Curse the Dawn

by Karen Chance

  It was simply impossible. I could feel it in my bones, like the jerking pulse of my own heart. There was simply no way could I shift so many. Even if I’d been well-rested, I could have made only four or five trips, taking out two at a time. As things stood, I’d be lucky to rescue the man the vamps seemed so interested in and still get the rest of my own party out.

  We stopped in front of a cell containing a middle-aged man with frizzy brown hair. Marlowe worked to get the ward on his door to release while I glanced at the cells on either side of him. One contained a red-haired woman with a sly, calculating look on her face. The other held another middle-aged man who was losing the fight with male-pattern baldness, despite there being charms for that sort of thing. Maybe he’d been too proud to use them—his expression was certainly haughty enough—or possibly the Circle didn’t allow such vanities in its cells.

  Neither of them looked particularly sympathetic, but the thought of what was about to happen to them sent cold chills across my skin nonetheless. This was my doing. Not my fault—I hadn’t told Richardson to betray us, hadn’t thrown the spell that caused this. But if I’d left that meeting when Pritkin had warned me, none of this would have happened. His voice came back to me suddenly: “They’ll die of starvation or drowning or by being crushed under a mountain of rock.” I looked into the man’s face and shuddered.

  A ward snapped, the buzz ringing in my bones like a struck tuning fork, and the frizzy-haired man tumbled bonelessly into Marlowe’s arms. “How many can you take?” Marlowe asked me.

  “I . . . not this many,” I said, admitting the obvious.

  “Tell me which ones.”

  “Which ones?” I stared at him. “You’re asking me to choose who lives and who dies.”

  “Someone has to do it,” he said with a shrug, hoisting the man onto his shoulder. “And the Senate has no stake here. We have the one we want.”

  I looked at the red-haired woman again. She had gray eyes that, in the flickering light, seemed almost conscious, almost aware. We stared at each other, her stiff and lifeless as a doll, me as wooden as a carved statue. In a few more minutes, she’d be dead. Or I’d take her and the rest would die. Like the human servants the vampires had housed upstairs, like anyone who had happened to be on the upper levels. It seemed so horribly random.

  “There has to be a way,” I said desperately.

  “A way to do what?” Marlowe asked, his brow knitting.

  “To rescue them. All of them. We can’t just leave them here!”

  Marlowe stared at me blankly. “Yes. We can. In approximately forty minutes this entire level will collapse and in the process take out those below it. Your compassion is admirable, but if we don’t leave soon, none of us will get out of here. And I, for one, would miss me.”

  “And I’m sure a lot of these people would be missed, Marlowe!”

  The light directly above us took that moment to blow out, raining plastic and glass onto the corridor floor and throwing Marlowe’s face into shadow. The darker atmosphere accentuated the harsh planes of his face, making them visible behind the jovial mask. For a moment, he looked as dangerous as everyone always said he was.

  “If there was a way to save them, we would do it. But there isn’t,” he said flatly. “And keep in mind where we are. For all you know, these people deserve their fate.”

  My gut clenched, my usual deny-repress-ignore method for dealing with uncomfortable facts suddenly not working so great. I looked up and down the corridor at the faces, young and old, hard and soft. They had won the Circle’s enmity, but so had I. If Richardson had had his way, I’d be in one of these cells, too. They were no different from me, except that they were about to die. Condemned because I’d made a stupid mistake.

  Chapter Nine

  Green light from inside one of the cells dyed my hands an eerie, ill color. I pressed them tight until they ached, staring around at dozens of faces. The temptation to finally use my power was almost overwhelming. I’d been thinking about it, had it in the back of my mind ever since I saw that burnt, dead landscape, the milling group of shell-shocked mages, the empty space where MAGIC should have been. Because Marlowe was wrong—I could do this.

  I just didn’t know if I should.

  “Cassie, the mouth of the nearest escape tunnel is ten minutes from here, and it is a further ten beyond that to safety,” Marlowe said. “Time is not our ally.”

  I felt a hysterical laugh building in my throat but tamped it back down. “Yeah, well, that’s the question of the day, isn’t it?”

  A small frown creased his forehead. “Cassie—”

  “I need a minute, Marlowe.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know yet!”

  This was one of those times when I really lusted after that nonexistent training. In the last month, I’d sort of come to terms with the fact that I was time’s janitor, there to clean up the messes left by other people’s attempts to play god. That wasn’t what had been keeping me up nights. This was. The idea that, sooner or later, I was going to run across a situation where the person wanting to change time would be me.

  I could go back, make sure I missed that meeting, prevent all of this so easily. There would be no destruction of MAGIC, no loss of life. . . . It seemed almost too easy. And that was what scared me. I’d changed one small thing before and almost killed Mircea. What would changing something this big do? I didn’t know, and that terrified me.

  Agnes had said not to mess about with time, that it almost always caused more problems than it solved. But she’d also said that the reason the Pythia was a clairvoyant was because we could look into the future and see the outcome of our actions. She’d said to trust my gift. But that was just it—I’d never trusted it.

  My whole life, it had shown me nothing but bad news, had been a source of nightmares instead of daydreams. One of the few things I’d liked about becoming Pythia was the fact that my visions had tapered off. Instead of one every two or three days, weeks had passed with nothing. And now I suddenly found myself in a situation in which lives depended on that despised gift.

  I really hoped Agnes had been right.

  “I’m going to try something,” I told Marlowe. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “You’ve already had a minute.”

  “And now I’m taking another one!”

  I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. I could practically feel the disapproval coming off him in waves, but he didn’t say anything. And after a few seconds, I calmed down enough to make the attempt. Only I wasn’t sure how.

  I’d struggled with my talent all my life, but mostly to repress it. Only rarely had I deliberately tried to see things, and most of those efforts had been failures. And now I was asking the impossible, to see a potential future in place of the real one. I didn’t really expect it to work.

  But it did.

  I picked my way over blackened rubble to the entrance of Dante’s—or what was left of it. The buildings had been bisected by a line of destruction, cracked open like a broken tooth. A wash of dirt had collected in the carved letters over the main doors, which now opened onto nothing.

  Only part of one tower remained, ruined rooms cut open and exposed to the elements. Water-stained, faded furniture leaked over the sides and a few tattered curtains still shifted in the breeze. The rest was a blackened shell, with only a faux stalagmite sticking up here and there, like burnt and wrinkled fingers pointing at the sky.

  I crawled through a door half obscured by rubble to a floor knee-deep in windblown debris. It had been part of the lobby, although it was only possible to tell by the location and overall shape. The bridge was gone, as was the Styx, the reservation desk and the employees’ dressing rooms. The lobby bar was still there, a jumble of overturned tables, broken bottles and a slanting drift of sand from two missing windows. It was also home to a chattering colony of rats. I quickly backed out again.

  I sat down abruptly in the shadow of the remaining tower, sen
ding up a little cloud of dust. The sun was glaringly hot through the missing roof, and it was the only shade available. But it came at a price.

  Every time I looked up, I saw some new horror: a human rib cage, yellowed with age, housing a family of foxes; random bones, several with teeth marks on them where some long-dead animal had feasted; and a crumpled Dante’s uniform behind the desiccated remains of a potted palm. Where once there had been constant life and bustling activity, there was suddenly only dust and decay, everything brown and withered and so very still.

  The vision shattered, the dead world spinning backward at a dizzying pace. I looked up to see Marlowe kneeling beside me. I was on the floor, although I couldn’t remember how I got there. “What is it?” he asked urgently. “What did you see?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Agnes had been partially right—my power was trying to tell me something. I just didn’t know what. MAGIC had been destroyed, not Dante’s. And even if the breach had taken place in Vegas, a major casino wouldn’t just have been left there like that, with no signs of attempted repair or even demolition. None of this made any sense.

  But one thing was clear: I’d asked my power to show me what would happen if I changed time. I didn’t understand the message, but the general gist hadn’t seemed positive. And without some major confirmation, I didn’t dare meddle with anything.

  “Can you describe it?” Marlowe asked, helping me to my feet. When I looked into his face, I saw only concern. The frightening glimpse behind the mask was gone, and the kind, genial man I’d always known was back.

  Not that that meant anything.

  “It . . . was a jumble. It happens like that sometimes.” I couldn’t change time, but I could use the time I had. I could do a lot with forty minutes, if I had help. But I wouldn’t get it from Marlowe. The Senate wasn’t likely to risk a useful tool to help a bunch of convicts.

  “I think you were right,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”

  Marlowe hoisted his prisoner like a sack of potatoes and took my hand. I shifted us back only to find Rafe, Pritkin and Caleb crowding the small stairwell. “What is this?” Caleb demanded, catching sight of Marlowe’s burden. His hand dropped to his weapon belt.

  “A rescue,” I said, grabbing Pritkin’s shoulder. “The cells are full and the passage is blocked. Any ideas?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” I said, and shifted.

  We landed in the middle of a tremor and fell to our knees. The corridor shook, setting the industrial pendants overhead swinging and popping a block out of the wall like a shotgun shell. It exploded against one of the cells on the opposite side of the corridor. It didn’t faze the ward, but it peppered us with shards like minuscule hailstones and scattered gray dust over the floor. I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to curl into a ball and put my hands over my head.

  When I looked again, Pritkin was regarding the exploded block with a scowl. “We don’t have much time,” I told him, getting back to my feet. “Marlowe said it’s a twenty-minute hike to the surface from here.”

  “I know. Raphael showed us the schematics. Caleb is working on a faster alternative.” But he continued to kneel there, scowling fiercely.

  “Pritkin! Come on! What are you waiting for?”

  “Inspiration,” he said, gesturing at the cells. “It’s worse than I thought. If the outer wards had held, the walls would be stable. But they’re buckling under the weight from above. That means that the only thing keeping this place intact are the inner wards.”

  “The inner wards?”

  “The ones on the cells.”

  I looked at the row of prisoners and my jaw dropped. “But . . . how are we going to get everyone out? If we disable the wards—”

  “Then the weight from above will crush us all,” he finished grimly. “And once they go down, they aren’t going back up again. Not with this kind of damage.”

  “Crap.”

  “Exactly.” He stared at a cell for a few seconds. “If we can preserve the wards on at least half the cells, it should buy us enough time to get away.”

  “Get away how? Because I can’t shift out this many!”

  He glanced at me as if surprised that I’d be worried by a little thing like that. “I can get them out as long as enough wards remain to keep the roof up.”

  His tone made it sound like getting through thirty-five yards of rockfall in roughly that many minutes was no big deal. I opened my mouth to ask for specifics and then realized we didn’t have time. Besides, if Pritkin said he had a plan, then he did, and it would probably work. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. “You’re talking about leaving half these people to die.”

  “Not necessarily.” His gaze turned considering. “You could shift in.”

  It took me a second to get it. “I could bypass the wards, and bring the people out with me!”

  “If you can shift that precisely. There’s not much room for error.”

  I glanced at the nearest cell, which held a large, hairy, tattooed man in a tank top. There was very little extra space that I could see around him. But in the next cell was a slim woman, and between her and the ward there was maybe two feet. “I can try,” I agreed.

  I shifted past the ward and inside the woman’s cell. It was a tight fit, and there was some sort of energy field that wrapped around my limbs like a blanket, trying to paralyze me. I didn’t give it time, just grabbed her wrist and shifted out again.

  “How much energy did that cost you?” Pritkin asked, catching her before she could collapse.

  “Not much. But I won’t fit in all the cells.”

  “Do the best you can,” he told me, glancing up at the swaying light fixtures. The place was becoming rapidly more unstable. Every moment we stayed upped the chances of our getting killed by falling debris before the place could crush us to death. “And make sure you keep back enough energy to get yourself out of here, if this goes wrong.”

  “Sure, because it’s not like any of this was my fault,” I said sarcastically.

  He grabbed my arm hard enough to hurt. “I mean it.”

  I blinked at him, taking in the tense set of his jaw, the tight press of his mouth and the more-than-slightly-maniacal gleam in his eyes. I’d never tell Pritkin this, but there were times when he really reminded me of a vamp. He had the same way of flipping into the scariest person in history, and then flipping right back out and never noticing the difference.

  “Okay,” I said meekly.

  He nodded curtly and moved to the cell with the tattooed man. He started on the wards and I went to work avoiding them. The tiny hops, only a few feet at a time, didn’t take much energy, but there were a lot of cells. And no matter what I’d promised Pritkin, I couldn’t look into people’s faces and tell them, Hey, sorry you have to die, but I’m getting really tired.

  By the time I reached the end of the row, I was soaked in perspiration, my skin was a sickly white and my hands were shaking violently. I leaned against the wall and watched Pritkin release another person the old-fashioned way. Together, we’d freed about thirty people, most of whom were lolling drunkenly against walls or sprawled unconscious on the floor.

  Pritkin glanced at me and frowned. “Take a break,” he said curtly.

  “How? We aren’t even halfway yet.” And I hadn’t seen what was on the next corridor.

  Pritkin’s eyes moved from me to the cells to the half-unconscious young man who had just fallen into his arms. He had wavy black hair pulled into a short ponytail, pale skin and an athlete’s body. He looked to be around thirty. Pritkin propped him against the wall and shook him. The young man stirred, blinked his eyes open and looked up groggily. Just in time to get slapped hard across the face.

  “What are you doing?!”

  “Bringing him around. Some of the prisoners are war mages—or used to be. They can help open the cells.”

  “What are war mages doing in here?”

  “The current ad
ministration has a habit of locking away those who get too vocal against its policies,” he said shortly.

  Two more blocks burst from the wall before I could comment. The once orderly pattern was starting to look like a toddler with missing teeth. “There’s another cell block beyond this one,” Pritkin said. “Although with any luck, it isn’t fully occupied. Can you finish here?”

  I nodded and he slipped around the corner. I stumbled down the corridor and knelt beside the mage. “Wake up! We need your help!”

  He looked up at me with bleary eyes. They were a weird color, almost no-color, like rocks viewed through river water. I took another look at the number of cells remaining and then pulled my arm back and slapped him as hard as I could.

  “I’m awake!” he said heatedly, his eyes sharpening up fast. “What’s happening?”

  “A ley line ruptured, destroying most of MAGIC. We’re trying to get everyone out, but a cave-in cut off the passageway from the prison wing. We need you to help release the rest of the prisoners while we look for a way out!”

  “There isn’t one,” he said, sitting up with his hands on his head, like a hangover victim. “It’s a prison. It’s supposed to keep people in.”

  “If you want to live, you’ll help us think of one,” I said grimly.

  “The Circle will rescue us.”

  “The Circle evacuated an hour ago!”

  “I don’t think so,” he told me nastily. “We’re war mages. We don’t simply abandon our colleagues.”

  “Then what are you doing in here?’

  He glared at me. “That’s none of your concern! The point is that you’re wrong.”

  “You’ll figure out otherwise in about twenty-five minutes,” I said. “But it’ll be a little late.”

  “Fuck that.” The red-haired woman I’d noticed earlier had come around. She crossed to the other side of the corridor and started working on the ward imprisoning a tall Asian woman. “I’m not dying today.”

  The corridor shook again, and the war mage gave a start. He noticed the missing blocks, and for some reason, they seemed to shake him. “The external wards are down. Why?”