by Nazri Noor
“What the – my dossier says I’m arrogant?”
Royce held two fingers to his temple, his eyes unfocusing, like he was looking at a screen only he could see. “It says it right here. Bold, overconfident, dumber than he looks.”
I flinched.
“Whatever,” I said. “I’m not so dumb that I don’t know what’s going on here. I thought the Lorica was above torture. I never would have worked here if I’d known.”
I held one arm over Mona’s torso, like I could even be enough to defend her with my body. My eyes flitted to either side of Royce, assessing our options for getting past him, but something about him was so stalwart. Immovable.
“Oh, I’d hardly call it torture.” Royce rolled his neck about, his joints popping. “Think of it as tactical coercion. Force and fulcrum. We don’t like the T word around here. I’m more of a communications specialist.”
“You sifted around in my head,” Mona said, shaking. “I told you everything I knew and you still picked at parts of my brain that should have stayed untouched.”
“Leave no stone unturned,” Royce said, his voice still so infuriatingly impassive.
“Fuck you,” Mona spat. “Fuck you and your Lorica.”
“Now, now, siren. That’s going too far. We said that we’d let you go if you spilled everything.” Royce held out one hand, then clenched it, his knuckles cracking. “But you didn’t. You claim not to know the spell that killed all those normals. And in the end, we still don’t have a name for this alleged perpetrator. The voice in your head.” Royce grinned. “Maybe I shouldn’t have used such a light touch.”
Mona shuddered.
He brought two fingers to his temple, speaking into some invisible device. “Note to self. Allow PR department to demonstrate creativity when extracting information from detainees. Foster innovation and reward initiative.” He smiled again. “See? I’m managing.”
I grimaced. “The other Mouths? It’s not enough that you personally corrupt your prisoners the way you do?”
Royce raised his hands. “Harsh words coming from someone who couldn’t even pull off an infiltration. You never stood a chance, Graves. You only made it this far because we let you.”
I really, really shouldn’t have underestimated them.
“Last time you’ll ever underestimate us,” Royce said.
Damn it. He was seeing the inside of my mind, or maybe it was one of those cold reading tricks. I sincerely hoped it was the latter, because at least then I’d have a fighting chance of pulling off my next move.
Royce pulled back the sleeve of his coat, peering at his wristwatch. “The Hands should be on their way.” He spread his arms. “You’re welcome to try and run. Both of you. We’ll just catch you again.”
The air streamed out of my lungs, like the oxygen had been sucked into the swirling vortex of heat building in my palm.
“Catch this, asshole.”
I lobbed the fireball directly at Royce’s chest, expecting him to feint left – clearing a path for Mona and I to run through. I tugged on her even as the searing ball of flame left my hands, as it soared, crackling and sputtering. Mona gasped as she dashed after me, a noise that I echoed when, instead of feinting, Royce disappeared completely.
“Wing,” I muttered to myself. “Damn it. Come on, Mona.”
I pulled her along, keeping to plan A, sprinting towards the same corridor where the entrance crystal was. Watchers whirred, clicked, then shrieked into life as their piercing stares followed us down the halls, turning the inside of the Prism an impossibly more alarming shade of red, sending a steady siren sounding out through the crystal. A pounding began in response – a loud, increasingly desperate thumping from the exterior wall, from the occupied prison cells of the red sector.
The huge creature imprisoned in that one cell had finally struck so hard that the wall had cracked. I looked over my shoulder, panic rising in my throat. Wrong move. The wrongest in the history of wrong moves. Mona tugged against me, resisting as she shouted in warning.
I looked where she was pointing – down the very corridor we were running – but looking behind me had given Royce the precious few seconds he needed to teleport right into our path and deliver a savage punch to my chest.
I crumpled to the floor, rolling away from Royce, wheezing and heaving, scowling at the horrible, dull pain in my chest, at the agony of taking in every breath. Royce hadn’t just teleported in. He’d used his magic to deliver velocity behind his punch. It was like being hit by a truck. He’d knocked me out of the way, enough to give himself an opening to reach for Mona.
“Get away from me,” she shouted, her feet slipping against the slick crystal floor. It only gave Royce even more of an advantage.
I couldn’t let him grab her. That was all it would take for him to teleport her somewhere out of my reach. No time to form another fireball either, so I did the next best thing. I opened my backpack.
Vanitas flew screaming out of the pocket dimension, sword and scabbard bursting apart in a furious screech of metal. Mona threw herself to the ground, her hands clasped across the back of her head, keeping herself low. Good move. She knew to protect herself. I watched, scrambling back to my feet, as Vanitas’s two halves zoomed unerringly for Royce’s body. He snapped his fingers, then disappeared again. Vanitas zinged through thin air.
And the wind left my body again when a foot appeared out of nowhere, kicking into my stomach. I collapsed to the ground, doubled over, retching. My palms pushed into cold crystal, my ears pounding with the low, polite, horrible siren of the Prism, my chest and my insides burning with pain. Fuck, but how much more punishment could I take?
Somewhere above me Royce chuckled. “That sword’s in your dossier, too. Interesting, isn’t it, how we know all this? It’s how the Lorica keeps tabs on you.”
I grunted when a huge, strong hand pulled me up by my hair, when Royce forced me to look him in the face. The taste of metal spread across my tongue. Maybe I’d bitten it, or even my lip during one of the multiple times he’d clobbered me.
“Interesting picture, isn’t it?” Royce said. “You, on your knees, like the good little Hound you once were. Once a dog, always a dog, eh?” He placed one huge palm against my forehead, and I quailed under his touch.
“V,” I thought, sending a silent, telepathic distress call to Vanitas. “Help.”
As one unit, sword and scabbard came zipping back down the corridor.
“Ah,” Royce said. “Is that how you control the sword, then? With your mind? I wonder what would happen if I made some – adjustments.”
A voice pulsed somewhere deep in my brain, in the same place where I went to speak to Vanitas. It was Royce. He was murmuring something, but I couldn’t tell whether his words went through my ear or directly into my head. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, either. Somewhere down the corridor I heard metal clattering against crystal as Vanitas fell to the ground.
“No,” I muttered. “What have you done?”
Royce grinned at me, his hand still wrapped across my brow, me the Hound, and him the forceful Mouth and master. “Leveling the playing field. How am I expected to kick the living shit out of you when you’ve got that sentient sword coming to your rescue at the slightest provocation? A very useful weapon you have there. We really should confiscate it.”
“Useless to you,” I groaned. “He’s attuned to me.”
“If you say so.” Royce’s fingers dug into my skull, and I hissed at the sudden pressure. “Now, while I have you here, may as well find out more about your employer. Tell me, Graves. We know who you work for. The question is, why all this interest in our siren friend?”
“No,” Mona screamed. “Don’t let him probe your brain. Don’t listen to him.”
Don’t think of the Boneyard, I told myself. Anything but the Boneyard. It was the one thing preventing a total raid from the Lorica: the hideout’s location.
I thought of burgers. I thought of steaks, of raw meat. Of blood.
I licked at the corner of my mouth.
Blood.
“You’re resisting,” Royce said. “Interesting. You’re trying to block me out. Cute. Maybe I just need to apply a little more pressure.”
“Maybe,” I grunted, my head lolling. I was putty under his thrall. But the blood remained, and the blood reminded me of one last thing I could do. “Or maybe you should have read my dossier a little more closely. Maybe you shouldn’t have made me bleed.”
I wish I could tell you that Carver’s close instruction and all those hours I logged with meditation apps had drained away the bloodlust that lived in my bones, but then I’d be lying. My scar, the star-metal dagger that had plunged into my heart, all of that had changed me. I could control myself, to a point – but I had learned to enjoy inflicting pain.
I slammed my open hand into the ground, calling on the agitated mists of the Dark Room to come to my aid. All around me, from the pools of shadow cast by my body, by Royce’s, came the slivers of solid darkness, blades emitted from the pure night of the Dark Room itself.
Each was razor-thin, each a slender, deadly spine, all of them aimed at piercing my attacker full of so many holes from which the Dark could drink its fill of blood. But again, all Royce did was disappear. I slumped to the ground. Angered, dissatisfied, the shadows retreated to the Dark Room.
We had seconds to act before Royce showed up again. I was exhausted, too drained to move, but Mona was already at my side, one hand shoving Vanitas’s scabbard back into my knapsack, the other gripped tightly around the hilt of his sword. She nudged me with one hand, and when I looked in her face I was taken aback by its sudden hardness. Her cheeks were tear-stained, her eyes wet, but her fear had been taken over by resolution, perhaps even resignation.
“I didn’t want to do this,” she said, “but it’s our only choice. Pull yourself back together, Dust. Were you wearing earplugs earlier?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, my vision still swimming from the pain of Royce’s blows and the exertion of opening the Dark Room.
“Well put them back in. There’s only one thing left to do. My cell was warded to muffle the power of my voice.” She breathed in deeply, and when she did the ends of her hair seemed to come alive, electric. “But out here, I can sing again.”
“What – what are you going to do?”
She said nothing more, digging through my pockets and stuffing the earplugs into my head herself. Mona pulled me to my feet, handing me Vanitas. I steeled myself, forcing my vision back into focus. The whole point of this was to protect her, to save her. I could do this. We could do this together. I held Vanitas in both hands, feeling him thrum with power against my skin, waiting for his sentience to return.
But Royce returned first. This time he appeared further down the corridor, as if to taunt us. Maybe he spotted Vanitas in my hand, or the blades of the Dark Room had given him a scare, and he knew to be warier.
He said something I couldn’t hear, something that could have been “Give up now.” I don’t know, I’m not great at reading lips. I could, however, clearly tell that the smile was gone from his face.
Mona gripped my free hand tight. I turned to her, still unable to hear anything, but I followed the line of her finger as she pointed at Royce, her mouth opening and closing rhythmically. She was singing. Royce collapsed to his knees, heaving what looked like blood onto the ground. But everything looked like blood in this sector. Everything looked like blood in the Prism.
I wondered why Mona hadn’t sung her song from the very start, until I felt something warm trickling out of my nostrils. Even with my ears plugged something about the vibration of her voice was innately destructive.
For a brief second I panicked – maybe she really had killed all those people after all. But no. This was a last resort. Mona wasn’t a murderer. She was only doing this to protect us. I clenched my teeth against the pain, straining against the ache building in my head, squeezing my eyes as the world appeared to spin around me.
No, I was wrong. The world wasn’t spinning. It was shaking. It was breaking. The crystal walls of the Prism were beginning to splinter. We ran past crystalline walls already lined with fissures, past Royce still retching his guts onto the ground. I kept my eyes on the exterior walls. With the collapse of the Prism came the destruction of the crystal barriers that sealed the prisoners within their cells.
We made it to the entrance as the first chunk of ceiling crashed to the ground. Mona and I thrust our clasped hands at the seven-sided crystal, and I threw one look over my shoulder, at Royce on the floor, and at the escaped prisoners of the red sector bearing down on him.
I blinked, and we were gone.
Chapter 17
My sneakers squeaked as they skidded across the wooden floors of the Gallery’s hub. Mona bumped into me as she stumbled out of the Prism, then pulled on my arm, supporting me when I threatened to topple over.
I was still hurting from Royce’s assault. I knew Scions were forces to be reckoned with, but I never expected them to be so physically strong. My hand ran under my nose, clearing away the blood, my ears still ringing from the force of Mona’s terrible song. I hissed as I plucked out the earplugs, air and sound rushing right back, just in time for me to hear Mona’s soft, urgent whispers.
“Dust. We’ve got a problem.”
I looked around us, my hand tightening around the cold hilt of Vanitas’s blade, and I groaned. Remember when I mentioned that the red sector had guards come around every hour? Well. Guess what time it was?
Add to that the fact that Royce had summoned his own batch of Hands to respond to my presence. Oh, and there was also the possibility of him surviving the red sector. At any minute he could come bursting out of the Prism to punch me right in the back of the head. We were cornered. How’s that expression go again? Out of the frying pan, and into the churning, shrieking pit of hell itself?
I counted some seven or so Hands who at least looked fully prepared – probably the guards scheduled to patrol each of the Prism’s sectors. A couple of more sloppily dressed ones lingered among them, their hair sticking up in odd places, jackets thrown hastily over bed clothes.
“So,” I whispered back. “This might not be a good time to use your songs.”
Nor was it a good time for me to conjure the Dark Room, or to even throw fireballs, for that matter. Mona’s fracturing of the red Prism was bad enough. I didn’t want to think of the suffering Royce had to go through with its prisoners, or – oh, shit. Its prisoners. They were going to come out from behind us, too, out of the crystal.
But if we so much as attempted anything destructive, there was no telling of the apocalyptic chain reaction we could set off from just damaging the Gallery’s artifacts. I looked around wildly, studying the nearby display cases. A surgical strike, then. I could release one of the sentient artifacts, and –
“Don’t even think about it,” called out one of the Hands. Her eyes seemed to glow blue from where she stood, her hair in tight, beaded braids, the tips of her fingers crackling with white lightning. “You’ll be dead before you can break open even one of these cases.”
“Hah,” I scoffed, with way more courage than was even left in my body. “Fat chance. You guys need her alive, and you need me alive, too.”
They were bluffing. They had to be. If they so much as used an offensive spell, the entire Gallery would go up in an arcane inferno, like that massive nuke that Carver had triggered in our last battle against Thea. Just one stray spell would be like lobbing a grenade into a gas station.
I studied their shadows. With some effort I could call blades to burst out of the Dark, to skewer them if not scare them off. But where would that leave us? We’d still have to run clear through the entire building, then somehow find the time to deactivate the wards from the inside before we burst back out through the front door.
“Funny,” another Hand said, bouncing an orb of fire in his palm. “Our orders were to take her alive. No one said anything about you, Graves.”
Fuck.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Mona squealed when I tugged on her, my arm locking around her neck. It was like my body was moving of its own volition. My other hand snapped into place, pressing Vanitas’s edge lightly against her throat. Her body went limp against mine.
“Don’t do it,” one of the Hands screamed. The whole bunch of them tensed, and I didn’t miss how a couple were muttering under their breaths, eyes huge and glaring, lips moving rapidly. If one of them hit me with a sleep spell, that was it.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered again, but Mona said nothing. I held perfectly still, my mind scrambling for a solution, wishing that Vanitas was active. At least then I could have the option of consulting him for something to do. A tactic. He used to be a soldier, didn’t he? I would have tried anything. But maybe, once again, this all boiled down to escape. After all: he who lives to run away –
“Dust,” Mona cried, her head craning back. A net woven out of criss-crossed filaments of mystical energy had appeared above us, and it was dropping fast.
All I had to do was protect her. But what chance did I truly stand against a dozen Hands? Game over, man.
Or maybe – maybe not. Once, Hecate, the goddess of magic, had helped me unleash the true potential of the Dark Room with the simplest of instructions. Instead of letting its denizens run wild in our reality, creating horrible meadows of ebony glass to cut and to kill, I learned how to concentrate its dark forces into sharp, strategically-placed blades. What I truly needed to succeed, she’d said, was to hone my mind to a point, to find my objective. Back then it was to kill Thea.
Here, in the Gallery, it was to protect Mona. To save her. And you and I both know that there was only way out of there, and it wasn’t through the front door. I knocked on the Dark Room, gripping Mona tight, pulling the door open.
“What’s happening?” Mona gasped, staring at the floor, eyes wide at how her feet were sinking into a pit of absolute nothing.
