Ashfall Legacy

by Pittacus Lore

  27

  I took off at a run after Arkell. I had to catch him.

  He was a former member of the Merciful Rampart, an organization that wanted humanity quarantined to Earth.

  He was our ship’s engineer, which meant he had access to the Wayscope and would know how to use it. Or hack it.

  He’d kept quiet about the incident with the Etherazi, despite being a stone-cold prick.

  He was hunting around for a piece of Vulpin technology that could steal coordinates from a Wayscope. Or fry the brain of its user. My uncle hadn’t understood why using the cosmological tether had gone haywire for me. My second time using a Wayscope, in Rafe’s basement, had been so much easier.

  Arkell had sabotaged the Eastwood’s machine. It all made sense.

  He’d found my cosmological tether and then set a trap.

  He almost shattered my mind.

  That motherfucker tried to kill me.

  And now, the night before we left Denza, he was gearing up to try again.

  “Syd?” Zara ran at my side, her head bowed low as she tried to keep up. I was moving fast, at the maximum speed I could go and still weave through the crowd without trampling anyone. “What are we running toward?”

  “Arkell,” I told her. “It was him.”

  “Remember the stalking techniques you’ve learned—,” she panted.

  “No time for that,” I responded, hunkering down and leaping straight onto the nearest rooftop. From up there I had a better vantage point.

  Arkell stuck out like a sore thumb in Keystone Cove, dressed in formal black clothes and at least a couple decades older than most of the other Denzans out partying. He hadn’t gone far. Arkell had stopped at another shop, another place run by a Vulpin, this one with a neon sign shaped like a samurai sword.

  I’d spent my whole life on Earth running, always worried that there were people about to pounce on me. I’d never had the chance to turn the tables. Maybe I was still buzzing a little from the drink I’d had with Zara, but I was practically vibrating at what was about to happen. Finally, I was going to get some answers. I remembered the way Arkell had looked at me back when we had our altercation on the Eastwood, like I was some kind of wild animal. I’d felt bad then, like I didn’t want to reinforce his ugly human stereotype.

  But now? Fuck it.

  I leaped from the roof and landed inches behind Arkell, shaking the ground beneath his feet. Frightened, the Vulpin merchant immediately slammed a shutter down over his kiosk’s window and disappeared from view. Arkell’s shoulders scrunched up around his ears, and he covered his head like a meteor had landed behind him. I reached out and spun him around.

  “Cadet Chambers!” The old Denzan’s voice was a shriek, part surprise and part disgust. His scarred face puckered; his eyes narrowed. “Unhand me, you beast!”

  Instead, I reached into his coat and pulled out the mechanism. The Wayscope refractor. I held it in his face, just like he’d done to the Vulpin merchant.

  “What is this?” I demanded, even though I knew the answer.

  “A Wayscope refractor,” he answered simply.

  “Why do you have it?”

  Arkell started to sneer at my questioning, but something in my face must have convinced him to answer straight. “The day we returned to Denza, I found it attached to the Wayscope during a maintenance check. I’ve been asking around, trying to discover its origin.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” I said, stepping closer so Arkell had to back up against the storefront. “This is yours. You tried to—”

  “Ah, I see.” Arkell nodded, like he knew I had caught him. His coat had slipped off his shoulder, and I could see the glint of metal where his arm was bound. “You think I had something to do with your blunders on the Wayscope. I understand why you would think that, Cadet Chambers, but I assure you, during my time with the Merciful Rampart, my work was never so sloppy—” No way was I letting him worm out of this. I grabbed Arkell by the front of his shirt. “You’re a liar, man. I know—”

  “Hey, friend, I think you’ve had too much to drink,” a woman’s voice interrupted from behind me. “Why don’t you leave Grandpa alone?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. A group of Vulpin had gathered in a semicircle to watch my altercation with Arkell. All of them wore their fur in bushy manes dyed with black and yellow spots that reminded me of leopards. The woman who’d spoken to me was probably only a few years older than me, although it was hard to tell with the Vulpin. She wore a long duster covered in grease stains—some kind of mechanic.

  “Mind your own business,” I told her.

  She smiled and took a cautious step toward me. “Come on now, strong guy, don’t mess up your whole life over some geezer.”

  I realized then how it must look. Like I was assaulting Arkell on the street for no reason. I was making a worse impression than Hiram chasing around those shoplifters.

  “You don’t understand—,” I started to say.

  The Vulpin was close now, the rest of her den looking on tensely. She reached up and gently brushed her clawed fingers through my hair. “You have pretty fur for a human. Come on. Let’s go party.”

  “Uh.” Was she flirting with me? There was something about the Vulpin that seemed vaguely familiar to me. “Do I know you?”

  She laughed musically. “Not yet.”

  The other Vulpin were all watching me, smirking, like I was the butt of some joke. It was at that moment that Arkell surprised me by speaking up.

  “I am an employee of the Serpo Institute, and this boy is one of my cadets,” he declared. “We were just returning to the institute.”

  I couldn’t understand why Arkell would want to go anywhere with me after I’d just outed him as a saboteur. I tried to shoot him a look, but my neck felt suddenly tight. My whole back, actually. I must have pulled something when I leaped off the roof.

  “You must be a lousy professor, if you let your students come at you like that,” the Vulpin said to Arkell. “You can run along, old-timer. We’ll have the cadet back for curfew.”

  “I think not,” Arkell replied, and then suddenly his hand was hooked through my elbow. “Come along, Sydney.”

  As he tried to lead me down the street, I noticed how the circle of Vulpins moved with us. I also noticed how the rest of the street had cleared.

  My knees locked. My fingers felt oddly numb. My vision seemed suddenly dark around the edges.

  I did recognize that Vulpin woman. I’d seen her before. The same day that I thought I saw Goldy hiding in the exo-suit of an Ossho wisp. The Vulpin had been walking right behind me. The wisp had actually bumped into her.

  She’d been following me.

  I groaned—a low, raspy thing, like my lungs were caught in a vice. My entire body was stiff and rigid. My limbs felt like they were locked in ice. I teetered on my heels, trying to stay up. Arkell grunted as I leaned against him.

  “Arkell,” I croaked. I was vaguely aware of drool trickling down the front of my chin when I tried to talk. “Something . . . is wrong . . . with me.”

  “Walk, you idiot,” Arkell hissed. “You’ve been poisoned.”

  The hair. She’d put something in my hair.

  The Vulpin surged forward. Some peeled Arkell away from me, while others gathered around to take custody of me. I couldn’t lift my arms to fend them off.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” the Vulpin woman said. “We’ll get him to a doctor, boss.”

  “You’re the one going to need a doctor, if you don’t go piss up a tree.”

  If my lungs hadn’t been frozen in carbonite, I would’ve breathed a sigh of relief. Zara stood a few strides away. The other Vulpin all seemed unsettled at the sight of her. They outnumbered her twelve to one, but we were in public. I got the sense that they didn’t want to attract attention with a big throwdown.

  The Vulpin who’d poisoned me stepped forward to meet Zara. “All right, now, little sister,” she said. “You run along and forget you saw this. Sleep
easy that way.”

  “Zara, go—” Arkell started to issue an order, but a Vulpin slapped a hand over his mouth.

  “I don’t recognize your marks,” Zara replied. “What den are you?”

  “Den Nobody,” the Vulpin answered. “Go on now. Consider yourself lucky you don’t know us better.”

  “Human boys are heavy lifting,” Zara remarked, looking at the Vulpin holding me up. Her knife appeared in her hand, and she hunkered low. “You got numbers, so you probably win the fight, yeah, but I’ll carve you up nice. Make it so you can’t carry your own guts back to your ship, much less my boy here. You want that? You—?”

  “Too much talk,” the woman replied, then flicked a hand into her duster. That hand came back holding a weapon—I didn’t know the Vulpin name for it—but in Earth terms it looked like the laser cannon version of a sawed-off shotgun. She fired before Zara could even lunge forward, a burst of plasma energy that struck Zara right in the stomach and knocked her off her feet.

  Zara didn’t even have a chance to scream.

  I smelled burning fur and blood. My chin was stuck to my chest. I couldn’t work up the energy to check on my friend. I’d lost sight of Arkell, too.

  The Vulpin woman stood in front of me. She brushed her fingers through my hair again. Another dose of whatever drug I’d absorbed.

  “Okay, sacred boy,” she said, dragging her claw down my jawline. “Off we go to save the universe.”

  Part Four

  Ashfall

  28

  Darkness.

  “You gave him too much of that toxin. He’s useless to me in this condition.”

  “You know what humans can do. I wasn’t taking any chances.”

  “You left witnesses.”

  “You didn’t pay for bodies. You paid for no bodies.”

  “The others will come looking. I need him awake.”

  “Give it some time, boss. Go take a nap or something. We’ll come get you.”

  Waves crashing. I was at the beach.

  I couldn’t feel anything. I tried to wiggle my toes or squeeze my fingers. Nothing.

  My eyelids felt weighted down. It was a struggle to pry them open. When I did, the low-hanging sun seared my retinas. I would’ve jerked my head away or shielded my eyes, but I couldn’t move anything.

  As my vision slowly cleared, I made out a rocky beach, littered with jagged shards of coral, like an oceanic graveyard. The water came in rough here, smashing against the barbed reefs. It was light out, the sun just beginning to rise above the horizon, which meant I’d been out for some time.

  Docked on the beach was a Vulpin cruiser. I hadn’t seen one of their ships up close before, but they looked about how I expected—sleek and angular, sharp edges, built for speed. This one was painted in speckled crimson and tan, likely for camouflage against the deserts of Stonlea. Some of the leopard-spotted Vulpin I’d unfortunately met at Keyhole Cove milled around the underside of the ship, doing minor repairs.

  Kidnapped. Successfully this time.

  Instinctively, I reached for my pocket to see if my dad’s cosmological tether was still there. Well, I had the urge to reach, anyway. My arm didn’t actually respond.

  I came to realize that although I could see the beach, I wasn’t actually outside. I was staring out through the smashed wall of a building. A wide-open space. Maybe some kind of abandoned warehouse. Bad shit always went down in places like that. Sand blew in through the open wall, and it was an inch thick in most places, except where my captors left fresh footprints. No one had been here in a very long time.

  That meant no one would be looking for me here.

  A furry hand snapped its fingers in front of my face. A burly Vulpin dude now blocked my view to the outside. He peered into my eyes, and I tried my best to glare at him.

  “Yo, Nyxie,” the Vulpin yelled. “Our boy’s awake.”

  Footfalls approached from behind me, then the Vulpin woman from Keyhole Cove stepped into my eye line. Nyxie smiled at me. She’d gunned down Zara for no reason. I wanted to lunge at her. I tried, but nothing happened.

  Wait. That wasn’t true.

  My fingers twitched. I had a little tingle there.

  Didn’t want her to notice that. If she did, she might dose me again. Luckily, she was busy giving orders to her partner.

  “Go tell the boss the kid’s awake,” Nyxie said.

  As the male stalked off, Nyxie crouched down to put her snout right in my face. Her hot breath smelled like cinnamon gum. She tapped one of her claws against my forehead.

  “You awake in there, eh? Blink twice for yes.”

  I refused to blink at all, holding my eyes open until they watered.

  “Oh, I see you in there, you big mad,” she said and laughed. Then she grabbed my chin and swung my head around so that I could see more of my surroundings. “Make this easy on us, yeah? We don’t want to hurt nobody.”

  My fingers twitched again at that.

  I was strapped to a chair. I hadn’t realized that before, on account of the lack of feeling in my limbs.

  Not just any chair. A Wayscope. The goggles hung above my head, a little rust built up on them from exposure to the sea air.

  So that’s what I was supposed to cooperate with.

  I thought back to the Vulpin who had attacked my mom on Earth, how she’d stolen the cosmological tether and tried to kidnap me, too. These people wanted to use me to find my father—but why?

  “That’s enough, Nyxie,” said a stern voice from behind the Vulpin. A familiar voice.

  Aw. Not him. He was like the nicest one.

  Nyxie stepped aside, revealing Vanceval. The elderly Denzan’s impressive pompadour drooped lower than I’d ever seen it. His mouth trembled as he met my eyes, then looked away. Vanceval held a tablet in his hands, nearly fumbling the thing as he came forward.

  His hands were both cast in obsidian. New shame. His wrists were raw where the recently affixed bonds chafed. Vanceval didn’t have those when I saw him in class just a few days ago.

  They were for me. He was ashamed of what he was going to do here.

  And to give up his hands? These weren’t some bands around the bicep like my uncle had, reminders of how he’d let people down. This was real shame.

  The killer kind.

  “Leave us,” Vanceval said to Nyxie.

  The Vulpin looked disappointed to be cut out of whatever was happening next. She reached into her pocket and handed Vanceval a stoppered vial. “He gets rowdy, a little bit of that in his—”

  “I know,” Vanceval interrupted. “Leave us.”

  Holding up her hands, Nyxie walked out of my field of vision, disappearing somewhere behind me.

  Vanceval held the vial up to the light—a clear, viscous gel swam about inside.

  “This toxin would not work on a full human. Not potent enough,” he said, still teaching, even now. “A full Denzan would be able to metabolize it for nutrients, which is why your body was so eager to absorb it. As a hybrid, you are neither strong enough to resist it nor adaptable enough to convert it. A rare downside for your kind. However, the paralysis will wear off in time.” He frowned at me. “In fact, I suspect that is already happening.”

  I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, trying to speak. I wanted to ask him why. I wanted to curse him out.

  Vanceval’s clumsy metal fingers nearly dropped the vial, but he eventually stashed it in his coat. He gazed over at the shattered wall. “The Merciful Rampart built bombs here once to destroy the wormhole back to your galaxy. A close-minded and grotesque business. But, like Arkell himself, this place has its uses.”

  Of course. Arkell would be the perfect fall guy for whatever Vanceval had planned. He’d discovered the Wayscope refractor on the Eastwood and gone around hunting for its origin. And now I’d be found here, in one of his old haunts, with Arkell being one of the only witnesses to my abduction. I’d never even suspected the doddering old man in front of me. How could I? He’d been noth
ing but patient and kind.

  The way he’d apologized to me back on the Eastwood, though, when we all thought the Etherazi was going to kill us . . . I thought he’d been sorry for the Wayscope mishap. He’d actually been apologizing for almost nuking my brain.

  I tried to bite the inside of my cheek, hoping the pain might spur something in me.

  “I want you to know, Sydneycius, that this brings me great sadness and grief.” He held up his hands. “You can see the shame that I feel already.”

  I stuck my lip out at him. A pouty face. So sad.

  Vanceval sighed. He reached into his pocket and produced a cosmological tether—my father’s cosmological tether. The Vulpin must have searched me when I was unconscious.

  “You are going to help me locate your father,” Vanceval said simply.

  I breathed out through my nose. A snort. No way. I closed my eyes to show him that I’d never use the Wayscope, never access the data stored in that ring.

  “Yes, I imagined you would have misgivings,” Vanceval responded. “I am going to show you two things that I suspect will convince you.” He held up the tablet in front of my face. “The first.”

  A video began to play. A transmission. The feed was fuzzy and buffered frequently—it had been sent across a great distance.

  A Denzan man. High cheekbones and a tangle of aquamarine hair, gentle eyes, an upturned mouth that made it seem like he was half smiling even when he was clearly distressed. I’d seen this man before.

  I could picture him eating a donut on the hood of a car. Smiling down at me and ruffling my hair. Telling me that he was leaving.

  My dad.

  He sat against a cracked wall covered in scorch marks, ash falling like snow across his shoulders. It was like he was transmitting from a war zone. Strands of hair were stuck to his cheek by dried blood, a deep cut along his scalp. He started to talk but had to pause to cough raggedly into his shoulder.

  “Vanceval,” my dad finally began. “This will be my last transmission before we go permanently dark. There was some disagreement among the survivors about what to do, but that—” He coughed into his shoulder, leaving a dark wet spot behind. “That’s been resolved.”