“Lee!” I called out as she turned in my direction. “Lee Harrison!?”
“Who the fuck-” she spotted me looking out at her from the small cell door, which was at knee-height to anyone standing. “No way. Is it… no way, it can’t be.”
“Let me help you get out!” If it was a case of mistaken identity, I wasn’t complaining.
She was already running over, crouching down with a shuddering sob of pain. Lee had the strong, muscular build of a career adventuress, but they had fucked her up—her bare skin was covered in scorch marks from electrodes, cigarette burns, cuts, and deep, bloody bruises. With sweat-slick hands, she unlocked the cage by touching a sphere of black glassy material to a matching lock, which didn’t unsnap so much as ooze around the heavy iron loop and reform. I tried not to boggle at it. When she threw the door open, she stopped, lips pursed.
“I thought you were… shit. Never mind,” she said, the hardness of her eyes dulled with fatigue.
I scanned her warily. “I’ll help you anyway. We have to leave, now.”
“Come on.” Even with the wild-dog look about her, she jerked her head in a nod and pushed herself back upright. I crawled out as she stumbled and sagged against the wall. All she wore was a pair of jeans. Her bare feet looked like hamburger, swollen and twisted with fractures. It was a miracle that she could still walk.
Rushed but not panicking, I frisked the dead guard, found a keycard and a single frag grenade on his belt. I swept up his gun just as the door at the end of the hall burst open. Lee saved my life for the second time: she yanked me around the corner of the T-intersection where she’d emerged as ten guards opened fire and turned the corridor into a blender. I helped her to run to the next door, turned and opened fire on the first man to make the corner. He ducked back around, winged, but not before he’d thrown the grenade in his hand.
“Come on!” Lee threw open the heavy industrial door and hobbled through. I caught up just as the explosive went off, deafened and numb from the concussive wave that hit the door as Lee slammed it closed. She hooked the weird glass lock on and closed it up, and we plunged our way forward.
Neither of us knew where we were going. I sunk my trust into my intuition, that strange cocktail of experience, sensory input, and raw psychic knowing that pressed me toward the surface. Like runners in a three-legged race, we turned another corner and found a filthy cargo elevator that worked with the keycard.
“We’re not going to make it.” Lee moaned, as the elevator began to lift. “This fucking thing’s too slow!”
“You won’t be able to do the stairs,” I said. “This is what we have. Give me a boost up to the ceiling.”
Lee growled with the effort, but she lifted me high enough that I could push open the trapdoor on the elevator and get on top of it. There’d be plenty of room to stand when we reached our floor. I reached down for her with both arms. “Give me the gun and grab on. Now... One, two, three, jump!”
She shot through the hatch just as the elevator slowed. I pulled the door up, handed her the rifle, and took the grenade in hand.
“Fair warning,” I said. “We might die.”
“Death is better than what these assholes have in store for us.” Lee spat.
“Glad we agree.” The elevator honked as it reached its floor, and I felt my link to the Art sweep back into me in a tidal rush. We were clear of the Vigiles’ anti-magic field in the levels below. Still, this was no time for spellcraft: I pulled the pin on the grenade, waited until the doors opened, then threw it back down into the elevator.
The sound of it bouncing and rolling was drowned out by the hail of gunfire. The Vigiles guards had approximately one second to scramble, and at least one didn’t make it in time before the explosion rocked the elevator in its shaft. Screams pealed up from outside, followed by the thundering of boots in the steel box beneath us. I looked up and around, and spotted our salvation barely six feet over our heads: the ventilation tunnel and the extractor that pushed the pressurized air from the elevator shaft into the engine room.
“Okay, one more big jump, and we’ll make it,” I said. “Stand on that hatch and boost me up.”
Lee got on just in time, snarling with pain as the soldiers tried to bust up into the shaft with us. They fired at the roof, denting but not piercing the thick metal, as I clambered up to hang off the pipes beside the ventilation. I broke the vent off with the stock of my rifle, braced it, and shot up at the extractor until pieces blew up and out into the room above. Muscles burning, I dropped the rifle, swung up, and pulled and kicked until the fan dislodged into the floor above, raining metal down where Lee hung on grimly to the door. Then the elevator clunked and groaned, and began to descend.
“Climb up! Climb up!” I barked at her, scrambling up into the ventilation. “Climb up and grab the pipes!”
“GOD-fucking... DAMMIT!” Lee grabbed the counterweight as it shot up, swung crazily, and leaped out to clutch at the red pipes I’d used for leverage. She was weakening, and fast—but I caught her and pulled her high enough that she could hold on beside me.
“Just hold on, okay?” I turned, huffing, and gathered force at the end of my fist. “Tzain!”
The dust thrown up the shaft by the grenade was plentiful. I smashed the grate open with a long blade of bonded matter and pulled it out, throwing it down onto the elevator below. Puffing with effort, I swung up and in feet-first, hooking my knees over the edge of the floor above us. All those Soviet-era gym drills Nic had made me do as a teen were finally paying off.
“I’m losing it down here!” Lee called up to me.
“Hang on.” I kicked the remains of the ventilator away, braced my heels under the solid edge of the rumbling elevator turbine, and bent back down into the shaft to clasp Lee’s reaching hand. Something in my back popped as she climbed up my body and into the room. Panting, she pulled herself up and over, then helped me up before stumbling to hands and knees. But it wasn’t over yet.
“This leads to the roof. It has to.” I rolled over, made sure I could still bend at the waist, and got woozily to my feet. My half-treated bullet wound burned and throbbed with warning, but my legs held.
“I can’t feel my feet.” Lee shook her head. She was bathed in sweat, drooling blood from her mouth to the floor.
“We made it this far. Let’s get out of here.” I hesitated for a moment, then pulled my shirt off. They’d taken my clothes and given me a set of gray scrubs, no shoes. “Here.”
Lee looked up woozily. When she saw what I was offering, she reached for it and knelt down for a few seconds. I turned away as she dressed. That she’d been half-naked up until now wasn’t the point.
“Okay.” I heard her get up behind me. “I can do it. You take the gun.”
“No. You should,” I said. “I’m a Phitometrist. I’m always armed.”
If what the guards had said was true, then Ayashe was on her way to prison and whatever horrors awaited her there. There was no point in trying to look for her here. I felt a pang of regret as I swiped the card, counted, and kicked the door out into the howling wind outside, a word of power curled on my tongue. Visibility was fractional—it was pounding slushy, icy rain, and even the flood lights on the roof barely illuminated anything beyond six feet. The reek of garbage was overwhelming despite the cold. There were helicopters warming up somewhere, the whop whop whop of rotors audible over the continuous roar of the storm. The wind was so powerful that it flattened us both as we half crawled, half clung to the slippery metal on top of the building.
I knew nothing about Lee, but in the immediacy of the moment, there was complete trust between us. We kept our hands clasped around each other’s wrists as we fumbled our way in the dark. The first helicopter rose over the edge of the building minutes later. We dove behind turbines as the searchlight flooded the roof, giving us a brief view of where we were: near the edge of a very large, bland building surrounded by mountains of trash. The ground was at least fifty feet down, but where there was a
n elevator machine room, there was a ladder. There hadn’t been any stairs inside the machine room.
As I glanced in that direction, the door burst open and soldiers poured out. GOD, but they were fast.
Lee broke off before I did, racing for what I hadn’t yet seen: the handrails of the ladder leading down. Head and heart pounding, I followed as quietly as I could, crawling on hands and feet as the helicopter’s lights swept away. They were having a hard time staying level in the air. The wind swept the machine toward the other end of the building as surely as it tried to sweep our feet out from under us. Teeth chattering, Lee hung onto the ladder for a moment, then slid down. I followed, watching in nauseated fear as lights blazed up around the building, including one that splashed the wall right beside our descent.
The indignity of it, the hopelessness of it, pulled something up from the deep reserve of furious power that had always been at the core of my Self, the dark water that lay under the facade of the temple. I threw up a hand, power surging through my limbs, breathing life into a form with a sharp word of power. “KAPH!”
The light blew. The beam vanished as quickly as it had lit on us... and so did the next one along, then the next. Three were all the spell had in it, but it was enough to douse this end of the building in shadow. I heard Lee curse before she let go of the ladder and dropped the rest of the way to the ground. Five feet, no more than that. She hit the ground and crumpled with a stifled cry barely audible over the sound of sleet striking metal.
I heard gunfire cracking through the darkness. They were pot-shots, but a couple hit close enough that I had to snatch my hand away from the sparks. For a second, I thought I’d taken ricochet, but there was no damage evident when I dropped down. Lee was curiously still, head dropped between her shoulders. She swayed with exhaustion as I pulled at her. I got her arm over my shoulders, and began to run for the nearest cover.
The Tzain spell could cut as well as pierce, and I used it to slash open the fifteen-foot wire fence that surrounded the huge plant. Two layers of chain-link, a manned tower with lights sweeping at just the wrong angle... we plunged headlong into the darkness, slushing through the rotten slurry that ran from the towering mountains of garbage that rolled like hills in every direction.
My stomach curdled as we stumbled blindly into the narrowest valley between piles of landfill, staying ahead of the tide of law enforcement now sweeping every part of the yard behind us. We dropped into waist-deep, filthy water, waded through it, and emerged into a wet, filthy, warm mound that sucked at and scraped our legs. Our only guide was the faint orange glow on the horizon, the lights of the city.
Soon, we left the sounds of guns and dogs behind us. The helicopter was heading out this way—one of two now buzzing around the building, their searchlights sweeping in an expanding triangle around the transit camp. Lee was moving woodenly, staggering wildly whenever she lost my support. We broke through the trash mountains onto a path, another chain-link fence, and beyond that... water. Water, barges. New Jersey burned in the distance, the same baleful orange as a forest fire.
“Fresh Kills. We’re at Fresh Kills, we have to be.” I spoke quickly, struggling for breath. “Staten Island. How the hell are we going to get across the water?”
My reverie was cut short by the sound of the chopper breaking through the storm. Out of time.
“Come on! Final push! We can hide on a barge!” I tried to push off, but was jerked back by Lee’s dead weight. She went to her knees where she stood. Confused, I stared at her, trying to figure out what had changed. Only then did I see the enormous bloodstain across the front of her shirt, the blood that even now was being washed away by the sleet pounding everything in sheets of gray ice.
Lee shook her head.
“Kurva blyat! Come on! You’re strong!” I looked up as the helicopter buzzed by only a few hundred feet away. “You’re a survivor! Come on!”
The woman’s face set. She picked herself up, frustratingly slow, and stumbled off with me toward the nearest garbage delivery barge.
The barges that went between Fresh Kills and NYC were nothing more than huge, flat-bottomed steel trays guided by tugboats. They ran around the clock, crowding the wetlands around the dump in roughly divided lanes. They were slow, but they had numerous hiding spots—assuming you weren’t crushed by an overfilled dumpster. Strangely, all these barges had their lights off, and there were no people milling around... and it wasn’t until we’d made it another hundred feet that I saw the rust, the holes, the way that the scows were listing in the water. The tide around these derelict watercraft was utterly dead. We’d stumbled into a graveyard.
At a loss, I pulled Lee up onto the docks and into the closest shelter we had—a battered, gutted riverboat with half its roof caved in. There was dry space in it, and wood—not that it was safe to light a fire. I lay her down on the floor, and knew, as soon as I lifted her shirt to examine the wound she’d taken, that it was too late.
Chapter 27
“Bastards got a lucky shot, didn’t they?” She croaked.
“Yes.” I pulled her shirt down and sat back. The cold was drilling into my bones, and with it, a fatigue so profound that I felt like I was being sucked down into the ground.
Lee’s eyes rolled, fixing on my face. “You... really look like him. Easy to mistake.”
“Like who?” I frowned.
She regarded me in silence for several long seconds. “You look like Norgay.”
My head rang empty with a sense of surreal futility. “Norgay? Norgay, from… Answer?”
“Yeah.” Lee’s breath rasped through bloody teeth. “You could be his… his cousin or something.”
“I’d say that was the weirdest thing to happen to me today, but it’s not.” I sat back with a shrug. What could I say to that, really? “I know of him, and of Answer. Kristen Cross talked about you. You’re the Keeper, the one who knows where the Shard is.”
Lee winced as she shifted on her back, trying to find some way to lie comfortably. “Don’t… expect me… to talk about it.”
“To be frank with you, I don’t want to know.” I searched for a way to help her, and came up blank. All I could do was help her find a position that didn’t hurt as much. “The people who know where to find the Garden tend to end up dead.”
“Hah.” Her eyelids fluttered. “Tell me something. You believe in God?”
“No. Not the Abrahamic one. I think...” Exhaustedly, I dwelt for a moment in memories of awe, of my moments of immersion. “I think GOD is beyond our everyday perception. That it lives and breathes around us, and like any living thing, it’s mostly made up of microbes and water. We’re the microbes. And I think GOD is under attack.”
“The-The First War was n-not a war. It was a rout.” Lee said, reciting slowly and deliberately, like a child reading from a book. “It came when the… with the first star to ever light the Mirror of the sky.”
“It came when that star fell, screaming, to the White ground,” I finished, the mnemonic cadence reminding me of my own visions in the months since Zarya had entered our world. “Never forget that when the Morphorde appears, the skies scream.”
“So you’re the real deal, huh?” Her voice was thickening, slurring, like someone who was fighting sleep. “Now… here’s a story. My dad… big-shot judge. Joined the Teu… Teutonic Knights. One day, in ‘83, he takes me by the hands and tells me that he m-met an angel. Face-to-face.”
“There are no angels, only demons.” Kutkha’s words from months ago returned to me. For some reason, they sent a cold, crawling thrill down my spine.
“He… he told me I needed to straighten out, prepare for the Tribulations.” Lee continued. Her eyes were closed, her breathing labored. “I blew it off. Always cared more about the real world, like Mom. Dad had… lots of people coming in and out of the house after that. Visitors. Men I didn’t know.”
“Okay.” My eyes were heavy as I sat back. Had to wonder where she was going.
“Didn’t
care much at the time.” Lee’s throat clicked, her voice gluggy from the fluid slowly filling her lungs. “I was busy working with the tribes in S-S-South America. Until J-July. D-Dove a new cenote. Deep… deep, beautiful waterhole, never touched. Reached the bottom, got sucked in through a cave system into… into Eden. Found… found crystals, everywhere. Beautiful… so beautiful. All white, silver, pink. Picked one up… got hit with all this… all this shit.” She choked out a small, bitter laugh. “Too much knowing. Scared me into a r-religious experience. Went back to Dad, told him. I didn’t know he was wr-wrapped up with the V-Vigiles. J-Just thought maybe… maybe he was right. Fucker gave me to them.”
“To the Vigiles?”
“Yeah.” Lee’s eyes closed. “Gave me to these freaks. First round of torture, no luck. I dreamed of a woman in a tree. She spoke to me every night. Teaching me… reassuring me. Stopped the Vigiles freaks from getting in my head. One day, on transport, this little guy hijacked the truck. Took me somewhere in the f-forest. Leader called himself ‘Deacon’.”
“The Templum Voctus Sol,” I breathed.
“They had… this Tree down there with us. The Tree spoke like the woman in my head. She was so small. So sad. These men, they were evil. Blind, didn’t know they were evil.” Lee’s face rippled with momentary pain, and she grunted, shifting on the floor. “At war… with Vigiles. Spy told them I knew where the Shard was, so they asked me. Round two torturef-fest. Still didn’t say a d-damn fucking thing.”
A tree. A… MahTree? Kristen’s message had said something about a ‘MahTree’. At a loss, I took her hand in mine. “You’re stronger than me, then. The Deacon kicked my ass.”
“Hah.” The touch seemed to help. She shuddered and relaxed again. “A guy came to h-help me. Pretty boy. Said name was Zealot. Worked for ANSWER.”
“Answer to what?”
“Don’t know. It’s an acronym.” Lee swallowed, trying to clear her mouth. “I knew ‘em already. Big Dog, Norgay, they helped me in South America. ANSWER… helps the tribes. Weapons. Advice. Fight against corps, government.”
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