Eve of Destruction

by C. E. Stalbaum

  Glenn seemed to freeze solid. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I was taking a nap, and when I woke up after the explosion she was gone.”

  Glenn grimaced and turned to Shaedra. “Can you sense her nearby?”

  Shaedra half-closed her eyes like she was going into a trance. “Too many people. I can’t pick her out of a crowd like that.”

  “Well, where in the void is she then?” Zach snapped. “Where would she possibly go?”

  The Vakari pushed past him and stepped out onto the balcony. Her eyes narrowed as she swept them back and forth across the alleyway. “She made a choice.”

  “And just what is that supposed to mean?”

  Danev frowned. “You don’t mean…”

  “She’s gone after Chaval,” Shaedra said.

  “What?” Zach and Glenn blurted out almost simultaneously.

  “She’s convinced it’s the only way to end this—the only way to protect the people she cares about.”

  Zach stepped closer to her, his hands balled into fists. “What did you do? What did you tell her?”

  Shaedra grunted and turned towards him, but for once her face lacked its omnipresent sneer. “I showed her how to dig inside herself and trigger her power,” she said softly. “I showed her how to confront it.”

  “You did what?” Glenn hissed. The ice in his glare could have frozen even a Highlander solid.

  Shaedra sighed. “She’s been running away from it all week. Denial doesn’t solve anything—in fact, it usually makes it worse. She needed to face the truth of what she was—what she is—and learn to control it.”

  “And you made this decision all by yourself?” Glenn pressed, taking a single, menacing step forward. Even Danev found himself instinctively stepping backwards.

  “She’s been spouting that poison ever since she showed up,” Zach snarled. “I figured it was your idea.”

  “Eve didn’t need all of you trying to coddle her,” Shaedra snapped back, drawing herself up to her full, impressive height. “If you were going to do that, you might as well have locked her away somewhere like the monster you’re afraid she’ll become—or just killed her. This way, at least she gets to make that choice…and you get to find out if she really is worth protecting.”

  “I told you to keep her safe,” Glenn whispered coldly, taking another step forward. “I told you not to interfere.”

  “I know exactly what you said. I also know—”

  The words died on her lips as she froze in place, her arms crushing against her sides. The air rumbled, but this time there was no distant explosion sending shockwaves across the city. There was only a magister and his power, summoned without even the slightest gesture.

  “If she comes to any harm because of you…” Glenn threatened. His voice died off as he shook his head.

  “Glenn, this isn’t helping,” Jean whispered, placing her hand on his arm. “She’s still out there somewhere, and we have to find her.”

  He kept his eyes locked on Shaedra, and she stared right back at him. Glowing blue blood had begun to seep from her nose, and Danev wondered if it was even possible to kill a Vakari this way. He knew that some magi had the ability to manipulate gravity to vault themselves upward or even move objects, but to actually weave it in such a way as to physically crush someone…that he had never seen in person.

  And it made him wonder—or perhaps dread—what other tricks his friend had learned in his years with the Enclave.

  Finally the rumbling stopped and Shaedra let out a gasp of air. She wiped the back of her hand across her nose to gather up the blood.

  “If you’re finished, your Sister friend is right,” she spat. “We know exactly where Eve is—it’s just a matter of getting there before the Enclave reduces the building to rubble.”

  Zach glanced between Glenn and Shaedra, and Danev had the distinct impression that the young man was trying to decide who he should trust more....or less. His eyes finally stopped on the Vakari.

  “You think she was actually going there to confront him? To kill him?” he asked.

  “Or die in the process,” Shaedra said. “Either way, she’s able to keep you safe.”

  “Me?”

  She snorted. “Silly boy. She’s a teenage girl who’s in love. Who do you think she’s most worried about hurting in all of this?”

  Zach started to reply, but nothing came out. Glenn placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “We need to get to her,” the magister said, “and we also need to find Karyn. She’s not safe here, either.”

  “You said before she didn’t want to help you,” Jean pointed out. “What if she knew about this attack all along? What if she’s a part of it?”

  “She’s not. The Council gave up on her candidacy months ago. I doubt they would try to harm her intentionally, but she might get caught in the crossfire. They’ll definitely be after Janel.”

  Zach frowned. “Why would the Enclave go after—never mind, I don’t even want to know. But we need to do something. Now.”

  “Simon will have likely put them up in one of the hotels near the Hall of Innovation,” Danev reasoned. “Their conference was scheduled to last through tomorrow.”

  “That should give us some time, then,” Glenn said. “The Enclave will likely target the Hall and the surrounding area last, if only to force Chaval to see his city burning to ashes around him.”

  “Well, no offense, but I’m going after Eve,” Zach said. “Your friend can wait.”

  “We should split up,” Shaedra suggested. “The boy and I can go into the Hall and find Eve. The rest of you can go and find your friend.”

  Glenn shook his head. “No, we stay together. There will be troops scattered all throughout the streets. It’s far too dangerous to—”

  “You said yourself we don’t have time, and right now we’re standing here wasting it,” she countered. “Look, it’s simple: we stick together until we hit 3rd, then we’ll branch off. We can converge again as soon as either of us is finished.”

  Glenn took in a deep breath and rubbed briefly at his brow before turning to Zach. “We’ll go as fast as we can, Zachary, so don’t do anything stupid. Shaedra can protect you if you let her.”

  “Yeah,” he said roughly as he un-holstered his pistol and moved towards the door. “I’m sure she can.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Cadotheia burned, and Simon Chaval didn’t seem to care. He stood stoically in his arboretum, hands clasped loosely behind his back, passing leisurely from flower to flower as if it was a boring summer afternoon and not the start of a civil war that might eradicate his country.

  Amaya shook her head and glanced outside the glass dome to marvel at the newest pillar of fire reaching up from the horizon. At least three of the largest mills on the eastern side of the city were ablaze now, and only minutes earlier an explosion had rocked the only bridge out of town. It was more than a little ironic, she thought darkly, that the great Hall of Innovation built at the center of Cadotheia to oversee its remarkable growth was now the perfect observatory to witness its total destruction.

  She forced herself to stop pacing and instead stood rigidly as she awaited orders. At the onset of the attack some thirty minutes earlier, Chaval’s military advisors had rushed into the room asking how he wished them to respond. He said very little, only that they should use their best judgment. He also gave them specific instructions to admit a brown-haired young woman when she finally made her way to the building, and without so much as a word of elaboration he then shooed them away.

  The last part might have been what bothered Amaya the most, but so far he had outright refused to indulge her curiosity. She assumed he must have been talking about DeShane, but why in the Goddess’s name would he expect that girl to come here? Had she and her allies planned some foolhardy attack? Chaval was acting like he fully anticipated the girl to brazenly stride right up to the front door. It made no sense.And yet here he still stood, as calm
as ever.

  Eventually Amaya realized there was really only one explanation: he was acting out something he’d read in the journal. He had been treating the thing like gospel from the first moment he’d laid his hands on it, and yet not once had he been willing to share more than a vague hint with her. A few days ago he’d told her he expected an Enclave attack, and, far more shockingly, that he intended to lose the battle. He’d never explained what he meant by that.

  Now, apparently, they were all going to witness it first-hand.

  Was he really going to sit here while his soldiers fought and died on the streets? Was he willing to let a decade of unparalleled growth in his city be burned away by the Enclave? Was he planning on sitting here until they marched through his door and killed both of them?

  Another plume of fire rose in the distance, this one also on the northern side. The sound of concentrated gunfire had now joined in the occasional explosions, and flickers of light dotted the city streets as the fighting intensified. Soon the cannons would join them, and the smoke and fire would inevitably start consuming their own citizens as well as the magi assaulting them.

  “We’re safe enough here, don’t worry,” Chaval soothed as he leaned down to inspect one of the plants. “The Enclave will want to ‘teach me a lesson’ before moving in for the kill, so to speak. They’ll leave the Hall standing as long as possible, thinking I’m bottled up inside it.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “For the moment,” he said smugly. “But only for the moment.”

  “They’ve already destroyed the northern bridge,” Amaya pointed out. “I’m sure the Zefrim towers won’t be far behind. Even if we manage to get out of the building, there won’t be anywhere else for us to go.”

  “As I said, you needn’t worry,” he repeated, leaning back up and starting his casual tour around the room again. “All will become clear in time.”

  Amaya scowled and turned again to the explosions in the distance. How many magi had the Enclave sent? It sounded like thousands, but maybe that was just one of their illusions. Perhaps there were only a few dozen, or maybe even less.

  Ultimately, she wasn’t sure it mattered. Other than the heightened quality of their weapons, the Steamwork’s mercenaries were barely better than a village militia. Now if only Chaval had spoken with General Hovien and convinced him to station a few hundred of his own troops here…

  “Do Hovien or Turrel or the others know what is going on?” she asked.

  “Not yet, but they will soon. I already sent Jack to rendezvous with them outside the city. They have instructions on how to proceed once this is over.”

  Amaya repressed the urge to hiss. So Polard wasn’t even here, and neither, it seemed, were any of his other important advisors—except for her, assuming she fit into that category. Chaval must have wanted to keep the others safe and out of the fighting, but that implied he expected things to go badly. Was he planning on dying here to make some grand political statement?

  No, that couldn’t be it. Chaval was many things, but he wasn’t suicidal. He must have had something else in mind. He must have a plan to escape somehow.

  The question was whether he planned to take her with him.

  She licked at her parched lips and shifted her gaze to the south. “Aren’t you concerned that Janel’s forces could make this worse? They might even try to take advantage of the situation.”

  “They will surround his hotel and nothing more,” Chaval said matter-of-factly. “He’s not an opportunist.”

  “And what happens when the Enclave forces attack that building?”

  Chaval glanced up to her. “Then Janel and all his men will die.”

  Amaya swallowed heavily. “You think they’ll go that far?”

  “They’ve concluded that the people of this country can no longer be trusted to choose their own leaders,” he said. “Their arrogance has long ago convinced them that this is the only sensible course of action. They will erase the political field, try to find a way to blame the massacre on the Industrialists, and then take control of the government.”

  “While we sit here and let them.”

  He smiled. “While we sit here, anyway.”

  Before she could plead for him to elaborate, the door to the arboretum clicked open behind them. Amaya spun, pistol in hand…and then felt her mouth gape open as two Steamworks soldiers escorted in an unassuming young woman.

  “At long last,” Chaval said, stepping away from the flowers and moving to the center of the room. “I have so wanted to meet you, Evelyn.”

  The girl tilted her chin up. “From all your posters, I really would have expected someone less…bald.”

  Chaval chuckled. “You really do look just like her, you know. The voice might be different, but the attitude is the same.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “As it was meant to be,” he said easily. “It’s unfortunate our first meeting has to be under such stressful circumstances.”

  DeShane glanced out of the glass dome. “It seems like someone has finally had enough of you.”

  “The Enclave wishes to teach me a lesson. And they don’t seem to care who they have to hurt in order to do that.”

  “You two have a lot in common, then.”

  He grunted. “Considering they want to kill you as much or more than they want to kill me, I would say the two of us actually have a lot in common right now, Evelyn. I thought that since you decided to visit, we could have a much-needed chat.”

  “I’m not here to have a conversation with you,” DeShane replied tartly. “I’m here to kill you for murdering my mother.”

  Amaya’s eyes drifted slowly between them. For a nineteen year-old to stride in here so confidently, so brazenly, and threaten one of the most powerful men in the world…

  Well, the girl certainly had gall. And the most impressive part was that she didn’t even seem particularly nervous while doing it. She was calm and composed, not so different than Chaval had been himself just moments before. She might not have looked like much, but then, Amaya knew well how deceiving looks could be.

  Chaval nodded once to the two soldiers, and they turned and walked out the door. He then fastened his eyes back on the young woman.

  “Is that so?” he asked calmly. “You’re still convinced I’m the one who did it?”

  “You didn’t do it personally, no,” DeShane said. “You don’t seem like the type of man who gets his hands dirty very often. I’m sure you ordered one of your lackeys to do it, maybe even this one right here. But the moment I first got the news, I knew you were the one behind it. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to figure out why.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, a bemused smile pulling at his lips. “Indulge me, then.”

  “You wanted her journal, of course. But then a week later, you were willing to give it up without a fight. That didn’t make sense to me. Not at first, anyway.”

  “But it does now?”

  DeShane glanced briefly to Amaya, then back to Chaval. “You knew Shaedra was looking out for us, and I’m sure you assumed that once we made our way here, she would undoubtedly try to get the journal back. Stopping a Vakari is no small feat, naturally, so it was also possible you just left it alone trying to minimize your losses and took out the most important pages.”

  The young woman took a deep breath and clasped her hands behind her back before continuing. “But then when we tried to leave town, you sent your thugs to stop us, and you had prepared cellium bullets to kill Shaedra. If you had access to cellium all along, then you wouldn’t have been worried about her taking the journal and could have easily defended it—unless you wanted us to have it.”

  Chaval’s smile widened. “Which, if I really was willing to kill your mother to get it, still seems odd, doesn’t it? You were surrounded by her writings in your house for your entire life.”

  “Except she would never let me look at them while she was alive,” DeShane said. “And more to the
point, you didn’t make the decision to hand it over until after you’d read it yourself. So something in those pages convinced you that I needed to see it for myself.”

  “Your mother was always clever, her prophetic powers notwithstanding,” Chaval replied. “It’s good to see you inherited that.”

  “The only thing in there of any real consequence was her prophecy about my future,” the girl went on, ignoring the compliment. “At first I was too shocked to think about anything but the visions themselves, but eventually I started to wonder why you wanted me to see it. And there’s really only one explanation: you want it to happen. You want me to turn into a Defiler—you want me to inflict some great tragedy so that you can twist it to your advantage and finally galvanize the rest of the country against the magi.”

  Amaya turned to her employer. As impressed as she was by DeShane’s poise, her logic was just as remarkable. It was, essentially, exactly what Chaval had been telling Amaya this entire time. The question was whether or not the revelation would ultimately change anything.

  Chaval, for his part, actually laughed. “Many would dismiss that as little more than a far-fetched conspiracy. The magi haven’t needed any help to make the people of Arkadia their enemies. Centuries of exploitation and abuse of their power have already done that.”

  “Then why aren’t you out there right now trying to defend your city?” DeShane countered. “It’s simple: you don’t care about it. You know that every building they burn, every civilian they kill, just feeds into your narrative. It vindicates your warped and perverse view of the world.”

  “Or it reveals the truth,” Chaval said. “The magi and their Enclave desire power above all else, and now that their hold on this country is finally being threatened, they are lashing out in the only way they know how—by stepping on the torbos they care so little about.”

  “The Enclave is wrong,” DeShane conceded. “Perhaps they’re even evil. But you’re no better—you wanted this to happen. And you want me to make it even worse!”

  His amused smile suddenly turned dark. “Change—real, tangible change—rarely comes without bloodshed, my dear. Our own history is a testament to that. Perhaps if you studied more of it at the so-called school of yours, you would understand that.”