And though Sloane knew it was madness to choose this man, this masked murderer who kept company with the dead, over Matt and Esther—over Nero and Aelia, even—she also knew that it was already decided and had been since she broke into this building.
She put her hand in his. If she died because of this, well, at least it was a death she chose.
31
MOX LED HER down the hall with the checkerboard-tile floor and the tall, boarded windows she had seen when she had first regained consciousness. It was as crowded with soldiers now as it had been then. They walked past a group of them crouched around a few scattered dice and a pair stitching each other’s fingers back on with a needle and thread.
The woman with the hole in her jaw marched toward them. Her stringy hair was in two braids now, a girlish style that was at odds with her discolored skin. She stared at Sloane. “Sir,” the woman said, “what—”
“She came to warn us,” Mox interrupted. “We need to leave. Get everyone up and to the safe house.”
The woman leaned in closer to Sloane, her teeth clicking together as she clenched her jaw. Sloane watched her tongue work behind them before she spoke in the same raspy, strained voice Sloane remembered. “Are you sure she’s not setting a trap?”
“I don’t believe she has that level of foresight,” Mox replied.
“Fuck you,” Sloane said. Over the woman’s shoulder, she spotted the milky-eyed man who had carried her into the building over his shoulder. He was sitting with a few others, a siphon in pieces in his lap. He made a kissing face at her.
“I didn’t mean in general,” Mox told Sloane, sounding a little like the normal young man she had met in the cultural center even through the metallic warp of his siphon. “Sloane, this is Ziva, my lieutenant. Ziva, Sloane.”
“We’ve met,” Sloane said. “She chloroformed me.”
“We thought you were some great magic-user,” Ziva said, her upper lip curling in what might have been a sneer if her lips hadn’t been taut and cracked, like dry earth. “If I’d known you were completely helpless, I wouldn’t have bothered.”
“Helpless?” Sloane laughed. “So how do you explain me escaping from right under your nose?”
“This building is about to be stormed by the Army of Flickering, but by all means, continue arguing like children,” Mox snapped.
Ziva stood up straighter, then stepped away from Sloane and Mox. She stuck a whistle—attached to one of her fingers—between her lips and blew on it. Sloane brought a hand to her chest to steady herself when all the soldiers in the hallway got to their feet. It took some of them longer than others—Sloane watched a smaller woman slump against the wall and then shove herself up with both legs as a lever. When the woman turned, Sloane saw that she was holding an arm, one that had clearly once gone in her shoulder socket.
Ziva whistled again, bringing her hand up to her throat, where she wore a scratched siphon. Her voice came out twice as loud, though still raspy. “Emergency evac! To the safe house, and keep your eyes open. We’re being pursued.” Ziva looked over her shoulder at Sloane, and there was something odd in her expression. Something like hope and despair mixed together.
“Still can’t use a siphon?” Mox said to Sloane. All around them, the soldiers of the Resurrectionist had picked up bags and were stuffing things—including, Sloane noticed, the woman’s detached arm—into them.
“No,” Sloane admitted.
“Then you’re stuck with me at the front,” he said. “Better keep up.”
The army was forming a loose pack behind them. Someone pried the boards away from one of the doors, letting in a gust of fresh air. The blue geometric fixtures above Sloane’s head swung back and forth in the wind. Mox loped toward the doors, his gait uneven but powerful, his cloak whipping around his shoulders. She felt the soldiers behind her creeping closer and ran to catch up with him.
She had left her own cloak behind, so the cold air cut right through her shirt, sending a shiver through her. She pulled her sleeves down over her hands.
Behind her, the Resurrectionist’s army spilled into the street like a glass of water tipped over. They divided into smaller groups, silent except for the creaking of their bones and the shuffling of their feet. They disappeared down alleys and slipped between buildings, peeling away with every side street they passed, until it was just Mox, Sloane, and a trio of decrepit undead.
The streets were emptier here, south of downtown, and the buildings were farther apart. They passed a corner store lit up by pale fluorescents displaying a dozen brands of cigarettes—Rhabdos, Fairy Godmothers, and Fumus among them—and liters of soda in green, orange, and glittery blue. Behind the counter, a sallow-faced man gaped at them as they passed. Even shrouded in hoods and cloaks, as all the others were, they still made a strange sight: four hooded figures with siphon hands outstretched and one random woman making their way down the sidewalk.
A few cars passed, swerving away from them as if they were potholes, but their path was unobstructed until they reached Roosevelt Road. To the left was the train yard, the ground rippling with rails. And parked at the corner on the right was a police car. Though the vehicle’s lights were off, Sloane saw two silhouettes in the front seats.
Mox stuck out a hand, and they all came to a halt. He let out a tweet, like a sparrow. Behind him, the undead soldiers stretched out their own siphon arms and bit down on whistles. In unison, all four magic-users made the same sound at the same pitch, high and light, a chorus of birdsong.
The police car lifted off the pavement and turned upside down. Sloane saw the officers inside it shifting, and then one thrust a hand against the glass, showing the unmistakable palm plate of a standard-issue siphon. Mox whistled again. The car righted itself and touched down on the street like it had never moved at all.
A chorus of dissonant sounds surrounded Sloane. She clapped her hands over her ears. The car’s tires spun backward, sending it over the rails, through the barrier, and into the Chicago River.
Sloane stared at Mox. He began walking again, and the others followed him.
They traveled in silence over the water, then turned to walk along it. They passed gutters full of paper and half-crushed soda cans. Sloane kicked a rotting apple core out of her way. She was numb with terror and just as afraid of the Army of Flickering finding them as she was of the man who had just drowned two police officers.
Ahead of them, Sloane spotted dark figures. A shout rang out. There was a flash of fire, and in the orange light, Sloane saw the seal of the Army of Flickering on one man’s jacket.
“Ziva!” Mox shouted, so loud the sound crackled in his mask. He ran.
The wall of fire cast by the Army of Flickering danced toward hunched shapes that Sloane recognized as Ziva, the lieutenant, and four other undead soldiers. Ziva and one of the other soldiers whistled, together, and ice formed at their feet, piling on itself until it had formed a knee-high barrier of icicles that reflected fractured moonlight.
Mox reached them, and he swept the soldiers off their feet with a low rumble. They landed hard on their knees on the street. Mox shouted instructions at Ziva that Sloane couldn’t hear.
An arc of energy, almost like a bubble of air, swept toward him. It pushed him back, toward the river, and up, at least six feet in the air. Mox fell hard on his back, but as soon as he hit the ground, he thrust his arm up and let out a peal of percussive sound.
Chunks of pavement pulled away from the edges of the road and hurtled toward the soldiers. They threw up shimmering barriers of energy, and the rocks pummeled them but didn’t break through.
Mox turned to Ziva and shouted, “Go!”
Ziva hesitated, and Mox whistled, sending a hiss of air toward her so intense, it blew the hood off her head. She ran, followed by the four undead soldiers under her command. Mox turned his attention back to the soldiers of the Army of Flickering, who had let down their barriers in the wake of the rock assault and were, together, raising water from the river. At th
e gesture of the lead woman, the water formed a massive orb the size of a car. It had no sooner taken shape than it enveloped Mox completely.
The orb warped and rotated almost as soon as it hit him, and then he was in the center of a cyclone, his hair clinging to his masked face and his soaked clothes whipping around his shoulders. The cyclone chewed up pavement as it charged at the soldiers, flinging rocks and water in equal measure at them.
As one of the soldiers cringed away from the onslaught, Sloane recognized her as Edda. Their eyes met just as Mox raised his hand again.
Sloane shouted, “Don’t!”
Mox hesitated, and it cost him. Edda whistled, sharp and clean, and something silver shot through the air at him—a large fragment of metal that stabbed his side. His body hunched around it. He screamed through the siphon and, the next moment, let out a long, keening note. Day-bright light exploded from his hand.
Sloane threw an arm up over her eyes to shield them, but this was no momentary flash—she felt a continued heat against her forearm that meant the light was still burning. The Flickering soldiers were shouting at one another. A hand wrapped around her elbow.
“Keep your arm up,” Mox said to her. “Let’s go.”
He steered her away from the Flickering soldiers, barked a command at the undead ones trailing them, and they ran.
Cordus Daily
THE BULLETIN BOARD: MEETING PLACE OF MAGICAL YOUTH
by Sarah Romanoff
CHICAGO, NOVEMBER 3: “If I have an idea for a working I can’t do on my own,” Elissa, seventeen, says as she staples a piece of paper to the bulletin board in Palmer Square Park, “I just put up a request for an assembly. You can specify ages, too, so I always do eighteen or under. We don’t want any strange old men spoiling the fun.”
Elissa’s current assembly request? For a timed levitation. Her request is for five people, each with an object they would like to levitate, to meet in Palmer Square Park in two days’ time, objects in hand. Together, they will set up a timed working for the next morning, at which point all their objects will levitate at once.
“Timed workings always require at least one other person, one to do the working and one to set the timer,” Elissa says. “So they’re the most common thing you see on here. Also glowing. People are deeply interested in making things glow these days.”
For most of us, assemblies—the term for a group of magic-users convening for a single working—were integral to our magical education. But in the past, assemblies were arranged by school staff, and they had to be supervised by a teacher. Now, students are taking their learning into their own hands, meeting freely and with young people from other schools, even other cities.
“I drove all the way to Indianapolis for one once,” says Josh, sixteen, from Buffalo Grove, Illinois. “I told my mom it was for a concert. And I did go to a concert! But I also went to the group working. We built a rain cloud—some people did the illusion of a cloud, some did the water, one did lightning strikes, and one did thunder.”
Some parents, naturally, are concerned. “What if they do something dangerous?” asks Ellen Higgins, founder of Parents of Teens Under Control (PoTUC), a community action group that seeks out unsupervised group workings and interrupts them. “They can’t just run around doing magic without anybody knowing. They could really hurt themselves! So we don’t let that happen.”
When I ask Elissa about PoTUC, she just rolls her eyes. “We have to use code in our messages now,” she says. “I won’t tell you what it is. But my next assembly is going to be supervised, so PoTUC can’t spoil it.”
32
BY THE TIME Sloane’s vision cleared, they were inside the safe house, a large red-brick building perched on the river’s edge. The space looked like it had once been elegant but had fallen into disrepair. The ceiling was wood-paneled, with skylights in a squared arch that let in the glow of the moon. As with the Old Main Post Office, the lower windows were boarded up, but judging by the position of the building on the river, she was sure that the view would have been of a stretch of skyline.
Crowded inside the space were the groups of the Resurrectionist’s army that had arrived before them. Ziva wandered among them, distinguished by the braids swinging back and forth against her shoulders. When Mox walked in, he released Sloane’s arm and hunched over the piece of metal buried in his side to give it a closer look.
“Don’t go yanking that out,” Sloane said. “Not until you can clean the wound and pack it.”
Mox looked at her—or he seemed to, turning the mechanized siphon eyes in her direction for a moment. “Then it will have to wait,” he said. “Stay here.”
He loped across the dusty wood floor to Ziva’s side. Sloane leaned against one of the wood pillars at the edge of the room and watched as he worked his way through the crowd of soldiers, clapping them on the shoulder or bending his ear to them. The woman who had carried her arm in a bag took it out when he came near her and showed it to him. Sloane was surprised when he knelt beside her and took something from his pocket—a leather packet about the size of his palm that, when opened, revealed a needle and some kind of thick thread.
Sloane watched with mixed revulsion and fascination as he began to stitch the arm back on. The woman held it in place as he did so, watching the skin split around the point of the needle, the string tugging through gently and then pulling taut. When he finished, he tied off the string and gestured over the sutures. Sloane assumed it was some kind of working, but she couldn’t tell what it did. Regardless, the undead woman touched the side of Mox’s head fondly and smiled.
Sloane had assumed that the Resurrectionist’s undead army was in thrall to him, a mindless collection of zombie slaves. But it seemed clear now that they knew him. Perhaps they had even known him before they died.
It was a while before he returned to her, still with the metal embedded in his side, all his clothes damp from the Flickering soldiers’ attempt to drown him.
“We have food and water stowed elsewhere,” he said.
Sloane followed him out of the room. She knew she should be afraid to be alone with him—to be here at all. But it was too late to go back now. She had betrayed her friends. Edda had seen her with the Resurrectionist.
They went into a smaller room not far from the others, still in a state of disrepair—a crumbling half-wall separated it from a bathroom, and there were cobwebs in the exposed rafters of the ceiling—but swept clean and stocked neatly with cans of food and jugs of water. There was a pile of blankets in the corner, too, and a small table with two rickety chairs set up around it.
Mox stood before the table and started removing his siphons. The wrists came first, then mouth, eyes, and ear. Beneath them, his skin was sweat-slicked and pale.
“I’m not your nurse,” Sloane said.
“Didn’t ask you to be,” Mox replied.
But she still picked up one of the water jugs and set it on the table in front of him, then searched the row of supplies for a first-aid kit.
When she found one, she dropped it next to the water jug, which she opened and gulped from greedily. Mox sat down in one of the chairs, heavily enough to make it creak, and reached for the little box with trembling fingers.
“Is that metal serrated?” she said, nodding to the fragment just above his hip.
“No, edge looks straight.”
“Did it hit bone?”
Mox plucked a pair of scissors from the kit and cut from the hem of his shirt to the shard, then pulled the fabric away from the wound. It looked nasty, blood streaking his pale skin beneath the puncture, the tip of the blade—or whatever it was—sticking out behind him. But he had been lucky; it seemed to have gone through the meat of his hip, missing bone and organs both.
“Looks like you might be able to just pull it out,” Sloane said.
Mox grunted in reply.
“I guess I could help,” she said. “In exchange for some answers.”
“Not sure where to begin,” he said.
“How about you start with why you stalked me to the cultural center,” she said. She was hesitant about stepping closer, but she forced herself to do it, then searched through the first-aid kit for antiseptic. She would have to sterilize the wound as best she could with the metal still in it, then pull it out and apply pressure to stanch the bleeding. She had done it before—Ines had gotten pierced with debris during a Drain once—but it felt different this time, in the quiet, with no battle raging around her.
“Ziva noticed something going on at the Camel. All the scurrying around. So I knew they had summoned another one. There’s a . . . burst of energy when they do it.” His face twitched a little. “If you’re paying attention, you can feel it for miles in every direction. Like a . . . bubble of magic, popping. And I’d been waiting for it.”
“You said that you ‘knew they had summoned another one,’ ” she said. “Another what, exactly?” She poured water from the jug over the wound to clean off some of the blood, then doused the entry point and exit point of the wound in antiseptic. That would have to do.
Mox was unwrapping a square of gauze. “They bring warriors here from other places to fight me. You—your friends—are the fourth.”
He offered her the gauze, and she took it and clamped it around the metal so she could get a firm—and clean—grip on it.
“Fourth,” she said. “Nero said we were the fifth Chosen Ones they’d brought here.”
“Chosen Ones?” Mox’s brow furrowed.
“I’m going to pull now,” she said. “Unless you’d like to do it magically?”
He snorted. “I would probably cut myself in half if I tried.”
“Fair enough. Brace yourself.”
Mox grabbed the edge of the table, and Sloane pinched the flat of the shard between thumb and forefinger on both hands. She took a deep breath and pulled as hard as she could. Mox screamed, stuffing his fist into his mouth to muffle the sound. The fragment moved, but only a little. Without delaying, she pulled again, and this time, the metal pulled free. She set it aside. Mox was trembling but trying to open another packet of gauze. She smacked his hands away and did it herself, then used the gauze to apply pressure to both sides of the wound.
Chosen Ones Page 29
