Gunfire roared all around her now, far too many bullets for Glenn to stop, so she bounded into the air, blazing with a halo of yellow light.
She landed in the center of one of the other skiffs, surrounded by a mob of agents. They scrambled for her, but there were too many of them and their numbers made them an awkward scrum of arms and bodies. In the confusion, Glenn focused the air into a spike of force and shot it down at her feet, ripping straight through the skiff’s metal skin. The technology inside sparked and flared and the skiff began to plummet, moaning like a dying beast. Glenn jumped into the sky as the agents dove off, trying to save themselves. Glenn took the dying skiff in hand and hurled it toward the other one, knocking it out of the sky.
Glenn flitted toward the forest quick as a firefly as the agents fruitlessly tried to track her movements. Her power was enormous and thrumming, but it felt different now — as much a part of her as her arms and legs. As the agents fired, she dropped whole trees in their path and tore at the earth beneath their feet, sending them into confused piles.
A flight of drones shot soundlessly toward Glenn in a fan. Glenn flew higher and released a torrent of lightning from her fingertips, expecting to fry the circuits inside them, but the drones were too well insulated. The blue energy crackled and dissipated against their gray hides. They moved fast, surrounding her, firing wave after wave of their poisoned darts. Glenn pushed them away, but they came too fast, one after the other. Glenn managed to bring five of them down with a blast of fire, yet more rose up to take their place. They were everywhere. A swarm of hornets.
Glenn tried to keep them all in front of her, but one of the drones shifted to her left and there was a sharp sting at the base of her neck.
The poison did its work fast, tearing through her blood. They were smart — there was nothing high-tech about the poison. It would work even within her cocoon of Affinity. Glenn’s arms went numb and then her legs. She tried to summon a final blast that would destroy them all, but her head was swimming; she couldn’t concentrate. She tumbled in the sky, about to fall.
Three more darts struck her, two from behind, one from in front.
These weren’t poisoned, but each one was attached to one of their long lines of cable. The drones leapt forward and began to encircle her. The thread, strong as steel, pinned her arms to her body. Her ankles snapped together and were bound tight.
Glenn tried to focus, but she was slipping away, the poison soaking deeper and deeper into her. As the drones wound her in their spider’s silk, Glenn focused on the poison. It was a nettled thing tumbling through her blood, biting at her muscles, clouding her thoughts. Glenn took hold of it, shattering the cells that made up the poison, destroying it, but it was too late. By the time she had expelled it from her system the drones had her bound tight. It was a struggle to even draw a breath.
A shock exploded through her, and Glenn realized she had hit the ground.
She opened her eyes and saw one of the paving stones beneath her shoulder. It was splashed with her own blood. Her ribs screamed with fresh pain. The drones had completely covered her and were now retreating with the barest wisp of sound. A heavy tread crunched through the hard-frosted ground. Glenn managed to scoot away and fell onto her back, gasping.
The drones moved away as Sturges lowered himself down beside her, his gun perfectly balanced toward her temple. Glenn imagined the feel of the bullet, a white-hot foreign thing tearing through her body followed by a blast of darkness.
“Shh,” Sturges whispered. “It’s going to be okay.”
Glenn pushed herself away from Sturges, trying to buy time.
Now that the poison was out of her system she expected her Affinity would flood back into her. But before it could, Sturges simply reached down with his one free hand and snatched the bracelet off her wrist.
He tossed it to an agent standing behind him. “Go,” he
commanded. “Now!”
Already the world was going flat at the edge of her vision as her Affinity vanished. Sturges turned back to Glenn, the barrel of his gun a hard O on her skin.
“I’m honestly sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want it to end like this.”
His finger tensed on the trigger, but before he could fire, there was a screech as Hopkins launched himself over Glenn’s body and sank his claws into Sturges’s throat.
Sturges fell back and Hopkins pressed his advantage, slashing at him again and again and howling. Sturges managed to swipe him onto the ground, but Hopkins quickly righted himself for another go. Sturges, face cut into bloody stripes, aimed his gun at the center of the cat’s chest.
Through her rapidly fading Affinity, Glenn felt the brightest spot within Sturges, his quickly beating heart. As he was about to pull the trigger, Glenn reached out and crushed it like a scrap of paper.
Sturges’s body jerked, sending his shot off into the trees. He dropped the gun and clutched at his chest, his face pale and wrenched.
His terror washed over Glenn as he hit the ground, eyes wide. He grasped at the last strands of his life as they slipped away. With the final wisp of her Affinity, Glenn tried to reach out to him, tried to pull him back, but it was too late. It was as if a massive door fell closed and Michael Sturges was gone.
Glenn stared at the cold emptiness on the ground in front of her.
“Glenn, we have to go. Now!”
Her father had appeared and was kneeling beside her, tearing at her bonds.
“The agent took the bracelet,” Glenn said, staring at Sturges’s body. She felt hazy and disconnected. “We have to get it. We have to
—”
“It’s gone,” her father said. “We have to run. They’re already regrouping.”
As he pulled her up, the Colloquium crashed into her, dull and flat. The trees were just trees, the wind was just the wind. He pushed Glenn up onto her feet, and the three of them ran, followed close behind by Hopkins. Glenn stumbled and faltered, still weak from the poison and sick from the image of Sturges’s abandoned wife and their little girl.
“Faster, Glenny,” her father urged. “It’s not much farther. We have to go faster.”
She could hear the agents pursuing. Soon the drones would come too. They ran as hard as they could until they finally crossed under the red lights and made it through the border, running another twenty feet before Dad told them all to get down and they collapsed in a deep thicket. There were more gunshots, a flurry of them, and then they went silent. The agents had stopped at the border. Glenn struggled to catch her breath, but her Affinities were already reaching out and painfully drawing the world into her. She needed to get to Opal and her nightshade. She turned to her side.
“Mom, we —”
Her mother was on her knees, bent over, her arms around her middle, gasping.
“Mom?”
Her father reached for her mother and she fell sideways into his lap. Her eyes were already clouding over, slowly turning black.
“What do we do?” her father asked. “Glenn?”
There was a crash out in the woods. A pack of agents. Now that they had crossed the border, she could feel them too. They were an ice storm, anonymous and deadly.
Glenn’s thoughts raced. Opal had said her mother was too strong for the nightshade to have any effect, and so without the bracelet, going deeper into the Magisterium meant losing her mother to the Magistra forever. And it was clear that with or without Sturges, none of them could ever return to the Colloquium.
Glenn searched for an answer, looking up at the stars. The sky was clearer on this side of the border, making it easy to pick out the line of three blue-white stars, a gleaming arrow pointing far out toward 813, millions of miles away.
Glenn’s pounding heart slowly went still. Agents were still moving out in the woods, but Glenn barely heard them anymore. What had Opal said?
People walked from world to world….
Glenn could feel her mother’s Affinities crashing into her own. It was like being next to a nuclear reactor. Something clicked and Glenn seized her mother’s wrist and pulled her into an embrace. The power of her Affinities was overwhelming, terrifying.
“I need your help,” Glenn said into her mother’s ear, as she struggled to control the torrent that was battering at her. “I need you to concentrate.”
“What are you doing?”
Glenn could feel the agents’ wolflike prowl and hear their voices just feet away from their hiding place.
“Opening a door,” she said.
Every voice around them screamed. Glenn desperately wanted to push them away but she forced herself to drop her resistance. The universe poured into them until there was no distinction between her and her mother or between them and blades of grass or fields of stars burning light-years away. It was as if their bodies were melting away.
Disappearing. And for the first time Glenn wasn’t frightened. She could feel every life in the world as if it was her own, all their hearts pounding together. It was glorious. Her mother clasped her hand, holding her steady, keeping her grounded.
“Alnitak. Alnilam. Mintaka,” Glenn whispered as more power
than she ever imagined coursed through her.
Glenn saw the three bright points strung together, could feel their raging fusion drive. She moved from one to another and then off to the bright green eye that was 813. Glenn repeated her prayer under her breath, holding on to her mother and father and her one single intention as if it was an anchor. She gave a single push and suddenly there was an immense flare of light and the three of them were surrounded by a brilliance that grew until it seemed to cut through everything around them — the woods, the earth, the air. They sat suspended in that blinding void, the forest around them wiped away.
Nothing is separate
, Glenn thought.
Everything is one thing.
She stood and raised her hand in front of her and then, just as she had once pushed at the face of Opal’s wall, she set her palm against the surface tension of the universe until, with a tremble, it parted.
The light swirled and a smudge of green grew and took shape. It slowly came into focus until Glenn saw swooping curves of rain forest trees festooned with vines. A flight of birds, pink and yellow, soared through the lush emerald jungle of 813. Glenn could feel the planet’s warmth and the clean moist air. It was impossible and yet there it was.
Another world. Not Magisterium or Colloquium. A place they could all be safe. Glenn looked to her father, who was staring wide-eyed into the portal.
“Take her,” Glenn said. Already the portal was trying to collapse, like a slow-healing wound. Keeping it open was a massive weight bearing down on her. “We’ll be safe there. Straight ahead through the forest you’ll find the base. I’ll be right behind you.”
Dad staggered to his feet and lifted Mom into his arms just as a man, a scientist in his whites, appeared in the foliage and stared, dumbfounded. He called back to someone behind him.
“Go!” Glenn called. Her father looked back at her and then he took a single step through the opening. The fabric of the air rippled and he dropped to his knees in the midst of lush green grass, breathing alien air for the first time. Mom slipped out of his arms and then slowly stood up beside him. When she turned, her eyes were clear and blue.
She tried to call to Glenn, but her voice couldn’t make the journey. She waved Glenn forward instead.
Glenn felt a surge of joy as she took a step toward the portal. But before she went through she turned and saw Aamon and Kevin standing, partially shrouded in the dark woods.
Kevin walked forward and was washed in the light of the portal.
He raised one hand to her, saying good-bye, brown eyes glimmering in the otherworldly light.
Glenn paused, inches from the portal and freedom. Beyond Kevin and Aamon she felt all the millions living in the Magisterium. The Colloquium agents had fled, but they’d be back. With the whole of Authority behind them, it wouldn’t be long before they cracked the secret of the bracelet’s technology. Once they did, they would send fleets of armed skiffs, drones and agents, and not even the Miel Pan could stand against them. They would tear the Magisterium down brick by brick.
Opal and Aamon and Kevin were all willing to give their lives to stop them. Glenn knew that without her and her Affinity, that’s exactly what they would do.
Inside the portal, her mother and father were framed in the green of the other world, lit in slowly falling amber light. Glenn saw herself standing beside them, but it was as a little girl, her hand in theirs, face upturned in awe. She wasn’t that person anymore. She never would be again.
“There is no road home.”
Glenn raised her hand to them.
“Meera doe branagh,”
she said.
Her father cried out and charged the portal, but before he could reach it, Glenn let it fall. There was a brilliant flash and the great light was gone. The portal was closed.
Glenn collapsed into the snowy leaves at her feet. Her head was swimming and her eyes ached from the glare of the doorway. The forest was quiet. She felt no trace of the agents. Glenn looked up at the stars, wishing her Affinities could reach her parents way out there, wishing she could feel some trace of them, knowing she never could.
“Glenn,” a voice said. “We should go.”
Kevin’s hand fell on her shoulder, and there was a snap as they reconnected and he flowed into her. Glenn raised one hand to his cheek and guided him down to her lips. She closed her eyes and for a moment the rest of the world fell away and there was just him and the memory of a swirling band of snow that locked them together. The borders between them dissipated until it seemed that together they made a world all their own. Glenn knew then that he was never more himself, and she was never more herself, than when they were together.
They parted slowly and Kevin smiled — how long had it been
since she had seen him do that?
“Come on, Morgan,” he said, offering his hand. “No time for naps. Things to do.”
Glenn’s knees wobbled as she stood, but Kevin’s hand was there, pressed into the small of her back. Once she was steady, they walked, hand in hand, through the woods. Aamon fell into place beside her, his thick fur soft at her side. The forest slipped by, a flickering show of black and gray.