Raging Light

by Kyla Stone

  Micah kept his arm around her as they hobbled across the grass. Amelia took five steps. Ten. She turned back, twisting from Micah’s arms. “We shouldn’t let him die like that.”

  Silas grabbed her other hand. “This isn’t the time to get all nostalgic, Amelia. He deserves to die—”

  “No.” She shook him off. It didn’t matter what her father had done. She couldn’t just walk away. “Not like this.”

  Amelia turned back toward the platform.

  “Amelia!” Declan croaked. Blood trickled from the corner of his split and swollen lips. “I’m—I’m sorry. Go. Go now. Leave me.”

  Despite the fact that her father had purposefully killed thousands of people, had manipulated and bullied and abused his own family, despite everything—the emotion shining in his eyes now could only be called love.

  A broken, twisted love, but still there, in this moment, in this rare burst of humanity. It was in his blackened eyes, his stricken face, his hoarse, hopeless voice. It was real.

  A grenade whistled through the air. It landed on the platform only a few feet from Declan.

  “Down!” Micah cried. He shoved her in the back, knocking her to the ground. She landed hard, pain biting into her knees, elbows, and hips. She stayed down. Trampled grass and snow pressed against her face. Gasping and terrified, she wrapped her arms over her head.

  A deafening explosion trembled the air. A wave of heat blasted over her. She shook, eyes squeezed shut, ears ringing. She dragged in a scorched breath. Then another. Her eyebrows—her whole face—felt singed. But she was alive.

  After several excruciating seconds that felt like years, she crawled to her hands and knees, then limped to her feet. She coughed, her throat seared, and peered through the billowing smoke, searching frantically for her father.

  The whole right side of the platform blazed with searing white-hot flames. The fire engulfed everything, surging fifteen feet high. She could barely make him out through the roaring flames and billowing smoke. Her father writhed and screamed in anguish as he burned.

  There was no way to reach him, to help him.

  “No!” she screamed.

  Silas lifted his gun. He hesitated, hands trembling. Unable to make the shot. Pain and dread swirled in her brother’s eyes. He wanted to put their father out of his misery. In the end, he couldn’t do it. Just like she couldn’t just leave her father behind.

  Micah placed his hand on Silas’s arm and slowly lowered his gun hand. “Let me.”

  It was Micah who took the shot.

  Declan’s head slumped to his chest. His screams went mercifully silent.

  Her father was dead.

  Something cold and hard shattered inside her chest.

  “Are you okay?” Micah grasped her shoulders and shook her. “Amelia!”

  She looked from Micah to Silas. Her bones were brittle as air. A dull, nameless grief sucked at the edges of her mind. She blinked against the snowflakes landing on her eyelashes.

  She couldn’t let herself break. She wouldn’t break. Not here. Not now. Not at all.

  Silas reached for her hand and squeezed it. His gray eyes shone with unshed tears.

  She squeezed back. “I’m—I’m okay. Are you?”

  Silas nodded.

  “We’re okay,” she said. She wasn’t sure if it was true. If anything would ever be okay again.

  Micah spun around. “We have to get you somewhere safe.”

  “No.” Amelia shook off her grief. She would mourn later. There was too much to do now. Too much at stake.

  She picked up a spherical object from the ground and dusted it off against the hem of her scarlet dress, ignoring the soot and ash stains, the streaks of dirt marring the silk. The tiny light blinked. It still worked. “Sloane fled into BioGen. We need her.”

  Silas checked his ammo. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is a war zone.”

  “We need to get you somewhere safe,” Logan said.

  “You need to hide inside the capitol until this is all over,” Micah said.

  “Sloane is the key.” Amelia wrenched the handgun from Micah’s holster with numbed fingers she could barely feel. “We can’t let her get away.”

  The thudding roar of a hoverchopper filled the air, coming from the direction of the gates somewhere behind them.

  Amelia craned her neck toward the sky. Amelia, Micah, Silas, and Logan all watched as the hoverchopper thundered toward the Sanctuary, darting through the gray sky like an elegant but lethal bird of prey.

  Micah gestured at the tail fin, painted with a red circle with a raised fist inside it. The Patriots insignia. “It’s one of ours.”

  The chopper rose rapidly, banked, and headed toward the plasma wall.

  “Look!” Amelia cried, pointing.

  On the ramparts, one cannon was still moving.

  Micah gaped. “It’s supposed to be down! All the cannons are supposed to be down!”

  “That one clearly is not,” Logan said.

  The cannon fired. The chopper exploded in a blaze of smoke and fire. Twisted metal shrieked as it spiraled crazily, tilted on its side, rotors chopping as it spun over the plasma wall and crashed to the ground.

  21

  Gabriel

  Gabriel jerked Cerberus to his feet, hauled him around the corner of the nearest building, and slammed him against the wall. He pressed the muzzle of his gun against Cerberus’s head. “You just killed innocent kids!”

  “Reaver and everyone on that chopper are dead because you wouldn’t!”

  Gabriel winced. He was deeply sorry that General Reaver and everyone on that chopper had died. But he would never condone murdering children. Never again. “That’s not who we are.”

  “That’s who everyone is!” Cerberus spat. He tried to jerk away from Gabriel’s grasp, but Gabriel jerked him back, shoving his head against the wall. “You. Me. The whole world. In the end, we’re all just animals. We do whatever it takes to survive.”

  “No. There is a cost that’s too high. There is a line. If we cross it, we’re no different than the people we hate.”

  “Pretty speech.” A vicious smile twisted Cerberus’s lips. Blood trickled down the side of his temple from a gash in his forehead. “What now? You going to kill me? Is that it?”

  Gabriel stared at him. He was so close he could see the pores in the man’s nose, the bloodshot veins spidering the whites of his eyes, the digital tattoos on his neck throbbing with his pulse. Cerberus was so much smaller, so much less intimidating without his white wolfskin cape. He was just a man now, fragile, made of flesh and bone and blood just like the rest of them.

  Cerberus licked the blood smeared over his teeth. “You’ve been waiting for this for a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Ever since that little Middle Eastern girl, right?”

  Gabriel ground the gun’s muzzle against his head. “I said shut up!”

  “We aren’t so different, you and I,” Cerberus said. “We’re both trying to build a new society out of chaos, to create something better.”

  “We’re nothing alike, you misogynistic, murderous bastard.”

  “Order is necessary. Hierarchy is the natural way of things, of nature and everything else. Alphas are meant to rule. They’re meant to kill any threat. It’s what we do. You can’t blame a beast for acting on instinct, can you? That’s all we are, teeth and claws and instinct. That’s all I am. That’s all you are. And you know it.”

  Rage thrummed through every cell in Gabriel’s body. Nadira’s scrap of blue cloth smoldered in his pocket. The overwhelming desire for vengeance slammed through him like a jackhammer. He could taste the coppery tang of it on his tongue.

  Cerberus’s storm-blue eyes glinted. “I told you that we were the same, you and I.”

  Gabriel’s hands shook. His fury nearly blinded him. One tiny nudge of his finger, and this monster would be wiped from the face of the earth.

  He stepped back, angled the gun, and
pulled the trigger.

  Cerberus howled in agony. He slid down against the wall, clutching his right leg. His kneecap was an explosion of blood, tissue, and gristle.

  Gabriel slammed the barrel of his gun against the side of Cerberus’s skull. The man slumped, unconscious. Gabriel yanked a pair of handcuffs dangling from the belt of a dead guard lying a few yards away and slapped them on Cerberus’s wrists. Then he dragged him to the destroyed tank and shoved his body into the relative safety of the space beneath it.

  Micah was right. There had to be more. Killing Cerberus wouldn’t bring Nadira back. It had taken all this time for him to admit it to himself, but he knew the truth. Nadira never would have condoned such violence. She wouldn’t have wanted him to murder anyone, not even Cerberus.

  There was no justice in vengeance. But there was still justice.

  “You’re going to rot in prison for the rest of your miserable life,” Gabriel said to Cerberus’s unconscious form. “Enjoy hell on earth, asshole.”

  “What the heck is happening, Alpha Team One?” one of the Patriots shouted in his comm. “We have to take out that cannon!”

  Gabriel was the last remaining member of Alpha Team One. It was all up to him now. “I’m on it!”

  He crouched and peeked around the front wheel of the tank. He hoped the engine block would shield him from incoming fire. Smoke and ash created a thick haze. The snow was falling harder now. Wet flakes swirled in the wind, wetting his cheeks and settling in his eyelashes. He blinked them away.

  Theo’s hacked nighthawks were engaging four tanks, zipping out of range of their firepower and striking close and fast, ripping huge craters in the tanks’ armor.

  But he didn’t have time to worry about that.

  Atop the ramparts, the last cannon swiveled an impossible 180 degrees. Its huge, menacing barrel aimed straight at Gabriel.

  22

  Amelia

  Amelia stared in shock at the downed chopper in the distance. Smoke poured into the snow-thickened sky as flames surged from the twisted, blackened metal.

  Micah wiped melting snow from the lenses of his glasses and peered at the wreckage through his rifle scope. “Gabriel is there!”

  Far across the square, Coalition soldiers were running for the downed chopper, shooting their pulse guns. Amelia couldn’t see Gabriel in the chaos. “Wait—what’s happening now?”

  They watched in horror as the cannon barrel rotated a full 180 degrees toward the chopper. “It’s not supposed to be able to do that!” Micah said.

  “New upgrade last week,” Logan said. “All the guns are scheduled for upgrades; this was the first one the mech-bots actually got to.”

  Silas swore. “That cannon can take out our fighters inside the walls!”

  “Gabriel!” Micah cried.

  Amelia’s chest constricted. She touched Micah’s shoulder. “If he’s in trouble, go help him!”

  Micah hesitated. “You have to get somewhere safe! Wait inside the Capitol for us.”

  “I will,” she said. “Go!”

  Silas gritted his teeth, less than thrilled at the proposition. He didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t have a choice.

  “You too, Logan,” she said. “And you, Silas. I’m fine. You can fight. They need you more than I do.”

  Silas nodded in weary resignation. “We’ll be back.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Micah, Silas, and Logan took off running toward Gabriel and the smoking chopper.

  Amelia watched them go. She kicked off her heels. The freezing ground stung her bare feet. She tucked Micah’s handgun into the bustline of her dress, grabbed a handful of the sumptuous silk, and ripped a slit up to her thighs on both sides. It didn’t look pretty, but it would allow her to run.

  She retrieved the gun and checked the ammo. Six bullets. She wasn’t a great shot, even with Jericho and Silas’s training. It would have to be enough. She would make it enough.

  She’d lied to the two people she cared about most in the world.

  But there was no way she was sitting this one out.

  She was going after Sloane.

  23

  Micah

  “Run!” Gabriel screamed. He sprinted toward Micah, terror etched on his face.

  Panic gripped Micah. He skidded, digging his heels deep in the ground, trying to stop, to turn his momentum. To flee the cannon aimed directly at the Phantom, at Gabriel.

  Too late.

  He threw himself to the ground.

  The Phantom exploded.

  Dirt and shrapnel sprayed over Micah. Several chunks of metal struck his chest. The tactical vest blocked the impact. A shard punched deep into his upper left shoulder, tearing into muscle. A couple of smaller shards ripped into his calf.

  Pain knifed through his body. Still, he was alive. The warning had given him enough time to miss the brunt of the explosion.

  He raised his head, eyes watering, ears ringing. “Silas! Gabriel!”

  Silas lay belly-down on the snowy ground, his hands over his neck and head. He groaned and pulled himself to a sitting position. “I should’ve just stayed in bed.”

  Gabriel was several yards away. He was already on his feet, rubbing his head. His face and arms were covered in small cuts, but he’d suffered no major lacerations. He was okay.

  Micah let out the breath he was holding. He climbed to his feet unsteadily and seized Silas’s arm. “Come on!”

  Gabriel ran up to them. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not mortally.” Silas picked a shard of metal out of his forearm. “Don’t worry about us—”

  A groan came from behind them. They whipped around, guns up and ready.

  Logan propped himself against the wall of the nearest building, wincing. A large chunk of razor-sharp shrapnel a foot long pierced his thigh. It sliced deep into muscle, tendons, bones.

  Gabriel aimed his gun at Logan.

  ‘Stop!” Micah blocked Gabriel with his body. “He’s a friend of Amelia’s. He was her guard, but he helped her.”

  Gabriel lowered his gun, his gaze still suspicious.

  Micah turned his attention back to Logan’s leg. He squatted beside him. “Should we try to remove the shrapnel?”

  Logan shook his head weakly. His skin was leached of color. “It likely sliced right through my femoral artery. This hunk of metal is the only thing keeping me from bleeding out.”

  “We shouldn’t try to move you, either, then,” Silas said.

  “Not a great idea,” Logan wheezed. “You should go. I’ll be—fine.”

  He clearly wasn’t fine. “But—”

  “Listen to him,” Gabriel snapped. “We have larger concerns. Check the Phantom.”

  They stumbled to the weapon. The force of the blast had struck the ground a few yards behind it. But even without a direct hit, the Phantom looked fatally wounded. The wheels were shredded, the metal base tipped on its side, torn and twisted. The Phantom itself had been thrown several feet to the right. It was vulnerable and exposed, but appeared to still be in one piece.

  Even though they knew it was useless, Micah and Gabriel tried to lift it, grunting from the exertion while Silas covered them. The thing barely budged. Even if they managed to get several helpers, they’d never be able to lift it and aim accurately enough to take out the last cannon.

  Conceding defeat for the moment, they darted back behind the safety of the nearest building. Micah fought a wave of hopelessness. If they couldn’t stop the cannon, it would blast them all to smithereens. It would kill everyone he cared about. “What now?”

  “Where’s Amelia?” Gabriel growled suddenly. “Why isn’t she with you?”

  “She’s taking shelter inside the capitol until we come for her,” Micah said. “She wanted to go after President Sloane somewhere inside BioGen. Amelia said Sloane was the key.”

  Gabriel blanched. “Cleo’s hunting Sloane for killing her mother. If Amelia gets anywhere near her…Cleo is out of her mind. She’ll kill anyone who g
ets in her way.”

  “Go,” Micah said. His first instinct was to go after Amelia himself. The thought of Amelia in danger made him nearly crazed with worry. But Gabriel was a stronger, more skillful fighter than he was. And if Cleo or anyone else was a threat, Gabriel had a better chance at neutralizing the danger. “We’ll take care of this.”

  Gabriel gripped his arm. “You have to get that last cannon down.”

  “I know,” he said. “We will.”

  Micah watched his brother sprint away, crouched and darting from cover to cover, his figure masked by swirling smoke and ash and falling snow. He turned to Logan. “How do we stop that cannon? There’s got to be another way.”

  “You can turn it off manually,” Logan said between gritted teeth. “There’s a kill switch. But to get to it, you have to go through them.” He pointed across the square toward the plasma wall a hundred yards away. The rampart below the last cannon was a narrow tower with a metal door at its base.

  At least two dozen Sanctuary soldiers guarded it, pulse guns at the ready. They fired the occasional pulse blast, but they weren’t engaged in the battle pitched all around them. Their orders were to protect that cannon with their lives.

  Silas stared at them, his eyes narrowing. A slow, cunning smile split his blood-spattered face. “They all have pulse guns.”

  “With blasts that leave holes in your body the size of baseballs,” Micah said. “There has to be another way.”

  “There isn’t,” Logan said.

  “Pulse guns have electronic chips inside them,” Silas said.

  Micah stared at him warily. “What are you thinking?”

  Silas pointed at the Phantom. “We have an EMP right here.”

  “But we can’t lift it or aim it.”

  “We can give it a nudge. And we can aim at something—as long as it’s at ground level.”

  Micah looked from the Phantom to the soldiers guarding the tower. It was a straight line of sight. And the Phantom only needed to be moved a few degrees to the right.