He knew that Saben wasn’t trying to kill him. He was sure it was an accident. But really, that was too close for comfort.
The beam shifted beneath Dade’s feet, unsteady, the final cable stressed. He crouched low and grabbed on to the edge. Dade needed to get off this beam as soon as possible before it gave way, and he needed the last cable to get across the expanse. He looked back at the crowd of construction workers calling out to him. The beam shifted again, a bigger tremble this time. Dade surged forward, shooting at the remaining cable as he ran. It detached, spinning into the air as Dade launched himself and caught it. He felt the beam give way beneath him and fall into the dark static depths below.
His feet landed on the skyway, and in the next moment he was blown to the ground as the walkway beneath him gave way to phase-fire. Dade shifted to avoid the debris, stumbling to his feet. He tripped forward to run, disoriented as to which direction he should head.
In the distance, he saw Saben drop and roll behind a metal sign to avoid being hit with a sudden volley of incoming blasts. Phase-fire littered the area, tearing up the walls of the buildings and anything else in its path. The shots came in from all sides, blocking where Saben had holed up. He peeked out, looking for an escape while returning fire.
Dade couldn’t identify who was shooting at them or from where. The phase-fire seemed to be everywhere at once. The blasts along with the growing pile of debris made it impossible to distinguish any sort of a pattern, cutting off Dade’s ability to see much beyond where he was currently crouched.
There was nowhere for Saben to gain cover going forward. He slipped out and sprinted back toward Dade. Another volley of fire hit the street behind him as he ran. Though Saben was too quick to get caught.
Dade looked at the space between the buildings behind them and knew that Saben was headed there. He tried to head there as well, but phase-fire cut him off, sending him sliding behind several parked hovercars to take a better tactical position. His adrenaline kicked in. This he could do. Real danger had been the missing piece in his chase with Saben. For some reason, when his life was on the line, he didn’t stop to think, and helping Saben was high on his priority list.
He leaned out and shot, clearing a path for Saben, who switched directions and ran to where Dade sheltered. Dade could see them now, govies closing in on their position. They were being boxed in by swarms of them, too many to have been called in via the emergency comm system. They were geared up and ready for a fight.
Somehow Dade and Saben had wandered into a trap. It must have been logical, to the govies at least, that if the Ghost was prevented from stealing VitD, he’d make a public appearance eventually. It frustrated Dade that he’d been so shortsighted.
Saben slid in next to Dade. Covered in sweat, he gulped huge pockets of air, coughing them back out. He yelled over the sound of exploding phase-fire, “Who’s shooting at us?”
Dade shot off three more rounds, pulling back as the hovercars were blasted, shaking against their backs. They’d taken a lot of damage and wouldn’t last much longer. Dade could hear the ping-ping-ping as the hot beam melted the metal on the other side. “Govies.”
Saben made a rude comment.
Dade grunted in agreement.
The govies had to know that it was Dade who crouched behind the hovercar, and yet they still continued to shoot. There were no thunks of sleeping gas as the spheres hit the ground, no flash grenades. The govies weren’t trying to capture the Ghost. They were trying to execute him, and anyone who happened to be around him would get killed as well.
“Were you trying to kill me with your crazy acrobatic stunts?” Dade asked while leaning out to return fire.
Saben gave a short, amused laugh. “I had to make it look good.”
“I almost died a dozen times.”
“I thought that was the point.”
Dade pulled back to yell at him. “Not real dying.”
Saben grinned while leaning around the hovercar to pick off the govies who’d started to crawl closer. “I taught you well enough, you were never in danger.”
That was a matter of opinion. Dade glared at him before returning his attention to the fight. The tension that had coiled in Dade’s body now focused him, making his shots precise.
The hovercar was taking too much damage, though, melting in on itself. They needed to move.
Saben gestured to the building across from where they hid. It was mangled, the windows blown out and the doors blasted through. “We have company.”
Looking up, Dade realized that a person inside the building was waving at them. He did a double take when he saw it was Clarissa. She had her phaser out, shooting at the govies from the depths of the building’s carnage.
“Go,” Saben shouted, already moving.
Dade followed, knowing Clarissa would cover their backs. He ran in a low crouch, following Saben. They crashed through the open door of the building, rolling across what was once a luxurious lobby while taking fire. Things exploded around them: glass from the front doors, floor tiles, chunks of concrete. Dade could barely see. He kept one arm crooked up over his face, his nose tucked into the bend of his elbow as he hacked and ran. Tears streamed from his eyes as they flushed out the smoke and dirt so that he could see.
As soon as they were close enough, Clarissa also turned and ran, leading them into the blackness beyond.
Shooting and running, Saben and Dade followed, jumping over anything in their path and fully trusting her to get them out of there.
Hitting the doors open to an industrial stairwell, she slid to a stop on the landing. She signaled for Saben to take the stairs up, while pulling Dade in the other direction. “We have to separate. You can’t be caught together.”
Saben nodded once, already moving up the stairs, which he took two at a time.
“No,” Dade shouted, but neither responded. He watched Saben get farther away from him with every second.
Clarissa pulled on him with a surprisingly strong grip, getting him to move. He ran beside her, going double time down the stairwell.
“You can’t be caught with me either,” he said. The repercussions at this point would be just as bad for her. He regretted putting both Saben and Clarissa in this situation.
“I’m not going to leave you.”
Dade cursed and muttered under his breath. They didn’t have time to argue.
Three Levels down, they checked the exit to the skyway. He peered out the door, phaser at the ready. But everything looked ordinary. People were walking along, going about their everyday life, seemingly oblivious to the chaos several Levels above. There were no incoming blasts. He checked above, looking for snipers. Deciding it was clear, he nodded at Clarissa before tucking his phaser away and exiting the building.
Dade brushed his hair out of his face, pushing his way into the crowd. He felt Clarissa behind him, knew she followed close. They couldn’t run. The point was to blend in. They moved faster than normal, though, as quickly as the crowd allowed them.
A single shot sizzled through the air. He heard it a second too late, realizing when it was close enough that he could feel the pulsing energy as it spread through his body that he couldn’t avoid it. Dade felt the burning in his chest as it thunked into the center of his vest. It burned white-hot, sending out searing agony and pain. The vest’s fibers felt like they were melting into his skin.
“Dade,” Clarissa screamed.
He was going to die. The reality of the moment slammed into him. He hadn’t meant for this to happen.
Another shot hit him dead center again, sending him off balance. Dade careened over the side of the walkway, going limp and numb as his pain receptors shut down.
He fell, felt the sky rush around him, the static cloud enveloping him like a thick blanket. Dade closed his eyes and let himself be taken.
The Levels rushed past.
Then everything went black as he passed out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Arden watched her data
pad in horror. Her lungs burned—she couldn’t draw a full breath. She shook while tears streamed down her face, wondering whether somehow this was all a bad dream, whether she was really witnessing Dade’s last moments.
Normally she didn’t waste time on visicasts, never bothering to look at the news unless Lasair was involved somehow. But the chatter she heard as she’d made her way through Undercity had her finding a dark corner so she could figure out what the commotion was about: buildings burning, shooting in the streets, and the Upper Levels at war. What she hadn’t expected was the devastation that greeted her.
She enabled the volume to hear the commentators’ reaction to the coverage, wanting to know every possible bit of information she might have missed. Her mind was a blur. Perhaps if she could work out what had happened to start this mess, there would be a way to make it better, to rescue him.
Each vid-angle became more painful than the last.
She needed a moment to process, but the events didn’t slow. Thankfully, she was alone, because she couldn’t have concealed her emotions, the utter devastation she felt. How could she explain to anyone from Lasair why she was crying over a Solizen? She would never be able to answer with the truth.
Her eyes continued to track the situation playing itself out on live visicast. Every moment of the fight captured, displayed for the whole city to see. At first Dade had been in a phase-fight with the Ghost. That hadn’t bothered her. She didn’t know who was playing the part of the Ghost or for what purpose, and she really didn’t care as long as Dade was safe. Perhaps it was a plan of some sort. She trusted that Dade knew what he was doing. At the start, it had been entertaining to watch all the stunts they’d pulled off. She’d been impressed with Dade’s skill, and a little hot for him, truth be told.
It was no longer amusing.
When the govies had shown up and Dade had switched sides to fight alongside the Ghost, the tone of the commentary shifted. Now it was speculative, with Dade on the wrong side of the discussion. They were all but calling him a traitor.
“We’ve got positive confirmation that the first shooter is Dade Croix, son of Hernim Croix and heir of Croix Industries. We don’t know who the Ghost is at this time,” the woman said. The commentators’ images were at the bottom corner of the screen so that both visicasters could be seen while also covering the live feed.
“It appears they’re working together now. Weren’t they just shooting at each other?” the male visicaster asked.
“They were, Hal.” The woman’s mouth puckered as she watched the feed along with the rest of the city.
Hal leaned forward, practically salivating. “A bit of gossip landed the Croix heir in hot water just this morning.”
“What’s that?”
“A series of photos posted on a gossip site show the young Croix heir buying Shine in the slums on Level One. Sources said the pictures were taken three weeks ago. Along with this, it makes me wonder what Dade Croix has gotten himself involved in.”
The woman loudly inhaled through her scrunched lips. The surprise seemed insincere. It was a calculated move. They’d probably sat on this piece of news in order to release it at the right time. Perhaps they’d even known the govies had planned to confront Dade. The city loved to watch a Solizen fall.
Arden did too. She couldn’t deny it. This was different, though. This was Dade. It made her spitting angry that they dared to say such awful things about him, especially when he was fighting for his life.
Grudgingly she admitted that they had a point about questioning his allegiance. It was foolhardy for him to have publicly aligned himself with the Ghost. Maybe Dade hadn’t thought of the repercussions of the actions in the seconds he’d had. Perhaps he wanted to help a friend, which was completely in character with the man she loved. She smiled softly in spite of the ache in her chest and the tears on her face.
The visicaster continued to speculate. “Does Dade Croix have a drug habit? Perhaps the Ghost is not a humanitarian, but rather a drug dealer? Are we seeing the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong? Perhaps Dade Croix is the connection the Ghost uses to break and enter the drug facilities.”
Bright sun, Dade would be held accountable for this even if he made it out alive. That kind of suspicion didn’t go away. It grew like a cancer. She wanted to punch both visicasters in the face. This was a very dangerous path for people to start speculating on, and they were heralding the charge.
“It seems a logical conclusion,” the woman agreed. “If that’s the case, the Croix heir has an almost unlimited drug supply.”
Arden didn’t want to hear any more, but she couldn’t force herself to silence the stream. Their comments made her sick, but it was important to know the totality of the consequences Dade would face. The fallout would be more troubling than the visicasters suggested. They were effectively painting a target on Dade. If the city believed that the Ghost was in the drug business and not just being a do-gooder, then he’d become a bigger target in her world than he already was. Lasair wanted him now, but that was because he affected them specifically. If it was perceived that he cut into the drug profits of the whole city, he’d be hunted by other gangs as well for encroaching on their territory.
There was also social perception to consider. It would open the doors to stricter laws, and then maybe a civil war. She could see the spin now: a rich Solizen keeping life-saving VitD from the people, while flooding the streets with Shine.
Maybe Niall was right. Perhaps civil war would happen with or without the Lasair prodding things along. There would be a fight eventually, and people would die either way. He might also be correct in his assumption that cutting off the beast at the head was the best way to move forward.
Dade and whoever was playing the Ghost made a run for it into the blown-out building. She knew that building had several exits. The govies couldn’t cover them all. It looked like they would have a chance of escape if they chose wisely. Unfortunately, they didn’t know some of the hidden passages that would take them to Level One nor the bolt-hole into Undercity. If she had been there, halfway across the city, she could have used the bolt-hole to rescue them.
Arden tried to convince herself that they’d be okay. Dade was resourceful. He’d proven to her that he was smart and capable of taking care of himself. She wanted to believe in happy endings, even if the logical side of her brain didn’t agree.
She watched with the rest of the city as the battle ceased for the moment, practically holding her breath the whole time. She felt the burn from lack of air and the ache of the unknown. Her head felt light too. Being on this side of things—watching and not doing—was the purest form of torture she’d ever experienced.
The visicasters continued chatting. Recapping the last ten minutes. Speculating and discussing the situation with supposed experts. It was complete rubbish. They had no clue what was happening, but they needed to fill airtime.
The picture was set on a repeated loop, showing the last part of the chase that had ended in the phase-fight. Then the picture switched to show a full shot of the visicasters looking directly into the camera.
Arden held her breath.
“We’ve gotten a preliminary report that the Ghost has been shot.” Hal delivered the announcement in a somber tone. “Once again, we believe that the Ghost—the menace who is believed to have stolen our precious VitD resources—has been killed. There’s no confirmation at this time, but we will bring you more information whenever we get it.”
Arden’s stomach twisted. Had Dade stayed with whoever had played the Ghost? Had he been shot as well?
The woman broke in. “The city is blocking our view of the live feed in an effort to secure the crime scene. Just as soon as we have the live shot back, we’ll take you there for the most immediate details.”
“Wait a second,” Hal said, interrupting her. “We’ve just gotten word that there is movement on Level Two.”
The camera went wide with another live shot. The streets were crowded, as they usu
ally were at that time of day. The shot focused on a door to that same building as before. It caught Dade emerging and the girl, Clarissa, following. They quickly merged into the crowd, keeping their heads down as they pushed themselves through the commuters.
Arden clenched her jaw, sending pain streaking through her face. Resentment rolled through her, making her seethe. Of course Clarissa was there, fighting by his side, because Arden couldn’t. And that, she realized too late, was so many levels of wrong. She should have never relinquished her spot to fight beside him.
“Is that Clarissa Hemstock, Dade Croix’s fiancée?” the woman visicaster asked.
“I believe so,” Hal agreed.
The woman looked flabbergasted. “What is going on?”
Hal shook his head, equally dumbfounded.
Arden’s gaze stayed on the video feed, taking in as much as the camera angle allowed. Dade and Clarissa weren’t moving fast enough, and they didn’t realize they’d been spotted. She panicked. Her heart thundered in her ears, and her already twisting stomach threatened to rebel. Why were the govies focused on him and not on the Ghost? Dade was a Solizen. They could pick him up at home without a problem. He posed no threat, unless the govies were declaring war on the noble class. Arden had a sick, sick feeling that was only confirmed when the blast hit Dade.
His mouth made an O, and his eyes opened wide in surprise. The cameras caught every nuance.
Arden felt it as if she’d taken the blast herself.
Clarissa looked up, realizing they were under attack. She glanced at Dade. Arden knew there was nothing Clarissa could do. If she had been in the same situation, she would have calculated that there’d be no way to help him and that she should save herself at that point. Clarissa must have realized the same thing. She moved to the right, running fast, and the camera lost her as it stayed focused on Dade.
Arden wanted to scream. Instead, she choked as tears streamed from her eyes, and she hiccupped in a sob. The horror of watching nearly undid her. Dade could not die. In no scenario had she ever fathomed that happening. He had to be wearing protective gear. He’d run. He’d hide. He’d be alive.
The Breaking Light (Split City Book 1) Page 21
