The Sapphire Shadow

by James Wake

  “Stay with—” Jackson was cut off by gunfire punching holes in the wall all around them. She crouched low, popping back up to return fire—and paused.

  Wedge was gone. Her body slumped over, fresh holes in the wall where shots had gone right through.

  That was it then.

  Jackson stared. Shaking. She couldn’t stop shaking. Voices, behind her, coming up the stairs.

  Trapped. At least she could keep them busy, keep them off the Sapphire Shadow’s trail.

  Something snapped deep inside her. This wasn’t the first time she had watched friends die. But there was something in her this time, shrieking and frothing and raging, unhinged, roaring. That this…

  This was her fault.

  This was all her fault. She had wanted to do the right thing, to fight back, to make things right. To try.

  She’d tried. And she’d failed. And Vicks and Wedge were dead.

  Jackson broke. That roar fought its way out, one long, mad scream as she charged, charged headlong towards the stairs, emptying her gun as she went.

  * * *

  Every Auktoris Private Security employee in the city.

  It had to be, or at least near to it. Nadia screamed along on her hoverbike, rain stinging her bare face, hair blowing wildly in the wind. She could barely see, the canyon between buildings before her a blur of lights, ads still flashing down the side of every structure.

  Theseus roared underneath her, banking and swooping through turns, dodging oncoming bikes that tried to block her. The heavy security models couldn’t keep up, not even close—but the APS choppers could, beasts of machines with red sirens flashing, twin rotors blowing long trails of wash behind as they chased her.

  A loudspeaker called out from the nearest one, demanding that she land immediately and surrender.

  “Give up.”

  “You’re surrounded.”

  “There’s no way out.”

  She glared back over her shoulder and spat blood, throwing them a very unladylike finger for good measure. If they wanted her, they’d have to shoot her down. And if they wouldn’t do that, they would very well have themselves a chase. A good show for all the news feeds, indeed.

  A chopper dove from above and braked right in front of her. Nadia had seen this trick before. She dove as well, quicker by far, hugging herself close to the bike as she spiraled down toward the streets. Wet pavement rushed up to meet her, horns screeching and automated alarms blaring, her bike weaving in and out, just above traffic.

  Something small tried to cut her off. A drone, throwing itself in her way, a desperate stopgap. She lifted her bike’s nose, speeding through the pesky thing and shattering it to pieces, shards of plastic and a still-spinning rotor glancing off her face and chest. Up ahead, grounded APS cars formed a blockade, lights flashing and guns ready.

  Flickering caught her eye, a bit of odd motion in the uniform madness on every building. She saw it only for an instant as she sped along, but there was no doubt what she saw.

  A cartoon cat face.

  LEFT

  She yanked Theseus into a drifting break turn, slipping into a dark alleyway cramped with fire escapes. Her mirror showed her patrol bikes trying the same, one of them crashing into the side of the alley, others shakily slowing down to make it in one piece. Up ahead, another chopper glared at her, hovering at the exit of the alley.

  Straight up was clear, for now at least. Nadia pulled up, Theseus growling and shuddering and threatening to stall. Never built for completely vertical ascent, it struggled to keep its own weight moving.

  “Come on!” she screamed, pinning the throttle, spurring the bike with her heels. “Come on!”

  Finally she burst out into open air, almost crashing into a chopper moving to cut her off. It flashed a spotlight on her, more demands yelled over its loudspeaker.

  Idiots. As if she would just give up after all this. She drifted up out of the seat as she leveled out, then slammed back down painfully, every wound on her body yelping. Just a little longer, just a little farther, a little more.

  Cheshire lit up another building as she passed by.

  BLOCKADE AHEAD

  A billboard on her other side flickered from a shiny new car to a leering cat.

  LEFT AGAIN. HURRY!

  Not a narrow alley this time but a wide boulevard, cars scrambling to pull over, automated rides glitching out as they searched in vain for somewhere to pull over to. Nadia saw clear skies ahead, flashing sirens behind, nothing between her and freedom. Nothing left but to race, screaming through the night.

  Not fast enough. She wasn’t losing them. They were gaining.

  She caught a glimpse of Cheshire again, blowing her a kiss from a nearby tower.

  YOU CAN DO IT!

  She leaned down, hugging the bike, nosing lower until she was scraping paint off the cars below, cranking the throttle until her hand was numb and her knuckles bled white.

  Just a little faster, a little farther.

  GO!

  Cheshire flickered to life again and again, cheering her on, each glimpse a frame of a looping, leering smile.

  GO! GO! GOOOOOOOOOO!

  Theseus jumped beneath her, the dash display flashing red. She heard it this time, a short whine of gunfire from behind. A car was ripped to pieces below as she swooped by, a clean line of holes cut right down the middle.

  She barely had time to stare before Theseus bucked again, listing dangerously to the side. The APS chopper on her tail cut loose with another short salvo, shredding her bike’s engine to nothing but sputtering, smoking ruin.

  Theseus lurched and slowed, drifting down as it lost power. Nadia tried to lean back, tried to right her steed, to swing with her weight. Anything.

  None of it worked.

  Theseus fell, catching the hood of a car as it crashed to the ground.

  * * *

  She just couldn’t die.

  Soaked in blood, Jackson limped along.

  It was the girl’s fault really, if you thought about it. The Sapphire Shadow. She snorted, once, loud and mocking. These Auktoris fuckers were all in disarray, scattered and distracted and busy. Easy pickin’s, if you had no sense of self-preservation. Jackson was supposed to be drawing their fire for her. Not the other way around.

  But no, it wasn’t the girl’s fault. The girl was all right. That had been proven. Jackson wished her well, wished her all the luck in the world—she actually was rooting for her. Showing all those Auktoris fuckers for the pricks they’d always been.

  Jackson kept limping, leaning against a wall, leaving a red trail where her tattered sleeve dragged. She looked at the revolver clenched tightly in her fist and thought, not for the first time in the last few minutes, about using it on herself.

  The girl had been considering it, clearly.

  No. No, that wasn’t in her. Never had been. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She would go down fighting, and that was that. Even if it meant fighting her way for miles down through the Structure, murdering her way through every APS officer unlucky enough to cross her path.

  Her revolver was empty anyway. She had cycled through dozens of guns by now, taking them from fresh corpses and then making more. But the revolver stayed with her. To the end.

  More screaming near her. The ground level of the Structure had descended into chaos, a screaming cluster fuck, the protestors outside breaking through the line and losing all sense of purpose. It was simply a riot now—enraged crowds looting and burning and beating anyone in a uniform they could find.

  Shattering glass. She looked up to see a car door hurled through the window of a storefront, people hopping in empty-handed and hopping out with arms full of glitzy jewelry.

  Idiots. Back in her day, they’d stolen food. There was nothing really worth stealing in this overdone, stretched-out shopping mall. At that moment Jackson realized she hated this city, hat
ed the Structure, hated the army and the police and her life and this whole fucking tragedy that was the human condition.

  But most of all, she hated Auktoris Global Funds.

  She watched a young man, acne visible even through the sheer T-shirt he had wrapped around his face. He tossed a Molotov cocktail into the empty jewelry store. She nodded. Good on him.

  Good on him? Was she going crazy?

  Jackson chuckled and shook her head, still limping along, sliding right into crying as though it were the most natural thing in the world. She’d been a tool her whole life. At least these people were fighting back.

  “Whoa, is that a cop?”

  “Yeah…damn. She’s a big bitch too.”

  They came closer. Jackson raised her empty gun, pointing it at them with a very inviting look on her blood-soaked face. Not calling her bluff, they simply walked away.

  Cowards. Up ahead, she could swear she heard radio chatter.

  A squad of Domes was moving from one of the elevator banks, shooting anyone who got close. Jackson tried to stumble back the way she had come, holding her gun up in what she hoped was a threatening manner.

  “Friendly!” one of them yelled. “Stand down!”

  She lowered the gun and let out a wavering breath. Close. So close to the doors.

  “Wait…uh…” another Dome said, his gun at the half ready as he watched her carefully. “Isn’t that…?”

  Jackson tensed up, trying to walk away but falling to her knees instead.

  The Dome put a hand to the side of his helmet. “Yes, ma’am,” he said finally, raising his weapon to fire.

  She stared down the barrel of his gun. What a way to go, after all she’d lived through, all she’d survived.

  She didn’t even notice the sedan until it had plowed through the squad of Domes, ramming right into her would-be killer and launching him over the hood. The vehicle screeched to a halt, the back passenger door opening to reveal Cheshire’s face—her real face, not that silly cartoon cat but a young woman in glasses and…a cocktail dress?

  “Get in!”

  Jackson merely stared back at her. Maybe she was dead now? This didn’t seem possible.

  “Get in!” Cheshire screamed, then groaned and got out, yanking Jackson into the backseat with some difficulty. That prosthetic arm of hers did most of the work. The car peeled out before the girl even closed the door.

  “Oof, she looks bad!” someone riding shotgun said. British accent?

  “Gel! Now!” Cheshire said. Her hands typed furiously in thin air, her eyes glazed over with light.

  “I need an exit!” a blond woman in the driver’s seat shouted.

  “I’m multitasking! Just drive!” Cheshire said, her prosthetic hand pausing to poke and prod some of Jackson’s many wounds. The man riding shotgun turned around in his seat with a compress, looking at a loss for where to even start.

  “Hey…I know you…” Jackson slurred. “I stole your gun?”

  He nodded and smiled, picking a bullet hole at random and applying pressure. “S’all right, ma’am.”

  “Sorry,” Jackson mumbled. All that blood loss was finally catching up to her; she knew the symptoms.

  Tired, mostly. She gritted her teeth, trying to fight it. “Lemme out,” she said, trying to bat his hands away. “Lemme out, Shadow. Get her out of here…”

  “We’re losing her!” Cheshire said. “Brutus, help me hold her down!”

  “I’m trying!”

  Something cracked the windshield, one big spider-web dent. “Dose her!” the driver yelled. “Dose her until we get clear!”

  “On it!” Cheshire said, still typing furiously. Something pinched the side of Jackson’s neck.

  “It’s all my fault,” Jackson felt herself mutter. “Let me out. I’ll keep ’em busy.”

  The store. A year ago. Over a year ago. Jackson blinked, trying to turn to Cheshire and tell her. Tell her she remembered. The transmitter, the kid with the scarf, the offer of help.

  Slipping away, nodding off.

  Jackson’s head fell back; she was fading fast. She heard one more thing. Words she would never forget for the rest of her life.

  “Welcome to the resistance, Jackson.”

  * * *

  There was a trick to not dying in a crash. Well, to reduce one’s chances of dying anyway.

  This wasn’t the first time Nadia had been flung off a hoverbike at high speed. She’d been relatively lucky then, and she was relatively lucky now. Her bike stopped dead upon crashing into a car, sending her flying forward into open, flat street.

  She tumbled to the hard ground, willing her limbs not to flail in panic. No. Arms out straight above her head, legs out straight. Roll. Let your body roll. The suit helped, tightening around her body one last time before the batteries died for good.

  Nadia’s body rolled and bounced, losing speed, as she felt her ribs crack to pieces. The last dozen or so feet turned into a slide across pavement, the skin on her exposed arm sandpapered off until it was raw and bleeding.

  And then she stopped.

  It felt good to not move. She sucked in a long harsh gasp of breath, happily stuck in the moments of shock before overwhelming pain inevitably would rush in. Nice, cool street. Crisp raindrops falling on her face.

  Get up.

  Nadia opened her eyes. Above, all she could see were dull angry clouds of smog, glowing orange as always.

  Get up!

  Had she stopped moving? It was very nice, if so. She would highly recommend it.

  Tess!

  Nadia blinked. It all came rushing back—she had to move, had to run, had to fight. Sirens blared in her ears, muffled and tinny. It took her limbs a few tries to respond, but after several long creaking seconds, she rolled to her side.

  Improvement. Next she scolded her arms into participating and pushed herself to her knees. Quite good. Almost there. One foot up, getting there, rising up and—

  A rifle butt caught her in the stomach. Another slammed into the back of her neck. Nadia was forced to the ground, a knee in the small of her back. Someone’s boot ground into her head, scraping her face against the street.

  Nadia heard her own voice in her head, dazed and woozy. Such ruffians. Surely no way to treat a lady. A celebrity, no less. She looked up to try to scold them and saw nothing but the muzzles of guns pointed at her. Her one remaining glove was removed, very carefully, before hinged steel cuffs were snapped around her wrists.

  All these big, scary men. All for one little girl. She laughed, or at least she thought she did, wheezing under a boot on her head, spattering dark blood onto the street. When she was lifted up off the ground, it felt like she was floating, each arm held by a faceless trooper in white. Her dangling feet couldn’t even touch the ground.

  None of them spoke. Nadia had been expecting some kind of recrimination, some proud swaggering declarations that they’d done it. They’d finally, at long last, captured the Sapphire Shadow.

  Something. Anything? Nothing.

  So disappointing. No fun at all.

  A chopper waited for her. One of several had landed in the street while more patrolled above, shining spotlights down on them. A veritable army crowded around the spot where she’d crashed. Such an honor.

  I’m sorry, Tess. I’m sorry, so sorry.

  She felt her lips mumble, failing to make words. They carried her on, steps away from the waiting doors of an Auktoris Private Security chopper.

  Chin up. Back straight. Show no weakness. She raised her head, lolling backward on a neck that felt like loose, old rubber. Her eyes cracked open, trembling, blinking, then shooting wide open at the very wonderful thing she saw.

  A building above them flickered. It turned into Cheshire—regular old Cheshire cat—with a toothy, leering grin.

  But only for a moment.

  The face grew, looming over them all as th
e grin transformed into a vicious snarl, hissing and spitting.

  YOU CANNOT HAVE HER, it spelled out beneath the face.

  YOU WILL NOT KEEP HER.

  I LOVE HER AND I WILL SET HER FREE.

  The men carrying her stopped. Nadia’s head fell to the side, her vision passing over other towers around them—all of them showing her Cheshire, snarling and snapping and glaring down at the small men gathered around her.

  “Is that…” one of the men at her side said. “Is that in our comms? Do you hear that?”

  “Keep moving!” someone else yelled.

  They did. Nadia’s head tipped forward; she saw only the wet street. But she felt her chest shake, felt something crawl up out of her throat, force its way through the blood and the fear and the numb, exhausted pain.

  A wheezing, spiteful laugh.

  My girlfriend is going to kill all of you.

  She laughed again. She couldn’t stop, no matter how much it hurt. It was a ridiculous thought, a ludicrous sentence, madness on every level.

  And yet.

  She laughed all the way to the chopper, laughed as they strapped her to a seat in the back, kept laughing until she nearly choked as they filled the seats around her with heavy troopers, guns trained on her and ready.

  When she finally ran out of breath, feeling the chopper lift from the city street, she caught a glimpse of herself in the dark glass on its side.

  The soldiers around her barely caught her eye; she was lost in her own reflection. Her face was ruined. Beaten, bruised, her eyes swollen black hollows. Blood ran down her chin. Great chunks of her hair had been torn out. She barely recognized her face in the glass.

  It was beautiful, really.

  Gorgeous.

  ###

  THE SAPPHIRE SHADOW WILL RETURN

  IN

  BOOK TWO: A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

  Final Thanks

  Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed the book, I would really appreciate a kind review.