Standing before the movie screen, the Shield continued to work the crowd. “Why do you think Queen Carmen refuses to help us?”
Shouts; inarticulate rage.
“Why does she sit back and hide, while othersiders abuse and exploit us? While they destroy our society, and harm our loved ones? Why does she refuse to stop them?”
People shouted back answers. Most of them were ugly.
“That is the truth I have come to reveal,” he said.
Cheers. Pleas.
“I know you’re here, Ash,” the Shield said.
Ash and I exchanged glances, mask to mask. Frightened eye to frightened eye.
“You can’t,” I told her.
“I have to,” she said.
I turned back to the stage. Watched the crowd. They were so worked up, so angry—they’d have torn us to shreds at the slightest word from the Shield.
“Come out, Princess. For too long, you have hidden your face from your people.”
At a wave from the Shield, his people brought out two figures in chains.
“Niv,” I whispered, recognizing him first, and then, “Connor.”
He was so little. And so scared. His clothes were filthy.
“Come out, Ash, or I will break these two in front of everyone.”
“You’ll come with me,” Ash said, grabbing my hand again. “Okay? We’ll try your idea—I’ll trigger something in you, something that will incapacitate them, and we’ll get Niv and Connor and get the hell out of here.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling extremely not okay. There would be no getting the hell out of there. Not alive. Not with so many angry people all around us.
I felt her hands grow sweaty. So did mine. We started walking toward the front of the big hall.
The crowd slowed us down, and by the time we got halfway there it had become impenetrable.
Ash took off her mask, carried it under her arm.
Someone gasped. No one else seemed to notice.
“Make way for your princess,” I said loudly.
The gasps spread. People turned, stared, cried out. Some shook fists. Some dropped to their knees.
I heard the rumor ripple through the crowd, watched a path open up for us. I heard the click of camera shutters, and wondered where mine was. When had I lost it, in the whole wild ride of the past couple of days?
A big guy stepped into our path. Tears in his eyes.
“No. I can’t let you do it, Princess,” he said.
“Step aside, brother,” she said, and touched his arm. And then she winked, and smiled. And he nodded. Stepped aside.
I watched it happen, how effortlessly she won over the crowd. Her fearlessness impressed even these people who a moment before had been perfectly okay with tearing down her mother’s government.
Courage does that. It transforms people. With a shiver, I realized: It takes a very special kind of crazy to change the world.
The Shield saw the change happen too. I could see him growing more furious, the closer we got to the front of the park.
“Seize her,” he said.
Connor saw me. He called out my name. Niv looked barely conscious.
A pair of Destroyers took hold of Ash, and I tried to fight, but three of them were on me and they wrestled me to the ground. My face was pressed into the filthy scuffed carpet, and I could barely see the scene as it unfolded. As they forced Ash to her knees. Turned her around so her back was to the Shield, her face out to the crowd.
“No!” I cried.
She was going to be broken. Maybe murdered. They all were.
I had to do something. I shut my eyes, reached out for the Shield. Took hold of my anger, my fear. Tried to magnify it. I fumbled with the rush of my emotions, sprayed hatred in his general direction, felt a few drops of it land, a stream, a trickle, strengthening, connecting . . . I saw his twisted smile widen—
But no. Hate was what had gotten us into this problem. Hate had only made him stronger, meaner, more dangerous.
“Now I will reveal the truth,” the Shield said, and took a gun from his nearest soldier’s hand. I looked around the inside of my mind for a weapon, and found it.
Of course.
I had to dig deep. Burrow down into myself, as far as I could.
Fear was obvious.
Rage was easy.
But love . . . love was hard.
What did I love? I loved Ash. I loved Radha, and Connor. I loved Maraud. I loved Cass, and the Clarion. I loved my city, and the way the sunset lit the riversea up, and the taste of roasted chestnuts from the street vendors in Raptor Heights. I loved Niv, in a very weird and conflicted kind of way.
Fear and anger felt so strong, I’d come to rely on them. So I’d never noticed before how full of love I was. How it filled up my spine with a shivering so strong it made my whole body shake.
It was him, I knew it. The Solomon on the other side. The one who had been hurt so badly but was still so full of love. I felt it leaking into me. I let it fill me up.
“The Refugee Princess is a monster,” the Shield shouted, and took the safety off his gun. Pressed it to the back of her head. Screams resounded through the crowd. So did cheers. Ash’s face was fearless, defiant.
Love. I focused on that, and not the horror before me. Love filled me up, and overflowed. My spine was electric, alive, a conduit for lightning. It had always been there; I’d just been too blind to see it. Too focused on my anger, and my fear. My teeth chattered with the surging energy in my backbone. It poured through my bones, down my arms, out my fingertips. I felt the feeling leak into the soldiers who held me; felt their grips weaken. And I saw it reach the Shield. Saw his smile tighten, vanish. His mouth opened in a silent cry. Tears began to flow down his face. He shut his eyes, and accepted it. Embraced it. For just a split second.
He smiled. Had he felt love at all, in the years since the Night of Red Diamonds took his mother away from him? But he felt it now. And he let himself feel it.
Time slowed down, for me and him. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Because I watched everything unfold with crystal, perfect clarity, even though so many things were happening at once that there’s no way a normal human mind could have observed them all.
Beyond the reach of my aura of projected love, the Shield’s soldiers had raised their guns. They saw how he and I were locked in a trance together; they thought—correctly—that I was enchanting him; they were ready to kill me to save their leader. Ash’s eyes were on me, wide with terror. Convinced she was about to watch me die.
All hell had broken loose in the crowd, and people had run screaming from the spray of gunfire they believed to be imminent.
But the men with guns had stopped. Frozen. Their fingers hovered in midair, millimeters from the triggers.
The ground trembled. Trembled again. In that moment a roar split the air. Like an elephant’s trumpet and a tiger’s snarl, tapering off into a wolf’s howl. A shriek not of anger but of power, of confidence. An animal who was not afraid of anything on Earth.
People screamed. Pointed. The Shield stood motionless, his head turned in the direction of the roar. All his anger and rage and violence held back for a few slim seconds by the love that bound me to him.
The Earth shook. Like distant thunderclaps, one after another—boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! It shook the teeth in my gums. There was a sound of ripping.
Time sped back up.
A white blur tore through the old movie screen with one clawed foot. Something massive. Something with eyes like storms and teeth like nightmares. Something most citizens of Darkside spent their whole lives praying to get a glimpse of. It stomped through the rip and roared again.
Queen Carmen’s white Tyrannosaurus rex.
I thought, It worked, Ash. You did it. You reached her.
Soldiers and peasants and prosperous merchants all fell to their knees and pressed their foreheads to the ground. Like thousands of dominoes falling in quick succession. The tyrannosaur stood fifty feet from me, and I realized—she wasn’t albino at all. She did have pigment: a marbling of purple along her spine, fractal spirals tapering down her sides. Queen Carmen looked unstoppable in the saddle.
Inches from where my hands were pressed against the ground, a foot as wide as a tree trunk smashed into the floor. The tyrannosaur came to a stop, tail whipping around for balance. All the men and women with guns ran away screaming.
Only the Shield and Ash and Connor and Niv and I remained, frozen in place, and only for an instant more. Fear and awe overwhelmed me, at the presence of this magnificent monster. Fear and awe crowded out every other emotion, including love. Released from my crippling bond, the Shield turned to flee.
Of course he did not get far. Effortlessly, without even moving her body, the tyrannosaur lowered her muscular neck and opened wide her terrible mouth and picked him up with her terrible teeth. She tossed him up into the air, a cat playing with a mouse, and caught him in her jaws. And bit down once, hard, snuffing him out.
With a lightning-fast whipcrack motion, she jerked her head around and flung the body into the bonfire. And roared. A long and earsplitting sound every citizen who was there that day will hear in dreams for the rest of their lives. Will tell their grandchildren about. The sound of power, of ferocity. Of a mother protecting her baby. Of order and balance restored.