Blake - 86

Blake had handled a gun only twice in her life, and both times had been at Rossiter’s insistence. He’d wanted her to learn to protect herself. The lessons had lasted all of five minutes, Blake unwilling to hold the weapon any longer than that. The feel of the metal against her skin had made her uneasy back then, even with an unloaded gun and an expert by her side. Now, it made her downright ill, and uncertain she wouldn’t vomit before she had a chance to pull the trigger. The muzzle knocked against her temple, her hands shaking too violently to hold the damn thing still. She knew better than to pray to any god that Kira might be spared the sight of this. The gods weren’t listening.

Remove yourself from here. You heard what the handmaiden said. Remove yourself. How else are you to do that now? End this. Help your sister.

The viper’s vitriol had never lacked for truth. It was what caused the words to burn deep and scar themselves into her psyche. Blake was a hindrance. An exhausted, desperate hindrance. At the very least, this chosen path would end the viper’s flagellation once and for all. Give her reprieve from constant, deepening damnation. The singular world she needed to destroy was her own. Blake held her breath and brought pressure down on the trigger, both her grip and her bowels threatening to loosen.

‘Blake, stop!’

The body came at her as the bullet should have, rapid and sure. Cym aimed his weight at her arm, forcing the gun away, and sending them both tumbling into a gasping pile on the debris-strewn floor. Blake landed on her injured leg. Consciousness hung on by a mere thread, blackness stealing most of her vision. Cym’s voice rained down on her, but faintly and from far away. He rattled off a Syranian curse that she recognised from the time he’d spent by her side in the tech rooms.

‘Brandis mer, this is not the way, Blake.’

Cym shifted onto his knees. Unable to even consider moving, Blake lay against the hard, uneven ground. Beyond Cym, something moved down from the heights of the chamber. Blake watched as a wingless angel descended towards them, her body lit with a pale golden glow, her hair a shock of black against a ghostly face.

‘Kira.’ Shock vapourised the single word as it left Blake’s lips.

Her sister’s descent slowed. She lifted a hand towards where Captain Nex stood, bewilderment clouding his expression. The Earth must have slowed on its axis and gravity deepened, because the blinding pulse of light that flew from Kira’s fingertips did so in slow motion. A ray of pure sunlight made its way across the space between Kira and the captain. Blake watched from her sideways world, shocked into stillness. The ever-present shake beneath her skin, gone. Her heart had ceased to beat. Lungs discontinued their rise and fall, as she followed her sister’s path.

Captain Nex did not cower or attempt to defend himself. Either of those would have taken time. And that was one thing he was without. The pulse of sunlight met his chest and crackled the length of his limbs, streaks of lightning that singed his clothing and turned his silver hair to strands of inky black. The captain of the Syranians, the proclaimed Messenger of Lahar, died a very quick and simple death. And his god was nowhere to be seen. Nex dropped to his knees and toppled forward, landing flat on his face with his hands trapped underneath him. He made no attempt to rise, no attempt to do anything at all.

A cry rose higher and higher. Gren, screaming Cym’s name. The Syrana medic was on his feet, his back now to Blake. Seeing the same thing she saw. Kira barrelling down on him, arms raised, pristine, white light balled around her hands.

‘No.’ Blake breathed. Struggling to co-ordinate herself, find a way to rise.

Kira needed to see she was alive. Or Cym was going to die.

But the world was racing too fast. Before Blake could do more than consider moving, energy shot from Kira’s fingertips. Gren threw himself in front of Cym, crying out his lover’s name. And Blake finally found her own voice.

‘Kira, no!’

Her sister’s hand jerked, sending the energy skyward, but it was not soon enough for Gren. The radiant light slammed into him, before everything grew too bright for human eyes. Blake curled up in a ball, eyes squeezed tight, as everything in existence was drenched in sunlight. And the sky began to fall. The thump and thud of great, heavy things crashing around her. Shaking the ground with their weight. A body pressed against hers, lying on top of her. Her eyes flew open. The person was too close to see clearly. But Blake didn’t need any clarity to recognise her sister.

‘Stay down,’ Kira shouted, loud enough to make Blake cringe. ‘What the fuck were you thinking, Blake?’

The rainfall of debris ceased, and Kira edged back. ‘Don’t you ever, ever do something so fucking stupid again. You stupid, stupid . . . ’

She threw her arms around her, clinging so tightly Blake had to blink against dots of light. The embrace was uncomfortable, painful even, far too tight against a body that felt set to come apart at the seams. But Blake sank into it, willing it to engulf her altogether. She pressed her arms around her sister, and noted the hardness of metal at her back. Body armour. It must be.

‘Kira . . .’ Her hands traced the solid surface all the way down Kira’s spine. And the very faintest of sheens struggled to push through the material of Kira’s clothing. ‘This is not how any of this should have been.’

‘Nope. So let’s stay right here.’ Kira’s breath warmed her ear. ‘Pretend we’re back in that crappy bedroom, the one with the disgusting orange wallpaper, and the creaky bunk beds.’

Blake abandoned her search and wrapped her arms tighter around Kira’s shoulders. Hardness of metal on both sides there too. ‘Your bed creaked because you treated it like a trampoline.’

‘God, how cool would a trampoline bed be?’

A smile tugged at Blake’s mouth, despite all that went on around them. ‘It would be extremely cool.’

She’d all but forgotten that draughty two-bedroom apartment they’d shared with their father, Blake approaching her teens and perturbed about sharing with her younger sister. At least, to begin with. Then it had become all but impossible to sleep without drifting off to the sound of Kira’s chatter. Which always continued long after their father told them to be quiet.

Blake allowed herself one more moment of the embrace, and let her sister go. Kira sat back, and Blake pushed herself onto her elbows. A short distance away, Cym was on hands and knees alongside Gren. A grimalkin lay not far from his body, legs jerking as it attempted to right itself. The rest of the robots had fared even worse. Only the hint of one or two visible beneath the rubble.

‘I thought Cym had…’Kira hesitated. ‘I thought you were dead. I couldn’t think straight.’

She was not the only one. But for now the viper was silent. Sunk deep, or vanished, impossible to tell.

Cym was urging Gren to get up, to move, to open his eyes, none of which Gren did. Nor would he ever do so again. It did not take a medic to understand the graveness of the injury he’d sustained to his torso. One, Blake noted, her sister kept her eyes averted from.

‘I thought you were dead,’ Kira whispered again, strain coating each word.

Even if Blake could have found something to say, the opportunity was taken from her. A great rumbling flowed through the chamber. Far more intense than any of the tremors that had proceeded it.

‘My god.’ Blake ignored all the pain receptors that told her she leaned too heavily on her wounded leg. The Earth was slowly opening. A widening crack parted the chamber roof right over Tamas and his cluster of carapaces. ‘What is happening?’

‘Oh fuck,’ Kira said. ‘This just gets better.’

The shower of loosened rocks and dirt that fell over the group did so in the oddest of ways, not raining directly down but edging out almost at right angles and avoiding those standing beneath the enlarging crevice.

‘I think the little fucker is tunnelling his way out of here,’ Kira said.

‘Kira, look out!’ Nina appeared out of nowhere, running towards them from the direction of the containment cells, gesturing wildly. ‘Behind, turn around, you fool.’

Blake and Kira did so in unison, and Blake’s language was as vibrant and crass as her sister’s. A creature of liquid rose from the Tier, its shape etched into Blake’s mind after what had felt like an eternity beneath its malevolent glare in the shrine. The Precon bounded over the stone edging, the ratlike creature large as a draught horse, far bigger than what Blake had witnessed pacing the Tier earlier. The beast released a sound, a hundred pigs squealing in unison, and all at once Blake shuddered – as though the Waters within her fought to escape what approached.

An arm slipped beneath hers, and she was dragged backwards. Away from her sister. Blake reached for her, missing Kira by the barest of lengths, her fingers clutching at empty air.

‘Kira –’

‘I told you to leave here!’ Nina shouted, her grip around Blake’s chest bordered on breathtaking.

‘I tried.’

In more ways than one.

The Precon zeroed in on them. The creature left wide puddles of gleaming emerald with each footfall. Nina shepherded Blake out of harm’s way while Kira faced the approach. Pacing backward, taking slow, cautious steps. Not attempting to run. Merely bracing for what came at her.

‘Kira. No, Kira, move.’ Blake attempted to dig her heels in, forgetting entirely that she wore no shoes, and her resistance was short-lived.

‘She does what she must. Make it easier for her, Blake. Let her go.’

Let her go? She had refused to do so three years ago, she would not start now. Blake renewed her struggle. Cym remained with Gren, despite Kira’s shouts at him to do otherwise. The Syranian clutched his fallen brother – lover – to his chest, but reached for the zuary, straining his body over the distance that kept it just out of reach.

The Precon reared up on its deformed hind legs, the bend differing for each limb, one protruding outward while the other jutted back. It arrowed itself at Kira, who stood, maddeningly still, a dim glow haloing her body.

‘Kira!’ Blake screamed. Nina dragged them farther away, her strength belying her appearance.

Another shape rose up from behind the debris pile Kira had created, and rocketed towards the Precon. A second beast, an enormous reptile reminiscent of a Komodo dragon. If those dragons grew to rival the size of a lion. Glowing with the same sheen as Kira did, only far, far brighter, the creature threw itself against the Precon’s side. The impact lifted the duo up and over the meagre pile of rock. Their rapid descent was headed directly for where Cym still clung to Gren. The creatures barrelled in on them, oblivious to anything, anyone in their path. They clawed at one another with all the ferocity of starved animals over a carcass. The Precon lashed out with a barbed, liquid tail. The lizard dodged, leaving the path clear to where Cym tried to get to his feet. Kira reached him, just before the Precon’s strike did. Her shoulder took a glancing blow from the sweeping tail of luminous green liquid, and sparks radiated from the impact point. The momentum forced both Cym and Kira clear of the battle, one that continued without the slightest indication their presence had been noted at all. The lizard—the dragon—clamped wide jaws around the Precon’s ratlike head, thrashing back and forth in vicious, jerky movements.

‘Where did that come from?’ Blake fought to catch her breath. ‘The dragon?’

An ally of some kind? Or would the creature simply turn its attention on the rest of them once it was done with the Precon? And done it almost was. The screeches coming from the watery beast reached higher and higher. The Waters dulled, the emerald dipping to a danker shade of mould green. The creature’s form bulged then deflated, bulged then deflated, as though the fluid struggled to retain its shape.

Nina’s breath came equally as rapid, pushing against Blake’s back as the woman held her fast. ‘The witches called him Bradley, but their goddess was far closer than they knew. The true name of that being is the Maiden. You are witnessing the fast-tracked ascendance of a god. It should have taken millennia for Her to reach this point, but the Waters have changed everything. She’s looking rather good right now, wouldn’t you say? Putting on quite the show.’

A show that concluded a moment after Nina finished speaking. The dragon’s jaws snapped together, a sound like the crack of thunder. The Precon bulged, expanding until it ruptured, exploding in a fountain of liquid that cascaded down and formed a wave deep enough to sweep over Cym and Kira, who had been able to get far from the maddened action. The dragon creature – a god if Nina was to be believed, and Blake was fast running out of reasoning that would allow otherwise – raised a diamond-shaped head and released a bellow that rippled the surface of the Waters. The glow of the beast lifted in curling tongues from its body. Eyes black as any desert night, focused on the liquid that flowed around its thick legs. Those same jaws that had just destroyed the Precon widened again. And a torrent of light – the shades of ember and flame – were breathed between jagged teeth, spilling across the surface of the Waters. The instant the fire touched the liquid, it was as though it leapt against Blake’s skin. She buckled in Nina’s grasp, letting loose an anguished cry.

And so the deathbringer shall burn, too.

The viper and the fireball tore through Blake’s senses in unison.

The new god takes back what you stole.

She was burning alive, skin flaking from bone. Bone turning to ash, as the Waters that intertwined with her own DNA ignited.

‘Blake? Blake, what’s wrong?’ Nina’s words reached her, and each was a red-hot iron against her ears.

‘Water.’ Blake couldn’t be certain the word had reached the air. She sank beneath the flames, seeing through a veil of red, a warmth running from her nostrils.

All at once, her face was covered in liquid. And the flames extinguished. The heat slunk away, far less intense, but a hint of it remaining. The Waters’ hum played at her core. Her breath wheezed in her chest, her throat too tight to allow much oxygen to escape or enter. And her eyes slowly found focus. Blake wiped at her face, and her hand came away coated in clear slimy wetness.

She found herself under the watchful gaze of the creature who had just decimated the Precon. Eyes of jet black, set in a head equally as dark and contrasted by the bright orange spotting that marked smooth, scaled skin. It was equally as large in size as it had been when it had battled Lahar’s beast but with no hint of the golden light that had enveloped it. In ordinary circumstances, Blake may have been fearful, terrified, most likely, but ordinary had long since disappeared from her world. She raised her chin, meeting the creature with an unblinking stare. A god, the viper had declared.

The beast ran a bulging pink tongue back and forth across smooth lips. The same viscous slime that covered Blake’s face, dripped from its wide mouth. She had been slobbered on by a diety.

You carry a burden, Technician. A precious one. The voice was satin and velvet against Blake’s own mind, caressing the very corners of it, in stark contrast to the viper’s vitriol. If you survive this, you will be the Waters’ last vessel.

Blake blinked. And the Maiden turned and left her, no explanation, no translation of Her words.A huge bulk, there one moment, gone in the next.

Kira stumbled in her rush to get to Blake’s side. Cym was close behind her. Alive, and as close to well as could be expected.

Blake couldn’t place it, what was different about her sister. There was the obvious – the presence of metal where Blake had never set it, the light emanating softly from the folds of her clothes – but it was over and above that. A largeness to her presence that had been absent before.

‘Are you all right?’ Kira demanded.

Blake’s pause was infinitesimal. ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’

‘God, you’re a shit liar.’

Blake was saved from having to try to prove Kira wrong by the arrival of Azrael. Touching down alongside the group, several long lengths of metal in his hand. Blake recognised the pieces at once. Impossible to forget after the hours she’d spent labouring over them. The wings she had designed for the Four.