The knife hole appeared again in the plaster, and another minute later, Daymon blasted his way through the wall again.
They were on the twentieth floor of the girls' dormitories. The stairwell down to the common room was open at the end of the hallway.
“Quietly,” Alayne whispered, “in case Tarry has anyone left up here.”
“They're all fighting,” Daymon murmured, “but yes, it's good to be cautious.”
Alayne's pulse thundered in her ears as she gripped Daymon's hand and hurried to the end of the corridor and down the stairs toward the common room.
What had once been her home and a place of security had been turned into an Alliance haunt with graffiti all over the stairwell walls, abusing Naturals and half-Nats. Alayne leaped past the images and paint down the stairs, doing her best to ignore the messages.
She slowed as they reached the bottom of the stairwell. “We can't give ourselves away yet,” she whispered to Daymon. “Tarry is holding my parents somewhere near here, so I can't just kill her as soon as I see her. We'll have to pressure her to tell us where they are first, and then we can end it.”
His hand squeezed hers. “As long as we can do it fast,” he said. “They're overrunning us outside.”
She stepped off the last stair, took a deep breath, and moved into the common room.
At the far end of the room, an enormous desk took up an obscene amount of space before the arching windows. Crowds of Alliance personal clustered around the windows, peering down at the chaos.
Alone at her desk, her gaze fixed on the chute doors, sat Tarry, obviously waiting for someone or something.
Chapter 24
The common room was barely recognizable. All the couches and tables and games had been cleared out. The trees remained, lined up like pillars along the giant hall, pulling all attention to Tarry's enormous desk. In front of her desk, long tables were set up in a square, and several of the Alliance's high-ranking officers were gathered around the square, hovering over holographs of chaotic movement on the grounds. A low hum of voices rumbled through the room.
Alayne pulled in a careful, soundless breath. Daymon still held her hand, but she wasn't sure of their course of action. The elements quivered beneath her uncertain touch.
She felt Daymon's warmth as he lowered his head to Alayne's ear. “Let's see how close we can get,” he whispered. “We have one chance; we can't miss, and we can't kill her until we find out about your parents.”
Alayne took a careful step forward, but Tarry's MIU on her desk lit up at that moment.
“Madame,” a man's voice said, “they're inside. They got past our guards on the shuttle platform and are somewhere in the spire.”
Alayne froze, her pulse thudding in her ears. Daymon sucked in a sharp breath beside her. On the MIU, they could see an image of a square hole in a wall.
Tarry's palm hit her desk. “Block every entrance!” she called. “The chute doors, the stairs to the dormitories. Send scouts into the girls' dormitory to look for them.”
Several of the Alliance brass separated into sections, only the highest ranking remaining by the tables. The hunters swiftly strode the length of the common room, their knives in their hands, blocking the doors and the dormitory exits.
Alayne and Daymon were trapped in the common room.
Now what?
Daymon moved close again. “We can still creep up on her,” he whispered. “She thinks we're not here yet. There are fewer soldiers around her now, too.”
Alayne tightened her grasp on the element strands, still unsure what she would do or how quickly she would be able to do it, and stepped forward silently, following Daymon's pull on her hand.
Tarry rose from her chair, pacing uneasily behind her desk, her arms folded over her chest.
The chute doors banged open, and an EA Commander entered. He strode forward, brushing by Alayne and Daymon, nearly touching them before Alayne stumbled out of the way. He approached Tarry and sketched a salute. “Madame, I bring word that Commander Simeon Malachi has been killed in battle.”
Tarry didn't look at the man, but her flinch was unmistakable. “When was this?” she asked in a voice as hard as nails.
“Not long after the battle started, Madame. He killed the Last Order's Commander, but was crushed beneath a burning tree not long afterward.”
Tarry's glance speared the man. “You say he killed the Last Order's Commander? Manderly Manders?”
“I believe that is correct, Madame.”
Tarry's face relaxed into a full-fledged smile, and Alayne had never hated anyone so much as she did right then.
“At last, some good news after sitting in this spire, waiting interminably for the vermin to crawl out of their holes. Have you found the Quadriweave yet?”
The man shook his head. “No, Madame, but there are hundreds of rooms in the girl's dormitories to search.”
Tarry's gaze turned thoughtful. “She wouldn't hide in the dormitories, not if she knows what's at stake, and I'd guess my dear departed friend Manders would have made very sure that she was to get to me at the risk of everything. His mission would have been everything to him.” Her red-taloned fingernails gripped the back of her chair as she suddenly looked around the room. “Alayne!”
Alayne jerked, but Daymon's hand covered her mouth. She swallowed her cry before it rose in her throat.
“Alayne Worth, you made yourself invisible at end of last year, didn't you? It was how you sneaked back into Clayborne to rescue that ridiculous boy, Jayme Cross.”
Alayne waited, hardly daring to breathe. Daymon didn't relax his hold on her mouth, and she could feel his heart thudding in his chest from behind. Alayne's hand stayed frozen on the element harp, terrified that Tarry would check the air element and feel the notched bend that hid them in invisibility.
She didn't know how to hide the bend from an Air-Master, unless...
The conversation from weeks ago floated through Alayne's mind. She'd stood with Manders and Daymon and the others on the hillside overlooking the Capital and discussed locked bends. If she could—
But Daymon was there before her. Slowly, he pulled the notched bend that wrapped them in refracted light rays and dislodged it from the element harp. The refraction slid into a secure lock.
Alayne dared to release a quiet sigh of relief. Carefully, she touched the element harp again, and Daymon handed her the element strand. “When you're ready,” he whispered.
Another hand reached for the air element, but as the strand that bent the light rays around Alayne and Daymon was securely in Alayne's grasp, the hand did not disturb it. Frustration pulled the corners of Tarry's mouth into a frown, and Alayne relaxed.
Tarry jerked her attention to the man who had brought the report. “Who is in charge of the guard on the shuttle platform?” she snapped.
“Lieutenant Boslo, Madame,” the man replied, his voice free of any inflection.
“Bring him to me.”
“Yes, Madame.” The Commander turned and nodded to one of the guards who now blocked the chute door. The guard hit the button on the chute and entered, lifting quickly out of sight. He was back within two minutes with a white-faced, terrified-looking soldier of rank.
The man approached Tarry and saluted. “Madame, you wished to see me?”
“You allowed the Quadriweave into this spire, and she is likely—RIGHT HERE IN THIS ROOM!” Tarry's roar of rage quickly mounted, and the poor terrified man shook where he stood not ten paces in front of Daymon and Alayne. Sweat poured from his receding hairline.
In a flash, Tarry withdrew something shiny from the surface of the desk, tilting her arm back and hurling it at the man. The lieutenant jerked and screamed, collapsing onto the floor, the hilt of a knife projecting from the center of his throat.
Alayne shuddered violently against Daymon, and his hand pressed tighter against her mouth. He deftly turned her so her face pressed against his chest, so she would be unable to see the man still twitching on the
floor.
Tarry's voice broke through the buzzing in Alayne's ears. “They're in here somewhere. Look for distortion; they're refracting the light and hiding behind it. The little tramps somehow managed to lock the bend, which releases that particular strand from the harp, so I can't find them via the elements. However, if they move for any length of time, we'll see them by the air distortion around them.”
Alayne's breath froze. She'd forgotten that she could be spotted by the distortion of the air as they moved if someone were truly looking for them.
Tarry's voice, soft, almost playful, spoke again. “Come out, come out, wherever you are, Alayne.” Her gaze swept over the spot where Alayne and Daymon stood, searching the far corners of the room. “It's lovely to have you back again. Won't you stay for a while? I can give you a front seat view of what's happening to your friends down below.”
Alayne didn't dare to move. The officers had divided into groups, maintaining a guard presence at the exits, but also beginning a systematic sweep of the massive room, searching up, down, in every corner. Tarry had left and disappeared with two guards into the girls' dormitories.
Alayne waited until an officer stepped carefully forward, arms outstretched as he searched no more than two feet away from them. After he passed, she lifted herself on tiptoe until her mouth was at Daymon's ear.“Should we destroy the place?” she whispered.
His head twisted to the side. “Not yet. We have to get your parents out first.”
No sooner had he spoken than Tarry appeared once again with her two guards flanking her, but this time, she prodded two very familiar figures before her into the room.
Alayne restrained her cry, but only with an enormous effort.
Bryan and Wynn Worth stared blankly across the room toward the windows. Their faces were free of stress or worry for the first time since Alayne could remember, but the glazed expressions that clouded their eyes wrapped a heavy chain around Alayne's heart. She watched their eyes twitch once, twice, and her stomach rolled.
Tarry reached the spot where the dead lieutenant lay in a pool of his own blood. Bryan stopped on her left, Wynn on her right. Tarry reached down and plucked the knife from the soldier's throat.
“Alayne, do you see this situation here?” She turned around, glancing all across the room. “Right here, I hold your parents in the palms of my hands. I can make them do anything I want, Alayne. I could have for a while now, but I didn't. Do you know why?”
She lowered the knife, bloody blade and all, back onto the desk, the cold metal clinking against the burnished, gleaming wood. “Because I was saving them for just such an occasion. I knew you would come, Alayne. You couldn't leave them; you just had to be the hero.”
She paused and then raised both arms high in the air. “So be the hero, Alayne. Come on. Rescue your poor parents. Free them from my hold. That's what you want, isn't it? To overcome all evil with good?” Her voice melted into a soft laugh. “Oh, the innocence and naiveté of a mind like yours.”
She waited, glancing around, as Alayne stayed frozen in the center of the room.
Tarry walked slowly to the desk and sat on the edge, crossing one toned leg over the other, swinging her red heel. “I'll tell you what I'll do, Alayne. That clock on the wall says it's twenty minutes until midnight. At midnight, when the gong sounds, you will show yourself. If you don't appear by then, I'll begin to carve a masterpiece in the flesh of first your father, the filthy Natural, and then your mother, because she was disgusting enough to marry a Natural. All the exits are guarded, my dear. So you will get the great joy of watching my creation take shape.”
Ten minutes dragged by, and Alayne was still no closer to a solution than she had been before. Her parents stood like statues on either side of Tarry's desk, and her gaze flew repeatedly to the clock that moved much too fast toward midnight. Alayne and Daymon remained statues in the center of the room, narrowly avoiding passes by the officers, some of whom continued their work at the tables as if they had never been interrupted.
Just before midnight, the chute doors banged open, and Beatrice Pence strode in. Alayne stifled a cry of surprise. In Pence's wake trailed the stringy-haired, pale-faced Bryce Marshall, his shoulders slumped, his gaze on the floor.
Tarry's head snapped up at Beatrice's entrance, and her eyes narrowed. “What is that slimy runt doing tagging at your heels, Pence?" she snapped. “I told you I didn't want to see him again.”
Beatrice Pence stopped in front of Tarry's desk with Bryce standing in her shadow. “Don't be so hard on the boy, Madame. He brought us word of the Last Order's movements. He's proven himself quite useful—more useful than that son of mine, at any rate."
Alayne stiffened at Beatrice's casual mention of Kyle.
Tarry's gaze was rock hard as she stared at Bryce. “I have a better idea for him.”
Bryce showed signs of life for the first time, raising a hopeful glance to Tarry. “Yeah?” he asked. “Can I have a reward? Just enough lemps to get me out of this school and away from here?”
Tarry raised an eyebrow, and her lips twisted into an amused smirk. “No,” she said coolly. “You'll be an example of what we do to Last Order traitors.”
She nodded, and two officers grabbed Bryce from behind, twisting his arms in their grasps.
“What are you doing?” Bryce yelled. “I helped you; I helped the Alliance! I brought you information you'd never have gotten without me!”
“And it was very thoughtful of you. Thank you, Bryce.” Tarry yanked a paper from her drawer and opened a black marker. In a looping scrawl, she wrote: Lest you think to rise against the Alliance...
Bryce's eyes widened as he read what she wrote.
“Madame, please consider—” Beatrice Pence began as Tarry marched around the desk and pinned the paper to Bryce's t-shirt.
“I won't hear arguments, Pence,” Tarry snapped. The paper affixed, she whirled around and threw her hand out. Wind smashed through one of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows behind her. “Take him.”
Bryce started to scream, a keening, wailing high shriek that increased in volume as the guards pushed him forward to the shattered window. “Please!” he shrieked. “I helped you, Tarry, please!” On the lip of the window sill, he twisted with one final plea before he tumbled into the air outside.
His trailing scream dissipated as gravity embraced him in its final hold.
Alayne shuddered, tears pouring in a silent rain down her cheeks. Behind her, Daymon's tight grasp on her arms didn't relax. She felt his mouth on her ear. “I'm sorry,” he whispered. “That was horrible.”
Tarry turned back to her desk as though nothing had happened. Pence moved to the window, staring out into the night, her back to the rest of the room.
“No point in sulking, Pence. He was weak.”
“Yes, Madame,” Pence answered, her back stiff.
Tarry shook her head and turned to the waiting ranking officers to dispense her commands. She finally returned, taking up a stance behind Pence at the windows, staring out at the ranks below. Beatrice itched to fight; Alayne could feel it in the tension of her stance. She wondered why Tarry would keep her here. To fight the Quadriweave?
Alayne had almost decided several times to rip the element strand free of its lock and face Tarry, but each time she moved to do so, Daymon increased the pressure of his arms around her. “Not yet,” he mouthed in her ear.
She was intensely uncomfortable. Her feet ached, and sharp pain shot through her neck as she held her position. Her parents with their blank gazes pained her the most. A tear seeped from her right eye, and she hid her face against Daymon's shirt, afraid the moisture would give away her position.
The giant clock wheezed as the long minute-hand slipped to land directly on the twelve. Time had run out.
Tarry glanced at the clock as the deep gong reverberated across the room. She walked to her desk and leaned on it, her fingers tented on the desk's flat top.
“It's now or never, Alayne. And I do so h
ate to ruin your father's handsome face.” She straightened and picked up the knife she'd retrieved from the officer she'd killed and placed on the desktop. The blood had dried; it crusted the metal blade in a deep, brown stain. She motioned her finger at Bryan, and Bryan approached her desk.
No resistance, not even a little bit.
Alayne had had enough. She slipped the element strand from its lock and stretched it back onto the harp. Then she yanked the elements aside, careful only to disturb the ones that bent the light around her own body, moving swiftly away from Daymon.
“I'm here, Tarry.”
Instantly, she was surrounded. She raised her arms. “Hold up, boys. Give me a little space.”
A low chuckle came from the desk. “She's right, gentlemen. She's armed and wields four elements. I'd let her have some space, too.”
The men backed up a little, but Alayne was still surrounded. She peered at Tarry. Pence had taken up position beside her. A grin crossed her scarred visage, but her expression bled hatred.
“The Cast, Tarry. Let my parents go.”
Tarry smiled. “You know very well my prerequisites if I am to fulfill such a request.”
“Of course.” Alayne sighed, suddenly tired. “The Vale, the Vale, the eternal Vale. The life-sucking, greed-producing, turn-friends-to-enemies Vale.”
“Exactly. So have you changed your mind yet, Alayne? You see your parents right here; you hate their blank faces. I know you do; I can see it in your eyes. I hold their Casts right here in my fingers. All I have to do is release it, Alayne. That's it. I just need you, the Quadriweave. That's all. It's not a lot to ask, is it? Especially not for the two parents who love you more than anything? Except that they don't remember they love you, Alayne. They don't know you at all right now, and doesn't that just tear your heart right in two?”
“You're scum, Tarry. Worse than that; you're the vile bacteria that feeds on scum.”
Tarry laughed heartily. “Such an insult. As you can see, I'm mortally offended.” She sobered, and her gaze hardened. “The Vale, Alayne. Agree to work with us, or I start my masterpiece on your father right now.” With a swift movement, Tarry grabbed the lanky blond hair on Bryan's head and slammed him down on top of her desk, her knife raised.
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