Siege of Shadows

by Sarah Raughley

  “Duly noted,” I mumbled, my toes curling in embarrassment as Chae Rin sauntered back to us, gunless.

  “We’re four minutes out from the start of the mission,” Sibyl’s voice came from the overhead. “Everyone get to your stations.” She didn’t have to be physically present to order us around. Communications was too public for a mission that was only supposed to involve part of her fighting force; she’d set up her own operations base from her office instead.

  “Oh dear. I’m getting a bit nervous.” For a few seconds, as Lake shifted uncomfortably on her feet, I could see the erratic rhythm of the rise and fall of her chest. Then suddenly, like a switch had been flipped, she snapped her head up. “Oh, by the way, Maia, speaking of Rhys—”

  “We weren’t,” I said flatly.

  “Since you two are in a bit of a rough spot, do you want me to help by getting him an invite to the TVCAs? I can ask my agent for tickets!”

  Chae Rin laughed. “Of course you’d be worrying about some celebrity wankfest instead of the actual mission at hand. Why am I not surprised?”

  “What?” Lake said as I distinctly heard Chae Rin mutter the word “airhead.” “I’m just trying to lighten the mood a bit, sorry. I know you’re all about blood, death, and destruction, but some of us aren’t.” Lake tried to keep her voice measured, but I knew it wouldn’t last. “Besides, this stuff is important too. We have other kinds of Sect duties, you know.”

  “Other kinds of Sect duties! I’m dying!”

  “Yes, other kinds of Sect duties!” Lake’s voice rose rapidly over the harsh dissonance of Chae Rin’s laughter. “Going to this awards show is our duty. Cheryl and Sibyl okayed it—hell, they want us putting ourselves out there.”

  “Right, and this has nothing to do with your old girl group snagging their first number one. You really are completely, decidedly full of shit, Lake. I seriously—”

  “I’m what? Say that again?”

  It was never going to stop. It didn’t stop even as the two stalked off to their vans.

  Just as they left my sight, Belle turned around the corner of a van, her hair plaited down her head in a French braid. “There you are. You’re with me,” she said. “Come, it’s time.”

  Sucking in a breath, I followed.

  • • •

  One o’clock. In the dead of night, the delivery vans drove out of the underground hangars through a network that took us up to the surface. Only when we were clear of the facility’s reach did our silent procession break up as each van traveled down its prescribed route.

  To the regular civilian passerby on the highway, our van would have looked almost too deceptively simple. But our boring, white moving cubicle skillfully hid from view the weapon cases strapped to the wall, the handheld blades and electromagnetic phantom-dispelling bombs tucked in the compartments beneath the black-cushioned benches.

  And one of Saul’s rings. It was in a black safe specially fitted against the division separating the driver and passenger seats from the cargo unit we were sitting in. Another van followed a few car lengths behind. The only way inside our compartment was sealed shut with an electronically locked door that could only be opened with a code.

  With sweaty palms, I sat rigidly on my bench next to Belle, who laid her head against the wall, eyes closed. On the opposite bench, Rhys stayed alert, watching the several blinking red lights on the center screen of the monitor as the vans separated down different paths. The van floor rocked beneath my boots while I listened to the sound of cars rushing by.

  The left and right screens of the monitor acted like a surveillance system showing us different angles outside the van. But they didn’t show us every angle.

  “Eveline, what do you see out there?” Rhys held a finger to his earpiece as the communication device picked up his voice.

  “All clear so far.”

  I could only hear her; she was on the other side of the division in the passenger seat with another agent, Lock, who drove us along the highway.

  “All units check in,” came Sibyl’s voice over the comm.

  “Unit Seven, all clear,” said Rhys.

  “Unit Six, all clear.”

  “Unit Five, all clear.”

  And it continued like that.

  “You don’t think Saul would just ambush us out here, do you?” I asked quietly, shifting uncomfortably in my seat.

  “Yes. That’s why there are bombs in the bench, Maia.”

  It wasn’t a tone I was used to from Rhys. He sounded annoyed. I heard the sting in his voice, but he kept his eyes away from mine as he continued to keep in contact with the other units. Not that I had a right to complain. But my throat still labored as I swallowed hard.

  “Maia,” came Belle’s voice from beside me, and when I looked up, my lips almost parted in surprise. Her eyes weren’t fully open as they looked at me, but the encouragement of her small smile, as fleeting as it was, had enough of an impact. “This is all just a precaution—you know that. Don’t worry.”

  She wasn’t as confident being warm. Her voice was softer, more fragile. It didn’t come naturally to her. But she gave it a shot sometimes, as if she’d suddenly remembered during those odd moments that I wasn’t just the girl whose destiny used to belong to her mentor. I was the girl struggling under the weight of it.

  She was trying, Belle. Every once in a while, she’d set her grief aside and try. And I always appreciated it. But when her smile disappeared, the knit in her eyebrows returned quickly as if to make up lost ground.

  “I’m sorry,” Belle said. “I know I’ve been acting . . . strange lately.” She said nothing else, but I already understood. As she brushed back some loose strands of hair streaming down her forehead, I stared at my knees.

  “It’s okay,” I said as an insidious whisper of guilt taunted me. “And you’re right about the mission. I guess I’m just nervous. I don’t know if I’m really ready to face Saul again.”

  “You should be. This isn’t your first mission,” Rhys said flatly, watching the monitor as he twisted the sheathed tip of his favorite knife against his finger. “Haven’t you been training? You should have toughened up by now.”

  That childishness was back, the same defiance masked as innocence while he pretended to be interested in his knife, twisting it against his finger. My hands clenched against my knees as we crossed through a Sect-controlled toll. I heard Eveline’s voice from inside my comm.

  “Entering the underground tunnel,” she said. I could see that much on the monitor. The two-way highway stretched on in the darkness, speckled by the small lights lining the wall.

  “Well, Rhys,” I said finally with a bitter curl of my bottom lip. “Seems you’ve been reading some of my criticism online. Nice to know you found something to do back home for all those weeks.”

  “You mean aside from recovering?”

  Recovering from his injuries—the injuries he’d gotten trying to protect me from Saul. I couldn’t forget. A knife plunged into his chest close to his heart.

  He’d done that for me.

  He wasn’t a bad guy. I knew that in my heart. He’d shown me as much while we were together. It was my head that needed convincing—not easy when there were other people living in it.

  “Anyway, this is a mission, Maia.” Rhys faced me with nonchalant eyes. “So let’s stop this here, okay? No one’s out to get you. Stop being ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous?” I sat up straight on my bench. “How about you stop being a jerk?”

  Rhys’s jaw went rigid. His shoulders slumped. “Jerk,” he repeated quietly. It seemed as though he wanted to say something else, but he thought better of it. Instead, he turned away with a pained expression that still didn’t reveal his guilt one way or the other.

  I heard Belle’s quiet sigh before the road split off from the main highway down a closed-off path: Route L-9. The tunnel was available for commercial and civilian use, but the Sect’s Route L-9 remained hidden from prying eyes. And it wasn’t difficult
to see how.

  Our path was blocked. The wall stretched up from the paved road to the tunnel ceiling. For a moment, both delivery vans had to slow to a stop—that is before the solid wall smoothly shifted to the side, revealing the Sect’s secret, expansive two-way network. It wasn’t so much a tunnel as it was a miles-long underground bunker.

  “We’ve reached the route without any issue,” said Rhys in his usual, mission-fit tone as if he hadn’t just sucker punched me.

  “Good.” The tension in Sibyl’s voice was audible. “We haven’t been able to detect any kind of dangerous frequencies on our end either. Checkpoint one, report.”

  Checkpoints. Sibyl must have meant the booth on the second-floor walkway above us, blocked off with a safety railing. It could have been either of the two agents standing at attention by the railing who answered, “No hostile sightings. Route is secure.”

  “There’s a secret facility outside a small village in Oxfordshire,” Rhys explained to us. “Only a select few agents know about it. Heavily fortified. This tunnel is a direct pipeline.”

  “And the ring will be safe there?” Belle crossed her legs, watching the monitor. “What of the other carrier?”

  “On their way to another secret location,” Rhys answered. “Everything seems all right on their end. Though their route is a little shorter than ours.”

  “Sounds like you missed out.” It was lame, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Maia, look, I really don’t know what’s been up with you, and I don’t know why you’ve been acting up around me or what I did to you that you can’t stand to be around me. But whatever your deal is, it isn’t my problem.”

  “Isn’t your problem?” The dam broke. My voice rose several decibels. “Like hell it isn’t. You of all people don’t have the right to judge me. For anything.”

  Rhys’s lips snapped shut as he looked at me in silence.

  I could feel Belle’s attention on me without looking. It was then that I realized the situation I was in. Rhys, a potential murderer. Belle, his potential executioner. With jittery hands, I clenched my teeth, thinking of a way out.

  “Maia?” Belle leaned over when I turned my head and hid my expression with my thick bush of hair. “Are you okay?”

  We crossed another checkpoint. Voices rang through our comms as various people reported in. Agents stood at attention as we passed, firearms ready at their sides.

  With trembling fingers, I touched the scarf around my neck, hiding the neck-band keeping Natalya under control. All those weeks having the same nightmare tearing me apart every day and still no answers. No answer I wanted to believe, anyway.

  “What I mean is . . .” I sucked in a long breath to still the rise and fall of my chest. “I may not be as calm as you are on a mission, Rhys. But not all of us were lucky enough to be battle-trained since childhood, so cut me some slack.”

  “Lucky.” Rhys whispered the word as if it were poison. “You think I was lucky?”

  We stared at each other, unspeakable words brimming beneath our heavy gazes. Rhys had told me once about his training at some facility in Greenland. He’d met Blackwell’s right-hand man, Vasily, there as a child. Twisted, violent, vicious Vasily. But according to Rhys, not all of his malice could be blamed on nature.

  Some training facilities are a little tougher than others, he’d said once.

  “Forget it,” I said more to myself than to anyone else.

  “I agree,” Belle said with a dangerous note of finality in her voice. “This is a mission.”

  Rhys gripped the handle on his knife. “Fine.”

  The agonizing minutes of silence that followed were mercifully broken by Eveline. “All’s clear. We’re approaching checkpoint three,” she said.

  “Good. We’re getting close. Checkpoint three, report,” Rhys almost mumbled.

  He must have been distracted, stewing in his own anger, because it took him a while before he realized no one had responded. Blinking, he looked up at the monitor. So did I.

  Two agents were there by their booths, standing behind the railing like they were supposed to be. Like the others we’d seen, they had their long, stalky firearms, similar to the one I’d seen Howard use to vaporize Saul’s phantoms in New York. What I couldn’t figure out was why their firearms were pointed at us, charging blue along the metal side strips stretching up the length of the guns.

  Belle was already on her feet. Rhys had grabbed my hand before I knew what was happening, but it was too late. The deafening blast tore my eardrums, and all I could hear was a terrible ringing as our van launched into the air.

  11

  TWO BLASTS. OUR DELIVERY TRUCK flipped and landed on the pavement with a crash. I felt my bones crushing against metal through my bruised, battered flesh. The sound of boots landing on the roof—no—the floor above us knocked me back into consciousness. I hadn’t even realized I’d lost it in the first place.

  “Rhys.” With blood dripping down my eyelids, it was that much harder to pry them apart, but I managed to. Squinting, I felt around for him, my stomach pressed against the van’s ceiling, my hands touching cold metal, until I felt strands of hair beneath my fingertips. “Belle?”

  She stirred at the sound of my voice, her lips sputtering something I couldn’t hear. Blood was streaming down the sides of her forehead, matting her hair, tracing a line down her ears. It was dark. Some of the weapons had burst out of their cases, a few phantom bombs rolling past my legs, hitting my twisted left foot. But they were still locked; none of them had gone off.

  “Rhys!” Coughing, I looked around, lifting myself off my stomach to survey the inside of the delivery truck until I found him. He was out. Or dead? My heart rate suddenly sped up as I squirmed to him and felt for a pulse. No. He was still alive. Gingerly wiping some of the dirt and blood from his face, I sputtered out a grateful breath before shaking him. “Wake up. Wake up. Rhys!”

  The pair of boots on the “roof” of the van stood still above us.

  “U-unit Six,” I said, trying to contact the van that had been behind us. No response. “Eveline? Lock?” I shook Rhys again. “All units, all units. Unit Seven is down. I repeat. Unit Seven is down! Help us! Someone. Anyone!”

  I smelled the smoke before looking up and seeing the red line of a laser carving itself through the metal.

  “Saul,” I whispered. “Oh my god. All units, we’re being attacked. I think it’s Saul.”

  But Saul could vanish and appear anywhere he wanted. He didn’t have to cut a hole into the van to get to us. Who was this?

  “Hey!” I was yelling now, as much as my voice would allow. “Can’t you hear me?”

  “They cut the communications.” Belle just barely managed to find her voice. “The mission is compromised.”

  The last thing I wanted to hear.

  We were running out of time. I shook Rhys again and finally he began to rouse, but it wouldn’t be fast enough. Whoever it was above us, he’d hopped down from the roof. The back doors of the van were already bent out of shape and half off their hinges, so I could see him approach. He needed only to push the metal doors to the side to find us squirming inside the van.

  Or was it a “she”? The fitted bodysuit revealed an average-size feminine form, though her hair and face were sheathed inside a white metal helmet.

  Metal helmet . . .

  “It’s the same,” I whispered. The same helmet, the same suit. The same as the man we’d found in the Sahara hideout.

  Whoever she was, she was blocking our way out and coming toward us. With a wave of her hand, Belle created a thick wall of ice to keep her from reaching us, but I knew the barrier wouldn’t last; the mysterious soldier was already pounding against it. I had to do something. Dragging myself over to the side of the van, I placed my hand on the surface. My mind was still rattled by the impact, but I didn’t have a choice. Summoning my will, I let the power flow into me, breathing it into my lungs. I felt it slide down my arms according to my will, my pulse quickenin
g as it leaked out of my fingers.

  Calm down, I told myself when my heart began beating out of whack. I saw my burning house in my mind’s eye, but I banished the image. Don’t think about your family. You’re not there; you’re here. The heat spread down half the length of the wall. Belle was pulling herself over to Rhys as the circle above us neared completion.

  “Rhys, get up!” Belle gave him a hard slap just as the laser above us stopped.

  One last kick sent the ice barrier crashing down. Belle knocked a block of it away with her arm, yelling out in pain. With a grunt, I let the fire explode out of my hands, closing my eyes from the blast. What was left of the van’s wall soared off and skidded across the ground. Rhys was conscious enough to grab on to Belle as we jumped out after it.

  I landed on my back, turning just in time to see the woman’s boots clicking into the van, too late to reach us. She didn’t seem to mind. Instead of coming after us, she stayed inside the van, busying herself as we dragged ourselves to our feet. Busying herself . . .

  The ring. That must have been it.

  “She’s stealing the ring,” I yelled as Rhys and Belle got to their feet. “We have to—”

  The Sect agents by the checkpoint lowered their weapons only to pick up the guns in their holsters.

  The bullets hailed. One flew past my head and another tore across my right arm as we ducked for cover behind the van. Effigies healed fast, but right now the stinging pain was hard to bear. Belle was breathing heavily, holding her stomach, still reeling from the explosion. Eveline and Lock, still alive, dragged themselves out of the van’s window to take cover with us. But that woman remained inside the van. It was bulletproof, Sect-grade protection. With us occupied, she had plenty of time to take what she needed.

  “This is insane.” Rhys already had his knife in hand; the other held his head in pain. “Unit Six!” He’d yelled it instead, not bothering with his comm. “We need back—”

  He couldn’t finish, because he finally saw them through their windshield. They were dead, their heads rolled over at odd angles, blood dripping from the single bullet holes in their foreheads, shot through the window.