving an uppercut into the center of his form, then catching him on the back of the neck with the same hand to force his head downward and meeting his descent with a rising knee.

  I stepped back to let my intention shield recharge, but I never dropped my stance.

  If the Cyn had been human—organic—I would have expected him to be coughing, wheezing, spitting blood and maybe teeth; he didn’t quite do that, but he dropped to one knee, the places where I’d hit him discolored like bruises on his energetic flesh. He didn’t gasp for air—he didn’t breathe—but instead just looked up at me, his lack of a face unreadable, almost certainly a glare, and whatever he might have been saying at that moment, threats or ultimatums or begging, I just didn’t give a fuck.

  As soon as my shield was charged, I hit him again.

  My first attacks had surprised him; now he was in the game, throwing fast blows of his own. But I wasn’t Jane—my defense wasn’t just a dodge, because I had the energy of my shields and I could shift them where I liked, and so long as I knew where he was throwing I could not only block his strikes, I could hurt him where he connected. He came away from that exchange even worse off, suffering not just from my attacks, but also from the strikes he’d landed against my shifting shields. If he’d been organic, I imagined those must have felt something like punching a solid wall.

  I hoped they fucking hurt.

  He tried to focus his will, to launch a projectile at me; before he could even fire it off I reached out with my teke and took the energy away from him, stretching it and shifting it and making it fit my needs instead, until I was holding a shield of light in one hand, round and flat like some ancient centurion. Then I took that shield, and I proceeded to bash it into his face as hard as I could before wrapping my leg in defensive energy and kicking outward, putting teke force behind the blow.

  The kick connected; for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and I flew backward into a controlled reverse somersault, landing on my knees, as he went crashing through half a dozen pieces of collapsed machinery before sliding to a stop, his glowing form marking a trail through the fog. He was leaving traces of himself everywhere he hit, like spatters of luminescent blood.

  Come on, motherfucker. Stand up. Stand up. We’re not done. You hurt my friends. You hurt my family. You killed tens of thousands of people to get to me, maybe more over the years as you hunted my kind: here’s what you wanted, standing right in front of you, beating the everloving shit out of you. Here’s what you asked for—here’s what you were looking for, what you stole from this place, come back to fucking haunt you. Your goddess wants me? Here I fucking am. Now stand the fuck up, you son of a bitch—stand up and see if you can take me.

  He obliged.

  A beam of light like a laser cut through the darkness; his next attack. Still holding the energy shield I’d made out of his last projectile, I knelt behind it, crouching my body behind its barrier, and as his laser hit its surface I shifted my defense slightly, using the shield to reflect his beam back toward him. It cut through the fog and swept directly toward his head—he only realized what was happening a moment before he decapitated himself with his own attack, and the light flooding from his hand shut down undramatically.

  I hadn’t reflected all of the energy he’d just poured at me, though—and I hope it cost him, I hope every single joule of electric power he’d poured into that beam felt like it had been ripped right from his strange and pulsating heart. Some of it I’d kept back, held to myself, and it had hurt, and I’d done it anyway, because sometimes pain was necessary, sometimes pain was what you had to eat in order to win.

  I started charging at him, and as he prepared new projectiles I flung his own energy back into his face, first the shield—hurled on its edge like a discus—then the rest that I’d gathered, lobbed as twin orbs of light. He blasted the shield out of existence; tried to do the same with the arcing orbs, but they were as much light energy as anything else, and as the resulting flash blinded him—apparently with eyes or without, if your entire sensory input revolved around energy, bright things were still bright—he reeled back.

  It was just for a moment, but long enough: I was already closing the gap, and I smashed my teke into the ground beneath me, the added momentum sending me sailing over his head. I lashed out above me as well, smashing a teke battering ram into the ceiling, reversing and adding to my momentum—that sent me hurtling toward him like a cannonball, barreling down from above and behind, where he’d expected me to hit low and from the front.

  I had just a moment to wrap myself in teke and energy, and then I hit him so goddamned hard I carried us both through the decking below, into the labs beneath us.

  Away from the reflected light spilling off the atmosphere through the window, the only illumination was the Cyn’s azure form and the focused glow of my intention shield that wrapped around my body like an extension of my mind. We slammed through the laboratory walls; I was using his own energy like a battering ram, forcing him to spend himself to break through the barriers. Finally, I leapt free—he staggered to his feet, and I just hit him again.

  As we clashed in the darkness, it was like bolts of lightning meeting in a void. He was still trying to fight, but I’d realized something very early on: maybe once, a long time ago, he’d trained to fight other Cyn, other enemies that could meet his electrified form, but he’d spent the last seventeen years—maybe even longer—hunting organic beings instead, beings he didn’t have to fear, beings he didn’t have to defend against, beings he could kill with one hit, and not even a clean hit.

  I’d spent the last three years training, every day. Training to fight for my life, training to fight through pain, training to fight through fear. I was better than he was.

  Of course, Jane had been as well. But she couldn’t hit him. I could.

  My only weakness was that every few moments I had to spring backward to let my shields recharge, and he still wasn’t recovering as fast as I was. He tried to press his advantage during one such break, coming at me with what he thought was a fast combination, but I’d trained with Jane and Criat and Sahluk, better fighters all, once you took his natural advantages out of the equation; I simply ducked low under the flurry of blows, my palms to the floor, then stabbed at him with an arc of energy that rose off of my back like a razor-edged tail, my gifts giving me the telekinetic approximation of a Reint physiology.

  Match that, you asshole.

  He doubled over against the intensely focused blow, that much energy striking such a small target that it must have felt like a gunshot; I straightened up even as he went down, using the moment to coat the fingers of my right hand with absolutely all of the energy my shield had left. Before he could recover, I reached into his neck with those electrified fingers and I ripped his head right off his goddamned body, scattering its fading light into the darkness that surrounded us.

  I won’t lie: that was pretty fucking cathartic.

  He dropped to his knees, headless, his being flickering in and out of focus, the energy that made up his body barely able to maintain his form now, and there it was, my target: the organ at the center of him, all that was left of what had once been the organic beings the Cyn were so goddamned sure they’d evolved right past.

  I didn’t have much energy left in my shield at all—I’d pushed it well past the point of recharge with that last attack, compensating for the incredible storm of power that made up his flesh—so I drew my knife instead. I was wrapped in darkness now, the light of my shield gone, and the Cyn was trying to stand, a glowing-fading being of light in all that black.

  He took a staggering step toward me, still trying to re-form his head; I don’t know if that was involuntary reflex or what, but it was drawing even more of his being away from his chest, revealing more of my target. I siphoned what little of
my shield I had remaining into the palm of my off hand, a single pool of light in the darkness, and held the knife out in front of me in my right, weaving the blade in patterns slightly serpentine so that even if he could see me, he wouldn’t be able to predict the strike. Just like Jane had taught me: don’t let the enemy see you coming.

  That was all I had—the knife in my hand and three years of training by the most dangerous, most formidable badass I had ever known. And I was going up against a deathless thing of energy and fire. Fucker didn’t stand a chance. I’d seen his heart now—or the closest thing he had to one. I didn’t know what it actually was, that pulsating, slime-soaked organ beating in the center of his chest, suspended in the energy of his form like a planet in a void of crackling light, but it didn’t matter: all I had to do was get a knife through it. Nothing can survive a blade in a major organ, not if you can sink it deep enough. Stab once, and you’re done: Jane had taught me that, too.

  He came at me with a lumbering strike, desperate to land one last blow that would turn the tide of the fight, almost pathetic in its predictability. I slid to one side, let it pass, then jammed my shielded palm up under his jaw—drove his re-forming head back and up, exposing his chest further as the energies of his being pulled taut—and I sank the knife hilt deep into the meat at the heart of him, the piece he wanted to pretend didn’t even exist.

  He screamed into the silence; I felt it, even with my comms cut off, a ghostly reverberation, like a wail from another world. For a moment, we simply stood there, me holding his head up with my hand under his jaw, pushing the blade deeper into the organ that kept him alive, him convulsing, the echoes of that scream still broadcasting through every audible frequency he could access. Pulses of light and tongues of flame rose outward from his form as he struggled to hold on to voluntary control of his being—struggled, and lost. The dark laboratory was bathed in shifting hues of fire, azure and crimson and orange, until I gave the blade one final twist.