“I said I’d be where I’m needed. And anyway, low key, if anything happens to you and I wasn’t there to at least jump in front of the blade and get got too, Carlos would kill me.”
I roll my eyes. “Except he knows I’d come back from the Deeper Death and kill him for hurting you for such a dumbass reason.”
“Mighty kind of ya,” Riley says. “And anyway, I wanted to be where the action at.”
“You found it,” Cyrus says. “Just don’t get got. We need that booming voice a little while longer, aright?”
Riley’s about to respond when a shining rush of motion blurs around us. “The fuck?” he yells, and then “Oh!” as the blur slows, resolves itself into the towering forms of the Old Ones. “Oh damn.”
The ancient spirits have their backs to us. They shove forward into the enemy ranks rhythmically, slicing away and then pulling back—much like we’d been doing earlier but way, way better. The Council army seems to collapse around them.
“So much for that theory about them being slow and ineffective,” Cyrus mutters.
“Damn,” Riley says again.
Up ahead, the Old Ones have cleaved a clear path straight through to the cemetery gate, and there, standing amidst a squad of primes, is Juan Flores. My whole world curves around that singular figure. I clench my blades. “He’s mine” is all I say as I brush past Riley and Cyrus, then the front lines of the Burial Grounders.
“Fine, but don’t die, dammit!” Riley yells after me. “Dag, keep her company.”
I hear Dag grunt, and then I’m out in this strange no-man’s-land that the Old Ones’ double-column assault has created—a perfect tunnel leading right to the heart of the Council’s leadership. I could cry, but first I have to kill. The twins, Carlos, Trevor, those photographs of my family—they all make a cryptic kind of slideshow across my mind. Then comes Reza, Janey, Gordo. The few good Survivors I still cared about before everything went to shit. Maybe it’s my way of saying goodbye, but somehow it just feels like they’re cheering me on, wherever they all are. I catch Dag charging forward in my peripheral, a massive, unstoppable steam engine beside me, hammer raised.
Up ahead, the commander’s men break their huddle and move into defensive positions. The lead two crumble beneath Dag’s unblockable swing. I burn past their fading corpses, block a downward cut from another guard, and dart straight for Flores. He steps forward to meet me, broadsword raised, one hand out, beckoning me to stop.
“Aisha,” he growls. “Don’t do—” I’m on him before he can get the this out, both my blades clanging against his. He parries easily, but I can tell he’s tired, torn between his duties as general and warrior. The armies stretch out to either side of us, an ocean of turmoil.
Dag clobbers another Prime while I press my attack, cutting, thrusting, dodging, thrusting again. Even winded and wielding that ridiculous broadsword, Flores moves fast. Still: he can’t hold up much longer on pure defense. I feint to the left and manage to slice into his shoulder with one blade. The wound electrifies him: whatever dam had been holding back all his rage against me must’ve finally shattered. Flores roars and charges, swinging wildly. I hurl his blade to the side with mine, sidestepping as he hurls past and cutting deep across his thigh.
We’ve switched places now, and from here I can see the two battles waging to either side of the Old Ones’ warrior corridor. At the far western end of the field, what’s left of Talbot’s and Kaya’s troops are scattered throughout the Council army, fighting desperately in small clumps. The eastern front is faring much better: the Black Hoodies and Saeen’s 4s pushed hard against the ’catcher ranks, forcing them into the Old Ones’ blades. The Burial Grounders have swept out of the corridor and now wreak havoc on the Council’s rear guard.
Still: we are outnumbered. And have lost who knows how many . . .
Flores charges again. His downswing carries all the wrath of an endlessly rejected lover, a man who still rules the broken world he created even as his plans collapse at every turn. I block, but the sheer force pushes my blade down, slashing it against my own shoulder. I shove forward, bodychecking him out of my way, and then stumble back to get some distance while I regain my footing. He doesn’t give me the chance, rushing in with a series of vicious swings and jabs.
“Push west!” Riley’s voice blasts out. “West! All troops to the western front!”
It’s still anyone’s battle. We could eke out a draw. We could be crushed. We could win. But I will kill Flores, one way or another. At the sound of Riley’s voice, Flores pulls back from his attack and glances across the battlefield. ’Catchers on the western end of the field begin rushing toward the corridor, reinforcing their lines. Flores must’ve sent out a silent telepathic blast.
I’ve never understood Carlos’s obsession with throwing that blade of his. Like: You throw your blade, and then what? Maybe you hit, maybe you miss, but either way, you’re down a blade. In fact, you mighta just given it to the person trying to kill you. Sure, I carry two, but not so I can hand one of ’em over.
Still: sometimes it’s good to break patterns. I run toward a headstone, leap on top of it, and then hurl into the air as I let one of my blades fly at Flores. He only barely registers it in time and has to swat it away with an awkward, one-handed swing of his broadsword. Which leaves him wide open when I come hurtling out of the sky, blade-first at him. The point goes through his face guard, into that emptiness, and pierces out the other side of his helmet. My empty hand pulls out a dagger as we collapse into the snow, and I stab his chest again and again until there’s barely any Flores left to pester my nightmares and day terrors.
Panting, I stand over the crumpled, fading mess that used to be my husband. A roar goes up from the rebel army. Word traveled fast. Dag stands a few feet away, wounded and breathless from his own tight victory. He’s still got that hammer, but one arm hangs useless at his side. He’s smiling.
“Commander Flores is dead!” Riley announces across the midnight sky. “PUSH!”
But the Council troops fight with renewed vigor. They must realize how much is at stake suddenly. Superior numbers made them sloppy, but now they’re fighting for their collective lives. The initial flood of rebel squads falls back beneath a desperate tide of screaming ’Catcher Primes. The revolution’s western front is all but obliterated. I don’t see Damian or Talbot anywhere. Kaya and Big Cane fight off a rising onslaught with their few remaining troops.
I see Big Cane growl and launch directly into the Council throng, blades flashing. He’s cut down in seconds as Kaya hollers and pulls further back toward the trees.
“PUSH!” Riley urges, and I can hear the desperation in his voice. The Council pushes too, crushing several Old Ones in their counterassault. A few river giants stalk the battlefield, untroubled by the now-wiped-out throng haints, but there aren’t enough to turn the tide our way.
This will be a close thing.
I’m following Dag back into what’s left of the Old Ones’ corridor, about to launch into the fray when a rush of wind shrieks over my head. At first I think it’s Riley, and he’s been wounded and somehow broadcast his own death call across the skies. Then a heavy thud concusses the world, followed by a sharp blast. Council ’catchers hurl upward, screaming, in pieces, and a mushroom cloud rises from their ranks.
I duck as another shriek cuts through the air. Another explosion rocks the Council army. From the edge of the battlefield, a single thread, barely visible against the darkness, reaches upward. I follow it to where a huge, somehow familiar-shaped void is expanding across the night sky.
And then mangy, translucent hounds pour out of the void, yelping and yipping and growling. They flood into the Council ranks as a third projectile streaks past, exploding not far from me.
“Booyakah!” Krys yells as her mohawked head appears in the crisp emptiness taking over the night. That bazooka is on her shoulder, and there’s a tall
ghost beside her, one of the Burial Grounders. Fighting erupts around me—the ’catchers are in disarray, but they still have the numbers, and Riley’s rallying for the final push. The hellhounds run rampant through the fray, snapping and snarling. Krys hurls downward, drawing a pistol and a blade, and her friend follows.
I count four ghostly threads leading from various parts of the cemetery up to the edges of the void above us. Small shapes shimmy along them into the sky.
Ngks.
And then the whole plan clicks into place.
Mama Esther wasn’t just setting into motion a strategy for the revolution to win—victory will be a happy by-product of the larger plan.
She was putting all the pieces in place, aligning each element for a singular event.
Mama Esther has arranged for an upheaval of the natural order, which really isn’t so natural at all, and the Council just happens to be standing in the way of her plan. So she’s removing one element and in the process bringing in the ones she needs.
Her laughter echoes across the battlefield as I smile, placing each piece together in my head. She’d been planning this all along. And now there’s only one last piece left to complete the puzzle. The ngk threads pull loose from the ground and begin coiling upward toward the void. I break into a run, cut two soulcatchers out of my way, and then jump, grab the nearest thread, and let it haul me into the sky.
For a few outrageous seconds, the whole battlefield spins beneath me, then the whole cemetery, and then . . .
You came! Mama Esther’s voice surrounds me, becomes the world.
“You invited me,” I say. Or think. I don’t know which. Everything is Esther. Am I still holding the thread? Doesn’t matter.
I wasn’t sure if my message would come through clear. Things accelerated faster than I thought they would.
“Some of that might’ve been on me,” I admit. It’s been weighing on me, to be honest, but I’d been pushing it aside. “I pissed off their head war honcho just before they came at you. I didn’t think—”
No! Her voice booms through me, expands outward in waves. None of this is on you, Sasha Brass. You are the balm.
I shake my head, laughing or maybe crying—I can’t tell the difference anymore.
Each of you played your parts. And of course, we must credit that old fool Sarco with giving me the idea of getting rid of the barrier. He was onto something brilliant, just a shit way of going about it.
I remember having the same thought, back when it was all going down. Pretty sure Carlos was on the fence ’bout it for a minute too. And of course, Trevor was all in . . . but the inevitable disaster once the throngs of needy dead poured through the newly opened breach between the two worlds—that was always the downside. “How’d you clear all those masses of spirits out of the first level of Hell?”
Credit young Krys with that. She followed the plan I left, released the hellhounds, and that sent the mezzanine spirits scattering. They’ll come back through, but it won’t be the deluge that would’ve caused mass havoc. And you . . . well, you got the message, I see.
Somewhere below, ghost troops thrash back and forth in the final throes of the battle to end Council rule; it seems so far away. “Thought you were dead,” I mutter. “Deeper Death dead.”
Close, Mama Esther chuckles. But not quite. Something else. Something in between, you could say.
I muse on that for a moment, or maybe ten moments, picturing Mama Esther’s impossible journey from grounded ghost to this being of the sky. Whatever it is, the reverie is broken by her voice: You ready?
I pause, catch the words for what? before they slip out. Instead I nod. The Mama Esther–shaped void stretches all around me, but it’s not everywhere. There’s an edge where the regular sky begins. I move toward it, float-swimming through cloudy ether.
Carlos stood in the same position a little over a year ago, except he was on a rooftop and it was Sarco urging him to step into the role of the Divine Gatekeeper.
This is the same recipe at work, but a whole ’nother chef entirely.
“Will it hurt?” I ask as I approach the line between the sky and the void.
You will feel amazing. You will feel the whole world pass through you and open up into what it was meant to be.
“I wasn’t talking about for me.”
Oh. Ha . . . pain isn’t really an issue for me. Don’t worry about me, Sasha. This is bigger than me.
Hard to imagine anything being bigger than Mama Esther, in whose expanse I’m just a speck at the moment, but I get it: this is about the future. The line between life and death hangs by a thread.
Draw your blade.
It’s already in my hand.
A humming sound rises around me; I don’t know if it’s Mama Esther or the sky itself or the soldiers below.
I place my blade against the edge of the sky, take a breath, and cut.
Carlos
Caitlin’s broken, smiling face keeps blitzing across my vision as I make my way through the snowy fields of the dead. The bus caught her full on, and her whole body flipped upward and through the sky like a rag doll, landed on an SUV halfway down the block, spiderwebbing its windshield. Its alarm screeched into the night as the bus driver jumped out, yelled, “No! No! Oh God, no!” and ran to where Caitlin lay crumpled.
He stood over her, blubbering into his radio for help, and then just burst into tears. A small crowd gathered, mostly folks from the bus; then an ambulance screeched around the corner, emergency lights blazing. I watched them put a plastic C-collar on her, strap her to a backboard, scoop her up, and place her on the stretcher. I followed along from behind the cemetery gate as they lifted her into the back of the ambulance.
I saw her smile.
It was just a flash. She pulled herself up, ever so slightly, straining against the straps and tape. She caught my eye. That broken face. She smiled. Then she screamed and shook her head back and forth, as if she was trying to clear a noise out of it that wouldn’t stop. “Noooo!” she screamed as the medics tried to calm her and tell her to be still so they could get her loaded up.
“Stop!” she yelled. “Bitch, stop! I killed you! Be gone!”
I didn’t see no ghosts on her, though.
The medics shook their heads, loaded her up, and then peeled off through the snow.
—
I make it back to the battlefield just in time to see the woman I love swoop up into the air at the tail end of an ngk thread. I yell her name, trying to figure out what the hell is going on with the sky—some strange void seeps open across it—but then there are Black Hoodies all around me and the yells and clangs of fighting take over.
“Keep pushing!” Riley’s voice cries. I let a little wave of relief slide over me: he’s still alive. We burst through a line of those ancient park spirits—no idea when they arrived or how they survived this long; those guys must be slow as hell in a fight—and then, a few rows ahead of me, I see the front line of Black Hoodies clash with the Council army’s rear guard.
The ’catchers look harried. Their swipes and parries are desperate now, and sloppy. I’m guessing Flores is down, but what about Sasha? I look up, and all I see is that unfathomable emptiness. No Sasha. No sky. Just nothing. More and more nothing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Krys
Redd and I aim for a spot right in the middle of the Council army. We come down cutting, drop three as we touch snow, then turn to see an entire squad reel toward us. Chaos rules here—there’s no organization, no direction. As quickly as the squad heads our way, two run off, and a third gets tackled by one of the hellhounds. We dash forward, meet the remaining nine head on, clanging ghost steel to ghost steel. I send one spinning out of my way with a slash as she charges, hack off another’s arm, and then something slices my cheek and I reel back.
And then the sky shatters.
No
. “Shatter” isn’t the word. It’s like a dirty film peels away and suddenly, for the first time ever, the true sky stares back at us, and it’s resplendent, glorious, crisp, unfiltered.
The fighting stops.
Weapons fall to the snow. All of us, ’catchers and rebels alike, just turn our heads skyward and gape like children at winter’s first snow.
There are spirits all across the sky. They’re not Council spirits—there is no more Council. And they ain’t renegades either. There are no more renegades. They’re just spirits, floating back and forth through the air with newfound freedom. They came from that first layer of the Underworld, like Redd and I just did, except there is no first layer of the Underworld, because the wall has come down.
We aren’t one or the other now; we just are.
Redd slides a hand around my shoulder and grins down at me; I take his face in my hands and pull him in for a kiss.
“We did that shit,” Redd whispers.
“We sure helped.” A trail of tiny fires erupts along my shoulders and arms as I wrap around him and kiss him even deeper. All across the battlefield, ’catchers and rebels shake their heads in wonder as the new world we created begins to take shape around us.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sasha
After the first few days of wild debauchery as that initial layer of the Underworld became one with the living world, everything pretty much calmed down and found its own equilibrium.
Imagine that.
Spirits, for the most part, can’t be bothered to politic with the living. But now, if they feel to, they can. And something much deeper has changed, besides the breath of freedom of life without the Council. It’s hard to describe, but it’s something like a filter being removed from your vision that you never realized was there. Or maybe it’s just been replaced by another filter. Freedom is something you feel in your muscles and bones. It’s a certain ease you carry as you walk down the street and don’t check each corner to see if you’re about to get got. Freedom is the smile that rises suddenly, catching even you off guard, when you realize this new peace is here to stay.
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