“Go, Karl,” White-Haired Maggie said. Karl didn’t move and frustration rushed across her features. “Go now! They’ll kill me if you don’t. I’m dying as we speak!”
Karl hesitated a moment longer, then with a growl Marcus completely sympathized with, he whipped around, dragging Marcus with him. The pain had already turned Marcus’s muscles to jelly. He couldn’t have fought Karl’s grip if he’d wanted to. Twisting his head around, he caught one more glimpse of White-Haired Maggie. She scaled the slope, using hands and feet to push her way up the mountain. Her back was to him, white-streaked hair swaying and bouncing as she moved.
Marcus watched until the trees swallowed her. Then he turned forward to where his Maggie lay screaming and encircled by enemies.
Chapter 27: The Center Point of a Gyre
THE BLACKNESS RECEDED. Two voices argued close by, too muffled for Maggie to make out. Light made its way back to her eyes and the world took form around her. Her body twitched with aftershocks of the pain and she saw only indistinct blurs of movement and color.
As her senses returned to normal, things became more clear. Hundreds of hard-eyed, tattoo-faced Trepids glared down at her. It was Justine and Colin arguing, but Maggie still couldn’t make out their shouts. Jonah stood a few feet away, in front of Lila and next to Kristee, who still lay motionless on the ground. Jonah fended off attempts by the Trepids to grab Lila. Lila threw electrostatic energy at them, resulting in tiny shocks when one of them thrust a hand out toward her. It wouldn’t hold them off for long.
Maggie raised her head, breath rasping through a raw throat. It took her several minutes to locate David. He lay crumpled at the base of a thick tree. Though Maggie hadn’t been conscious of anything except the pain, her senses still gathered information. Now she tried to recall it. She thought David had lunged at Justine. She’d flicked him away like a fly. He must have hit the tree trunk. Maggie prayed he wasn’t dead.
The voices became clearer, so Maggie focused on them.
“—not careful you’re going to kill her,” Colin was saying.
“A little torture never hurt anyone,” Justine replied.
“What will you tell him if she dies?” Colin shouted. “She’s promised to me!”
“Do you think he cares?” Justine gave a throaty laugh. “Do you think he’s deeply dedicated to making sure you get to play out your sadistic fantasies on her? If she dies before he sees her, I’ll get a slap on the wrist. Then he’ll make me his second in command for single-handedly saving the Union.”
Jonah cried out. One of the Trepids had swiped at him with a curved blade. He’d jumped back, but not quickly enough. A red stain bloomed on the outside of his upper arm.
“Hey!” Justine yelled, looking at them. Neither Jonah nor the Trepid acknowledged her, so she turned her fury once again on Colin.
“Keep your men in line! You know he’s not to be touched!”
Colin glared at Justine. Seconds later the Trepid stepped back from Jonah and sheathed his blade.
With an effort so big her muscles shook as though trying to bench press a house, Maggie pushed herself up onto her knees. Colin and Justine leered down at her.
“Maggie?” Jonah called from six feet away. “You all right?”
She wanted to tell them she felt fine. It would be a lie, but she would have told it anyway if she could have forced her voice to work. Instead, she threw one knee up high enough to plant her foot on the ground, then lunged to her feet, shrugging her shoulders back and raising her chin. The world swam in front of her and she swayed, barely staying on her feet.
“What say you?” Justine asked haughtily. “Ready to join us, Executioner?”
Maggie didn’t answer, but glared defiance at Justine.
“As you please,” Justine said and the red energy appeared around her hands again. Colin was right about one thing. If Justine kept this up, she’d kill Maggie eventually. Maggie prayed silently for help, for an idea, for anything that might give her an advantage.
As red energy swirled and thickened around Justine’s fingers, Maggie felt him. Marcus was coming up behind her. His presence growing closer felt as certain in her mind as the pain had been only moments before. She spun on her toe and searched over the heads of the Trepids.
Marcus and Karl lumbered down the slope toward her. Tears of relief came, unbidden, to Maggie’s eyes. Marcus looked unsteady on his feet, and Karl stayed behind him, hands outstretched as though to steady Marcus.
A small outcropping, perhaps eight feet in height, overlooked the flat ground where Colin’s army stood. As Marcus reached it, he slid onto his knees, skidding to a stop exactly at the precipice. He raised his staff over his head and slammed it into the rock beneath him.
Maggie felt the shockwave that radiated out from the staff long before it reached her. She closed her eyes and filled her mind with the most tranquil memory she had—the one of her and Marcus visiting the diamond caves below Interchron. She let the memory and the pleasant emotions attached to it fill her.
The wave of Offensive energy passed right through her. Each collective goon it hit was mowed over, dead before they hit the ground. Maggie jumped back to keep the Trepids between her and Marcus from falling on top of her as they went down. She only had a few feet of space, though, before she tripped over those behind her who’d also fallen. She didn’t want to crawl over the corpses of collective henchmen, their dead eyes staring out from the centers of spider’s web tattoos.
Neither Colin nor Justine fell to the wave of energy. They probably had ways of defending against such weapons. If nothing else, they’d probably heard of Marcus and his abilities, and cleared their minds of all malevolent thought when they felt the energy coming.
Marcus’s wave passed through Kristee, Lila and David without incident. Jonah wasn’t so lucky. It all happened so fast, and Maggie’s voice still hadn’t recovered, so she had no way to warn him.
When the wave of energy hit him, it picked him up and threw him twenty feet. He hit the ground hard and rolled, not stopping until he slammed into the face of a small boulder. Falling onto his stomach, his shoulders hunched as he attempted to rise. He collapsed onto his face the next moment and lay still.
“How did they get here?” Colin whined as soon as Marcus obliterated his army.
Maggie gazed at Marcus and their eyes locked across the field.
Justine stalked forward and grabbed Maggie by the hair, yanking her head back. The next moment cold steel sliced stealthily into Maggie’s throat, sending tiny rivers of red sliding down her neck. “Do you think killing our army will be the end of us?” Justine screamed. “Do you think all of you together can defeat me?”
Karl stood beside Marcus on the outcropping. He shifted his eyes from Marcus, who still knelt, chest heaving, to Maggie, who didn’t dare swallow. Karl shrugged and started down the rise. “I’m willing to try.”
Amidst her desperation, Maggie felt a stab of affection for Karl, but Justine would flay him alive in a matter of seconds. Maggie summoned her neurological energy. Nothing happened. Even if it came, Maggie was too worn out to direct it. The pain, the fatigue, the emotions of the past few days welled up and she couldn’t think in a concrete direction. Despite the memories which had begun to come back to her, she was still ridiculously unprepared to battle things like Justine.
Justine gathered her red energy once more, though this time black swirls laced it as well. Maggie had a feeling the black ones were lethal, and Justine was going to hurl them at Karl, who couldn’t defend against them neurologically.
Maggie reached over to claw at Justine’s face, hoping to distract her. Justine yanked harder on Maggie’s hair, sending stabbing pains through Maggie’s scalp and making cat-fight tactics impossible.
Something rumbled softly. Justine let go of Maggie’s hair and took several steps backward. The red and black energy around her hands evaporated. Confused, Maggie turned to look at her.
Justine cast her eyes around to all corners o
f the landscape like a trapped animal. She sensed something that clearly spooked her.
Maggie focused on the rumbling sensation. It was like thunder rolling in the distance, though she felt it, rather than heard. The clouds covering the sky had become black while Justine’s torture still cocooned Maggie, and thunder did actually rumble in the distance from time to time. This sensation was different. Silent thunder, reverberating up from the ground, but also coming from the air itself; from the trees and the rocks and the fabric of the sky.
What was that? Maggie followed her senses to the source of the sound. They eventually led her to look up.
On an outcropping one hundred feet up the mountain, Maggie detected the movements of a person. If she had to guess, she’d have said it was a woman. She couldn’t tell anything else about the person except they held some kind of orb in their hand. It glowed with white, fluorescent light, contrasting sharply with the dark clouds overhead.
“No,” Justine whispered from a few feet behind Maggie. “It’s not possible.”
“Who is that?” Colin asked, eyes on the figure high atop the mountain.
Everyone else followed Maggie and Justine’s gazes. Marcus and Lila both stared up at the figure. Even Karl halted to gaze upward.
Maggie still felt the rumbling, but more, too. She felt the earth’s rotation. Things spun, swirled. The entire universe rotated around one central point. That point was the woman on the mountain.
Everything happened at once. A group of Trepids burst out of some nearby foliage. They hadn’t been with the main force and therefore hadn’t been in the path of Marcus’s wave. They were either a backup force or, more likely, a group of scouts who’d been sent out to patrol the surrounding forest.
With bone-chilling war cries they headed straight for Lila and Kristee. Lila stood, planted her feet, and waited for them to reach her, though Maggie didn’t know how she expected to defend herself. Karl lunged into action, putting himself between the Trepids and the two women.
Meanwhile Justine staggered backward, still looking shell-shocked and terrified, while Colin simply looked annoyed.
A movement in the corner of her eye brought Maggie’s head around as David staggered to his feet and moved toward her. He moved jerkily, as if in pain, but at least he was alive.
Even Jonah stirred at the base of the boulder.
And the woman on the mountain with the glowing orb jumped.
Chapter 28: Forbidden Things
DOC SKIDDED DOWN THE mountainside as best he could, keeping his weight in his backside so he didn’t pitch forward, and trying not to dislodge too much gravel as he went. Joan skidded right beside him. Frustration rolled off her, probably because they couldn’t go any faster and survive the descent.
Doc identified new thermal signatures on the mountain below the instant Karl and Marcus arrived. From this distance, he couldn’t identify them by their body heat alone, but peering over the side of the mountain, there was no mistaking them. They had two women with them, neither of which Doc could make out from his vantage point, and they ran into four more thermal signatures. Doc thought these four were strangers, not connected with Interchron. He wanted to be beside his team, but didn’t dare ask Salla to get them any closer using her Traveling gifts. She didn’t have the experience, and Traveling was an inexact science at best.
When an army of Trepids made their way into the valley below, encircling something he couldn’t make out, Doc didn’t understand what was happening. Nor would he. Not until after. He had to help his team. Before he and Joan could decide what to do, both sides began lobbing Offensive Energy back and forth. The battle had begun.
He told Salla to come slowly down the slope while he, Joan, and Nat raced down. He also told her to stay hidden until the battle ended. The last thing they needed was for her to become a liability.
Nat, of all people, had begged off, saying he sensed something strange up higher on the mountain. He wanted to investigate. Doc couldn’t imagine what would be more important than the battle below, but Nat wasn’t exactly an un-trained apprentice, so Doc let it go, too eager to get down the mountain to waste time arguing with his brother.
As he and Joan skidded their way down the sheer face of the range, Doc kept an eye on the scene below. Marcus and Karl rushed forward, running almost on top of one another for some reason. Marcus carried his staff. Doc knew what was coming before it happened. Marcus fell to his knees and the wave of energy that radiated from him took out the entire Trepid army.
Marcus didn’t get back up. Doing that always sapped his strength. Doc ran faster. If Marcus was hurt, and used his staff on top of injury, he’d be out-of-commission now.
Dark clouds rolled across the sky, bringing a cold wind and the scent of rain with them. As Doc descended, he became aware of a white, other-worldly light. The source would have to be behind him, somewhere up on the mountain. Below, everyone still standing turned their heads to look up at it. Nat had gone up. Could it be him?
“Doc, what is that?” Joan called over the wind as they slid down an expanse of loose gravel on their backsides. At the bottom they reached a ridge they’d have to climb over to continue down the slope. When Doc reached it, he wrapped his hand around the trunk of a thin tree, planted his foot against its base and swung outward, over the face of the mountain, gazing upward.
Far above, a woman held a glowing white orb between her hands. Doc had never felt anything like the energy coming from the orb. He couldn’t identify it. Streaks of white ran through the woman’s hair. Despite the distance, Doc could swear she looked just like...His eyes widened as implications bulled their way through his head.
And the orb...that energy. Doc had only seen energy of that nature once in his life, and it was not something he would ever forget. No Maggie, he thought. Anything but that. You’ll kill yourself.
“What is it? Do you see it?” Joan breathed heavily in his ear. She’d stopped beside him, catching her breath. Now she peered over his shoulder toward the Other Maggie high up on the mountain. “Doc, is that...?”
Countless energies swirled around the Other Maggie. Doc couldn’t identify or even see most of them, but the energy was there, gyrating around her, as though she was the center of gravity, pulling all things to her.
Then she did the last thing he expected: she put her foot out over the side of the mountain, and jumped.
Joan gasped, hand flying to her mouth, and together they watched Other Maggie and the white orb fall, down, down, down in a straight line. Doc stood, mouth open and paralyzed with shock.
“Doc,” Joan said after a moment. “We have to get down there.”
“Yes,” Doc swallowed, blinking and forcing himself to act. “Yes. Go!”
AS MAGGIE WATCHED, Karl and the Trepids met, clashing hard. Lila remained defensive a few feet back, looking ready to jump in and help if necessary, and casting worried glances at Kristee, who was sleeping through the entire thing.
Marcus stayed on his knees, looking like he wanted to help. Maggie knew every time he used a wave of energy to consume malevolence, it exhausted him, sometimes for days at a time. There was no way he’d be able to summon it again so soon. He’d have difficulty even standing until he got some rest.
David made his way toward her while Jonah attempted to rise. Maggie only observed all them on her periphery. Her eyes stayed on the woman with the glowing orb. The woman leapt out over the side of the precipice and fell in an immaculately vertical line down toward the earth. She landed on both feet and bent her knees deeply enough that her butt brushed the ground behind her, though her feet stayed flat.
Maggie got her first clear look at the woman, and her mouth fell open. She looked like...like...
The woman with white streaks in her hair separated her feet, planting them wide, and drew the orb back behind her head with both hands.
“Nooooo!” Justine yelled behind Maggie.
“What on earth—” Colin sounded utterly bewildered, which might have been quite sati
sfying if Maggie hadn’t been so preoccupied.
In one smooth motion, the white-haired woman, whose identity Maggie simply couldn’t accept, brought the orb over her head and slammed it into the ground.
The reverberation knocked everyone who wasn’t already on the ground to their knees. Even Karl and the Trepids fell apart from one another.
Maggie couldn’t process everything. It was too much all at once. She couldn’t make sense of the chaos swirling around her. The weight of the last few days’ events suffocated her. Her physical pain made it hard to think in a straight line, like bits of broken glass had been embedded under every inch of her skin.
She set her sights on Marcus and moved toward him. When his eyes fell on her, he stumbled to his feet and moved toward her as well. The drunkenness of his movements confirmed her suspicions about his exhaustion.
The earth began to shake. Maggie’s movements matched Marcus’s stumbling ones as the earth rolled and slithered beneath her. Maggie had never experienced an earthquake before. She imagined it felt a lot like this.
She kept falling onto her hands and knees. Each time she lurched to her feet again. Marcus fell too but didn’t bother to get back up. Instead he crawled toward her across the moving landscape. The shaking intensified. Maggie felt like a vibrating rag doll, her limbs being kicked in every direction at once.
She stood only feet from Marcus, now. She wanted to touch his face. To feel his breath on her shoulder. The last time she’d seen him, she hadn’t remembered him. When the memories came back, crushing guilt and sorrow crashed in. She’d wanted nothing more than to see him again for months. The entire universe seemed to heave around them, and Maggie only wanted to hold Marcus’s hand.
“Maggie! Maggie!” David called her name from somewhere behind. She tuned him out.
When Marcus was three feet away, the land lunged violently and Maggie fell to her hands and knees again. A thick crack appeared in the earth six inches in front of her palms. She lunged forward, arm outstretched. Marcus did the same, but the crack turned into a fissure, and the two sides of the fissure pushed away from one another. The ground caved in between them, collapsing in on itself.
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