The grenade tinkled against the stalt floor as it rolled for a second before coming to a halt. The chaos of gunfire stopped.
Whoom! The grenade released a magnesium brilliance, the crystal around it magnifying the already dazzling glare. It glowed so brightly, it damn near set fire to Reyes’ eyes, rendering her useless as she clapped her hands to her face and fell to the ground. Out of breath, blind, and with her heart galloping, she then felt the touch of a long hand against her shoulder. “Stay here. Everything will be fine,” Sparks said. “Your sight will return.”
Reyes had no choice but to trust her friend. As she lay on the ground, her pulse fast, her throat dry, she focused on her breaths. The only way to ground herself, she fought against her frantic thoughts. Nothing but white in her vision, she listened to what must have been Sparks fire her blaster. The only blaster to go off in the room, she must have been the only being in the entire place who could see.
While the shooting continued, Reyes rubbed her eyes and blinked. Utterly ineffective, she had to do something other than lie there. A hard bite on her bottom lip—so hard it stung—stopped her from calling out to Sparks. Too much noise and she’d be a target for the guards, something for the blind to aim their weapons at.
As the sound of blaster fire continued unrelenting, Reyes put her energy into muttering near silent support for her friend. “You can do it, Sparks. I trust in you.”
Chapter 39
As much as Seb hadn’t wanted to leave the others, they’d be fine. They knew what they needed to do, and they’d find a way to do it. They could stop the broadcast, but he had to stop Enigma. He didn’t know much about what lay ahead, but he knew that.
Seb ran on intuition, not knowing where to go until a moment before he had to decide. Every long hallway looked the same. Every turn like the one he’d taken before. Yet he ploughed forward through the palace, turning left, right, right, left, left, right without breaking stride.
Finally Seb’s scenery changed as he ran into one of the palace’s many spires. A circular turret, he looked up at the pointed roof at least ten storeys above him. Stairs corkscrewed around the walls, showing him the route to the top. For a second, his legs refused to carry him any farther. Something about climbing so high on transparent stairs … But he dug deep, shoved down his reluctance, and pushed on. The woman in his vision had to be up there.
Near dizzy from his fast and twisting ascent, Seb tried to focus on the next few steps ahead and not much farther. No rail to stop him, if he slipped and fell, his body would shatter on the hard ground below. He got so fixed on where to put his feet, he didn’t see the guards until it was too late.
Two of them—centaur-like creatures with four legs and two arms and shields as tall as they were—blocked his path. Then they charged, coming down the stairs to meet him as he came up. Just a few metres between them, they closed the gap quickly and drove their shields into him, sending him back several wobbly steps before he lost his footing and fell.
The second the back of Seb’s head connected with one of the stairs, a loud ring sang through his skull and his world turned dark.
Chapter 40
Reyes’ ears rang from the constant sound of shattering stalt. Enigma’s army must have been blind like her. They must have realised if they didn’t shoot back, they’d be executed by Sparks’ blasts.
Splash after splash, the shots hit the room at random points in quick succession. It made Reyes’ head spin and her heart gallop. One of them had to hit her soon, but what could she do? Nothing but whiteness in her vision, she had no choice but to rely on Sparks.
The only chance she had of protecting herself, Reyes lay face down, her nose squashed against the cold stalt floor while she covered the back of her head with her hands. Not only did she experience the vibration of every explosion through her face, but she felt the stinging spray of shattered stalt against her back.
Despite the disorientating wash of sound, the next explosion Reyes heard rang louder than all the others. A heavy whoosh filled the room, the reverberation of the noise swelling through the grand hall. A moment later, a loud bang! Whatever hit the floor, it landed so hard the vibration of it shook her face and made her eyes water.
“Sparks!” Reyes shouted, lifting her head to look in the direction she expected her friend to be in. Before she could say anything else, another whoosh and bang drowned her out.
Maybe Reyes imagined it, but when she looked up again, it seemed like some of the whiteness in her eyes had turned slightly grey. Where she’d seen nothing, she could now see movement. Although still no more than shifting shadows. “Sparks?” Still nothing.
Reyes got to her feet on shaking legs, her arms stretched out in front of her. Blaster fire and the glassy crash of stalt exploded around the room. Less than before, but splinters of the sharp crystal still hit her, making her flinch when they landed against her face.
“Sparks?” Reyes stumbled forward, caught her foot on what felt like a large rock of stalt, and fell to the ground again. Expecting to impact it sooner than she did, she put her hands out and braced for the shock. When it came a second later, it caught her body off guard and sent a jarring jolt snapping through her.
After hitting the floor, Reyes rolled over as if she could squirm free from the nauseating burn the fall had forced beneath her shoulder blades. How could she possibly help Sparks if she could be defeated by a lump of rock?
Then the shooting stopped. An eerie stillness swelled through the room. Reyes lay blind on the cold floor, trying to see the shadows in the grey. Nothing moved. At least nothing she could see. “Sparks?” Her voice echoed, the desperation in her tone coming back at her from the hard walls.
Then the sound of footsteps. They came towards her fast. Reyes saw something. A shape, nothing more. She flinched.
Just before Reyes’ attacker clattered into her, she felt a hand on the top of her head. She gasped.
“It’s okay,” Sparks said. “It’s okay.”
Sideswiped by her emotion, a lump swelled in Reyes’ throat, hot tears streaming down her cheeks a second later. She sniffed against her running nose and looked up in the direction of the voice. “What the hell happened?” The panic she’d pushed down rushed forward, and she shouted before she’d had a chance to control it. “I can’t see. I’m blind.”
“Shhhhhhh,” Sparks said and stroked her head. “It’s temporary. I can help you get your sight back. Sorry I couldn’t do it before. Different species react differently, and I needed to capitalise on the advantage I had by taking the guards down before they recovered. This won’t smell nice, but it’ll work.”
“What won’t smell nice?”
It sounded like a small bottle being unscrewed. Reyes then caught the medicinal alcohol smell of whatever Sparks put in front of her. The second she inhaled, the scent ran up her nostrils and drove a hard kick through her heart.
Chapter 41
Seb’s heart kicked, forcing both his eyes wide and the air from his lungs. A centaur creature—a muscular semi-naked brute of a thing—glared at him through neon pink orbs as it stepped away. Hooves clicking against the hard stalt ground, it looked like one of the guards that had shoved him down the stairs. As it backed off, it closed its grip around the small bottle it had held to Seb’s nose.
The galloping high initiated by the beast’s ointment quickened Seb’s pulse and sent needles into his brain. But as his consciousness returned, he suddenly saw her, and everything slowed to an almost halt. The green-eyed woman.
Still not entirely sure where they were, the battering wind told Seb they were high up. Immobile, he watched the woman in white shoo the two centaurs away. She clearly didn’t feel threatened by Seb, and she clearly wanted to be alone with him.
The wind cut to Seb’s core. Fierce and bitter from where it had gathered speed racing over Varna’s stalt desert. A natural instinct to hug himself for warmth, his arms didn’t move when he tried to pull them in. A look to either side showed him he’d been s
trapped to what appeared to be a cross of some sort. His arms were bound at the wrists to the horizontal pole, his ankles clamped together and tied to the upright one. The ropes were pulled tight enough for both his hands and feet to tingle from where the circulation had been cut off. Although he wanted to speak to the woman, he resisted the urge, his heart rate settling as he stared straight at her.
The green-eyed lady waited for a few seconds, but her patience ran out first. A wry smile, her long white hair billowed in the breeze as she said, “Don’t you want to know who I am?”
A sneer, it took all Seb had to not spit at her. Besides, the fierce wind would probably throw it back in his face if he did. “What does it matter? You’re a murderer.”
“You think it’s that simple?” She threw her head back and laughed at the sky. Where her eyes had glowed before, they were on fire when she looked at him again. “You’ve been a victim of the news cycle for far too long, Sebastian Zodo. Killer, saint. Soldier, terrorist. Black, white. That’s all they give you credit for understanding. They want to give you a simplified identity and then set you against the other side so you don’t notice all the shit they’re pulling right under your nose. They busy you with extremes while they play the beat you subconsciously march to. And maybe they’re right to do so. Maybe it’s all most beings can understand. But I think you’re better than that.” She lowered her voice. “So I’m here to tell you the galaxy has far more nuance than those in power want you to believe.”
Seb tested his bonds by tugging against them. If anything, they tightened. “Spare me your crap and just kill me if that’s what you’re going to do.”
“I want you to come on a journey with me, Sebastian.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“The kind of name that’s only reserved for family, right?”
Seb scoffed a laugh at her. “What? You’re telling me you’re family now?” For the first time since he’d woken, he glanced out over the roof of the palace and saw the spire he’d looked at when they flew in, the thick one with the large open space beside it. Even before he got there, he’d recognised it as where he’d end up.
Instead of replying to him, the woman’s green eyes lost focus, and she frowned as she concentrated. A second later, Seb lost sight of her as the world changed in front of him although he still heard her voice.
“Recognise this?”
It took the breath from Seb’s lungs to watch two little boys playing on a sandy wooden floor. All of the floors in Danu were sandy. He watched as he played with Davey. He must have been about three at the time. They had toy soldiers lined up in front of each other. They were playing battles. They liked to play battles. As the youngest, he always lost because Davey made the rules. Tears itched his eyes to look at his now dead brother. His voice cracked when he shouted at the woman in white, “How are you doing this?”
Instead of replying to him, she changed what he saw. Where he’d been looking at the two boys, it moved to show him his dad, red-faced while pointing a finger at a woman. The woman was about the same age as his dad. They were both in their forties. She had long white hair, flowing white clothes, and brilliant green eyes. “What are you doing there?”
“I used to call you Sebastian as a boy. Sebastian and David. Do you know that? Your dad hated it. Your father and I always had a difficult relationship.”
The argument between Seb’s dad and the woman with the green eyes increased in ferocity, spittle flying from his dad’s mouth as his face grew redder and he leaned close to her.
“What are you doing in my family home?” Seb said.
“I used to be welcome there. Until that day. I think it was the paranoia of the prophecy that got to your dad. Not something I had to live with. That was all his. Well, all yours now.”
The green-eyed woman then left the room, and the vision followed her. It played like a movie, the camera fixing on whatever the director thought Seb should see. “You expect me to believe you’re related to him? What do you think—?” But he lost his speech as he watched his mother walk from another room to meet the woman with the green eyes. The word left him in a gasp. “Mum?”
What had been silent footage suddenly had sound, and Seb heard his mother’s voice as she spoke to the green-eyed woman. “Take care of yourself. I’m sure he’ll come around.” It didn’t matter what she said, more that it tore into his heart to hear her voice again. “He just needs some time,” his mum went on to say. Were it not for the cross he’d been strapped to, Seb would have fallen hard from the strength having left his body.
Seb watched as his mum and the green-eyed woman hugged. Then he watched the green-eyed woman walk from the house out of the front door.
The sound of the wind came back to him, crashing against the side of his face, sending a poorly timed drum roll battering through his ears. The woman with the green eyes stood in front of him in her current form. In her sixties now, she looked as pure as she had in her forties. “Your mum understood where I was coming from. And she promised me she’d let me keep in touch with you two. After all, I wanted to be in the lives of my nephews as they grew up.”
Unable to reply, Seb’s head dropped. He looked at the glistening crystal ground, his warm tears turning cold against his face in the harsh wind.
Chapter 42
For a brief moment Reyes worried it might never happen, but as her sight gradually recovered, she slowed her breaths to bring her panic down. A tight pain in her chest, her body tense, she looked at Sparks standing over her. Tiny cuts covered the small Thrystian’s face like freckles. The spray from the crystal must have eaten into her as she fought Enigma’s guards. But the wounds looked to be superficial. Sore, but superficial. The same couldn’t be said for Enigma’s army. A glance around the room showed her that the place looked like the streets of Kajan, bodies and body parts scattered everywhere. When she nodded at her, Sparks nodded back and turned her attention to SA. Clearly going through the same adjustment, the yellow-skinned assassin rubbed her eyes as if it would bring her sight back quicker.
Because Sparks focused on SA, Reyes looked around the room again. The shock of it made her laugh, and she shook her head. When she spoke, her voice echoed in the near silent space. “You certainly did a number on this room.”
Sparks shrugged before she scratched her head while raising her eyebrows. “I needed to take drastic action. There were a lot of them.”
Other than the clear massacre of the army, Sparks had also demolished the place. The landing running around the first floor remained intact above them and nowhere else. The rest of it had been shattered and gathered on the floor in large piles of glistening rocks. It must have been what had caused the whooshing sounds.
“Sorry I blinded you both,” Sparks said, pulling Reyes’ attention back to her. “I had a hunch the flash bang would be effective in here and knew it would be the best chance of taking Enigma’s army down. But I couldn’t warn you about it. Especially as we can’t talk through SA at the moment. If I’d have told you to cover your eyes, they might have done the same.”
After watching SA nod, Reyes spoke for both of them. “It’s fine. You did what you had to. And it worked better than any other plan we had.”
“It was the best we had, right?” Sparks said.
Reyes smiled. “Right.”
Her computer still working, Sparks held it up for Reyes and SA to see. “The main control room isn’t far. We have six minutes to get in there and destroy their transmitter. I’d like to give you more time to recover, but we need to go.”
While Reyes nodded, SA got to her feet. Later than her to regain her sight, yet she seemed more ready to move off. Another laugh thrown back at her in the quiet room, she shook her head. “You’re a machine, SA.”
The usual warmth had left SA’s eyes. Steel belied her calm bioluminescence. Whatever it took, she’d make sure the next phase of Enigma’s plan didn’t get implemented. The next broadcast wouldn’t happen.
No time to waste, Reyes to
ok Sparks’ hand when she offered it to her to help her up. She then tried to find strength in her weak legs as she set off after her two friends.
Powdered stalt crunched beneath Reyes’ every step, and she watched the floor to avoid the larger divots dug into it from the firefight. It slowed their progress, but better that than falling and breaking an ankle.
Every door now open again like when the guards had entered, Reyes watched Sparks and SA run out of one of the exits in the left wall. She followed them out a second later to find them both stopped in front of her and halted just short of clattering into them for a second time. When she looked where they were looking, she gasped. “Damn!”
Bruke sat on the other side of a thick window of stalt. It gave them a clear view of him strapped to a large chair with an Enigma guard standing in front of him. It held a saw in its hand. The blade of it had a coating of rust and blood.
When Bruke saw them, his eyes widened. Although his mouth stretched open, the thick window muted his scream. Whatever the guard had said to him, it must have been making good on its promise. It leaned over him with the saw and cut into his left thigh.
Before any of them could speak, Sparks opened fire on the window, screaming as she laid down a barrage of blasts against it. The transparent barrier took all her shots, a series of black marks to show for it, but nothing else.
After she’d swapped her gun for her computer, Sparks projected a red lined grid against the window. “Damn it. Whatever they’ve used to make this, it’ll take a cannon to destroy it.”
Although Sparks lifted her screen for them to see, Reyes couldn’t take her eyes from Bruke. A twist writhed through her insides to watch more blood coat the guard’s rusty saw. It put all its weight into each hacking cut. Veins stood out on Bruke’s neck from the effort of his scream.
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