The Root

by Na'amen Tilahun

  Perhaps even Queen Chayyliel was nothing but a cat’s-paw. A tool right now without knowing it.

  It was easier for them to believe this than to dig deeper and uncover too many secrets. She saw now that they were afraid of her. The realization had been growing for days, but she had thought it too absurd. This way they got rid of a problem and a threat all at once. It was why the guards were holding Min and Davi, a warning so that she would behave and simply go to her death.

  Did they worry that she’d speak enough Babel to bring the entire Hive down on their heads? Even if the strain of that would kill her, it might be worth it . . . if it would not also kill Min and Davi . . . and Arel and Jagi. She didn’t know when the two Antes had become important to her, but it was long before the kisses of last night. There was no time to examine that realization right now and no point, with Chayyliel planning her death before her eyes.

  “You must of course be stripped of your position and sent to the punishment rooms.” It was only because her knees were locked that Lil remained standing. Chayyliel used one claw to coax the bones back into the bag and placed it on the table. She wanted to look at the faces around the room, see if any of them would give themselves away, except she could not tear her gaze from Chayyliel.

  “Only time will see if others must also pay for your indiscretion.” Its gaze swept over the people behind her and she could feel them shrink back. Lil nodded. Good, perhaps her betrayers would be paid back.

  She had one last chance and she was able to force herself to turn and look at her Holder. He looked away, guilt and anger and sadness and surprise burning in his eyes, but no hope. She remembered his cast-down emotions as they left the Ossuary. Lil’s fate was sealed and she felt a sudden calm.

  She would die today and that was that.

  Everyone waited to see who would make the first move. She turned to Arel and Jagi, who watched her with both fear and banked anger. She could not handle any of their emotions. She had too many of her own.

  “Your vow has no time limit. Take care of them,” she reminded them.

  Arel and Jagi both nodded. They understood what she was saying. She didn’t know if the thought has crossed any of their minds yet that her skill with Babel might in fact be genetic.

  It was not.

  Neither Min nor Davi had ever shown any aptitude for languages at all. It did not matter though. Eventually someone would think it. Perhaps years after this night and then they would come after her sibs. She would die this night, but she would not allow the same fate to befall Min and Davi.

  RAZEL

  The whole plot was laid bare in front of her. The satisfaction on Krezida’s, Riana’s, and Haydn’s faces, the guilt and surprise that Mayer carried like a cloak—betrayed by his fellow conspirators if she wasn’t mistaken. Pure terror changed to settled resignation on Liliana’s face and anger on June’s. The incandescent rage boiling from Chayyliel was the last clue.

  The betrayal had happened and there was nothing to be done. It would be her greatest test to stand stone-faced as a person she would have liked to call friend was dragged away to her death.

  She also had to admit the genius of the plan on some level. How does someone fool an Ante searching for theft?

  Make sure the victim doesn’t know they are stealing.

  As Chayyliel approached Liliana to take her away, the older of her two sibs moved.

  “No!” she screamed and elbowed the guard holding her and ducked from the hold. She was reaching for her sister when the air turned to ice around her. Before she could call out, her outstretched arm was on the ground, severed cleanly at the shoulder. The stump of the girl’s shoulder was not bleeding, flash frozen as it was. The young girl herself collapsed to the ground, eyes wide and mouth gasping. The younger sib was screaming now, struggling in his guard’s arms. Arel and Jagi were moving, one toward each guard, but before they could do anything the air changed, as if it had been filled with molten lead.

  “You dare!”

  Razel had never heard Liliana’s voice with such a tone. It was anger and the edge of madness and the next words out of her mouth were in a language no one but Mayer understood, but they all saw the effects.

  The guard who’d harmed Lil’s sister resembled a small crike wrapped in a sheath of glittering ice—but not for much longer. The temperature in the whole room dropped as suddenly as it had rose, and the Ante screamed.

  At least Razel assumed it was a scream. She’d never heard a sound like it before, as if breaking ice could express pain. Its form rose into the air, small cracks beginning to break across its surface. Through the translucent ice Razel could see its bones shattering, bending. It shivered and twisted in the air, crying out as it floated over the maimed girl.

  It became smaller, collapsing in on itself.

  The young girl screamed and passed out as it joined the stump where her arm had been. The Ante shrieked as it melded with the ’dant’s skin there, as it shrank until the girl had a limb of ice. Lil’s sib laid out, unconscious, her original right arm on the floor beside her, replaced by all that remained of the Ante who had attacked her.

  It took only seconds.

  Before anyone thought of anything, Jagi had scooped the young girl up in his arms and darted over to the corner of the room. Razel saw June, who was closest to the door, open it and dive out. She could not blame them.

  “You dare to break your vow!” Chayyliel’s voice filled the room, made the light bulbs shatter into pulp above them.

  Liliana turned to Chayyliel but the madness and anger in her eyes did not abate, it grew. She snarled out something else and the other guard who had been moving around the edge of the room, trying to come up behind her, flew into the Queen’s side. They collapsed in a heap of limbs and tentacles.

  Krezida and Haydn were trying to head for the door, but Liliana’s head snapped around and with a growled word Krezida was thrown to the floor and Haydn was suspended in the air before her.

  “You!” The voice was gravelly and bits of blood now flew from her mouth.

  Chayyliel had risen from the heap on the floor, as had Krezida. The Holder still moved toward the door, abandoning her Apprentice. Razel was not surprised. Haydn was never going to be Holder. Everyone but he knew that. He was nothing but a placeholder.

  Liliana placed Haydn between herself and Chayyliel, as if his life were some sort of barrier. Razel closed her eyes from where she crouched behind a larger pillow with her Holder, because she knew what would happen even before it occurred. She heard the snap of Chayyliel firing upon her.

  Most thought the quills that covered the Ante’s head were simply Chayyliel’s version of hair or an ornamental choice. Chayyliel’s bloodline—Asclepti—was one of healing but many chose to forget the flip side of the healer: the torturer, the subtle poison, the silent death.

  She could hear the sharp snikt of release as Chayyliel allowed the barbs to go flying, the wet sound as they ripped through Haydn’s body completely like damp tissue paper, and the scream from Lil as they hit her.

  Razel could stand it no longer and looked over the edge of the pillow. Liliana lay on the ground, two barbed shafts sticking out from her side and hip. She still looked angry. She still looked like a threat. Then her eyes started to droop and she barely had time to hiss out a single word before she collapsed to the carpet.

  They all froze, waiting to see what her last gambit would do, but nothing happened around them. Chayyliel let out an incoherent growl and moved across the room, reaching down to Liliana’s unconscious body. She could not see what the Ante was doing since the tangle of its limbs blocked much of the movement. Finally there was a ripping sound Razel would remember for the rest of her days and Chayyliel stood with a clump of redness held in two pincers.

  She realized that Chayyliel held Liliana’s tongue. It was only as she turned her face away from the scene that she noticed that the children were gone, along with the two Antes, Arel and Jagi.

  Perhaps her attack was not
mad at all but a distraction.

  Queen Chayyliel turned to face them and noted the absences as well. It turned to the remaining guard, over six feet tall. It resembled a ’dant but was covered head to toe in long golden tentacles. Only when the Ante moved did they part enough to see the disjointed albino-white slug body underneath.

  “Find them, bring them all back.” Chayyliel paused. “Alive.”

  The guard left, the tentacles allowing the Ante to quickly rise off the floor and scuttle out the door. Next Chayyliel looked at the Turms, who simply stood there as silent as ever. He gestured to Haydn’s fallen body. “Call a guard to take him to the body shapers, see if he can be saved or hopefully turned into something more useful.” He looked down at Liliana. Razel always had trouble reading Ante expressions. Their faces were often so different, but now the satisfaction in Chayyliel’s stance was clear. “And another to take her to the rooms. Give her to Oolina and Gluti. Tell them they have no limits.”

  The gasp that followed this order was loud in the room and it took Razel a minute to realize it came from her own throat. Chayyliel was now looking at them: Mayer, Riana, and herself. The only ’dants left awake in the room.

  “No one outside these rooms knows anything of what transpired here. Luckily this shame can be kept in Hive, so no one need know. If someone does find out I will know who is to blame and they will suffer the same fate.”

  Razel swallowed but nodded along with the other two. The Ruling Courts were the worst gossips of Zebub. It would only be a matter of time. The story would get out and when it did they would be blamed without evidence or cause.

  They had to find Krezida before she spoke to anyone. Chayyliel was already turning away and moving out of the door, leaving Haydn’s body and Liliana on the floor.

  After a minor hesitation and a quick look at Liliana, Mayer followed. Riana did not even glance at the carnage before leaving. As Razel turned to follow, her eyes fell on something under Haydn’s splayed leg. She moved his still warm limb and saw the bag of bones. In all the chaos of the attack on Chayyliel and the discovery of Arel and Jagi’s running off with the children, everyone had forgotten about the bag that sealed Liliana’s fate.

  No one had said what they were, but she’d seen the look on June’s face. The bag of bones must be important in some way. Razel slipped the bag into her own pocket and hurriedly followed her Holder from the room, not looking at the two broken forms on the ground that made her the sole Holder-Apprentice in Zebub.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  DAYA

  Her head felt as if it were filled with marbles and cotton wool. It was hard to think and remember. She sat up and saw Elliot, Tae, and the young girl from the mall sprawled out on the hard ground next to her. She rose slowly, looking around. They were surrounded by rough white stone. No doors or windows at all. They were entombed in rock. The walls were sheer and the ceiling was free of any ornament other than a hanging light bulb.

  Elana was nowhere to be found, which worried her more than anything, but she refused to panic. Slowly the memory of the fight came back to her.

  Elliot groaned and shifted, slowly opening his eyes.

  “Ugh, did you get the number of the space shuttle that landed on my head?”

  “Nope, but I need you up. Now.”

  The pained smile dropped from his face and he immediately looked around for a threat. Daya hated herself a little bit. Elliot’s crush on her was not the secret he thought it was. It never had been. She tried her best not to take advantage of it or give him false hope, and for his part he never pushed or mentioned it and just acted like a good friend and partner. She knew how rare that was. More rare than it should be.

  Still, she knew how he reacted to her using the words “I need,” which was why she didn’t use them against him often. But right now she did need him. She needed him to be on high alert, she needed him focused on more important things than jokes.

  “Where are we?”

  “I’m guessing a cell of some kind.” Daya was pressing her fingers to the walls, looking for some sort of secret passage. Of course, if there was a secret passage for them to dump prisoners in this place, she sincerely doubted it would open from this side, but you should never discount an enemy’s potential stupidity.

  “Elana’s somewhere above us.” He said it quietly.

  She let out a relieved breath and some of her panic subsided. “Good.”

  “At least there are no bodies or bones around?” The forced chipperness was still appreciated.

  “bodies? bones?” The voice was a whisper. Daya turned from her examination of one wall to see Tae flipping over to his back, his eyes wide from Elliot’s words.

  “Relax, I said no bodies or bones.” Elliot moved over and propped their aspirant on his thighs to steady him. “Which means they are probably coming to find us at some point. This isn’t a place they just dump people and forget them. And considering the lack of bathroom facilities, we probably won’t have to wait that long.”

  His chatter was the perfect thing and calmed Tae down until he could sit up and look around. “Where’s Erik? Where’s Matthias?”

  “No idea. A separate cell would be my guess.”

  Daya was tired of the chatter. She called up her power, relaxing as the cold and numbness crept over her skin. “Everyone to the other side of the cell.”

  The other two didn’t question her, moving as far away from her as the cell would allow, carrying the still-unconscious young woman with them.

  Daya’s vision had already shifted from color to grayscale and she looked closely at the rock all around them. With her sight like this she saw cracks and fissures more easily, she knew where to hit to break something apart. Except there weren’t any such fissures in this cell; it was as if it had been formed out of a piece of solid uniform rock. Still, Daya had been in very few situations where brute force didn’t get some sort of result.

  She slammed her fist into the wall. The crack of stone meeting stone was loud in the enclosed space but neither her fist nor the wall broke, so she did it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  She only stopped when hands she knew as well as her own wrapped around her body and into her shoulders. She felt the chill of her lover’s touch on her underskin.

  “Elana.” She turned. Others were calling her lover’s name as well, but Daya could not look up to see what was happening yet. She was too happy just knowing that she was here and not in some special cell or being experimented on by this group of Angelics.

  “Elana, what happened?”

  “Some kind of gas. I think that soap-bubble Angelic did it. You all passed out and I went invisible.”

  Daya sank to the floor. Elana stayed in contact with her body. They faced Tae and Elliot, who was trying to focus on his sister’s face rather than the places she and Daya were overlapping.

  “Then they gathered you all up—”

  “Wait. The gas didn’t affect the others?” Tae asked.

  “I don’t know, we had those three Suits knocked out and no one else was on the first floor with us. And it was gone by the time the reinforcements showed up to take you guys away.”

  “What about the hostage?”

  Her silence answered Tae’s question.

  “Who was he?” Daya asked quietly.

  “The boyfriend who ended up in jail.” Elliot answered.

  “What?”

  Tae looked at Daya and Elana. “How do you not know? Don’t you remember the scandal? He played Erik’s stepbrother on With Love. Then everyone found out they were sleeping together. Since he had just turned eighteen and Erik was only sixteen, Erik’s father pressed charges and he got something like two years in jail. Erik quit working after that. It was a good show, though.”

  “Right?” Elliot turned to him. “They never released it on DVD.”

  “Oh, I have bootleg copies of all the episodes. I can burn them for you.”

  “That would be awesome! I can—”


  “Boys!” Daya’s voice rang through the cell. “Later. More importantly, the boy is dead.”

  They were all silent at that. Erik was stable in his power, so Daya didn’t fear him coming after one of them the way he had Hu, but he had a temper and this was far from likely to improve it.

  “Elana, love, can you see if you can find Erik and Matthias?”

  She turned in Daya’s arms. “I can try, but this place is like a maze. The only reason I was able to find you guys buried under like a whole wall of solid rock was my bond with Elliot.”

  Daya felt guilty sending her love away, but she couldn’t help but think it was better that the one of them who could become incorporeal should be the one to break this news to Erik.

  ERIK

  Erik woke up cold, alone, and bent into an unnatural position. There was no one light source that he could see, but the white stone all around him was faintly luminescent. There was no space to do anything but stand; the walls around him were so close it was a chore to turn around. He looked up and far above him he made out a grate. His arms were pinned and it took him a deep breath and a hard exhale, plus thinking extra skinny, before he was able to maneuver to raise them both above his head. They were scraped bloody from the rock walls but at least were no longer trapped.

  He studied the walls, looking for handholds and footholds. There were small outcroppings of rock but they crumbled under his weight. He was trying to figure out a different way out when he heard the breath and realized he was not alone. As loud as the sound seemed, it did not stir the air around him.

  “Elana?”

  The breath stopped and started again. It sounded like it was coming from all around him. Erik looked up and there above him, translucent, was a figure in an orange jumpsuit. It was hard to see because the dim light from the walls made features blend and blur, but there was some sort of fringe on the front of the outfit. The bottoms of the feet looked filthy, as if he had been running through mud. His pale golden-brown skin glowed like sunlight. Erik catalogued all these details and more, all in an effort to ignore the truth that had been welling up in him since he first caught sight of that shade of orange. Still so bright and obnoxious. Then the figure glanced down, Erik saw the face, and the ghost was gone.