by Martha Carr
“What if we already finished it and turned it in?” The girl who’d laughed at her own lame joke leaned forward in her chair. “You did get my email, right?”
“Probably, if you sent it. I’ll go through everything over the weekend. Everyone else, be sure to have it in by midnight tonight.” Right, like I’m gonna be going through assignments tonight.
The girl raised her hand and slowly lowered it again. “If we already finished, what do you want us to do?”
Cheyenne laughed at that. “Whatever you want. I don’t think I need to give you—"
The tingling energy raced across her back and shoulders again, and she sat up straight in the chair. This feels familiar.
“Give us what?”
“What?”
The girl shook her head, and the other students around her shifted uncomfortably in their seats. “You said you don’t think you need to give us what?”
“Step by step instructions on how to use your time.” Cheyenne tilted her head, wanting to shudder and roll the tingling energy off her back. “That comes standard with, you know, the fact that we’re all adults.”
Someone in the back row sniggered, and the eager student turned to glare at him. “Yeah, real adult.”
Cheyenne swallowed. What’s going on?
The next second, the activator flared to life with a burst of flashing lights and a blaring siren shooting right through her head. She grimaced and clenched her eyes shut, leaning over her lap at the sudden onslaught to her senses.
“Are you okay?” The girl with the half-shaved head who always sat in the front row leaned forward and tried to peer over the top of her instructor’s desk. “Cheyenne?”
“What? Yeah, I’m fine. Bad headache just hit me.” She could barely hear her voice over the blaring siren pulsing in her head. When she opened her eyes again, a blazing orange message flashed across the front of her vision.
Warning. Incoming threat approaching. Location pinpointed at forty yards southeast.
What the hell? Cheyenne pushed herself to her feet and turned to her right. A flashing yellow arrow blinked in the center of the wall, slowly rising and growing larger as the activator tracked the threat. She turned off the alarm with a thought and stepped away from the desk.
“I’m just gonna step out for a—”
The ground rocked and trembled beneath them, sending Cheyenne staggering sideways. The students shouted in surprise, clutching their backpack and laptops and looking wildly around.
“What is that?” someone yelled.
Cheyenne gripped the edge of the desk and caught her balance. “Earthquake, maybe.”
“What kind of earthquake shakes like this?”
“Every kind!”
“This isn’t an earthquake.”
“Then what is it?”
The halfling ignored her panicking students and turned toward the classroom door. “I’m gonna go see what’s happening.”
The ground bucked again, and half the classroom erupted into screams when the overhead track lighting popped and sent a shower of sparks down on the room.
Cheyenne held out her hands and headed carefully toward the door, trying to keep her balance on the trembling floor. “Everyone just pretend this is one of those hurricane drills you had to practice in elementary school, right?”
“What?”
“Just duck and stay away from windows and doors. I’ll be right back.” She braced herself against the wall and jerked open the door. It cracked against the wall, and Cheyenne gripped the doorframe to keep herself upright.
“You shouldn’t go out there.”
The half-drow was already racing through the halls as fast as she could, trying to see through the furiously blinking lights in her vision. Multiple classroom doors flew open as she passed, letting out streams of panicked students and faculty, all scrambling to get out of the building. That’s not gonna help anybody.
The activator’s warning flashed wildly, filling her view with scattered descriptions she couldn’t read while she focused on not falling flat on her face or being shoved against a wall by fleeing students. That yellow arrow’s getting bigger.
An earsplitting groan rose from beneath the laminate-tile floor, bringing louder screams and more scrambling people into the halls. Then something loud cracked and split outside. Through the sliver of open door quickly shutting behind the last group of students to run outside, she saw a brilliant flash of multicolored light, punctuated by darting streaks of silver. “Shit.”
The thump of a body hitting the wall around the corner in front of her made Cheyenne pause. Then a woman with dark hair in a rainbow tie-dye dress barreled around the corner and froze as the front door of the building clicked shut.
“Maleshi.” Cheyenne raced toward the nightstalker posing as an IT professor, stumbling forward when the ground trembled again and brought another wave of startled and terrified screaming from people outside and inside the building. She steadied herself with a hand against the wall and swiped her hair out of her face. “Did you feel that?”
“Yeah, I felt it. What the hell’s happening out there?”
“There’s something coming.” Cheyenne blinked against the bright flashes of warning messages darting across her vision.
“I meant what specifically, Cheyenne.”
“I don’t know.” The blaring alarm returned in her head with full force, and she doubled over at the sudden deafening pain bursting through her head. “Enough, already!”
“Hey. Look at me.” Maleshi almost fell into the halfling when she staggered toward her over another buckling earthquake. “What’s wrong with you?”
Cheyenne pointed at her ear. “Activator.”
“Seriously?”
Warning: Threat detected at the surface six yards southeast.
“Dammit. It’s already here.”
“Cheyenne.”
“I said, I don’t know! Come on.” The halfling pushed away from the wall and darted toward the door, zigzagging across the hall as the ground bucked from side to side. Maleshi hurried close on her heels, and they both pushed the front door open before stumbling out into the bright mid-morning sunlight.
Two enormous mounds of dirt churned twenty feet from the front of the Computer Sciences building, ripping up grass and earth and sending huge clods flying through the air. The spinning corkscrew tips of O’gúl tunneling machines burst through the surface, the mechanisms roaring as the powered war tanks breached and toppled forward out of their tunnels.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Maleshi growled.
Students, staff, and faculty screamed even louder at the foreign contraptions of glistening black metal made their way across the lawn, spinning and rumbling forward as they churned and kicked up more grass and earth. Cheyenne hardly noticed the deafening chaos beneath the new rise of earsplitting alarms setting off one after the other in her head.
And the activator’s yellow arrow didn’t center on either of the O’gúl war machines.
“There’s something else,” she muttered, swiping twice across her vision just so the activator would get the message and turn off the damn alarms.
“Besides those things?”
“Yeah.” The yellow arrow flashed brighter and brighter before a massive crack split through the earth between the two holes from which the tunneling machines had emerged. The ground shuddered again, and the fissure splintered toward the Computer Sciences building, rending the air with crack after deafening crack like magnified gunfire. Another blaze of shimmering light streaked with purple and green burst from the center of the widening chasm. “Shit.”
“Just say it already!” Maleshi snarled.
“It’s another portal.”
“Did the activator tell you that?”
“No, but I’ve seen it before. I’ll handle it. Can you deal with the machines?”
Maleshi shot her a quick glance. “That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard you ask.”
“Great.”
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Chapter Seventy-Four
Cheyenne darted into drow speed and raced away from the front door toward the splintering crevasse widening on the VCU campus. A fraction of a second later, she saw Maleshi enter the same plane of enhanced speed, hiking up her dress with one hand, slashing at the hem of it with her four-inch steel-like claws that had burst from the other, and running straight for the rumbling war machines.
The diggers only slowed against the magicals’ enhanced speed until Maleshi reached them. As she brought her claws arcing down toward the blinking blue lights flashing at the spinning top above the corkscrew spiral of the first machine, the contraption turned its mechanical sights on her and unleashed a spray of green fire.
Maleshi dodged the attack with a hiss and brought her claws up against the side of the war machine instead. A grating screech of metal on metal erupted on contact, sparks flying. “What the hell? Since when did these things start moving as fast as us?”
“No clue,” Cheyenne shouted, skidding to a halt beside the suspended burst of magical light rising from the crevasse. “You still got it?”
The digger groaned and opened a four-inch metal panel on its side before ejecting a rod tipped with razor-sharp pincers and spraying a burst of yellow magical attacks this time. Maleshi brought her claws down on the rod and severed it like a chef’s knife through an onion. “Quit asking me and do whatever you need to do, kid.”
The second war machine turned and headed toward the first, powering up for something clearly more intense with a low whine that quickly rose to a high warning pitch.
“Yeah.” Cheyenne studied the crack in the earth and the light shimmering slowly in suspension. Just reach out and feel for it. You’ve done it before.
She closed her eyes and slid that sixth sense of her drow magic along the energy of the earth in front of her. There.
Hooking her fingers around it as if she were about to pull herself up on a ledge instead, the halfling took a lunging step back and pulled with all her strength. The ground trembled in protest, groaning and shivering even at her enhanced speed. Something like a scream erupted from the crevasse and startled Cheyenne out of her concentration.
“Cheyenne!” Maleshi shot a bolt of silver lightning into the second machine, lighting the digger up with jolting electric sparks. The second tank rose a foot off the ground and sprouted unfolding metal legs, using the two in the front to bat the nightstalker aside. Maleshi flew sideways and skidded across the grass, crouching to keep her balance.
The second war machine launched a massive ball of sparking yellow magic from an open hatch in the dome on its top. The attack struck Maleshi squarely in the chest and blasted her backward. This time, she landed on her back instead of her feet and snarled.
“I almost had it,” Cheyenne shouted back, reaching out with her magic to feel for that ledge of the earth’s energy so she could grab hold and try again.
“And these things might almost have me.” The nightstalker scrambled to her feet as the diggers advanced on her again. “In case that wasn’t clear, kid, yes. This is me asking for your help.”
“Right.” Cheyenne darted toward the machines, the activator lighting up their scrolling lines of code she now knew were O’gúl workings scrambled with Matthew Thomas’ program. That asshole’s got a lot to answer for.
The weakest parts of both diggers flashed the brightest in her vision, side panels, undercarriage, two small nodules on each of their fronts just above where the corkscrewing spirals emerged from the metal body. Cheyenne reached out for the first tank’s closest side panel, her telekinetic energy heightened by the activator’s precision as it peeled the side panel away with a shriek of ripping, buckling metal. The second tank’s rotating dome swiveled toward the halfling, blinking in alternating blue and red, and opened five hatches to sprout five metal rods that looked way too much like gun barrels.
Shit. Cheyenne abandoned the telekinetic destruction and threw up a massive shield in front of herself as the tank opened fire with fell-green rounds of light. The rounds exploded on impact, blasting heat and a thick wave of green energy over Cheyenne’s body as she fought to hold up the shield until the attack ended. We’re screwed without being able to move faster than these things.
Maleshi ducked a swinging blow from the second tank’s protruding legs, which had now rearranged themselves into long black blades with serrated edges. She brought her four-inch bladelike claws swiping up against the legs, only to be met with instant resistance and a shower of sparks. “Seemed a lot easier for you to rip these things apart yesterday!”
“It was easier yesterday!” Cheyenne gritted her teeth against the last of the green explosions, then darted around the shimmering black wall of her shield and sent two black energy spheres at the closest digger. The gun barrels swiveled again to face her. “Blast out what’s inside.”
“Inside what?”
“The part I just ripped off! And go for the head.” The halfling ran back toward her shield, feinted away, and slid forward on her knees beneath the extended barrels stretching over the tank’s body. The activator centered her telekinesis on all five rods, and she flung them aside, ripping wires and metal bolts and something that looked like a potions vial out of the digger’s swiveling dome.
Maleshi ducked the hurtling gun barrels flying toward her and snarled, “That’s the best thing you can come up with? Just get through the armor?”
“No.” Cheyenne slapped her hands on the tank’s side panel and felt a stronger burst of connection from the activator and her magic before she tried to haul the side panel away from its brackets. The metal body lurched away by half an inch and stuck fast again. “Go for the head!”
Maleshi leaped atop the digger attacking her, slashing at the metal spikes now pumping up and down along its back like motor pistons as she rushed toward the swiveling dome. She sent a bolt of silver lightning at the swiveling dome spinning fully around to lock onto her new position. The dome sparked and sputtered with yellow and red lights. “That’s the head, right?”
“Yeah!” The halfling roared when the metal hull of the digger shifted its composition in tiny unfolding pieces and pierced her palms pressed against it with hundreds of needle-thin points. A burst of heat flared from her belly and the base of her spine as the activator flashed brighter and showed her the command to put everything she had into ripping off the panel. Like I need prompting.
With a shout of effort, Cheyenne torqued her body sideways and ripped the panel free with her telekinesis. Blood sprayed across the grass when the hundreds of needles peeled away from her hands and the panel hurtled away from her toward the crevasse in the earth. The ground wobbled under them in their enhanced speed. Staggering to her feet, she reached with her lashing black tendrils into the exposed innards of the tank. The coils of her drow magic bursting from her fingertips wrapped around the thick cables and razor-thin wires to rip them free. Green and orange sparks flew, and the small explosion at the digger’s center rocked the machine sideways off one set of rolling tracks. The resulting magical shock jolted back up through Cheyenne’s whipping tendrils and flooded her body with a sizzling burst.
“Ah!” She withdrew her tendrils and hissed, blinking against the minor static in the activator coil blurring her vision before it settled.
On top of the other tank, Maleshi leaped from one section of the machine’s top panels to the neck, dodging the swiveling dome’s attacks and sending bolts of silver lightning at the machine’s head between intermittent slashes of her claws and bursts of sparks. “What the hell did they do to these things?”
“Made them better? I don’t know.” Cheyenne swiped her hair out of her face and glanced at her blood-smeared palm.
Another scream came from within the fissure opening within the earth. The halfling spun and headed back toward the edge of the newest Border portal, trying to erupt through the grass. The multicolored light shimmered in suspension, and the dark tip of a black stone pillar rose slowly from within the
crack. Nope.
Cheyenne reached out again for that tension in the earth’s energy. Her activator noted the difference between the energy of the portal stone and the earth around it.
“Cheyenne,” Maleshi said in a warning tone as chunks of shredded black metal hurtled away from the dome under her swiping attacks.
“If this thing comes through, we have a serious problem.”
“So don’t let it through!”
The half-drow let off a blast of crackling black energy straight down into the crevice at the first portal stone jutting through. The screaming intensified, and she hooked her magic around the earth’s resistance and pulled again. With a massive groan, the fissure in the earth shrank inch by inch. Cheyenne staggered back, pulling her clawed hands toward her and snarling with the effort. The ground shifted again, and a massive explosion behind her almost made her lose her concentration again. Heat and flashes of green light bathed her back.
A ray of the portal’s shimmering light erupted from the center of the closing fissure and shot straight up into the sky.
Maleshi delivered a final blow to the digger’s dome. What was left of the metal shell fractured and finally ripped away, sending black metal shards in every direction before they slowed in the air, suspended in the nightstalker’s and half-drow’s enhanced speed. The mechanisms beneath the dome’s shell burst into blue flames, and the digger let out a shrieking whine before that too cut out, and the broken machine lost power, crashing back to the ground. The nightstalker spun toward Cheyenne and saw the burst of light streak into the air. “You said you could stop it.”
The portal ridge fought back and opened the crevasse again by another inch, pulling the halfling across the grass as she struggled to maintain her grip on the earth’s energy.
“I’m trying!” A renewed wave of searing heat and tingling energy flashed from Cheyenne’s core. The black flames burned behind her eyes and across her skin, setting her human-illusion ablaze with drow fire.
