by Kaleb Nation
Every bump in the road made me bounce and feel sicker. The drive continued longer than I’d expected, and partway through Wyck whispered something in a radio to the driver. We took a sharp turn and started down another way. We could have been anywhere for all I knew, heading deeper in to a maze from which I knew there would be little chance of escape.
The longer we rode, the more edgy the four guards became. Each was nearly twice my mass. It didn’t make sense for them to be so afraid and yet I didn’t need a Glimpse to see the anxiety lurking in their eyes.
Soon, the truck slowed and I heard a massive grating outside. Then we pulled ahead a few more feet, the windows darkening as we entered a building. The guards glanced at each other but still said nothing.
The back door opened. The guards beside me seized my arm again, pulling me down the steps and onto the ground. Lights from our single police car escort flashed against the walls.
We had parked inside what appeared to be a giant airplane hangar. I wasn’t sure at first until I looked over my shoulder and saw far off in the corner was a small, Gulfstream G650 executive plane. That was how large the space was: a small jet could sit tucked away in one corner and go unnoticed for a few seconds. The roof towered above my head and the walls were made of long metal sheets, everything lit by skylights. There were five silver sedans parked neatly against the wall, all bearing the Maserati trident on their fronts. Two other people were standing behind racks, shuffling around with cables and a row of screens, paying no attention to us. Other things were scattered about under tarps and behind tables but I was pushed ahead before I could see them.
Wyck got out of the van last, approaching the guards and me after a quick check of his wristwatch. He took me by the arm.
“Stand over here,” he ordered, as the men let go of me uncertainly. I could see they were confused about what was going on. I was shoved from Wyck’s hold into the grasp of the driver, as Wyck tossed his coat into the man’s other arm.
“Good work, men,” he said, spinning around. Claws slithered out from the ends of his fingers. The men didn’t even have a chance to gasp.
In a single twirl of motion, Wyck slashed around on either side of him, slicing the men across their middles. Their bulletproof armor did nothing to stop the silver blades, blood splashing in a watery line across the floor as they cried out. But their noises were short—he swung the claws back down, stabbing two through the center then drawing the blades back again.
The men gurgled, trying to choke in air, but they were dead before they could get a single breath more.
Wyck turned around—his face was blank. No vengeance, no enjoyment, not even a second of killer’s glee. Just frigid, unaffected calm, like he’d squashed mosquitoes between his fingers. His claws disappeared, the blood wiping against his skin and staining his fingers as it did. He retrieved his jacket and swept it back on.
“We won’t be late for the meeting,” he told the two remaining officers with a satisfied nod. They turned me around, forcing me to walk again, and I realized that these two officers were on Wyck’s side. Humans actually helping the Guardians? I thought of the nurse in the white room and the other technicians still plugging the televisions together in front of me. Why would any human ever help a Guardian?
We came to a square of tables and I was pushed down onto the cold metal chair at their center. The other two people were bustling around the area, keeping their heads down and their faces turned from mine. I managed to see bits of their faces: a man and a woman, both middle aged. It was hard to tell exactly how old they were though, because like the nurse from the white room, their faces had received vast surgical work. Their chin and cheeks were puffed up over plate-like bones, all their skin stretched tightly. It looked like they’d only made minute changes but with all of the alterations added up, they appeared disfigured.
I wanted to look in their eyes, hoping somehow I’d capture a Glimpse—to find out why they continued to move at the command of these Guardians who despised their entire race so much. Was it fear? Had they been brainwashed against their own kind? Every time one of them accidentally glanced in the direction of Wyck, they lowered their heads even further, almost as if through some spiritual devotion. They were like cult members.
The metal rack they were setting up held a row of television screens, a large video camera poking from the center and aimed at me. Far off, I saw another row of vehicles: massive trailers like the one with the white room. There were no windows for me to see through any of them. I felt a shudder go up my back when I thought about what might be inside. Was Thad already in one of them, suffering at the hands of another brutal nurse?
One of the tables screeched as it was slid in front of me, the edge bumping my chest. The men placed my hands in top of the table and undid my handcuffs.
I was still shaking lightly, unable to control it. The bleeding on my face had stopped but my head continued to pound, and I had to keep blinking so that my vision would stay clear. I wanted to sleep, to give in to the black that seeped in around my vision.
Wyck fell in front of me, both hands slamming down on the metal tabletop.
“Awake?” he checked, tilting his head. I licked my lips and tasted the salt of blood. He reached to the side and picked something up with both arms, dropping it on the table with a crash. It startled me and I blinked again, vision clearing as the sound reverberated back and forth in the hangar. It was the metal box, the eyes of it still open and waiting for me, just as it’d been when Wyck had plucked it from my hands in the crypt.
“Where’s Thad?” I spoke my first words in what felt like hours. It wasn’t even a question, really. It was my demand, one that I knew Wyck was smart enough to have figured out hours ago. He knew why I’d turned myself in. One glance up at his face told me that much.
He conceded immediately. Lifting a hand, he gestured for one of the two workers to carry out the command, and I heard her steps leaving and a door cracking open. My eyes remained locked with Wyck’s, refusing to look away.
I heard the creak of wheels behind me and stiffened. It was a slow, unhurried sound, like that of a grocery cart being wheeled down an aisle. My teeth tightened together. Wyck was too close to me. My hands were free—I could have slapped him again, ripped the skin right off his cheek before the meager guards could have stopped me. But I held myself back, squeezing my hands together to keep them from moving on their own as I heard the wheels continue around me and come to a stop.
I didn’t want to turn. Wyck nodded to the side. So finally, I forced myself to look.
Thad was lying on a stretcher with white sheets, arms exposed and flat against his sides with wrists facing up. His long hair was ruffled around his scalp, matted by sweat that ran down his forehead in long beads and lines. He was strapped down just as I had been but didn’t try to shift when I saw him—or rather, he couldn’t. I saw why: a tall metal arm on wheels sat beside his bed, and running from it was a tube with a needle poking his left arm.
Only his eyes moved. Their lids were stuck open, bloodshot, and unable to bat the dust away. But with great effort, his irises turned down, stretching so that they could see me out of the corners.
He drew a breath in quickly.
I let one out.
“You don’t need to do that to him,” I said, casting away all the façade that I’d been hoping to keep. I lifted my hand to wipe my eyes and both of the guards jumped, grabbing my arm, smashing it back onto the table. I spun to look at Wyck.
“I’ve been good so far,” I told him. “You can get that out of his arm.”
“Ha!” Wyck gave a laugh like he found my request hilarious. “And what then? Let him go flying around the room to save you? Be thankful he’s still alive.”
“I won’t open that box until he’s free,” I spat.
“And I won’t set him loose until that box is open,” Wyck returned instantly. “Do you see me as a fool?”
“Then we’re at a stalemate,” I said. “You can kill me.
”
Wyck suddenly rang out with another laugh, terrible and frightening all at once. He clapped his hands together, turning from me and stepping over to the row of five television screens. There was a keyboard beside them. He started typing as his forced chuckles shrank.
“We’ve been through this. We don’t need you dead,” Wyck told me, as he flipped switches on the screens to turn them on.
“We just need you gone,” he insisted. “That’s all there is to it. We just need the Blade to do that. One tiny prick. Then we don’t care about you anymore.”
He spread his hands to accentuate his promise, as if his desires were so obvious that I should have guessed it myself. On the outside, he looked so innocent behind his request, like I’d be a fool to turn down such an easy offer.
Yet I still had the upper hand. He might not have showed it, but all of us knew that if he shot me right then and there, he wouldn’t get what he wanted. The Blade would still be locked away and I’d just come back in another form. Eventually, in time—even if it took millennia of reincarnations—I’d find some way to get it back and end them.
The screens came on one by one. They caught my attention as the static faded and was replaced by a row of faces. Four men in a row, and the fifth a woman I’d already seen: the Guardian named Morgan, now without her young son. The first four all had different faces, but as I looked, those faces changed. Just like what had happened with Anon, all of the men were wearing the identity-concealing devices, so that even in the space it took Wyck to turn to me again, they’d all changed twice each.
But their eyes, those stayed the same. In their eyes, even without needing a Glimpse, I knew who these people were, why they were all gathered to watch from safe places far away. Power. Authority. Anticipation. Guardians.
It was impossible to identify any of them in that state, besides Wyck’s mother Morgan. She seemed unconcerned for her identity, relaxed into her high-backed chair and blinking at us.
So there are five of them: five Guardians. Did each of them have two Chosens? That meant at most, there were fifteen in total. That seemed like such a tiny number when placed against how vast the world was, how much of a reach they’d need in order to control so many things at once. It was startling, but also encouraging. I only had fifteen to take down.
Fifteen minus one, I corrected myself. Mr. Sharpe was already gone. I wondered whose Chosen he had been. I scanned their eyes, wondering if I would see any of them with extra hate to identify Mr. Sharpe’s Guardian by, but they only stared through the screens at me unfeelingly.
“As you can see,” Wyck said to the screens, angling himself toward Morgan, “I have brought Mr. Asher in as promised, and he will give us the Blade.”
“What is that over there on the side?” Morgan said, ignoring Wyck. She leaned over in an attempt to see something that the camera did not reveal entirely. Wyck, blinking, looked to his side, then pulled the edge of Thad’s bed toward him.
“This is Mr. Asher’s Chosen,” he said to her, now looking a little flustered.
“Why isn’t he dead yet?” she asked. “Haven’t we made this little mistake before, Wyck?”
Before my eyes, I watched the unshakable man crumble. The absolute assurance that Wyck had displayed so far was betrayed by a single, thin line of sweat that ran down the back of his neck, so insignificant that I almost didn’t notice it.
I sat up straight. Something was going on between Wyck and his mother. It looked like she’d struck him through the screen.
Wyck coughed, ignoring me. “The dilemma with killing Mr. Asher’s Chosen is that… Mr. Asher will not be as inclined to open the box if—”
“Can we just carry on with Mr. Asher?” one of the men said, the second screen from the left. He had just changed from a middle-aged, bearded gentleman into a sallow-faced elderly woman with discolored wrinkles across her skin.
“Hush, Arthur,” Morgan commanded with an impatient wave of her hand. “Just kill the Chosen and take the ring and be done with it.”
Wyck, seeming incited by her sharp words, turned to the guard next to him and seized the gun from his hands. In a flash, he cocked it and–
“Wait!” I burst in a scream, standing up with the chair dropping behind me. It fell with a crash that brought Wyck’s head around.
“I’ll open the box!” I shouted at him and the screens. “I’ll open it now. But if you shoot him I swear I won’t.”
I shook with intent, trying not to show my fear but unable to mask it from my widened eyes. The gun hovered over Thad’s chest, his eyes rolling away from where they’d locked on the barrel. Now he looked at me.
“If he dies, I’ll scrape my own eyes out,” I hissed through my heavy breathing. “Then you can torture me all you want, it won’t get the box open.”
The gun didn’t move. Morgan looked upset.
“Well?” she said, leaning back and drumming her fingers on the chair’s arm. “One or the other. Let’s hurry.”
Seeing my hesitation, Wyck lifted the gun to his shoulder again. So I threw my hands out, seizing the box and spinning it around to face me. I leaned over the table so that my eyes were aligned with those in the box, looking up to make sure that the others saw me.
Thad’s bed had begun to shake, such tiny movements that they’d have been imperceptible if not for the way the wheels creaked on the floor. Tears ran down his face, eyes his only way of speaking. They begged me to stop, to run, to leave the Blade, to do anything but allow it to fall into their hands and forfeit everything that we’d already done, everything that we’d already given up.
I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t see his tortured face and push myself to continue. So I swallowed hard, turning away from Thad, and looked down to the box.
Its designs appeared all the more intricate in the glow from the skylights, as if every detail was heightened and I could pick out even the tiniest, most miniscule stroke from the expert’s knife. I hadn’t been able to see it in the dark of the crypt, but now I could tell just how different this was from previous case. It was longer and the designs were darker with more points. Its eyes were dilated: waiting for me, calling for me to read them.
So with the seconds passing, with me wondering if I was making the worst mistake of my thrice-lived life, and the stillness of anticipation enveloping the room…
I looked.
A simple, fixed stare was all it took, locking my eyes with the pair below mine. I waited for the eyes to change, for the lock to shift, for a gear to spin, for the box to open so that finally, all of this would be over.
The eyes in the stalks rolled forward to meet mine. In a flash, they narrowed into black slits.
The box gave an immediate shift. The lid beneath my thumbs moved a millimeter upward, releasing itself from the rest of the box. I heard a sharp intake of breath from across the table, Wyck lowering his gun, as if even he hadn’t believed that I would do it.
And that was all I needed.
The moment that the box was open and the lid had brushed the ends of my waiting fingers, something inside of me came back to life. Maybe it was because the lingering pain in my head had finally faded. Maybe it was because the guards’ fingers on my arms had loosed slightly at the box’s sound. But more likely, it was because when the box opened, somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, I remembered the last time that I’d heard that sound: two lives before, when I’d locked it away.
Like an explosion going off with me at its center, suddenly things went flying.
A backwards swing of my scaled fists sent both guards through the air. I seized the cover so quickly that my now-extended claws threw sparks against its surface, the lid torn from the case. I grabbed the handle of the Blade and pulled it from the sheath before I even had a chance to look at it.
I darted in front of Thad like a shield, shadowing him as Wyck’s gun went off. Instincts now out of my control, my left hand moved on its own in a blur of motion. I felt something strike the outside of my hand but t
he impact was as gentle as a pebble, and it wasn’t until I heard something clatter across the room that I realized I’d blocked Wyck’s bullet.
Without a second to dwell on my newfound defense, suddenly my legs pushed me from the ground, launching me forward into flight. My shoulder caught Wyck’s side and sent him crashing into the rack of screens.
All of this had happened in mere seconds. I was suddenly on the other side of the table, eyes filled with fire, hands covered by scales, and a short, silver Blade clutched in my right hand.
My teeth ground together, all the pent up fury coursing through my body and feeding me strength. Wyck stumbled against the rack, knocking the screens over, scrambling as his claws ripped through the cables he attempted to use to help him to his feet.
“One tiny prick!” I said, lunging for him as he pushed himself backward, arms and legs diving away from the Blade. Now that I saw the weapon, I recognized how identical it was to the one from the video, entirely unchanged by age. The black metal handle was tight in my grip, with indented bumps to secure it against my fingers and a golden hand guard. The knife’s edge—as I’d seen before—was like a large feather, narrowing to a point at the end.
I couldn’t marvel at it though, holding it out as Wyck lifted his claws in defense. The largest knife I’d ever held was a meat cleaver and thus at first the Blade felt wobbly in my grasp. It was nearly weightless. I heard the men trying to crawl up behind me so I pushed Thad’s bed backward, brandishing the knife between them and I.
“Just one prick,” I told him again. Wyck circled us, forcing me to turn the bed again so that it remained protected behind me. I jabbed the Blade in his direction, startling him, and in that flash of a second, I caught a Glimpse.
Fear and terror. A panic that consumed him from the inside out.
