by Loren Rhoads
Jaden exchanged a glance with Jarad. His twin had always wanted only that: to take Jain’s place.
Jaden could only picture their brother standing proudly atop the tower with a noose around his neck. Jain had been shamed in a way he would never be able to survive. A similar fate awaited any of them who disappointed their father now.
CHAPTER 17
Before long, five boys converged on Raena’s rooftop. Two came from the stairway she’d taken to the roof. The other three came roaring over the walls with jetpacks on their backs. Each one was armed with a stun staff.
The meter and a half long staves were tipped with two sparking prongs. The butt was capped with a durable nonconductive porcelain, the same material from which Ariel’s family used to make their rifle stocks. The staves’ butt ends were heavy enough that they could be used as bludgeons.
They wanted to take her alive. She shook her head.
Raena shot the boy who’d risen directly into her sight. His hand slipped from his jetpack controls. He rocketed upward to smack hard against the dome. The rockets continued to roar, bashing him upward like a fly against a windowpane. Raena aimed carefully; one missed shot might shatter the aged dome and drown them all. She fired again and pierced one of the rocket tanks.
Before she saw the boy fall, she heard a staff whistling toward her. She dropped to the rooftop and rolled.
All the weaponry she was carrying slowed down her somersault and made her awkward. Another staff came plummeting down toward where she lay. She quickly reversed her hold on the rifle and caught the staff against her stock. The rifle’s impact-resistant butt absorbed the blow, but the scope might be rattled enough to make the gun useless.
She kicked upward, flipping onto her feet. That put her within striking distance of one of the boys who’d come through the door.
Raena turned her back to him, stepped inside his reach, and pulled his staff across her chest. He had the staff strapped to his right wrist so that she couldn’t pull it free as planned. Problematic.
Then the others attacked, three on two. She didn’t expect any of them to pull their blows just to protect the brother trapped behind her.
The fight was textbook, attack and parry. She could have fought it in her sleep. And yet these were Jonan’s sons. She had expected better of them. Had they ever faced a real opponent, one not bound to them by blood or payroll? She doubted they’d ever beaten their father with moves like this.
In fact, the boy at her back was enjoying his opportunity to press up against a real woman all too much. He hadn’t yet realized that if he stepped back from the fight, he could draw the Stinger on her left thigh with his off-hand. She wanted to get out of his way before the strategy filtered past his hormones.
Unfortunately, the three boys closing in on her hadn’t given her enough room to regroup. The hero at her back wasn’t giving any ground. Finally, she was able to dodge left, dragging his arm into the position recently vacated by the staff they were both holding. When the next blow came, his arm caught it. Raena heard him groan as the bone shattered.
She continued on around, putting the injured boy between her and the attackers. She dropped her hold on the staff and left him to fend for himself. That gave her a second to draw the Stinger. As she came around, she opened fire at point-blank range.
The boys never stood a chance. She wondered if Jonan had ordered them to their deaths, or if they’d volunteered. Or if they’d been intentionally betrayed by Jain.
She looked up to where Jain stood on the ledge, but without the rifle’s scope, he was too far away for her to read his face. While she watched, he deliberately stepped forward off his platform.
The rope had very little slack to it. His feet scrabbled against the stone, but they didn’t regain purchase. Raena watched until he’d stopped kicking. She wished there had been another way for Jain, but she still couldn’t imagine what it might have been.
She looked down at the dead boys in front of her. The oldest pair were maybe nineteen. The youngest twins seemed no more than ten. Children. She tried to feel something for them. She had never known a mirror like that, nor the sense of something she loved growing inside her body, an autonomous possession that would adore her as the god who had created it. Children meant nothing special to her.
Now Thallian’s sons were dead. She had destroyed him in all his reflections: nine clones gone, all the creatures in the vats contaminated, and no mirrors left.
No one else came for her. Apparently, she was going to have to hunt Jonan down herself. She left the rifle and took one of the jetpacks. It would be a faster way down than taking all those stairs.
* * *
Because Raena was flying, she was high enough in the air to see the cloning laboratories explode. All of that dome’s air suddenly bubbled upward.
She paused to watch, immensely surprised to find someone had the courage to fight on her side. She wondered who it could be. If she’d counted the boys correctly, and if Jimi’s photo had contained them all, there should be none left to betray their father. Was her assistant one of Jonan’s brothers? Someone from the Arbiter who’d stayed behind when the city was evacuated?
The ocean poured in through the broken dome to smother the fire raging inside the complex. Goosebumps shivered over Raena’s skin and she laughed at her own horror. At least that kind of death was quick.
Anyway, she’d seen the security precautions between the domes and knew she was safe here near the castle. The breach of one dome didn’t necessarily threaten the others. Still, the destruction, when that dome cracked, rained in inescapably fast. The breather she’d packed in her rucksack would give her a scant moment to get out of the crush and cold of the water. Survival was an outside possibility. She could never swim to the surface before the pressure or the leviathans killed her.
While she tried to slow her racing heart, another explosion split the dome covering the city. Then the vacant dome beside it collapsed, followed by others farther away, the farms and factories, washing away everything the Thallians built under the sea. Somebody meant to leave them with nothing. Who?
Raena wondered if Jonan was standing somewhere at a high window, watching the devastation of his kingdom. Or had he ordered it himself, to drive her toward him?
She took the breather from her bag and looped it over her head to dangle around her throat. Then she used the jet pack to change her trajectory to aim for the shipyard. Her cursory examination earlier had shown that all the ships had been adapted for travel underwater as well as through atmosphere and into space. She had an escape vehicle picked out. Maybe it was time to make sure it was gassed up and ready to go.
* * *
Sickened, Merin watched the devastation, too. His first thought was to blame the girl, but then he saw how she panicked and fled toward the shipyard. She hadn’t set these explosions. The possibility of being trapped underwater terrified her.
Good. He could work with that.
At full speed, he cut his rockets. As he dropped, he made no sound. His feet caught her hard in the small of the back, but his angle was slightly off and he didn’t snap her spine. Still, he had no doubt that it hurt enough to get her attention.
She rolled into a little ball—and she was small enough that it was a very little ball—then pulled out in time to kick off the upper lip of the security wall. She’d cut her own rockets, so she wasn’t fighting their thrust.
Merin launched himself at her again. He body-slammed her into the dome, but she squirmed away before he could get a hold on her. Her size made her tricky. He was used to pulling back when fighting the younger boys. Jonan had approved of injuring them, but killing them would have crossed the line. Merin didn’t want to kill this girl either, although she deserved it. Still, he did want it to hurt as he incapacitated her.
She ran along the curved surface of the dome gingerly, as if she worried how much pressure it could withstand from within. Even with those ludicrous heels, it wasn’t a concern. The domes were built
to withstand a lot of abuse, if not explosives. He’d deal with the saboteur as soon as he had the girl subdued.
Merin drew his pistol, but he didn’t want to fire on her while she kept close to the dome. She spun toward him, still moving fast, and drew her own sidearm. It seemed to be one of the Stingers from Revan’s transport. As she ran toward him, she aimed in his direction.
Merin hit his rockets and blasted toward her. She dropped the Stinger, wiping her left hand along the top of her boot. When he hit her, she hadn’t quite gotten the knife up. It glanced off his jetpack harness and jammed into one of his ribs.
She was watching him, not her hands, so she got her right arm up under his and forced his pistol across his body, aiming straight into the dome. Then she turned across him, jabbing the knife into his back, missing a kidney by sheerest luck.
Merin hit his rockets, flying backwards hard and fast. He drove her into the parapet, felt the breath whoosh out of her past his ear. She’d angled the knife, so the impact stabbed it into the kidney she’d missed before. The pain sent a white jolt throughout his body.
She left the blade in place, pinned between their bodies. Her left leg wound around his hips. She pulled another knife from her other boot.
Merin slammed his head back, hoping to break her nose or crush her skull—anything to make the pain in his back stop. She was turned awkwardly on his back to avoid the hot jets of his rockets, so that his skull missed hers. His head snapped back, baring his adam’s apple. Very obligingly, Raena grabbed hold of his graying hair and slit his throat.
* * *
Raena reached around the dead man’s body and turned off his jetpack. His body suddenly took on its full weight. She let it drop.
Blood soaked her legs and slicked her arm, cooling rapidly. She used her jetpack to ease herself down to the ground. Nothing else had exploded. Had the demolition simply been intended to chase any stragglers into the castle dome? Or to erase anyone who’d stayed behind?
Nothing moved. The only sounds she could hear were regular mechanical noises—the air exchangers humming, water circulating in the pipes, the heaters and lights making life livable kilometers below the surface of the sea—sounds that she’d tuned out because she’d heard them since her arrival. Raena felt as if she was already walking through a ghost town.
Maybe Thallian, like Jain, had chosen to take his own life, rather than face the loss of everything he loved. She needed to see his corpse to make certain. She wondered if she would feel relieved or disappointed to be cheated of her victory.
Something boomed nearby. A projectile slammed into her shoulder, knocking her off her feet. The pain was surprising, but manageable. There were doorways around her, but no sense in taking cover until she knew where the sniper hid. She got to her feet and leaned forward into a run, trying to make herself harder to hit.
Pure electricity jolted through her, unstringing her limbs. She missed a step and toppled forward, unable to even get her arms out in front of her. Her head crashed against the pavement. Her teeth closed on her tongue. She lay in the dust convulsing, trying to force her hand upward to dig the electric bullet out of her shoulder. No. It couldn’t happen like this. She was so close to accomplishing everything she’d hoped for, everything she’d lived for. She couldn’t go down like this.
After an excruciatingly long time, a pair of lovingly polished black leather boots stepped into her field of vision.
“At last,” Thallian purred. “Welcome home, my dear.”
Raena felt unstoppable tears spill from her eyes. Thallian knelt beside her, rapt and adoring. He reached out to wipe a tear from her cheek like he was examining a diamond. She noticed he’d replaced his velvet gloves with rubber.
“What have you done to your hair?” he growled. “You had such lovely hair. I suppose it will grow back before too long.” He stroked her head, setting off a chain of sparks across her scalp. That made him smile.
“Don’t try to speak, my love. The charge is enough to disrupt your muscle control, as no doubt you’ve noticed, and it will garble your speech. Wait and tell me later. We’ll have eternity to catch up.”
He hauled her onto an anti-grav cart, which was also shielded by a rubber mat. The convulsions weren’t strenuous enough to beat her up too much, but the constant jerking and twitching made her ache. Black spots flickered at the edges of her vision. She wondered how much blood she was losing.
As if reading her mind, Jonan clucked and stuffed gauze into the wound. That pain was alarming, white and sharp. It roused her from her swoon, for all the good that did her.
Where was her accomplice now? If someone was going to go to all the trouble of blowing up the city for her, the least they could do is rescue her from this madman.
Thallian escorted the cart as if it was some sort of palanquin and she some sort of returning queen. “The family can’t wait to meet you,” he promised.
There were more of them? Raena couldn’t even shiver at the thought. Her tongue throbbed where she continued to bite it. Blood drooled from her mouth.
“Of course, we’ll have to clean you up before I present you,” he said. “At least, we’ll have to see to your bleeding. But then, not all of that blood is yours, is it? Does any of it belong to my sons, or is it all Merin’s?”
He looked at her as if expecting an answer. Raena didn’t even attempt to respond. It didn’t matter. Thallian’s thoughts zoomed off in a different direction and he said, “I have such a dress for you! It was my wife’s.”
He paused, disturbed by some fleeting thought. When he continued, he was gazing off into the hallways of the castle. “It was her bridal dress. When I returned home after the War, I married her.” His laughter echoed from the metal walls. There was a brittle ring to it. “I thought I’d never see you again. I thought I could replace you. I hope you will forgive my lack of fidelity."
On one level, Raena was relieved that he’d taken away her ability to converse. His madness made him much less fearsome. Part of Thallian’s power over her had been that he had always set up every experience so that he could test and control her responses. He had been fascinated by taking her apart psychologically, stymied only by her silence. Eventually, he’d decided that the silence was a result of her damage rather than the source of her strength.
But where was Thallian’s wife? His rant stumbled when it came to her. Interesting. Raena felt nothing but pity for the poor creature.
“Here we are,” Thallian announced as he nudged the cart into a room near the bottom of the castle. Raena felt her eyes widen as she realized it was kitted out as an operating room. Jonan smiled down at her, displaying his pointed teeth. “This is Dr. Poe. He’s been with the family for generations.”
The antique medical robot rolled toward her, a scalpel upraised.
“He’s going to remove my bullet and suture your wound.” Thallian raised a mask connected by a hose to a canister of some kind. He held it above her face. Raena could smell the anesthetic. Normally, she would be able to control her breathing, but with the electrical interference jamming her nervous system, she had no defense. She couldn’t even huff the drug and pray it put her out forever.
* * *
When she woke, she was confined in a dress built like a steel cage. Her arms were forced behind her, bound from elbow to wrist in cold metal. Her shoulders were bare, so she could see the needlessly baroque dressing taped over her shoulder wound. Below that, from bosom to ankle, she was encased in metal. Perhaps Madame Thallian had been able to move in her bridal gown, but Raena was locked in place. Her feet didn’t even touch the floor.
Before her stretched a banquet table. Arranged around it were the Thallians she had killed: the brother she’d stabbed in the back, a scorched cripple in an ornate rolling chair, and an empty place for Revan, whose anonymous corpse lingered unclaimed on Kai. Jain, with his broken neck, was propped up close to hand. Two charred boys were too fragile to be uncurled from their death poses. Toward the outer ends of the table slumpe
d the young boys she’d shot on the rooftop. She noticed there was no empty place for Jimi. Perhaps he’d already been disowned. There was no vacancy for the wife either.
“My family,” Thallian announced proudly. “They’re thrilled to have you become a part of us.”
He wore an elegant suit of black velvet, embroidered with ropes and coils of gold. It clung to his body like a second skin, revealing how obsessively he had preserved himself beneath the sea.
Raena knew from the burning between her thighs that he’d raped her while she was unconscious on the operating table. After quickly assessing whether there were any significant injuries, she locked her disgust down. This was just one more reason to kill him as soon as she was able.
Thallian turned slowly in a circle, eyebrows stitched together in puzzlement. “I don’t know where the servants have gone. I ordered a feast in your honor.”
“I’m sorry, my lord.” A woman scurried into the room. “There’s only me left.”
“Eilif,” he purred. Raena’s hackles raised at the sound. Thallian grabbed the woman’s arm and dragged her closer to where Raena stood imprisoned. “This is my wife,” he said.
Raena couldn’t find words to express her sympathy, so she merely nodded.
It didn’t matter. Thallian’s wife didn’t raise her head to see. “I brought some of your father’s wine to celebrate,” Eilif said. She lifted a sealed bottle in her right hand. Her other hand clutched two glasses and a bottle opener.
“No glass for you?” Thallian wondered. “Don’t you want to toast my new bride?”
“I—”
“No matter,” he said, cutting her off. He took the bottle and proceeded to draw its cork. Eilif presented the glasses, which were thin as paper and glowed with a sheen like the surface of a soap bubble. Thallian poured generous glassfuls. He handed one to Eilif, kept the other, and stepped back to gaze at Raena.
