Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  The beast growls, furious, and picks up a two-hundred-pound hunk of car debris. Weiss fires again, and this time, the bullet shears through the monster’s neck, a spray of purple dying the orange winds. But the thing doesn’t even seem to notice the assault. It reels its arms back and launches the twisted metal chunk at Weiss, who deftly dodges it at the last possible millisecond, somersaults to a stop a few feet away, and unleashes a barrage of well-placed shots into the wriggling flesh of the beast before him.

  Both kneecaps shatter. Shoulders crack. Feet muscles are torn to shreds.

  Two bullets in the heart. One in each lung. And six in its gut for good measure.

  Weiss fires until he runs out of ammo.

  Still, the monster doesn’t fall.

  Weiss tosses the rifle aside and tugs his handgun from its holster, barrel pointed at the unsteady monster’s face. The eerie grin has morphed into a bloody sneer, and a high-pitched whine of fury rises in the pulsating throat beneath it. Weiss, on his knees, braced to run at a half second’s notice, flips the safety off his gun and aims at a strange angle that I surmise is meant to blow out the monster’s eyes. Even the beast can’t give chase if it can’t see us in the storm; it’s too large and misshapen to coordinate itself without sight. Brilliant. Weiss is—

  The monster lunges. It leaps off the ground, five feet into the air, sand parting around its might as it soars toward its target. Weiss, taken off guard by its sudden speed, drops his gun and dives to the right, away from the monster’s outstretched hand reaching for his fragile body. And I see the conclusion before it happens: Weiss is too slow, and his head disappears into the monster’s massive, brutal grip, and a single, powerful clenching of a fist crushes the poor man’s skull to pulp. I see it and—

  It doesn’t happen.

  Weiss’ right foot hits the ground and pivots at an angle that must snap his ankle at the joint, but the rest of his body follows the motion, fluid, almost dancer like, and the tip of his nose skirts the skin of the underside of the monster’s wrist, the fist a miss. He lands in a painful-looking tumble as the monster crashes to the ground, its heavily damaged legs buckling underneath it. With a panicked shriek, it topples forward, unable to support its own weight, and its already broken head smacks the cement guardrail so hard its skull explodes into a rain of purple glop.

  For thirty-three seconds, its headless form spasms, limbs flailing wildly, and then it collapses. Defeated. Dead.

  Dead as a dream can be.

  Beside me, in the SUV, Briggs lets out a relieved breath and loosens the fist he had clenched on his vest. He crawls out of the gap in the doorway and shuffles toward Weiss’ fallen body on the nearby asphalt. The sniper has rolled himself over, and his face is warped by eyes shut tight and a mouth set into a pained grimace. His ankle is out of place underneath his field gear, an entire combat boot shifted out of alignment at so severe an angle, I think a bone might have pierced right through his skin.

  But my mind is less occupied by his injury and more by the superhuman move the man pulled off. Humans don’t have the kind of reaction speed Weiss just displayed. Our brains are physically incapable of it. Our bodies far too slow. (As demonstrated by Castile’s devastating crash.) By the time our eyes process something moving as fast as the monster’s hand, our bodies no longer have enough time left to get the hell out of its way.

  For Weiss to have calculated exactly how to move in a way that avoided an untimely death in the spare fourth of a second he had before the monster landed on him…that’s not possible. Not in the real world anyway.

  And yet he did it. He figured out the precise angle to turn, ankle integrity be damned, to avoid the massive fist that would have killed him.

  Ric Weiss is the best sniper in the world for a reason, and that reason is not raw talent or skills built from years of practice. There’s something underneath his skin that isn’t quite natural, and I wonder if he has some sort of brain mod, some secret army tech that—

  That I don’t have time to dwell on.

  Because out of the murk emerges the scorpion monster, tail poised to strike down Weiss and Briggs, who’re sitting ducks before it. My heart skips a panicked beat, and then I surge forward, grab the handgun from the ground where Weiss dropped it, and whirl around to shoot at the eight hundred pounds of raw fury I know will rip me to bits long before I deal any damage with a forty-five. Behind me, Briggs yells, “Run, Adamend!” Before me, the monster shrieks and snarls. Around me, the sandstorm surges, grains biting at my skin.

  And from my left darts into view a figure clad in black. Who throws a grenade into the monster’s snarling mouth, barrels right into me, and drags me over the cement guardrail a second before said grenade explodes. Heat sears the air. Sand blasts away from the detonation zone. The monster is ripped to bloody bits, shredded from the waist up. It dies with a half-formed scream on its sharp-toothed lion lips.

  I land with a thump underneath my small savior, and she shields me from the blast of fire and smoke and the resulting rain of charred monster debris. It seems to go on forever, waves of ash and burned clumps of flesh coating my skin, clogging my nose, irritating my eyes. But finally, the heat wave cools and the smoke starts to clear, so I chance a peek at the woman on top of me.

  Dynara Chamberlain stares back with a less-than-amused expression. She turns her face and spits out a glob of ash-tinged saliva, then shakes her soot-covered hair before rolling off of me. “I should have known better than to send you off without an army of EDPA protection. No matter where you go, what you do, you always get your ass targeted by dream killers somehow, don’t you?” She stands and offers me a helping hand.

  Breathing heavily, I accept her help, let her pull my shaking body to its feet. The second I’m up, Briggs appears at the guardrail, Weiss leaning against him, to check to see if we’re all right. Beyond them, the scorpion monster is a pair of legs inside a small, smoking crater, half hidden by the orange haze. And beyond that is a huge group of EDPA agents. At least a dozen.

  The cavalry has arrived.

  The war is on.

  And…

  “Dynara, they weren’t targeting me. They were targeting Jin.” I spin around on my toes and peer off toward the edge of the storm, but nothing is visible past the outer fence of the floodway center. Anderson has already passed that point—he’s either closing in on the tunnels, or he’s already made it. My chest constricts. “Oh, Gods. We have to get him now.”

  The next thing I know, I’m running toward the floodway center, and everyone and their mother is screaming for me to come back. But I don’t. And I won’t. Because I can’t.

  I can’t let Jin Connors die. I owe him life.

  I owe him my life.

  Because he saved it, that day at Jericho.

  And if I don’t return the favor…

  There is no forgiveness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The edge of the sandstorm, winds at fifty plus miles per hour, tries to flay the skin off my bones. But through some miracle that might involve me falling and rolling my way forward, I pass the end of Lang’s dream and emerge onto solid land. Somewhere behind me, Dynara and Briggs’ yells are lost in the roaring storm, and when I glance over my shoulder, into the dome of orange, I can make out the shadow of another enormous dream monster approaching the crowd of agents gathered on the roadway. They don’t have the time to chase me down before the beast attacks.

  Just as well. I wouldn’t stop unless they stunned me with a VERA round.

  Ahead of me, the floodway center sprawls across the flatland, a circular depression in the ground three hundred feet wide and eighty feet deep. At the far end is the management building, a plain, gray square jutting up from the ring of cement, with a tinted window cut into its face. The management crew must be there now, sitting at their workstations, watching the impossible sandstorm unfold across the grassy field. In the distance, miles away, I see a hovercopter approaching—it’s either the IBI or the press.

  Ton
ight, there will be a story on the news about a freak accident involving unspecified experimental chemicals that resulted in what “looked like” a sandstorm on the Beltway. Tomorrow, there will be politicians calling for more rigid regulations for chemical research and development. The day after that, the conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork and claim the storm was a government test for a super-weapon. They will get half the points right and be so far off on the rest that no one with any rational sense will believe them. Poor bastards.

  But right now, in full view of the management staff of the floodway center, I climb the security fence that (thankfully) isn’t electrified, drop down onto the cement walkway on the other side, and race toward the narrow steps that lead down to the first level of the floodway ring, where eight massive tunnels spill out from various city sectors into the well below. The well, once it reaches a certain water level, is drained using massive pumps at its base, and the water is sent through very, very deep pipes to various exit points on the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay.

  As such, the well part of the system can kill you if you somehow get caught in it, so Anderson must have chosen one of the open sector tunnels. I sprint around the floodway ring, peering into each tunnel for any sign of Anderson or Jin. Water splashes on my shoes and pants, six to eight inches deep in some tunnels and always more frigid than the air. Runoff from the melting snow. It cascades over the edge of the ring and into the deep, deep well below. I make sure to stay far from the edge.

  Lungs burning, chest freezing, puffing and panting and stumbling from exertion, I reach the third tunnel, the fourth, the fifth, but in the dimness of the weak tunnel maintenance lights, I see no signs of the kidnapper and his victim, hear no footsteps treading through ankle-deep water. And for every tunnel I pass, the panic in my head beats harder and harder against my skull. Nausea grips my guts and twists them so tight I almost double over and vomit. But I press on, legs trembling, press on, abdomen cramping, press on because Jin Connors needs me.

  Finally—the seventh tunnel. I slip-slide to a stop at its wide-open mouth, the ceiling a good twenty feet above me, and listen. Two seconds pass and I hear again what made me stop: the sounds of a man grunting and gasping, water sloshing around moving legs. Found you, motherfucker.

  Without delay, I break off into a run that pushes my bruised and tired body farther, faster than I ever thought it could go—idly, I wonder if Dynara would be proud at my “physical fitness” progress—trying to catch up to Anderson before he reaches a fork in the floodway.

  The light of day fades around me, and my eyes take a minute to adjust. When they do, I spot him: the aging dean with Jin on his back a good hundred feet in front of me, moving at a snail’s pace through the shallow stream of water. With the hunched back and the uneven gait and the off-kilter tilting from side to side, I can tell the man has run out of steam, energy spent. But whoever gave him the mission to snatch Jin, whether it was Lang or Finn, must have struck fear into his shriveled heart, because though he sounds like he’s on the verge of a heart attack, he keeps moving forward regardless.

  My lungs suck in the deepest breaths they can manage, pressing painfully against ribs bruised in the crash, and I force my legs to move faster, faster until I’m covering five feet for every one of Anderson’s. At some point, when I’m closing the last thirty feet between us, he hears me coming and throws a terrified glance over his shoulder. Squealing, he attempts to quicken his pace and reach the upcoming fork before I catch him.

  Each smaller fork tunnel has a thick, steel emergency door usually controlled by the management computers, but for safety reasons, the doors are built with manual overrides. One on each side. So I can get the door open if Anderson closes it, but by the time it retracts, slow as all hell, he’ll be long gone, lost in the sprawling maze of tunnels that lead to the Lincoln Sector.

  Don’t let it happen, Adamend. Don’t you dare let him take Jin!

  Faster. Something sharp and hot like acid tears across my shin.

  Faster. My stomach convulses, and bile races up my throat.

  Faster. An electric jolt zips up my spine, into the back of my head, and for a second, I lose all feeling in my left arm.

  Faster still.

  Dirty water splashes my face and neck, soaks my clothing, and my feet half slip with every step on the layer of slime on the floor of the tunnel. But I near him, Anderson, liar, killer, fool. The gap between us lessens and lessens, ten feet, five feet, three. I’m an arm’s length away from him, and I reach out with a grasping hand, reach for the unconscious, bloodied Jin hanging off Anderson’s back, reach for the swaying arm of the man I owe more than I can give, reach for rescue, reach for vengeance. My fingers brush the skin of Jin’s wrist, and—

  The sandstorm roars into existence behind me, sweeping down the tunnel at eighty miles per hour. The sound, reverberating off the walls, strikes my brain like a dull-edged axe, cleaving a massive chunk out of the gray between my eardrums. Anderson, in front of me, falls first, tripping over his own two feet, startled. I barrel into his back, knocking Jin from his clutch, and the two of us tumble over one another into the sludgy water, a heap of flailing limbs. My head dips beneath the water’s surface, and it floods my nose and mouth, choking me. Anderson, his face near mine, swallows by accident and immediately vomits it up, and I struggle to clear his struggling body before I suffer the same fate.

  With a well-aimed kick to his pudgy gut, I free myself from the tangle and force my head above the surface, trying to gulp in air. But all I meet is a ceiling of sand so thick I cannot breathe, and the grains are moving so fast they cut my face to shreds on impact. I dive back beneath the water, screaming through my teeth, my eyes and nose and ears and lips on fire. And deep in my chest, my lungs burn, slowly running out of air. And somewhere nearby, Jin is unconscious in the water, too—drowning because he’s not awake to hold his breath.

  I curse Lang. Who is so talented an echo maker that she can extend the boundaries of a breach with so little practice. A move that, according to my lessons, is hard for even seasoned EDPA makers. I curse Anderson, who was so wrapped up in a promise of money that he actually obeyed a command to try and kidnap another person, an effort for which he was so ill suited that it resulted in this death trap. I curse Finn for his plots and Castile for her avoidable demise. I curse Briggs and Dynara and the IBI and EDPA and every single person involved in this disaster that will likely kill me in the next couple of minutes.

  Lastly, I curse myself.

  Adam Adamend. So-called genius. Hapless fuckup.

  Adam Adamend. Who has the intelligence and the power to fix this situation.

  Adam Adamend. Class Five echo maker.

  Adam Adamend. Who now has the choice between going down without a fight or…

  I’ve never been one for glory. Only justice.

  But in this case, those two are deeply intertwined.

  So I kick off from the bottom of the tunnel, break the water, rise to my knees in the wicked, violent sandstorm, and crawl to the floodway wall. Where I proceed to bash my head so hard against the cement that my brain shorts out on impact and my consciousness bleeds away into the muck.

  A little trick I learned from a failed museum raid.

  To get inside a dream.

  * * *

  According to my EDPA textbooks, there are three cardinal sins of echo-making.

  The first is falling off the edge of a dream. Never get yourself into any situation that could risk such a fall, or else you’ll end up like Brennian, his mind doomed to a dark, desolate purgatory for all time while his body sits rotting in Arlington. The second is overextending your dream creation capabilities to the point where you become incapable of maintaining your echo content stability; this is what Chelsea Lang is risking now by expanding the boundaries of a dream that is already breached. If she keeps widening the circumference of her dream space, she’ll eventually lose control and cause a total collapse.

  The third cardinal sin is the rare
st of them all: overlapping two breached echoes. It rarely happens in a “natural” environment because different makers’ echoes repel one another like magnets of the same charge. But if you force it hard enough, you can indeed fit your breached echo into the same reality space as another maker’s—and doing so can have disastrous consequences on the segment of reality involved. Consequences up to and including disintegration of real-world matter, temporal-spacial destabilization, and, of course, death.

  So imagine my surprise when, instead of crossing into Lang’s dream like I did at the failed museum raid, I end up in my own, small echo, already breached, in the middle of Lang’s significantly larger dream space. At first, I think my attempt to cross failed altogether, because I try to control the sand swirling around me but can’t. Then I look down and see my body sitting against the wall, face maimed by the vicious storm, blood streaming, and I realize that, no, I didn’t fail entirely. I succeeded in breaking a rule held so sacred by EDPA agents that I’m probably going to be roasted alive on a spit at the end of the day.

  First I cross when sedated, something Dynara claims shouldn’t be possible.

  Then I overlap a breach, something that shouldn’t happen without intention.

  I’ve always held myself as a bit of a rule exception, but this is fucking ridiculous.

  If I’m not in Lang’s dream, I can’t manipulate her content. I can only create my own content and use it to combat hers.

  But I have no time to wake myself up and try to cross again. Ten feet away from me, Jin is floating face down in the floodway water, and fifty feet in the opposite direction, still wearing crimson red, Chelsea Lang is flying toward me, using her winds to hold her aloft. The sand clears around her as she approaches, giving me full view of the dark anger boiling in her face. Either I defend myself here and now with every ounce of dream power I have, or I die at Lang’s hands when she suffocates me with sand.