Ever since the RSA had lost the battle in the Pacific, the military had doubled their ground troops, making their presence felt in every corner of New Vegas. The brass was on edge, jittery, and dangerous, looking for enemies in every shadow, in every movement. The raids on the marked were more prevalent, and there was no longer any pretense about hospitals or a cure. The white priests were even more visible than before, led by their High Priestess, a madwoman who called herself Lady Algeana Penthos, goddess of pain and suffering. There was no safe harbor for anyone marked by magic. They were considered dangerous, enemies of the state, and anyone caught harboring one would suffer the same fate—there were murmurs that even the military was in collusion with the Lady to get rid of them all. All the more reason to get out of the RSA, out of the crossfire, Wes thought. But where would he go? Where would he live? What kind of life could he dream about for him and his friends on this frozen wasteland of a planet? The time for dreams was long past.
The elevator shot up toward the skyway, to the casinos that floated high above the sidewalks, and it was easy to see that the lights of New Vegas glittered less brightly these days. Two casinos had gone dark this month, one the month before. The big three remained—the Loss, the Apple, and Mark Antony’s Forum—along with a few others, but if the downslide continued, the Strip would be dark in a year. An unexpected wave of nostalgia hit Wes. The city’s descent had been quick. The diamond in the ice desert was the RSA’s last playground, but lately that playground had lost its luster, the bubble was cracking, the snow globe was about to collapse. New Vegas, the city that had shrugged its sequined shoulder at the apocalypse, was about to turn off the lights. He looked down at the lonely black slabs, the abandoned casinos looming like dead trees over the strip. The world was ending, and Vegas had staved off the inevitable for as long as it could, but the End had come to cash in its chips.
Wes only wished he could do the same.
Down below, a group of people were assembling in the middle of the icy sidewalk. Wes held his breath as his phone confirmed what he already suspected. The text read: LS VGS BLVD + L FLMNGO. ZERO HR. A protest mob. He’d never heard of anyone protesting anything in the RSA before. No one would have dared.
But that was before 12/12, before the drakon, before Nat. Wes hated the nickname the nets had given the battle, as if it were a tragedy, when only drones had been destroyed. Rumors of what happened on the ocean had spread through the RSA like a swift and wild winter breeze. The soldiers who’d lived to tell the tale were new recruits whom the talking heads on the nets had tried to cast as a group of deluded children spinning stories, perhaps even a Xian conspiracy. Even so, the relentless lore of the mighty fire-breathing creature was becoming popular around the globe. In the outlaw territories, they feared the hydra, in New Pangaea, the tarakona, and its rider was named a demon, a devil, a witch, a black drau. Old Vegas hands had dubbed the creature the Black Ace, and its image was everywhere in the city, its serpentine silhouette appearing on T-shirts and graffitied on walls, along with the words THE BLUE IS REAL! THE MONSTER IS REAL! DOWN WITH THE RSA!
People were starting to believe the rumors that the thrillers who haunted Garbage Country weren’t suffering from failed government experiments but were dying from a magical disease. Which meant magic was real and the Blue was real.
Of course the Blue was real. So was the Monster, if you wanted to call it that, though having seen it, Wes wasn’t certain he would. He just wished he could be as certain of everything else he had witnessed, and he wondered again about the vision he had experienced that afternoon, if Nat had truly seen him as he had seen her. He clung to that memory and to the hope that one day he would make good on his other promise.
I’ll come back for you. This isn’t the end for us.
Wes flinched every time he played the words back in his mind. They were almost too painful to think about, even for him. He told himself they were true. He needed to believe they were. As real as the drakon and the stories and the Blue itself.
The Blue and the girl who belongs to it.
He’d left Nat to find his sister, to answer a question that had occupied him for nearly a decade: Where was Eliza? What happened on the night she disappeared?
Did Shakes have the answer to that question at last?
The elevator chimed, the music faded, and the doors opened to a blast of cold air. He’d reached his destination. The thirty-second floor. A girl in a slim-fitting, whole-body heat suit stood at the door. She was wearing one of the new ones, with the fancy hoods, the bootstraps, and the matching balaclava that left only her eyes visible. Her eyebrows were tattooed pink and her eyelids were covered with gold glitter and swooping waves of blue eyeliner. “Welcome to Ice. Are you on the list?” she said automatically, checking the tablet she held.
He coughed and she looked up at him. “Oh, hey, Wes.”
“Nela,” he said, letting her press her cheeks against his. “How are you, gorgeous?” He winked.
“How am I gorgeous? How am I not gorgeous?” His friend Nela smirked. She was the hostess at Ice, and he’d shared many a can of Nutri with her and her girlfriend, the equally stunning Vixen, while waiting for Shakes to finish his shift.
“He’s over there,” she said, pointing to the empty portion of the bar where a familiar solitary figure was clearing snow from the glass floor. “Seems more cheerful than usual, and that’s saying a lot.”
Wes nodded. “Any crazy stories tonight?” Like him, Nela was a New Vegas native and had juicy anecdotes about growing up among the gamblers and the gangsters. Last week she told him how she’d heard about a pair of kids who’d jumped off the ice bridge with parachutes strapped to their backs. One of the packs hadn’t deployed, but the boy had been lucky enough to land on his friend’s chute and had made it to the ground unharmed. That friend had landed beneath him and lost a mouthful of teeth. That was the price of friendship in a city like theirs.
“Not yet but the night is young.” Nela smiled, showing her gold grill.
“Isn’t it ever?” Wes pinched the edge of her heat suit playfully.
She batted him away.
Wes smiled and pushed through the crowd in the direction she’d indicated. Guys like him couldn’t get into a place like Ice unless they knew someone important or, better yet, were friendly with the ice princesses at the door. Like all decent Vegas hotspots, it was guarded by beauteous young things who knew every mover and shaker in the frozen city—along with whatever it was that happened to be moving and shaking. If they wanted to, they could tell you the secrets of the universe. But in general, they were as cold as their suits were warm. Only Nela had ever shown him anything like affection, and Wes was careful not to abuse it.
The all-glass bridge bar was the hottest place around. Ice stretched across the Sky Strip, joining a pair of casinos that afforded the best views in town. Patrons toasted with cocktails as they floated three hundred feet in the air, with nothing beneath their feet but an inch of glass. Heat suits and heat lamps kept the clients warm, but they couldn’t keep the snow from collecting on the bridge, so the bar had half a dozen full-time employees tasked with shoveling snow from the floor. Their official job title was “snow manager,” a moniker that never failed to make Wes chuckle, and one he constantly teased Shakes about.
Shakes spotted him and nodded in greeting, but continued to work, clearing the snow from a glass rail and tossing it to the sidewalks below.
Wes wanted to barrage him with questions but decided to play it as cool as his friend was acting. “Hey, man, how’s the snow?” he asked, sliding up next to his friend.
“Cold,” Shakes said, shivering in his cheap down jacket. Flaky crystals dotted his beard and eyelashes. The two of them were the only ones on the bridge not wearing heat suits or heat vests.
“But you’re managing?” Wes tried to wink at his friend, but his eyelashes stuck together.
Shakes sigh
ed. He looked far from the young, scrappy recruit Wes had met in Texas when they were both new recruits. He was thinner now, his neat goatee scruffy, and his clothes threadbare. The heavy lines on his face made it look like he hadn’t smiled in a month. Wes knew the source of his friend’s unhappiness, but there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing either of them could do.
“Pick up a shovel and help out, will ya?” Shakes groused. “If you can manage that.”
“You know I’m not management material.” All the same, Wes picked up a trowel and chipped at the ice. “So, about your text . . .”
“Give me a minute, can’t be seen talking to customers, or lowlifes like you,” said Shakes with a wan smile. “My shift ends in fifteen.”
Wes nodded and hacked at the snow that had clumped on the side of the bar, sending it flying. Four months and now he had to wait another fifteen minutes.
He’d been working side by side with Shakes for a while when the sound of sirens filled the air. A helicopter hovered between the two towers, spraying snow and ice in every direction. A blinking casino sign failed as the sound of a car crash echoed in the distance. A portion of the Strip suddenly went dark, just as a large crowd appeared in the middle of the street. They could be anybody—casino workers, military, vets, tourists.
Wes checked his watch. It was midnight.
The protest was on.
The crowd didn’t say a word, didn’t scream slogans, didn’t hold signs; they were a silent, moving, amorphous shape. On cue, they stopped, and when they did, the people clustered on the sidewalks and up on the sky bridges all gasped. Wes pushed closer to the bridge to see.
The mob had formed the shape of some sort of beast, only with short arms and legs that bent down the street, and a longer shape trailing down the Strip after it.
Now he could make out shadowy larger protrusions on either side, near the vacant buildings, almost as if they were . . .
Wings.
A drakon.
It was unmistakable, now that he saw it all at once, with its long body and heavy tail. The people who formed its mouth released a cloud of red dye that covered the snow in scarlet. Without making a sound, they made their message heard:
Down with the RSA!
We believe in the Blue!
The monster is real!
Wes snapped a picture and hurriedly put away his phone as the slick, smug patrons of Ice gathered by the rails to watch the commotion. But the protesters dispersed just as quickly as they’d appeared, blending back into the crowds, shedding coats and hats and swapping jackets and wigs to evade the security cameras. The entire protest lasted for just a heartbeat, then it was gone, swallowed by masses and the snow, and when the military police arrived, there was nothing to see but a plume of red in the snow, no one to arrest, as if nothing had happened at all.
Except, of course, that it had. Tomorrow, images from the protest would go viral on the nets, and similar protest mobs would spontaneously gather in streets all over the world.
Something had happened because something was happening. Something is happening, Wes thought. The idea occupied him as he continued shoveling his part of the bridge until Shakes tapped him on the shoulder to indicate they were done. They picked up glasses of Nutri from the bar and found an empty table. Underneath their feet, through the glass, and down thirty-two stories, they could see more patrol cars arrive. Meanwhile, the bar’s heat lamps melted the icicles on the top of the rails, sending pellets of warm rain falling onto their faces.
Shakes took a big gulp from his drink and avoided Wes’s eyes.
A group of kids jostled their table, spilling his drink. Wes ran his fingers through his thick brown hair in annoyance.
“Icebags,” Shakes muttered as the kids shuffled past.
“All right, stop messing around,” Wes said.
“What are you talking about?” Shakes looked anxious.
“You said you found Eliza. So where is she?” Wes asked, the light catching his face, illuminating a stubbled chin and chestnut bangs. “Come on, man.”
“Might not be anything.” Shakes scratched his goatee. “Can’t be sure.” He shrugged.
“Try me,” Wes said, taking the drink out of Shakes’s hand.
He sighed. “I mean, the guy who gave me the intel makes you look like a rocket scientist and me look like a, a—you know . . .” Shakes couldn’t even think of the right word.
“An honest person?”
Finally, and probably only to get back his drink, Shakes gave it up: One of his contacts, a friend who knew Wes and Shakes were searching for Eliza, had found her name on a list of prisoners being held in a facility in El Dorado, a domed city floating on what was once the Great Salt Lake.
“El Kiss-My-Golden Dorado.” Shakes finally spat it out. “That’s all I got.”
Wes exhaled. Thank god. His sister was alive, and they finally knew where she was. El Dorado was a haul, but he could get there in a day; he just had to find some wheels.
“You boys want anything?” a waitress asked, stopping by their table, cocking an eyebrow and pursing her lips. She wore long golden blond extensions, a look they were calling “sylph-style.”
Shakes was about to demur when Wes nodded to his friend. “Yeah. But not here.”
The waitress rolled her eyes, moving on.
Wes stood up. “Come on, let’s get something to eat. I got paid today.” He’d waste his entire paycheck if they had more rounds of Nutri at Ice, and even Nela couldn’t front them that much. “We gotta celebrate.”
But Shakes didn’t move and his frown deepened.
Wes slapped his friend on the shoulder. In happier times the two often sparred, trading punches as easily as they exchanged quips, but when he slugged Shakes, the boy didn’t move, he didn’t even respond. “What is it?” he asked.
“About Eliza,” Shakes said, not quite meeting Wes’s eyes again.
“What’s with all the drama?” Wes said. “El Dorado, I got it. We covered this already.”
Shakes bowed his head. “The list she was on that my friend got. It was part of a job.” When he saw the dark look on Wes’s face, he continued hurriedly. “You know the type—high paying, off the books, like the stuff we used to get. He didn’t take the gig, but someone else will . . .” He trailed off.
“A job?” Wes stared at him in disbelief.
Shakes shrugged.
“A job job? Like, one of our old ones?” Wes could feel the adrenaline race through his body. They had been mercenaries once, but they never took those gigs anymore. It was why Shakes was working as a snow janitor and Wes was racing cars to lose. Which basically made him a professional loser, a thought that wasn’t lost on him. Still, it was worth it, to get out of the work they used to do.
“You’re sure?”
“Looks that way.”
“Go on,” Wes said, his voice flat and toneless.
“Eliza’s on a transfer list. They’re moving her out to the Red City. Which can only mean they’re done with her and her next stop’s the flesh markets where she’ll most likely be sold to the temple of the white priests. And you know what they do there: the bone charms, the unguents made from the essence of the marked, the wigs woven from sylph hair. We don’t have much time. The brass are eager to keep their hands clean on this one, so they’re looking for an outside contractor. Pretty sure they would’ve found someone to take it by now. I mean, with that kind of payout.”
Shakes sounded as miserable as Wes felt, but he kept going. “Not everyone’s a hero.”
Chapter 5
HER HEART HEAVY AND HER ARMOR still smoking from the battle, Nat left her buried drakon and stomped through the mud toward the archway of trees that marked the gate. Pilgrims called it the Blue, but its true name was Vallonis. As Nat slipped through the gate of Afal, she entered a world where the breeze was sweet as hone
y, the air ripe with the scent of blossoms. Just like the first time, she was overwhelmed by the brightness of everything around her. The sun was so strong that she had to shield her eyes from the glare. Here, the sky was an eternal, endless cerulean, nothing like the perpetual gray and fog of New Vegas. Vallonis glowed with color in every soft and velvety leaf, every glorious flower, every mossy rock and pebble. It looked like pictures from the net archives, of the times before the Big Freeze.
It was paradise, and today, for the very first time, it meant nothing. How could it? Paradise bought with the blood of my own. Her drakon was gone; it could be dying. And I am alone.
The words repeated themselves on an endless loop as she walked. She hadn’t gone far when a shadow fell across the forest floor.
Faix.
You are alone, he sent. Sylphs rarely bothered to communicate with spoken word. Where is Mainas?
“In the ground,” she replied. Unlike the drakon’s, Faix’s voice in her head was very much an other, and she resisted his ability to speak directly into her consciousness.
The sylph raised a pale eyebrow. Faix was the first person she had met in Vallonis and was a member of its ruling council. He had welcomed her in the name of Queen Nineveh, the immortal mother of all the marked. Faix of the Green Island was the Queen’s trusted adviser, an ageless sylph, the most beautiful boy she had ever seen. Like Liannan, he was unnaturally tall and thin, with iridescent eyes and hair the color of starlight that fell to his shoulders. Faix was the one who had gifted her with armor, who sent her on patrols, who told her which gate was under attack. He was also the one teaching her how to use her newfound power. She should really be used to him by now, but each time she met him was like the first—she was taken aback by his beauty, by the sound of his silky soft voice in her mind. Usually.
Just not today.
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