“I am better.”
It was going to happen. He was going to die. Philippe saw nothing but death in the man’s vibrating irises. He shot his gaze skyward in a silent prayer and saw through the hole the Hercules C-130 nosing up as something dropped from its cargo hold.
“F.A.E,” he croaked, eyes widening. It was a Fuel Air Explosive, the biggest non-nuclear boom that the Americans could muster. From the size of the ordnance, Philippe knew it would flatten the valley.
“Do your worst, asshole. We’re all, gonna die, anyway,” he spat through the grip on his throat.
“What?” Heinrich asked, cocking an eyebrow.
Suddenly Philippe was prone on the ground next to a now-unconscious Sacks. The strange man looked at the sky as the tanker-sized object fell towards the frigate, and he raised a hand as if to stop it.
He was too late. It exploded, white fluid ballooning out for several hundred meters like a liquid firework. Then the secondary charge ignited and an immense fireball filled the sky, engulfing the ship.
As the shockwave broke the sound barrier, a tremendously loud clap sounded as though the god of thunder challenged the world, and from beneath the earth came an answering roar. The ground erupted into violent shudders.
Philippe looked out the hole in the side of the craft as the entire hill, millions of tons of rock and ice, fountained straight up into the air. Trapped between the immense, elemental forces of earth and fire, the shields around the frigate flared, then winked out as they were compressed. The ship buckled and snapped in half, keel broken as if it were a twig snapped over a knee.
“No!” the man screamed. Despite the blurry features, Philippe could see the man’s face twist into a rictus of rage.
And still the fountain of earth increased, blowing the pieces of ship, rock, and flaming gas higher. From beneath it, rising out of the newly created chasm, was a figure that glowed like the heart of the sun, orbited by four white balls.
Philippe stared, open-mouthed, shocked beyond comprehension until the man in blue with the golden compass insignia turned to him and spoke.
Grief colored his tone and his voice slid down Philippe’s spine like ice. “Tell your leaders to prepare. The other Monarchs will soon come. Then you shall know the path.”
With a crack of displaced air, the figure vanished.
In the twisted and tortured mindscape, Jay desperately defended against Delta’s onslaught. If I can just get the key, I can fix it. I can fix Dee. I can fix everything.
Jay raised the strongest mental shield she could muster, but it wasn’t enough. Delta was the stronger telepath and little pieces of his attack got through, pinpricks of pain in her head like dandelions made of fire. Like a matador faced with a bull, he skillfully slipped mental barbs into her and soon she would be too weak to avoid the final sword-stroke.
She couldn’t hurt him. She’d seen the chains that held his mind in check as they struggled. He was as much a victim of their father’s machinations as she was. No—more.
She pushed at him with her telekinesis, not with the aim to injure, but to give herself an advantage. A half step, a precious few inches closer to the key than him so she’d reach it first. But he diverted her push again. Neither of them made anything but the slowest of progress towards the key. One step at a time as they crossed the polished stone floor with its strange patterns.
They both stretched at the same time, and she saw she would lose. He was taller and had longer arms. All her mental strength and she was going to lose just because her brother was taller than her.
In desperation, she did the only thing she could think of. She closed her eyes and dropped her mental shield entirely, preparing to embrace the pain in order to fuel as much as she could into one last telekinetic push.
In the mindscape, her small figure, outlined in a golden halo, held out welcoming arms of forgiveness and love like the statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
As her golden rays touched him, Delta stopped his attacks. In the mindscape, the scarred and tortured figure inside his chains of sparkling wire and rigid thought smiled at his sister. For one brief moment, she saw him as he had been: green eyes that touched her soul, flawless skin beneath a mop of straight, blond hair.
“I can see what Alpha saw all those years ago. She saw freedom.”
Laid bare in the mindscape as she was, she didn’t feel the sting of another attack that would end her, but the trembling brush of the touch against her cheek she’d missed for the last decade. Beneath her fingertips, she felt warm, flawless crystal.
She’d already released the telekinetic push to force Delta backwards. As her fingers touched the crystal, she felt energy rush into her like a wild torrent of unending power, threatening to tear her apart. She screamed, feeling the power course through her as if she were merely a conduit, a vessel for something greater.
Her mind blazed open and the crushing weight of billions of minds cascaded into her. For a moment, she lost all sense of herself: a speck of dust in an immense nebula of mental landscape extending infinitely.
Within that universe of dust, particles of gold twinkled. These pinpoints of light felt like a part of herself and she imagined cradling them to her. As the sense of her mind expanded, she felt other grains of sand, sparkling red with tiny nuclei of fear and pain screaming and winking out of existence.
Those pinpricks of red were intolerable. She sensed them so intimately. By instinct alone, she formed a mental shield and the press of minds ceased instantly. The nebula of the mindscape closed, but not before brighter stars in the cosmos shone their light and whispered secrets at her.
She opened her eyes and gazed down on a snowy landscape and a bottomless chasm beneath her feet. White globes of impenetrable force orbited her like moons and within them were people she cared about. Looking up, a sluggish asteroid belt of rock, ice, and pieces of the massive silver ship hung in the air above her. With a thought, she moved it slowly over a scorched ridge and directed the pieces to drift down like feathers.
She opened a pinprick in her shield and sent out a tendril of thought.
‡Delta? I can free you!‡ she broadcast with a strength that surprised even herself. A feeling of forgiveness and love suffused the words.
A second later, only a whisper returned to her, from within one of the globes that orbited her. A faint and flickering image that floated across the mindscape like the breath of a kiss on the wind. ‡Little sister. Juliet. I’m already free. Jay. This time, I made my own choice. I choose rebellion.‡
Like fog on the wind, all sense of Delta disappeared.
Jay moved herself away from the sinkhole and cracked open the first sphere to reveal Snake, barely conscious, with the broken-necked form of Sheila clutched tightly in his bloody hands.
The next sphere parted to reveal Mack, groggy, holding her head and blinking as if amazed to be alive.
In a panic she opened another and the form of Delta slid bonelessly to the ground, unmoving. His vacant stare behind the mask looked to the heavens. She tried to connect with him again, but what lay before her was an empty shell and she knew. The tech inside his head had killed her brother.
She wanted to weep, but there was one more globe of force to be opened.
Jay’s breath hitched as she realized. Only one more. One more sphere with a beating heart nestled somewhere inside.
Cracking it open, her mother’s form appeared. Sarge opened one eye that flicked around and saw the wrecked pieces of the ship in the sky. Jay followed her gaze and looked at the segments of ship in the air. Dad. The tears started.
Her mother’s face expressed all her grief. Enough to consume the world, yet she managed to hold out an arm to Jay, shaking as she did so. Jay collapsed into her embrace as the tears started. Her dad was on the ship, and she hadn’t sensed him.
She wanted to search the mindscape for his presence and her precognition showed her a flicker of an image. Seven billion voices, poised like a tidal wave to crash into her. She slamme
d her mental shield around herself so hard she felt it should reverberate around the world. Feeling helpless, Jay hugged her mom.
Seconds later, she felt Mack and Snake join them, offering comforting arms and shared tears in the aftermath.
“Jay,” Mack said between sobs. “Did you sense the other four keys?”
Jay sniffed and nodded, answering all of them in a voice laden with grief. “But there aren’t five world keys. The Monarchs lied all these years. There are six.”
King Mycroft Barrett stared at the shredded back before him. White spine and red flesh as he held the tiny Rose in his arms, her screams piercing the air and the mindscape. Tears ran through his beard to splash onto her.
He extended tendrils of thought across the vastness of the mindscape to companions intimately familiar after decades of close contact.
‡The Monarchy is under attack. Protect your children, and look to your own defenses.‡
He couldn’t help but think about the other things revealed by Tesla.
A daughter raised by these savage, murderous Rebels, who, if she succeeded in eluding Heinrich’s grasp and obtained the world key, would match him for power and be able to deliver devastation on a significantly larger scale. Their world was in danger. Everything they had worked for. The great plan. The hard-won peace since the end of the Monarch War was over. He must confront her.
‡Yoshi, prepare The Titan. We are going to war.‡
Thanks to all the crazy ones
A book doesn’t happen without a lot of crazy people.
I’m crazy—you’re reading vivid hallucinations pummeled into me by a thick-knuckled muse.
These people, who first helped me with these ideas; wicked crazy:
K Andrew Faw, Caroline Rhodes, Jake Anderson, Matt Helm, and Brandi Thorn.
These two, who convinced me that it was worth pursuing; drunk camping crazy:
Damian Tan and Jason Frew.
These people, who helped me when I thought I couldn’t do it; special writer crazy:
Brisbane NaNoWriMo CWG, Melanie Edmonds, J. Stevland, Finn McRae, Jennifer Britton, Maree Bright, Matt Hellscream.
And finally, these people, who had to live with my crazy; big love crazy:
Peta and Jessica.
And to all you crazy people who liked the book enough to champion it out into the world:
Thanks. Couldn’t have done it without you.
Suffrage (World Key Chronicles Book 1) Page 33
