Divided: The Alliance Series Book Four (25 page)

“Ask him.” I pointed at Jeth. He’d just have to deal with the questions.

And I had to find those Stoneskins. Once through the crowd, I took one look at the number of guards on the other side of the doorway and turned invisible.

More exclamations followed me, but I ran, unseen. I sprinted through the entry point, past crowds of guards and Enforcement officers, until I reached a road packed with hover cars, and a pile-up midway.

No time to pause. I ran for the car park, where the hover cars and bikes were parked several feet off the ground, and jumped for the nearest bike. Pulling myself up, I hit the accelerator and switched off the invisibility. Heads turned as the hover bike nearly shot out from under my feet. I dug my hands into the handlebars and slowed down enough to steer around a corner, pausing beside a pair of senior-looking guards.

“Whereabouts are they?” I asked, interrupting their questions. “I’m an Ambassador, I have permission to chase after those monsters. Where are they? Is there a girl with them?”

“You can’t have permission—who in the stars are you?”

“Kay Walker,” I said, flashing my ID, “and those Stoneskin monstrosities are carrying a source powerful enough to destroy the Multiverse. I don’t have time to explain, but there are some people in the Passages who do.”

“That way.” One of the officers stepped forward, pointing. “But they took a car, and they might be on the other side of the district by now. They’ve seriously injured twenty-five officers. Enforcement are sending every squad that way. Didn’t see a girl.”

“Hell,” I said. “Right—thanks.”

I hit the acceleration, the hum of the engine in line with the roaring in my ears.
Get to them.

Gleaming skyscrapers wheeled past as the bike gathered speed. Once I reached the main road, the trail of destruction the Stoneskins had left became evident. Hover cars were abandoned in mid-air, glass littered the pavement where windows had shattered, and the entire front of one building was smashed in. Other hover cars were upended on the high pavements, and the gleaming buildings and roads reflected the devastation back in fragments.

The wind whipped against me, cold air cutting through my jacket. I spun the bike around a corner, past another row of shattered windows. All the smashed windows told me they’d moved fast, with no clue how to control the car.
Where were they going?

I passed by a police station, where shell-suit-clad officers gathered outside. One shouted after me, but I was already wheeling around a corner, towards the sound of screaming.

“Shit.” I decelerated, just in time. I’d been about to steer right over the locomotive hover-track, except someone had already done that. The mile-long train had ground to a standstill, half off the rails, and people climbed out the open windows, running from the smoke pouring from the end. Even more ran screaming from a building on my right.

The sign outside reading “KimaroTech” had been smashed through, the foot-high letters scattered on the pavement. The metal gates were bent and twisted out of shape and half-open. Behind, the front of the building had been smashed in, too.

Two invincible monsters and a laboratory full of dangerous magic-based sources was a recipe for disaster if I ever knew one. I swore again when I spotted the limp bodies of guards outside the entrance. The bastards had killed everyone on-site.

I hit the acceleration again and steered the bike through the gap in the gate. The lab now had a car-shaped hole in the glass doors, and the car itself lay upside-down in the entrance hall in shattered fragments of glass tinted red with blood.

The Stoneskins would pay. I’d make sure of it.

The sciras didn’t make me invincible to getting cut by glass, so I stayed on the bike until I’d passed by the shattered doors. The entrance hall was eerily quiet, where it had been bustling a few hours ago. Swearing under my breath, I reached the corridor where the walls were dented like a mallet had slammed into them. I switched on the invisibility, and followed the sound of voices.

“Are you happy you let your people die?” said a voice, with an accent I couldn’t place. “You can’t stay holed up in your lab forever, humans.”

“Technically, we can,” said Mr Helm’s voice. “The doors are reinforced even against whatever in the Multiverse you people are.”

Damn.
The survivors must have barricaded themselves in. I hadn’t tested the sciras enough to be confident I could take on two of them.

Turning the corner. I stopped short. One of the creatures stood to the side, hands in his pockets in a disconcertingly human manner. His face was like the side of a cliff—literally. Grey and white marble covered his skin under the tattered remains of a shirt and trousers. The other Stoneskin, dressed similarly, leaned forward against the metal door as though trying to force it open. The metal coating had chipped, revealing black beneath—just as I suspected. The door was made of adamantine, same as these creatures.

Stop thinking of them as invincible. Think of them as human.
No weapon would kill them, true, so I couldn’t apply the same logic I did to creatures like chalder voxes—but I didn’t know for sure they were immune to other damage. I had my own two hands. That was enough.

If my plan didn’t work, I was good as dead. And there was no healing god around to save me.

You won’t kill me this time.

“If you don’t let us in,” hissed the Stoneskin, “I’ll kill every human in the city. We were made to kill, thanks to you people.”

Despite everything, I paused.

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!” said Mr Helm. “What the devil
are
you?”

“We are Stoneskin,” he said. “We were made to be shields, but instead, we shall be gods.”

“Gods?” said Mr Helm. “You’re lab experiments, aren’t you?”

The Stoneskin pounded on the door with enough force to shake the whole building. “Your people made us what we are, and we
will
have our revenge. It seems it wasn’t chance that dropped us into your world.”

“No, it was an illegal doorway,” said Mr Helm. “How did you do that, anyway?”

“Priorities!” shouted a female voice. “Don’t
talk
to it!”

“But Lynn, imagine if we trapped it? I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Thud.
The Stoneskin hammered on the door again. The floor shook.

I crept up behind his partner, and switched off the invisibility, pulling on the sciras instead. In the split-second before one of them spotted me, I got my arm around his throat.

For a heartbeat, I thought that was it—he’d grab my arm and crush it like before. But I found the pressure point, and the monster choked.

Hell. Yes.
I’d taken him by surprise, and as the other Stoneskin turned with total shock etched on its face, I kicked his legs out from underneath him and pinned him down.

“If you don’t step away from that door,” I said, “I’ll kill him.”

“What—in all the stars.” The Stoneskin took a step back, eyes wide.

Revealing another weakness.

“You’re a pair of murdering psychopaths,” I said, “and I don’t think anyone will care if there’s one fewer of you in the world.”

As the monster I held down struggled against my grip, I freed one hand and jabbed my fingers into his eyes.

The Stoneskin screamed, high-pitched and—again—almost human. Too bad I had no mercy for killers like him. I returned my hand to his throat, and pressed. The Stoneskin’s legs spasmed, kicking at me, but it hurt no more than it would if he were an ordinary person. Human.

“You’re not one of us!” snarled the second Stoneskin, advancing on me. I kicked him in the kneecap, and he yelled in pain. “We are invincible!”

“You’re deluded,” I said. The Stoneskin was starting to go limp. His bloodshot eyes closed. He’d passed out. Good timing, because the second was ready to attack. From the hesitant way he moved, he didn’t have a clue how to fight—if you could literally crush people with your bare hands, you didn’t need to have any kind of skill or training.

I tackled him, the momentum sending us both crashing into the wall. He was cowering after two blows to the jaw. I grinned at him. “How does it feel to be outclassed?”

“Bastard,” snarled the Stoneskin. “Human scum.”

“You were human once, weren’t you?” I goaded him. “Lab experiments, right? On a little revenge plan? Which world?”

“That is
none
of your—argh!” He cowered away, but I had him pinned against the wall.

“I’d say it is, seeing as you broke a hundred laws and murdered a bunch of people,” I said quietly. “If you tell me what you’re doing here, I
might
kill you fast.”

The Stoneskin cried, real terror breaking through, “We were following our leader, but that girl pushed us through a doorway!”

My heart missed a beat, my hand clenching.
Ada.
“Who?” I demanded.

“This redheaded girl the StoneKing thought was so important.”

“Ada,” I said.
She’s alive.
Relief momentarily stunned me, and the Stoneskin shoved his way free and ran.

Too bad he was slow. I tackled him again, sending both of us crashing to the floor—and the door to the labs burst open. Mr Helm ran out, accompanied by three other scientists, and stared at the limp Stoneskin.

“He’s not dead?”

“I wouldn’t touch him,” I warned. “He’ll wake up soon.”

“Good job we have a cage just perfect for him.”

As the Stoneskin struggled again, I knocked him out. Standing, I watched as three scientists dragged the other Stoneskin into the lab. I grabbed the second by the scruff of his neck and pulled him after me.

The lab looked no different to last time, aside from the metal cabinets lying where they’d clearly been pushed against the door. A dark-haired girl held a remote and when she hit a button, the doors to the cage in the room’s corner opened.

As one of the other assistants closed the door on the second Stoneskin, Mr Helm turned to his assistant, Lynn, who looked more put-upon by the minute.

“Good job,” he said. “I’ll be interested to question these two later.”

“And report it to the Alliance,” said Lynn. “That should be our first priority.”

“Well, yes,” said Mr Helm, “but think what this will do for our research?”

“They
killed
people,” Lynn said.

“And there are more of them out there,” I added, with a glance at the sealed cage.

“How in the stars did you fight them?” asked Mr Helm, looking at me as if seeing me for the first time.

“You’re Alliance, aren’t you?” asked Lynn, eyes wide.

Unsurprisingly, everyone else stared, too.

“Yeah the Alliance sent me,” I said, figuring it’d save time just to go with it. “From Earth. I followed the trail here. I fought it with this.” I unclipped the Chameleon and showed him. “It’s enhanced with sciras.”

Five stupefied faces stared at it. Mr Helm’s hand reached out, but I shifted the Chameleon out of reach. “I need it,” I said. “Ask the tech team at Central—someone called Jethro Fletcher. I reckon the Alliance can make good use of these.”

“I will,” said Mr Helm, shaking his head in wonderment. “Sciras—shield-enhancement on a
person?
How in the stars…” His gaze drifted over to the half-visible car floating in the opposite corner. “Not bloodrock?”

I nodded. “It has a camouflage switch, too.”

“And a good job, if there are more of those things out there,” he said darkly. “I didn’t understand a word. Why did they attack us? Where did they come from?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said. “I can’t use a tracker on them—they don’t have magic, they repel it. But they said they were created… by KimaroTech?”

Mr Helm blanched. “We would never have done such a thing. But there are others who have used the same name—our sister lab on Klathica, which has since moved into researching magic-based enhancements…”

“That sounds familiar,” I said. Klathica. Maybe that was why I couldn’t place the Stoneskins’ accents. Klathica, like Valeria, had had offworld links for long enough that its native language and culture, whatever it was, had been superseded by a mishmash of offworld traditions and mannerisms. What set their world apart was their fixation on human enhancement via magic…

“You don’t think they might have been involved? Those Stoneskins—he said something about being made as a shield.”

And that meant—no. I wouldn’t go there. Not now, not here.

“I have no idea,” said Mr Helm, shaking his head. “Stars… you’re right, Lynn, we must inform the Alliance. I would contact the Klathican branch, but the Alliance wouldn’t want word spreading…”

“I reckon it has already,” I said, moving in the direction of the door. “There were guards from a dozen worlds out in the Passages. I’ll tell them we caught the Stoneskins.”

I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with a questioning from half the offworld Alliance—the other Stoneskins were still somewhere out there.