by K A Riley
We look around, waiting for backup or for the wail of sirens or security alarms, but it’s quiet in the corridor, so we breathe a collective sigh of relief.
“You got pretty good with those things pretty fast,” I tell Rain.
“It’s not hard,” she shrugs, taking her boot of the guard’s neck. “Aim. Squeeze. And these little guys do the rest.” She shakes the leather quiver of darts at her waist and frowns. “They’re easy enough to reload. I just wish I had more of them.”
I tell her not to worry about it and then turn my attention to Branwynne. “Which way now?”
“Follow me.”
Rain and I follow her down a hallway of polished stone and up a set of collapsible, telescoping steps.
From there, she stops and squints into space, apparently assessing our choices. Beckoning us forward, she leads us down a long, glass-walled walkway.
This part of the cathedral is eerily…wrong.
Cathedrals like this are supposed to be solemn sites, a towering tip of the hat to God. This place, we’re discovering, is a brutal hybrid of the remains of majesty infused by criminal hands, with all the trappings of digital technology.
It’s half lab, half prison. There’s nothing holy or majestic about it anymore. I don’t know why that makes me angry, but it does.
From here, we can see into the various rooms and cells along the way. They’re all empty except for one where a man in a silver lab coat snaps his head up from his holo-monitor as we pass.
He strides toward the glass door, which whooshes open as he approaches. Staring at us like we’re some species of invasive bug, he asks, “Who are you?”
Branwynne and I are frozen. Rain isn’t.
In the blink of an eye, she delivers a straight punch to the man’s sternum, and, before he can even register what’s happened, she’s unleashed a follow through shot with her other fist to the bridge of the man’s nose.
His face explodes in a spray of blood. But Rain’s not done with him. With the man doubled over and staggering backward, she presses forward, driving her knee up into his chin. His neck snaps back along with his eyes, which roll into his head as he slams into a table full of lab equipment in the middle of the room.
He and a host of tubes, monitors, and a rack of digital micro-tools go down in a thunderous clatter. He moans and lifts his head. Her fist cocked, Rain gets ready to give him a second thrashing, but his eyelids flutter, and his head cracks against the floor.
I’m a half-second away from congratulating Rain on a job well done when a commotion from down the hallway we just came from snaps us all to attention.
“Hawkers!” Branwynne shrieks.
We race down the hall with Noxia and the Hawkers—three of them in sleek, brown-hued uniforms—sprinting after us. I can practically feel their breath on the back of my neck.
Branwynne, Rain, and I clamber up a second staircase, this one made of rotten wood reinforced with flat panels of riveted steel, until we arrive, dripping with sweat, at a glass door.
Branwynne slams it open and runs full-tilt, pointing to the second, solid synth-steel door at the end of the long hallway.
“That’s it! That’s the Processor’s Holding Cell.”
“Can you get us in?”
“Unless they changed the code.”
Branwynne’s fingers fly over the input panel.
Nothing happens.
“Try again!” Rain shouts.
Branwynne practically lunges at the panel, her hands dancing as she tries to find the combination that will get us inside.
Rain and I whip around at the thunder of boots on the rickety staircase behind us. At the far end of the hall, the glass door we just came through shatters into a million pieces.
Striding through the door frame—brimming with the confidence of predators who have cornered their prey—are Noxia and the Hawkers.
Coming to a stop on either side of her, the three Hawkers have their long bows drawn, and I get a horrifying flash of what it will feel like to have one of those razor-tipped arrows go ripping through the air at me.
Noxia calls out, “Fire!” and the Hawkers release a coordinated hail of arrows at us down the length of the hallway.
I scream and duck as the arrows zing at us. I don’t know if it’s our good luck or their bad aim, but the arrows miss. Two of them pierce the wall behind us. The third bounces off and clatters to the floor.
I turn to face Noxia and the onrushing Hawkers. “Just get in there,” I bark over my shoulder to Branwynne. “I’ll buy us some time.”
I snap my Talons out. Rain, Branwynne, and I are outnumbered and outgunned, and I have visions of the three of us dying here in this hallway. I don’t have Brohn’s hyper-dense skin, but if I can channel Render’s blindingly fast speed, maybe I can hold my own long enough for Rain and Branwynne to get inside and lock the door behind them.
I’m just taking a breath I hope isn’t my last when I’m yanked backwards by my collar hard enough to pull me clean off the floor.
48
Lucid and Reverie
I tumble backwards as the door whooshes closed with me, Rain, and Branwynne on one side and Noxia and the onrushing Hawkers on the other.
I’ve got my eyes riveted on the closed and sealed door as Rain helps me to my feet.
I rub my neck. “Did you really have to pull me so hard?”
“I weighed the options. I could yank you in here or leave you out there to take on the Hawkers by yourself.”
“I could’ve taken them,” I say, retracting my Talons with a metallic snap and brushing my hands on my very sore butt.
“I don’t doubt it,” Rain beams.
“We don’t have a ton of time,” Branwynne calls out from the input panel next to the door. “I locked it from inside, but that won’t stop them from breaking it down.”
So…we’re safe, but we’re also trapped.
The partly-domed roof high overhead is made up of panels of glass—probably the transparent hyper-alloy stuff they use sometimes in the military—but it’s got be at least twenty feet up. I might be able to channel Render and get to the top. But once I’m there, I wouldn’t be able to break through the glass or help Rain and Branwynne follow me up.
The walls in this high-ceilinged room are flat, windowless, and pure white. Well, three of them are. The fourth wall is actually a fifteen-foot high panel of shimmering black, slightly concave glass.
Rain, Branwynne, and I are all reflected in it.
An explosion from outside the door makes us jump and sends shockwaves through the floor.
“What do we do?” Rain asks, but Branwynne doesn’t have an answer.
As for me, I’m distracted into an almost hypnotized daze. “That’s a strange wall,” I say, running my hand along the smoky and oddly reflective glass.
“It’s not a wall,” Branwynne says.
Next to me, Rain’s voice goes oddly soft as she also places her hand flat on the glass. “What is it?”
“It’s a Dampener,” Branwynne says, her eyes still rivetted to the bent door behind us.
“What’s that?”
“A Semi-Permeable Neuro-Dampener. It’s designed to suppress certain bio-electric, neurological signals.”
My heart’s racing, and, right now, I’d rather be pretty much anywhere but here. But I have to know. “What’s that mean?”
Rain’s eyes light up. “It’s like a shower curtain!”
Another blast and another shockwave rip through the room. Fortunately, the door bends again but doesn’t break.
“A shower curtain?” I ask.
“You know. A screen so water can’t get out. Only in this case, the water is the mental ability of the Emergents they must keep behind here.” Rain asks Branwynne if that’s right, and she confirms that Rain’s analogy makes sense.
Another explosion staggers us. The door lets out a complete spasmic shudder this time, and the whole room vibrates, pitching us into each other.
“I do
n’t think Noxia and the Hawkers are going to let us take our time figuring it out one way or the other!” I cry, snapping out of whatever daze I was in. “We need to get in there before they get in here.”
Rain gets to work on the input panel, but she warns us it’ll be slow going. “This is a very secure system, and I don’t have access to any of the network’s protocols.”
“How long?” I ask.
“Based on the firewalls I’ve encountered already…three hours.”
“Three hours?”
“They’ll be inside here in less than three minutes!”
“I’m not Manthy!” Rain says, choking back tears.
In a panic, fueled by fear and frustration, I snap my Talons out and slash them across the odd black wall.
Branwynne stops me from taking a second shot. “It’s absorbing your energy.”
Glancing over at the door, I drop my hands to my sides and allow the Talons to snap back into their housings in the gloves.
Branwynne clasps my hand in hers. “Come on.”
“Wait. What?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, we step forward past Rain and toward the wall.
“We’ll be right back,” she calls out to Rain, whose mouth hangs open as Branwynne and I walk directly into the wall.
I wince, expecting the pain from my face colliding with the towering, indestructible pane of solid glass. Instead, the wall disintegrates into a million floating particles that orbit each other like a silk-black galaxy full of mini constellations.
I blink hard, trying to determine if Branwynne and I are somehow inside the wall, in outer space, or, more likely, I’m just losing my mind.
She tugs my hand and guides me forward in a frictionless walking-glide. It’s unlike any feeling of flying—in a plane or connected with Render—that I’ve ever felt before.
It’s almost like walking through water, only easier. More like what I imagine walking in space would feel like.
Stepping out of the speckled darkness, we enter a square room of harsh white light.
In the center of the room is a floating, transparent bubble. I recognize it instantly. It’s a prison orb. I’ve had the misfortune to have been locked in one these things, helplessly suspended by its mag-grav field. Twice, actually. It wasn’t fun either time.
Inside this orb are two teenagers: a boy and a girl.
The twins.
They’re dressed in nearly all-white biker’s gear. Leather jackets, matching pants, and white military-style combat boots with black soles and black zippers up the sides.
Except for the black trim on their uniforms, they’re barely visible in the pure white room with not much more than their jet-black hair and dark eyes standing out.
With my hand still in hers, Branwynne tells me to follow her lead.
She reaches into the orb, right through the glass, which warps and whines but easily gives way under her touch.
I do the same. The feel of my hand passing through the orb’s solid glass tingles and tickles. Branwynne grabs the hand of the dazed boy, and I do the same with the girl. Together, we pull the two teenagers clean through the glass like magicians passing a deck of cards through a coffee table.
Blinking fast and breathing hard, the girl and boy stagger out into our arms.
Branwynne must be reading my mind because she cuts off their questions before they’re asked. “Answers are on the other side!” she cries. “Let’s go!”
Clasping their hands, we guide them back through the galaxy inside the wall, through the cluster of rotating and revolving stars and planets, and out into the room to rejoin Rain, who is standing there, understandably slack-jawed and staring at me, Branwynne, and the twins like we’re aliens who just beamed down from a distant planet.
Stepping forward to greet Rain, the twins treat the moment like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
“I’m Lucid,” the boy says.
The girl blinks hard and says, “Reverie.”
“You’re the twins we’re looking for?” Rain asks.
“We’re twins,” Lucid smiles. “We don’t know if we’re the ones you’re looking for.”
“You’re Seventeens?”
“I don’t know how old we are.”
They’re both tall, broad-shouldered, and olive-skinned with mysteriously dark eyes, their irises flecked with glitters of green and gold specks.
They both have their long hair pulled back into dark, matching ponytails.
The room shakes again, and we all cringe. The door just moved.
My hearts races, and my lungs threaten to seize up. “We need to get out of here!”
Branwynne tilts her head up to gaze at the partial dome of glass high above our heads. “I couldn’t agree more!” She grabs my elbow and spins me around, so we’re nose to nose. She points up, desperation in her black, pleading eyes. “You can fly, right?”
49
Escape
Branwynne reaches deep under her red leather vest. She whips out a coil of what looks like some kind of white filament. “Here! Take this!”
“A clothesline?” I ask.
“A utility cord. Part of the survival gear my parents insist I always take with me.” She pats her vest pockets. “I’ve got a fire-starter, water purification pills, and some hunting gear, too. Just in case.”
“I’m sure that’ll all come in handy,” Rain cries, stabbing a finger in the direction of the door. “But not against them!”
I look from the high domed ceiling, over to the door, and back to the ceiling.
I gulp.
The last time I accessed my Emergent abilities, I got a massive migraine. Then, I threw up.
“You’ve done this before,” Rain insists. “Back in D.C. You helped catch Krug on that rooftop. We need you to get up there.”
“It’s not that easy,” I say, practically in tears.
Another explosion, bigger this time, rips through the room. And now the door is bent in half and leaning into the room with Noxia’s scowling face pressed into the small opening between the door and the frame.
She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. There’s pure, savage ferocity in her eyes and a sinister scowl on her lips that quickly morphs into a “gotcha now” grin.
Rain’s hands whip up, and she fires her dart-drivers. Noxia ducks back as the silver barbs slice at her through the air. By the time darts ping off the door and its frame, Rain is already reloading.
“I can’t hold them off forever,” she snaps. “Come on, Kress! It’s fly or die!”
I take the thin coil of synthetic rope from Branwynne and loop the end of it around my wrist.
Channeling Render who is somewhere nearby—flying between here and wherever Brohn and the boys are—I let myself go light.
A wave of dizziness floods my consciousness, and I think I might pass out and drown in it.
Another wave crashes against me, tugging me back down in a kind of psychic undertow.
It’s Noxia!
It’s like she’s got her hand locked around my ankle. But she’s thirty feet away. No. She’s not trying to reach me. She’s trying to reach into my mind. From the other side of the door, she’s somehow pulling and clawing at me from inside my own head.
Even after all these years with Render, I’m still not used to having two voices in my head, and right now, there are three.
She’s strong. Is this what it feels like for people who fall under Cardyn’s Persuasion?
The voice tells me to give up.
It’s what you want.
No!
To stop running. Stop fighting.
Get out of my head!
Noxia presses deeper. I feel myself letting go. Of the rope. Of my stubborn refusal to quit. Of myself.
I’ve got to filter her out.
Without my whole Conspiracy, I’ve got no other choice. I harness my own strength, my will, an internal drive that doesn’t belong to anyone else but me. It may not be much, but it’s mine
.
I’m going to die either way. Might as well go out giving it everything I’ve got.
The floor plunges out from underneath me, and the next thing I know, I’m face to face with the center glass panel on the inside peak of the dome. I grab onto one of the thin I-beams forming the support ribs for the curved rooftop of glass and copper.
I snap out my Talons on the other hand and take a swiping hack at the pair of long sliding bolts holding the glass panel in place.
A shower of sparks bursts out from the contact of metal on metal, and the bolts split into pieces and land with a clatter on the floor below.
I push the glass panel open and clamber out.
With the end of the thin, knotted line still lashed to my wrist, I drop the rest down into the deep room where Branwynne grabs onto it.
She pushes it to Rain. “You first!”
Rain passes it to Lucid and barks at him to get moving.
He doesn’t argue. Looping the wire around his forearm, he starts climbing. I summon a strength I have no business having and haul him the rest of the way up until he’s outside of the dome with me.
After that, I do the same with Reverie, Branwynne, and, finally, Rain, who has stubbornly insisted on being the last one up.
She pulls her feet up just in time as three arrows thunk against the glass right underneath her.
Rain grips my bicep in her hand. “Pretty good muscles you got there. Are you channeling Render or Terk?”
I don’t answer, partly because my head is spinning and partly because, frankly, I don’t know. I’m sure I bring plenty of advantages to our Conspiracy. But physical and emotional strength have never been among them. Until now.
As fast as the flood of strength filled me, though, now it’s gone, and my muscles have gone rubbery.
I massage as much feeling back into my deflated arms as I can as Branwynne urges us on.
Below us, having fully invaded the room, Noxia—her cowl back, exposing her sculpted, exotically beautiful face and cascade of sable hair—is barking out orders to the Hawkers, who fire another volley of arrows up into the opening in the dome.
