Runaways

by Christopher Golden

  “No way,” Karolina said. “No way I’m letting you—”

  “We’re listening,” Gert interrupted. “But if you swap back, why won’t the Kurdogrim just kill her?”

  “I’m going with her,” Zeke said quickly, glancing around as if the answers could be found elsewhere. “When I swap bodies this time, I’m going to ride this body back into limbo.”

  “Can you do that?” Gert asked. “You said you’d swapped places with a Kurdogrim, and swapped minds with one, but can you really stay inside that body and switch places with the Kurdogrim that’s using yours?”

  “I’ve done it once before. The second Nico vanishes with me and it looks like I’m back in my body, knock me out. Fast. ’Cause it’ll be a Kurdogrim trapped in my body and he’ll be really pissed.”

  “I’m so confused,” Molly said. “What the f—”

  “Do it!” Gert snapped. “She’s dying and we’re out of time, so go!”

  The Kurdogrim stood to his full height inside that vast room of broken glass. He murmured words that sounded like rocks being scraped together, and then he vanished, and Nico along with him. In his place, in a single blink, stood the beautiful boy they’d come to know as Zeke Zheng. But in Zeke’s human eyes was now a primal sort of anger and he glared at them all with suspicion.

  “What is this place?” he asked, in a rasping voice nothing at all like Zeke’s.

  Molly walked up to him slowly. The thing inside Zeke’s human body turned to stare curiously at her, not seeing the threat. Molly grabbed his wrist, tugged him toward her, and punched him in the side of the head. Zeke dropped right into her arms and she hoisted him off the ground and turned to the others.

  “We need to—”

  Where is she?

  “—run.”

  The wind picked up, raging inside the room. Gert looked out through the broken wall of windows and saw Zeke’s mother rising up, carried by the wind. The temperature in the room dropped and ice crystals began to form.

  “Karolina…” Gert began.

  But Karolina was one step ahead of her. She whipped her hair back, turned, and thrust out both hands toward Zeke’s mother. Rainbows swirled around her arms and then tendrils of pure color burst from her hands, struck Kathryn Zheng, and blew her back with such force that she smashed through the windows of an office building across the street.

  Then they were all running. Molly carried Zeke over her head with both hands. It looked ridiculous and impossible, but she could have carried them all if she’d had enough hands for it.

  The floor quaked beneath them. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. A light fixture blew out. As they raced back through the foyer, Gert glanced to her left. Karolina had burned out the power to the elevators and fused the doors, but something was coming up inside the shaft. Gert could feel it there, feel the hugeness of the presence she knew only as Abernathy. As she ran, she looked over her shoulder one last time and saw the fused elevator doors bulging outward. With a shriek of metal, they began to peel open.

  Then the others were shouting at her and she turned to see the pile of rubble ahead. She scrambled up the debris to the hole in the roof with Old Lace right behind her and the feeling that Abernathy was trying to peel away her brain, to drill into her thoughts. This wasn’t something elegant, not the scalpel-like mind reading she’d read about. This was brute force.

  She felt faint for a moment, but Old Lace bumped her, and a moment later Molly had grabbed her and they were climbing into the Leapfrog with Chase shouting at them to buckle in and Allis helping Karolina strap Zeke’s unconscious body into a chair, and then they were leaping into the air and Chase whipped around in the cockpit to stare at her.

  “Gert, where’s Nico?” he demanded. “Where is she?”

  Where is she?

  They all turned to stare at her. At Gert Yorkes, the new leader of the Runaways—at least for now. At least until they knew whether Nico would ever come back from the Kurdogrim’s limbo. Until they knew if Nico would come back alive.

  I’m in charge, she thought.

  Holy shit.

  Nico dreamed of pain and music. Her eyes fluttered open to a gray nothing-space full of smoke or mist that smelled like old leather, stale beer, and cat piss in roughly equal measure. Her nose wrinkled and she let her eyes close, preferring the dream. Or was this still the dream? The pain lingered in her chest. She tasted blood and knew it was her own. A strange chanting and percussion echoed quietly, filling the air around her as completely as the smoke, so that it seemed to her blurred mind that the smoke itself might be making the music.

  She groaned and rolled onto her side, pulled her legs up nearly into a fetal position. Her chest hurt as if her rib cage had been cracked open and she knew the pain was not a dream—not unless the whole thing turned out to be a dream. The smoke, the stink, the chant, the pain. Eyes still closed, she brought her hands to her chest, and felt the sticky wetness there. Nico opened her eyes as she raised her hands toward her face, and even in the gray nothing-space she could see that her fingers were red with blood.

  Her body jerked and she felt it again, the sword punching through her chest. With a cough, she spat blood into the smoke and the act of coughing tore her up inside, her body rigid with agony. But the music continued, the chanting, and somehow the agony receded just a little and she drifted off into a place even more gray, even more nothing.

  When consciousness swam to the surface again, her hands went immediately to her chest, to that blood. It felt cooler, tackier, as if it was drying, but now her fingers searched for and found the slice in her shirt where the sword had impaled her. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and she tensed as she probed for the wound…and found it. She groaned and tried to make sense of what she felt. This wasn’t the gaping, bleeding hole she’d expected, but a long cut, closed and crusted, as if a knife had slit her skin instead of a sword running her through.

  When she tried to move the pain screamed inside her and she slid into darkness again.

  Time passed before a muddled awareness returned. The music had faded. At first she thought she could still hear it, but as she felt the strange, soft ground beneath her and the ache in her chest and the weakness in her bones, her mind came more fully awake and she realized what music she still heard was only lingering memory. The song had ended. With a groan, and quite gingerly, she tried to shift again, and this time she managed to lift her head slightly. Nausea roiled in her gut at the motion and unconscious threatened to claim her again, but she breathed the leathery stale piss smell and forced herself not to pass out.

  There might not have been music, but this place was not silent. There were voices in the smoke. As she peered deeper into it, looking toward those voices, she realized that she could see the hulking silhouettes of strange figures, darker inside the gray. Things scraped the ground and there were soft huffs of breath, but mostly it was just words in a language that her brain told her she ought to understand, as if her ancestors had known it but she was too much a part of today’s world and had lost the ability to translate.

  Then there came another voice, this one familiar.

  “…you saved her,” came that voice. “She’d have died for sure.”

  Nico raised herself up on one elbow. Weak, her thoughts still muddled, she whispered into the smoke. “Zeke? What did you do?”

  Not where are we, because she knew the answer to that. Even with all the blood she’d lost and the pain that fuzzed her memories, there was only one place this could be. If it was the weird limbo dimension where the Gibborim had been trapped, they’d have killed her already. Or just let me die, she thought. So it wasn’t the Gibborim. With Zeke here, it had to be the Kurdogrim’s domain. He’d brought her here—or the Kurdogrim had dragged them both here. Now they were raging at him, clearly furious, and Zeke was thanking them for saving someone.

  For saving her. Nico knew it was the only thing that made sense.

  I was on the verge. Emilio jammed that sword right throu
gh me…he killed me.

  Yet somehow she still lived. In this weird netherworld, she still breathed and still felt pain. Pain meant life. Zeke had somehow gotten a tribe of ancient Elder Gods of the Earth, evil bastards who were usually more interested in exterminating humanity than in saving one girl, to keep Nico alive. The big question was why. What had Zeke promised them in return?

  “Zeke?” she called again, trying to crawl toward those voices. The second she started to get onto her knees, pain ripped through her and she had to breathe through her nose to keep from puking. Even then she nearly passed out.

  Through the stinking smoke, their voices still floated to her but they seemed not to hear her.

  “No, no, no,” Zeke kept saying. “My mother and the rest of the Nightwatch don’t speak for me. I’m not like them.”

  Nico frowned. What had he promised them? It seemed like the answer was nothing, but if he’d given them nothing, why would they help her? Kathryn Zheng had implied the Nightwatch were the good guys in this situation, but then she’d seemed angry at Zeke for betraying the Kurdogrim…hadn’t she? And Nico knew from experience that these tribes of supposed Elder Gods of the Earth were hideous things, cruel and bloodthirsty with a hatred of humanity. Zeke had brought her here to save her, and now it sounded like the Kurdogrim were threatening him. She had to do what she could to help him.

  Gritting her teeth against the pain, Nico started to drag herself toward those voices. Her thoughts and awareness blurred, but she knew her wound was healing. She’d lost a lot of blood, but whatever they’d done was restoring her slowly but surely.

  She dragged herself two or three feet. She was still clutching her staff. No one was getting that, not over her dead body. Wavering, she nearly collapsed onto her chest but she knew the pain would black her out, and so she paused to breathe. Suddenly the stink of the smoke strengthened, the acrid piss and dry old leather smells enveloped her in their own cloud, and she had the overwhelming sense of something behind her in the smoke, something huge filling the void of that gray smoke world.

  Resting on her hip, she began to turn, and saw the figure looming in the smoke off to her right. No sound had betrayed its arrival, so perhaps it had been sitting there all along, wreathed in smoke, unseen. This Kurdogrim had tusks that jutted up from its lower jaw and a long, knotted beard with iron rings tied to thick corded strands of it that clanked like wind chimes now, as it turned its head to sneer at her.

  Then she felt herself falling. All feeling left her body for a moment, as if she had begun to float, and then she struck the ground and a spike of pain worse than anything she’d ever experienced or imagined slammed through her chest, and the blackness swept in, and Nico drowned in it, all conscious thought winking out like a lantern dashed against a rock.

  Only the stink stayed with her.

  Molly had passed out on the Leapfrog, drained by using her powers. Someone had carried her into her room and she’d slept for a while. When she crashed like that, she usually slept like the dead, but this time she’d had a terrible nightmare where they’d all been at Nico’s funeral. Even Captain America had been there, standing in the rain. He’d been crying. In her dream, Molly had fallen to her knees and tried to dig up Nico’s grave with her bare hands. She’d snapped awake after that, still incredibly tired, but she had forced herself not to go back to sleep. She was afraid to have that dream again.

  Now she tapped lightly on the glass-that-wasn’t-really-glass. Inside its cell, the thing that looked like Zeke Zheng didn’t move.

  “Don’t do that, Molly,” Gert said.

  “He’s still knocked out,” Molly replied. “I just hope I didn’t scramble his eggs too much.”

  Karolina knelt beside Molly. “‘Scramble his eggs’?”

  “I kinda made it up. I mean I hope I didn’t give him brain damage or something.”

  “I got it,” Karolina assured her. “I hope so, too.”

  It had come as no surprise to them that the new Hostel had a little wing of holding cells in a subbasement. A short corridor with two cells on either side and a larger one at the very end, with a sort of viewing area in front of it. Yawning, Molly stared through the glass-that-wasn’t-really-glass at the prison-style bunk in the room. It was bolted to the floor and Zeke lay unconscious on top of it, where Chase and Karolina had dumped him.

  “This is wrong,” Allis said quietly. “I feel like we’re at the zoo.”

  Molly frowned. She’d forgotten Allis was there in the room with them. When they had first rescued the girl from the Nightwatch, Molly had sort of liked her, but now it felt like she wanted to be part of their group—one of the Runaways—and it was too soon. Allis wanted to belong and Molly understood that, but the girl was forcing it. They’d given her a room. She could have gone there. Instead she stood at the back of the viewing area, looking awkward, disapproving of the rest of them.

  “It’s nothing like a zoo,” Chase said, tucking his hair behind his ears. He did it when he felt self-conscious or irritated. “If he wakes up and it’s Zeke, we’ll let him out, but unless Nico suddenly appears, we need to assume it’s still the Kurdogrim in there.”

  “How sure are we that Nico’s even coming back?” Allis asked.

  Molly shot her a dark look. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  Karolina glanced at her, looking hurt, like it had been her that Molly snapped at. “That’s not very nice.”

  “I agree with Allis,” Gert said. “It does feel wrong. Seeing him in there…”

  “Here we go,” Chase muttered.

  Gert glanced at him. “What does that mean?”

  He threw up his hands with an innocent smile. “Nothing.”

  “I know you don’t like him,” Gert said.

  “Doesn’t matter if I like him. I don’t trust him.”

  Molly tapped on the not-glass again, trying to see if she could wake the Kurdogrim currently unconscious inside of Zeke. She was curious, now that it was trapped in the cell and couldn’t hurt them. Maybe it could give them some advice about how to fight the Nightwatch. A stupid thought, probably. Why would it want to help them? But still…she tapped again.

  “Please,” Karolina said quietly, taking her hand and lowering it so that she wouldn’t tap again.

  Surprised, Molly glanced at her, but Karolina was looking at Allis guiltily, like she felt embarrassed or ashamed of the way they were treating the thing that wasn’t Zeke. Molly loved Karolina. All of the Runaways were her family, but Karolina was the one who sometimes seemed like real family. Now, all of a sudden, Karolina seemed more concerned about the new girl’s feelings than she did about Molly’s, and that sucked.

  “Okay, so what do we do?” Molly demanded. “We just all stand here like a bunch of dumbasses, waiting for Nico to magically appear? And how do we know she’ll appear in there with Zeke?”

  Karolina said nothing about her language, and somehow that hurt Molly’s feelings even more.

  “We’re guessing,” Gert said. “When Zeke swaps his mind for the one that’s using his body right now, that’ll bring him into the cell. And when he comes back, he’ll have Nico with him.”

  If she’s still alive, Molly thought, but didn’t dare say. It was an ugly thought, her nightmare still lingering in her head, and she thought that speaking it aloud might give that nightmare the strength to come true.

  “Then what?” Chase asked. “We can’t go back. The Nightwatch practically killed Nico, and that was without this Abernathy guy. We’re outmatched. Do we just tell Zeke it can’t be done, or do we try to recruit someone else to help us?”

  “Who’s going to listen to us?” Gert said, brow creased in thought. “The Avengers would just tell us to stay out of it, if they’d even respond at all.”

  “That’ll take too long, anyway,” Karolina said. “If we’re going to do anything, it’s got to be fast. We need to get reinforcements before they get reinforcements. Someone here in L.A.”

  “Wonder Man?” Allis suggested. When Molly r
olled her eyes, she shrugged. “He’s the only L.A. Super Hero I know.”

  “We discussed him, but we don’t know how to reach him,” Karolina said.

  “And we’re not sure he’s alive,” Chase added.

  “Oh.”

  Gert sighed heavily and began to pace, head down. Every few steps she’d cock her head in one direction or another, as if she’d come up with various ideas and discarded them.

  “What about the Masters of Evil?” Molly suggested.

  “Not now,” Gert said, pacing.

  “That’s not what I—”

  “We need to deal with the Nightwatch before we can worry about whatever the Crimson Cowl’s up to,” Karolina said.

  “Yeah,” Chase agreed. “The Masters of Evil are criminals, but if the Nightwatch pick up where our parents left off, it could put everyone on the planet in danger. They’re definitely a bigger priority.”

  Molly stepped in front of Gert to stop her pacing. “I’m not saying we need to fight the Masters of Evil. I’m saying they could be our reinforcements.”

  Chase threw up his hands. “Get serious, Molly.”

  “I am serious.”

  Gert stared down at her, and Molly watched a grin spread across her face.

  “That, Miss Hayes, is a fantastic idea,” Gert said. Then she looked around at the others. “The Crimson Cowl wants the same thing the Nightwatch wants, to control crime in L.A. If we do it right, we can aim the Cowl at them, use her and the Masters of Evil as weapons.”

  Molly flushed with pride. She’d come up with the plan. Nico was supposed to be the leader, and with her out of commission, Gert had stepped in. But it had been Molly who had come up with the big idea. The trouble was she doubted it would work.

  “I know, right?” she said. “It’ll be great. But Karolina said we have to do it fast and it seems like this is more a long-term type of plan.”

  Gert reached out with both hands and adjusted the koala bear hat Molly had put on. “Nope. All we need to do is find the Masters. We’ll tell them the Nightwatch are giving them an hour to leave L.A. and make sure they think it was the Nightwatch that sent us to screw up their tech heist last night. No way the Crimson Cowl is not going to come out guns blazing.”