Oh Christ.
“You cannot be serious with this. Lewis. Please, tell me you’re not asking me to go and deliberately get my ass killed so that it will trigger David into a homicidal rampage against your enemies?”
It would work.
Sure it would. It would leave Bad Bob and whoever was around him radioactive dust. Including, probably, the cruise ship, which would become collateral damage.
The hideous thing was that as a nuclear option, it was not bad. So long as you accepted that the pile of bodies would be unthinkable, but at the end of the day, the enemy would be gone. . . .
No. “Not happening, Lewis,” I said. “If I get killed anyway, fine, all bets are off. But I’m fighting all the way down. Get me?”
Yes. You understand that I had to ask.
Not really. But I was starting to think that in some ways David was right—I never would truly know Lewis. Not at his core.
“I’m signing off, Lewis,” I said, and spit salt water as a wave slapped me. “Hey. Thanks.”
For what?
“Letting me say no.”
I got a dry, tinny chuckle in my ear.
How could I ever stop you?
“See you on the other side, then.”
Yes.
That was it. Our big good-bye. As romantic scenes went, it lacked, but that was all right. We were past all that now.
After a good half hour of chasing down the floating island, my flailing hand finally slapped a boulder on the island’s rocky shore—whatever sand there once was had long ago been scoured away, so there was nothing left to this beast but slick, water-smoothed stone. I grabbed at the rock, but my hand slid off. I kicked, gritted my teeth, and lunged up out of the water as far as I could.
My rib cage thumped down painfully on the smooth surface, and I started to slip back, but more kicking and clawing paid off. I found a handhold, at the cost of the last memory of my French manicure, and hauled myself out of the pounding surf to lie exhausted and dripping, draped like Josue’s proverbial drowned mermaid over extremely uncomfortable terrain.
“Damn,” I whispered. “Why am I doing this again?” Oh yeah—because I was probably the only one who could, with anything like certainty.
And because sometimes I just had to face my own demons—and Demons—head-on.
I spent several moments just letting my muscles shake and cry out in relief, and then rolled up to a sitting position to take a look around. It wasn’t much of a garden spot—lots of black basalt and granite. This place wasn’t more than a few dozen millennia away from the lava flows that had built it in the first place. It still had most of its sharp edges.
That wasn’t great for me, of course. I’d worn heavy boots, but my battered shorts probably weren’t going to protect me from gathering some new and interesting scars as I scrambled across the edgy landscape.
I climbed up on the tallest boulder I could find and did a quick survey. The island was bigger than I’d expected—maybe a solid mile across—and toward the middle there was an unlikely small collection of jagged palms, all dying now. Whatever fresh water had nourished them was long gone.
This island was a rotting hulk, and I wondered uneasily how Bad Bob had kept sixty Sentinels—that I knew about—alive on such a bare span of rock. I supposed he’d laid in supplies, but he didn’t seem to be a logistical kind of guy.
Maybe they were eating each other. It wouldn’t surprise me, given the level of devotion he inspired in people.
This was not the place I’d have picked as my home away from home if I had to choose a portable island paradise, that was for damn sure. No beaches, no living trees, no water, no shade. Just razor-edged rock and the odd crab scuttling by. The surface of Mars, only at least fifty percent less hospitable.
If I hadn’t been doing such a careful survey of the island, I might have missed the first attack that came at me. There was nothing to give it away but a faint shimmer against the rocks, like a reflection of waves—but it didn’t move with the waves.
It was bending light, and it was moving fast, heading my direction.
I’d never seen one in full daylight before. That was a crystalline skeleton, barely visible without the human disguise its kind had adopted back on the
Grand Paradise
. I knew now why it had gone for the skins; the creature made a vibration on the aetheric as it moved, a kind of ringing like a finger tapping an ice-cold crystal glass.
The skins had muted the vibrations, hidden them in the natural noise of human existence.
The crystal shimmer disappeared, lost in the glare of the sun for a second, and then I saw the blur of it against the piles of rocks only about three feet away from me.
I didn’t have time for fancy moves, just dived out of the way. It was fast, but the rocks were just as hazardous to its footing as to mine, and I saw it stumble and try to catch its balance as it checked its momentum. Instead, it tumbled off into the water.
It sank below the surface in seconds, pulled down by the density of its bones.
Well, that was great news, but as I looked up, I counted three more shimmers against the rocks, heading in my direction. I calculated frequencies. I didn’t have time to try very many, but the good news was that I’d already killed one of these things on my own. Well, with help, but close enough. I knew the theory, and even without the direct access to the aetheric that I’d have had with David free, I wasn’t starved for power. I was almost shining with what had spilled into me at our wedding ceremony.
The next creature lunged for me, and I opened my mouth and picked a note. Nerves forced the amplitude of the sound too high, and the creature just kept coming. I adjusted the range of the note, holding it steady, and fine-tuned it as the beast came closer, and closer, and—
—and then it burst into a powder-fine shower of disrupted crystal. Instant sand.
Gotcha.
Two more on the way, bounding over the rocks. I dug deep into my diaphragm and half-remembered old singing lessons. I kept the note going, and amplified it a thousand times, sending it in a shock wave out across the island from end to end. The intensity of the sound swept out like a bomb blast. I was immune to it, but across the island, a dozen crystal ghosts exploded into dust and shards as the wave of sound rolled over them.
The note did more than take care of them; it also brought Bad Bob’s other allies out of hiding. Farther inland, near the stunted, mummified trees, Bad Bob’s former Wardens were coming out of camouflaged tents and starting to get organized. The shock wave rolled over them, and dozens more went down—not dead, but stunned and probably deafened. I’d caught them by surprise.
They returned the favor.
As I took a step forward, stone softened under my boot, and I sank in to my ankles. A rival Earth power was trying to harden the matrix again around my body, which would have not just trapped me but pulverized flesh and bone, if I was lucky—or amputated both feet at the ankles, if I wasn’t.
I held her off, and found some weedy grass struggling to survive between the rocks near my opponent. I added a giant shot of power to send it growing and weaving between the stones. It slithered out of a crevice and wrapped around her ankles, yanking her flat on the ground, then dragged her out into the open where I could see her.
I knew the woman. She was a thin little thing, older than many of my peers in power—a veteran, someone who’d ruled with an iron hand in the old days. A contemporary of Bad Bob’s. Her name was Deborah Kirke. She’d been wounded in the Djinn rebellion, I remembered, and she’d lost most of her family when her Djinn had destroyed her house around her. She had cause to believe Bad Bob’s anti-Djinn agenda, but that didn’t mean I could give her a pass. She’d taken up arms against me and the other Wardens.
That meant she had to be stopped.
“Deborah,” I yelled. “Just stay down, dammit. I don’t want to hurt you!”
She didn’t. I suppose, from her perspective, she really couldn’t.
I trapped her under a clump of boulders and reinforced it by melting the top layer into a concrete cage. She could breathe, and in time she’d probably dig her way out of it. I was heartsick doing this to an old lady, but I had a war to fight, and mercy wasn’t going to win me any consideration from their side in return.
Another former Warden had emerged from cover as well. I knew this one, too—Lars Petrie, a Fire Warden. He liked to form whips out of living flame, and sure enough, one hissed through the air and cut a burning path down my right arm. It wrapped around my wrist and yanked me off balance. I wasn’t prepared, and the burn bit deep, charring skin and muscle. That was bad; burns created distractions, made it harder to concentrate, channel, control the forces I needed to balance.
I grabbed water out of the sea. It rose in an arc into my hand, frozen solid, and compacted into a spear. I barely paused before sending it arrowing at Petrie’s chest.
He dodged. The spear hit the rocks behind him and shattered into snow, but it distracted him. While it did, I formed another blade of ice and slashed it through the whip. The flame fell apart on my side of the cut, leaving ugly black spirals up the skin of my arm, with red exposed muscle.
I tried not to think about how much that was going to hurt once the nerves woke up.
I started running for him, knife clutched in my uninjured hand, and while I was at it, I shook the rocks under his feet, a miniature earthquake that sent him stumbling. He wrapped his fire whip around a boulder to steady himself, but I was there when he straightened, already cutting at him with the knife.
I got it under his chin and held the cold edge there. Our eyes met, and Petrie’s widened in shock and horror.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Lars, we have no fight here. None.You can’t win, and he doesn’t expect you to.You’re nothing but compost and cannon fodder to him.”
“Yeah? And what the hell am I to you?” he demanded, and shoved me backward. “I watched four Wardens die while Djinn ripped them apart, and where were you?
Screwing
one of them. You don’t care about us, any of us. Don’t pretend we’re the same.”
The fire whip formed in his hand again, and I moved my right foot back for better stability as I tried to anticipate which way I needed to dodge. He trailed the whip on the ground, snaking it this way and that, hissing the burning edges of it over stones. A tiny alarmed crab scuttled out of a tide pool and toward the sea. A second later, the whip touched the pool and turned it into steam, baking whatever was unlucky enough still to be trapped there.
“I’m not your enemy,” I said, and held out empty hands toward him. “Come on, man. Let’s not do this.”
Petrie, like Deborah, was a post-traumatic survivor of the Djinn attacks. I didn’t know what had happened to him, but I remembered that the review team had removed him from his duties, and that Miriam, the head of the internal security team of the Wardens, had put in precautions . . .
Petrie had a fail-safe in his brain.
Dammit.
Standard Earth Warden procedure was to put a two-stage fail-safe in place. The first one stunned, and the second one killed. If I knew the stun code . . .
But I didn’t. And I had no time to find out, because even if Lars was damaged and irrational, he was one hell of a master of that whipping loop of fire. It flared at me without warning, and I dropped to a crouch. That saved my neck, most likely; he’d been aiming to decapitate me, and I felt the scorching heat as the living flame snaked over my head.
I lunged forward and pulled up seawater with both hands, forming a massive wave that shattered over the rocks and hit Lars from behind, sending him flying and dousing his fire whip in a hot blast of steam.
I threw myself on his chest as he sprawled on top of the rocks. “Stop!” I screamed at him, and banged his head against the rock. “Stop fighting me!”
I put a forearm over his chest to hold him down as he struggled. My arm was bloody and torn from the fight, dripping on his chest, and I felt savage. So much for the black torch being responsible for all my darkness; Bad Bob had been right, I’d had some of it all along.
And I always would.
He got an arm free and put it to use by landing a right hook to my jaw—but not hard enough to break free, or to break my bones.
“Just stop,” I said. “Please stop.” I didn’t know if I was talking to Lars Petrie, or to myself.
I let Petrie go, and he sat up, exultant triumph lighting up his plain, middle-aged face. I backed away.
I heard a dry, ironic sort of clapping behind me. “Impressive.” Bad Bob’s voice. “Damn if you aren’t still a do-gooder, after all this effort.”
Petrie’s face twisted in fury, and his fire whip formed in his hand, then snapped toward me.
From directly behind me, Bad Bob said, “Duck.”
I did. Well, I was going to do that anyway.
A sheet of ice the thickness of a razor slashed through the air, spinning like a saw blade. It sliced feathering hairs from the top of my head, bit into Petrie’s neck, and kept on spinning.
I gasped as Petrie’s hot blood splashed over me in a wave. That blade hadn’t been aimed at me.
It had been intended for Petrie. I whirled around while Petrie was still falling.
Bad Bob was sitting in a battered deck chair behind me, right out in the open, on top of a pile of rocks that I’d have sworn had been empty a few seconds before. He grinned and waved at me, and made a discus-throwing motion. “Hell of a shot, eh? I should turn pro.”
Petrie’s head and body hit the stones separately, spattering me with even more blood.
I couldn’t turn to look. I didn’t dare take my gaze away from Bad Bob, who was no illusion, not this time. He was
here.
Within striking distance.
Victory was at hand . . . for one of us.
“You look tired,” Bad Bob said. “Rough trip?” He sipped a beach drink. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt in vomit yellow and pinkeye pink that clashed with his skin and hair. He also was wearing old man shorts, socks, and flip-flops. If I hadn’t known who and what he was, he’d have looked like any old pensioner roaming Fort Lauderdale or asking directions at Disney.