“Believe me, you don’t want what I have.” I looked around the destroyed room. A few L-SED officers were beginning to stagger to their feet. I hoped no one had been killed.
“I was captured and held, totally helpless, by a young girl,” Alex said. “The strength in her little finger, was more than I had in my whole body.”
“That girl was crazy, Alex, but she’s dead now. You know that.”
“But it’s not just her, is it?” A tear leaked down the side of Alex’s face. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him cry before. “Thousands of them fill the city, each one of them with the strength of a dozen men. I could spend a hundred years working on strength and martial arts, and one of them could beat me up with a hand tied behind his back. I could spend a lifetime building myself into someone important only for a stray bolt of magic to end me in an instant.”
“That’s just the way life is, Alex. Nothing to do with supernatural power. Nothing to do with your kidnapping.”
“Being captured. Being helpless. It happened once.” Tears streaked down both sides of his face. “And it happened a thousand times. There hasn’t been one night since that I haven’t woken up screaming. The girl is rotting in her grave, and still she holds me powerlessness each night. I’ll never be free unless I gain the power that would make me her equal.”
“Just nightmares, Alex. You could have gotten help. Jo didn’t know about what you intended … No, of course she didn’t. The betrayal. The deaths you’ve caused. If you thought it bad before, how will you live with yourself now?”
“Not by being strong, that’s for sure.” His gaze was bleak and harrowing, his eyes red-rimmed. “I didn’t know about the ambush,” he said. “Elizabeth just told me she needed a captured fire sentinel, preferably you, and that you wouldn’t be harmed.”
I leaned away from him, noticing something. “Alex, you’re glowing.” A faint but distinct orange shimmer surrounded him.
He looked down at himself. “What’s going on? I feel strange.” He lifted his shirt. The wound was no longer bloody—it had already closed over, leaving only a scar.
The glow and the healed wound both meant something magical had to be involved. “The summoning crystal,” I said. “It has to be.” I looked over my shoulder at the two chambers, now just skeletons of metal. “A tube connected the two containers. The blast from the explosion must have forced the crystal back down the tube and into your container where it shot…” I looked back down at Alex’s side.
Alex pulled his shirt back down to cover the scar, then rose to his feet.
“Wait. Where are you going?” I called out to him.
He didn’t answer, just ran for the door. Taylor, who’d gotten back to his feet, tried to grab Alex as he brushed past, but the boy avoided his grasp, and a moment later had left the room. Taylor hesitated, unsure whether to give chase.
“Leave him,” Lowndes said. “What’s wrong with your face?”
Taylor reached for his cheek, grabbed a long shard of glass and pulled it free. Fresh blood trickled from the wound, which he wiped away with his palm. “I’m fine.”
It’s looking promising,” Walker announced. “One of my men cut Allen, and he didn’t heal.”
Lowndes held up the laptop. She was the first one in the room to have lost the dazed expression. “If he’s lost his power all the way back in London, then the Searing has happened. The fire sentinels have lost their power.” She smiled. “Just as I promised.”
Relief washed over me. It was over. My power was gone.
“Allen, do you hear me?” Walker called out.
I stood up so I could see the laptop. Despite a vertical crack in the screen, Mo Allen was clearly visible. He, too, looked dazed. He touched his earlobe, and his fingers came away bloody. “Walker, what have you done to me?”
“Not me. One of your own,” Walker said. “Summon your weapon.”
A pulse of smoke shot out of the darkness, and struck him on the arm. Allen spun to the side with a scream, grabbing hold of his injured arm.
“Summon your weapon,” Walker repeated.
“I can’t. Is this a test? You want me to prove that I won’t use magic even with my life at stake.”
“No test. If you can’t summon a weapon, you certainly can’t use magic.” Another pulse of smoke shot forward, striking Allen in the chest. He slumped to the ground.
I charged forward. “What are you doing?” Taylor stretched out an arm to hold me back.
“Congratulations, Elizabeth,” Walker said. “Tie up any loose ends on your side, and we’ll talk tomorrow.” The call cut off.
“Was he killed?” I asked. “I was promised he’d be spared.”
Lowndes put her hands to her ears. “This bloody alarm. Sergeant, take the men and recapture as many prisoners as you can, and get this place back in order. But first, shut off the alarm.”
“Of course,” Taylor said. “But what about the fire sentinels?”
“Don’t worry about them. They are toothless now.”
Taylor went around to each of his men, directing them to the door. The L-SED officers, still dazed, began to shamble out, one by one.
I was still trying to come to terms with what I’d just seen on the laptop screen. It was so senseless. “You promised not to hurt him if I helped you.”
“You were promised they’d be killed if you didn’t do as we required,” Lowndes said. “Nothing was said about sparing them if you did.”
“You said you didn’t want to have to kill him. That Allen and men like him were your friends.”
She ignored me. “Kressan, where are you, you beautiful genius, you? We did it.” She swiveled in a circle, finally spotting the woman slumped against a wall. Lowndes hurried over to her. “Kressan. Kressan.”
Kressan’s glasses had been thrown clear, and her face looked very different without them on. Or perhaps it was the glassy look in her eye and the unnatural tilt of her neck that made her look so different. Lowndes bent down to check her pulse. “That’s unfortunate,” she said.
“Noah, Noah.”
I turned around to see Persia crawling toward her husband. She took his head in her lap and let her head fall to his chest. I felt sick.
Lowndes looked triumphant. “Time to finish this,” she said, summoning her weapon.
Chapter 29
Thursday 20:30
Her multani was a spinning black disk of smoke on the end of a chain.
I had my hands raised, about to summon my fireswords in response, when I remembered that my power was gone. I let my hands fall back down again. “Why would you kill me now that I no longer have any power?”
“I have my orders.” She swung the disk over her head.
Walker’s final instructions were, I remembered, to tie up any loose ends. “He may just have meant recapturing the prisoners,” I said.
Her answer was to fire the spinning disk at me.
Instinctively, I raised my fireswords, crossing them in front of me. Shocking both of us, the fireswords came alive in my hands and blocked her attack.
“Impossible!” Lowndes said.
I swung the fireswords back and forth in front of me. “It seems not.” I stood straighter, checking myself for injuries, and quickly realized I didn’t have any. Whatever damage the explosion had done to me was already healed.
“You,” Lowndes looked down at Persia. “You want to kill me, don’t you? Summon your chain mace and smash my head in.”
Persia raised her head. Her eyes were bleary, but they had a spark of anger. She curled one hand into an open fist, and began to climb to her feet. She fell back down again, her weapon unsummoned.
“I understand now,” Lowndes said. “You caused the Searing. You were in the chamber at the center of it. Only you were protected from its effect. You are the only true fire sentinel left in the world.”
“I shouldn’t have done it, should I?” I asked no one in particular. “I made the wrong choice yet again.”
“He w
arned you again and again,” Persia said, retaking Noah’s pale unmoving head back into her lap. “Why didn’t you listen?”
“I thought that even if I was wrong, it’d be the last bad decision I could make,” I said. “Once my power was gone, I would no longer… Seeing death and disaster is one thing, always being at fault for it…” I stopped talking, realizing my excuses sounded as hollow as Alex’s had. Had my actions been for selfish reasons? Were they my way of dodging the responsibility that power brought? I had known Lowndes’s and Walker’s motives to be evil. I hadn’t needed Noah to tell me that. And yet I had followed Lowndes’s orders.
“You made the right choice, Rune.” Lowndes spun her disk over her head and began to circle me. “You just have one more choice to make, then it’s over.”
I didn’t reply. My feet shifted to keep Lowndes in front of me and to keep her away from Persia. I felt bone weary.
“Sentinels are born with a purpose, Rune, I know you understand that,” Lowndes said. “A purpose more important than any other. To defend our world from Brimstone.”
“You’ve shown how much you appreciate sentinels.”
“For us sentinels, hard decisions, sometimes brutal decisions, have to be made. Protecting our world from Brimstone, especially from the overreaching power of creatures like Uro, is all important. You have now become the key to Uro’s power. The last fire sentinel. The only one who can allow Brimstone’s full power to be unleashed on this world. Your purpose to protect the world is at odds with your existence.”
“You expect me to kill myself?” The way I was feeling, it didn’t sound like the worse idea in the world.
“Sometimes saving the world means fighting to the last drop of blood. Sometimes saving the world means laying down your life.” She jerked her hand and the disk flew for my legs. I lowered the firesword and blocked. Lowndes pulled the disk back to her and resumed spinning it over her head. “You don’t have to do anything difficult. Just don’t react quite so quick, and it’ll all be over. No more tough decisions. No more pain.” She fired her disk out behind her, then yanked her hand forward. The disk went flying forward and upward heading for the ceiling, then it whipped downward, so fast it turned into a blur.
I threw myself to the side. The disk crashed against the floor, then rebounded, only barely missing me on the upswing. She pulled the disk back to her, and resumed spinning over her head.
Taking the offensive, I charged toward her. She lowered the disk so it blocked my advance, spinning it in fast circles that kept me out of range.
“Why are you fighting so hard? Do you not understand sacrifice, Rune? When you are gone, the power of Uro on this world will be neutered forever. You will have fulfilled your purpose, saved your fellow man.”
I didn’t answer back. I didn’t care how convincing her arguments were. She had manipulated me from the start, just as she had manipulated the entire city by disguising her own men as shade terrorists. She was evil and needed to be stopped. That was all that mattered.
I struck out with my sword, blocking the disk, then stepped closer. She then sent the chain end of her weapon whipping forward. It hit me in the arm, and I fell backward with a scream of pain. My left firesword disappeared.
She struck out at me again. I turned my left side away from her and used my right firesword to block.
“Dual fireswords don’t work as well if there is only one,” she said.
I curled my fist, reforming my left firesword, but agony lanced up my hand, and the sword disappeared again.
Lowndes snickered. From the way she looked at me, I knew she wasn’t worried; she had never been worried. I was a punk kid who didn’t have it in him to defeat her. Her talk, trying to persuade me to give up, was just to add some spice to the battle for her. She was seeing if she could win against the idiot kid just by messing with his mind.
Those thoughts sparked an anger in me, then the memory of Pete’s death filled me, stoking that anger until I was overflowing with rage. “I have killed before, but never hungered to kill before,” I told Lowndes.
“You? I don’t think you know real hunger.”
“I’ve known real pain.” I began to walk forward, determined that I wasn’t going to take another backward step. If Pete had made a difference, it was in supplying me the spirit I needed to win this fight. She fired out again with her disk. I blocked and kept coming. “You pretend to be a warrior and a soldier,” I told her. “You aren’t. You’re a manipulator and a coward.”
She attacked again, and I re-summoned my left firesword and blocked. I took the pain that coursed through my left arm and added it to the rest of it. The pain inside me would not defeat me—though it might defeat her.
Lowndes snarled. I could see she had only just realized that she could lose.
“You’re a schemer who waits until the enemy is weak, and only then do you attack,” I said. She had a long-ranged weapon, mine were for close in. She was the strategist; I just fought to see my friend avenged. I wasn’t going to give her a chance to retreat and reevaluate. “No more pretense, no more cowardly attacks,” I said. “We fight and one of us dies.”
I kept going forward relentlessly, uncaring of whether or not I got hurt. I struck out from the left and the right, my fireswords blurring as they struck her chain, then the disk, then the chain again. She retreated, her movements getting faster but also more frantic. Again and again I struck, until it wasn’t just her weapon I was hitting; it was her flesh.
With my firesword raised for another blow, I forced myself to stop. She was dead. Hacking her body might sate my anger, but it wouldn’t take away any of my sins; if anything, it would only add to them. I backed away from her and turned. “Persia,” I said, approaching her.
“Get away from me,” she said. “You did this. You and the stupid Searing. We told you not to. Noah begged you to stop.”
“We have to get out of here.”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now. My world is at an end.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?” I knelt down beside them, ignoring her attempt to push me away.
“Of course he’s dead. Look at him.”
His features were lifeless but he looked different than how Pete had looked after he’d died. Different than how Doctor Kressan had looked. I pushed my fingers against his neck. “A pulse,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Persia put her head against his chest. “I can hear his heartbeat!”
“Give him to me.” I lifted him into my arms and stood up.
“What are you doing with him?” Persia demanded to know.
“Go to the hospital. Lusteer General. You’ll find him there if I have to carry him the whole way myself.” I pulled him close to my chest, and I started to run.
Chapter 30
Friday 13:35
An empty highway stretched out in front of me. I was keeping well below the speed limit both because I had nowhere in particular to go and because my attention kept drifting off as I thought back to what had happened.
After I’d dropped Noah off at Lusteer General, I’d returned to Ten-two. I hadn’t met anyone there, nor had I wanted to. I’d gone up to the attic bedroom, levered off some floorboards and retrieved all my cash. Enough to pay Danny for the pickup, and enough to live the simple life for a long time.
I’d thrown away my phone, and driven from the city. That night I’d slept inside the pickup at a motel carpark, or more accurately, stared into the darkness while I waited for dawn to arrive. It was a long night. Too many thoughts, too much emotion swirled inside me to allow for sleep. At times, I thought the night would never end; but of course eventually dawn chased away the darkness as it always does.
The external darkness, at least. Some scars are permanent. Though others deserved more responsibility for Pete’s death, notably Lowndes and Alex, I couldn’t help but blame myself. If he’d never met me, he’d still be sitting on the couch in Ten-two, watching his TV shows and movies, imbibing herbal relaxants, and regal
ing any who would listen about the latest conspiracy theory to take his fancy. I had asked Alex how he could live with himself, and I had to ask myself the same question.
So far, I wasn’t even heading toward Danny’s lake cabin; I had just driven to get away. When I needed a destination, though, I’d figure out how to get to the cabin. A place far from people. A place Walker and the Order might not be able to find me.
I’d bought a throwaway phone earlier in the morning, but I hadn’t picked up the courage to use it yet. I dreaded finding out that Noah, too, was dead. He’d been so full of energy and humor. I wanted him to be still alive, because he deserved to be, and Persia deserved to have him by her side. But also, because I didn’t want another death on my door, another mountain of guilt on top of the other ones.
Finally, I pulled in to the side of the road, picked up the phone and dialed. “Jo, it’s me,” I said when she answered.
She immediately began to cry.
Which made me want to cry. But I didn’t. “Jo, how’s Noah? Is he still alive?”
With an effort, she controlled her sobs. “Noah hasn’t come out of the coma yet. Persia is with him.”
“They weren’t arrested?”
“No. Mayor Maxwell rang the hospital and told them to make sure he has the best care. Rune, where are you?”
“I’m gone. If you are lucky, you’ll never see me again.”
“It’s terrible about Pete, but you can’t blame yourself,” Jo said. “He made his own choices. He knew the danger.”
“It’s okay.” My voice was cold and hard. “It was my fault, and I’ve come to terms with that and decided to move on.”
“Just like that?”
“It’s necessary,” I told her.
“About what Alex did, you have to kn—”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“You can’t just disappear forever, Rune. You must know that. Persia told me you’re now the last fire sentinel. Everyone will be looking for you.”
Fire Soldiers Page 17
