She got to her feet, swaying a little. Everything was a little blurry in the aftermath of panic; she felt as unsteady as a boat adrift. But she checked her siphon where it clasped her wrist and looked for a clear path to the exit.
Mox’s hands closed around her arms. He spoke right above her ear. “When a maniac all but summons you to him,” Mox said, “you don’t just obey.”
“My friends,” Sloane said. “My—”
“I know.” Mox sounded almost terse. He squeezed her arms, hard, one hand cold with the metal that encased it, the other warm and callused. “We’ll go. But we won’t go without a plan.”
Ziva stomped over to them both and planted herself in front of Sloane so she couldn’t have walked out of the safe house if she had wanted to. Ziva folded her arms over her chest and Sloane realized there was a plate of armor screwed right into her forearm, a gauntlet anchored to bone.
“I’m not allowing either of you to march like fools toward a man who, apparently, both of you have failed to kill on more than one occasion,” Ziva said. “So get a firmer grip on yourself, Chosen One.”
“Ziva,” Mox said, chastising.
But Sloane only nodded. There was something bracing about Ziva’s manner, like a slap to the face that brought her back to herself. She ran her hands through her hair and nodded again.
“Okay,” she said, tugging herself free of Mox’s grip. “Let’s make a plan, then.”
38
SLOANE HAD NEVER had to plan an operation like this without her friends before. Her mind was a maze of city streets and entry and exit points. Her talent was in observation, not in strategy. Not like Matt, who had an instinct for people and exactly how they could be pressed, or like Esther, who could think five moves ahead of her opponents, whoever they were. All together, they had not been great wielders of magic, but they had been like the fingers of a hand moving to make a fist.
And now she was just a single finger. The middle one, probably, Sloane thought with a kind of faint hysteria.
Mox and Sloane sat on the table in the safe house’s ballroom that Ziva had been using to stitch up the soldier when they returned. Mox had finished the job himself, sewing deftly, like he was darning a sock. He asked the soldier about his luck with dice, a game he apparently played with the others in his platoon and often lost. They bet scraps, the soldier explained to Sloane when he saw her looking confused. Pretty bits of glass, old bottle caps, nuts and bolts they had found in the gutters. He gave her a piece of rounded blue glass that he had sanded into an oval.
“Can you sew?” Mox asked her, and Sloane looked out at the room of groaning, shuffling bodies and sighed.
“Yes,” she said, and that was how she ended up with a sewing needle in hand, swallowing hard to keep herself from vomiting as she pinched a woman’s dead skin together just above the elbow to sew a cut closed. Mox had gotten her a pair of gloves so she could keep her hands clean, but the dark fluid that seemed to serve as blood for the undead army got all over her gloved fingers and ran down the back of her hand. It stank like mold and mildew.
She tried not to think of the last needle she had held, the one she had used to blow a hole the size of a house into the Dome.
At least stitching up zombie soldiers was distracting. Her thoughts kept drifting back to the boots. Flakes of dried Earth mud falling onto a Genetrix floor. Nero wanted her to know what he was. Did that mean he was going to keep her friends alive until she got there, or did it mean he had already killed them? Some of the gray ooze splattered on her cheek after an enthusiastic stitch, and she wiped it off with the back of her wrist, trying not to grimace. The Dark One she knew wasn’t erratic; whatever he had done, he had always thought it through.
Ziva and Mox spoke freely in front of the soldiers, with Mox explaining to Ziva Sloane’s revelation about reversing the effects of the siphon fortis in the Hall of Summons. He didn’t act as if the soldiers weren’t there—every so often one of them weighed in on the conversation, and Mox was happy to engage. “Do you know how to do that to an ordinary siphon?” a woman propped up on her elbows to watch the stitching of her leg asked. “Because if you can’t do it to a regular one, you probably won’t be able to do it to that massive one.”
“Good point,” Ziva said. “We can’t just barge in there and expect to figure it out on the fly.”
“What do you suggest?” Mox said, talking around the needle between his teeth. He was holding it there while he checked his stitches. Sloane had moved on to yet another pungent gash. Her gloves smeared fluid on the undead man’s shirtsleeve.
“Hey,” the man grunted. “Just got this thing clean.”
“Well,” Sloane said, scowling, “it’s my first time sewing rotten flesh back together, so you’ll have to forgive me being a little clumsy about it.”
“ ’S not rotten,” the man said. “ ’S rotting.”
Ziva’s teeth whistled as she laughed. “Don’t take offense, Pete. She’s a little wound up right now.”
Sloane gritted her teeth and tied off the last stitch. She didn’t bother to keep it neat. Pete—what a ridiculous name for a zombie.
“Gotta stay loose,” Pete said, and he wrenched his arm out of its socket so he could waggle it around a little.
Sloane bit back a laugh. “That doesn’t hurt?” she said.
“Eh, not really,” Pete said. “ ’S more like the memory of pain, if you know what I mean. That’s how everything is for us—echoes.”
Sloane glanced at Mox. He was acting like he hadn’t heard.
“Ziva,” Mox said. “What do you suggest we do?”
Sloane pulled a length of tough thread through the eye of the needle. How had she not known who Nero was from the first second she had laid eyes on him? His unassuming flop of hair, his passive smile, his submissive attitude toward Aelia—all constructed so that he could move unsuspected right under her nose. But what was the purpose of that? She cut the thread. Her hands were shaking again.
“What I suggest,” Ziva said, “is that me and your nemesis-slash-lover over there—”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m dead; I’m not stupid. You two are . . .” Ziva flapped her hand at Sloane and Mox. “So I propose that she and I go on a little reconnaissance mission in order to document the innards of the siphon fortis.”
“You and Sloane,” Mox said. “Without me?”
“Well,” Ziva said, her voice gentling—as much as it was possible for that raspy, bone-rattling voice to gentle. “Your spine—”
“Right.” Mox scowled at his hands as he jerked the needle too hard, making the soldier in front of him jump. “Sorry, Fred.”
Fred. Honestly, Sloane thought. “Do you know Nero’s range?” she asked. She needed to focus. If Esther were here, she would snap her manicured fingers in front of Sloane’s face. Feel later, think now, she would say, and Sloane did. “How close do you have to be before he can control your magic?”
“I haven’t tested it much,” Mox said, sighing. “A couple blocks is the closest I’ve come.”
“Well, then, you can still help us get there,” Sloane said. “I’m sure they’re on high alert. We might need you. I’m still unpredictable with the siphon, and what if the blond cadaver’s head falls off?”
“Unpredictable? I think the word you’re looking for is useless. You are useless with the siphon,” Ziva said. “But this raises another question: How are we even going to get in the Camel? It’s not as if she and I can just walk in unnoticed.”
“We could put some tape over that hole in your face,” Sloane said.
“Careful, flesh-bag, or I’ll give you one to match,” Ziva retorted.
Mox coughed as if to disguise a laugh. He shook his head. “It would be better if we could go in from underneath, but—”
“Wait,” Sloane said. When the Dark One had narrowed his range of attacks to the Midwest, Sloane had gobbled up as much information as she could about every major Midwestern city, especially Chicago. It m
eant she knew all the oddities of it, the secret passages and the back doors and . . . “Do you guys have the pedway here?”
“The what?”
“There are underground tunnels for pedestrians in the Loop, and one of them opens up under the Thompson Center—sorry, in this universe, it’s the Camel,” Sloane said. “They started building the pedway before our universes split, I’m pretty sure. We could pop up right in the middle of the building.”
“Our universes . . . split?” Mox said.
“I mean, it seems like we were running right alongside each other—hence the term parallel. But then you guys developed big magic, and we didn’t.” Sloane shrugged. “I thought it was the Tenebris Incident that caused the split, but now I think it’s because Genetrix’s World War Two was fought primarily on water instead of air, so they focused on underwater surveillance, which is what precipitated the Tenebris Incident and . . . what?”
They were both giving her odd looks.
“Where,” Ziva said to Mox, “did you find this fucking nerd?”
Sloane wolfed down two cans of soup for dinner, the first one lukewarm because she started spooning it into her mouth the second she got the top off, and the second warmed over Mox’s siphon as he whistled out a controlled flame. Both of them were quiet. Mox seemed almost glum as he twirled his spoon in a can of corn.
She wondered what he would be like when he didn’t have to fight for his life anymore. He had spent so long locked up with the remains of his friends, separate from the world. Would he even know how to go back to a regular life?
She hadn’t fared very well at that herself. She had her friends around, but she was still leaping across rooftops to avoid journalists with questions, grimacing through public events, lying to her loved ones, spending her nights in recurring nightmares and panic attacks. And now Albie, who had anchored her, was gone. She had been able to delay the grief somewhat because she wasn’t even in the same dimension as his remains. But she wouldn’t be able to delay it forever.
“What is it?” she asked Mox after he had twirled his spoon for the twentieth time.
He glanced up at her. “It’s stupid,” he said, making it sound like a warning.
“So?”
He smirked and set the can of corn down on the table. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the storeroom on top of a folded blanket. The wool was making her ankles itch.
“We’re closer to taking him down than I’ve ever been before,” Mox said. “And I should be eager to do it. But seeing the army like that, I . . .” He shook his head. “I’ll have no excuse to keep them around once he’s gone.”
“No,” Sloane said, “I guess not.”
“And if they’re gone,” he said, digging a knuckle into an eye socket as if to work at a headache, “then I’ll be alone again.”
And she would be leaving too if they succeeded, she thought. Something neither of them was saying, because they had known each other for only a few days, and it was ridiculous to get attached after such a short time. Yet she had. It had been so long since anyone had talked to her like she wasn’t eighteen-year-old Sloane Andrews.
Still, it wasn’t the impending loss of her that plagued him. She had seen the way he looked at those oozing, marble-eyed people that came forward to be mended. Heard the tenderness in his voice as he spoke to them. Noticed that he knew every single name, welcomed every comment. “They weren’t just people you were supposed to command, were they?” she said. “You were close.”
“Not to all of them, obviously,” he said. “But to some. Ziva especially. You and I, we’re fated to join this fight. But not her. It was her choice. She wanted to defend the world. I can’t imagine taking on that kind of burden voluntarily.” He smiled. “I seem to attract the chronically grumpy.”
Sloane felt like she could see the person Mox had been before as he fidgeted with the cuff of his sleeve, picked at his cuticles, scratched an itch on his forearm. Always moving, and always elsewhere, watching the light of magic play across the room, maybe, or searching for the source of it inside him, the place where it started, the precise shades of his desires. He attracted people with a certain sharpness because he needed it—needed someone to give him a light smack and tell him to focus.
“She’s the best friend I’ve ever had.” Mox sighed. “You must think I’m fucking twisted, keeping a bunch of corpses around for company.”
Knowing magic was about knowing yourself, she thought. If you could be honest with yourself, you could better predict what your magic could do. Only how was anyone supposed to know themselves that way? Almost thirty years in this body and she still had no idea where it was half the time or how it worked. If anything, it was becoming more of a mystery, not less.
“I mean,” Sloane said, “I just had a panic attack because of a pair of boots, so I don’t think I’ll be winning any mental-health achievement awards anytime soon. But if I knew how to bring Albie back, or my brother, even for a moment, even a pale version of them . . .” She shrugged. “I would, I think.”
“You would?”
She smiled. “You’re not the only one who’s been alone for too long.”
“Yeah.” He cocked his head. “Feeling better now, Sloane?”
She liked the way he said her name, heavy on the Slow. Like he was tasting every vowel before letting it out.
“Not really,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure out how it was possible for me to stand right next to the Dark One without realizing it.” She had thought that she would know him in any universe. That she could trust her heart to tell her what hearts knew. But her heart had never been that wise, had it? There were some things it just didn’t seem to know. “But some pieces are fitting together now. Sibyl said she thought the Drains were a world’s allergic reaction to the presence of someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. We thought he caused them because he was there whenever they happened. But maybe they just happened whenever he was there—he was the wrongness in that universe, and the Drains were a way of Earth trying to right itself.”
“But then he came here,” Mox said, “and they started again.”
“Did they? I mean, when did the first one happen?”
“After I was on the run. Everyone was saying I was planning something big, that I was dangerous, and then—” Mox paused, frowning. “And then he summoned the first challenger. The first Chosen One from another world, I guess.”
“Which caused,” Sloane said, “a Drain.” She sat back with a satisfied smile.
“She was young, the first of them.” Mox was lost again, his fingers chasing each other across his kneecap, hair falling over his face. “More deft than powerful, I’d say. Caught on to Genetrix magic so fast, it was like second nature, and she was clever with it, knew how to slide one working into another as easy as singing a song. It was her skill against my brutality, and . . .” He shrugged. “I feel trapped by it all,” he said. “Stuck in it like mud.”
“I wish I had some kind of answer for you,” Sloane said softly. “But all the things I was good at were from before. Good at falling asleep fast and waking up faster, and running toward Drains instead of away, and making dark jokes afterward that made other people uncomfortable. If you’re good at those things, how are you supposed to be good at going to work, getting married, popping out kids? They’re opposite lives.” She shook her head. “Nobody ever prepared me for what came after. They just assumed I would never find out.”
When she looked at Mox again, she was surprised to find that he was smiling a little.
“That’s a false dilemma you’ve created, you know,” he said. “It’s not like you either hunt Dark Ones or get pregnant, nothing in between. There are many lives out there to live. Endless possibilities for you to sort through and discard.”
She hadn’t, of course, thought about it that way. She had asked him why he didn’t run, leave the state, the country. And his enemy was still out there, hunting him. But hers—well, now she knew that he was still aliv
e, but she hadn’t before. She could have left Chicago, left Matt, left her entire life. Gone backpacking in Europe like a college graduate with wanderlust. Ate, prayed, and loved across India to find herself. Bought a bunch of land in Idaho and built her own log cabin. But she hadn’t tried anything. Her only desire had been to be left alone.
No wonder she couldn’t do magic reliably; deep down, she didn’t even know what she really wanted. “You’re right,” she said. “But first, we have to survive this.”
“True. But in order to do that, we’ll need to get some sleep.”
“We?” she said. “Who ever said we would sleep anywhere?”
His eyes danced a little. “No one,” he said. “But, you know, we might die tomorrow.”
“That’s a good line.” Her face broke into a smile. She couldn’t help it.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
TOP SECRET
TO: Aelia Haddox, Praetor of the Council of Cordus
FROM: Nero Dalche, Quaestor of the Council of Cordus
RE: Plan of Action for Dimension C
Dear Praetor,
Per our last discussion, I have verified that Dimension C-1572, the third parallel universe we have discovered that significantly overlaps with our own, is a suitable candidate for our first Chosen One summons. Said Chosen One has been identified as Sergei Petrov, who outsmarted a dark force known as the Black Cloud five years ago in that universe’s accounting of time.
Following the so-called rules of hospitality governing travel between universes, I located a point of vulnerability in Dimension C. We have previously defined a point of vulnerability as an individual who is susceptible to the influence of magical energy upon their person, which is to say that when we knock, he or she will open the door. Typically, a child serves this purpose well, as children are not as prone to questioning odd things as adults. However, in this dimension, our point of vulnerability is an adolescent girl with a suitably open mind and childlike belief in the impossible.
Chosen Ones Page 35
