by S. C. Green
Between all of this, stretching out from the building we’d come from, a long, black trail ran through the wide suburban streets. The cloud had burned through buildings, eaten away at the asphalt, and destroyed everything that stood in its way. Stretchers were being carried away, the body bags on top of them too thin and misshapen to contain complete bodies. A forensic team cordoned off a blackened patch on the edge of the charred path that could have only been the remains of people.
The air rushed from my lungs. My whole body sagged under the weight of guilt. This is your legacy – a trail of destruction.
The cloud had its first taste of life outside the dome. It was already on the move. At least there wouldn’t be too many people it could burn out in the desert, only a few souls to feed its hunger. But when it got to a city, it would feast like a king.
My stomach turned with sickness. This was all my fault. By entering the dome, I had delivered Red into Harriet’s arms. I had insisted on finding the immortium and giving her the means to raise this abominable cloud. I had opened the way for this woman to raise an army of wraith and escape into this world.
May’s disappearance ... all these deaths ... all the deaths to come ... they were all on my head. Like a selfish, spoiled child, I had been worrying about Alain, what he felt for me, if there was a chance I could get him back, when I should have been paying attention. I should have seen what Harriet was, should have listened to the warnings Red had tried to give me. I should … I should … Now it was too late.
Lorcon croaked, asking where we would find the observation tower. I pointed with my wing and dived toward it. The place was guarded by a military patrol, but clearly they hadn’t been trained to respect Reapers. We flew right overhead without them noticing and dived in the open office window.
My heart sank to see what had been done to the place I’d called home for five years. Our beds had been torn to pieces, all our furniture overturned. Our file boxes had been flung open, and the contents of our fridge poured over the top. Rats already scuttled through the foul mess, fattening themselves up on the remains of our life. All the equipment had been ripped from the walls, and what hadn’t been taken had been smashed on the floor.
There was nothing here that could be salvaged. My heart heavy, I followed Lorcon back to the building as fast as we could. Jack and Sydney had barely made it to Sub level-10. I felt a pang in my chest to see Jack’s face straining with the effort of climbing quickly. He’d come all the way down those stairs, in great pain, just to wait for me.
If only he knew what a monster I really was.
Lorcon transformed and broke the news. “It’s no good. The observation station has been trashed. You won’t find any equipment there.”
“Oh.” Jack wheezed. Pain flashed in his eyes. He sank to the floor, wiping the sweat that dripped from his brow. “Fuck.”
I knelt by his side, my arm around his shoulder as if I could help. As if I wasn’t the source of all this pain.
“My thoughts exactly,” Alain said. “What do we do now?”
“It’s okay” Jack pulled the monitor onto his lap. “I should be able to do something with this. If we can get a vehicle with GPS, I could—”
“That’s going to be pretty difficult,” I said. “It’s swarming with cops and military and all manner of government officials out there.”
“So, what do we do?” Lorcon asked.
“What Jack and I should have done the moment we discovered the breach,” I said. “We have to go to the authorities.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous.” Alain moved toward me, but I held up my hand to stop him.
“I’m not being ridiculous. This is beyond our ability to deal with. Even Sydney admits she doesn’t know how to control her power. We’re just hoping that once we get her close enough to the cloud, she’ll know what to do. But out there, they have all the firepower, all the top-of-the-range equipment, all the expert minds in the country. They may be the enemy, the ones who trapped you in the dome in the first place, but right now, they have even more invested in destroying that cloud than we do. If I can help them do that, I will.”
“No, Raine. You can’t.” Jack frowned. “They’re still after you. They’re scouring the desert for you, for us. If you just deliver yourself to them...” He left the words hanging, unfinished, but I understood what he was saying. I’d go back to jail, back to the drugs, back to a life that wasn’t really living. And this time, there would be no escape.
Terror rose in my stomach, but I pushed it down. I had to be brave. I had done this. If I’d never gone through the wall, if I’d lived with my pain the way everyone else did, none of this would have happened. Now, it was my responsibility to put things right, before every living person was left burned at the hands of this new wraith.
I placed a shaking hand over his. “It’s okay, Jack.” I said, my voice breaking.
“It’s not.” He shook his head, his face pinched. “I won’t let you go.”
“You will. That’s an order. Don’t you dare argue with me.” I turned to Alain. “They’re not going to hurt you. I’ll die before I let them do anything to you or May. You know that’s true.”
A shadow passed over his face as he seemed to understand the full meaning behind my words. He inclined his head, not quite a full nod.
But he was going to let me do it. I felt both betrayed an honoured by that.
“You can’t hand us over to those people,” Sydney said, her fingers curling by her sides. “That’s not your decision to make.”
“I’m not handing you over,” I said. Before anyone could stop me, I turned around and flew up the stairs.
Sydney’s voice echoed after me, bouncing off the walls. I ignored it and poured on speed. Out into the desert I popped, and as I soared low to the ground in front of the dome, I transformed.
My feet hit the pavement, the soles of my boots crunching on the charred debris. The men who held the line leapt back in surprise. I stood up straight, my heart pounding as I took in the whole scene from the ground. Sirens wailed all around the wall. Floodlights poured over the ground in front of me, lighting up my surrender for all. Behind the line, cameras flashed. People cried out in loud, excited voices.
“Do not move,” a voice boomed through a loudspeaker. “We have you surrounded.”
No shit. I stepped out of the shadows, into the beam of light, and raised my hands above my head. “I believe you’re looking for me.”
17
May
Harriet’s cloud swept me away, carrying me higher and higher above the city. It tossed me about like a piece of trash, a discarded napkin or pizza box that served only to remind me how fragile the world had become. Buildings zoomed past me, and I caught fleeting glimpses of the road and the dead trees and the dome. Soon I became so disoriented, all the images became lost in the grey miasma.
The grey consumed me. I no longer knew if my eyes were open or closed. At any moment, I expected the burning force of the cloud to consume me, or to drop me from this height and dash my brains out upon the road, but it never did.
I lost sense of time and movement. At one point, it seemed as though my body was being squeezed on both sides. The grey darkened to black.
A voice hissed, “Hide,” but it was far off, muddy, as though speaking underwater.
I didn’t know how to hide in the cloud anyway. There was nowhere to go that was darker than where I was right now.
The darkness faded, the grey returned, and voices shouted. Screams of terror. The crunch of buildings tearing apart. I flailed my arms, trying to swim away from the invisible horror, but the voices only grew louder, the crash and smash of metal and glass toppling to the earth, the roar of a great fire consuming its prey.
“Harriet, let me down!” I had no idea if I even spoke the words, or if I just thought them.
The cloud whipped them away, swallowing them into its grey stomach. The wind ceased. The cloud’s grip on my body fell away. I hung in the air for a moment
, suspended like a character in a cartoon. And then, I started to fall.
Blind panic coursed through me. I flapped my arms uselessly, trying to stop. A stripe of yellow appeared on the horizon, spinning as I toppled toward it. Through my panic, I remembered that I could stop it. I spread my arms and called up the raven within me, forcing my change. As the yellowy ground rose up to meet me, I shoved my feathers through my skin. My body shrunk down, and the wind caught beneath my wings. My body tensed, bracing itself against the rush of air that threatened to knock me off-course. Dunes rose from the earth below, ripples of sand shifting below the cloud. I gritted my teeth and tipped my wings back, willing my body to obey.
Lift up, please lift up ...
At the last moment, I got the lift I needed and swooped up just in time. A single talon scraped across the sand, grinding off skin and feathers. It hurt like hell, but at least I’d avoided crashing headfirst into the desert.
The wind was too strong for me to regain complete control. I skidded across the rough earth, the sand rubbing my skin like corrosive sandpaper. Finally, my momentum slowed, and I landed in a heap of wings and legs and feathers. I spat sand from my mouth.
“You told me to let you down,” a cruel voice echoed in my ears. It came from right behind me, but also from all around me.
I opened one eye. Big mistake. Sand blew across my face, clawing at my eyeballs. The grey cloud still swirled and shifted around me, rising great pillars of sand like a temple of dust. I lifted one wing. Black feathers floated away in every direction. Bare patches of skin along the span of my wing and feathers bent at all angles meant I wouldn’t be flying again any time soon. My whole body felt as though it had been dumped in a vat of burning acid. But I was alive, which was more than I’d expected.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” I yelled at the amorphous swirl.
“I thought we should talk first,” a familiar voice oozed through the haze.
I looked up, and my heart burst open wide. “Harriet?”
She descended from the grey as though she were a phantom in some grisly operatic production, suspended on strings from the roof of the theatre. Her blonde curls whipped around her angelic face, and her eyes blazed with a mad joy I’d never seen before. Her boots landed on the sand in front of me. My Harry. Only not. She was inches from me, but there was an entire gulf between us.
Furiously, I wiped the tears that spilled down my cheeks. “I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”
“You don’t understand,” she shot back, her beautiful face twisted into a scowl.
“I’d really like to. But you have to stop—”
“May?” Harriet’s voice changed, less cruel and more familiar. Terrified. Her head swung forward, her eyes bugging out. “Please, you have to help me.”
“What’s going on?”
Harriet’s hand jerked out, as though it were being pulled back and forth by a pair of competing puppeteers. She rested it against my cheek, a tender touch she rarely employed. Usually, she was only soft with me after sex, when we lay together in a tangle of limbs and sheets. She usually spoke with her fists, and if she liked you, she didn’t touch you at all. When she’d first taken me to bed, to show me what I truly was, her touch had been so rough, so desperate. She didn’t know what to do with me, any more than I knew what to do with her. “You’re so soft,” she’d whispered, running her hands over my breasts. She’d felt soft, too, and she smelled like springtime, but I wouldn’t dare tell her that.
A tear fell from my eye, sliding over her fingers before toppling over into oblivion. She stared at that falling droplet, her eyes impossibly sad. I knew then how bad this was – Harriet would never have stood to see me cry. She’d have turned away in disgust.
“He’s inside me,” she whispered. “I can’t stop him. I can’t … control him.”
“Who?”
“The Mayor.” She screwed up her face, her whole body shuddering as though it were being shot with electricity.
Shit. How was this possible? How could a wraith be inside her?
“He wants to—”
Her words dissolved into screams, horrific choking cries that sounded all the more terrifying from Harry’s mouth. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Even when she’d been working for the gangs, and she would come to me with her face all bruised, her arms cut up from talking back to the family, she would never keep her mouth shut. She didn’t take shit from anyone, which was how she’d ended up in that whorehouse in the first place. The Dimitri brothers had tried to put her in her place.
She’d survived all that, but this … Whatever was going on inside her, it was breaking her.
Her screams dissolved into great, hiccuping giggles. The fingers on my cheek curled over into a ferocious grip. Her nails raked across my skin. I yanked my head away. She tossed back her hair and laughed and laughed.
“Oh yes.” She grinned.
I realised I was no longer talking to my love, but to the wraith who inhabited her body. The Mayor. A wraith.
“Your precious lover is in here with me. That’s the first time she’s ever been able to overpower my voice. She must reeeeaally love you.”
“Get out of her body,” I growled. How had he done this? How had a wraith actually ended up inside Harriet’s head?
“No can do, little Mayfly.” He cackled at his joke.
Mayfly was Harriet’s name for me. She only used it when we were alone, just as I was the only one who called her Harry. The idea this wraith had that name on his lips ripped a violent shudder down my back.
“You see, I quite like this body. I can make it do all sorts of things. See?” She did a little chicken dance, cackling uproariously. Then she grabbed her crotch, started rubbing herself lewdly.
“Oooooh!” She moaned. “I’m such a little whore.”
“Stop it,” I sobbed. I grabbed Harriet’s arm.
She flicked her arm underneath mine, and twisted my it over my head, forcing me forward and jamming it against my back. I expected her skin to feel cold, clammy, like the touch of a wraith. But it was the same warm, soft skin I’d always known.
I was forced to move with her grip, my body twisting around itself. I winced as she applied pressure to my elbow. With a short shove, she could break my arm. That would stop me from flying, even more than my missing feathers. I’d have to walk back to civilisation. I’d probably die out here. If I didn’t die right here first.
“You can’t stop me,” Harriet hissed in my ear. “Your friends can’t, either. I have seen the other side, Mayfly, and I’ve come back with all the knowledge of life and death. You won’t get me again with the same old tricks.”
“But why are you doing this?” I begged. “You have your freedom. That was what you wanted all along, wasn’t it? To get outside the dome. Well, you’re here now. Why do you need this cloud? Why do you need to kill?”
“Don’t think you can—” Harriet’s voice rose in pitch, back to normal. “Run! Run while you can. I can’t stop him. Get as far from me as you can!”
Harriet dropped my arm. The sudden release sent me sprawling across the sand. I rolled on my shoulder and scrambled to my feet, facing my love, but not sure who exactly I was looking at.
“I love you,” she choked out. “I love...” She burst into cruel laughter.
I raced away, spreading my arms wide and forcing my change. Feathers sprung from my skin, the prickling of their release forcing away my tears. A few of the gaps had already healed, but I was still damaged. I wouldn’t fly well, but it would be enough to get away.
“Fly away, little Mayfly,” Harriet called after me. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
Wanna bet? I thought, as I swooped off toward New Vegas. At least in my bird form, I couldn’t cry. My body shook with silent, unfulfilled sobs. The whole world, and everyone I loved … Dad, Sydney, Harriet, even Mum … They probably thought it was all finished. They thought we had lost with Harriet’s cloud now free of the dome. But while my heart sti
ll pounded and my wings still unfurled, I was going to do whatever I could to stop the wraith once and for all.
18
Sydney
Fucking Raine.
That woman was nothing but a walking tornado, ripping apart everything she encountered. Of course, not only did she bring a wraith into the dome with her, but she also managed to give Harriet and that wraith exactly what they needed to bring forth an even greater horror. Of course she wanted to run back to her precious Reaper Institute the minute we were outside the dome. Of course she flung herself into their waiting arms as soon as we told her it was a fucking stupid idea. Of course Alain followed her, and the rest of us followed Alain. And inevitably, we were all arrested.
Thanks, Raine.
Lights blazed in my eyes as I stepped out from the shadows, into the hands of the very people who had taken away my freedom. All around me, the fallen remains of crumbling suburbs rose, houses tipped on their sides like overturned toy boxes, spilling furniture and possessions out on the streets. My first glimpse of the world outside the dome for ten years was obscured by a wall of army vehicles, tanks, and TV station vans crammed into the narrow streets, creating a barrier to the mysteries beyond. Cameras snapped away while men in black military uniforms cuffed us all and led us toward a van. Reporters surged against us, yelling questions over the din.
