Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Janus staggered. He didn’t fall. He yanked out Stab at the same time he kicked Nax in the belly.

  Nax fell next to the twitching and bleeding Antonius and the now-visible, screaming Daniel.

  “Stab is mine! I am the Fate Progenitor!” Janus roared. “I’m going to nuke every spike you motherfuckers drilled into my world. You do not get the Earth! Earth is human!” He slashed at the air.

  Janus bellowed again and held my sword in front of his face like some damned medieval knight.

  The new-space energy coiling around Stab rebounded. It shimmied and shifted from one oscillation pattern to another until it formed a bubble.

  Leif slapped at his arm but it didn’t matter. We’d lost. The war was on. The world was about to permanently end.

  Janus opened his ground incursion.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The part of all this that I did not understand was how the Dragonslayer had called to me in the first place. I understood why Alt-me did what she did—delivering a human-built battle cruiser of a spaceship into orbit could have been what saved this timeline. We still had our militaries and the Southern Hemisphere and Praesagio Industries. Having that ship could have been the win we needed.

  I understood that she needed me in order to make the transfer possible. I did. But what I didn’t understand was how the ship I supposedly moved had managed to talk to me.

  The voice I’d heard was not a dead intelligence as the Seraphim claimed, nor was it an intelligence that would go through all this effort only to nuke the surface of Earth because it couldn’t help itself.

  I am the fearless and the bold, she’d said, not I’m the battle-scarred shell of a traumatized AI with both feet already in Valhalla.

  Because I’d heard that, too. May you and Odin save us all. Like I’d been hearing calls from two vastly different curlicues. One that understood what the hell was happening, and one that just wanted it all to stop.

  What had Marcus said? Let us do our jobs. Destroying the world was not doing her job.

  How many times while helping Mrs. K get to dinner had I said something similar to her? Let me do my job, Mrs. K. Or to any of the other residents who gave me guff because they were old and mad that they could no longer do for themselves what they’d done all their lives.

  I understood that now, too. I understood just wanting to leave the place where I’d been dumped and go home to my family because everyone around me was trying to do their jobs and sometimes that messed with my dignity.

  And now Antonius bled out and Nax vomited and Daniel had no clue. Leif battled whatever Janus did to his suit and the dragons…

  The dragons yelled in art. Ten dragons had gathered behind the far airlock, but it wasn’t the soldiers about to come through to protect their spike-city who yelled the most.

  Seven had come in from the ruins. They wailed and they argued and they did so in shapes and patterns and colors only the best of humanity could even come close to matching. Seven dragons with obviously differing points of view, with BlueLeaf flashing the most.

  Why was this happening? Why couldn’t they have popped into orbit and said Um, hi, we’re the neighbors instead of releasing their vicious dogs into our yard? BlueLeaf had followed us and I swear she was trying to stop this too. I swear she didn’t understand why any of this was happening any more than I did.

  We started a war and we built tools capable of the most human of all responses—utter and complete destruction of everything. Because we were human. And nothing said human like our narcissistic, psychotic technology.

  And Janus was going to stop this once and for all, even if that stopping did the opposite of saving everyone. Even if we all died. Because at least he’d have his dignity.

  The incursion bubble pulsed three times and expanded to about twice the size of the one at Paradise Homes. I could have taken a motorcycle through the other one. This one was big enough for a bus.

  But there were other things about all this that bothered me: All of Daniel’s slight-of-hand deceptions. The making sure I had the phone and understood that calling the Russians wasn’t as good as calling The Legion. That Leif’s father was a good man. That the Seraphim were really Legion and that made them good.

  That, plus I no longer knew Vivicus’s location. He was here, somewhere. I just didn’t know where.

  I dug my hand into my pocket and pulled out the insignia Erik had given to Mrs. K. Then I dug in again and pulled out the two from Marcus and Daniel. Because I didn’t think me having the phone was really about sending the video. I thought me having the phone was so that Leif could clone it. And I was pretty sure it was a decoy to make sure I got the little pieces of metal in my hand.

  Three were always better than one, right?

  Vivicus had to be nearby, and I knew he didn’t want to die any more than the rest of us. He’d help.

  “Get me Stab and I can talk down the Dragonslayer!” I yelled. I was pretty sure I could, because I didn’t think the Dragonslayer in orbit was their Dragonslayer. It certainly wasn’t Janus’s. Someone up there was helping Stab target, which meant that the ship was not dead.

  Because the timey-wimey bullshit had to work out on the side of the better angels at least once, right?

  So I did the one thing I knew Vivicus would understand. The one thing that made no sense and that I had no right to do, no matter what was happening, because I wasn’t worthy. But I did it anyway.

  “Ego Dracones Legio!” I yelled.

  I am Dragons’ Legion.

  Vivicus manifested no more than two feet from Janus, and unlike Nax, he didn’t carry a standard-issue modern military rifle. During the chaos, Vivicus had lifted Leif’s.

  And unlike Nax, he didn’t aim for Janus’s chest.

  A loud, chilly whine like a flywheel winding up screamed off the gun. Janus inhaled. He twisted as if he’d seen this coming, lifting one hand off Stab in order to push Vivicus away.

  He wasn’t fast enough. Vivicus pressed the gun’s muzzle against the shoulder of the arm still holding Stab. He fired.

  Janus’s arm—and my sword—bounced across the bridge’s surface.

  The recoil sent Vivicus staggering toward Leif and the wounded.

  Janus screamed. He screamed and yelled and twirled—and dove head-first into the incursion.

  And I did exactly what he’d told me not to do when he stole that suit.

  I called The Legion.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Janus’s arm looked more like a mannequin’s than real flesh and blood. The gun had cauterized the wound and no blood escaped, thankfully. The damned thing was still twitching though, and I kicked it away from Stab.

  I snatched her off the bridge with one insignia in my palm pressed against her hilt. The second I dropped at my feet. “Anchor here, Stab,” I said.

  The third sailed from my hand, a little flipping round of silver and gold, directly into the pulsing void of the incursion. “Find the Tsar’s ring,” I said. I figured since the sword and her helpers had used Vivicus’s glove to send us to Tokyo, maybe they could do the same with Legion insignias.

  The dragon soldiers blasted at their clear inner airlock door. One rammed it. We didn’t have a lot of time.

  “Listen to me, you stupid ship!” I yelled at the haze above us.

  She was right there in the sky above Tokyo, a beacon of human might so bright I saw her through the haze, and I swear she brightened. I swear she threw a red dot onto this one particular spike.

  “Do not nuke us!” I yelled. “We’re the timeline that will do our jobs!” We were. We had to be. We were a nexus point where two very different space-time curlicues met and damn it, we needed to use the tools the universe gave us.

  Not let it destroy us.

  “Please.”

  The phone vibrated in my pocket and I yipped. I flipped open the case. “Oh my God,” I breathed. The name said Dmitri Pavlovich. I didn’t need to call the Tsar. The Tsar was texting me.

  Move
to the side, Ms. Parrish, the text said.

  A spotlight burst through the haze and onto the incursion. I looked up. No helicopter. No plane, either. “Russian drones,” I said.

  Targeting complete, Stab said.

  The incursion pulsed and rotated. Not in a normal manner, not in the three dimensions we knew, but in new-space.

  Incoming vehicle detected.

  I dove to the side just as a black Praesagio SUV roared through the incursion. It bounced a little as the driver slammed on the brakes so the vehicle didn’t careen off the side of the bridge.

  The driver’s side window rolled down. “Del!” Harold yelled.

  I pointed at Antonius and Nax. “They’re wounded. Go!”

  He saluted and backed the SUV toward the men. Daniel and Leif quickly loaded Antonius and Nax.

  Harold would get them out. They’d be okay.

  Incoming vehicle detected.

  The incursion pulsed and the rear of a bus backed through it at a speed no vehicle that size should be moving. Not a military vehicle, or something armored, but a big, cushy, bright blue touring bus with Praesagio Industries: Building a better future for the world to see painted on its side in gleaming yellow letters.

  A second, identical bus followed.

  The two vehicles faced the incursion, both ready for an immediate retreat.

  I looked up at the sky. The ship hadn’t responded. Not really. Not in a way that told me, for sure, that she wasn’t going to nuke us.

  She’d sent me touring buses instead.

  BlueLeaf’s dragons had moved the wounded rhino-beast off the bridge. None of them camouflaged, and from the colors bouncing around, I suspected several had begun to panic. They circled and pointed at the buses and the soldier dragons still fighting their way through the shut-down airlock.

  I stood between them, Stab in my hand, in the center of a human-generated cone of white light, watching Harold gun the engine and take Antonius, Nax, and Daniel through to what I hoped was safety. What I prayed I’d called up correctly.

  The door of the closest bus opened and that bitch Cordelia the Assassin’s Daughter jogged down the steps. Another, smaller woman with bronze hair and skin jogged off the other bus.

  The bronze-haired woman held up her hands and did to the dragons what the Praesagio enthraller had done to me—she sent the gathered dragons a cloud of enthralling.

  I had no idea what she told them, but she’d gotten something across. They visibly calmed.

  “Del!” Cordelia called. She pointed at the airlock. “We have less than a minute. Get on the bus!” She looked over her shoulder. “Showtime, kid!”

  A brown-haired boy walked down the steps. He looked to be about thirteen, and just at the beginning of his first major growth spurt. I recognized him not because we’d met, but because he’d helped Maria.

  Nax’s son, a kid named Orel, walked toward BlueLeaf’s group. “Ms. Parrish,” he said as he passed me. Behind him, Cordelia tapped at her phone, and another, brighter cone of light surrounded the kid.

  I am the Captain, he signed.

  The cone vanished just as two new dragons manifested, one on either side of the kid. They lifted their heads in unison, then touched snouts above Orel’s head. The larger of the two manifested rapidly changing, complex patterns that moved from his tail, to his snout, then across to the other dragon. Then they sat back on their haunches and signed at the other dragons.

  Come with us, they said.

  Leif’s family had come to rescue us in buses big enough to take back defectors.

  A boom rolled from the airlock. A flash followed and a wave of heat, then rapid, screaming fire from the drones overhead.

  I ducked. A riot of colors erupted throughout the dragons. The two new ones backed toward the buses as Cordelia’s seer rolled outward. “Orel, get on the bus,” she said.

  The kid held up his hand.

  The two new dragons flashed at BlueLeaf’s dragons, who flashed back. One released a column of flame at the sky.

  But BlueLeaf pushed forward. She touched snouts with the larger of the two Dracae dragons, then she, too, released a column of flame toward the sky. She looked over her shoulder and flashed the other dragons. Two backed away. But the other four did not.

  BlueLeaf contorted her torso and twisted through the bus’s door. Another larger dragon followed while the other three boarded the other bus.

  Cordelia extended her hand to me. “Maria can’t hold the anchor at the other end much longer.”

  She did get out. I jogged toward the bus. “Is she okay?”

  Vivicus manifested between the bus and me, Leif’s gun still in his hands, and his hood rolling off his face as his suit cycled down toward gray.

  He looked up the steps at the driver. “Ladon!” he yelled, as if all the weirdness we’d been through, all the time jumping and the fighting was a normal day, and seeing this man was what finally set off Vick’s personal ghosts.

  I couldn’t see the man well, but could see his black boots, and his hand pointing a gun at Vivicus’s head.

  “I’m not him,” Vick called.

  Behind the buses, the soldier-dragons shot down one of the drones.

  We needed to go. The dragon soldiers would be through any second and all this would have been for nothing if we ended up rotting in dragon interrogation cells.

  “Either get on the bus or get out of the way, Vivicus,” Cordelia said.

  Something snapped in Vick’s head. Something moved his already-precarious balance from just-stable-enough-to-help-me back toward his self-serving state of assholery.

  He punched me in the face.

  This time, Stab didn’t adhere herself to my hand the way she had in the past. This time, I let go. She fell into Vivicus’s hand.

  I couldn’t see the new-space power torrents anymore. “Give me back my sword!” I was blind.

  Leif, only semi-visible, appeared directly in front of the bus’s door. He pointed at me. “Make sure she’s safe, Dad.”

  He vanished again just as dragons poured through the inner airlock.

  Why hadn’t he gotten into the SUV with Nax and the others? “Leif!” I yelled. Where did he go?

  Vivicus twirled Stab. “Guess she’s mine—”

  Leif rammed him hard enough to knock him toward the incursion. “We’ll meet you on the other side.”

  He dragged Vivicus into the bubble.

  Cordelia pushed me up the steps.

  The man named Ladon gripped the bus’s steering wheel and stared through the windshield. In the back, three dragons flashed and rolled and coiled around each other.

  Cordelia pushed me into the seat next to Orel. “Sit down,” she said. “Dmitri says they’re about to lose the last drones,” she called toward the front.

  Ladon signaled with his hand.

  Orel watched me with wide, brown eyes and a look of awe. He wore the Tsar’s ring on a chain around his neck and he looped his thumb into it as I sat down. He reached out with his other hand and squeezed my fingers tightly. “They’ll come home,” he said.

  “Hold on, everyone!” Cordelia said.

  The man who in another timeline was Leif’s father gunned the engine, and we left the dragons’ world behind.

  Chapter Thirty

  Daniel adjusted his new Praesagio Industries glasses. They were pretty standard issue sunglasses, except for the opaque black lenses, and didn’t look high-tech at all. I suspected he wanted it that way. Neither Daniel nor Addy liked standing out in a crowd.

  He picked a bit of lint off his charcoal gray jacket. “The Legion’s never had uniforms before.” Then he smoothed Addy’s long, leather-wrapped ponytail. “Armor, yes, but never a uniform beyond our insignias.”

  He touched the combo of his and Addy’s talismans around his neck. The uniforms were the same color as the suits when they cycled down, and part of me wondered if the color choice had been a nod to their lost members.

  “How’s Addy doing?” I asked.

>   He gave my arm a quick squeeze. “Do you have time to continue your lessons? It helps.”

  Adrestia had been teaching me an old obscure lacemaking technique. It helped her stay calm while sharing her body with Daniel.

  It also reminded him that he was the passenger even if he didn’t want to admit it. Figuring out how to separate them continued to be important—even if, as he’d said back in Tokyo, it was an improbable future. But we worked with what lace and Legion insignias we had.

  “Yes,” I said. Besides, Antonius was dealing with Daniel-in-Adrestia as well as he could, considering. But getting them apart was best for everyone.

  Daniel smiled. “Ready?”

  I picked lint off my own jacket. Two years since Tokyo and here I was, about to get my own, actual, real Legion insignia.

  I still didn’t feel like I’d earned it, no matter what Orel said. No matter if all the Fates said Leif and Vivicus were “out there” and that they’d find their way home.

  Then Orel would return to his linguistics studies and his work with BlueLeaf. The kid might be only fifteen, but he already understood the dragons’ language better than anyone else alive.

  We’d lost three billion to the invasion proper, and another billion to chaos and the two Northern Hemisphere fimbulwinters that followed. Thankfully, South America avoided the worst of the crop-killing cold, and Emperor Trajan had worked with the governments there to make sure food got where it needed to go. But the Fates all said that this summer would be closer to normal, and that the remaining North American farming territory would bring in the harvests we needed. As long as the front in Tennessee didn’t advance, they added, and the dragons left the people rebuilding alone.

  New Tokyo was quickly rising outside of Vancouver, and New Beijing on the eastern coast of Australia. Scandinavia, Ireland, and Russia had taken in most of Europe, and the nations of Africa most of the Middle East and what remained of India. And most of what was left of Canada and the United States fought to hold the Great Lakes, or had moved west of the Mississippi River.