I felt my teke start to slip as I passed through the doors to the docking bay; I started running after that. Once the switch triggered, I’d still have a few moments as the chemical mixture that made up the bomb started to combine—of course, given how terse Schaz had been forced to be over the comms, I didn’t know if those moments would last ten minutes or ten sec—
The blast picked me up and threw me against the far wall, my intention shield absorbing the impacts from the half a dozen pieces of shrapnel that had come whistling down the corridor like bullets made of razors. I hit, hard, then hit again as I landed.
Ow. Being that close to an explosion sucked.
“That didn’t look fun,” Schaz commiserated as I tried to pick myself up, and failed. Maybe just another moment, lying on the floor, gasping for breath.
“Oh, no, it was grand,” I wheezed back. “You should try it sometime.”
“I do it all the time, remember? Remember all the space battles we’ve been in?”
“Oh. Right.”
“I’m just saying—the next time you prioritize some distant target rather than an incoming missile, arguing that ‘Schaz’s shields can take it,’ I want you to remember this moment. Remember how much it rattled you, and how hard it was to think, after. Fair deal?”
I exhaled something that most definitely weren’t actual words, just a kind of wheeze.
“Fair deal,” Schaz agreed, mostly to herself. In the process of making obscene gestures in the general direction of her docking bay, I at least managed to get to my knees.
My comm crackled to life. “Esa, was that blast what I think it was?” Jane asked. Thank god—she was alive.
“Where the hell have you been?” I coughed, using the wall behind me to lean against as I tried to stand. “And also, yes.”
“I didn’t want to give away my position by using the comms; he’s been chasing me all across this asteroid. Schaz, double check, but the route from her position to you along the main thoroughfare should be clear; as soon as he heard that blast, the asshole booked it toward the tunnels, so he’s coming at her from the interior.”
“Clear,” Schaz agreed tersely—she must have been scanning her feeds, looking for the glowing bastard, but the cameras were patchier in the maintenance tunnels, as I well knew.
“What . . . what does all that mean?” I asked, still a little fuzzy from the “mostly being blown up” that had just happened.
“It means run,” Jane growled; I could tell from the way she clipped her sentences that she was already doing the same.
Starting a full-out run from a dead stop is hard enough—starting a full-out run from a dead stop after you’ve just suffered a mild being blown up is not one of my favorite things in the world, as I was just learning. I did it anyway.
The lights in the tunnels were shutting off behind me, one by one, leaving a sea of darkness in my wake. I didn’t know if Charon was doing that, or if it was something else; I just kept running. Every step I took, another shadow fell across the floor before me. And somewhere in the deep center of the asteroid—maybe passing through the catacombs even now—our enemy was coming.
If he knew that I’d just blown up his ship, he was probably going to be pissed. If he’d figured out we’d fried all the other ships on board the station, trapping him here once we escaped, he was going to be even more so. That thought gave me a savage kind of joy—a petty vengeance in the face of all he’d done, but fulfilling, even so—and it helped to push my speed up just a little bit higher. How much farther was it, anyway? How much farther—
I saw Jane, pelting down the corridor toward me; she’d passed the entrance to Scheherazade’s docking bay, trying to reach me before our pursuer did. I grinned when I saw her—put on just a little more speed.
That may have saved my life.
Jane slowed to a stop, drawing her pistol and firing in a single fluid motion; I saw her do it and just reacted, threw myself into a slide just as a sizzling bolt of energy sang over my head, right through the place where I had been, close enough that the passage of ionized atmosphere made the fine hairs on my arm stand on end.
I couldn’t help myself: as I came to a stop, I turned.
Our enemy had shed his armor somewhere along the way—or Jane had torn it off him, piece by piece. Now, he was just a shining, glowing figure, a being made purely from azure fire. Four limbs, a chest, a head, but beyond that, nothing: a terrifying spectre of energy and flame, his face like a void.
And he was closing the distance.
Jane was still firing, but her rounds weren’t doing any more good than they had when he’d been wearing armor—I actually saw one of the bullets get close and vanish in a burst of sparks and metal shards; he was melting the rounds before they hit—and he was still stalking forward, his hands out at his sides, light spilling between his fingers, glowing brighter.
“You cannot silence the coming scream,” he growled, the words seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere—because they were still coming from my comm, despite the fact that he was close enough that I should have been able to just hear him. He wasn’t speaking at all, just . . . transmitting. “You cannot escape the fire, nor the fall. Purification is your destiny. Purification is the destiny of—”
“Go!” Jane shouted at me, emptying the chambers of her revolver of dead casings and slipping a new cartridge in even as the cylinder spun. It was a fancy trick, and it wasn’t going to make a damn bit of difference—her bullets weren’t even fazing him.
Except when she aimed next—pulling the hammer on a still-spinning cylinder, five-to-one odds it had stopped on an empty chamber, but this was Jane, there was a bullet under that hammer as sure as I was breathing—she wasn’t aiming at the stalking figure of blue flame: she fired instead at a transformer clinging to the rock wall between him and us, a transformer that gave off a shower of bright sparks into the darkness when her single bullet smashed it open.
And once she’d damaged it, Charon seized control.
A torrent of blazing energy filled the hallway, making a shield of crackling lightning between us and our enemy, but he’d seen what we were trying to do, and he threw one last attack before the wave of electricity cut off the tunnel—an orb of glowing blue flame that just made it past Charon’s impromptu electric fence.
It was aimed straight at Jane.
She was flat-footed; even if she’d wanted to dodge, she wouldn’t have time. Intention shield raised or not, that much energy would cook her where she stood. I don’t know how I reacted, but I know why—I’d thought I was going to lose her once, and I’d vowed then and there that I’d never risk that again.
So I reached out with my teke, and I grabbed at the ball of lightning with my mind.
It was a bad idea.
It was a horrible idea.
It wasn’t really an idea at all, just a thing I did, somewhere in between seeing the projectile of burning energy and tracing its route to its target in an instant. If I’d had time to think about it, I never would have done it—my teke functioned as an extension of my brain, just like my hands were an extension of my brain. I couldn’t manipulate pure energy with telekinesis any more than I could reach into a fire and grab the flame. I did it anyway.
It felt like burning. Inside my skull.
I held on. It was aimed at Jane.
I tried to scream; no sound came out, replaced by a whisper of smoke from my nostrils and my throat. I really was burning, no different than if I had reached out and grabbed the fire—the energy leaping from the projectile to me, tracing the path of my teke back along the same quantum channel I used to control it, trying to fry my mind from the inside out.
With more effort than I’d ever put into anything, ever, I pulled at the ball of fire, I yanked at it, I used every ounce of energy I had to jerk the thing out of position.
I felt it shift, just a little, and then I was collapsing; I was done. I started to pass out.
But just before I did, I saw the ball of circular lightning pass Jane by, just an inch or so to her left. I’d fucking done it. It had been monumentally stupid, but I’d done it anyway.
Then the world went to black, and I don’t think that was just Charon cutting off the lights.